TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 6

POST: Implicit reformatting metaphors & Magick / Occult

If you want to play around with a "magickal" perspective, while avoiding the historical and cultural baggage of the older traditions (everything is "of its time" so you shouldn't get too bogged down in the contemporary "wash" of things, I say), you might check out Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos, Alan Chapman's The Camel Rides Again, and Ramsay Duke's SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic. As regards the difference between "magick" and "dimensional jumping", here's an answer I gave recently: I suppose you could say that they are both different "traditions" based around the recognition that there is no difference between moving the fact of where you arm is, and changing any other world-fact. In other words, that: "experience is apparently local, but intention is actively global".

This underlying truth is true anyway; things like "dimensional jumping" and "magick" are just ways of thinking-about the world that incorporate that truth and so make the unthinkable (by which I mean: literally unthinkable, because it's not possible to think about the nature of experience) nearly thinkable, at least in terms of conceiving of outcomes while using a narrative structure. A key element of "dimensional jumping" is that it explicitly recognises this meta aspect, at a formatting level. In other words, it acknowledges that the only fundamental truth is "the nature of experiencing" itself; everything else is relative truth only. You may have experiences "as if" something is true but it is never irrevocably true. That includes the existence of everyday objects as much as, say, "auras" or whatever. All of this means that you are free to explore and incorporate the elements of any tradition you find attractive, and leverage any metaphorical concept to get results - while realising that there is no deep and permanent mechanism of "how the world works" underlying it all. (In fact, there is no mechanism at all other than awareness and intention.)

POST: Seeing repeating number patterns after two glasses

This is actually the basis of the whole thing: "the patterning of experience". In this example, it's like you've overlaid a pattern onto your world and it's "shining through the gaps" wherever the opportunity arises. When you become more opened out and relaxed - perhaps because you've selected that as an outcome, or as a side-effect of something like Two Glasses which leads you to do this - you tend to see more of that sort of thing, and the more you notice the more prominent it'll become, as the "relative intensity" of the pattern deepens. Things like geometric shapes and arrangements sometimes become more obvious too. It's a bit like the "raw component" level of experience - outlines, colours, layouts, symbols - becomes more visible, becomes a bit more independent of the usual "world imagery" of objects and such.

Just be sure to not get too obsessed with it - people waste years thinking this is a "thing" and trying to wrestle with it, which of course just implies the pattern again and further intensifies it. It is a "thing" of course; it's just not that thing. If you keep in mind two views of experience at once - that it is simultaneously a "world full of objects" and an "imagination space upon which patterns can be drawn" - then you can come up with ways to use one view as a way to affect the other. For example, if you wanted to "summon" a person, how would you do that, such that their "pattern" would "shine through" the next available plausible gap? And so on.

In our case, the training program would be our minds (or spirits)?

So, probably the sooner we get a grasp on what our direct experience is actually like, rather than what we tend to think-about it, the better. Our thoughts-about experience are always actually "parallel constructions in thought", happening alongside the main strand of experience. We never really think about the world, we think about a world, in a separate strand. If we never look to check what our actual ongoing moment is like, then our "constructions" will lead us astray, and making the connection between "patterning" and "the world" intellectually will be difficult. Later, this helps makes more sense of events like your examples there, and also what it might mean in terms of influencing the content of experience. As a preview though: basically, you should treat the "imagination room" metaphor as almost literally true.

First, I'd kick off with: the "feeling out" exercise described in this comment. So, what you will note is that the experience you are actually having has no edges, that what you think of as "you" is actually just a set of floating sensations plus a thought of "you", and that actually "you" seem to be unlocated in the scene: you are "over here" and "over there" and everywhere. What you seem to be is an "open awareness" in which sensations, perceptions and thoughts arise. Even your thoughts about an outside world actually appear inside that "openness". We might then start to ponder what effect holding a thought in mind has. Is it perhaps the case that thinking an intense thought in the same space where sensory experience arise, a bit like drawing on a 3D-immersive multi-sensory screen?

...

Someone pointed out to me that 982 also has a meaning in the Marvel Comics universe which is relevant to "parallel realities" (they assumed that's where I got the idea of using that number). From the wiki summary:

MC2 (Marvel Comics 2) is an imprint from Marvel Comics whose comic books depict an alternative future timeline for the Marvel Universe. The imprint was spun off from the events of What If? #105 (February 1998), which was the first appearance of the character Spider-Girl, Spider-Man's daughter from an alternative future. This reality was designated as Earth-982.

POST: I did the two glasses thing

Relax! Perhaps you need to change how you are thinking of this generally. Instead of thinking that you are jumping between universes, like some sort of inter-dimensional soul, instead think of it as having a "private copy" of the world, a copy which you can modify. This means that if you intend a change (and note that change happens instantly, even though the signs of it may appear only later) you can always intend a compensating change later - because you haven't left anywhere, you've changed somewhere. It's called "jumping" because the changes can be such that the facts of the world shift in your ongoing experience, meaning it seems "as if" you have gone to another universe. Meanwhile, don't go reading fictional scare stories and taking them seriously. In effect, the underlying concept of "dimensional jumping" is extremely simply and you have been accidentally using it all your life. That is,

• "Sensory experience is apparently local, but intention is always actively global."

Until now, you've only been using deliberate intention for, basically, summoning body movements as you roam around the world. Actually, though, any intention shifts the entire world-pattern to some degree, is overlaid upon it, so intending a change in a "world fact" and intending a change in your arm position are identical in kind. The Two Glasses exercise is a structured way of "re-patterning" your experience by attaching to a current and target state and transforming their relative intensities or contributions to the world. There's no reason to fear - you're not going to encounter a bad outcome unless you deliberately (and I mean deliberately, I don't just mean a passing thought or whatever) intend for one.

I saw Kynari say in some thread that we are shifting all of the time, naturally. What exactly does that mean?

Personally, I don't think that's a very helpful statement, although I get why they might say it. Let me lay out a line of reasoning that you could use to interpret it. Let's imagine that you have a "private copy" of the world. Right now, that world can be described as a particular pattern of facts - the world is in a particular "state". This state fully determines the moments of experience that are going to appear in your awareness, from now into the future. This includes the things you are going to see happening around you and your bodily movements, and so on. If right now you simply "cease interfering", your ongoing experience will continue spontaneously, in accordance with that state.

Let's say that this "state" = "a dimension".

Meanwhile, we will call deliberately interfering with that spontaneous flow of moments "intention". If you "intend" something, then you are shifting your state to incorporate the "intention" into it. Once you have "intended", the state now includes that new pattern ("the intention") and you will now experience a new deterministic path defined by that new state.

Aside: To get an everyday feel for this, "intend" right now to go and get a drink of water - and don't interfere with what happens. You'll find that your body will move "by itself" to get and get the water. Your new state now includes the intention and the experience happens accordingly. Note that if you are someone who has developed the habit of constantly "asserting their bodily position", you might feel that nothing happens. If this is the case, first intend to "cease interfering", and then intend the task.

So, from this we might say that every time we deliberately intend something then we are "shifting dimensions". This includes intending that we do in resistance to the experiences that appear. However, we typically do not intend constantly, and so we are not "shifting all of the time". A shift is not the same as a bodily movement or a passing thought; those are spontaneous pre-determined arisings from the current state. Ideally, then, we should live our lives as a spontaneous, effortless, resistant-less unfolding - with only occasional redirections (shifts) via deliberate intention. This is where all the talk about "detachment" and "allowing" and "trust and faith" and "absolute surrender" comes from: only by letting go of trying to control each moment, do we gain control of our overall experience. (But even if we don't let go, we are still not "shifting all the time", because the resistance itself will lead to a fixed state - just an unpleasant one.)

TL;DR: We are not "shifting all the time"; we change state only when we deliberately intend change; mostly people do not do that except in the case of occasional resistance to experience; many people probably don't actually intend at all.

POST: It doesn't need to be with glasses

Definitely. Something to note, though: there is a difference between writing out a description, say, and actually linking objects (mental or physical) to particular situations or patterns. So no matter what the format, be sure to actually ponder your current and target states, and let the words come from that contemplation, rather than just writing out something or working out the words to use intellectually. That way, the words will be "handles" onto those specific states, rather than simply unattached words that will trigger a more general extended pattern.

(Although the Two Glasses instructions don't specify this explicitly, they are structured in such a way as to lead you to do this - provided you actually follow them and aren't tempted to interfere and analyse things during the performance of the exercise.)

Lol it's fun watching you guys discover sigils.

It's even more fun watching people who are committed to sigils discover that it's all just assigned meaning and patterning within your own imagined perspective! ;-)

There's a benefit in having different angles on the same underlying approach. Sometimes things like "sigils" (and "servitors" and all that) have quite a bit of baggage associated with them, because they're still linked to a particular worldview or to a tradition with some contemporary decoration that no longer makes sense. "Sigils" make a nice halfway house pattern between older ritual approaches and a more direct non-dual approach, but it would be a shame if anyone stopped and felt satisfied at that point, rather than pushing it that towards a more generalised pattern that connected to an understanding of "the nature of experience" more fully.

Also... We know it's assigned meaning? That's kindof literally how it works...?

So - how, exactly, does that work, literally? How does one assign meaning to something, and why should assigning meaning accomplish anything?

Without a descriptive framework for that, we're left sort of hand-waving the topic, rather than being able to deliberately construct outcomes via actions.

Correct. However, one day you guys will realize that you're literally doing the chaos magic thing (which you, btw, just summed up very nicely) except in a more dogmatic way (though I think this post kinda points out that the dogma that permeates this sub is pointless... Yay milestones.)

No, it's a bit different to chaos magick, which I view as a bit of a failed experiment. Chaos magick had an idea - basically, the adoption of belief as a method for structuring experience - but because it never really worked out what a "belief" was, nor had a "meta-metaphor" for managing and directing it, it never really went anywhere. It's basically dead now. The underlying concept here isn't really that you are "jumping dimensions" of course; that's just a formatting metaphor. The real point is to be able to directly observe and utilise a formatless platform, and then knowingly engage in "the patterning of experience" (for example) via intention and implication. The more important thing, though, is to ask how or why that can work, right?

Q1: Yup accepting a new truth/reality/dimension through use of "assigned meaning techniques" or whatever is different from causing a paradigm shift through a "magic ritual". /s You clearly have some kind of baggage/hang up about the occult. I'm sorry, but the main thing with chaos magic is the idea that you can do magic without a set dogma (basically, whatever works for you is good. Or "nothing is true, everything is permitted".) if you think this "dimensional jumping" is anything but another way to preform practical magic, you're misinformed. All magic is based on self hypnosis and assigned/reassigned meaning. But whatever, that's none of my business... Clearly the "two cups" method is different from "magical elixir/charged water" and suggesting that you don't need the cups, but just focus attention and a symbol/goal is clearly not at all "sigils"...

Sigh. Save me the sarcasm, eh? It gets us nowhere. Definitely, "dimensional jumping" in the broader sense is as different to ritual magick as ritual magick is to having your arm move. That is to say, there is no difference in their nature at all. There's not much point in arguing in that area: before we know it, we'll end up retorting "oh, but that's just a movement of consciousness" to everything. For sure, chaos magick had the idea that "whatever works for you is good" - and that's a nice principle to bear in mind - but then got stuck because that's not really an idea at all. It has no content. It never went anywhere as an approach, because there's no substance to that statement. I don't really have a hangup about "the occult" - hey, it was fun times - other than that the categorising of some things as "occult" and "magick" tends to makes them seem distinct from mundane ongoing experience, something special that requires "techniques". For example, if every assigned meaning is effectively a reshaping of experience, then labelling some as "sigils" and not others, without digging any deeper, isn't helpful or insightful. It stops the exploration dead for many people.

All magic is based on self hypnosis and assigned/reassigned meaning.

First, we should probably broaden it out and say that: "all experiential content is based on assigned or implied meaning."

But then: how, though? How does that work? What does "self hypnosis" even mean? What and where is this "self"? It's not even clear that such a thing actually exists, other than as a container concept. Without a metaphysics - a base formatting - that doesn't really help us at all. It doesn't have any meaning, assigned or otherwise.

Q2: I agree with the need for some sort of metaphysics or belief system. If you think you're free/above such things then you are deluding yourself. A teacher of mine once told the story of a friend who built a device to erase all of his beliefs. After using it, he died a few days later of multiple exotic diseases. Perhaps he no container left to protect him? If you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian metaphysics, then you have angels and demons; you are under their authority. If you subscribe to some other metaphysics at the deepest psychic level, then those are your rules for morality and magic. I'm still examining my own through introspective meditation.

Agreed. People sometimes get into these things thinking that if they could just delete their limitations, everything would be great. What would happen instead is, they'd destabilise the structure they had in place, getting some unlovely side-effects, or end up with something more like a strand of associative thought rather than "a world". It's good to be aware of your current structure, but I tend to feel the focus needs to be on shifting to a metaphysics or "formatting" that is cleaner (maybe somewhat "diagrammatic" rather than symbolic), rather than just dismantling something. The term "beliefs" can be part of the problem, I find. It's not always clear with that whether someone is referring to the formatting of their main ongoing experience ("the world"), or a strand of thought about their experience. The boundary is not a simple one, but focusing on the latter while thinking one is addressing the former can lead to issues. Descriptions can never really capture this, of course; as you suggest, our "own ... introspective meditation" is how we make progress with this stuff.

POST: Help me with two glasses

That's some OCD happening right there! :-) Don't worry, you can't do this wrong. Just follow the instructions, as they are written, and don't fret about it beyond that. Maybe this comment might be useful:

Something to note: there is a difference between writing out a description, say, and actually linking objects (mental or physical) to particular situations or patterns. So no matter what the format, be sure to actually ponder your current and target states, and let the words come from that contemplation, rather than just writing out something or working out the words to use intellectually. That way, the words will be "handles" onto those specific states, rather than simply unattached words that will trigger a more general extended pattern.

Apart from that, as someone else mentioned, you are meant to do this once, then put the glasses away and carry on with your life. The change happens when you do the exercise - it becomes true now that things will happen then. Checking and tinkering afterwards tends to imply the initial pattern again, essentially re-intending the starting point, a bit like being in a standing position and confirming just how "standing" you are by sitting down again.

POST: Questions on dimensions

It's not really like that. Read the sidebar and links about how there is no "other you" and you don't go anywhere as such. Nothing's left behind in the sense of your old situation still "happening" without you; all that's "happening" is your current situation. So to "go back to your original dimension" really just means to make another change to your experience such that it's "as if" things were as they used to be. When you stand up, does "standing-up you" leave a "sitting-down you" behind? Can you ever return to your "original posture" after you have stood up?

What I feel when dimension jumping is that you have to be absolutely sure you want to leave everything you've ever known and have for something "more". It's a sacrifice that you have to be willing to take; so yes. Possible loved ones are left behind. I haven't tried going back to my original dimension (if I even jumped in the first place, I have some doubts here and there but I feel like I had possibly jumped) because I'm /now/ happy where I am.

Although the idea of literally leaving things "behind" doesn't really apply, it's certainly the case that to allow a shift in your ongoing experience you need to, to a greater or lesser extent, be "okay with whatever happens". You do have to sacrifice your current world (where "world" means "your current state") in order to shift to a new world (state), because "the world" is one continuous coherent pattern that must always be internally self-consistent. That world-pattern, of course, includes both the pattern of you-as-person and also the patterns of "loved ones" (all of which can be described as the "shape" taken on by you-as-awareness). Therefore, all shifts imply a shifting of the whole and, in a way, a willing sacrifice of everything you currently know.

POST: Two Glasses Exercise With More Than One Word?

To be honest, you don't really need anything to be explained; you just need to follow the instructions as written. Over-thinking it or trying to do it "right" will tend to get in the way, because the exercise is deliberately structured the way it is. Save the thinking for later when you actually have something as an outcome that you can deconstruct. However, I'll say: the reason you are asked to use single words is because you are not actually "describing the area of" your situations. Who would you be describing it to anyway? To "the universe"? This exercise is not a "send a request to the universe" type exercise. It's about creating "handles" onto fact-patterns and changing their relative prominence by leveraging a pre-existing operational pattern. You might find some additional detail from a previous comment useful:

Something to note: there is a difference between writing out a description, say, and actually linking objects (mental or physical) to particular situations or patterns. So no matter what the format, be sure to actually ponder your current and target states, and let the words come from that contemplation, rather than just writing out something or working out the words to use intellectually. That way, the words will be "handles" onto those specific states, rather than simply unattached words that will trigger a more general extended pattern. Apart from that, as someone else mentioned, you are meant to do this once, then put the glasses away and carry on with your life. The change happens when you do the exercise - it becomes true now that things will happen then. Checking and tinkering afterwards tends to imply the initial pattern again, essentially re-intending the starting point, a bit like being in a standing position and confirming just how "standing" you are by sitting down again.

So: one word for each label is adequate! You can use two words or in fact any other symbol if you feel it appropriate, and so long as you're not trying to create a description of the situations you'll be fine, however there's no need really.

Is there a limit to how frequently this can be done?

No, but it makes sense in terms of "experimentation" for you to leave a decent gap between each session, especially given the last instruction. Typically, I'd say leave things for about a week before considering doing another two glasses exercise.

POST: Sitting outside for hours

So, you might consider whether you are trying to "force" this to happen, rather than following the last instruction (to "carry on with your life)". The circumstances in which outcomes arise tend to "happen to you" rather than you seeking them out. That does include feeling or finding yourself "moved" to do things, certainly. However, this is spontaneous; you don't need to check for the feeling; it's sometimes only apparent in hindsight. Only you can judge whether the action you are taking now is a sort of over-vigilent "pushing" or if it feels like a natural opportunity you were drawn to.

Don't feel foolish - just think of it as having stretched your legs and got some fresh air! ;-)

So, generally, the experiment with the two glasses means you do the exercise, then carry on with your life without tinkering, typically leaving things for a week or so to see what comes up. The results come to you. Circumstances arise, feelings shift; you don't try to "make it happen". (And in fact keeping doing so can tend to re-trigger your old state, since the effort comes from that position.)

Of course, this isn't easy when we are dealing with something we really want to happen, but it's how the exercise is meant to be approached. This is because actions with attempt to force an outcome tend to be ones you've "worked out" in your mind in your own parallel thoughts, rather than actions that have arisen as part of the larger movement of your intention. Note also: the idea is that the results have been put in place at the time you did the exercise. That is when the shift of state occurred, and from that point on you are just seeing the already-fixed results play out in your experience. In other words, it becomes "true now that this happens then". Anyway, if you can, try to take this all in the spirit of "performing an experiment" or "investigating" how the two glasses exercise works. That way, you take a step back and are wondering "how and whether this interesting experiment operates" rather than "when oh when will I get my outcome". The latter is a "patterning" of yourself with the fact of "I am in a state where my outcome is in doubt" and is also the reason you shouldn't spend too much time in deliberate thought about your situation or your concerns about it (passing thoughts are of course fine).

So, I did this twice in the last two days. The first time I did it was after a long night out, and I admit, I was high from earlier. Today, I became rather anxious about being high and convinced myself that that somehow nullified the results because I wasn't in a clear state of mind. So, I did it again today—right before my initial post. Does me doing it twice in two days make the desired outcome less likely?

It doesn't really work like that. You should treat every time you do the exercise for a particular things as a "reset and replay". Just as, for example, if you are in a chair and you stand up, sitting back down and repeating the process doesn't make you more or less "standing-up" than you were before. So: set aside a little quiet time, do the exercise, and then follow the last instruction - forget about it. (See this recent comment too [POST: Two Glasses Exercise With More Than One Word?], perhaps, just to emphasise things. Note that there is no effort involved in this. You literally just follow the instructions as written. Don't try and work it out, or concentrate, or put energy into it, or whatever. None of that is needed.)

Ah, alright. That makes me feel a lot better. I was just nervous because I saw a previous post saying that doing it repeatedly for the same thing could put you further, or back to, the original state. Thank you for your response and engaging with me!

Yeah, don't worry about it. While you shouldn't keep repeating it - once and done! - it's not as if it causes harm, it's just that doing it doesn't add anything, and essentially restarts the process again. So in the spirit of conducting an experiment, do it and leave it be, then just see what turns up over the week or so that follows. Good luck!

POST: Tried a big jump into a fictional universe while changing my body and....

As another user said, let things normalise. Just stop tinkering for a bit. Every day do a "daily releasing" exercise for 10 minutes: rather than doing a focused meditation, just lie down on the floor in the constructive rest position and "give up". That is, let your body, thoughts and attentional spatial focus move wherever they want, and "be okay with whatever happens". Don't attempt to control the experience at all. This will let everything settle out (it's something you should consider doing every day as a routine regardless). For the rest (and this is something you might find the above provides insights for), experiment with being sure that when you concentrate or focus, that you do not narrow your attention spatially - in other words, stay "open" and "unbounded" while doing your intending. Intentions should not be accompanied with a sensation of effort; a sensation of effort is an additional experience that does not contribute, just as tensing your muscles does not help you push or pull an object, it merely creates an obstruction by fixing a position.

Can you actually jump into a fictional universe oh my god

Well, I suppose you could say that this is a fictional universe, really; it's just that you've got kinda used to it over time.

Sorry to reply to another comment, but exactly this!! Correct me if I'm wrong but it's like... Since the day I was born I have been reading the same book. My mind has been focused on the same book for 22 years. Now I'm starting to move around the library and pick other books to read. It's just opening the book that's the issue haha.

Right, wandering though The Library of Babel, perhaps, with Jorge Luis Borges. You lift up your eyes from the page, find yourself surrounded by hexagonal shelves - which book to choose?

POST: Modified Owls of Eternity - I'm Seeing Doppelgangers

[POST]

I was feeling experimental and decided to play with the limits of the Owls of Eternity experiment. Instead of owls, I chose to call more sharks into my life. I recalled images of specific experiences throughout my day (my office desk, the subway car, my living room, my street) and superimposed an image of a shark on top of these mental images, and held onto this new image for as long as I could before moving on to a new recalled image. For the next two days sharks showed up everywhere: On multiple stranger's t-shirts
Someone referred to their gf's period as shark week
my coworker told a story about their crazy uncle's gun collection and how he would even carry heat on his boat "because a shark could come out of nowhere" (so crazy)
And I even saw a shark tattoo on a random porno (it was hilarious). edit to add: this one was the most impressive. I suddenly got this urge to see this one, very specific video. I've seen it a couple times before, its super obscure, and it was calling me. I soon realized why it was calling me when I noticed his shark tattoo. Amazing stuff really. Reflecting on how well my Sharks of Eternity worked out, I decided to alter the experiment again, and make it much more specific. I decided to replace the sharks/owls with my crush. I did the same thing as before but with his name and face superimposed on my images.
Long story short: I'm seeing doppelgangers everywhere. Its amazing. And its more than just strangers on the street. Today I noticed a new guy in my office that looks uncomfortably similar to my crush. Additionally, his first name is showing up a lot too.
I'm blown away. Just dumbfounded. Amazing stuff.

[END OF POST]

Yep, that's the right idea. You might also experiment with not just intensifying a visual image, but also adding some context - by including a "knowing" or assigned meaning with it. That is, for example, incorporating the feeling of "me imagining this means-that <insert fact here> is true". You could consider an "image" in the more general sense: that you are intensifying (the subsequent contribution to your ongoing experience of) a multi-sensory meaningful pattern rather than just a visual.

Is this a possible mechanism to tackle limiting beliefs...

I definitely say it's a possible approach to tackling limited beliefs - or more specifically, limiting "formatting" in experience. You don't have to restrict yourself to tinkering with "world facts"; you can experiment with addressing "meta-facts" also. Aside - I'm not sure I find "beliefs" that great a concept; it's quite vague. A belief, as in something that appears as a thought about whether something is possible or not, isn't necessarily a problem. You can just ignore the thought and intend the outcome regardless, then resist tinkering due to doubt. What's important is the "patterning" of one's experience, which may or may not correspond to any passing thoughts you have, or indeed any "conceptual castles" you have about the world. I think this is an area once needs to examine personally, to note how it really is for you; trying to change "beliefs" can become an unfocused and sort of superstitious activity if you're not careful.

You're saying to use other senses that I have at my expense correct?

Not just senses and emotions - which for sure will further narrow and specify the pattern - but also "knowing" or "meaning". That's why I phrased it as "multi-sensory meaningful pattern". This is an overlap with the means-that concept, really, but there is a difference between "imagining an owl" and "imagining an owl + knowing that this means physical owls". (You could also take this into pure symbolism, where you have decided-that an owl is the essence of certain properties, and that imagining it means-that those properties will increase in certain ways.)

So, in summary, I suppose, we're talking about the assignment of meaning via intention, explicitly or implicitly.

...

Or it could be that you are more conscious of sharks, so you will notice more of them. I find this when I get a new car or there's a particular car I want. Probably not jumping dimensions here.

It could be that you "notice more of them" - that is, the sharks are already there in the environment and you are just finding your attention is drawn to them (confirmation bias). The way to check that, would be to perform the experiment multiple times with different things, increasingly unlikely things and scenarios and patterns, and see what happens. In particular, you'd choose things which are not naturally in your environment, so that it isn't just selection of experience from 3D space - although we couldn't discount it being selection of experience from an infinite "space". For example, a focus on events and outcomes might be one way to approach this. (Meanwhile - you may be misunderstanding what is meant by "dimensional jumping" here.)

But why would that difference matter? We can say that everything is out there already anyway, and simply focusing on some things more (and thus making them 'appear' more often in a confirmation bias way) is succesful enough. What does it matter where does this stuff come FROM, as long as it is more prevalent in our lives?

Because focusing on this "formatting" - the "how things work", if you will - has advantages itself in terms of patterning your experience in a "confirmation bias way". It's the step beyond just picturing stuff or feeling "frequencies" to make them slightly more prevalent, to actually addressing the "as if" mechanics of your ongoing experience. Additionally, there is something more to pursue here than just "getting stuff I want via unlikely coincidences". That is, to conduct experiments and come to a deeper direct understanding of "the nature of experiencing" itself. Casting a critical eye over all facts/patterns to optimise them, recognising that there is no fundamental "how things work" at all, is quite a good way into that. The short version is that: the difference matters because the way you formulate an intention implies a certain set of possible apparent mechanisms for its appearance in sensory experience.

I agree, but what I mean is, what does it matter if it is a confirmation bias OR actually creating/recalling things to existence? As long as we subjectively experience their increase, that result is what matters.

(EDIT: Actually, I thought I was replying to another thread when I first responded a couple of messages back, but it's all worked out okay anyway.)

For sure, agreed: both "confirmation bias" (often a misused term anyway, in this context, since it presumes the thing under investigation) and "recalling from eternal background patterns" are really narratives or stories about experience. Parallel constructions in thought. If you get the result, it matters not a jot what you think about how it works (even the idea that there is a "how it works" is a parallel construction). Then, if you want to distinguish between the two (because you are trying to ascertain whether your default assumptions about experience are true or not), you repeat your experiments to the extent that it becomes undeniable that, for example, the results are less like "selecting experiences via attention from a 3D space" and more like "selecting experience via intention from an 'infinite gloop'". So, we're on the same page here. The extra bit, though, is that the formulation of our intentions can themselves imply a particular description, which then leads to experiences corresponding to that particular formatting. For example, if you have an assumption that the world is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" with you as an object within it, and your intentions start from that sense of things, then you are not only intending your outcome, you are implicitly re-intending that standard view world-formatting. So it is not necessarily quite enough to just go "hey, who cares so long as I get the results", because without directly addressing your current patterning in your intending, you are reinforcing certain limitation. While saying "hey, anything is possible", we can be unwittingly intending that "really only these things are possible". This is why deliberately adopting the metaphor/patterning of the concept of "states" which define a set of facts and a sequence of moments, and intending with that "how things work" in mind, can be better than having an optimistic but non-specific notion of "we're jumping all the time and everything is possible, somehow". All of which is really just a way of saying: the only fundamental truth is the fact of the property of awareness or being-aware or being; everything else is relatively true only (conceived of in the most abstract way as a "shaping" of awareness, as "patterns" and "formatting" and "facts" or whatever). It's definitely worth being explicit about this, though - hence the idea of "active metaphors" and so on.

This sounds a lot like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

The problem with the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" is that it's basically just a categorisation - that is, only a labelling of the experience that often when something is held in mind it seems that there is more of that something arising in your experience. Beyond that, the "brain likes patterns" and "it can trick itself into seeing a pattern" aren't really explanations; there's no mechanism suggested (how, exactly, does the "brain" do this? what is the evidence that it does do this, in fact?). It's a restatement. Although it is a catchy term. Really, then, it's just a rephrasing of the idea we are investigating: "experience tends to exhibit some sort of 'patterning' effect (and this can be used to advantage)".

While it may be that you actually jumped dimensions, or have attracted more sharks into your life through manipulating some law in quantum physics we have yet to discover

Well, "jumped dimensions" is a metaphor, remember; it's not intended to be taken literally in the sense of an external set of "places" that one is transported to. No actual explanation is offered, only a way of conceiving of it (one amongst many). No description is identical to "how it works". In fact, even the idea that there is a "how it works" is under scrutiny here. There is certainly no suggestion of "manipulating some law in quantum mechanics". This would be nonsensical anyway, I guess: a "law of quantum mechanics" is an aspect of a descriptive scheme, used to account for certain experiences/observations resulting from experimentation, not a thing "out there" that exists as an object that can be transformed. I could scribble on the relevant pages of my old copy of Eisberg & Resnick, I suppose!

Again, you're telling your brain to see/recognize something, which it is doing (I hope this paragraph made sense).

Now, we have the issue of how to distinguish between seeing something that would have been there anyway, versus now seeing something that wouldn't, and the difficulty of the whole idea of "would have been there anyway". This is why we have a similar issue with explaining things as "confirmation bias": that implies a stable background environment or dataset from which patterns are being selected. However, we can't necessarily take that for granted: this is actually one of the assumptions that is being investigated by conducting the experiment. As mentioned earlier, perhaps the selection of experience isn't actually from a 3D space? Perhaps the usual assumption that the "world" is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time", with you as an object within it, is flawed?

Aside - This latter area is something that is touched upon by some recent approaches to quantum physics, see here and here for accessible articles about that. This ties into the "objective frame" comment I'm about to make below. One of the authors also has a nice article on the reificiation of abstractions which is worth a look, here.

If you take into account all the times during the day you did not see anything shark-related, you would soon realise that there is an insignificant increase in the sharkyness of your life.

Relative to what, though? Comparing the number of "shark objects" seen compared to the number of "non-shark objects" doesn't tell you anything about the significance of the number of sharks encountered. The correct comparison would be between "number of sharks 'actually' in environment" vs "number of sharks 'experienced' in environment", before and after doing a patterning exercise. However, this option isn't available to use, for obvious reasons (the environment assumption, and the lack of repeatability, and lack impossibility of counting before the exercise). So we can make no comment on the significance from an "objective" frame, because the whole experiment is "before" the idea of an objective frame; it's one of the assumptions we are examining by doing the exercise...

One of the main purposes of which is to make you think about these things, but after doing the actual exercise. And repeatedly. Because the only way to really decide whether there is "something to this" (whatever that might be, we don't presume) is to do it many times, with many targets (first objects, then more abstract things, events perhaps) until it becomes undeniable that there is a link - or not, of course. The summary of this is, I guess, that it doesn't really matter what reasons we come up with for why this is "not a real thing happening 'out there'", or is "only this (insert named category of experience)" - the actual point is to more closely examine the nature of ongoing experience as it is, and not short-circuit that by confusing descriptions about "the world" (as parallel constructions in thought) with that world-as-it-is. Perhaps the "formatting" of the world as it is experienced is best described in another way?

There's a general rule when trying to prove a theory; You first need to try to prove it wrong. That is exactly what I'm doing.

One might say that this is what is being done here. It's not that anyone attempting to prove there is such a thing as "dimensional jumping" as such - as the sidebar says, "there is no theory of 'jumping' or its mechanism". That's not the theory that people are attempting, as an exercise, to prove wrong. Rather, they are attempting to prove wrong the theory that the world is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". In fact, "that is exactly what we're doing".

POST: The Mandela effect and dimensional jumping

is the little ritual I did earlier constituted as a spell?

Not a spell. Ultimately, it's just what you might call deliberate, structured intention. If you are okay with moving your arms and legs, then you should be okay with this!

As for noticing spontaneous changes (versus one's memory of prior moments), I'd use them as a reminder that your ongoing experience of the world is more like a "pattern" in your (impersonal) mind or "awareness", than a "place" that is "out there". Remember that "dimensions" are a concept which we are using to conceptualise change; you never actually go anywhere, you just use it to create an "as if experience, using it as a sort of transformative pattern. And so, although we might say that a Mandela Effect experience feels "as if" we jumped to another dimension, really we are using the term casually in that case, like a story. We could equally say that we shifted a fact in our "world-pattern" in our awareness as an implied side-effect of another intention, or that we accidentally selected a new subset of moments from an eternal memory block, or whatever. There is no unchanging separate "how things are" to refer to in that way, however. Except for just fun chat, I think it's best to consider such concepts and descriptions as "patterns we use as part of an intention, a context for defining an outcome", than any true description. The only true, unchanging, fundamental fact, then, is that of the existence of the property of being-aware (or "awareness"). Everything else is a relative truth, a temporarily active pattern of fact, only; the only causal force is intention and everything else is a result; and so on. So if you have the experience of a fact changing, then there is nothing more to it, nothing "behind" that, other than the fact changing. If you didn't deliberately intend a change to that fact, you may assume that it is a shift associated, with a byproduct or implication of, another intention. Even that is too much, but at least it keeps the "explanation" at the most basic level, that of "experience is patterned" and saying no more that is just "parallel fiction" (description in thought).

POST: How Can I Record Accurate Data Before/After The Owl Method?

I guess it all depends on what exactly you are trying to demonstrate for yourself. The issue here might be in your use of the word "accurate", if this is supposed to refer to some form of external world independent from you which is being measured, and which is affected by the exercise. That is, that there is a "real" before and after number of owls "out there" which the exercise is changing. But you never experience such an "out there" though; there is only the number of owls experienced. Even by simply deciding to keep track of owl instances, and being on the look out for them, you are already "patterning" yourself with "owls". You may indeed find that there are more instances of owl experiences after the exercise than before, because you are deliberately further intensifying the pattern. Ultimately you are not really demonstrating anything beyond that (that deliberate intention increases the relative contribution of the pattern being intended), because you cannot actually get outside of "experiencing" in order to have an independent reference point which is not entangled with your intention (or the implications of your intention).

Therefore, the pre-exercise data count should have little-no effect on the post-exercise data count, if given the 1-2 week grace period.

The performing the pre-exercise count will have some effect, and the exercise may increase that. However, even the fact that you are contemplating doing this experiment at all will have an effect. And you might well find that the pattern reaches extreme levels before you even get to the exercise, in anticipation of it, and the exercise itself doesn't really make any difference. You can't "fool yourself", basically, because your entire experience is "made from you", and continued attention corresponds to a continued deformation of your experience. This is what makes "proving it" experiments difficult to construct, and "objective world" concept experiments impossible (because it is a concept only).

To be honest, I'd throw away the idea of a conscious and subconscious mind, particularly in terms of them being "active" entities that "do" things. I've never seen a "conscious" or a "subconscious", personally.

if in the first part of the experiment I'm actively looking for it, it shouldn't show up as frequently or prominently if I understand the exercise correctly.

Why not? What you've actually done is pattern yourself with the intention "I will have the experience of looking for owls". That alone will increase the contribution of the extended pattern "owls", to some extent, even if you don't imply "...and finding them" on top.

But post-exercise, my subconscious mind should attract the owls, and more frequently.

Your subconscious doesn't "attract" anything. That metaphor implies that you are some sort of object in a place, and that your subconscious is like a magnet which "attracts" other objects you've decided upon. In the owls exercise itself, it makes the comparison with drawing a pattern on a screen and that pattern peaking through experience wherever an appropriate context gap opens up. That's a more appropriate metaphor, I think.

I need a control group to measure my noticing...

The problem is, that "noticing" is also a patterning! It is also a selection of an experience!

If I start the exercise with something that may have been frequent, but on the fringes of my perception...

If something isn't in your experience, then it isn't in your experience, though. The idea that there were things "on the fringes" that you just didn't notice, is basically a little story you'd be telling yourself.

then how will I know that I'm not just making myself notice what's already been there more often?

The point is that the idea of there being an "already there" is an assumption you possibly going to be challenging, so you can't actually use it as the basis for an experiment. As I said, you are possibly assuming that what you are is an "person object" in a "stable, fixed place with other objects in it", when the exercise is actually based on that potentially not being true. It might be more helpful to conceive of yourself as a sort of "open, void, aware space" within which multi-sensory experiences arise, as if selected from a background. That is, you are not a "body" which is "looking around a place", you are a "mind" which is selecting moments or "sensory frames" such as "the experience of being a body, looking around". See also, the Feeling Out exercise linked earlier. On version of it:

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".)

To continue on your before-and-after experiment concept:

The pre-exercise is meant to keep track of what's already there.

There is no fixed "what's already there", so there's no good way to do that! The "already there" that you'd have to be referring to would be something like an "infinite gloop" of all patterns or an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments that you are selecting your experiences from. So it is meaningless to measure a "before" and "after" for that, because both involve selecting experiences by intention (and the implications of intention), rather than noticing things in 3D-environment: The "looking for" is still a "selection" of an experience: the experience of apparently "looking for things in a 3D environment (and finding them or not"), just as the "intending and noticing" is a selection of an experience: the experience of apparently "seeing things in an 3D environment that you'd decided on". All you can do is pursue the exercise for different images, ideas or outcomes - different deliberate "selections" - until it gets to the level that the suggestion of there not being a causal connection between intention and outcome becomes ridiculous. See also, this recent response on the owls vs confirmation bias:

It's one hundred percent confirmation bias.

Although, we should ask: what exactly is "confirmation bias" in this case?

If the term is taken to mean "noticing patterns that were already there in a three-dimensional environment (a place)", then the extreme experiences one can have often seem to conflict with that. If, instead, we expand the term to mean something like "selecting patterns into sensory experience from a non-dimensional environment (an infinite gloop)", then we've got a description that's more useful, perhaps. In the first case, "confirmation" refers to confirming ones prejudices. In the second case, "confirmation" is more in the sense of confirmation of a property of experience. In neither example, of course, do we have access to an independent external reference against which to measure the "confirmation". However, in the case of "dimensional jumping" and that exercise, we explicitly recognise this fact - and pushing against ("confirming" or not) the standard "world experience" assumptions is actually the basis of the exercise. This sort of discussion we're having, though, is exactly what all this is about: digging deeper into our assumptions and being really picky about our world views and interpretations.

and in your own words

Hmm. As opposed to...?

where does it lead..

It leads to a clear perception of the actual situation, rather than just being lumbered with whatever you've ended up with in terms of your perspective, your default "formatting" of experience. Clear perception, then, of what is directly and fundamentally true of the content of experience (that is, the nature of all experiences), versus what is only conceptually and relatively true based on a superficial view of the content (that is, merely "being self-consistent" in thought, a conceptual "castle in the sky"). Without that, then everything else you think or do is (or might be) based on a set of misconceptions - i.e. it is wrong.

what is the use...

So, the main "use" is to no longer be wrong about everything! (Initially, of course, to realise that you might be wrong: hence the exercises rather than methods.)

Now, it so happens that the shift in perspective that this results in is beneficial - things like: the world is not a solid separate unyielding place, and you are no longer a little object waiting to expire, and everything is more flexible than you might have assumed. However, even if that were not the case (and, hey, no promises given: it's a "personal" investigation!), it would still surely make sense to thoroughly examine one's experience to truly ascertain one's situation, rather than simply assume that whatever ideas and habits you've ended up with are, without having really spent time critically examining it all, miraculously correct.

Very good indeed.

Oh, well done me, then! ;-)

Well, it seems like we're already talking from the same basis. I'm sure you'll agree, there's no way to truly articulate "your real nature", so we resort to metaphor (in my case: folds in blankets, sandcastles on beaches, patterns in space, and so on) and indirect pointing. It's non-conceptual, and language and thought is object-based. Or more to the point, the experience of thinking is "made from" and "within" the very thing we'd be attempting to think about. As a vague stab - where the purpose to more to have a formulation which indicates what things are not than what they are - we might have something like: "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". Anyway, I'd say the answer is best conveyed by guidance towards an experience which might imply noticing, rather than by even a metaphor-based definition. For example, in the Feeling Out exercise referenced above, to try and find where you are within the current moment of experience, and to notice that although there is apparently an "over here" and an "over there", both of them are "you", and you are sort of everywhere and nowhere. The hope, there, is that this insulates against the tendency towards identifying with a particular experience as being "it" - including the experience of "realising it" - and thereby short-circuiting idea of a process of "discovery" more generally, perhaps.

Q1: Thanks for taking the time to write this out. My main question is, how do separate consciousnesses fit into this? Is this comment just appearing in my experience, or did its creatiom also fit perfectly into your experience? How is it possible for all of these aspects to fit together but also leave room for any possibility of my own consciousness shaping my experience?

There's aren't any separate consciousnesses, because we are talking about the thing before "separateness". So, when talking about this, I tend to use the term "awareness" because it isn't quite so misused, or is at least relatively little used and so easier to convey meaning with. Note: "awareness", rather than "an awareness" or "the awareness* or "awarenesses". So we are referring to something which is "before" division and multiplicity and change. These are aspects of experiences, rather than the structure within which experiences arise. (In fact, it's not even a "something" because it is not an object; it is the subject to all experience, all apparent objects.)

From a recent comment, one way to say this is:

• "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."

There is no "my" and "your" experience in the sense of apparently-being-me or apparently-being-you being simultaneously experienced now. The experience you are having right now is the only thing that is happening. Although you can conceive of other experiences happening and meshing, and may even have experiences "as if" that is the case, that never truly happens (note: "happens" as in "events arising outside of this moment). The urge to try to resolve things in this way is really an artefact of only being able to think in terms of objects related in mental space. You can't really think-about this at all, in fact, because thinking is another experience, which is "made from" the thing you are trying to think about! (Again, see also: the Feeling Out Exercise in this comment.)

POST: If DJ'ing is just a "metaphor" then why do people say that the number in the header changes?

The change in the content of ongoing experience is real; the description or conceptual framework about that change is metaphorical. So, you can potentially experience a number change, just like anything else. You can have any experience "as if" (as in: consistent with a description based on the idea that) you have "jumped dimensions". However, the number changing doesn't of itself mean that dimensions exist like "places" which "you-as-person" transfer to and from. The number changing means that... you have had the experience of the number changing. Everything beyond that is story and metaphor.

So it's not a metaphor, but rather something that actually happens?

Right. It is true that your experience changes. That is what happens. And nothing outside of that. In your example, at one moment you see the number is x and at a later moment you see the number is y. But you don't actually experience "jumping dimensions" or "changing places" as such. That is merely a description or story which you can use to understand it. (Or, and this is the extra bit, it is metaphor that you might use to conceive of an intentional change in your experience.) There are many possible "explanations" which could fit that experience, actually - but none of them are "true" in the sense of being "what happened behind the scenes". In other words, in thinking about this, focus upon what you actually experience, directly. The experience of "seeing a new number" actually happens. The experience of "jumping dimensions" does not actually happen - although you might have the experience of "thinking about the change in terms of the concept of 'dimensional jumping'". Any explanation for an experience is actually just another experience (the experience of "thinking about a story of what happened"); it does not get behind the experience. It does not get to the nature of the experience, if that makes sense - it does not cause the change.

(For an approach to trying to directly recognise that there is no explanation that goes "behind" experience, try the Feeling Out exercise halfway through this comment.)

POST: Mixing things up?

Are you sure that this technics that you guys provide are for making a REAL dimensional jump

What would be the difference? If you have an experience "as if" you have jumped dimensions, what is the difference between that and "really" jumping dimensions? Is there a difference?

Similarly, what is "programming the subconscious"? I've never seen a "subconscious". When we do that, are we sure that we aren't just having experiences "as if" we are "programming the subconscious", but we aren't "really" doing so?

You get the idea.

POST: Explain (?)

is this real travel, or just "changing your experience", becuz i hear people say that you don't go anywhere, but i've also heard people talk about getting lost or something. So can i get a definitive answer?

Well, they amount to the same thing essentially: the experience is identical, there is no difference between "really" jumping and "seeming" to jump in experience. The idea that you "don't go anywhere" is a reference to that the usual assumption that what "you" are is a sort of person-object who is inside a world that's a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". In fact, when you think about it and examine it further, what "you" are is not a person after all, and you are not in a place. Rather, it is the experience of apparently being in a place which arises within you. Similarly: "jumping dimensions". Hence, you can't go anywhere, because you never are anywhere - you can only "change your experience" (because there is nothing else to change).

that's what confuses me. What causes the number to change then?

It's "intention - and the implications of intention according to the currently dominant set of facts and patterns". Think of it as collateral damage, from tugging on part of a blanket of material whose folds are the abstract "fact-patterns" of experience. You don't specifically decide upon the slight rearrangement of other folds that results from adjusting one fold deliberately -, nor can they be predicted (because that would be "pre-experiencing" then - i.e. basically just experiencing them - and also they don't necessarily correspond to thinkable concepts). From earlier, too: It might be better to conceive the world as an abstract "coherent landscape of facts and patterns", where raising up one fact deforms the landscape around it, fits the world to that fact, regardless of spatial and temporal considerations. (And this entire landscape is within you-as-awareness; there is no outside to it.)

this stuff is hellla meta

Indeed! It's meta... and then take one more step back. But don't let the descriptions bog you down; the "thing itself" is super-simple. You directly are it, the whole moment of experience, it's just that it's not possible to capture it in thoughts (concepts and words).

POST: Relevant, informational video on understanding dimensions

The actual theory (or better to say: underlying viewpoint) isn't structured around "dimensions" in that sense, as such - but as a way of detailing out a metaphor or conceptual framework for use (as per sidebar), rather than "how it works", it's all good. The lack of discussion might be due to people perceiving that. Or, of course, it might be because most people want "results", even though that probably doesn't get you anywhere longer term, and the experiments are best thought of as seeds for an investigation and contemplation into the "nature of experiencing"

POST: A few questions from someone who really wants to believe this is true

The sidebar text covers some of this I think. For example, you are not going anywhere, you are changing the content of your ongoing experience. It's not solipsism, because you are not the only person or mind. In fact, you are not even a person. You are not an object at all, you might eventually conclude. The assumption that you are a "person-object" in a "world" that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in time" is one of the things under investigation. A recent discussion on the "person" thing can be found in this thread [POST: People around us]. Ultimately, though, it doesn't actually matter how you have conceived of it. You have to do the exercises as experiments, and then reach your own conclusions. If it was solipsism - if all your subsequent experiences were more consistent with that description rather than a "shared world" type description - then that's how you'd have to conclude it was. However, one of the possible outcomes is that the very nature of "descriptions" themselves one of the things that ends up under scrutiny. It might turn out that all experiential content is best viewed as being on an "as-if" basis only ("as if" a particular description were true, at the time of the experience), because no descriptions really get "behind" experience anyway. In fact, you might decide that descriptions are themselves just more experiences: the experience of "thinking about experiences". In the end, you might conclude that the only fixed fact, the only fundamental truth, is the fact that there is an "experiencing", and everything else is temporary and relatively true only. This would mean that what you truly were was something like a "non-material material whose only inherent property was being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" states and moments of experience". Right now, you might have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world - but that isn't what you are. This you-as-experiencer is independent of any particular experience; with you-as-person not being a thing at all (with "person-formatted experience" being a more appropriate phrase to use). Again, though, it's all down to: conduct experiments, ponder the results (if any!), draw conclusions, decide what is true and not-true for yourself. Anything anyone else says here is, after all, just the experience of "reading words on a screen", and right now you don't really know what, if anything, is "behind" that experience...

...None of that necessarily follows, surely?

The basic observation is simply that your ongoing experience is "made from" you-as-experiencer (or "awareness") - the context of experience. Apart from that, the present content of your experience needn't be one thing or the other, and it isn't of itself causal. For example, you can't refer to experiential content (things you read, for example) as if it were independent information. The encountering of that information is just a further experience. And it doesn't necessarily define the content of other experiences (although you might use it for a template, perhaps). If you-as-awareness haven't so far "taken on the shape of" the facts that you describe, by intention or implication, then you won't experience them (other than, say, reading or thinking about them). There is no outside "will" to do it on your behalf.

POST: n00b question: Can two glasses still work if you don't notice any strange changes?

If your target outcome doesn't have a component in the present moment, then there's no reason to expect to experience anything in the present moment. For example, if your intention is for an event to turn out a certain way next month, then why would you have a sensory experience about it now? The format of the intention could be described along the lines of "it is true now that this happens next month". Next month is when the experience of a result happens. If it is not strictly time-bound in that way, even then, you wouldn't expect an experience at a moment ahead of when the target fact actually becomes relevant.

POST: I dont understand

OmegaAces: Different perspectives and different experiences lead to different conclusions, this is why some say it's "just" a mindset change, and others say its "just" purely spiritual. The exercises in this sub are laid out in a specific fashion for open minded experimentation and contemplation. Not exactly something you do on a sunday afternoon and form a ultimate conclusion on 3 days later. Basically, extended experimentation (months to years, or longer) may change ones perspective on what "actual things", "reality" and such things are.

/u/OmegaAces says it as it is. Treat this as an investigation into the "nature of your experience" (and of "descriptions"), consisting of experiments and subsequent contemplation of the results. You're meant to reach your own conclusions, really, although all the relevant strands are in the sidebar text from the start. Ultimately, you are led to confront your assumption that you are a person-object located within a world-place. That is, whether the standard concept that "the world" is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time" is in fact a completely accurate description of your ongoing experience.

POST: Paradox

It would only create a paradox if changing the present moment involved some sort of "replaying" of past moments in a logical causal sequence. If, instead, what was happening was an "assertion of a situation", then there would be no such restriction. You would simply be having the experience "as if" you were a person with no recorded parentage.

POST: Trying to reconcile apparent contradictions in DJ explanation.

Or is this the "brain in a jar" type perception, wherein your entire world is essentially a construct of your senses, and nothing beyond that holds validity?

There is no jar that is ever experienced, though, and even "a construct of your senses" makes certain assumptions about an external world that is being interpreted. The fundamental issue turns out to be, I'd say, the conception of oneself as an object that is located in some sort of place. We never experience ourselves as that!

In fact, we never experience ourselves as anything. It is more accurate to say that we are "that which 'takes on the shape of' states and moments of experience" - including the experience of apparently being "over here" and the rest of the room "over there". Consider: where exactly are you-the-experiencer right now, in this current moment?

You don't need to comprehend anything for it to work: the exercises in the sidebar, for example, are intended to be the start of you checking your assumptions about experience versus your actual experience. Actually: In fact, the nature of "descriptions" is itself something that is under investigation. If descriptions are themselves just further experiences - that is: the experience of "thinking about experiences" - then in what way can they ever get "behind" our main thread of experience? Are they not just "parallel constructions in thought"? Any ideas you have about experience are "inside" experience too - except that, importantly: experience has no boundaries, and so there is no "inside" or "outside", except as the conceptual thought about such a thing!

So I guess the summary is: there are only contradictions if you try to reconcile experience based purely on its content - trying to match thoughts about the experience with the main strand of experience as if one can "get behind" the other - without considering the context that applies to all experiences (which turns out to be: you-as-experiencer as the experience).

POST: Newcomer questions

The answer to all of these questions is: try it. Treat this as an investigation, where you conduct experiments and draw conclusions from the results.

It's just a little glass of water. How bad can it really be? :-)

Not bad at all, of course, relatively speaking. Well, no worse than allowing whatever sequence of moments you've already unwittingly defined as unfolding, anyway. There are a whole lot of caveats in terms of ideas like "the subconscious" and even "everyone around you", here. Our default assumptions cannot be taken for granted in these areas. Ultimately, there are no such things, not independently anyway, and experiences are best considered as being on an "as if" (things were true) basis, I'd say. That is, any "monkey paw" type warnings should not be taken too seriously, except in the sense that (as emphasised in the exercises) one should only intend outcomes one would find acceptable as experiences. Because you always get results, in some form or other. (Which you reference in a later comment I see, right enough.)

POST: "As If"?

I see that term come up a lot in discussions and am having a hard time wrapping my head around it, mostly because it's kinda thrown in there casually like certain acronyms or secret lingos. Can someone please explain why they term keeps popping up and what it means?

It's a way of saying that the experience you are having is apparently consistent with something being true, but that it is not fundamentally true. So, you might say that right now your ongoing experience is "as if" you were a person-object in a world-place, "as if" there was an "external world" that was impinging upon your "sense". The content of your experience is consistent with a description based around those ideas. But: that description is not what is "really happening" when we take into consideration the context of experience. What is "really happening" is more like you-as-experiencer has "taken on the shape of" a particular state and sequence of moments, and so there is nothing "behind" or "outside of" that experience at all. Of course, that there is also a description, but unlike the first description, it is intended to point to something you can notice directly about experiences, rather than something that is "true" in terms of content. The first description is like a model, the second one more of an observation or line of investigation. This connects to the notion of direct experience or "direct truth", verses "conceptual truth", and the Feeling Out exercise mentioned elsewhere.

POST: Protip for people failing 2cups and Mirror Method

Chipping in with some general thoughts:

Do not ask for money (too abstract)...

I would also avoid the concept of "asking" (or "wishing") at all. It's more in the manner of a direct update to the patterning of your ongoing experience - see below. For sure, you can produce some experiences "as if" you were talking to a universe and getting responses, but actually those experiences would themselves be direct updates also. You can ask for "money" but you should have a good sense of what exactly you mean by "money". Sometimes people avoid being too definite, sort of superstitiously. But being clear about the target, even if not in the details, is helpful I think. You don't need a big description written out - you just need to "know" it. And: Ultimately, all that we ever experience is... experiences, moments. So I think it's beneficial to have a sense of what a target outcome means in terms of experiences. Otherwise your intention for "money" is like the Owls of Eternity experiment: you will probably see a generalised extended pattern of the idea of "money" become more prominent in your experience, without any specific target event taking place.

the universe can't give that to you because your consciousness can't find a version of you that isn't so deeply flawed state.

Remember, too, that, as per the sidebar, "dimensions" or "universes" are best thought of as being a metaphor which describes being in a particular state. They are metaphors upon which a structured intentional act is built, leading to results formatted by the conceptual framework or pattern of that metaphor. In this description, "the universe" doesn't give you anything and "your consciousness" doesn't find anything. It is much more in the manner of a "dumb patterning system". That is, your intentional act is simply an increasing the prominence of a particular fact-pattern in your ongoing experience - dragging into play any logical implications required for coherence, since your experience is a single thing, not made from parts. It's like grabbing a bit of a landscape and pulling it up to make a mountain. The mountain is your new fact, the rest of the landscape is deformed to accommodate it. However, there is no separate "intelligence" doing things or working things out. You are the only intelligence, and what you are doing is changing you state by shape-shifting yourself.

If you're having difficulties try smaller specific jumps that affect yourself more before trying bigger jumps.

It's definitely true that, in terms of investigating the "nature of experience" here, starting off with target outcomes in your everyday life (things you would consider highly unlikely but not reality-rule-breaking) is sensible. And then build out from that once you've demonstrated ("demo exercises"!) that there is "something to this" (or not, of course). But: pushing against our assumptions of what is possible and how the world is (are we a person-object in a world-place that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in time"?) is ultimately exactly the point of all this, so there's no need to be too timid! Swapping the limits of one description for another would be a missed opportunity - especially since the nature of descriptions, and their exact relationship to our ongoing experience, is also one of the things under investigation.

Is it possible to jump to one that's very different? Sure, the number would change in the sub.

I'd highlight that this isn't necessarily the case. There is no reason why the sub header need alter along with any other fact or pattern, no matter how dramatic the change. From the sidebar text: Header No. 982 - Please note that a shift in your experience does not require a change in the header number, which should be treated as an emblem of change and a symbol of potential rather than an ID.

POST: Escaping the system, to true reality

Thing is, no matter what world I jump to, I'm still trapped within what is ultimately a false world.

There isn't a "real world" in the sense of a place. "Dimensions" aren't places, they are more like states. Ultimately, they are just different experiences, all at the same "level", with none being any more special than any other. It is all you-as-experiencer having "taken on the shape of" a particular state and the implied moments of that state. So, you are not trapped anywhere, because you aren't anywhere; you aren't an object and so you never have a location. Any apparent location within a place is just a part of the "as if" (as if it were true) experience you are having. All experiences, then, are the equivalent of "reading a book" - but in the sense of all books being within you, a library "dissolved" into the background of you, and you selecting one or the other. You might arbitrarily select the "void experience" as the ultimate version, I suppose, since in that state you are not "reading a book" at all (see for example the description: here). But really it is just another "shape" to adopt.

the world that contains all other dimensions as well as the substrate that robustly maintains existence and explains how there can be something from nothing?

There is no "world" that contains all dimensions (because there are no places as such in the sense of being "containers"), and no substrate maintains anything (since that implies some sort of ongoing activity holding things together and a solid "material" of some sort). You might say that you are the substrate, in a sense, because you-as-awareness are all that is: the only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of the property of being-aware. As for "something from nothing", one way to consider this is that all things - all facts and patterns - are eternal. All that changes is which facts and patterns are brought into prominence, with a particular set of relative "intensities" corresponding to your current "state". See this previous comment and links for more on that [POST: Who are You?]. Aside - It's worth reading some of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges for some interesting ways to conceptualise worlds and patterns, perhaps - particularly The Library of Babel, The Circular Ruins and The Garden of Forking Paths. They're all ultimately different versions of the Infinite Grid metaphor referenced in the sidebar, but they're fun to play with.

Could you expand on what you mean by "level", and why it is that different experiences are always at the same "level"?

So, what I'm try to get at here is that if you were to have an experience of, say, finding yourself transported through multiple universes, seeing strange scenes, all different kinds of life, and having an interaction with some beings who told you about the secret structure of reality...

You would not in fact have gone any "deeper" into the nature of yourself or the world. None of those experiences would be any more special than your everyday experience; they are still just further content made from "experiencing" and within or as the context of you-as-awareness. That is, an experience of "digging into the deeper levels of reality" is in fact just that: an experience, actually at the same level as any other. Similarly, any thoughts about a deeper level, your descriptions and explanations and models, are also just at the same level: parallel and simultaneous rather than behind or underneath. A shorter way to say this, is that the realisation of a "real reality" being looked for by OP here is actually the "meta fact" that applies to all experiences (the very fact of you-as-awareness taking on the shape of experience), and not something that is contained within the content of any particular experience.

POST: Glad to find this sub!

In regards to the post on the two glasses technique I want to point out for those new to it, that you must focus on the result of what you truly want, not on what you don't want.

I would emphasise for that exercise, though, when performing it as an experiment: just follow the instructions as written. Don't "focus" on anything in terms of straining, no effort or concentration is required. There is no actual mechanism at work here, it is far more direct than that. And then follow the final instruction (which is basically: don't interfere afterwards).

So instead of focusing on the mechanism to get the result you want, focus on the result

I'd definitely agree with this. (And nice story.) One could perhaps conceive of this as "inserting a fact into the world": If we think of the world as a single landscape, one continuous coherent pattern which completely defines the world, then to assert one particular fact as an outcome inherently involves a shift in the landscape around the two defined points: now (which is fixed because you are experiencing it unfolded as a sensory moment) and then (your target which you have fixed via intention). It becomes "true now that this happens then", and all of it is present now even though only one moment is "unfolded as the senses". So, any apparent mechanism is only a seeming mechanism, when viewed afterwards. In truth, we just experience a sequence of moments, aspect of the landscape, pre-determined by the facts within our patterning. The actual cause is always intention: the assertion of a particular pattern as true, incorporated into the existing world-pattern, which is really a patterning of ourselves. Everything else - all experiences, even those that are apparently "causes" - are "results". Meanwhile, I'd say that "believing" is optional - in the sense that it doesn't cause anything if it's just an occasional thought about things - but it does make it more likely that you will fully commit to an intention (and since intention is a direct shifting of yourself, with nothing interpreting a request or whatever, a "sorta" intention equals a "sorta" update), and definitely assists you in resisting the urge to tinker and interfere and engage in doubtful reflection afterwards. For clarity, it's probably worth making a distinction between "believing" an idea versus intentionally fully "patterning" or "formatting" yourself with it.

POST: Shifted to a New Awareness/View of My Cats?

[POST]

This is long. Sorry! Well.... Over the past few days I've realized that Triumphant George had posted many gems of information both here and on another site, Oneirosophy, that I had not yet thoroughly read. So, last night I began reading through a lot of these and really pausing to give each one some deeper thought (for instance, the Hall of Records, the Imagination Room, and the wealth of ideas here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Oneirosophy/comments/2r39nc/overwriting_yourself/] - and in several other posts). I was aware of some sort of deep change in my perspective as I kept reading these (although I've experienced plenty of "changes in my perspective" already!); something really seemed to "take hold" as I pondered and mentally experimented with some of these new techniques and ideas. The first thing that happened after this, that I recall, is that - still on the computer - I did some web browsing and encountered several synchronicities in a row that startled me a little (although I'm pretty used to synchronicity and "magical happenings" that come and go,) and the content of them was so important to me that I wrote them down. Honestly, I would share them here, but I've found that sometimes another person's "startling synchronicity" just isn't read as such by others. Maybe I've spent too much time on GITM (silly me) where the main idea seems to be to "shoot down" every poster's "glitch" ;-/ but I feel it best to keep the details to myself, since those aren't the "main event" in this post, anyway. Before I proceed, as an explanation I need to say that I live on a rather busy street, my cats never go outside, & part of my small-ish home is really not in use right now so my livable space is reduced from what it used to be. Also, those of you who have had cats know that if I just "locked them up" in a room at night, they would meow, yowl and howl pathetically all night! Which would hardly be restful for any of us. ;)
Sooo, it wasn't too late but I was very sleepy. I left the computer and went upstairs to sleep. Now - I have 5 grown cats. They've slept with me for a long time, but until about 3 1/2 years ago, I was in my double bed and there was plenty of room for 1 human and 2 or 3 cats. Now, however, I actually sleep on a sofa (I won't go into why at the moment,) and the cats kept getting, from my perspective, needier and needier and more and more invasive. So for at least 2 (more like 3+, I think,) YEARS I've been trying to sleep with one cat draped about my head, chewing on my hair, pawing at my face, another cat sniffing at my nose and tickling me with her whiskers, and another cat pawing at my feet.... You get the picture! The obvious result was much disturbed and thwarted sleep, and me feeling a lot of irritation toward my poor kitty cats. My oldest cat has never been a lap cat or very "touchy", but at the elderly age of 15 last year, even she decided to become a lap cat and now insists on sitting on my lap for 1/2 hour every evening before bedtime. Anyway, so - on to my point. I had read all these articles and posts by "TG", seemed then to feel some sort of inner shift... then experienced a rash of synchronicities, and then went up to "bed". Last night, I didn't do "two glasses" or anything really deliberately, but I sort of felt... filled with love, or... I dunno! As I sat with my cats, (a couple of whom also do things like race about madly, scratch up the sofa, and get into "tiffs" with each other,) I was led or drawn to appeal to their Higher Cat Selves. I remember petting them very lovingly and thinking that I was appealing to the "Magnificent Heart" of each of them. In this "appeal" I wasn't really asking for anything too specific, but there was a very silent, (sort of deeply hidden within me so that even I was not very aware of it,) INTENTION: peacefulness - goodness -. I hope this is sort of clear. Seems hard to express. So, during this "petting" time of about 1/2 hour, at one point my big orange cat, Sam, raced over and began to claw (with great gusto - you'd have to know Sam!) at the sofa I was sitting on. I sort of just... thought about his "Magnificent Heart", his Higher Being, and he stopped right then in mid-scratch, jumped up on the back of the sofa and began to snooze! I just thought, "Gee" or some such. I finally lay down, very tired. William, my other male cat - big, orange & white, and fluffy - jumped up onto the pillow above my head. He chewed on my hair and did his usual annoying tail-swishing, etc. One of my female cats had taken some of the cover off my feet. In this somewhat uncomfortable - and perfectly usual - state, I began to drift off to sleep, still with thoughts of some of TG's writings in my head. I was still slightly awake when William jumped up suddenly from the pillow he was sharing with me, and down onto the floor. Sam also got off the sofa, as did Annabelle (little cat at my feet). I didn't think too much of it as they will go to the food bowls or to get water at night, but they always, always come back. I just snuggled down to enjoy my very temporary (I thought) Sole Occupant of the Sofa status, since every single morning I awaken in some more or less uncomfortable position, basically "covered in cats". I usually sleep very poorly and wake up several times at night due to cat-related discomfort. Except this time, I didn't. They weren't there. (!!!) This may seem like a small thing, but when my alarm went off and I realized there wasn't a single cat with me, and I was awakening from a very peaceful, undisturbed all-night sleep, I was stunned. It seemed that, when they left the sofa as I was drifting off to sleep, they stayed off. I sat up, and after a minute, slowly the cats came in from the other rooms, one by one. I was going to write that I have no idea how tonight will play out - when Sam (my most "in your face", high strung kitty,) jumped onto my computer desk and did something he has truly never done before. Instead of sitting or standing in front of the monitor, blocking my view, and meowing insistently in my face, he has politely lain himself down off to the side so I can still see the whole screen. I have seen what seems to me to be an extreme change in some cat behavior that was totally entrenched over a period of about 3+ years, and I hardly know what to make of it. All I know is, I FEEL "shifted". And I didn't DO anything. I just assimilated & allowed new perspectives in.

[END OF POST]

Q1: I just said thanks to n8dawg189 & BraverNewerWorld for not calling me a fruitcake! :)
And I wanted to follow up just a bit. Last night I fell asleep with a kitty (William) by my head, and this morning I woke up - once again "sans cats"!!
I just don't know....Also, another change (big change, in terms of my state of relaxation vs irritability,) is that my cats were not "under my feet" either last evening or this morning. For quite some time, (years, that is,) I haven't been able to go up or down the stairs, walk from the living room to the kitchen, etc. without having cats - especially William, Mary and Annabelle - "accompany" me by racing ahead of me and then stopping in front of my feet. If I go to my small bathroom, the pattern has been that 2 or 3 cats race in there ahead of me, throw themselves down on the floor and roll around, etc. (Yes, they're cute! :-) - but, convenient, it isn't. There's hardly any room for me! lol)
Well, this morning I went up to the bathroom and William walked BEHIND me up the steps (unheard of, I swear,) and then he didn't actually go into the bathroom, at all. He sat in the hallway for a while. All my cats, (except for the oldest, Claire,) are behaving very differently. I'm trying not to misread modes of behavior that were always there, but just unnoticed, as new. Trying to be logical and honest with myself about what's going on. However, over the past couple of days, there are behavioral changes in my cats that I just can't deny. I sort of feel as if I have...well, (gulp) different cats, somewhat. I'll just relax and try to be observant without losing all my common sense.
Edit to say: I'm at work so not really in "Dimension Jumping Think mode". I wanted to clarify that I don't really believe it's a matter of actual "different cats", but rather....shifting to a state of consciousness where I - well, I've created them to be different! (I'm truly something of a solipsist these days, I think.) I've created changes in the past with thought alone, but 1) not on purpose; 2) still, in such a focused (though unintentional) way that I was able to look "back" and see very clearly exactly how I did it. Nice to find myself doing it with positive intention. In the long run, I just want comfortable me - and comfortable, happy cats!*

Not different cats as such - but maybe different cat patterns, eh? :-)

Aha, a secret is revealed! To shift patterns one must love seamlessly whichever pattern is present and silently intent/reveal/flow with the heart into the desired pattern. It has to feel as if you almost aren't doing anything at all, only allowing what you really want to happen by appealing to a Higher Authority in a humble, unobstructed trust. Hmm, very cool. Thanks to everyone involved for helping me think this out :)

The "higher authority" part, I would emphasise, is simply you providing yourself with an excuse to not interfere with what you've already done via intention - to let it unfold without re-intending again due to doubt. Once you have intended something, the new deterministic experiential path is set!

You are the only intelligence, everything else is a "dumb pattern".

Meanwhile, since intention has no specific sensory component (you don't "do" intention so much as "shape-shift" to a new state where the intentional pattern is prominent), there is no sense of effort. You didn't do anything; you-as-experiencer became something. In OP's case, they intended-that they would read some "active metaphors" and allow themselves to be re-patterned by them. And at that point the new pattern was fixed and the subsequent experiences determined.

(As with all of those things, it's much easier to do some experiments and know it, than it is to discuss it intellectually and try to "understand" it!)

Q1: Yes, it certainly is a challenge to discuss "things of the spirit" from an intellectual perspective. Sort of makes me think of, "The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life". Also, while I'd like to avoid mangling things up with a new "slant", there was definitely a sort of trance-like element to the way I was feeling the evening the change occurred. Have you ever had a dream, read a book or watched a movie that "caught you up" so much that you were sort of floating around, not quite grounded in your "real life" for a bit? That's not a perfect comparison to how I was feeling, but somewhat. I think the "shift" actually may have occurred while I was reading and so deeply contemplating those new concepts. By the time I went upstairs and spent time with my cats before sleeping, I was already mildly "entranced", immersed in the ideas I'd been reading about - and the brand new thoughts about my cats, such as their "Magnificent Hearts", just came to me out of nowhere. Not planned, at all. As TG has noted somewhere, my viewpoint had already switched - and I provided myself with a path to the recognition of the new viewpoint. (Ha! sounds so complicated.) When I "got in touch with" my cats Higher Selves, by the way, I sensed them, not as something like Big Noble Cats, but more like...very benevolent royal Beings, with their spirits "equal" to my spirit. It was interesting. I really, really appreciate this sub for being a place where such experiences can be shared and discussed! You guys are great. By the way, that "change" was Wed night, and it's now Friday night. My cats are still shifted/changed/different - and believe me, while I can write all this High & Mighty, got-it-together stuff, there is a very earthbound side of me that finds this very freaky!! I've had brief moments of staring at them like, "Who are you??" and wondering if I should rush them all to the vet! (lol) - They are fine, actually. I'm pretty sure.

They are probably the finest they've ever been! But it's interesting, isn't it, that having an actual experience is a bit more destabilising than one might expect in advance, no matter how enthusiastic one has been about contemplating "such things" beforehand. You can see how some people intuitively sense that perhaps they don't really want the miracles they are hoping for, since the price you pay is possibly a re-evaluation of the nature of things at a fundamental level.

Q1: Well, I'm sure everyone is sick to death of me posting about my cats, at this point, but I just have to post this. If anything would convince me that some change has actually occurred, and I haven't simply gone cuckoo, THIS (oddly, perhaps, but that's just me...) is it. I adopted Sam as a tiny, abandoned, bright orange (so cute) kitten in 2004. Once he started eating cat food (he got kitten formula for a short time,) he was strictly a fish or turkey guy. He would not eat chicken in any form, to my surprise. He wouldn't eat any kind of cat-food chicken. My sons and I tried giving him home cooked chicken, fried, roasted, braised, store-roasted chicken, KFC chicken, white meat, dark meat.... It didn't matter. He would look at us as if we were nuts to offer him something that was clearly inedible, and he would walk away. So, I seldom eat any chicken any more, at all, but yesterday there was a party at work and a ton of chicken tenders left over, so I brought some home. (Hey, free food....)
So, this morning for a snack I'm having some chicken and Sam wants some. I remove all the mildly spiced breaded coating and give him some white meat. He gobbled it up!! I am not kidding. He just ate a bunch of chicken. (Now he's meowing. I wonder if his tummy hurts.)
omg. It seems I have to get used to cats with a whole new set of "stuff"! (I need some chocolate immediately. lol) Jeepers. This is SO weird. In fact, it's so weird, I just have to try it some more. :-D
Edit to add: This is certainly the last time I'll post on this specific topic. (Enough is enough. :) I think everyone who finds it possible to "believe" is now aware that apparently I've had some kind of "shift" and may continue to see small bits of evidence of it as I "move forward in time".
Of course I'll post again if I perceive some totally unrelated, truly significant "shift"! Um - That is, I'll post again if reddit exists in my awareness after I've shifted (should I "shift"...)! Thank you for all your comments! Wish I could meet you all for coffee or something. :)

Good stuff. It's always been a concern with this subreddit that there has been a distinct lack of cat-related material - which, as we know, is the true mark of success on reddit and the internet at large. No longer! I just hope your cats are inclined to play along nicely with owls... :-)

Q1: Ha! I was going to stay off this thread, but... Yes, I probably should have included links to cute pics of my cats. Would've gotten "Gold". OWLS - I didn't even do the owl thing, just read through it. Yet I see them all the time. Decided to walk a different route to my bus stop Friday morning, and there was a car parked by the curb with a big stuffed owl on the dashboard. Last night (Saturday), I was looking at pics online of a home for sale, and in the living room of that home there was a large owl figurine on the coffee table. On and on, owls everywhere. I want to apply it with something far less popular, such as snails or hippos, and see what happens. :) Fun. You are my primary mentor at this time, TG. I have (just for the moment,) set aside Neville, Kidest, Fred Dodson, Bashar, all my New Thought folks, et al - and am diving in to study and apply the info in your writings. I wonder if you ever think of putting out a small book (?).

This is one of those threads where if you keep tugging on it, you find a whole sweater! Or a whole sheep! :-)

So, all the people you listed do, I think, give you a different starting structure that provides a path or "formatting" by which intention is filtered. Neville Goddard, with his references to Blake, is slightly more direct about it all, but regardless, what's actually important is realising the nature of experiencing. That's really the ultimate aim. If you realise that - infer the context of experiencing vs the content of experiences - then you don't need a mentor or a structure at all. As your post indicates, if you allow yourself to be fully formatted by an idea of "how things work", a metaphor, then you will have experiences "as if" it were true. Realising this, you just pick your metaphors wisely, choosing the most flexible. I really think that if we fully commit to directly experiencing ourselves as the "open awareness" which formats itself by imagining-that, there's nothing else to learn. All descriptions about it are merely parallel constructions in thought, inside it.

POST: I would love to hear your feed back on this video - is he accurately describing DJing as you understand it or experience it? OR is your experiences with DJing different than he describes? If so, how are they different?

Just to start: I don't think it's very helpful to define a "reality" as every change in experience (which is essentially what he does), because it makes it kind of a meaningless concept. However, if we define a "dimension" as a particular "state", meaning a set of world-facts from which follows a deterministic set of moments, then we've got something more manageable. In this view, when we deliberately intend a change, or imagine-that something is true until it becomes fact, then we have shifted our state (really: our-selves). Our subsequent experiences then arise spontaneously from that state. From there, it's not so much that you have to "start acting like the new dimension you jumped into is really there" - rather, you have to not obstruct or react to the sensory experiences that arise, including the experience of apparent physical movement. If you oppose the moments that then appear in your awareness, then you are in effect re-intending against them - and hence shifting state again. In summary then, we're really talking about:

• Adopting a new state and then:
• Not accidentally intending against that state.

For this to make sense intellectually, though, we really have to reconsider what we think of as "me", which leads us to philosophical idealism or non-dualism. You are not a person in a world doing magick or attracting things across time and space, for instance.

Honestly - you seem to be drawing VERY subtle distinctions between your understanding and what Bashar is saying. I'm not sure I even see a difference or even understand the difference you're highlighting....but I'll think about it, meditate on it and try to understand what you're saying. But regardless of all that - I don't want to sound ungrateful so thank you for your reply.

Well, do remember that this is not an understanding of something that independently exists as such. So there's an element of "whatever works for you" to all this. The only thing that truly matters, is that we recognise the distinction between the nature or context of experience (fundamental truth, you might say) and the content of experience (relative truth). Everything else is up for grabs, potentially. "Very subtle distinctions", then, are worth attending to, because how we conceive of the world shapes the structure of our experience. The benefit in drawing the line of the definition of a "dimension" at this point - of a world-state rather than something akin to "what I am grossly experiencing right now" - is that it logically follows that you can have effortless experience with occasional redirects. It's more obvious that you do not need to maintain anything, and so on.

Also: no aliens! [1]
__
[1] Unless someone particularly wants aliens, of course, in which case they can totally go for it. :-)

Q1: "Very subtle distinctions", then, are worth attending to, because how we conceive of the world shapes the structure of our experience.
This is exactly why I said I wanted to think on this further because I'm not afraid of subtle distinctions - but sometimes they're a distraction. It's the old analogy of you can't see the forrest because you're too focused on the trees. I had originally been thinking this thread would address the differences and/or similarities between DJing and Bashar's ideas but something about your response is making me think much deeper about all this.....which is actually quite fun for me so thanks. I'm not not nearly "up to speed" on all of this so it'll take me a while to process.

Yeah, it can be easy to get lost in formulations for their own sake, forgetting they're about constructing something useful rather than discovering something. (The exception being the discovery of our direct experience of ourselves.)

The subreddit overall is intended to be fairly concept-agnostic - hence the idea of "active metaphors" referred to in the sidebar and links. The underlying idea is that there is no particular "way things are". All changes are basically the intentional "patterning" of our experience/ourselves - to different levels of granularity. So, "dimensions" and "frequencies" and "grids" and "states" and "facts", they're all potentially useful as self-formatting patterns; none of them are inherently true. Anyway, thanks for kicking off the discussion.

Q2: Not accidentally intending against that state.
Could you please give a few examples of accidental intending?

So, one form of that would be you reacting against an experience that arose as part of the state's path to your outcome - either because it seemed unpleasant, or because you can't see how it fit in, or you were trying to "make" things happen by directing them in a more micro way. For example, perhaps as part of the sequence towards my outcome, circumstances force me into meeting up with someone who I find intimidating, and then they are intimidating, but my spontaneous response (rather than my reaction) is to stand my ground and say something out of character, and that resolves that situation and leads to my outcome in an unexpected way because that person has direct access to what I want. Throughout all this I have to trust that the deterministic path, the path that has been created as part of my outcome-focused state-shift, is heading in the right direction, despite my fear and discomfort. I must do this even though I can't know it in advance exactly what will arise along that path, because I can't "pre-expereince" my experiences and it's never possible to think it out. In exchange for that faith, I benefit from the entire "world-pattern" having reshaped itself as a coherent whole around my intention, in a way that could never be planned using my basic thought model of the world. However, to benefit from it I must surrender to it. Any resistance to what then unfolds in my senses is an intention against my current moment, but also the whole state. Since your state or "world-pattern" is a continuous whole - like a blanket of material with folds in it - to intend against one part - to tug on one fold - is to shift the entire world. (However, I'd suggest a strong outcome intention will not be completely mangled by a minor counter-intention that isn't directed at the specific outcome itself.)

Q2: it's never possible to think it out
What exactly is "thinking it out"? And how would thinking it out be different from not resisting the sensory experience that arises as thought itself?

In this context, the manual construction of a parallel structure in thought, which is then used as a plan for what needs to be done to reach one's goal. Perhaps "work it out" or "calculate what to do" might have been better ways to phrase it. The basic idea is, you can't "understand" the world enough to choose the correct action, but the information is there so that you can "know' what to do towards something you've intended - because it is the movement already occurring within you.

we might even just call it perseverance

Although for some people that word can imply struggle and effort and pushing, perhaps? The best words are probably "trust" and "faith" and "confidence", if we can put aside any religious connotations they have in the context of action in the world (not necessarily a bad thing, since that's where the concepts probably came from originally, but just associations that are unneeded). Maybe a blend of both.

Q2: Although for some people that word can imply struggle and effort and pushing, perhaps?
Yeah i intended it to come across more as "overcoming challenge," which probably blurs into struggle... for some people.. maybe. but i think if you know or have faith, trust, confidence etc, that you get to your end outcome, then it seems to make it more about upping the quality of that experienced moment and the implications following, which can mean struggling if struggling means-that your results will be, overall, better. Maybe not though, struggling could just be struggling.

I suppose we might suppose two levels for convenience, something we often have to do when discussing these topics. There is the "experience of struggling" as content - really just part of your sensory adventure - and then there is "resistance struggling" as context - which is when you-as-experiencer push back against the sensory adventure itself. For example - using a retro film reference - if we were Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark and we had decided we were going to find the Ark of the Covenant, then we might experience many struggles along the way, but those would be part of the "sensory adventure", and in fact our outcome would already be assured. However, we are simultaneously the actor Harrison Ford, and if we as Harrison Ford struggle against the unfolding of the adventure, of the script that is arising in our theatre, then we might derail that outcome, or at least (more likely) make the path longer and more punishing.

Q3: I must surrender to it.
Like Jim Carrey in "Yes Man"? :) But isn't there a limit to what we can say "yes" to? I'm ok with tackling a challenge that forces me to face my fears, making me stronger... but what about "deal with the devil"/"indecent proposal" kind of situations, that force us to violate our moral code? Should we embrace those too? Can we intend a different path without changing the destination?
a strong outcome intention will not be completely mangled by a minor counter-intention
How do you know whether or not your path has been completely disrupted by a negative reaction and is no more headed in the right direction?

Haha, no, it's not a Yes Man type deal. It really simpler and more basic than that: to give up micro-controlling in the sense that you think something "should" unfold a certain way, and to not let your fear lead you to avoid things. We might draw the comparison with body movement more generally: you don't actually need to control your body muscles "manually", and actually doing so tends to bring about inefficient and tension-producing results, because you can neither know what your body "should" be doing, nor consciously make it do such subtle co-ordination. Instead, you should intend the outcome (e.g. getting up from the chair; catching the ball) and let your body move by itself. However, until you've had that experience - there there is a movement that arises spontaneously in response to situations - then this probably doesn't make too much sense as a recommendation. Without a certain confidence or faith, there's the temptation to intervene and try to "make" the result happen - which has based on your crappy limited idea of the world. (In the specific case of body movement also, many people are constantly asserting their current position, and then overcoming it in order to move. So when they "stop interfering", they can feel sort of stuck for a while because they haven't "ceased asserting". We might wonder to what extent we continue to assert aspects of our world-state.)

So, what we're talking about here is the larger version of that - not just the experience of body movement, but of world movement. As far as disruption goes - I'd say that the outcome is never fully de-incorporated, but by asserting something that is counter to that outcome, you have at least reduced its relative intensity, its relative contribution to your future experience. If you feel you've lost your way at some point, then re-intend?

when we are learning a new movement (dancing, sports, etc.) we have to control our muscles "manually"

Obviously we've talking about intending other sorts of outcome here, but when we learn a new body movement, I would still say that we don't have to move our muscles manually really, as such - and that attempting to do so gets in the way, actually. We still direct ourselves towards outcomes. We shouldn't be trying to co-ordinate our muscles directly ever, I suggest - largely because we can't. We have no access to them in that sense. If we try to control muscles directly, what we in fact do is generate an experience of "controlling muscles", rather than generate an experience of "body moving as I'd like". Approaches such as Ideokinesis and the Franklin Technique for dance, or the Michael Chekhov approach to acting, or the Alexander Technique for general movement, follow this route - using intentional imagery or merely outcome-intention in order to bring about movement. Neurones don't have much to do with it (in the sense of what "we do" or what "they do"). If you haven't checked out chapter four of the Michael Chekhov Handbook: For The Actor yet, it's worth a look if you want to do some body movement experiments using intention: see here.

Since we can't know in advance exactly what will arise along that path, it seems to me that we have no GPS for manifesting.

Why do we need one? This assumes we need to progress step by step, as if we are walking across rocky and uncertain alien terrain. The is the opposite of how we want to go about things! Once the landscape is set - the deterministic path of moments is chosen - we don't need a "GPS". Again: the path is already set. We just need to not derail what we've done. If we are in doubt, we might periodically assert the outcome, but we shouldn't be "checking ourselves" (even just because of what that implies). You are not navigating a landscape, you are the landscape - even though you only perceive a slice of it in your senses at any one moment - and your intentions work by changing the contours. If you stop fiddling all the time by intending stuff constantly due to doubt and reaction, if you stop "thrashing your world", then you don't need to keep correcting yourself. The moments of the landscape "move through you" as the-perceving-space; you don't go anywhere. To use another metaphor, we might conceive of an intention as inserting a particular scene later in our script - and by the magick of movies, the script from now to then immediately rewrites itself to lead us there. So long we we don't do another rewrite, we just need to let the movie play out. We don't "do" our character, we experience it.

...claims that sometimes he gets error messages from the "ethereal software" he uses to heal or manifest

As for ethereal software and error messages, all that's doing is adding another layer of "how things work" on top of something that is, in fact, super simple. Sure, you can have experiences "as if" that's how the world is structured - but you're still just intending something extra you don't need (namely, that there is such a thing as "ethereal software" and that it gives you messages). Why not just go straight for the outcome and let it play out?

EDIT: I get that you might want to "check" the outcome, but I'd suggest that since there is no way to do this independently (the intention behind the action implies an outcome in itself), it's probably still better to continue to intend the outcome if you have doubts.

So, I'd maybe summarise this as:

• When you intend something, you are directly updating your "landscape" of upcoming moments with a new fact, incorporated into your existing patterning.
• All intentions are basically of the form "let my experience now unfold as if 'this' were true".
• The 'this' might be an event ("let experience unfold as if 'I get the job' is true") or a general fact ("let experience unfold as if 'there is such a thing as ethereal software'") and so on.
• It's up to you how much "mechanism" you explicitly or implicitly introduce into this; but there is no real mechanism behind the scenes. There is no "how it works"; intention operates "before" that sort of structuring.
• "Checking" is also potentially an intention to have a certain experience. Are we then going to check the checking? And so on!

To emphasise: We have experiences "as if" certain facts were true, but no fact is fundamentally true. There is no way to get outside of this and be an independent navigator or checker.

Body Movement Experiments

But it's ineffable.

We are, here, at the boundary of what can be discussed! Once you have the experience, it makes more sense. So, visualising (visually or kinaesthetically) is also a result of an intention, really. The intention itself isn't "anything", because it is the change in state. Or to be clearer: the "intention" is the potential pattern that you are increasing the intensity of; "intending" is the name we give to that act of intensifying. Anyway, putting that aside, you got some minor twitches. Something to check, then is that you are not also simultaneously asserting your current position as you do this. In other words, are you holding onto your current position so that you can move from it, instead of fully committing to the target position? It is very easy and common, I think, to end if "wishing" the target state and "wishing" your current state at the same time - to "ask" to both move and stay still simultaneously! The actual experience is more of a releasing into the target state. One idea which might help, is to conceive of yourself as containing all possible positions simultaneously - it's just that your current position is "brighter" than the rest. You are therefore permanently in a state of elastic potential, primed for movement in any direction, and it's not a case of deliberately moving in one of those directions, so much as ceasing to obstruct yourself in that particular direction. Meanwhile, another way to stop yourself getting stuck in a "visualisation as cause" trench, is to do something more basic. Every day, just lie on the floor. Then, having decided that your body will get up, do nothing at all. Importantly, don't engage in staying-lying-down either. Just let whatever happens, happens. Eventually, your body will stand up, effortlessly and perhaps in a manner or sequence you could not have predicted, "by itself". At this point your recognise that intention is perhaps best thought of as "inserting facts into the background", which later arise in your sensory theatre. It just so happens that we have become used to thinking of only intentions associated with immediate results as being "us doing stuff" - in addition to confusing the result of muscle tension with the act of intending.

Checking For Results; Feedback

[Checking for result] I don't understand what you mean by "independently".

If you have done something which you have decided or intended means-that a future event will occur - there is no way to check whether that event will happen without interfering with it. The act of checking implies something, because it has meaning. For you, the act of checking now might mean-that it is doubtful that the event will continue to be true then.

With Chekhov's exercises, for instance, you actually have a feedback.

Yes, because you are intending something whose sensory result is within the current moment, more or less. Beyond that - when intending a future event - you would be seeking sensory feedback for something that has no sensory component in the current moment! (Although the exception to this is that there can be a subtle background felt-sense of your overall state.)

This is where doing that lying down exercise might assist, because you will have the experience of having intended a future event ("standing up"), doing nothing about it or to interfere with it, and then it happening "by itself" in a later moment. You probably need to conceive of your situation differently here. One helpful analogy: your ongoing experience can be thought of as a deterministic landscape or sequence of "sensory moments" across which your "sensory attention" scans. When you intend something, you shift that landscape. If the part of the landscape you are changing happens to be the part you are looking at, you will "feel yourself doing it" because the result will be visible in the very next moment. However, if it is a part of the landscape you aren't looking at, you won't have any sensory feedback until you get to that moment - minutes, weeks, months later. It is true now that the result happens then, it's just that you aren't experiencing then, now. (Whew!)

Asserting For Outcomes

Well, you should know the answer [whether it is best to just assert the outcome], or you wouldn't have created the Two Glasses method... :-P

Haha, well, I'm me, y'know? :-)

Yeah, "how to assert/intend properly" is the key, but as we're noting here, it's not actually something that can be described in words. It's like "shape-shifting" - it's not something you do because it is the movement of your entire self, rather it is an act of "becoming" a new state. That's why instead we use a cheat. In Chekhov's case, the cheat is that we imagine-that there is such a thing as the imaginary body, and then this implies-that doing something with it will lead to a result. What this actually does, is shift our focus away from intending the movement, to intending the feeling-image which then implies the movement. We've dodged the question of how to intend the movement, and distracted ourselves from the issue of how we intend the feeling-image! The generalised version of the cheat is: find something you are already intending, then attach your desired outcome to that. This is how the Two Glasses exercise works. Everyone knows how to intend writing labels and pouring water, so we take that and piggyback another intention onto that.

Not-so-triumphant moments?

Everyone is omnipotent, but that doesn't necessarily mean jumping off a building results in a flying experience, for example. The movie always matches your script - by definition! - but you are not starting with a blank page here. You are in a state and that state is effectively the present draft of this movie script. This current state is the sum of all previous intentions and their logical implications (see handy visualisation). Altering the relative contribution of those patterns or facts is what "intending" is all about. This means that having outcomes which are "unlikely-seeming but plausible" is relatively straightforward, since it amounts to simply overlaying a pattern on the existing landscape. Having outcomes which break your model more, however, requires an amount of "ceasing and releasing" (stopping implying your current state, as with the movement examples above) and intending alternative deeper patterning or formatting. For example, the purpose of the three main metaphors in the sidebar is to provide just such an alternative formatting. If we are looking to come up with a feedback mechanism to inform our approach to change, then the sense of resistance on encounters when asserting that those metaphors are "true", is a good start. Extending this, we can also sense there resistance when we assert other facts as true, be they general or specific.

Should resistance occur, how does one cease resisting? Practicing surrender/faith?

I say: just leave the sensory experience of resistance alone, allow it to be there rather than try to push against it, and instead hold the intention.

so as i see it now, pushing against it is like reasserting it correct? fighting it/not allowing it thereby asserting the underlying truth of its existence? I just dont know, sometimes i feel like the resistance that arises comes out of fear, and i wish i wasnt afraid, but i am, sometimes i think i have been so consumed by fear all my life that is like a fish swimming in water, not knowing its environment, but ultimately needing it to survive.

That's how I see it. So, there is your intention and there is whatever the intention implies. If we resist something, we are implying its existence and also whatever we think that thing means. The only way around it is to "be okay with whatever is happening". Which doesn't mean we can't change things via intention, but intention shifts things "underneath" (or that's one way of saying it); we can't grip onto sensations directly and they are non-causal anyway.

(An intention always involves a complete shift of everything to an extent, since there are no "parts" to a state, and being a whole means things must be coherent and self-consistent, at least as a landscape if not as story.)

Fear: Totally normal. I have been an extraordinarily afraid person, almost afraid of simply existing, in times past. But fear is a sensory experience, and it's actually the squirmy resistance to the sensation that's the bad thing. If we can accept the experience as it is - "be okay with the moment" - then it becomes just an experience (albeit one that might contain useful information about our state or situation). That's where the whole "be the open space" thing comes in very useful, and that idea of "being an ocean rather than a glass of water" - because the ripples of fear are nothing to an ocean. That kinda thing. This loops back around to the "ceasing" again; that's how we are able to allow ourselves to open out.

Q3: are you holding onto your current position so that you can move from it, instead of fully committing to the target position?
I suspect so.
One idea which might help, is to conceive of yourself as containing all possible positions simultaneously - it's just that your current position is "brighter" than the rest.
Interesting. I've noticed that if I quickly alternate between the actual movement and the imagined one (to see if I can profit from the residual "after-image" of the target), my arm seems more willing to follow its phantom twin, albeit partially. It starts raising, as if pulled by a force field, falling back after a few inches. This "magnetic" sensation has made me remember another freaky "arm moves by itself" exercise. Perhaps, physical explanations aside, the pushing-against-the-wall might be seen as a rough way to set the target intention...
The movie always matches your script - by definition!
Where are unwanted experiences coming from? Are they just unforeseen side-effects of our wishes coming true?

I think you make a good observation about the pushing-against-the-wall exercise being a rough way of targeting intention - the action implies-that it will happen, plus perhaps that it triggers the ceasing of downward resistance which might have been opposing upward intention. Which segues nicely into your last point: where do unwanted experiences come from?

"Unforeseen side-effects" is probably not a bad way to put it, but we should be careful we don't think of those side-effects as being in any way deliberate or specified or even created as such. The world can perhaps best be thought of as a "dumb patterning system", with each intention being the equivalent of intensifying a particular pattern into prominence such that it is "relatively true". [1] However, the world is also a coherent whole - it always "makes sense" because it is one cloth - and therefore if we make one fact "true" then that logically implies other facts are true, within our specifications. There are different versions of this though, and not all fit into "stories": For example, if you intend "I will have good posture", then that implies your body will shift shape, tension will release and your body will elongate. Logically, all your trousers might now be too short and you'll have to buy a new wardrobe. Meanwhile, if you intend "I will meet Jim next week", then logically that implies you and Jim will be in the same location at some point, which also implies that, at the point of meeting, there will be an apparent plausible history that "explains' that meeting. You are defining more than just the meeting, in other words. Now, these two examples make sense in terms of there being a "story", but the way they come about is not a story-based structure; it is more like an abstract patterning system. I quite like to use the example of moire patterns for this:

[QUOTE]

Moiré pattern
In mathematics, physics, and art, moiré patterns or moiré fringes are large-scale interference patterns that can be produced when a partially opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. For the moiré interference pattern to appear, the two patterns must not be completely identical, but rather displaced, rotated, or have slightly different pitch.

The fine lines that make up the sky in this image create moiré patterns when shown at some resolutions for the same reason that photographs of televisions exhibit moiré patterns: the lines are not absolutely level.

A moiré pattern formed by two units of parallel lines, one unit rotated 5° clockwise relative to the other

[END OF QUOTE]

• Say there's something I want, let's call it A. This might be an event I want to happen or a fact I want to change. In any case, something I want to bring into my experience, a particular "pattern" I want to see in the world.
• Meanwhile, we've got the world as it currently is, which we'll call B.
• Now I intend the new pattern, A. By doing so I activate that pattern, in effect overlaying it on the world, B.
• From this I get the overall result, C, as my new world - see this illustration [missing].

Now, there is no sense in which I really chose that final pattern, and there's actually no way I could predict it (because I cannot see the entire all-space all-time pattern of the world at once), so in effect every overall result is an "unintended side-effect" of my intention. However, the intention itself is always guaranteed to be overlaid and appear in experience, so that's where we focus our attention. What's important, then, is that I specify my intentional pattern in such a way as it corresponds properly to what I actually want. If I just intend "owls" then the generalised pattern of owls will be overlaid upon the world without regard to space or time; it's like putting on spectacles with owl-patterns on. If instead I intend "owls on Tuesday in the city centre", then I have localised the intention to a particular part of the world-pattern. Beyond this, it's a matter of course correction as the larger world-pattern arises in the senses, moment by moment, as being becomes being-known.
__
[1] Here, we can refer back to our earlier notion of all bodily positions existing simultaneously but at different "brightnesses". Similarly, all possible fact-patterns exist eternally. When we intend, we are not creating something (if we can think of it, it must already exist!), rather we are making it a more dominant component of the world-pattern, thereby increasing its contribution to ongoing sensory experience.

So, we need to combine the intending/increasing-of-new-A with some kind of releasing/decreasing-of-current-B, as in the Two Glasses...

Well, I would say that Two Glasses is a level up from this in terms of structuring, since it is a content transformation - you have a defined situation you want to change - but the point about releasing is right, and the underlying notion is the same of course. If you are going to rearrange a rug, it's going to work better if you're not stepping on one corner of it at the time!

One difficulty in terms of thinking about it is that you can't "do" releasing - it's more of a "ceasing to interfere" or a "stopping gripping". Many people aren't even aware that they are gripping onto their sensory experience with narrowed attention. But anyway, it's really intending while surrendering to any shift, "being okay with whatever happens". In general, if you intend something into prominence then the logical implications of that pattern will take care of the contrary pattern. If you intend yourself into holidaying-in-Barcelona then working-hard-in-Arizona will tend to diminish itself logically anyway. In other words, there is no combining to be done really, since it's part of a continuous whole. There's a little bit of "do or do not" to all of this.

POST: Detachment

Really, there is no method or technique really. Detachment is something you don't-do, rather than something you do. It's like not writing graffiti on your walls. You don't need to do anything about not doing it, you just need to not do it. (Except in this case, thinking a lot about graffiti is a sort of graffiti all on it's own.)

So, you simply have to be willing to no longer hold onto yourself - you have to decide to "cease!" and then not go back tinkering with things again. Increased confidence through results can help, obviously, since you come to trust things. Alternatively, coming up with a description of how things work that you can "believe in" - purely so that you feel better about not interfering, not because it will be "how things really are". However - Something to play with, though, is to notice times when your spatial attention has become narrowed in general, and then release your hold on it. For example, when you are reading this text onscreen, perhaps you'll suddenly notice that you have super-focused your spatial attention around it - at which point you "cease"t that, and let your attention open out and become expansive. You don't need to deliberately narrow your attention in order to do something, you need only to intend it; you should leave your attention to move as it wants in response. This can be quite a powerful thing to realise, and can improve your moment by moment life substantially. Narrow attention can be like holding onto an electrical wire - it makes everything "sticky", including thoughts about your desires and actions. It's much easier to surrender to things when you are an "open space".

Why we are not taught this by our parents. I remember being with open attention in the kindergarten. Then everything went nuts. And I certainly see people enjoying their life managing it only with intentions and not control.

Our poor stressed-out parents don't know! Along with society at large, they think that narrowing attention is how you do stuff, and pass that onto us. This isn't helped by the fact that it's not really possible to describe "intending" in language anyway. You end up saying things like "wishing but not doing", which aren't very helpful until you've actually had the experience. It's been quite fun teaching my parents about this stuff, and them being in wonder at how easily they can move, catch stuff, do everyday tasks without effort or strain (quite apart from the more "unusual" aspects).

This open awareness has me asking since I was little kid "What is like thorough the eyes of others" in the meaning how they experience. Is my experience the "ultimate"? I can't help but wonder about this again since I am returning to this open awareness. I wonder how others feel. Especially this pleasure of just having open awareness, does others have it? This pleasure is still weird to me bc it makes me feel less of a person and I ask how other people are experiencing. I am feeling weird with that. I want to see through the eyes of others.

There's only one open awareness - just try and find the edges of it! So, it sort of doesn't make sense to talk of other people's experience of it. A person doesn't experience being open awareness; rather open awareness takes on the experience of being-a-person. That's not to say that you-as-awareness can't have the experience "as if" you were someone else, just as right now you-as-awareness is having the experience "as if" you were /u/Leewo. Surely the open awareness can take on the shape of any experience, since all potential experiences are dissolved within it?

Which leads us to say there is no "ultimate" experience, since there is no hierarchy to experience, no outside structure by which it could be organised. There is only "open awareness" taking on the shape of "this experience" or "that experience".

George do you garner all this just from a scientific stand point? I have come across similar ideas in the bhagavad gita but in a spiritual context. You always amaze me with your more logical ways of looking at things.

It just a difference of language, I guess. In modern times, we have access to streamlined analogies and metaphors that weren't available in the past. Whereas previously this stuff had to be discussed in terms of examples in nature or quite poetic language, now everyone is familiar with more abstract concepts and visualisations, so we can create more focused descriptions which are less likely to be misunderstood. It's only more "scientific" in the sense that we might use the same component patterns in our metaphors; the fundamental nature of direct experience remains the same as in the older traditions.

Is it best to just intend for a desired outcome a certain part of the day and just forget about it the rest of the day? I just use Neville Goddards method every night and try not to think much about the desired state throughout the course of the day. Is this most effective?

I think that's a good approach, having an "intending time" each day, and also some sort of daily releasing exercise you do daily. For the remainder of the day, just carry on with life - except with that extra bit: whenever you happen to notice you are spatially narrowing your attention, "cease" to do so, and when you are aware you're about to do something, do so by "intending" rather than by narrowing. (Ultimately, you want to stay open and spacious, with attentional focus shifting "by itself" within in that, in response to a larger act, rather than manually.)

When you say 'expanding' your attention, do you mean just trying to become hyper-aware, but at the same time, mindfully dismissing the minutia of existing?

More like, opening up the filter. If you were a room, and your attention was like an "intensity of experiencing" value at each co-ordinate in the room, then "expanding your attention" would mean to be more evenly aware by ceasing to forcibly narrow your attention into a small volume of the room. Rather, you'd release your hold on that value, and instead simply intend what you were doing, allowing the attentional distribution to shift by itself as was appropriate. For example, if you decided to look at one corner of the room, you wouldn't "focus your attention onto the corner" - instead you'd "decide-intent" to examine the corner of the room, and your attention would adjust in whatever was the more appropriate way. (Similar to how, when you move your body, you shouldn't manually manipulate the muscles - you should intend your final outcome and let your movements take care of themselves.)

I understand what you are saying in a basic level, but I think I should go and read that zen body movement book you recommended a while back, which is sitting on my bookshelf.

Definitely this is about experimentation, that's how it comes to make sense. Descriptions don't really capture it (largely because thinking is itself subject to the same issues). The Missy Vineyard book and the Peter Ralston one are both worth your time when it comes to the body movement stuff, since they combine clear descriptions with worthwhile exercises. Be interested to hear how you get on.

POST: another two glasses question? will i be gone from this dimension forever?

[COMMENT]

A1: In theory for what ive understood reading thousands of posts here but mostly posts of /u/TriumphantGeorge which has helped me alot and seems like a good helpful person and very expert, basically with two glasses (i did it 1 week ago and seems working i might post what i did and my results in the future) you dont really change dimension (probably it can also happen if you do it for something really big which would require a huge jump) but you basically create or edit a path in your dimension which will lead to what you wish for, basically you re-written some facts which in given time will lead to the desired situation. The world adjusts the facts by itself and you will see the results come at you sometimes also in a very blatant way. Basically you alter your reality facts for things that are plausible if very unlikely to happen.
i quote TG: "Potentially any change, although this method is going to generally produce results by "plausible if very unlikely" means. In other words, that's a pretty big discontinuous change for this zero-prep approach! Although you'll tend to get results of "some sort" anyway even for "impossible" things."
I think as the page says, its just a Demo excercise which is very helpful, but, i think to totally change the experience of living in a big way you should use the Mirror one or the others listed here, but that is too risky if attempted without experience. /u/TriumphantGeorge maybe can make it clearer for both of us, he is the expert here :-)
Sorry English is not my first language and its kinda late too.
Edit: im using a throwaway account for personal reasons.

[END OF COMMENT]

Yeah, that's about right. If you think about the Two Glasses, what you are doing is: you are asserting that a certain outcome or situation will be true from this point onwards (although evidence may take a while to appear). You are not changing the events that have accumulated so far, and you're not changing the basic "formatting" of your experience - you are exerting your influence without pushing out of your comfort zone. The results might be incredibly unlikely, but they will not "break the rules of reality" as you understand them. Which is why a simple exercise can accomplish so much; there is no resistance to the outcome other than your resistance to getting what you want or your subsequent tinkering. For more out-of-the ordinary outcomes, where the outcome contradicts "things that you know", the target pattern will need to be intensified more in order to make it "true" (and for everything else to shift in alignment with that). This likely involves confronting what you think you are and what the world is, reexamining your assumptions. Basically, everyone just needs to do some experiments for themselves and draw their own conclusions. :-)

It's definitely useful to keep experimental stuff on a separate account - if only because most people's default view is often that if you are exploring something you must necessarily be a believer in it, which isn't true at all. Especially here, where the whole idea is that you take nothing for granted. Always up for suggestions of how to improve things. We've kept it pretty free-form so far - partly because the nature of the topic is that things are "flexible" with no singular correct way - but I can see how, for example, having a flair for posts which are specifically about Two Glasses results or questions might help people better find them.

no one really buys owl related items here but i just realized that i have two little white owls statue on my desk and 3 in another room, weird lol.

Ha, that's a good one. Now you get to ponder: has it always been true that there were "two little white owls" there, or is it only true now that there were "two little white owls" there? (Do it without actually intending to produce memories for them, though; try and just see what is there in your mind already.)

Hence the thought-provoking name, The Owls Of Eternity ;-)

Q1: Haha yea well my suggestion would be to have flairs (images or words) for threads and for nicknames, so, who is new can use the flair Beginner or Yet to try and who has already done lots of expetiments or jumps can use the Expert Jumper one, also, maybe flairs with Mirror, Two Glasses, ImgRoom etc so you can put as flair which method you used. And yea also for posts so they are easier to identify when searching :) ( it could also be a two cup or mirror icon image) For the owl thing yea its crazy i swear i know what owls are but they are extremely rare where i live and for the last 20+ years ive only seen or really noticed around 3 or 6 and a few on tv or internet. Its not mainstream here... Now when i noticed i had two white ones on my desk i couldnt believe it because i remember it as just two white snowmen in a christmas contest near a christmas tree... Now i got two white owls with christmas red green hat and scarf which really makes no sense to me that a xmas related item would be snowmen in an owls shape next to a tree, lol. Its fun, indeed, and got me question as you said if they were really owls or snowmen. Btw the flair one is just a suggestion to make things clearer, its ok if you guys want the page to be as simple as possible ;)

I'm thinking we probably don't want to frame "jumping" as a sort of skill set that you become better at, since it's really about ongoing exploration, discovery and creativity. It's not really something you achieve (you actually can't get better at it, in a way, you just become more confident). Plus, it's more important that we come to understand how things are, rather than get results (although the two are sort of mixed in). But I do quite like the idea of a simple labelling for posts about a specific exercise. Thanks for the input, I shall mull it over! :-)

Yeah, having owls with christmas hats and scarves next to a tree does seem a bit... unlikely, doesn't it? :-)

honestly the mirror method seems a little like self hypnosis. EX: In order for some people to stop smoking some people try hypnosis to have certain thoughts put in their pysche (like cigarettes are gross and whatnot) to achieve the goal of actually quitting smoking.

I suppose that, if you were to discover that your "self" was in fact basically "the world", then all so-called "reality shifts" could be described as a form of "self"-hypnosis - i.e. lowering resistance to change and then modifying patterns via intention. The difference would be that you would now realise and accept that "experiences are apparently local but intentions are actively global", and your intentions would likely increase in ambition and commitment accordingly.

POST: Butterfly effect

Just as a pedantic point, I'd probably not call this the "butterfly effect", since that implies that there is a sort of "causal ripple" or chain of events that arise from an intention. That can be a misleading image, because an intention isn't an act which sets off a series of happenings. It's an instantaneous shift in the "world-pattern", out of time. With that out of the way...

It's not necessarily true that an intention necessarily leads to further obstacles - but it is true that making any change inevitably implies other changes. Using the oft-invoked metaphor of the "blanket of material": if we think of our world as a single continuous pattern on a piece of material, then adjusting the shape of a fold in that blanket will by its nature mean that you will be tugging on the material and therefore reshaping other folds. This simply follows from the continuous nature of the material, which is a metaphorical way of saying that the world must always "make sense" as a whole between intentions. (Again, the reason I don't like to call this the "butterfly effect" is because the whole world shifts instantly, like a rebalancing; there is no ripple effect involved, in time)

Now, although these "collateral shifts" might be caused by the intention in the sense that you moved the material, they are not necessarily logically connected to the intention in terms of "objects in the world". For example, you intend to have success in a business meeting, and an extra tin of peaches appears in your parent's kitchen cupboard. Furthermore, even the collateral shifts that are logically implied by your intention aren't directly caused by it as such - it's more like an "autocomplete" based on existing patterning or plausibility. For instance, your success at the meeting logically implies that the other party in the meeting was less successful, which implies that he is less well prepared, which implies that something distracted him from his preparations. Even though you intended success the morning of the meeting, it will become true now that he stayed late at a party with his wife last night and so he didn't prepare - or whatever. So, I suppose that's a long way of saying that change always implies change! The world is a single pattern, so altering the contribution of one pattern always shifts the pattern as a whole, self-consistently. To expand on another point sometimes made: you are not generally "shifting all the time", inherently anyway I'd say, but any deliberate intention you do is a rebalancing, no matter how insignificant. With something like "dimensional jumping", we are choosing to make a larger shift than we would normally do - simply because we recognise that there never were any baked in barriers to the world, and we are comfortable enough to stop re-asserting those barriers. We are, like, making a year's worth or a decade's worth of changes in one shift. Inevitably, then, what would otherwise be minor collateral changes occurring over a long time, now occur in a shorter space of time. This can feel dramatic. You could end up having to "grow up fast" as your circumstances suddenly shift, without the usual acclimatisation period. This is not a reason not to do it, but it is a reason to choose your outcomes carefully. An extra thought is, you can always incorporate the intention that things will turn out for the best, more broadly. However, you cannot intend against the discomfort of change, since that is to intend against change itself.

==I get it now.

But what about having intended to connect with a person and that said person having sprinkled leg the next day? In that line of thoughts this person could lose his leg the next time I intend. (just to make the point) And it's as likely as not given the concept of rebalancing. What about when rebalancing is done the change affecting something/someone negatively, logically related or not to the intention? Is it all "it wouldn't happen if it wasn't to happen anyways in time"==

I guess what you need to do to deal with this, is come up with a model of responsibility that satisfies you. I'll outline one below that you might use, though: The implication of this "blanket" metaphor is that the whole world-pattern is dissolved within you. It is in effect your own "private copy" of the world, fully defined as space and time pattern, but all available all-at-once. However, that doesn't mean that you "know" the current state of the world. I'd suggest that you can only take responsibility for what you know, and what you intend deliberately. It is meaningless to draw causal connections between intentions and subsequent experiential content that was not the content of that intention. Those experiences may have already been there and been unaffected, or been improved. If the (hypothetical) link is outside of your sensory experience, if it cannot be experienced in advance, it is "does not compute" to speculate on it. You would be worrying about an idea about causality - and being skeptical of "ideas about" things is one of the main foundation of this approach. If you intend to connect with someone and you meet in the street because they sprained their ankle and had to stop to rest - well, you could hypothesise that maybe it was already "patterned" that they sprained their ankle, and what changed is you went down that street. Or the sprain changed date and location. But you would just be making up stories, since there is effectively no longer any "how it was before". Something to consider too, is: There is effectively no "how things are" until you've experienced them in the senses. And strictly speaking, the only definite "how things are" is the content of your sensory experience right now. Before you intended to meet that person, subsequently encountering them with their sprained ankle on the street, perhaps they had actually been patterned as "died in a car crash five years ago"...

How come they could have been patterned as "died in a car crash rs ago" given the concept "how things are" (your sensory experience right and only every now) when I saw them the previous day and every other day. It is mind blowing what I've got from your post.

Well, for the sake of the example, I was actually assuming that the person was someone you hadn't seen for years! Basically, I'm saying that you just have no idea of how things might be patterned before you intend or before you encounter facts relating to them in the senses, and how dramatic the shift might have been in a good way.

Ok got it. Till the next time I don't understand something. I feel a little bit foolish. Thanks. Does this thing works for depressed mood (currently nofap but just came off depression). And is it okay to use the two glasses method as often you want for different purposes? Like one day one thing and the next other. (Or two times a day) What would be more direct way and with the same efficiency? Dammit it's hitting me bad.

Well, I could have been clearer!

I was trying to emphasise that while things are still unobserved, you have no idea what the implied patterning might be for those things. The extent of a shift could mean a shift from an upcoming "reading in the paper tomorrow that your friend Bob died five years ago" to an upcoming "grabbing a coffee tomorrow and bumping into your friend Bob". (Meanwhile, there is a side discussion to be had about the extent to which having observed something means it is "fixed fact" from then on. It is not, necessarily, but that "fact" does become a strong contributor to subsequent experiences, so re-patterning it would involve quite a rebalancing. However: Mandela Effect or Glitch reports about someone you thought was dead years ago, still being around, etc.)

Every Two Glasses session is a fresh session. So, you can do it for one situation. Then, another time, do it for another situation. Every time you do it, you are connecting different states to the glasses and water, and performing a different shift. Doing it for mood is actually a good experiment to do, but: decide in advance that you won't oppose or fiddle with any mood shifts that happen. (Another experiment: just sit quietly for a moment, and then "intend" to "feel really happy" - and see what happens.)

I fell into deep meditating state. All is good now. Immediate changes were my internet connection dying since I wrote the previous comment and having no more flatline (nofap). I guess that's what we call a jump.

That's an interesting combination, for sure!

More weird was what followed (see Derealization if you haven't).

Just glanced over at it. If you are still feeling a disconnect, maybe try directing your attention towards your lower abdomen - not focusing on it so much as including it in your "presence" or "sphere of awareness" or attention. Then, gradually include other parts of your body space. You may have ended up being "over here" while the rest of your sensation are "over there"; this would dim everything down and make you feel kind of remote. There's a difference between everything being dreamlike (which it is), with feeling separate from it (which you are not). Generally, relaxing into the dreamlike feeling is a release of attention, an opening out, and feels present, good and "alive". Don't be afraid of just "intending" that sort of thing, just as you did with the mood, after deciding how you want things to be. You can tinker with it until you get something you like.

POST: WARNING - Please heed - Horrible result from mirror jump - family member suicide due to demonic possession

It's always hard to deal with the loss of a family member. That's never an easy thing to go through, and it's inevitable that we will go looking for reasons and answers afterwards. However...

There are no "evil demonic spirits", and people should be wary of obsessing about whether they "caused" something bad to happen when the connection is very vague like this (generally speaking anyway, and definitely in this case). If you didn't explicitly intend for something to happen, then any connection you make between your action and subsequent events is pretty much just story-making. It pains me to say it, but for a change this may actually be confirmation bias!

So, your post should serve as a warning - not about exploring the topic, but about being specific with intention and being quite ruthless when drawing connective lines between experiments and outcomes.

On Believing in Things

If you believe in things - by which I mean, if you fully adopt the conceptual framework or pattern of a particular worldview - then you are certain to have experiences "as if" they are true. This applies to spirits, souls, dimensional jumping, alternative realities, alien beings, norse gods and... just being a person hanging out on planet Earth leading a boring life. None of these things, including mundane life, are fundamentally true as context; they are relatively true as content. Note, I am not saying that those experiences are psychological or that they are "not real". Rather, I am saying that the only thing that is consistently real is the fact that you are having an experience (that you are a "consciousness"), but actual the content of the particular experience depends on what ideas you have absorbed. In other words: all experiences happen on an "as if something is true" basis only. Dimensional Jumping depends upon this. It is the fact that if we strongly adopt a specific intentional pattern, we can have experiences consistent with that pattern. (And that, by implication, our everyday world is noting more substantial than a pattern which we happen to have adopted and accepted unwittingly.)

So there are no alternate realities as such; there are just discontinuities in our experience "as if" we had switched reality. There are no "evil demonic spirits" , but we can have experiences "as if" there are such things. You can test this for yourself, by selecting an arbitrary pattern and then fully committing to it. For example, deeply decide to pretend that the weather is controlled by spirits who listen to your mood and adjust the sky accordingly. (Seriously.)

On Intention & Responsibility

I'll keep this one quick, because it has been expanded upon in the links below. The summary:

• If you did not intend something specifically, then you are not responsible for it.
• Responsibility is dependent on knowledge. The only knowledge you have is of the content of your specific intention.
• Responsibility for things outside of that intention, would require knowledge of what was going to happen before that intention, knowledge that it changed after that intention, and that it was your intention that specifically caused the change.
• None of these apply in your case. You didn't even intend anything! You just had a spooky experience!

Basically, I think you are probably just suffering from a mixture of fear and guilt - perhaps exacerbated by a religious upbringing - and are attaching meanings to events accordingly. Perhaps you associate exploring these areas as "bad" or "forbidden"?

Most problematically, you are mixing differing worldviews. The worldview that leads to "dimensional jumping" is by definition one that does not include "evil demonic spirits" as beings with independent agency!

In summary, then:

• You are not responsible for the events that occurred. (For starters you didn't do anything that would lead to change, and if you had you still wouldn't have "caused" the outcome since it wasn't specified).
• You do not need to worry about evil spirits and so on. (Well, unless you really like worrying about them, of course. That's up to you.)

Related Links: You might find the conversation over at The Butterfly Effect post worth a look too, for this. See also: the Kirby Surprise interview about synchronicity that is linked in the introductory sticky, for quite good examples on the "as if" thing.

I suspect this is what lies at the heart of why things like servitors or tulpas work. If I convince myself that entity X causes Y to happen, then I just need to continuously assert that entity X exists for Y to happen seemingly naturally, right?

It's at the heart of how anything works, really, but those are definitely good examples. It's all about your intention and the implications of your intention - where I'd define intention as "thinking the fact of something being true or existing" or "increasing the relative intensity or contribution of a pre-existing pattern". (I say "pre-existing" because you should consider all possible facts or patterns to be eternally present and always contributing to your ongoing experience; what changes is their relative 'brightness".)

POST: Owls say go for it but everything else says to give up.

I think you are kind of mixing up models here: that of direct patterning (the owls) and "messages from the universe" (your interpretation of the numbers). The fact is, the more you imprint yourself with 555 and 999, the more those numbers will appear in your experience, regardless of any meaning - just like the owls. So our thinking then goes to: how can we pattern the experience of "getting together with someone", using the same principles that are behind the owls? In general, I wouldn't worry about "the universe" and what it has to say, except as a reading of your own previous intentions. Which isn't to say that you can't structure yourself such that you experience "having insight via symbols" if that's what you like, but it seems a very roundabout way of handling something you can likely do more directly.

POST: Can I use the two glasses method to get a girlfriend?

If there's someone you like, ask them out. If there isn't, just start keeping an eye out. A sip of water in the meantime will, at the very least, keep you hydrated in preparation for the fun ahead. And if you're doing that anyway, putting a couple of labels on the glasses isn't much bother. ;-)

you'll get a girlfriend but end up in a universe in which you also die of cholera

Um, that does seem a little bit extreme! :-p

I was exaggerating...

...your monkey doesn't just have paws, it has talons laced with teen-specific biocide!

Are you saying I am a teen? Well, thank you very much for that compliment. Haven't heard that in over 40 years. Anyway, I wasn't being mean, I could have used anything else as an example but many people here on reddit don't get subtlety. So I thought, go and say something easy to understand. How is this being taken the wrong way? [Seriously].

On my end, I was just entertained by your example of a "monkey paw" effect being so extreme, promoting mental imagery of a particularly savage occult revenge monkey - the "teen-specific biocide" was because our OP is only 17. Although I'm sure you are young at heart too. ;-)

I think others may have misread your response as being dismissive, though, just because without a smiley to denote that it is well-meaning, the interpretation of it is vulnerable to whatever mood the reader happens to be in when they encounter it.

POST: Half a year ago, I jumped. Here is my final update.

It's a shame the header is the same number, but I believe that it should be a longer number (6+ digits) so that smaller jumps could be noted as well, and not just planet-changing ones. Maybe I'll make a website with a long dimension number for dimension jumpers to use

It would really make no difference, because: a) dimensions are not literal of course, but also: b) if there are an infinite number of states, then there are an infinite number of different states with the same number, no matter how long that number is. This is why the sidebar emphasises that the header number should be views as "an emblem of change and a symbol of potential rather than an ID".

The longer the number, the more likely it is that during the creation of the website, a different number was generated, hence, it would allow one to detect more minute changes.

I don't see the logic in that. You'd have to lay out why, exactly, it would be more "likely". The creation of a website is a static event - it is true now that the result will be this - within a particular state. The creation does not "happen" in time. There are an infinite number of states which have that same result. Furthermore, there is no necessary link between the number and the rest of the state. Literally every other part of the state could be different, and yet the number could be identical - even if that number was infinite. This is because the number is not a hash, or summary, of the state; it is merely another pattern of fact within it.

There is no indication that the header number on this subreddit will change either, but if it does - it will be irrefutable proof for the individual that they did jump. The number will be randomly generated and parsed through multiple more time randomly, which should, in theory, give a different result in each dimension since even small changes result in random number generators having different outcomes.

Indeed: a change of state doesn't necessarily give rise to a change in number, but if a change in number were observed then for the observer that would be proof of a change (whether in the world or in their memory of the world). Again, though, given the background concept of a shift, it just doesn't necessarily matter whether the number is randomly generated, multiply parsed, and so on. None of that actually "happens" as such, in this model. The number as it is, was - in narrative terms - already randomly generated by the entirety of all history, but really the moment, now.

We seem to have different ideas of how dimension jumping happens. In my interpretation, you are switching places with yourself from an alternative timeline as such, their past might have difference to your past. Hence, if the past was different, the outcome of the random number might be different and that would eventually change the number displayed on the website.

So - that's not the concept, really, as I see it. There is no "other you" and there is no past as such; there is just an ongoing now-state which has a patterned personal memory. If you update a fact in this now-state, the whole state will shift coherently, but it is not the same as going back in time to make a change or there being a parallel timeline that you are jumping to. There are no timelines, other than as a narrative fiction to help construct or describe intentions; "dimensions" fall into the same category. If I modify my current state, then, there is no reason why the number should change unless it is entangled with the fact I am modifying. Not entangled in terms of a history, note, but in terms of a logically coherent world at this moment. For example, being silly for a moment, if I shifted my state to one where the number "9" was written differently, then the number would have to change visually to be consistent (although: I could also subsequently encounter a plausible story about it being a stylised choice, or an error, which "explains it"). So it doesn't actually matter what the supposed mechanism by which the number is generated is; that process never actually "happens" anyway - the mechanism doesn't really generate the number in the way we normally assume - and if you make a change to your state it definitely doesn't "happen" again as some sort of replay. Your state could change such that the evidence, now, for your past is completely different, and still the number could be the same - especially if it is an supposedly random number (because then it has no logical link to the rest of the state at all). What we need, then, is something which absolutely dependent on the rest of the state, that must be different whenever the state is different. The only thing that fits the bill is your own global sense of state - your felt-sense. Other than that, the way to know whether you've "jumped" is by observing that the experience you have intended, has now become your experience!

That's an interesting explanation! I was basing this idea off the fact that many people reported seeing slight alterations in history when they jumped, so I thought that those changes tend to have a Butterfly effect on the rest of history - inevitably leading to different outcomes for random situations. Since, dimension jumping is still an unexplored concept, I will follow through with the website idea. Who knows? Maybe there is only an ongoing state of things, or maybe there is a parallel timelines in the sense I intended. Thank you for your input, it is much appreciated!

Yes, as I see it: "alterations in history" in the sense of the past changing is an interpretation. What is actually observed, is a discrepancy between what you see now and what you remember, also now. Once a fact has been changed, then all subsequent experiences will be in alignment with that fact "as if" it were always the case - the world always "makes sense". However, the world did not get "replayed" from some historical point. The entire pattern of the world is always now. There some additional factors that come into play to do with how we conceive of events, but the essential idea is: you can't rely on the replay of a process in your test, because the world merely has to be self-consistent as a pattern; it doesn't have to actually unfold in time. Anyway, yeah: don't let me discourage you from playing with stuff, because if nothing else it encourages us to think things through. However, I would point out that one of they key underlying ideas in this subreddit is that there is a difference between thoughts about experience - "parallel constructions in thought" - and the experience as-it-is. Have you ever observed a "timeline"? Or is it a diagrammatic convenience that exists only in thought? This is a general point about the reification of abstractions, and it is worth considering no matter what your overall position on this. This even includes ideas such as the world apparently being a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". That's why the sidebar has a section on "Active Metaphors".

Thank you for providing me with an interesting read, I will definitely think about this. All dimensional jumps are really hard to have experiments conducted on, as they are not falsifiable. I hope to merely bring another possible anchor point on which people can maybe build more concrete data as regards to "jumping". Your replies have been very enlightening, thank you.

Basically, ideas like "falsifiability" are pretty much meaningless here, since you are no longer modelling things using the "objective world" container concept. Even our usual description of ourselves as "a person in a world of objects" no longer applies; we have to shift to a direct observation perspective, and reconsider the "nature of experiencing" itself. All of which is, of course, why this is such an interesting avenue to explore! The "results" are actually secondary, in the end; that's just the hook really. Thanks for the enjoyable discussion! (And if you like that article, you may also find this Quanta article [https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/] and this Nature article of interest [https://www.nature.com/articles/507421a].)

So, I mean, are you just essentially going back to the Bill Hicks 'joke'?: Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Myself, I'm getting to the stage where I'm becoming more...adept at jumping and jumping into realities where life is substantially different to the 'human' experience. Jumping itself is easier, jumping into a substantially different 'reality' is more difficult although I feel like I'm getting to that point rather quickly. Anyway, thanks for clarifying. :)

Well, maybe. I do like the phrase "we are the imagination of ourselves", though; that nicely captures it, eh. It avoids any "stuff" or labels but gets to the essence of the experience. There's no perfect description though. I quite like:

• "What you truly are is 'awareness', whose only intrinsic property is being-aware, and which 'takes on the shape of' states or experiences, such as the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person".

However, I just can't get it to work in my stand-up routine, for some reason. :-)

George... during our chat today I mentioned the same Bill Hicks quote. Although, I have a feeling that isn't the first or last time it's been quoted here lol.

It does seem to have been "quote of the day", today!

POST: An experiment with the two glasses method

Well, the whole thing is an exploration of "the nature of experiencing", so treat it like an investigation, I'd say, and feel free to try anything. Having said that, 2G is not designed to be "world-breaking" so much as "world-shifting" - it typically involves results that fall within "plausibility" even if situationally completely improbable. So I would generally start with things like outcomes you want to happen in life, introducing patterns into your ongoing experience, stuff like that, and do this repeatedly until the idea of it being a coincidence become ridiculous. Then you can push it further, and contemplate what it means. Until then, lacking a sense of why the exercise is designed the way it is and how the results come about, efforts to "prove the validity of the methods" can sometimes miss the point. Even the phrases "validity of the methods", "strengthen one's belief" and "strengthen the ritual" are somewhat loaded with assumptions - assumptions which might turn out to be incorrect upon further examination. Think: what are you testing, exactly?

Q1: The way you explain things is the master of craft i would love to experience. Phenomenal work TG, and may i ask: " do this repeatedly until the idea of it being a coincidence become ridiculous." So just keep repeating the same thing day-by-day even if it fails? How does feeling intake into these assumptions/experiences?

I guess I mean, that if you keep deliberately intending for results (using your narrative of choice), and you keep getting them, then over time "it's a coincidence" or "it's confirmation bias" will not be tenable. In other words, you don't have to force a "rule-breaking" experience in order to be convinced; simply continually getting what you ask for can be sufficient. Although in fact, the manner by which outcomes come about will tend to become more outlandish, the more you continue. But only you can do this, personally, by intending; nobody can demonstrate this for you. Of course, if you don't get any results at all, ever, then you can feel free to dismiss the whole idea that there is anything unusual going on also. Not sure what you're asking, regarding feeling. Care to expand?

Q1: I completely agree as i've have experienced this to a certain extent, beginning with average cars such as a corolla S 2016, to a Maserati. Now speaking about the feeling, in the sense towards manifestation itself. You know acquiring ownership of the coincidence that often manages to follow you as you proceed with the intentions. Since this matrix is all mental based on feelings as some would say. So instead from seeing it day-to-day basis where ever you go, To having it, being able to use it, etc.

Hmm, so I'm not sure I'd agree that what we're dealing with here is "all mental based on feelings". Feelings are certainly things that can arise as aspects of our ongoing experience, parts of the pattern, and there can be a general felt-sense that is like a summary of our current state - but regardless of whether we feel like we are the world, or feel like we are a little person, we always are the entire thing. Meanwhile, I'd say we have to be careful of the desire to want feel ourselves "doing" things: intention is not a "doing" and has no particular experience associated with it. To focus on wanting to, for example, "feel powerful like a God", can be more of an impediment than anything else. Better to simply recognise the true situation, and from that recognition will flow experiences which support it. Having said that, spending a moment to assert that you are "the space in which, and as which, sensory experiences arise" can give you that sense of a shift in your perspective, placing the world and the person you apparently are in proper context. The experience is sort of like waking up and realising everything is inside you (and that there is no outside to it). Maybe that's a way forward?

POST: Is it possible to jump and change things for another person? If so, please help me.

Forget the idea of gurus or prodigies, it's all down to your own experimentation, but I can think of a few things:

• Try the "boundary" exercise described in this post [POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses] (you may find some of the other exercises in that thread useful too);
• Try reframing your experience as you being an open space in which sensations arise (this changes your sense of self relative to others);
• Experiment with "asserting" that the space you occupy is friendly and polite, by reaching out and filling the space around you with that "atmosphere".

Most importantly, though, you have to cease preparing for or defending against impoliteness, because doing that implies the fact. For as long as you keep doing that, you will continue to maintain that patterning in your experience in one way or another, I suggest.

A1: you can start by deciding you are not a victim. There is no inherent "negativity" of others. There are only other people talking or taking actions, with or without the intent of manipulating you emotionally. It then is your choice as to how you view and react to their blah-blah. You are currently choosing to view them as "being negative" and then "getting you down". Imagine if you were viewing them on TV doing their blah-blah. Would you make the same choices based on what you saw? So choose otherwise. Stop with this "impervious to negativity". Negativity is not a "thing". It is a decision in your mind.

POST: It worked in ways I couldn't imagine.

Dimensions aren't "places". You are assuming that the world is a "simple, single, shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" and that people must "go somewhere", but this isn't necessarily true. Keeping it simpler, though:

can see the post from your previous, "unhappy" universe (the one where you wrote that you are going to jump), which shouldn't exist in your "happy" universe.

However, there can quite easily be a "universe" where she posted an unhappy post, and then things magically turned around. The truth is, that the concept of a "universe" is just that: a useful idea. It implies there are a set of "places" with an unchanging fact set, and this story jars against that, but it is just a concept. In your actual experience what happens is that the content of your experience shifts. You never really experience going anywhere; that's just a description that is sometimes useful to help us conceive of change or grasp experiences. Anything that you think about experience that involves an unobserved "outside" aspect is immediately "wrong", just useful narratives. This includes "dimensions", "universes", even "objective worlds" or any other version of an "external environment" idea. So, to argue about whether someone's changes are because they "jumped dimensions" or something else, is really an argument about categorisation rather than about what "really happened". What really happened was: the content of their experience shifted.

Q1: What really happened was: the content of their experience shifted.
But if your concept is right, there is no "their" experience, because they are just a part of my experience. And in my experience, you say, literally anything can happen, breaking any laws of physics and common sense. I could end their existence by shifting my experience, shift it so that they never existed. Would it end their first-person experience too? The world isn't shared at all, it seems. That's a cool concept of course, but i'm not getting lucky with any of the techniques. Even with the owls.

Indeed. Although to pick up on a couple of points:

• You can't end "their" experience because, as you note, it is "your" experience, which in turn means there is just "experience" really, with no ownership, only experiencing. The Hall of Records metaphor tries to provide a simple way to think about that sort of thing, but of course in truth it is literally unthinkable. Conceptual thought is "too late" when it comes to trying to grasp the nature of experience. You can't think of what is "before" division and multiplicity and change (= objects relating to one another in a mental space), because thought is already chopped up into objects. Thoughts never get "behind" experiences; they are themselves just experiences.
• The "laws of physics" and "common sense" aren't rules in the sense of being a solid independent structured substrate upon which events occur. Rather, they are the "codification of [a subset of] experiences to date". (The "subset" part is because what gets included is already pre-selected by a conceptual framework, particularly the "container concept" of an "objective world", which relatively recent). So, we must remind ourselves that: the observations restrict the possible valid models, the models don't restrict the possible valid observations.

But yeah, all of that is fair enough and fascinating to ponder, and it can help you somewhat grasp the nature things as it is, but to really know it you'd want to actually produce experiences on an "as if" basis that goes beyond your usual assumptions. So, the owls should be a nice easy entry point. There are some things which might get in the way of making any changes, though. For example, something to check for yourself: When you go about your day, do you tend to "grip onto" your attentional focus? Or do you tend to assert your current bodily position and current experience? Are you "in control" from moment to moment, moving your body deliberately and with focus? As opposed to, "directing" yourself to do something and then allowing your body, thoughts and attentional focus to move "by themselves" towards your goal. As you read these words on this screen right now, is your spatial attention narrowed down onto them? Are you "using your eyes" to see this paragraph? Or are you "open and spacious" and allowing the world to "come to you" instead?

The reason for asking that is that continually intending everything, never releasing experience to just flow, can essentially amount to a constant re-assertion of your previous or habitual state, in opposition to other intended changes. This is why we say that doing the exercises should require no effort and no particular sense of intense focus or doing (because it "fixes" you in place).

Q1: This is why we say that doing the exercises should require no effort and no particular sense of intense focus or doing (because it "fixes" you in place).
Sounds like having concentration problems and bad memory would help, lol. How should one achieve the state of being "open and spacious" if concentrating on it would be an obvious mistake? I'm doing blank mind meditation every day for about a half an hour. Doesn't seem to help.

Ha, yes, people with poor memories might be getting everything they ever intend always, effortlessly, but ironically they never get to appreciate it. :-)

Alright, I'm now going to type out whatever occurs to me on this topic - So, it's not about having a blank mind or whatever. Rather, it's about reshaping your experience so that it is formatted with a different perspective, and you then don't narrow again. A key thing to realise is:

• Events are apparently local; intentions are actively global.

Which is to say, that although (for example) when you move your hand, the sensation of that occurring seems to be localised spatially, the intention or "wish" that triggers that experience is not localised - it is "unlocated" and "unbounded". It is a shift in the subject, not of an object. This is why you don't need to concentrate your spatial attention on your hand in order to move it, and if you do then you are intending something additional (narrowed attention and tension) rather than doing something causal. This can be visualised as overlaying a pattern of intention upon the current pattern of experience - like moire fringes. The intentional pattern has no boundary, it is equally everywhere, however it's combination with the current pattern results in a localised experience. Now, how does this apply to being "open and spacious"? In two ways:

• To become "open and spacious" one simple decides to be open and spacious.
• Having become "open and spacious" one now allows one's sensory experience to simply unfold unobstructed, without narrowing down or gripping it, having realised that intending does not require focus or indeed any "doing".

The phrases which may help describe this formatting of experience are:

• What you truly are is an awareness, a non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences. Or:
• You are an open mind-space within which your ongoing experience spontaneously unfolds. Your main strand of experience of "being a person in a world" can be conceived of as a particularly bright, stbale, 3D-immersive, multi-sensory thought.

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. It also lets us realise why narrowing down or forcing change tends to backfire, because it is a restrictive deformation of your current experience, which obstructs other intentions. In short, you want to cease interfering and adopt the stance of being rather than doing-controlling, at which point your intentions are minimally obstructed. Otherwise you are effectively intending two things at once: you are intending your current situation and your target situation simultaneously, like trying to get up out of a chair by focusing on "being sat down" while intending to shift to "being stood up"! (Lots of people do exactly this. It is a worthwhile exercise to experiment with standing up effortlessly without "doing" it. The same principles apply to both the mundane and the exotic.)

Q1: In a stupid simple takeaway from this, isn't this why a "assume the wish fulfilled" is a helpful technique? Effectively replacing your reality that way you aren't forcing anything anymore?

Yes, although I think that phrasing can sometimes leave people with no way into it (depending on their background). So equivalently we might say that we would "think the fact of something being true", where that "thinking" involves attending to an unbounded, unlocated, non-object thought. An intention, basically, which is: the pattern that you wish to make more prominent in your ongoing experience. When engaging in that, there is no experience associated with it as such (unless the intentional pattern has implications for your sensory experience right now), because there is no object present only a "dissolved pattern" being increased in its intensity, however there is a knowing that you are intending.

do you mean more discontinuous, less plausible intentions?

It was more to do with the spatial and temporal "co-ordinates" of the target outcome vs your current experience. I mean that you never actually experience "intending", you only ever experience the "results" - as in, the resultant content of your state. So if you intend something that doesn't affect this current sensory moment, then there's no reason why you should experience anything while doing it, other than "knowing" that you are intending. If you intend an outcome that takes place tomorrow, or a fact that only affects a situation in Sweden while you are in Toronto, there's no "result" for you to experience right now, even though your state has shifted. (Note: you might sense a "shift" but that's not necessarily the case.)

Q2: /u/triumphantgeorge now this just occurred to me: since i've been looking for anyone who could possibly understand me to meet, and any scenario i choose can be experienced - then couldn't i meet you? i imagine it would be like the "(you) speaking as i'm thinking" verse i saw in the caitanya bhagavatam. and if i wanted you to do something - wouldn't you?

It's an interesting idea. However, if you have already "patterned" me as a quite independent, purposeful character in your experience, then it might not be so simple as simply "wanting", because my "definition" might be contrary to that. You might have to change me first. As in dreams, you'd probably be better intending a new, fit for purpose character, rather than adjusting an ingrained existing one in an attempt to make it responsive.

Q2: As in dreams, you'd probably be better intending a new, fit for purpose character, rather than adjusting an ingrained existing one in an attempt to make it responsive.
but ultimately it would only be my decision, wouldn't it. as with everyone in the entire cosmos - only i decide everyone's fate and behaviour....

...and your new decision is added to the accumulation of all your decisions to date, as an amendment to your present state.

so there are no "fixed" characters

No fixed anything, only things that you keep intending or implying. The "implying" part is the tricky one, because sometimes it is implied by a more abstract pattern than an individual fact, perhaps. For example, intending a movement implies a location implies a coherent continuous space, and so on. Whole world dynamics may be associated with a particular fact or outcome, therefore. So one might need to keep in mind the "granularity" one is dealing with - attend to a more global fact, in order to better tackling minor or local facts subsequently. (The only thing that is permanent and fundamentally true is the fact of "awareness".)

/u/triumphantgeorge so couldn't i just make you appear somewhere at my choosing?

I don't see why not. But then, what I see or not doesn't really matter. Can you see a "why not"?

the only impediments I see are recognising your form and the 'story' by which i see you

...within you.

...

A1: I don't care if I jumped or if it's all coincidence. My life is better and I'm happier. Your skepticism is real downer though.

POST: Changing the past?

What you are really after, is to shift your ongoing experience such that it behaves "as if" the past were different. Neville Goddard has a nice discussion on that in one of his essays - see the links in the relevant post, perhaps.

POST: Get off your ass and do something about it.

However - if the purpose of the exercise is ultimately to conduct an experiment, to give yourself an experience that provides an insight into "the nature of ongoing experience", then your post is missing the point. Putting that aside though, if we were staying focused on outcomes it would probably help if you describe how, exactly a person goes about "making it work out". You can encourage people to "do things", but you have to say what exact things people should "do". Meanwhile, any description like that has a set of hidden assumptions, an underlying philosophy. Since in the end that's the deeper purpose of this subreddit - to reveal hidden assumptions, and use that knowledge - then laying this out would be helpful. Like, your theory of why "fate is more likely determined" by what you choose to do other than "2 fucking glasses". What if you choose to do two glasses?

Otherwise you're literally and unhelpfully saying: "hey, don't do that thing, instead do... um... y'know... something else".

What a person should do obviously depends on the situation he is in? I'm just saying take an active step to ameliorate your predicament.

Of course! But the difficulty can often be in knowing what that active step should be. You need the world to "move" and a path to open up. Just "doing stuff" often doesn't produce that; it just produces "being busy" without any accomplishment. In fact, your own behaviour is also part of the result of performing the experiment. The reason the final instruction in the exercise is to "carry on with your life" is because the overall movement towards a goal also includes your own bodily and mental movements. It doesn't say "now sit and wait for the championship trophy to be delivered by FedEx".

Example: Perhaps what might happen is, the day after the exercise you would feel the urge to call a friend, and in your conversation he might mention he just met a great coach that was doing free sessions, and you would find yourself feeling enthusiastic about that so you'd go along, and the new coach has a special method he uses which lets you master certain moves really quickly, so by the time the tournament comes around you are totally ready in that particular area, and then in the tournament the moves that come up happen to be the exact ones you've just mastered in such a short time - the trophy is yours. You get the idea. Although in practice it can be both more or less "logical" than that, more or less pushing against the boundaries of apparent likelihood, depending. Ultimately, the whole thing is recognised to be a sort of "patterning" of your ongoing experience.