TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 30

POST: I have a theory about why these happen (/r/MandelaEffect/)

I think the same applies here as to quantum-physics-inspired multiple universes descriptions. From a previous comment which then goes into more depth:

I'm with George Ellis on this, as regards quantum theory, string theory and multiverses and so on. Although it might be interesting and fun to consider philosophically, it is essentially meaningless scientifically. Having said that, the Mandela Effect is a philosophical or metaphysical issue, really, and not a scientific one, so this is not necessarily a problem for the subject as a whole; it just means we need to be mindful of what we focus upon.

So, while it is fun to consider these narratives (and they are narratives) about our experiences, they are not testable theories. In fact, anything "outside of" our experience is not testable, and your description is mostly that. We might recognise that there are patterns which are consistent with the idea that something is happening - that are "as if" it were true - but that's not the same thing. Which is fine, of course, because scientific theories aren't about "what is really happening" anyway; they are useful abstractions. However, when a description as almost no "observational touch-points" at all (that is, the description has very few observable components relative to the complexity of its conceptual framework) then the sense in which it is a useful model, rather than an enjoyable story, is questionable.

I really don't agree that "actual scientists" are proposing that we are living in a simulation, although they might engage in such "gee-whiz" discussions for popular-science-type magazines and programmes, as part of their promotional activities. (Nick Bostrom is not a good example.) If anything, one's treatment of such a hypothesis is a good indicator as to what extent you are an "actual scientist"!

Q1: I like your comment, until the part where you claim you don't agree with the unarguable reality that scientists are actually working with this theory seriously and calculatedly. I mean, that's cool i guess, but it's the reality whether you believe it or not. And why the random disclaimer about how Bostrum doesn't count? Confusing.

Bah, I knew I should have expanded on that bit of wordplay! Apologies.

So, that was intended to be a shorthand for a few things implied by the comment and the linked comment. For example, that one shouldn't conflate "working in a scientific role" with "this being a scientific hypothesis". The phrasing of "actual cosmologists and other scientists" heavily implies that the simulation hypothesis is itself a scientific hypothesis. As per the George Ellis article (to take one view), in what sense is someone being an "actual scientist" if they are engaging in what amounts to observationally-untethered philosophical musings?

Meanwhile, when I suggested that Nick Bostrom was "not a good example" in this context, it's because his Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? [https://simulation-argument.com/simulation/] paper (hosted on his The Simulation Argument webpage [https://simulation-argument.com/]) is sort of, intentionally or not, the logic equivalent of a wordplay joke. The amount of coverage it has got in the media as a "scientific" idea is largely to do with the ease with which it can be fashioned into a fun, engaging, pop-culture story in mainstream publications (in articles such as this [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/simulated-world-elon-musk-the-matrix] and this [http://theantimedia.org/tech-billionaires-matrix/], for instance).

Moving past all that, though, I suggest the important question to ask would be: "what is the relationship between one's ongoing experience and any particular description of that experience?" and how the "simulation hypothesis" fits into whatever the answer is.

I think all of these "simulation" ideas can ultimately be reduced to the idea - the long-established and foundational idea - that descriptions don't explain "what is happening", rather they are codifications of regularities in observations (which are themselves an abstracted subset of experiences), by us. The end-point of the simulation hypothesis is, then, really just a rediscovery of the fact that the standard description is just that: a description, a useful abstraction, and isn't intended to be more than that (as per the N David Mermin article in the linked comment).

The "laws" of physics aren't like legal laws which the universe must "obey"; they are "observed regularities" we have woven into a conceptual framework. Any ideas about "breaking out of The Matrix", a la Musk, are a slightly mangled version of "recognising that your experience does not in fact arise within a conceptual framework", and then trying to do some things which are not "allowed". But they were never "forbidden" in the first place. The "simulation" stuff itself is just distracting fluff on top of this.

POST: Why did the devs implement dreams? (/r/outside/)

These aren't features, they are the mechanics of how Outside operates!

You are not actually the character you play in Outside, rather you are an open "game-space" which connects to Outside and adopts a particular perspective in the Outside game environment. In periods of reduced activity, your "game-space" disconnects and either connects to another pre-existing game-world, or constructs one on its own, seeded by random data fluctuations. You can see this happening in the case of hypnogogia and fragmentary imagery.

Generally these worlds are more flexible than Outside, because to save on processor and memory power, all games function on a co-creation, procedural expectation/recall-based engine - so the more players there are, the more stable a game world becomes.

Because Outside is the main, default subscription for all current players there (part of the terms and conditions), you always reconnect to Outside whenever other connections collapse. You can prove this to yourself by trying to observe the disconnection/reconnection in progress, or illustrate it via a thought experiment:

• Sit comfortably. Now imagine turning off your senses one by one:
• Turn off vision. Are you still there?
• Turn off sound. Still there?
• Turn off bodily sensations, such as the feeling of the chair beneath you. Uh-huh?
• Turn off thoughts. Where/what are you now?
• Some people are left with a fuzzy sense of being "located". This is just a residual thought. Turn that off too.

You're still there, you realise; you are a wide-open "aware space" in which those other experiences appeared. Outside is the generator of those experiences, including the body and many of the spontaneous thoughts and actions. Only a subset of change: intentional change, is actually your influence. The rest is just part of the game experience. There are rumours of players who have developed limited, dev-like "magickal" powers based on "intentional" procedures, but since these would also produce a revised game narrative to cover their tracks - 'narrative/experiential coherence' is enforced religiously by the game engine - this is hard to confirm.

When you eventually complete Outside, after the final montage sequence, the connection is terminated and the 'world' within you disappears - followed by your next adventure, should you choose to accept it!

So what happens when the game builds a world withing my "dream world"?

It doesn't. You're actually connecting to another server group completely, which is running a different instance of the game engine that Outside runs on, perhaps one with no players except for you.

Since the game engine works by reflecting your expectations/recall back at you, a "dream world" is then spontaneously built for you to experience. Since your default subscription is to Outside, though, when that dream world fails, you are generally reconnected to Outside with the "waking up" intro.

holy shit! you really understand this. very well done.

Just seeing it how it is! ;-)

POST: Randomly stumbled on this guy's posts... (/r/DimensionJumping/)

The point is really that no particular experience is special; all experiences are at the same "level" because there is only one "level". ("You-as-awareness which 'takes on the shape of' states of experience" is one way to describe it, but really that is too fussy and, as mentioned below, there's inherently no positive way to describe this situation. Which is why people do the whole "not this, not that" thing.)

Even an "enlightenment experience", then, is just more content - it's just that the content is not formatted in the same way as the usual "everyday world" content. But it's still just content. Good for noting that the larger situation is "not this, not that", but not much more than that.

Analogy: imagine having spent your whole life thinking about people in cars driving roads, and not having any other thoughts, then one day you have a thought about a man climbing a hill in a vast open landscape. The new thought undercuts the formatting of your habitual thought, opens you up - but it's still another thought. (Note, though, that in this analogy I'm not saying that such experiences are "just a thought about something". I mean to indicate that experiences themselves are essentially "unfolding thoughts" in type.)

So, you can watch whatever you like, and conceptualise things however you want, and read this or that, and listen to this person or that, but all that will be just more content, all with the same context.

The purpose, then, of doing a particular exercise or unpacking a certain way of thinking about things, is to notice via direct experience and experimentation that ultimately there is no fundamental formatting. It's not really an experience (no particular content), so much as a deduction and/with an insight about all experiences, impersonally.

This is why when the DJ subreddit was running, we'd often say that it was about exploring "the nature of experience" and also "the nature of descriptions about experience". Noting the the latter is just an example of the former, helps dodge a lot of needless seeking around (which can be fun, but it's nice to have the choice to do it or not without misunderstanding what such a "seeking experience" is).

POST: How to use the Law of Attraction on a day to day basis?

As another commenter highlighted, there's nothing special or separate about LOA - it's just a recognition of how your personal world operates anyway, and a particular way of thinking about this for deliberate use. Day-to-day use means to be active in what patterns you allow to become dominant in your ongoing experience. All self-help and LOA and magick type teachings are founded on the same insights, something along the lines of the extract below.

All Thoughts Are Facts

On using the world-as-thought perspective as a way to create deliberate synchronicity and therefore particular scenes:

• You are an "open conscious space" in which thoughts arise. The apparent world is basically a very bright, stable, full 3D multi-sensory, immersive strand of thought.
• The world evolves by the accumulation of observations or "facts".
• Every thought you have about the world is literally adding a new fact to the world.
• Thoughts which randomly arise simply reveal the current state of the world.
• If you deliberately think a thought, then you are deliberately adding a new fact to the world. (This is how to make changes.)
• The more intense the thought, the stronger the influence of that “fact” upon your experience.
• If you respond emotionally to a random thought, then you are in effect re-thinking it as a more intense thought, meaning it will contribute more. (Hence fearful thoughts tend to increase the prevalence of fear-related experiences; however this works just as well for nice-emotion thoughts.)
• If you “grasp” onto a thought then you are persisting it - you are maintaining it at its present level of intensity and not letting it fade and be “forgotten”.

Things such as detachment, surrender, abandoning yourself, and so on, are all about letting the current dominant thoughts or “facts” become softer and fade, letting the world shift freely, and allowing other thoughts to shift into prominence.

Q1: How to use the Law of Attraction on a day to day basis?
Segment intending
Abraham's concept of segment intending simply involves taking time, as we go through each day, to declare what we would like to have happen during the next ''segment'' of our experience. We may have, for example, the overall intention for clear communication, but that intention is not very useful for the life-segment of going somewhere in the car. For that, we might want to take time to specify that we enjoy our trip, that it is smooth and pleasurable, and that we arrive safely. When we call someone on the telephone, we can spend a moment first imagining what we want to have happen in the conversation. Here is where clear communication might be an appropriate intention. We should use segment intending for the different segments of our day, all day long. This, says Abraham, will ''prepave'' our future. Once we start mentally and emotionally ''creating'' a smooth journey everytime we go out in our car, for example, it is more likely to happen this time, and even more so the next time, and the next. By this prepaving, we can divert negative events that otherwise might have made their way to us through previous miscreating.

I hadn't heard of that before and it's a really nice framing concept. Like taking a pause between "scenes" to script-write what's going to happen in the next part of the "movie". And "pre-paving" is a great word!

A lot of this is about being slightly detached and staying aware, I guess, so that you do the amendments and directions in real-time - rather than having to periodically clean up messes and intend your way out of them again when it gets desperate.

POST: Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don't (/r/lawofattraction/)

what is the purpose of this thread? i was expecting something in the description lol

Perhaps it's an essay question. Here is a title for your essay, please write 1000 words before next session. Next Week: "Reddit is a source of frustratingly incomplete posts: true or false?"

:) Haha. Nice to meet you. Any thoughts that you have about LoA? Since the OP just put this up maybe we should chat... or perhaps we should not. Up to you.

Why not? There's a big empty space up there. Hmm. Maybe that's the clever plan of OP: By making the post he is acting as if there is a description and, sure enough, we are creating it for him! LOA in action! :-)

Yup. But the fact that the OP has a paid website for LoA training is what makes me ever so slightly suspicious.

Oh yeah, I just realised who/what OP was - they've been doing link posts all week. Those blog articles are actually okay, but I'm a bit suspicious of anyone who charges for LOA type stuff. Fine to write a book or give lectures (if you've got new things to say), but creating a subscription "club" and having charged phone support? Strongly disagree.

Exactly! But we can talk amongst ourself tho. So how did you find out about the LoA?

I was interested in "the nature of reality" and all that sort of thing (science and philosophy but also imagination), then read about "chaos magick" and that stuff (things like Alan Chapman and Ramsay Dukes). So I see LOA as one version or approach from that group: reality-shifting, you might call it. Always been looking for better ways to think about the world, and to use it.

You?

Q1: Hmm, that's very interesting. Well, seeing that I'm 22, the first exposure I had to this stuff was when The Secret came out. I've always been spiritual so it did sorta interest me but I didn't really invest myself in it. Fast forward to 2012, I was in a very dark time and had been reading the book by Norman Vincent Peale about positive thinking and mid way through that I watched The Secret again and then discovered Abraham Hicks. That's really how I got into it in a big way. Since then my life has changed dramatically - for the better. During my journey, I came into contact with other such methods such as chaos magick and other stuff very recently but can't say that I have read up on it in any way close to that of the way I have done with LoA. If I'm not mistaken, chaos magick is what includes sigils and stuff, right? That's some powerful stuff.

I was aware of The Secret but never really looked into it, because it sounded like a half-arsed version of something else, I figured. But then it seems to have got people interested in "this stuff" and that's a good thing. Chaos magick has sigils and stuff but really all of this, I'd say, is about recognising that the world is "made from imagery" that has become stable, and so intention and imagery are how you redirect it from its current path (my attempt at a metaphor: The Imagination Room). It's about deliberately, wilfully creating synchronicity. So it doesn't really matter what tool you use, I think, so long as you thoroughly think that doing "this" means "that" will happen. Because if everything is imagination made solid, then everything is a sort of idea or metaphor. (Alan Chapman makes that point in the opening of that book: decide that this means that, then do this, and you'll experience that.)

I guess it means: Follow the approach that you feel you can get behind most completely. The LOA is pretty good if you just get behind it with faith, but it doesn't have much of an explanation behind it for the details.

That's actually very interesting. I really find what you said in Paragraph 2 and 3 to be very interesting. You're obviously so much further ahead in this. I know this is silly, but would you mind telling me of any particular instance that really strikes you as "WOW!" that you created?

The first things I did were things like choosing which exam questions to study (exact results), and "undoing" things that happened (never mentioned again, Ctrl-Z magic!). More striking is just getting patterns to appear deliberately in your life, because it shows you that reality is far more straightforward in some ways than we assume.

I had a post...

Found it - actually, I posted about the synchronicity thing here before. The only decent attempt I've seen at writing up that side of things in a book is Kirby Surprise's (yeah great name) Synchronicity - there's a good interview with him here. Check that out, but his "fictional explanation" is more detailed than it needs to be.

Copy-pasted related post below, in case you want to experiment.

Fun With Owls

Anyway, so the fun thing to do is simply spend a few moments imagining (say) an owl in the space in front of you, as it would be there if you were seeing it (i.e. don't think about it but actually put "over there"), really feel it to be there, with the firm intention that more owls are going to fill your life. Decide that doing this imagining means that you will see more owls. And then see what happens. At first, people see more owl imagery in their life and they think: hey, those owls were always there, I'm just noticing them more. But then events start happening that bring owls too them: that night, their girlfriend, knowing nothing about this, sends them a funny youtube video about owls. Hmm! Finally, they notice owl-related items in their homes or at work, which they kinda hadn't noticed before, but do have a memory of having been there. They start to wonder: was it always true that I bought this stuff a while back? Or has it only become true now?

It starts to look like the exercise has updated all future experiences to incorporate owls where possible - even existing situations and their memories. You get the idea. So the simplicity of that and getting results gives an insight into how automatic and mechanical reality can be. You think there's a big world "out there" where stuff happens, but really it's just lots of patterns combining on a conscious screen that has no depth to it...

So not just "wow!" results but something which really breaks your idea of reality.

Owl & Screen Metaphor

You draw a picture of an owl on your TV screen. It is always there, but its visibility depends upon the rest of the imagery onscreen. When the dark scenes of the TV show switch to a bright white scene, suddenly the owl "appears" - it is "manifested". Now imagine an owl idea being dissolved "holographically" in the space around you, and replace the notion of dark/white scene with appropriate contexts. Having "drawn" the owl into the space, you go about your day. Mostly the owl isn't anywhere to be seen, but wherever an appropriate context arises then aspects of the owl idea shine through and are manifest: A man has an owl image on a t-shirt, the woman in the shop has massive eyes and eyebrows like feathers, a friend sends you an email about a lecture at the zoo highlighting the owl enclosure, a newspaper review of Blade Runner talks extensively about the mechanical owl in the interrogation scene, and so on.

Q1: That is so interesting. Very similar to a lot of LoA stuff really. The fact that you took out so much time to type all of that touches me deeply. I've spent some time going through your posts and seeing how beautifully deep your views are. The key comes across as one letting go of resistance to feel the full effect of these forces of the universe (don't know how else to phrase it) and I wonder if you have any opinions/advice on letting go.

Well, everything has to have the same basis, if you think about it. If there is a "how things are" then all the approaches that work must be come from the same insights, even if they have some extra layers on top which seem different!

Yeah, it's hard to phrase these things, isn't it? But if you keep it simple, all you ever have is an experience, and all you every desire is particular experiences. Intending (willing-deciding) shifts your experience, and detachment (letting-go-allowing) is what permits it to happen. On "letting go", well it's not something you can actually do. It's about something you don't do - you don't stand in the way of your current experience shifting into your desired experience. But still, how?

Think of it a little differently. Here's a couple of suggestions:

The Background Space and Not the Things

Whatever you are identified with, that's a bit of "ground of reality" that you are "standing on" and preventing it moving. So the real trick is to identify with parts of experience that don't move, so I suggest: Identify yourself with the background space in which your experience arises. Take a moment, and "feel out" into the room in all directions, and beyond. You'll find that you can actually feel out "forever". Now, imagine-decide that you are this background space, and all sensations, perceptions and thoughts are just bit of imagery floating in that space. By identifying with the background space, you are implicitly allowing the content of the space to shift more easily because you aren't "standing on it" by essentially thinking in terms of it.

Out of the Way and By Itself

If you think about something, you are essentially re-triggering or re-imagining it into your experience. This includes even the most simple things, and you can experiment with this easily. Sit down on a simple chair. Now, decide to get up but don't do anything about it. Wait until your body moves by itself. This may take a while...

Here's the trick: If you think of your body at all during this, you will re-assert it's current position. When people get up normally, they first think of their body sitting (re-triggering sitting) and then try to overcome sitting by "doing", to get to standing. Instead, either switch your attention to the background space (delocalisation from your body) or focus on your forehead (withdrawing from the rest of your body). Try again: "imagine-decide" that your body will stand up. And wait. Until it moves by itself. This is how it all works.

The Form of the Decision

So it's worth talking about what is meant by "deciding" in detail:

• A decision is the summoning of a sensory image that corresponds to the desired state.[1]
• Since your experience is an "imagination space" anyway, by doing this you are basically deforming your space into that new shape. Provided you don't get in the way, your state will naturally shift to the new configuration.

Metaphor: It's like a sheet of material which has been pulled taut and a steel ball placed on it. The ball sinks in and the sheet takes on a shape accordingly. (The position of the ball is your holding a state; the sheet is your imagination space.) How to make a change?

Well, if you push your hand down in another location, the sheet will deform and the ball will roll towards it, settling into the new position and fixing the new state of your imagination space: the desired experience. However, if you push your hand down in the new location while also pushing down at the old one, then the ball won't transfer, you won't get a change of state, and it will merely have been a temporary fantasy...

Conclusion: Imagine & Imagine-That

Anyway, those are some ideas. As you can tell, I think one the most important things is to see everything as imagined. The world around you is just something that has been thought-about for so long that it's become a stable idea and your experience pop up in alignment with that. However, you are perfectly free to imagine new things and define them just by "deciding" their properties. The two sides to this are: "imagining" (create an object) and "imagining-that" (assign properties or facts to an object). For instance, if you were to take some time to imagine a glowing sphere and you imagine-that the sphere is a super-helpful robot who scans the city for people you'd be good friends with and then brings them into your life, then you have literally created such a thing and it will behave accordingly. Where LOA maybe falls down a bit is that it's model is quite vague because it has the "imagine" aspect - with detachment/allowing - but it does have the concept of "imagine-that".

[1] In general this would be a 3D sensory image filling the space you are occupying, from a subjective point of view. For instance, if you want to be in the Galapagos Islands, you would temporarily "overwrite" your experience of this room with a shadow-sensory experience of that. However, as I mention in the final section, you can do this other ways too.

Q2: WOW!!!!!!!!!! This is some deep stuff happening here. I'm really enjoying this conversation. I'm always looking forward to seeing the orange inbox icon. I'm so happy our energies connected. I agree, there is a foundation upon which all philosophies find their footing so of course there will be that common focal point. Thanks for those excellent tips, they seem slightly similar to mindfulness in the sense that you allow the situation to simply 'be' and no clawing at what 'is'. Since I am very much at ELI5 level in this enhanced understanding of "reality", could you give an example on how to use this on, say, a somewhat tangible topic, such as relationships or money. I hope I don't come across as a silly one, but its easier at times to understand with context to a particular type of situation. Might I ask what books do you recommend. I would seriously love to get to know more about this.

Well, it's a fun topic and... useful! Everyone starts each day somewhat in ELI5 mode though; that's what a spontaneous world is all about.

Mindfulness

...they seem slightly similar to mindfulness in the sense that you allow the situation to simply 'be' and no clawing at what 'is'.

Yes, mindfulness is definitely related. Unfortunately, I think that "self-help" mindfulness is poorly presented sometimes as a shifting of attention onto different parts of the body and so on - implicitly viewing attention a bit like a "torch". In fact, attention is more like a "filter" and your aim should be to release it so that your "imagination space" is unconstrained. After that, attending to something would be viewed as the content itself "brightening and expanding" in the space, rather than you trying to contract your space down to it. (If that makes sense.)

I think that sort of thing is getting better presented now though.

Examples

Could you give an example on how to use this on, say, a somewhat tangible topic, such as relationships or money.

Well, now that you know you can treat your world as a big imagination space filled with imagined stuff, there are lots of ways. So for a good relationship, then. In both cases, just relax and release control of yourself. Do not make the imagery come and you do not even need to imagine vividly. You stay relax and just ask and let whatever sensory stuff comes up, come up as you do this. (This means you are accessing the actual situation rather than imposing thought.)

• *Indirect Fun: Like we did before, you can imagine an amazing robot that you send out to find the best partner and bring them to you. Or perhaps imagine that just behind the scenes of the world is an infinite grid that connects everyone, like strings, and you imagine that one of the strings lights up because on the other end is your perfect person. You tug on the string and it starts reeling towards you... you know that person is coming into your life.
• Direct Fun: This is more like we discussed earlier. Here, you simply imagine an immersive scene in which you are with a particular person who is fantastic, fully feeling and enjoying the situation, knowing that it means you've got what you want.
• Super-Simple: Simply issue a command, with full power and expansion felt behind it: I will meet a perfect person and have a great time.

In each case, what matters is that you imagine-that performing the action means-that your desired thing will happen. And knowing-that it is done, you can enjoy anticipating with confidence, or leave it be, or whatever. The only thing to avoid is second-guessing or half-redoing, because then you are doing the same thing again, with a different intention.

Books

Might I ask what books do you recommend. I would seriously love to get to know more about this.

Well, this is a mix of stuff to be honest!

Neville Goddard's books are worth a read because they are a no-fuss version of using imagination and free. The only caveat is his framing device is that the Bible's parables are misinterpreted and were instructions for doing this sort of thing (he might be right) but the books only reference that a little. Summary article and this book and other materials. The couple of links I gave above - Kirby Surprise, Alan Chapman, Ramsay Dukes - are worth a read. For more, the partial reading list over at /r/Oneirosophy is worth a look. Robert Waggoner's book on lucid dreaming in that list is worth your time too. (Hmm, a lot of "worth" there; I need to get me some new words!)

But really, you should just experiment with your imaginary world and see what happens!

Just by you saying this, it shows you're the real deal.

Why thanks! Personal experimentation is always the way, and that's how you discover what works for you. It encourages you to operate through direct-experiencing rather than thinking-about. (If someone selling something suggests otherwise, run a mile.)

I have found that my issue is very much with letting go

The whole "letting go" thing is hard to grasp conceptually, definitely; it's something you understand through direct experience. If a person can't "manifest" standing up effortlessly, then they're going to struggle to understand how other changes can happen. (And think how much better daily life can be if your body is "flowing" rather than being dragged around?)

It takes a while to learn not to "do" not doing though. We tend to assume that the opposite of a clenched fist is to hold the hand open (say), but actually that's the same error in the other direction. The answer is to cease clenching and intend being open.

Seeing how brilliant your understanding is, would I be correct in saying that you can pretty much manifest stuff consistently?

The ideas I've ended up with come from a great mix of getting what I want and also completely screwing up! :-) But I do seem to have become remarkably lucky over the years...

Actually, I was quite a tense person for a long time and didn't realise I was always getting what I wanted; I was very much about "doing" and had a habit of not noticing the opportunities. Another reason to detach: it improves awareness! :-) It can actually take courage to walk through the doors you create; having trust in yourself-as-the-world is an important development. My big lesson, certainly. What I was really always interested in was "the nature of reality", what metaphors are, and things like what the "sharing model" of the world is - kinda independent of getting results, so in a funny way this stuff was a sort of side-show. Finding fun worldviews that people can use ("active metaphors"), and researching "discontinuities", is what I'm about at the moment. The stuff about "doing" reminds me of this great essay which you might find interesting.

POST: I Did Not Climb The Ladder. (/r/lawofattraction/)

As another commenter said, the purpose of the exercise is to show you that if you summon an image into your mind and an act, it will be reflected in your life subsequently. When you say "I will not climb the ladder" that implies the image of a ladder, the existence of a ladder in your future - triggering of a "ladder scenario" into experience without you challenging it - which you then don't climb. It's a clever way of preventing you questioning whether the ladder scenario itself will appear - because your focus is on the climbing-or-not. Creation by implication!

Next up: "I will not be frightened of the escapee lions..."

Aside: Before NLP became pop-psychology, in the 1970s Bandler & Grinder did a lot of work on modelling language and experience. See the Milton Model in Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson and later on the Meta Model in The Structure of Magic Vol I. These are very much about using language to imply something so that it's not questioned by the conscious mind.

Before I discovered LOA I thought I was haunted by owls...

You'd be surprised at how many people's lives are rather, um, "owl-rich" these days! ;-)

Ah, The Owls Of Eternity™

Regardless of everything, you should do a daily "playing dead" exercise for ten minutes:

• Daily Releasing Exercise - Every day spend ten minutes lying down on the floor and "playing dead", giving up control, surrendering completely to gravity, releasing your mind and body and especially attentional focus, letting them move however they want - to get used to what detaching is like. (It feels nice to do this anyway. Nothing to achieve, no aim other than allowing things to shift about as they please. The most relaxing thing you can ever do.)

Then maybe read Imagination Creates Reality to give you an idea of the general idea. You might like to read about The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments and adopt that as your background metaphor for how you can shift from one experience to another, just to give you a feeling that everything is possible. Then you're going to choose a scene that means that your ex is back in your life. You are going to avoid incorporating into that scene any path for how and why this happens. The idea is that by doing this you are literally inserting a scene into your world - just like inserting a frame into a movie-reel so that it will later be projected onto the screen. You don't need to worry about how the frame appears in the movie; the projection system is automatic and takes care of itself.

Get all relaxed somewhere and:

Suggested Scene - You are in a coffee shop, relaxing on a stool with a warm drink in your hand, your [name of person] is beside you and you are beaming with happiness. You are talking about how great it is to be back in each other's lives. The scene is like a fully-immersive 3D multi-sensory thought. You don't need to "draw" it, you simply let it fill out naturally and let all the details come to you. Just by looking for a good scene it will appear in your mind.

You might want to read about The Imagination Room to give you some inspiration.

Owls - I often use them as an example when encouraging people to try and cause synchronicity, there's no meaning other than that. Looking it up now, I see they are traditionally associated with intuition and transition, which is good eh? Of course, your experiences of owls may be because I am using them as synchronistic patterns. ;-)

(I used to use other things, but I read a thought experiment using an owl and figured they are the perfect balance between not being super-strange, but still unusual.)

On the right track - Hmm. Being "on the right track" assumes there is some external path to follow, perhaps? Maybe best to just focus on what you actually want to experience, rather than attempting to create "signs" for yourself which you then reinterpret, because that's just adding another layer that you don't really need.

"I will not gain £100 unexpected income"

I feel that this probably won't work, at least not in such a basic form, although it depends on the actual detail you are ending up imagining. To expand:

• When you say "I will not climb the ladder" the focus is on the "not-climbing" and the ladder is created by implication. The phrase presupposes an encounter with a ladder. So you get a ladder but you don't get the climbing. The negative did not actually generate a positive in this example.
• You actually got exactly what you asked for: the experience of "not climbing a ladder".
• When you say "I will not gain £100 unexpected income" then the focus is on the "not getting" of £100, but you are not necessarily implying that an unexpected income will come into existence. The phrase doesn't presuppose an unexpected income in the way the previous phrase presupposes a ladder.
• If the first phrase had been "I will not encounter a ladder", you just wouldn't have encountered a ladder.

However, having said that, your actual intention matters here - the "feeling-knowing-meaning" attached to the affirmation. In other words, if you are saying the phrase with the definite intention that it means you will get £100, then that intention dictates the form of the pattern you are triggering. The implicit declaration that "doing this means that will happen" is the what will actually shape the form of the resulting pattern.

Q1: It's not manifesting it directly, it's more about manifesting the opportunity. I was presented with the opportunity, and I recognised it for what it was, I just chose not to. I could have easily climbed the ladder as much as I didn't. With that logic, I'd be presented with the opportunity, but I would take it this time. LoA is about manifesting opportunities, if you extrapolate the thinking. You're opening paths of least resistance, each path is taken to get to the desire, but the genesis of the path is generally an opportunity.

Well, you'll have to experiment for yourself of course and see how it is for you - but this stuff (in my experience) works in a far more basic and literal manner than that. Very like hypnosis, like you are hypnotising the world. (If you delve into that Milton Erickson book, you'll see what I mean.)

It's all about what appears in your mind when you say the statement or make the decision. You get exactly what appears in your mind. If you simply make a statement, it will become true in a no-frills way. If you create a mental scene, exactly that scene will appear in some form. It's basically kinda stupid. Like you are literally drawing patterns onto the world and then encountering them later. And that's why it's good to let go of it once you've made the statement - because you tinker with the idea or rethink it, you end up overwriting it with the new thought. On the ladder thing, then, you might ponder:

• Did you really choose to not climb the ladder? Did you do the deciding?
• Or did you "have the experience of deciding not to" - thereby exactly fulfilling the actual request you made, which was to have the experience "not climb a ladder". And just post-rationalised it.

One thing that comes up in hypnosis is that the subject comes up with all sorts of reasons and excuses about how they could have opted to disobey the instruction, but they chose to follow the instruction anyway. Random snippet from elsewhere:

"Yet another similarity between dreaming and hypnosis is the odd phenomenon known as ‘trance logic’. This has long been recognised as an important characteristic of the hypnotic state. It is typically defined as “an extreme tendency of subjects to rationalise any occurrence they experience, no matter how improbable or absurd it may be”. In one example a subject in trance, who was told to close the window in a room that was uncomfortably warm, did so whilst explaining that the room was cold and draughty."

That's why it's (maybe) better to think of the LOA as being an indirect request to have a particular experience. When you intend to lift your arm and your arm moves, that is an indirect request to "have the experience of lifting your arm". You do not "do" the arm movement; you experience it. This stuff is the maximised, generalised version of that very same idea. And that's why you have to be careful what you wish for - and if you change your mind, do it ahead of time because once the experience arises, it'll follow through by itself as it happens to you.

On the books, if I were you as regards Goddard I'd browse Imagination Creates Reality and then The Pruning Shears of Revision and be done with it. That gives you what you need.

On the climbing or not climbing thing, you can get yourself in an awful tangle with that sort of self-guessing! :-) You might right now be able to imagine that different things could have happened, but only one thing did happen.

As I say, the actual thing that was in mind produces the final experience when you "get there". So, if there is was a little box named "Thursday" then you could keep editing the thought-content of that box right up until that moment arrived, at which point whatever thought was in that box would become your 3D-immersive experience and would happen to you. Unless you specifically asserted the new fact of "I will climb the ladder" then it wouldn't happen. Different people respond to negation in different ways. The appearance of the ladder was certain, the climbing-or-not would depend on (for example) which of these two images you'd generate to represent that idea:

• "Not climbing a ladder" = An image from the perspective of the bottom of the ladder, looking up and not moving.
• "Not climbing a ladder" = An image from the perspective of climbing up a ladder, with a red cross over the image and the word "no".

You can probably guess what the result of each of those would be. (Hint: in the second example you might find yourself climbing up a ladder which has some red paint on the steps, round at your ex's house, while she's telling you she won't help you carry the boxes down from the attic.)

Anyway, so I think you are right to say you don't have choices as such. You don't operate directly. What you do is, you edit the facts-of-the-world with your thinking - and encounter those facts as an experience when your "world-thought" gets to that location. Don't think of "the universe" bringing things your way. Just think of it as directly editing the facts of the world - "this fact is true", "this will happen", and so on - and from that point all your observations of the world being consistent with those updated facts. Yeah, it's great to have stimulating conversations about this stuff!

POST: I wrote this article which through logical reasoning explains WHY Law of Attraction works (what do you think?) (/r/lawofattraction/)

A good read!

One thing sticks out - that it assumes that our accumulation of "previous observations" persists. Just the use of the "path metaphor" implies that obviously. Makes me think - Is there room in your description for events which arise counter to previous observations? Isn't the "narrowing fan" of possibilities a function of the metaphor, rather than reality? Is "plausibility" an attribute of the world, or is it a condition of the mind?

If we can imagine anything, and what we can imagine can become experience, then what is it that limits our ability to "step into" what we have conceived of and can it be overcome?

Q1: Thanks - glad you liked it and thank for you interesting questions. Well that is true - previous observations (or impact on you by your context) do persist, but it also fades over time. Just as your overall impact on the world fades over time. So those with a big impact on the world (like Leonardo Da Vince) has not faded completely yet although his impact is fading (slowly over time. The same effect goes for your "previous obsrevations" impact on you. The most significant stay longer than the less significant. I am not quite sure what you me by "counter to"? Can you elaborate with an example? The "narrowing fan" of possibilities/choices/opportunities is only something that we experience in the mind, when we THINK that we have less opportunities, however, we almost always have an infinite number of opportunities. So "plausibility" (if you mean the chances for something to happen?) becomes a condition of the mind. When you realise that you can conceive it and you have an infinite number of choices/opportunities there will also be an infinite number of ways to get there. Some things are just "further away" than others on a time scale. When we dream big things are often further away in the future, but that does however not mean that there is a lesser "chance" for you to reach your dream. In terms of your last question I think that this is often a mix of "fear of failure" and conditioning of the mind from our context (i.e. society telling you that: "you can't have everything in life", "the trees don't grow into heaven" and "making money is hard work"). We have heard these "sayings" so many times that it takes effort and time to get truly rid of them and before we shed these limiting beliefs we hesitate to "step into" what we have conceived.

Okay, let's have a go at being clearer...

In terms of "counter to", what I'm playing with is the notion that our previous observations suggest to us what is plausible for future observations, and that this is what limits us - limits what we will make happen - rather than the world itself. (I'm using the word "observations" here to try and keep things as general as possible: both external events, passing thoughts and deliberate imaginings would all be "observations".)

What is plausible to us limits the set of experiences that we will allow ourselves to have - in terms of what we will choose to intend, and also in terms of what we will let happen. So if I wanted to lose weight, I wouldn't intend to lose it in one week, and nor would I allow that to happen, because I "know" it doesn't. But more interestingly: if my brother had always hated alcohol and was allergic to it, I wouldn't intend or allow myself experiencing him showing up at my yacht party sharing out the champagne. Also, I wouldn't intend or allow his eyes to suddenly change from brown to green. These things (his allergy, his eye colour) have become "facts" to me, even though those "facts" only belong to my thoughts and conclusions from observations, not to the world itself. So "plausibility" and the "narrowing fan" arise from what amounts to self-imposed limits for future experiences. We can't ever know what the limits of the world are (if indeed there are any), all we ever know is our personal limits which we've essentially made up. When such things do happen, we call them "coincidences" or "glitches" or "miracles", depending on the extent that they break our previous ideas about the world. This means that even the idea that we are on a path is a limiting notion, that the world unfolds by a sequence of choices in a probability space, and that things can be "far away". The path concept is itself a conditioning of society and our own thinking. Now, that's not to say that anything can happen - but it does say that prior observations are no indication of what could happen. Prior observations are evidence of our own state of mind, rather than the state of the world.

Q1: Hmm.. very interesting point (I see what you mean now). I like how you question the underlying notion of the article. So, are you arguing that the way of looking at life as a series of choices is in fact wrong? I think that this (path notion) is a product of the time moving forward. In terms of not "intending" to lose weight or changing your brothers eye colour: Isn't this why we should always visualise all our goals as already achieved and feel gratitude towards that we have already achieved it? Doing this would leave out the "in a week part" which of course wont happen. The "facts" (learned from our observations) such as your brothers eye colour or how fast it is possible to lose weight is a product of your context. Some of this has already been formed (in your DNA or similar) and the time in point in which this was a possibility has thus already passed which is why it cannot be "changed back". Same thing goes for people with disability, my height etc. It was a choice and possibility at an earlier point in time, on path was chosen and because time moves forward it is not possible to go back and choose another path.

I think that the notion of a life as a series of choices is not necessarily wrong, but may be optional. I think this view arises from a particular notion of time as something that passes, something that happens to us, rather than (say) something we do. Perhaps instead time doesn't move forward through us; rather, we move our attention across a landscape of experiences. It's the difference between the "stream of consciousness" model and the "associative traversal" model of experience. And associative traversal operates by logical connection rather than causal sequencing. This is how we can think ourselves into the next moment. When it comes to intending by visualising as "already achieved", what we are really doing is leaving the timescale up to our accumulated observational debris. We are deliberately omitting detail in our intention such that this aspect "autocompletes". We are deliberately choosing not to challenge prior observations, and this is why accumulated "implied facts" persist and limit us. Although we are doomed now to get into philosophy if we go to far on the next bit, it's inherent with the LOA that we are living in a somewhat "private view" of the world. The more you push it, the more obvious this becomes. What it eventually amounts to is:

• The only thing that is definitely true is that your experience arises as senses, perceptions, thoughts.

There is nothing solid behind it that you will ever experience or encounter - e.g. "sequencing your DNA" is just another thing you can experience, it doesn't cause anything as such. It itself is another result. If you ask for (admittedly this is an extreme example but let's go with it) a change in your brother's eye colour, you are not really asking for DNA to change and history the be reformed. What you are asking for is: that from this point onwards you will have experiences (senses, perceptions, thoughts) that are consistent with your brother having green eyes. All requests are really of this form. What you are calling "context" would correspond to my idea of accumulated observations. But whereas (as I understand it) you view context as a fixed foundation that is added to (like sedimentary layers, or a journey along a one-way path), something which has a level of "solidity" - a collection of observations has no such solidity. It can be revised or overcome because previous observations are not "buried" by later ones. I think of this as a collection of superimposed patterns - like moire fringes. The current - apparently moving - experience is a summation of all contributing patterns, equivalent to all previous observations. Meanwhile, LOA intention and indeed everyday choices correspond to the inclusion/activation of an additional pattern. However, we can see that all prior patterns are still accessible. Meaning we can perhaps do more than simply add - we can revise or remove.

Q1: Very interesting! I definitely have to look into te associative traversal model. In saying the the "solid" notion of our center as something fixed is an optinal viewpoint of the "collective observations" you implying that the latter is closer to "the truth"? I see where you are getting at - a very platonic view of the world where the only true thing that we can in fact know is the input from our surroundings through our senses. We only see the "shadows on the wall" and not the world it self? I am very interested in hearing how you interpret/explain LOA from your model? And also: is the any limitations imposed upon us by our observations (since everything is only what we perceive)?

Yeah, it's a view I'm pretty keen on at the moment. Eventually it involves flipping round the orientation of experience, but it's much more truthful to actual experience and it leads to some useful approaches I think.

To continue...

Well, associative traversal is just a way of saying you "recall into existence" your experiences - as if there was a vast memory-block of all possibilities and you "think your way through it". It changes the perspective view from that of an external world, to one of an activity of mind. (Which of course makes sense for LOA.)

It's slightly Platonic but we have to be careful what we mean by "the world" now. In this conception, the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Instead of being a shared environment it is more like a shared resource of possible patterns which we can draw upon for our personal experiencing. Rather than being a body and walking around in a world, what's happening is that we are a conscious perspective which is having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Observations of the world are no more inherently restrictive and limiting for subsequent experiences than, say, a sequence of thought limits what you are able to think in the future. In fact, I'm going to make a suggestion here: the only difference between a world-experience (sensory) and a thought (shadow-sensory) is that the former is 3D-immersive and stable, whereas the latter is not. This leads us to a useful formulation:

• The world is just a line of thought, albeit a bright and stable and immersive one.
• The world has no depth.
• Dissolved into the background space are all possible forms and relationships. It’s like a toy box filled with pre-made shapes and layouts, objects and containers.
• To bring them into worldly existence, we merely have to recall them.
• To recall them is to superimpose those patterns upon current experience. They are incorporated and “manifest” wherever context permits.
• The more specific we are with our recall, the more narrowly defined the context. (For instance, we might incorporate a timeframe or location or circumstance, and manifestation would be constrained appropriately.)
• An ’intention’ is simply the name for a pattern which we want to see incorporated into our life. The thought of the intention is that pattern and is its activation.
• We "recall things into existence", in effect.

So we might take this and use extreme examples to ponder it...

Okay, let's assume you are experiencing being sat in a room looking at a screen right now, reading this. Take a moment to recognise something important: although you tend to assume that you are a body in a situation, your direct experience is more like you are a "perceptual space" in which your experience of vision, sound, texture arises. If you are this space then the room around you is like a three-dimensional thought or imagining that you are "filled up" with. Now, I want you to think about the room next door. For the sake of the example, let's assume this appears as a small mental image floating in front of you. Ask yourself:

• What's the difference between being in this room and being in the next room? In what sense is the next room actually "next door", if at all?
• If the thought of the other room were to become brighter, more stable, and "fill up" your perceptual space, surrounding and enveloping the region where your body sensations are, then how (if at all) would this differ from actually being there?
• If the next-door-thought persisted, would that mean you had teleported? Instant manifestation of "being next door"?
• Why exactly do we tend to have an experience of "walking from this room to the next room" rather than simply teleporting? Why do we have a passage-of-time experience before our desires manifest?

So hopefully the relationship to LOA type stuff is clear.

Q1: Its clear thanks, but I clearly do not have as in depth an understanding of this as you do (and its implications). How did you learn about this viewpoint, what is your profession and would you be interested in discussing it more on Skype?

It just developed over time - via philosophical musings plus direct experimentation. Don't let my take on things distract you though: all descriptions should be viewed as "active metaphors". They shape experience, sure, but experiential content itself should be seen as arbitrary. So find ones that appeal and use them. You've already got an interesting worldview going on; I wouldn't want to derail it. Having said that, you might find some posts elsewhere worth a look, even though they are framed in terms of a particular perspective. Check out the top posts and wiki for related reading.

POST: What does this mean?! (/r/lawofattraction/)

I think it's much more basic than that: it's just a partial fragment of the pattern you focused on. You wrote a letter with aspects of "him, team, romantic and artistic" - and they are now appearing as "overlaid" over your experience. Out of curiosity: when you 'became" the reality, did you view it from your first person perspective (through your own eyes), or did you see a picture of the two of you? Something to consider. In any case, it's a sign that what you did, did work in some way. See how it plays out. Don't try and interpret things as "signs", you'll just get stuck in a loop where on the one hand you are asserting your desire, and on the other hand second-guessing it. Meanwhile, I'd be wary of the whole "universe has lessons" type deal. I tend to think of it as far more straightforward and mechanical: we end up creating a path for ourselves, and that continues until we make a change, by using intention to set a target, or until we are changed (by ourselves or by circumstances). There's no "benevolent intelligence" behind it as such, although it can seem that way because we are the intelligence. However, it's worth checking whether you really actually want to get back with this person, or whether want you really want is a relationship with a particular set of characteristics with a better guy. If this is what you want though, then I'd say: persist in imagining doing those things together, as if it were happening right at that moment.

Why would "imagining doing those things together" work?

Because that's how all of this works. You are basically triggering certain patterns into prominence, and those become "overlaid" over your subsequent experience. There is no "universe out there" doing stuff for you; it's much simpler than that. Your ongoing experience is like an "imagination space". This is easy to test. My go-to example with owls:

The Owls Of Eternity™

In this example, we really want to experience more owls in our life, apparently without regard to the constraints of time and space and causality. First, imagine that the world you see around you is a programme being shown on a TV screen. So we want to see more own in our TV programme. For this, you draw a picture of an owl on your TV screen. From that point, the owl picture always there, but its visibility depends upon the rest of the imagery onscreen. When the dark scenes of the TV show switch to a bright white scene, suddenly the owl "appears" - it is "manifested". Now we adapt this to daily life. Imagine an owl idea being dissolved "holographically" in the space around you, and replace the notion of dark/white scene with appropriate contexts. Having "drawn" the owl into the space, you go about your day. Mostly the owl isn't anywhere to be seen, but wherever an appropriate context arises then aspects of the owl idea shine through and are manifest: A man has an owl image on a t-shirt, the woman in the shop has massive eyes and eyebrows like feathers, a friend sends you an email about a lecture at the zoo highlighting the owl enclosure, a newspaper review of Blade Runner talks extensively about the mechanical owl in the interrogation scene, and so on.

Now, the more specific you get about what you intend, the more you shift from creating a general pattern, to a more focused experience - an scene which implies a new situation. So, imagining spending time with your ex-girlfriend again, implies that you have got back together, since this is required for the scene to take place.

[COMMENT]

*Q1: Hmm interesting. It seems to me when people are in a high vibration and want to get back with an ex-partner utilizing their knowledge of LOA(i.e. they are not doing this because they need to, but rather they want to), they are doing it for the following reasons:

1. To go on a quest for love (the fun is in the journey)
2. To actually have an IMPROVED relationship with the person and be validated by said person
3. Be validated by other people that you were able to get back your ex-partner (in my experience, most people seem to discount your ability to get back with an ex-partner; or when you do, they look down on you for going back with such a person)
4. To feel a special relationship with the universe (I.e. they are in control, that they know how to use LOA to their benefit)
   So it seems to me people want MORE than just to get back with an ex-partner. Just getting back with an ex-partner is easy. All you have to beg and grovel, and they might take you back all the while treating you like crap. But no one actually wants this.
   How would you go and manifest all of the above goals? It seems like a more complicated request, which is why so many people have trouble with it.

[END OF COMMENT]

Yeah, I agree that people don't necessarily want "getting back" - they want something else, and they target the "last known version" of that, which may in fact really be a strand of experience from much earlier in that relationship. I'm not sure it's more complicated; the same principle applies. So, let's stick with our owl example. What if instead of owls, what you really wanted was the feeling of excitement and companionship that being in the presence of owls gave you?

Well then, the same "pattern-triggering" principles apply. You would imagine (i.e. summon into awareness) the feeling your would have in situations which had those properties. By doing so, you are activating all associated patterns which have that feeling as part of them.

(This is the same reasoning behind having people go around saying "it's so amazing! life is so wonderful!" to trigger a feeling of happiness, and therefore all patterns which are associated with a happiness feeling.)

In our relationship situation, we'd pause and seek what the actual experience of what we want would be - and summon that into mind. Again, thereby triggering into prominence all experiences which would give you such a feeling.

What if I don't know enough about a specific person, but would like to get to know him well to see romantic potential, would imagining doing things together help in any way?

Yes, just imagine spending time together or an interaction which means that you are spending more time together. Choose a specific scene which means-that you would be more involved, and imagine that scene vividly with full feeling, knowing that this means you will be spending more time together.

I have exhausted all straightforward options. Expert consensus is that he might have Asperger's.

Well, that's something to take into consideration, if it is the case. In my view that pretty much corresponds to narrowed attention, which leads to a sort of "situational blindness". I've been through a period of this myself in the past, triggered by over-focusing, so I've spent some time pondering this, to avoid making the mistake again. Read a recent comment here [https://shorturl.at/h5woq] for an angle on it, if you're interested.

Off topic, but some further thoughts, in case they come in handy - The essence is, he is literally unaware of his "direct sense" of the underlying meaning of an interaction. Whereas you just "know" what's going on in a social situation or a conversation, he doesn't. And he is also probably unaware that there is such a thing and that he is unaware of it. You should assume he understands the world in terms of thoughts-about it and work from that - don't expect him to intuitively know anything. He'll appreciate it if you just say things straightforwardly in words. Say what you feel, say what you want. So if you want to spend time with this guy, literally tell him that. Say "I like you and I'd like to spend time with you. Let's do this thing.". You might need to persist, because by then nature of this he can't properly imagine in advance the good feeling that will come with it. More generally this means avoiding situations where you are expecting to him to take spontaneous "creative" action, or has to make a decision or anything that comes from he felt-sense that you operate from, because he has minor difficulty "feeling out" what to do quickly using that. You'll have to keep him on track a little! But once he's on track with you and feeling safe, if that's what you want, then he'll be narrowed on you and potentially the most loyal and maybe "dreamworld-exciting" person you could ask for. Or, you could teach him how to open out his attention and give him situational awareness. (See an article here [https://shorturl.at/xhXik], fun exercises here [missing], for instance.)

Do people with Asperger's feel emotions? Can they miss someone or fall in love?

I can only say from my interactions, and me rendering myself "focused" for that while, that - yes - of course they have emotions, but they often don't understand them, because they are attentional focused on their thoughts rather than that felt-sense I was referring to. As you can imagine, it's not very easy to work out how you feel using the intellect, just as they find it difficult to work out the gist of a situation. It's very slow, for once thing, and very "theoretical". They get "stuck", therefore, when there is tension to anticipation, which tends to make them focus in their head area more.

I assumed he would take the lead from then on, but he didn't.

So, yeah, that's pretty much what I was pointing to in that last message. For starters, he won't have known quite what to make of your email; he doesn't 'get' subtext and flirting. Or to be more specific: he might think that's what's happening, but he can't be sure, not in the way that you just "know" these things. He obviously likes you though, which makes it worse for him. As to the questions, he was feeling super-tense and stuck and pushing through it to connect with you. Imagine you and I were sitting opposite one another chatting away, and I asked you how your work was going. And nothing appeared in your head. Nothing. That "feeling" you have where responses automatically come from, it just stayed still. Your flow has stopped! So, you're forced to "manually" create something to say, by maybe mentally scanning your current "facts" about work, and construct a response. Then hopefully thinks start flowing again. For him, his flow keeps stopping whenever a novel situation comes up, and he has to restart it manually.

Do you have any ideas? I really like this guy.

Invite him to things, ask him about things directly, imagine that the words you say are the only information you are providing to him. All of that stuff of (sometimes unwittingly) trying to get a partner to do things you want by "hinting", so that they do it "by themselves" and you can feel they did it spontaneously for you - that won't work. If you want to continue, you're just going to have to accept that. If you do, stick to the "let's do this" approach for going on a date, and maybe set up something regular - like always going to lunch together on Thursdays, that kind of thing. And occasionally remind him that you really like him, and like spending time with him, because he'll doubt it occasionally.

Also, if he sees me behind him on the way to lab, he stops and walks back towards me so that I can catch up with him, I find that super sweet. :)

Yeah, see? There you go.

Does the "dreamworld-exciting" person mean anything more than it means in common parlance?

Y'know, some of these people have their own "reality bubble" going. Adventures follow. It depends on the imaginative momentum. So yes, overall you just have to bear in mind that he doesn't do "covert" or "subtext" in either direction, therefore the normal subtle games that people play don't work here. But then, it might be nice to live more directly for a while eh. However, if you do get together and become a longer-term thing, you might do him and yourself the favour of encouraging him to experiment with centring his attention in his lower abdomen, as a way of getting in touch with that "global summary feeling" you take for granted.

How do I increase my imaginative momentum?

Well, I mean more on his side. It's a side effect of being very focused, that you can end up (unwittingly) going on adventures and the world kind of lines up with the narrative you've adopted. Um, you could play with this yourself, if you like. Simply choose a theme for the world and focus on it, live from it. Look for signs of it, imagine that the world is based on it as you go about your day, and just decide that this is what's going on. (I strongly recommend that you do not choose "secret spies are monitoring my every move", however.)

Very quickly, you'll find it'll move from "I am just noticing things that match my theme" to "external events are occurring consistent with my theme" and then "it really looks like I have coincidentally stumbled upon something that's actually happening in the world". If you want to play it safe with a harmless version of this, you could spend five minutes right now, just imagining that there is an owl in front of you in this room - look at it there, doesn't need to be vivid, just mull it over and know it's there - with the knowledge that "imagining this owl means-that owls are everywhere, and my life will be filled with owls from now on".

Ah I see. So the owl exercise will make me see more owls?

It will trigger the extended pattern of the concept "owl", and overlay it over your experience from that point onwards. Just do it and you'll see - it's fun (although you'll understand why I urge you to choose your themes wisely). Typically, it will start with things you can dismiss as confirmation bias ("I'm just noticing owl imagery that was there anyway") but will progress towards something else: Internal > External > Eternal.

Also, regarding the guy, do people with Asperger's prefer planning stuff over emails or in person?

How about: probably better over email initially - but, y'know, you can always ask him what he prefers! :-)

He is such a shy cat. I don't want to scare him off. :) I was thinking of asking in person because he didn't reply to my date mail. But he did reply "Yeah, definitely" when I mailed him about coffee the first time.

Haha! Well, if you've got something specific in mind just go say it I guess - that's not planning, that's telling! ;-)

Meanwhile, did you try doing this? [The Act is The Fact - Part One: An Exercise] I can't remember if someone linked it to you before.

I did that last night :) Once would do right?

Once would do, indeed!

Those labels are just fine. The point is that you know what they mean, or what you mean by them, and the situation is shifted towards that accordingly. So, you just follow the last instruction ("carry on with your life") and see what happens. Perhaps things will happen with this guy; perhaps things will happen with someone else; perhaps one will be the connection to another. The change is already made, so just relax and go with it now. (Note: there's no need to "force" things or make anything happen, in other words.)

Thanks! I still visualize spending time with him though, mainly because it is fun :) I will stop doing this when it becomes a desperation.

Oh yeah, no harm in that, I just mean you don't need to work things out, it's no problem to enjoy imagining the nice things.

I saw a girl wearing a striking owl t-shirt today, a large golden owl in black background. Pretty cool, right?

Ha, that's good! Yeah, the owls thing is indeed fun. :-) The next stage is: seeing owls which come to you via events, rather than just apparently already being there in the environment. My recent owl spotting: went on a cycle yesterday and stopped a little cafe. Coffee, cakes and, for no reason at all, a whole table of stuffed owls for sale, made by a local craft person.

I have one more question about Asperger's. I just got back to my city after 2.5 weeks of travel. I saw him this morning, he looked nervous and waved without looking at me and then walked up. I am so puzzled. Is this aspie behavior?

Well, I'd say they're both aspects of the same thing? Narrow attentional focus inside = super-shy-awkward. Narrow attentional focus outside = super-babble-sharing. I mean, if someone was just a very nervous person, would it be so different? The more comfortable he becomes, the more that would settle out I'd guess.

If only he would state things clearly. So this morning's act is not necessarily an indication of dis-interest then?

Not at all. He obviously likes you. So from now on don't bother looking for signs, just assume that's true. I know it's not the usual way, but that's how to do it.

Do you say this specifically because he has Asperger's? What concerns me is that the indications of interest/dis-interest that I(as a normal person) decipher does not apply here

Hmm. Well, it'd be wrong of me to come over as being some general expert here, since my angle on this is based strictly on how a constrained attentional focus affects perception and behaviour. If you stick to the "often doesn't pick up situational signals" and "is shy-awkward and doesn't have confidence in his judgement sometimes because of that", that's probably as far as I'd confidently assess the situation. But to me, his wave-not-looking awkwardness and focused-over-sharing sounds like he likes you and is a bit nervous.

I am not used to being very literal in romance, but it looks like that is the only way to move this forward.

Ooh, what a great title for a movie: A Literal Romance. It's got that A Beautiful Mind vibe and everything. Anyway...

The "something" he sudden becomes aware of his probably: himself! And he's maybe a bit of a loner because just random interaction is probably a bit tiring if you're quite self-controlled (until he gets going!), and he's crap at chit-chat so making middle-ground friends doesn't happen so easily (ones between acquaintances and close friends). But y'know, let's not overanalyse the poor guy. Put aside you're inferences, deal with "just the facts, ma'am", and you'll do okay. If it doesn't work out, oh well, it'll have been an interesting experience.

POST: Attachment (/r/lawofattraction/)

Passing thoughts are not a problem, any more than a passing itch or a muscle twitch. It is willed imagination that is problematic. The tricky bit is dealing with creation by implication. So, if you squirm away from a bad image, you are implying that there exists something to squirm away from. You are effectively wilfully imagining being in a situation where you squirm away from a bad thing. This will seem off-topic, but the method described in this post about lucid dreaming 'realms' kinda gets to the truth of it, I have thought. The approach he uses is to imply something is the case, and then the dream 'autocompletes' the creation. This is why our everyday life is full of situations which we might say: "Hey, if I'm the creator, I wouldn't create that!"

Q1: I find that Meditation does help, But I also find letting go and living your life to the fullest every day helps as well. To me that is the Key, the more you live each day to the fullest and let go, the more the things you desire come into your life. Things you want and desire happen in the most unexpected ways, and you cant plan on how it will happen. Example in College I had the dream of traveling and filming the world. But having no money I didn't know how to do that. I put it aside and just decided to live life. Life has brought me to my career working in an airlines giving me the benefits of flying, So I am able to live the dream I had a few years back. I would have never thought of this career would be the way it would have happened.

This is pretty good. Where things like meditation and other more forceful techniques help is when you want to "bend the rules" a little. Most things will shuffle in your direction, in some form, eventually. But if you want them next week, you might need to deconstruct yourself a little.

Infact my wantings have almost subsided or have somewhat died.

I think we end up discovering that our "needy" desires are often about something else? And when we open out a little, the urgency of those subsides. Ironically, the position that lets you generate what you want most easily, is the position where you're not that fussed! :-)

The feeling of being detached and allowing the experiences of life to arise automatically is so relaxing and blissful.

Right, the relaxation into being the "open aware space in which experiences arise". When in that state, you can let things unfold quite effortlessly and spontaneously, just occasionally "deciding" a change. Although if you are totally in it, the arising of the thought of the decision is the deciding. In case it's useful, the 'passive' version of Overwriting Yourself is one approach I've taken. Basically it amounts to letting yourself 'unwind' without interference. I might as well throw in the Patterning of Experience thing too, even just for the Imagination Room metaphor (linked) which I've found useful as a reminder.

...Ah, interesting you posted these things together. See if this fits with your experiences: When people use the "Neville" technique, or imagination in general, they often narrow their focus to do it. This has the side effect that your self tries to cram itself into that little space, resulting in tension. Really, you are meant to be open and "let the world come to you". You aren't meant to "do" the imagining; you are meant to trigger it and allow it. So the meditation you describe is similar to what I do - nice! Although I conceive of it as "switching to the background". If I'm ever "stuck" then I more directly "expand" into the space my body occupies and then "expand" into the room around me and beyond. So long as you don't do this effortfully, it's great. Maybe "feeling out" is a better phrase. The longer you do the 'passive' thing though, the less you'll need to do it I think - your default will be more open.

(I'll check out Mr Kinslow - thanks!)

And then we realise an important thing: We might notice we've developed a bad habit of concentrating or narrowing our attention when we do something. But you don't need to do that. Your attention shouldn't be controlled by you at all. You might will things but you don't "do" them; and holding onto your attention is a subtle way of trying to "do". Btw, that little insight is a great way to get your eyesight (or should I say: visual perception) back if you've had some loss there. Leave "seeing" completely alone, release your attention and let the world appear within you.

Your examples are instructive!

My personal experience has been that I have in the past...

I think overnight shifting is fine but if you continue to view the outcome as special or dreamlike or temporary, then it doesn't stick because we never really fully committed to it. When things happen indirectly - we don't imagine them fully - then we are more inclined to think of them as real and stable. Even though there is no difference other than the detailing.

The 1st technique gives me a great sense of power and control over the process while the 2nd sometimes makes me feel helpless...

The halfway house, perhaps: To imagine but let the detail of your imagining "come to you". That way you can view it as triggering a pattern with the pattern already existing. You are simply selecting it into experience rather than creating it. (Creation by implication.)

You actually see this trick used in lots of approaches: usually it's phrased in some variation of "your desire is already there". It's a fake but it's the same fake we use in everyday life to live in an ongoing, continuous, apparent world.

I now feel that letting things happens on their own...

So we can integrate both approaches and realise they are a single approach, maybe? And the integrating concept is "imagining that": Relax as the open space and let the world come to you. If you want to make a change from the way things are spontaneously going, use willed imagination but do so by imagining-that rather than imagining in detail. By which I mean, if you wanted to encounter owls you wouldn't "draw" an owl using your imagination. Instead, you would imagine that there was an owl in front of you. You'd let the actual imagination-object form itself as result of "imagining the fact of its presence". Alternative description: you are "asserting a fact" and letting your sensory experience spontaneously fall in line with that.

...Depends how you are thinking about time. Regardless, you should consider all facts as being true now, independently of 'when' they might be experienced in the senses: Examples (you don't actually say the words, it's just what you are willing):

• It is true now that I am imagining this (for just creating a visualisation)
• It is true now that this will happen then (for creating a fact, which will imply a visual as a side-effect)
• It is true now that I am imagining this which will happen then (for creating an visual which will imply the fact).

What matters is what you are willing (and we might call that the "meaning" of the imagining). The broader point is that our sensory experience - anything in awareness either thoughts or perceptions - should be viewed as a transparent floating 'mirage' over the sand dunes of the facts-of-the-world. What we imagine doesn't matter so much as the will that something is true. Not sure that was very clear I'm afraid. Note that by "imagining" I don't necessarily mean an image. The "feeling of being true" is an imagining. (You can see I haven't quite worked out a consistent language for this!)

Would I 'will' by simply feeling the emotion of what I desire as if I had it now?

EDIT: This is a tangled area linguistically, because you don't actually experience "willing", you only ever experience content and results. But you know you do this.

No, I'd say the emotion would just be the imaginative content. In general, by "willing", I basically mean "the force of yourself" given to an intention. Otherwise you are just playing around with your imagination. Which does have an effect via synchronicity, but you're not really harnessing it. If you imagine an owl (my favourite) for a few minutes, that alone will produce a few owl appearances just because you are focusing a little on the image, but it's undirected. If you imagine an owl with the intention that you will experience lots of owls then that's a directed image.

• Using imagination does produce effects via synchronicity (you have triggered a pattern in imagination and it then appears in experience), and the more detailed you are the more specific the result.
• The willing is the actual "magick". You can actually do willing without imagination at all because simply having the idea, an intention, is to have activated a pattern. It is this pattern activation that makes things happen. The imagination is just putting more detail into the intention, and giving yourself an experience of "doing".

As to emotion, well in the example above you are generating owl experiences without regard to them being good or bad. If you include an uplifted, excited emotion into image, than that further narrows the experience your have requested, the pattern you have activated. Check out this multi-quote from Carlos Castaneda [POST: Some insights from lucid dreams] for a nice take on "the will". (Think of him what you will, he did have a good turn of phrase.)

'Will' is not Willpower.

It might be fun to try and pin this down. Will is basically creation itself, it is the changing of the shape of yourself into a new pattern. So if you will something to happen tomorrow, you are directly "changing the shape of tomorrow, as it is exists within yourself right now, such that this event has-does occur". As a result you can't feel willing or experience it, because it is not separate from you and there is no viewpoint from which it can be observed. You might choose to apparently create indirectly - to create two experiences, one you call "cause" and the other "effect" - but in that case you have simply taken on the shape of a larger pattern. Your will always operates in the "right now", creating that pattern across time right now.

It's hard to describe. I mean, how do you see or hear? You just do it. But it's the difference between having a 'technique' and it working or not working. It's sort of a commitment to something being a fact. Here's a little experiment which can give you the experience: Get a friend and challenge them to an arm-wrestle. Do this twice.

• On the first attempt, use all your muscle power to attempt to win the arm wrestle, as you normally would.
• On the second attempt, withdraw your 'presence' from your arm and simply "strongly decide" that you are going to win the arm-wrestle. Now, resist the urge to interfere - leave your arm alone and simply let your arm do the winning for you.

That "strongly deciding" is the willing. It is that which brings about the result. In this example, you can will muscular movement or will the result. When doing LOA-type things we want to use the second sort.

POST: What are the "limits" to the LOA? (/r/lawofattraction/)

The restriction on asserting another person's experience doesn't necessarily restrict what you can have as your own experience of them; our experiences aren't necessarily happening "at the same time". The underlying assumption to the argument is that "we are individual people in a shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" may well be false. This assumption arises, I suggest, from the idea that the world-as-it-is has the same "formatting" as our ongoing sensory experience. However, experiences with the "law of attraction" or other "intentions that disregard the usual worldview" tend to indicate this should not be taken for granted. Experimenting with directly updating other people can bring results - but you need to view it in terms of updating your experience of them, rather than their (hypothetical) experience of themselves. "Free will" is a 1st-person concept; extending it to 3rd-person perspectives might be am error.

So, one approach would be to say that the world as it truly is, is structured in such a way that everyone can experience what they want as if they had their own "private copy" of the world. In other words, the world is not "simply-shared" like a place, it is "abstractly-shared" like a sort of shared toolbox of potential patterns. Then, the sense in which "when someone enters your life, they are a lesson or a blessing" is that if you intend a particular outcome, then the path between "now" and "then" becomes defined at that moment, and inevitably contains events and encounters along the way which lead you from "here" to "there" - including people-based events. For example, if you intended to be successful in a particular career, events and encounters might include: meeting a person at a party who knows about the industry (blessing: make contacts and learn facts about that business), meeting another person in a particular office who is nasty to you (lesson: how to handle the unpleasant side of that business environment in future), being involved in a car accident (blessing: made you contemplate life, stop procrastinating and get on with switching career), and so on.

Note: the "blessings" and "lessons" that arise are not of the form of "messages from the universe"; they happen simply because you've put a stake in the sand saying "this will happen", and the pattern of the world shifts at that moment to accommodate that fact. It's like having two poles in the sand representing two facts - the fact of how things are now, and the fact of this future situation - and there being a string between them, which winds its way around the dunes and any pre-existing poles. It is a "dumb patterning system" based around a landscape which can be sculpted by intention.

POST: Crossover - Dimensional Jumping + LOA (/r/lawofattraction/)

Now LOA is a source of perspectives on jumping that isn't as...scifi or esoteric.

Ha, I have to say, I've always thought it was kinda the other way around!

Although, I admit, superficially the concept of "dimensional jumping" seems science fiction, but in the context of that specific subreddit that's not quite how it is presented. (It's more like a model or pattern one can adopt, rather than an actual "how it works". There is no fundamental "how it works", it is suggested.)

dimensional jumping is trying to re-invent the wheel, ignoring that the principles have been part of spiritual practices...

Although, I'd suggest that the subreddit isn't doing that, as such. The subreddit is about encouraging an examination of one's assumptions, by triggering experiences and contemplation, so that nothing is taken for granted. Even the concepts of "the world" and "reality" and "me" are suspect. The "dimensional jumping" part, then, is just a way into that, really - as the sidebar indicates, it's just one model amongst many. (Although this exploration - deliberately - takes the form of an ongoing conversations in the comments, rather than in the submissions and the subreddit setup.)

The "principles... of spiritual practices" are something to be explored, not accepted, I'd suggest. They all come from a particular culture, speak to a particular environment, the perspective of their time. There's nothing inherently special about them, in terms of their content. It's more about the "gap" they point to, the context of their descriptions, that's ultimately important. In a way, the wheel has to be continually reinvented, in order to keep it wheel-shaped!

Jumping isn't as developed as the LOA practices.

That is to some extent deliberate, really, although I'd say the "patterning" model that underlies the suggested exercises is quite fully-developed. But of course, the models are intended to be adjacent descriptions ("parallel constructions in thought") and structures used for intentional shaping of experience, rather things which capture "how it is". It's about building a bridge between what can be conceived of, and what can be adopted as experience.

Because, "what is really real does not matter", as you say, if it is only temporary and can be imprinted upon, or shape-shifted by adopting a particular fact or pattern. Rather, having recognised the only thing that is fundamentally true (that is, the fact of the property of being-aware), all other facts are seen as relatively true only.

POST: You need to actually read or listen to Neville (/r/NevilleGoddard/)

It's not so much about "talking down" the Law of Attraction, though? It's more about highlighting that LoA employs a different set of metaphors as compared with Neville's writing, and how mixing those metaphors leads to confusion - or empty pronouncements that, while "inspirational", are essentially meaningless because they have no grounding beyond some sort of general optimism.

For sure, the truth of things is always the same - that's why it's "true"! - but that goes without saying, and is not the issue. There are different descriptive frameworks as a way into "the truth and how to use it", and talking about one (Neville) in terms of the other (LoA) tends to create an unhelpful muddle. Hence lots of questions that people are asking here essentially resolve into having Neville translated into LoA-speak, unhelpfully. Or worse: a question isn't asked, the LoA perspective is just assumed and then the contradictions argued about.

It's like walking into an impressionistic art class and asking everyone to explain their paintings purely in terms of optical physics (or vice versa), or assuming that they will. Ultimately they're still talking about "painting in practice and outcome", but there's a definite choice being made in how to approach it conceptually - “brush strokes” versus “light rays” - even if the desired result is similar. The experience of the final painting is the same, but we wouldn't say that the two perspectives are identical, nor that one perspective was "based on" the other.

Personally, I do think that LoA is a much more vague set of concepts, and that "attraction" is not a good metaphor for the basic fact of experience, since it implies a spatial and temporal aspect, a separation between "you" and "experience" and the notion of something "happening" in between.

In contrast, Neville's approach to this - that creation is already done, that what you are is the context of that creation, and that to change experience you change your (impersonal) state to make some facts more prominent than others - manages to avoid that, while providing a tighter framework less prone to "inspirational" thinking. The different way the two frameworks handle the nature and operation of "visualisation", for example, highlights how much more complete, and therefore useful, Neville's approach to description is.

Hence, maintaining the distinction between LoA and Neville as parallel ways of conceptualising the nature of experience (and the nature of descriptions about experience), is surely valid.

POST: Do you decide? In your own best interests? (r/ADHD)

Do people find that life, and your impulses and thoughts, buffet you about randomly - to the extent where you realise you don't even decide what you'd like to happen never mind make actual plans for your personal self?

Using hyper focus seems to be about getting locked onto, say, a particular piece of work, which may or may not be in your actual best interests personally, for instance. Do people find they don't actually stop to decide, is this the best thing for me?