TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 7)

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

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

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

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

I perceive it differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: a different D.J.

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

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

and:

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

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

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

What are people "naysaying"?

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

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

Please dismiss them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

I fall into the latter camp of scifi paranoid dweebs.

Those are the best sort of dweebs! :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Oh shit I'm convinced now

Is this all metaphorical then?

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

Changing the way YOU perceive things?

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

POST: Seriously, is this real?

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling Out Exercise

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the sidebar takes time to emphasise:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

no-way for people to go back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...Don't buy what, though?

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

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

It just is.

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

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

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

POST: How long does the two glasses method last?

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

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

POST: My story

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

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

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

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

Let's have a bash at this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Experiment to see if this is bullshit

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

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

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

POST: Matrix and Dimensional Jumping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are either the archer or the target.

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

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

Whether it be dimensional jumping (string theory)

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

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

To answer one point, though:

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

Well, they could always ask, I suppose!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That literally made no sense at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not stupid, at all.

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

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

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

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

POST: Can you jump without using a method?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not?

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

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

It's not necessarily the case that you deliberately intended anything. "Deliberately intending" is sort of an intended experience itself. There's a bit of a language issue here, but the way I'd suggest "intention" is interpreted is that: "an intention" is a particular pattern whose contribution to ongoing experience is made more prominent or intense; "intending" is the increasing of the prominence of a pattern. And so, "intending" isn't equivalent to "making a decision and then asserting that something will now be true". That is an example, of intention, perhaps.

Furthermore, it's important to note that since you are not just a "void" state, you are already patterned. And so, any intention that you do make is done as a modification to that pre-existing structured landscape. Your intention will therefore also involve an increase of the extended pattern of that basic intention, plus an increase in any implied patterns. Every intention is a shift of the entirety of the state, to some extent. For example, if I intend that "it is true now that my arm will lift shortly" then I am also intending the full meaning of that assertion, plus effectively re-intending its full implications (of a body, of the formatting of experience as a space, of time, and all the other stuff). If I do it in response to a fearful situation, then perhaps I am also increasing the pattern of fearful situations - and so on.

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

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

It might be useful to revisit some previous metaphors. We have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, the lessons from those two exercises can be applied further:

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

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

POST: If everything is merely a super realistic 3D imagination of the mind, why cant we instantly change reality just by consciously choosing to?

Why would you expect to be able to? Just putting the word "merely" in front of something doesn't make it "just" that simple. "Merely" imagination is, I assume, a shorthand for "merely a structured, coherent imagination experience". It's not like you are just experiencing single images at random. For example, if you have imagined-that you are in a stable, external world which is persistent, then part of that imagining is that it doesn't just constantly deform according to your every passing whim. The fact that your current experience is not just a random mush - that is, that it has structure or patterning - suggests this is the case.

Even when you are "merely" in a dream, it is possible to deliberately create dream environments which behave exactly as the waking life environment does, to the extent where you really can't deform it - see "persistent realms". Of course, in that case we have fully and deliberately intended that it be a rigid environment, whereas for waking life we never did; we simply accepted and then continued to imply that it was the case. This is what makes this current experience, in theory, more flexible (without having to ditch it entirely and seed a new one). Also, there's the obvious question: have you actually experimented with changing something by consciously deciding that it is the case? That is, not just "try" to do it, or "sorta kinda" do it, but genuinely and with full commitment assert that something is true - in the form of "it is true now that this happens then", for example. (But not using the words, necessarily; words in and of themselves don't matter much for experimenting with this sort of thing, it is the intention that they are a part of that matters. If you just say the words, then you are just generating the experience of sounds.)

Lots of people come to this and say something like, "why can't I fly just by wishing it, then?", but if you ask them, they haven't ever actually conducted the experiment. They don't know whether or not they can fly by wishing it. Which isn't to say that you can - however, the attempt might itself bring about an outcome, an experience, that is informative in some way.

When does this enlightenment carry over to the social sphere and to other people?

Ultimately, I'd suggest, it doesn't carry over because the final result is that there are no "other people" - and in fact there is not even a you-as-person, at least in the sense of an independent object in a location, rather than an "as if" experience. This also leads you to a particular interpretation of "to act without acting" (or "non-doing"). That is, that you never act causally anyway; all your experiences, physical, mental and world, are in fact "results". The only cause is intentions (and their implications), which are equivalent to deformations of your current state, or "patterning".

I know DJ postulates that by changing our own individual 'construct' of reality we can change the whole world around us...

When you dig deeper, it's not that you "change the whole world around us" - because the very idea of a "world" is challenged. In other words, the whole notion that what you are is a sort of person-object which is located within a "world" that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially extended place unfolding in time" is recognised as an assumption. Now, you may have experiences "as if" that is the case, but it is not fundamentally true. In fact, what you actually are is recognised as "taking on the shape of" the whole current experience, including the apparent sense of being "over here" and other stuff being "over there". You are actually the whole moment - directly, your actual experience you are having right now.

POST: [deleted by user]

The owls of eternity exercise is a form of what I call Active Will, but one might replace that with...

Ultimately, I suppose, we find ourselves searching for a terms which simply means "redirecting experience" or "asserting a pattern into experience". But then the term often makes it seem like a "special" thing. But it's nothing special: the thing-itself is just the raw "shape-shifting" that comes with being "that which experiences, and that which experiences are 'made from'". Deciding to move your arm is that thing also, or more generally: changing direction to a new destination whilst the experience of "walking somewhere" is already occurring. The names we use, then, end up referring to a particular pattern or context for an intention, rather than any actual method or property. Actually, this can present a hurdle if we don't realise it: the urge to attempt to find out what it is we are "doing" that brings about outcomes is, despite being attractive and addictive, always going to be fruitless, because it is the nature of "doing" that is the key, rather than any specific "doing". The question to ask is, after a fashion: "What is doing made from?". And so, to names: "Active will" might be used to refer to cases where you shape-shift a pattern overlay into your experience directly (the owls); "dimensional jumping" might be used to refer to cases where you shape-shift an outcome-pattern blended with a structured metaphor-pattern; and so on. Always, though, the "magic ingredient" is simply the fact that you-as-awareness "takes on the shape of" experiences, and so can "shape-shift" causelessly in order to modify that experience, to create an experience "as if" something is apparently true that wasn't true before.

Well, since last year I've been developing a method for understanding and controlling the "magic" in this world.

So the "magic" in this world turns out to be the magic the world is within and "made from". That is, it is within and of you-as-awareness. And therefore, strictly speaking, nobody actually has a "latent ability" - because they are not actually a "body" (not fundamentally a person, just having a person-formatted experience) and they can't "have" an ability because in fact it is just a natural consequence of the "nature of experiencing". That is, the apparent world is a pattern within you, where "you" means you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person.

I'd flip it around, because talk of the "self" can get a bit circular.

So, "awareness" here loosely means something like the "material" that is all that fundamentally exists, but which "takes on the shape of" a particular state:

• "What you truly are is the non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences on an 'as if' basis, including the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world."

From there, your current experience might be person-formatted, but you are not a person. Similarly, you don't really have a "self" as such, but you might at the moment have a "self" that you think of yourself as occasionally (a conceptual self) and a sense of "self" that feels like you (a patterned self, perhaps). But you don't have a self in the sense of being an object within and relative to an environment.

Now, in this description, there is no creation (because time and change are part of a particular sensory experience, which is itself an aspect of a state, rather than something which experiences occur "within"). All possible facts and patterns exist always, eternally. And so: The "unknown", then, is always known, directly, because it is always there, and there is no "outside" to experience. You can think of it as "dissolved" into the background, always. If by "unknown" you mean "experiences that I haven't had yet as 'unpacked' sensory images or thought images", then in this description those patterns exist, now, but they just aren't contributing to ongoing sensory experience, relatively speaking, to any notable extent. And intention, or shifting, would be the act of intensifying one fact or pattern relative to the others, such that it is prominent within ongoing experience from that point onwards. Like a rebalancing of the contribution of patterns, metaphorically speaking, from some sort of "infinite gloop" or non-dimensional landscape.

I think I'd throw away the notion of "brains" doing anything, initially anyway. Have you ever experienced being a brain? The idea that you are a body or a brain is something you infer from the content of your experiences (you see "people" and if you open them up you find "brains") and certain little mental castles of thought you habitually wander around in - but your actual experience, if you attend to it, is something quite different to that. The highlighted phrase in the comment above is an attempt to capture that essence of your actual experience, the context within which all content arises. (For illustration, see also: the Feeling Out exercise in this comment, but actually do it rather than just think about it, since that makes a difference.)

You don't actually experience having five senses, or a brain interpreting anything. (Even in a more mainstream approach, without getting into the nature of experiences, this is true. Recent article related to that, here.)

Rather, you just experience a seamless single experience, "made from" yourself. And then your interpretation of that experience, your thinking about it, is also an experience. There is no "outside" to experiencing; all descriptions are on an "as if" basis also, and are themselves within experiencing, within you-as-experiencer. However, if you view "your brain" as simply a metaphor for the patterning of experience, a handy container concept to which we attach our discussions for convenience, then that's okay, perhaps. If done knowingly. That is in fact how we use the term usually, as a metaphor, albeit without recognising that we are doing so. This blurring of the lines between literal and metaphorical isn't a problem generally in daily life, but when we explore this particular topic, it can trip us up.

Aside - For example, in what sense do you actually experience thinking "in your head"? Thoughts may seem to be located in that area of space, but surely all of your experience would be in that space, not just your thoughts, if we were to take the notion seriously?

And so, we have that it's not that "we only experience a fraction" of all possible experiences because of our brains and our senses allowing us. That's just a way of asking: "how come I'm not experiencing infinity right now?"

I'd say that it's better to say that the patterning or shaping of you-as-awareness equates to a selection from all possible experiences (which might be conceived of as being "dissolved into the background" and available). Nothing is filtering or interpreting as an intermediary, as a process of steps. Rather, you have selected (or implied via other selections) an experience. A formatted, patterned experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-whole-world in its entirety, as if from a "infinite gloop". A bit like being a blanket of aware material, and shaping yourself into folds, where the folds are the shape of this-total-situation with an aspect of that being this-sensory-moment.

everything gets complicated and complicated...

I'd respond to that by saying it's the opposite: it is actually super-simple but it cannot be conceptualised. It's the attempt to create a thought-structure about it that gets complicated, in an attempt to describe something in terms of parts (objects, mental objects) that does not have any parts (the undivided subject which "takes on the shape of" experiences). The thing-itself has precisely zero complexity (or infinite complexity, but really potential is the better word). Consider the metaphor of The Beach, which illustrates how you can't think about the context of your experience (the context being what you actually are, and hence you are also the content):

The Beach

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

To continue:

it's like there is a pattern of some sort or maybe it is just a delusion...

Well, there is a bit of an issue here, which is that if you go on a search for meaning, you will tend to pattern your experience with the pattern of "searching". Similarly, if you have a sense of complexity, you'll tend to pattern it with "complexity". More abstractly, more meta, if you try to solve ever-trickier patterns, you'll pattern your experience if "patterning".

Aside - Check out the introduction post and the link to Kirby Surprise's interview about his book Synchronicity. Lots of nice examples of "patterning" there. And it also illustrates how this stuff can drive you a bit mad, because you keep getting evidence of whatever your current approach is, because your approach tends to imply its own pattern.

All of which points to the fact that it is not the content of experience (sensory or thought, which are identical in nature anyway) that is where you find the insight, it is in noticing to context to all experiences. Basically, you never "work it out", because the nature of experience is not in fact a "problem" to be "solved" or a "secret" to be "understood" (both of those are in fact arbitrary structures: patterns).

Yes i see that i am getting a little bit mad i am going to put this psyhological battle down for some time for my own sanity, I will look into that interview and after some time the battle will continue as it always continues, that is a fundamental part of human spirit its curiosity and inquisitivness....

For sure, but be warned: holding the idea that "the battle will continue" already sets up your experience as one of "battling". And "curiosity and inquisitiveness" in terms of finding a solution to "reality" will just generate more content of a "curious" and "inquiring" sort. The eventual insight is that no particular experience or idea is the "answer", but instead the fact of all experiences are it. It's a change of perspective, rather than a particular idea or whatever. Anyway, you'll likely find that a lot is to be gained by just putting all this aside for a while, and just relaxing into daily life. Then, when you do pick it up later, your focus is more "open" and your relationship to whatever you've been reading and thinking becomes clear.

...

Q1: I've never really looked into the owl thing. However when I was a kid my dad taught me a cool trick. We would often sit on the porch and watch cars drive by. We would notice the makes or colors of cars more often if we were actively looking for them. Same as when you might be thinking of buying a new car or a friend gets a new car. You end up seeing more of that kind of car if you keep thinking about it. Seems like sort of the same idea.

Commonly referred to as "confirmation bias", although that term is often used misused in this context.

[QUOTE]

Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

[END OF QUOTE]

Regardless, it doesn't really work as an explanation for an increase in apparent events though, necessarily (and it's not really an explanation for an increase in observations either, really, as is). From a previous discussion:

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

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

A related term is the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon", which simply refers to seeing more of a thing you have recently encountered.

[QUOTE]

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialised version of the effect of serendipity.

[END OF QUOTE]

However, since in the case above we are performing a deliberate experiment and are possibly expecting an outcome, "confirmation bias" is more appropriate as a challenge to someone's experience and its interpretation. (Although, as I said, most people find this does not easily account for the results, if they persist with it. That is for people to make up their own mind about, though; this is very much a personal undertaking.)

Aside -

Meanwhile, you'll notice that the Wikipedia page above is now removed from main Wikipedia, and the B-M phenomenon is referenced unlinked under "Frequency Illusion" in the article List of cognitive biases [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion]:

Frequency illusion - The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).
This illusion may explain some examples of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, whereby someone hears a new word or phrase repeatedly in a short span of time.

I included the other link, though, because I think the original full B-M page is a little more "honest", since at least it references the origin of the phrase and offers several views, rather than simply a throwaway "explaining away" line which implies it is essentially already understood. I think that many references get slightly ahead of themselves in treating naming and categorising as equivalent to explaining and understanding. Creating terms and connecting them is not the same as truly incorporating them into a useful body of knowledge. In fact, I'd generally take a short pause when you encounter the word "explain" being used with reference to psychological studies, since it often seems to me that there is a philosophical gap lurking beneath it. And also, perhaps, one should be somewhat cautious about the original studies even on their own terms [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/01/high-tech-war-on-science].

POST: People around us

I don't understand how another person can see or understand what is happening when I am jumping and changing myself.

Is that what you experience though? Do you actually experience another person "seeing or understanding" as such?

how do they comprehend what has just happened

They don't comprehend. At least not in the sense of "having an experience" like you are. The important thing to realise, perhaps, is that you are not having an experience as a person, you are having a person-formatted experience - and this is different. You-as-person doesn't have experiences either. Only you-as-experiencer or you-as-awareness is having - really: "taking on the shape of" - an experience. I'll see if I can clarify that by talking around the subject a little (excuse length).

The Realness of People

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that people aren't "real", but it does mean that they are not "real" in the sense that you previously assumed them to be (it is worth pausing and pondering what exactly you mean when you say the word "real"). They are more like, say, patterns of experience within you-as-awareness, as indeed are you-as-person. Consider, perhaps, what it is you actually experience, versus the stories or descriptions you think about experience (which are really just more experiences, of course: the experience of "thinking about experience"). Do you really experience yourself as a "person-object" with a "world" that is a "stable, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in time"? Or is it more like a line of thought, unfolding spontaneously in an aware space, albeit a 3D multi-sensory thought?

This latter idea leads us to the similarities between waking life and lucid dreams, which are indeed often conceived of as being essentially an unfolding thought. It is possible, in a lucid dream, to create "persistent realms" which are essentially indistinguishable in vividness and stability from waking life; the only difference is your knowing of the context of the dream. It quickly becomes apparent that they identical in nature. And, of note, within the dream you experience "other people" who apparently know things about the world that you don't, and indeed the whole world is laid out despite you not explicitly defining it.

The Real You

Now, the "you" in a dream obviously isn't the "real you". And so it is in waking life: the experience of being a person isn't the "real you", in a fundamental sense. But are you a "figment of your imagination"? Yes and no. While the entire "world-pattern", including "you" and "other people" might be said to be somehow "dissolved into the background" of you-as-awareness, this you-as-awareness isn't a thing or an object or a being. It is more like a material. Essentially, the final observation is something like:

• What you truly are is the non-material material whose only inherent property is the fact of being-aware, or "awareness", and which "takes on the shape of" states and experiences. Currently, you-as-awareness has "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world.
• All possible patterns, facts, situations, experiences, moments, formatting are in effect eternal and always present, "dissolved into the background" of you-as-awareness.
• The current "state" of you-as-awareness might be described as the current selection of patterns or facts which are presently contributing to your ongoing experience. While all patterns are present, some are relatively more "intense" than others. (This provides one way to think about "intention" and modifying one's experience.)

And so the sense in which everything is a "figment of your imagination" is a limited, because it isn't "your" imagination in the personal sense, and it is not "imagination" in the sense of an ongoing, maintained process. And because "creation is already done", you are only ever adjusting the shape of a metaphorical "world-pattern" landscape; there is never an incomplete world, there is always a complete and self-consistent experience because there are no "parts" to experience.

Feeling and Understanding

Meanwhile, I tried to get down a decent description of this previously which addresses some other points in this comment and this comment. They might be worth a glance, particularly the first one which is specifically about "in what way are other people real?" Do check out the Feeling Out Exercise also. The metaphors might be useful for this query:

I know that our reality and consciousness and life is so complex that one may never truly understand, but at least we can try.

In fact, you can't understand it, and there is no point in trying. By "understanding", there I mean turn it into words or concepts. You can understand it in the sense of simply knowing it directly, being it. But you can't create a description which captures it - because descriptions are themselves just more experiences, "within" you-as-awareness. Experiencing has no "outside", and so there is no perspective from which to create a model which captures it (see: The Feeling Out Exercise, for example). A metaphor from the second link which tries to illustrate why you can't really ever think yourself into a conceptual understanding of experience:

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

In a way, the problem is that the direct fact of the matter is so super-simple that it is impossible to grasp it by anything other than directly attending to your actual experience.

Have you ever read Process Philosophy?

I've enjoyed things like Eugene Gendlin's A Process Model, for example. I've probably not read into the subject as deeply as I might (recommendations welcome). Overall, I'm inclined towards something like a description involving apparent dynamic processes which are fully defined as part of a "landscape" which is static between shifts, with that shift not being a process because it is non-temporal as a self-shifting of the whole. (Sorry if that sounds muddled.)

POST: How do I know if the two glass method really worked?

You know it really worked when the outcome you targeted arises within your experience. That's it. However, you should treat it as more of an experiment (it's deliberately labeled as an "exercise") than a method or technique (in particular, those terms contain assumptions which might not be valid and the exercise is in part aimed at revealing those). So, you conduct the experiment as written in the instructions, then you see what results arise subsequently, and perhaps contemplate the implications of those results, using them as the basis for further experiments. It's not as simple as performing a pass/fail or worked/didn't act. But the first sentence still stands: something "works" when you get the intended result; anything else is an experience of something else, albeit perhaps related; there are no necessary "signs" or experiences other than that. We could perhaps describe an intention as being of the form "it is true now that this-outcome happens then". If that is the case, then why should there be any sensory experience of the outcome now, when the result has been targeted for then? And so beware, also, the urge to try to have an experience of "doing": the experience of "doing" would itself be another intentional result, rather than a cause of any subsequently observed change.

POST: [deleted by user]

So if you do a method like the two glasses, your perception is changed, because I read that you're not really "jumping" to another dimension.

Things to ponder are: Perception of what, exactly? Have you ever experienced the thing you are having a perception of? Or have you only experienced perception? If the latter, then all you've ever experienced is... experiences. Everything else is just a description about experiences (which is also an experience: the experience of "thinking about experiences"). And that includes the description consisting of "I jumped dimensions". And then, what is the difference between "really" jumping dimensions versus having an experience entirely "as if" one has jumped dimensions? So: Ultimately, the point is to conduct the experiments, and see what happens. And from there, you may draw the conclusions that your usual assumptions about your ongoing experience are not completely correct. Here, you are investigating the "nature of experience", and also as a byproduct you will be investigating the "nature of descriptions about experience".

POST: A couple of questions on intention

Kind of hard to be specific with one word.

You don't need to be - because it is not a "request to the universe" type deal. It is a direct manipulation. The word is a direct "handle" onto a pattern, a pattern which could not be fully unpacked into concepts and articulated anyway. You can be specific in your contemplation of what you want (see below) but if you write a description, you are often just attaching the description (as a sequence of words) to the process, rather than that actual pattern (from which those words emerge). Descriptions and patterns are not necessarily two-way or reversible associations. From a previous comment:

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

Impeccable timing! Considering I've not had much time the last couple of days. An owl must have tipped me off that there were some comments needing written! ;-)

In order for our minds to accept the new pattern as feasible/possible...

Hmm. I don't think our minds do have to accept the new pattern as feasible/possible. Our minds aren't things which actively filter or block things in that sense, like guardians. (Usual caveat: you can certainly have experiences "as if" that is the case, but that itself would be an example of patterning rather than something separate that is "happening".)

... that word has to be meaningful enough arising out of contemplation of the desired new pattern for our minds to accept it.

Our minds don't need to accept anything, because they aren't being asked to do so here. Your "mind", in this case, is just the mental structures you are unpacking into experience; there is no "mind" other than that. So you don't need to worry about "how the mind works", because in fact, the mind doesn't "work" at all. All that "works", is you, intending!

In this case, "meaningful enough" simply refers to that word meaning that intention, for you - corresponding to it as a part of it. If you feel the word captures the situation, if it "feels right", that is enough. It isn't any more complicated than that. The reason a single word is suggested, is that this limits it to just the pattern that you have a handle on, plus the extended pattern of the word itself. As you move towards having phrases and sentences and drawings, you start to move away from intending the outcome as it is wordlessly conceived of (the pattern itself) and towards intending the sequence of words and their extended meanings (the description about the pattern). It is fine, of course, to use a couple of words if one feels that best captures the current and target outcome states ( - although I'd say there's rarely really much need, so long as one accepts that the words that arise often aren't one that you would choose "logically", and sometimes don't actually make sense in those terms. However, since the instructions are intended to be followed as they stand, with no prior knowledge, specifying a single word is used helps avoid misconceptions about what is being done from getting in the way.

This is because most people's default idea of it initially (and even later until corrected) is of the "I submitting instructions to my mind/universe/subconscious which then carries them out on my behalf" form, when that is not the case. And in fact one of the points of the exercise is to reveal that this is not the case. That is, there is nothing "happening" in the background, afterwards, to bring about the results. There is no separate intelligence that is listening and doing stuff for you. You are the only intelligence, the only cause and actor, in this exercise.

POST: Perfect method to check if a jump was successful.

Hmm. This process is surely essentially just like checking for changes versus the header ID, with some extra activity and assumptions but essentially the same outcome, which as emphasised in the sidebar:

Header No. 982 - Please note that a shift in your experience does not require a change in the header number, which should be treated as an emblem of change and a symbol of potential rather than an ID.

The problem is, basically, that using an ID or a hash or whatever (to check for an intentional jump) is making an assumption that there is some connective process that links changing your altered fact to other facts. This is not necessarily the case. If you observe the hash changing, then it is not necessarily connected to an intentional "jump"; you can just be observing a general looseness to your ongoing experience versus your memory. And: We also have to remember that the "dimensions" referred to here are metaphorical, in the sense that they are not actually "places". Rather, they are a way of conceiving of and structuring change; they are more like experiential states. So it's a bit of a tautology to say "check for a hash value change, that is a sign you have changed dimensions" - because "change dimensions" is really just a synonym for "change of fact" or "state" in the first place.

I think ultimately, as per this recent comment:

You know it really worked when the outcome you targeted arises within your experience. That's it.

Having said all that, this sort of thing is fun to play with anyway, since it encourages us to be on the lookout for a certain flexibility to our experience, and to contemplate the implications.

...

As evidenced by the famous quantum double slit experiment, merely observing something collapses it from a probable state into a determined state.

Although, to chime in, the idea of there being a "collapse" is an interpretation. There is no actual probable state really; there is no collapse; those things are part of a narrative. What you actually have, is a description which lists possible observations (and in QM it's really a mathematical structure with no inherent meaning as such), and an observation that takes place. The idea that those possible observations "exist" prior to the observation, is a bit of an interpretative leap that many choose not to make - there are lots of different interpretations and none of them are, or can be, "correct" - since we're really just dealing with conceptual frameworks here rather than "things" (and almost not even that, in the case of QM). It's really a philosophical argument, there, rather than a scientific one. Aside - See for example: N David Mermin's What's bad about this habit? article and Richard Conn Henry's The mental universe piece. Also, the fun survey Surveying the Attitudes of Physicists Concerning Foundational Issues of Quantum Mechanics. EDIT: For completeness, since I'm linking away anyway, a nice accessible chapter providing A Brief Survey of Main Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.

Being aware of something means we have a quantum connection to it.

I'm not sure that saying we have a "quantum connection" is meaningful. What we do have, though, is an experiential relationship. That is, that everything we experience, we experience as "awareness" - both in the sense of us being "awareness", and in the sense of our experiences being "awareness" also. We are not separate from our observations, because they arise as and within us. However, we should probably make a distinction here between "observations" in the sense of a direct experience, and "observations" as abstracted conclusions about direct experience. Failing to recognise the difference can get us in a bit of a tangle. Descriptions are experiences, too: the experience of "thinking about experiences". We can never get "behind" our experiences or explain them, therefore. We just have further experiences.

Which leads us to: our ongoing experience of the world doesn't work according to "QM" as such; that is just one possible description after the fact. Such descriptions come after or in parallel to your experience, as thought; it doesn't cause your experience. In the case of "dimensional jumping" we are actually dealing with the domain "before" descriptions like quantum mechanics, so they can't actually help us make decisions for actions in terms of them being a "how things work". At the level of "experiencing", we might actually say that there is no "how things work" as such.

Having said that, we might use such models as a way of intentionally structuring or patterning our experience "as if" they were true, as "active metaphors". But this is a reversal of the usual assumptions we have about such descriptions. Here, intention would be the cause (via adoption of a certain pattern or formatting implicit in the defining of the outcome) and the correspondence to a particular description is an aspect of the result. All this is, of course, stuff to experiment with. But it is why this is all best viewed as an experiment or investigation, rather than a "technique" or "method".

(Added some headings to break it up a bit.)

Observations, Realms, Experiences

You can directly observe what happens and start to figure out something about our realm from it.

Yes - but one must be careful how one approaches this "something" in our case. You aren't talking about just observing (as in experiencing) here; you are talking about observing with reference to certain concepts and then drawing conclusions in terms of them, and the assumptions underlying them. And that's maybe a bit of a problem for us in this topic, because those assumptions are what we're examining. In particular, the conclusion that quantum physics tells us something about our realm being in the format of quantum physics is problematic. This is particularly so versus other types of theory, because quantum physics is a codification of a set of observations, it is not "what is really happening" and has no description of that sort. It is not meaningful in and of itself. While things like "atoms" are also really a conceptual framework which is useful rather than "true" (the world isn't really made from "atoms"), the component concepts at last have a discernible meaning, because the concepts came first. With QM, the equation came first, and was kind of ad-hoc dragged into being, rather than derived from a worldview.

From the Richard Conn Henry article in Nature, for example:

Likewise, Newton called light “particles”, knowing the concept to be an ‘effective theory’ — useful, not true... Newton knew of Newton’s rings and was untroubled by what is shallowly called ‘wave/particle duality’...
Discussing the play, John H. Marburger III, President George W. Bush's science adviser, observes that "in the Copenhagen interpretation of microscopic nature, there are neither waves nor particles", but then frames his remarks in terms of a non-existent "underlying stuff". He points out that it is not true that matter "sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle...
The wave is not in the underlying stuff; it is in the spatial pattern of detector clicks... We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles."

My actual point: this means we can't really extend it for our purposes, in terms of describing the nature of experience itself. People who do take QM to be literal are perhaps the same sort of people who say that the universe is mathematical. Which is like a painter saying that the universe is made from paint. I'd add that the QBism interpretation does try to tackle some of these issues head on rather than handwave them away, though, and is worth a read if you haven't already: here and here. It ends up covering some of the same philosophical ground that we confront here (it's interesting, in the Nature article, to note where N David Mermin balks at following through on the implications of his idea: it's the bit about non-overlapping moment-memories).

Consciousness, Links, Measurements, Descriptions

I think the main takeaway from all of it for me, is just that there is something that links human conscious awareness with what is being watched that cannot be physically measured.

I'd say that the double slit experiment tells us more about the nature of descriptions than experiences.

• First, going back to that comment about "atoms", light isn't waves or particles - rather it's simply that with one experimental arrangement we see one result (and the conceptual framework of "particles" is useful to capture it), with another arrangement we see another ("waves" is useful to capture it).
• Second, the idea that the observation "collapses the wavefunction", or similar, is already an assumption. No such collapse is ever observed; the concept is really just an artefact of attempting to assign an interpretation to a theory - really, a type of calculation - that was never built to be "understood" in that way. Wavefunction collapse, and therefore the idea that "human conscious awareness" is linked to something, is effectively a ghost!

Instead, we might be better to note: what exactly do we actually experience? In what way do we experience "human consciousness". I'd suggest that, in a very real way, we don't. Not as a thing, not as an object. Go looking for "human consciousness" in your actual experience right now. Can you find it? This is the starting point, I think, and it re-contextualises quite a lot of what we're talking about here. We cannot measure human conscious awareness "physically" because it is not a thing - and also the term "physically" refers to a concept which is part of a particular description of a certain idea of a world, and we are dealing with something "before" such descriptions. Which leads us nicely to:

Jumping, Self, Maps, Truth

And in the realm of dimensional jumping, it is not the self that shifts...

Or it is only the self which shifts. This of course depends on what we mean by "the self".

And sure, we are all one, in the words of the mystics - but for the purposes of this realm, we are evidently not.

It depends on what was mean by "we are one". I'll bet your actual experience right now is not divided up into "parts", for example. The only "parts" are in your description of, your story about, what you are experiencing. The mystics might not have been talking about "being one" in the sense of a place with objects that are all undivided. Rather, it is that you-as-awareness are undivided and "takes on the shape of" states and experiences. In other words, you are a not a person-object located within a world-place; you are a sort of non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware and which adopts states. That is the "self" that shifts, and it is all there is. It is, however, not a personal self, and it is not an object, so there is neither "one self" nor "many selves".

[Robert Anton Wilson] The map isn't the territory, and the map may or may not be completely accurate.

We could even extend this, perhaps: The very idea that any map is of the same "format" as the territory is in error. And the idea that there is "territory" somehow independent of ongoing experience is also in error, because that notion is itself an example of the map-territory mistake. A map is another type of experience, and the "thinking about a the universe" experience is alongside the "apparently being a person in a world" experience, at the same "level", and never gets "behind" it.

In other words, the whole idea of "explaining" experience or the world in terms of parts and relationships is flawed. The patterns we generate for our descriptions may be useful, but they are not true. The world as we are exploring it here is not something to be worked out - remember, we are not trying to make calculations or model trajectories here - and we have to make a clearer distinction between the-world (really, the ongoing moment of unbroken experience*) and "the world" (a fiction to which various conceptual structures are attached) than those doing science to. Although, we would all be helped greatly if some vocal scientists did a bit more philosophy and so didn't take interpretations literally.

I don't get it, what are you exactly saying?

Well, that comment you're replying to is part of an extended thread. Which bit isn't clear, and I'll try to explain?

Or did you mean just, why the hash-result idea doesn't get you anywhere in terms of deciding whether you have successfully "jumped" or not?

Mainly, that's because it assumes some things about our ongoing experience of the world that are actually being tested by the exercise. The hash is no better than the header ID, which itself, if it changes, tells you only that you are having an experience of "the header seemingly changing". Anything beyond that is just a story about "worlds" or "dimensions" or "hashes". For example, you can't have one part of the story break integrity - "the hash has changed" - with the others assumed not to - "the hash still corresponds to underlying facts". You are using the target of the experiment as its own reference. All you really end up with is: you had an experience where content changed.

The whole explanation is very complicated, please explain it in simpler terms, but the most important thing I want to know, is this: could this hashing method work? and if not, then why?

It's more that doing it isn't meaningful. That if you accept "jumping" then you also lose the ability to rely on proxies for indicating change between "jumps". I'll reply later with a bare bones explanation.

POST: REQ: Triumphant George's bio

Most flattering! But I'm afraid that this subreddit doesn't encourage AMA type posts. ;-)

More seriously, some background: Although I moderate here, really I'm just a contributor who occasionally helps out with some tidying up; the subreddit pre-dates my involvement. The Two Glasses exercise was originally a response to a "can we generate glitches deliberately?" thread on the Glitch subreddit, and the exercise was based on the "patterning" model I first outlined in simplified form at another subreddit (links are in the intro post). And the real purpose of all of that was to encourage people to identify hidden (and incorrect) assumptions by generating thought-provoking experiences that contradicted them. Now, some might call those experiences "results", but in the longer term the point is to go beyond that and change one's perspective on "the nature of experiencing" at a basic level. Hence, this subreddit tries to encourage thinking about the implications, what they mean for the "formatting" as well as the content of our experiences, as much as obtaining outcomes - all the while not really pushing a particular view on things one way or the other. Everyone has to check it out for themselves (for quite fundamental reasons which become clear later). We're not trying to convince anyone of anything here; it's a shared adventure. ;-)

Having said that, who knows? Perhaps with the search function, you still might be able to find something...

POST: [AMA Request] TriumphantGeorge

Ha, well that's very flattering! And yeah, it does seem that if I have a spare moment and there's a keyboard in the room, something "happens". I won't do a general AMA - because I'm not here as a 'person', I'm just contributing to the exploring and experimenting, and of course I'm not the originator here - but those questions are good jumping off points (excuse pun) for group discussion, so I'll pop back when I get a moment and reply properly.

EDIT: This will be tomorrow.

Q1: This may sound extremely odd (to put it mildly ;) ), but I was just finishing some work related to a course that I'm taking on Udemy, and I found myself thinking about how incredibly amazing it would be for someone to create and post a course [on Udemy, or on any other online learning site] about dimensional jumping...
...and, since you've shown yourself to be quite the expert on this subject, I couldn't help but also think of you and your highly informative posts. I know that you must be extraordinarily busy, but do you think you might ever consider doing such a thing, at some point in time?
(Currently, people have posted courses that involve subjects like clairvoyance, dowsing, remote viewing, telekinesis, energy healing, and lucid dreaming, so a course that covers the topic of dimensional jumping -- including, perhaps, the ideas, theories, techniques, and pertinent background information related to it -- would seem to fit in quite well, and appeal to many people.)
I do apologize for asking such a strange question, though, and I hope you don't mind. :)

Interesting! Well, it's not such a bad idea for something in the future. The overall subject (applied metaphors, the nature of experience, etc) can be hard to convey in language alone - and a visual aspect can definitely help. It's something I played with briefly when describing the Infinite Grid concept. The idea of giving the viewer some sort of version of the experience is quite appealing. I'll keep the notion in the back of my mind!

Q1: Thank you so very much for your response! I know that it must have seemed like a rather peculiar question to ask, so I really appreciate that you took the time to answer. :)

Not peculiar - you thought of something that you think would be good, and you asked about it! Seems like a sensible approach to me!

...

[Going to take each of these separately, posting the responses whenever I get time. This will make it easier to follow any discussion anyway.]

1) I see you are also a moderator of Oneirosophy and Glitch In The Matrix. What sparked your interest in dreams, reality and consciousness?

When I was studying at school I decided to look up memory techniques. In the library I found books by Tony Buzan and Edward de Bono about memory and creativity, but also an old book about “journeys into consciousness” in which a group of psychologists did basically the doors to the mind ritual, and Oliver Fox’s book on astral projection. There was also a de Bono book called The Mechanism of Mind[1] which got me thinking about generalised pattern formation. So these, combined with my interests in physics and art, kind of dictated my direction from then on.[2]

In terms of those subreddits, I never really aimed to get involved (the reason I ended up here is because the approach seemed “undirected” and I figured few concepts might help people avoid discomfort). I just found myself contributing too regularly. ;-) But it’s interesting that they do cover what I see as the three aspects of this area:

• /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix collects anecdotes about subjective experience and how it differs from our expectations and assumptions of how everyday-mode reality works, our “objective” notions of the universe. Reports of the spontaneous behaviour of the subjective experience.
• /r/Oneirosophy explores the metaphysics of the subjective experience, hammering out the perspective in detail by furthering the language and playing with different concepts. Metaphors to help us better describe the subjective experience.
• /r/DimensionalJumping is about directly experimenting with the subjective experience. The application of those metaphors to deliberately influence the behaviour of the subjective experience.

So: observation > metaphor > application

If there’s a “project” here, then it’s the project to bring knowledge that has become clouded by years of language abuse, strip it right down to the basics, and make it accessible - all based on the key insight that metaphors (“patterned thought”) shape experience, and experience is metaphorical.

Notes

[1] The book The Mechanism of Mind is out of print now although there's a copy on Scribd. There is a copy of the Oliver Fox book there too.

[2] Another book that was very useful was David Fontana's The Meditator's Handbook. It has a nice section on visualisation which concludes that (as we all know) the way to do it is to "allow it to happen". I thought it was out of print but there is a version available. Look up chapter 7 in the preview here [missing].

2) You have many great posts, would it be possible to somehow index them all so we could easily read through them?

Eventually it would be nice to gather all our insights and organise them in the wiki, but it’s a bit early for that probably. And it’s not a small task: these things need edited into some sort of shape so that they aren’t confusing and conflicting. And maybe separated out into metaphors, exercises, perspectives, etc. One idea would be to at least have a couple of pages for now: one for recommended reading material, and another an index for the main posts. That way, the information-based posts wouldn’t be so vulnerable to getting lost in the stream, obscured by our general questions and chat. And it would allow there to be a “read this first” list so that newcomers don’t have to ask the same stuff.

It’s tempting to think an FAQ would be a good move, but I feel the nature of this stuff is such that there’s no definitive worldview to offer. Rather, there are lots of different, equally valid, ways to describe and apply what amounts to the same “ineffable” knowledge. Maybe a page indicating “what your mindset should be” might be appropriate though.

3) What changes have you seen in your life when putting to practice your techniques, methods and philosophy?

Probably the best way to answer this is to discuss the underlying motivation, even though it might not have seemed this way to me at the time.

Unwitting Deformation

One of the reasons I think I was driven to investigate this, apart from just curiosity about the nature of things, was because I struggled with certain aspects of living sometimes. I would vary between being relaxed and spontaneous, and at other times not ‘getting’ what was going on, accumulating tension without realising it, and so on. Everyone has elements of this, but it was annoying to be alternately relaxed and present, then useless and unaware. Why was this? It wasn't obvious that I was actively doing something particularly wrong. The reason turned out to be: attention and control. By having the wrong concept of the structure of my experience, but being keen to perform, I was directing my experience incorrectly and so constantly deforming my perceptual space. I’d be open and spontaneous and then narrowly located and locked-in, all by trying to “do” things via action. And because attention is 'invisible', it really corresponds to a shaping of perception, it's difficult to realise what is happening. You are changing your own shape without realising it.

Detaching & Triggering

So the major change is actually simple and everyday: my ongoing experience is more “open and spacious”, and movement and thought don’t involve effort and strain. You realise you have experiences of moving and thinking; you don’t do moving and thinking, and so your point of interaction alters. The next major change is that, having realised you “insert experience” into the world, or activate patterns, you change your approach to getting what you want. If world is a single pattern coherent and you acquire experiences by “inserting a new future frame into the film” or “activating a pattern so that it later appears in sensory space”, then what use is thrashing about it trying to make things happen by constant fiddling? I used to do that, and it made for a very rollercoaster life. So, additional actions here don’t produce results there. Instead, your job becomes to occasionally assert things and otherwise allow experience to flow, knowing that the flow now has your desires incorporated into it. This flowing includes allowing body and thoughts to move of course - being, as they are, just parts of the extended world-pattern, and an aspect of your experience.

The short answer is: "Adopting new metaphors for more fun and less fight"

4) Have you got any tips for a beginner such as myself to start seeing real, positive changes in my life?

Okay, I’m just going to throw out some random ideas here and maybe something will be useful. For general things:

• Daily Releasing Exercise - I’ve mentioned this before but I think the single most important thing is to allow your attentional focus to relax out. So do a daily releasing exercise where, for 10 minute maybe twice a day, you lie on the floor (feet flat, knees up, couple of book supporting the head) and “play dead”. Give up completely - to gravity, surrender to God, abandon yourself to open space, whatever. Allow your body and mind and attentional focus to move and shift as it wants. Think of it as allowing your nervous system, or your perceptual space, time to unwind and cool down. The trick is that releasing of attentional focus. If you notice yourself fixed on something, just release again.

• Be The Background Space - When you have spare moments, close your eyes and “feel out” with your mind, go looking for the background space in which all experience arises. Feel yourself to be that peaceful aware background and stretches out forever. When going about your day, switch your perspective to being that background. Since the space goes on forever, you can realise that there is nothing beyond that. There is no world outside that is “happening” while you’re not looking at it. All there is, is the immersive “world-thought” that is appearing in your mind right now.

  An expanded version of the above ideas can be found in Overwriting Yourself.

• Fun With Imagination - You should always treat imagining as if it is a direct interaction with your private world. You are literally adjusting the relative strengths of various patterns by doing it. You don’t need to worry about passing thoughts; they’re just telling you the relative states of the world-pattern as it is. However, you should only deliberately imagine/say things which you would be happy making a more dominant contribution to your ongoing experience. This shouldn’t be seen as a task though - it’s fun to imagine things you’d like to happen, to make vivid your desires! Do so regularly for both what you’d like to happen and also to revise previous experiences into the desired version.

The last bunch of posts, including All Thoughts Are Facts and The Imagination Room, expand on this.

Meanwhile, for general body and mind use without too much esoteric flavour, I really recommend this book by Missy Vineyard. It’s based around the Alexander Technique (an approach to body movement) but she inadvertently goes further than this and gets the whole expansion of spatial awareness / non-doing flow and intention thing down pat. For other stuff, you just have to experiment. Play with the idea that the world you see around you is an immersive 3D sensory thought, and that you could “declare” that is going to happen, assert new facts, or assign properties and meanings to objects and events. Mostly, try to view it as a 3D pattern which has no depth - in other words there is no deeper world behind it, supporting it.

The What's it all about? post was an attempt to get some of the background perspective down, with relevant reading material so that people can form their own ideas.

5) What is the best book you've ever read and why?

I really can't think of an answer to this one! In terms of non-fiction for this the subreddit's topic, everything you read just becomes an interconnected web of different ideas here and there which eventually form into your own blended understanding, so I can't think of anything specific. My favourite fiction authors are probably Philip K Dick (for the concepts rather than the writing quality) and JG Ballard (exploration of society). Today, anyway.

...

Insanity and Functionality

Any fear of becoming completely unhinged or insane?

My thinking has been: If experiences are just that, it pays to not take them too seriously. People can get obsessed with certain notions and their experience reflects that back at them as the patterns become more established. There's only one thing to realise, and that's the relationship between consciousness and world in subjective experience. People messing around with magick and psychology often create unfortunate experiences for themselves, and then by viewing them as external make them behave "as if" they were external. I've always been super-cautious of that sort of thing, and indeed any content. The world may be an illusion, but it's an illusion in the sense that it's not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time"; it is still your experience regardless. I think an understanding of experiential reality as being "super-basic" - by which I mean that it's the activation of patterns in a 3D space - helps avoid delusion and maintain perspective, since it brings you back to experience, now without interpreting things as external forces or understandings. Of course, this doesn't mean that you have a great explanation for the patterns you experience in terms of "the narrative" of the content - but it does mean you're clearer about their nature.

World-Sharing and The Objective

Also, do you have any advice for people struggling with the idea of an objective or consensus reality?

Well, it's just an idea isn't it? It's a trick of language more than anything. The "sharing-model" of the world is one of the most challenging things to think about - and that's because it's inaccessible, it in effect doesn't exist, and by its nature it would be "before time and space" and therefore literally unthinkable. Which is why recent philosophy and physics efforts are often tending towards the "private view" notion (see P2P and QBism) with a handwaving promise to hopefully fill in the blanks on the objective (the nature of "world-sharing") later. For a convenient working model, it's handy to think of it as private copies of the world, built from a shared toy box of all possible patterns (objects, relationships). In stead of the world being a shared environment, it becomes a shared resource. In this view, "people" are patterns too just like any other object - collections of possible perceptions of a certain related form. This includes "you" as well; it's just that your experience has taken on the perspective viewpoint of this particular "person". You might think of people's full pattern of possible representations as them being "Extended Persons", of which you see a particular aspect at any moment.

...

Hey, thanks for that.

Do you know if there were/are any other schools or thought...

I actually think most "religious" traditions have their seeds in this sort of worldview, even if the organised versions of the religion lost touch with, or intentionally corrupted, that knowledge. Christianity itself seems to be rooted in these views, with the Bible's parables being metaphors-for-metaphors, and instructional manual for understanding reality and creating change. Over time, though, all groups seem to lose their way as the message is diluted, misunderstood, or suppressed. And I guess various magickal groups also fall into this category of "communities bound by worldview with the purpose of making change"?

I read a book called the Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self Mastery...

I'm not very aware of Toltec, although I've read Carlos Castaneda's books and they seemingly have some relation to it. Browsing the wiki page it's pretty interesting how their recorded history seems to be myth and metaphor, much to the pain of archeologists and historians who want the "real" story. But of course, the myth is the real story. (See: Toltecs as myth.)

Reading through the "agreements", they would seem to be on the core idea:

Maintaining purity of observation.

Which is a pretty decent approach I'd say. Although without an underlying metaphysics to ground it I wonder how much benefit it brings (perhaps the books explain more?). The All Thoughts Are Facts post is pretty much a description of maintaining a world by realigning "inner" observations appropriately.

I thought The Art of Dreaming was pretty interesting, it had good quotes on will and intention; I don't really remember much about the rest of the books though. Yeah, it's more of a meandering narrative than a direct discussion of a worldview though. Neville Goddard is quite interesting on the "taking the bible as instruction manual" view, but it crops up in different ways quite a few places.

POST: TriumphantGeorge - do you jump?

he says he "isn't here as a person"

Heh, well, I think when I said that, I meant it in the sense of my activities as a moderator and as a contributor to the subreddit aren't about me as a person; they're about facilitating exploration of the topic. Which, in turn, is about everyone examining their own experience and experimentation, without believing or following anyone else. On the other hand, the underlying idea of the subreddit is to explore the "nature of experience" and the "nature of descriptions", and one of the conclusions we draw is that we aren't a "person" as such, and we view our stories differently. In particular, a distinction is made between the content of experience versus the context, etc. Lots of comments going into that elsewhere, of course, so I won't repeat it here. It's not really mysterious, except in the literal sense of "mystery": a truth that one can know only by revelation (experience!) and cannot fully understand (describe!) in conceptual terms.

He's so enigmatic, almost overly so.

Ha. That has probably got more to do with my excessively comma-and-quote-heavy circular writing style, and my terrible habit of not doing enough proof-reading, rather than anything exotic!

So you are saying you did not 'transcend the human experience'? :-D

Heheh! I'm not particularly sure what they mean, to be honest. If you consider, say, playing with adopting being a "space within which a scene arises" - or more dramatically if you have a "void experience" [http://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1victor_c_other.html], or even just do the Feeling Out exercise to attend to your direct experience as it is. Then, I dunno, the "human experience" seems more like a thought about experience than something you ever really have, as such. At least, unless it is defined far more strictly. Like a lot of questions relating to this topic, it perhaps ends up falling into the "actually, the answer is that the question does not really apply" bucket. A bit like asking about the "other you" after a "jump".

I'd like to know if you had one (or more) of the spiritual (salvation history related) experiences described by Neville Goddard in his books. You know, meeting David, or holding the child wrapped in swaddling clothes, Kundalini rising etc.

No, none of those sorts of things. Plenty of symbolic lucid dreams and occasional waking life encounters with interesting people, but nothing overtly "standard" in terms of symbols. I don't have a religious background at all, though, and so those representations don't (or did not) have that meaning for me. And "meaning" is, I think, the driver for a lot of the content we experience.

POST: This shit actually works

Its just the vocabulary some people use to describe this experience.

True enough. The potential issue with it, though, is that it can be unintentionally misleading, since it implies there is an external agent involved in this. While lots of people say things like "signs from the universe" as just a fun turn of phrase, our language has a tendency to imply an active causal entity behind things (because it forces things to be described in terms of "parts" with one affecting the other). Unexamined, this can lead to some confusion. That is, we can end up treating "the universe" is a separate actual thing - to be appeased, convinced, negotiated or communicated with, and so on - rather than a concept which acts as a placeholder for "the current patterned state of everything" or similar. This results in the endless questions that crop up which are based on the idea of some sort of independent intelligence or mechanism that must be negotiate with, and ever more convoluted descriptive schemes to account for this never-really-experienced entity. So, it's probably worth clarifying these things periodically, to save people going on self-perpetuating wild goose chases, even though to many it's just obvious what is meant. Particularly because pursuing this in terms of such a view can generate "as if" experiences, the patterns of which become more and more pronounced, but ultimately distract from what is actually going on at a "meta" level.

It doesn't even need to happen on an Inner-world/Outer-world level, it can simply be in an internal dialogue.

Indeed. Ultimately, though, we don't even need an inner dialogue, because such dialogue is itself an intentional result - a piece of "sensory theatre". Intention itself has no particular experience associated with it, unless the intention (the pattern/fact being brought into play) has a sensory aspect within the current moment. And of course, nobody ever actually experienced an inner-world/outer-world anyway, although they may occasionally have had thoughts about such things: If the world is a patterning of you-as-experiencer (there is no "you" as such at all really other than the occasional thought about it) then simply asserting the fact that something is true is all that is needed. And really, that's all one ever actually does in any case: all apparent acts resolve to this. It's not even an act! It's a self-shaping. Non-verbally (since the assertion isn't a localised object, it literally is the outcome pattern, being "intensified") we might consider its essential form to be "it is true now that this happens then". (Better yet, replace "happens" with "is experienced".)

The whole idea of "delegation", then, is itself part of an intentional pattern. This is because an intentional pattern is not a "doing", it is "what is being brought into prominence" and that includes any apparent "causation" aspect. Of course, in terms of getting a specific result - if one is pursuing techniques - then there's a bit of "anything goes" about this! However, for the other part (the other focus of the subreddit) we don't just stop at "useful" and we dig a little deeper, even though initially that can seem pedantic and like empty wordplay. But eventually this bears fruit, I think, because that's how we're freed from the assumption that there is any particular mechanism or technique (they themselves are directly or implicitly aspects of an intention; there is no fundamental "how things work" involved), or that a "you-object" that is operating upon a separate "world-object" (any apparent experience of that is, again, an intentional result: a piece of "sensory theatre" and/or just a thought about "what is happening").

a technique such as Delegation is very useful for complex Intending if one wishes to continue as Person.

I would say, though, that one never is a person anyway. Although once can structure an intention using the formulation of "a person doing this", it never actually is that. The intention is always a shifting of you-as-experiencer rather than the (fictional) you-as-person. Basically, I don't think there is any essential difference between intending "it is true that the universe is going to obtain this-result on my behalf" versus "it is true that this-result will occur". However, it can be fun to pretend, to intend "as if" this or that were true. Really - this may be where you are coming from overall, especially with your next statement - we always do that to some extent. Even the idea of "making something true" is essentially an "as if" approach, of course. The only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of the property being-aware; everything else is relatively true only. (And it is impossible to pack that into concepts, because it is "before" objects and relationships.)

I think calling a conceptual framework "useful" already implies certain things about How Things Are(n't).

Of course: it (re-)implies the idea of being in a situation, the possibility of another situation, and that there is a sense of purpose involved it translating between them, plus the very idea of such a translation. But: I think, though, here we've been making a distinction here between "getting results" (that is, targeting certain experiential content) and "knowing the nature of things" (that is, recognising the context of all experiences). So long as we don't mix up one with the other, it's okay if things are being implied. When we're focused on "getting results", we're fully embracing those implications. We're okay with "useful" not being fundamental. We are, after all, not in a "void" state: we start this investigation with a certain patterning already in place. So we leverage it. When we're focused on "the nature of experiences", we again accept our current patterning as a starting point, but now we expand our approach to include that starting point also.

POST: Jumped and now seeing things

In the spirit of pushing back on unexamined assumptions, I'm duty bound to interject just to say say that this is not really an "asking the universe" or "connecting" type of deal, by design. Although one can certainly conceive of it as such and have experiences "as if" that is the case - if one intends in terms of those perspectives - the two glasses exercise is actually specifically structured in a much more direct way. There is deliberately no suggestion of an intermediary, or indeed any mechanism or process at all. Ultimately, the results might (should?) lead one to reconsider notions of what "you" and "the world" are, and what the relationship between them is - if any. This usually happens in a way that allows us to recognise that there is no "request/entity" structure, or even "you/world" structure, fundamentally.

See this previous thread, for example [POST: This shit actually works].

I think that the main issue with "universe", as it's commonly used anyway, is that it implies a separation between "you" and "world", as you suggest. But even when that is resolved, it still tends to be interpreted as indicated that the world is a sort of extended "place" with you as an object in it, albeit an object not inherently divided from that world. Specifically tackling that notion is what can give us a more intuitive, and direct, understanding or experience of what is meant by "oneness" and "intention". Yeah, it's always worth chipping away at what is meant by words, to reveal any hidden assumptions. In particular: assumptions that only one side of the discussion might hold, as with the meaning of "universe". It can come over as pedantic initially, but it's actually the things we haven't noticed about our thinking that make us stumble, like that, so that's where progress is made.

POST: Correlation Between Beliefs/Perception and Experience?

One issue is that people tend to mean different things by "beliefs" - so it's worth considering what exactly they are, in the sense of their form of existence, and how it is expected that they have a causal role. I suggest that if what is meant is roughly "stuff that I think is true when I think about something", then they are not particularly causal. If what is meant is something more like "the relative facts contained within my state", then maybe. The problem here is that when you dig into the nature of experience, the perspective on these things tends to shift such that the original meaning of "belief" might not really be coherent anymore. However: I'd say that where "belief" comes in is that if you believe something (in the sense of feeling that "it is the case" when you ponder it), then you are less likely to relentlessly tinker with things and second-guess yourself. It's in that way that it corresponds to "detachment". Which is really to say, not constantly re-intending or counter-intending something you've already asserted. The final instruction in the Two Glasses is, "just carry on with your life". Which is a (deliberately indirect) way of saying, it is already done so leave it be. The change occurred at the moment of the exercise, and so "it is true now that this happened then", with all subsequent moments being defined by that intention. All subsequent moments are a result of the intention, aspects of a state which now incorporates your outcome.

If you "believe" that or at least don't bother about it, then those moments will arise spontaneously (including moments of you apparently doing things, etc) and eventually you'll encounter the moment which contains your outcome. If on the other hand you have doubts and fiddle - doing additional intentions to try and "make" it happen, or spend time deeply concentrating on the possibilities of it not happening - then you are effectively doing a new intention, or at least a counter-patterning, thus shifting your state again. Note that we aren't talking about passing thoughts here and occasional loss of confidence, but about getting focused, deliberately or not, upon counter-patterns. The important bit is, though: Those subsequent moments might contain feelings of doubt or even unpleasant events.

If you resist those feelings and events or try to manipulate them away, then you are intentionally shifting state again, possibly to one that no longer contains your outcome. (Although I'd say that it's probably quite forgiving if you have a successful intention, unless you resist things like spontaneous physical acts that you are "meant" to perform.)

Another consideration is that when performing intentional acts, we tend to imply the extended pattern associated with that act, which gives the idea of the act meaning. So if you react (which is intentional/resistant, rather than respond, which is spontaneous) to something in terms of an expectation associated with your old situation, you are in effect strengthening that pattern again, to some extent anyway. Ultimately, then, the answer is perhaps: forget about beliefs, because the concept isn't that meaningful in the end, and also the course of action would be to do nothing about them and just treat ongoing experience as a "dumb patterning system" which you interact with in a direct fashion (that is, you are shifting yourself in order to adopt a new state; there are no intermediary mechanisms or entities involved).

...had waned in the past few hours and I thought I'd f'd up.

Yeah, I understand the concern! But, no. I think it's fairly ridiculous to expect some sort of permanent joyous experience [as a sign of success or as an ultimate ambition]; that's not the promise that is made. In truth, no promise is made, really. What you do get is, to notice the fact that - loosely speaking - what you truly are is "awareness" which is "patterned" into an experiential state, from which all moments follow. And so, subject to one's own experimentation, what you have is the possibility that you can re-pattern yourself.

From this, if you were to insert a particular fact into your state - a future event, say, such that it is "true now that this happens then" - then the only guaranteed thing is that fact. The rest of your state will have accommodated that fact such that the moments from now to then are continuous, but besides that there is no guarantee regards the content of your experience. Your assumptions about what "should" happen between now and then are irrelevant; they're just little ideas you are thinking, nothing more. You might even feel massively depressed for weeks until, one day, some event happens which completely transforms your viewpoint, and then your intention seems to come to pass, as if the event caused it. However, actually the entire sequence of moments was the result of the intention, not just the moment of that event. The intention was the cause of the whole thing, not the event.

This doesn't mean you have to simply accept feeling crappy, of course! You can intend adjustments or whatever. The point is, though, that the idea that you have to constantly control every moment in order to maintain yourself and get an outcome, is flawed. That view assumes your are like a boat sailing on choppy waters heading for an island, and you have to keep re-asserting your course. Really, though, you are the boat and the waters and the island, and your (accumulated) intention defines all three. Now, for sure, if you find you have intended against your outcome, then it's fine to re-assert it. But it shouldn't be viewed as an ongoing battle against the psychological weather; the passing waves and winds are actually part of the course you have implicitly defined for yourself.

I've read through your reply a few times to try and fully get it

The final paragraph is meant to suggest that whatever feelings that arise within you don't indicate that an intention has "worked" or "not worked". When you intend something, it's like you've inserted a fact into the world directly - and the "world-pattern" shifts at that moment to incorporate it. That insertion is the only thing that ever really "happens"; everything else, all feelings or whatever, are you experiencing the resulting state. As I said, though, you don't need to simply accept feeling crappy. As a separate item, you could address that. You might like to play with the exercises in The Michael Chekhov Handbook: For The Actor (Chapter 4) for this. You'll probably note the connection between the perspective adopted for those exercises, and the expanded viewpoint implied by, say, the Feeling Out Exercise in the link at the end of this comment. The focus being: experiencing and the "directness" of it.

At the back of this, really, is a reappraisal of what you consider to be "you" and what you consider to be "the world". For some previous discussion on this, see the exercise in this comment [POST: In what way are other people real?] and the metaphors in this comment [POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness].

A couple of quick comments for now [actually they weren't quick after all]:

But these "feelings" you get after intending something are a lot different from wandering thoughts and ideas about the intention.

The wandering thoughts, emotions and so on are pretty much what I'm referring to here, because that seemed to be what OP was talking about rather than a direct apprehension. The "deep intuitive feeling" - what I've tended to call things like the felt-sense rather than "feeling" to try and make them distinct - is something else. That is different to "feeling bad about things", including having passing bad emotional thoughts and feelings (thought which are just feelings, for example) about the situation. There's a difficult-to-articulate difference between a sense "about" the situation and a sense "of" the situation, too.

[When you intend something, it's like you've inserted a fact into the world directly...] I cannot agree that it's as simple as inserting a fact into the future and having it happen.

Perhaps I should rephrase this as: When you successfully intend something then that is identical with inserting a fact into the world directly. It is as simple as that, but only if that is what you do. If you do something else instead, then you don't get that outcome. If you don't intend the actual pattern but something else, or if you subsequently counter-intend, then you've not actually intended the update. If you want to draw a shape on a piece of paper, you have to actually draw the shape you want - and not another shape, or a drawing about the shape, or a drawing of drawing a shape - and then not subsequently draw on top of it. Intention is "direct" in that sense; there is no interpretation for you, and no gap (although there are additional concerns such as what is being brought in by association or whatever). If you don't get an outcome, then it's because you were doing something else instead. Working out what that something else is or was, is part of the experiment and fun.

You have to be willing to give up your life, your personality, your goals, everything you have in order to detach.

A brief way to say this is perhaps: you want to simply "cease" to intend in reaction to moments which appear, and only intend for occasional updates. So your default is to "be okay with whatever happens" (including things like your body positioning and movements; it's not just the big things) which is identical to simply leaving one's state alone between shifts. But there's some granularity to this. While our state is a single unbroken pattern, and so we might say that all intentional change is a change of everything to an extent, including reactive intention - it's not the case that one has to let go completely of everything, and always, to get any outcome incorporated into oneself. (But one has to not be stepping on the rug that one is trying to move, at the moment of movement.)

The Two Glasses exercise is really intended as something of a demonstration of that, and a starting point for exploration (which is why it and the Owls exercise are referred to as "demo exercises" of course). As one experiments more, then subtleties are noticed, but I think you really have to actually conduct the exploration, essentially of the condition of your own patterned state, to get further. Because lots of descriptions - involving "detachment" - don't make much sense until you do. Things that seem like they will an "action" involving "objects" upon reading, turn out not to be that in experience. I think that often ideas like "detachment" tend to suggest to people something that they have to do. And so they try to find the best way, method, technique, and understanding that will lead them to this. But, and the same applies to the idea of "intention" itself, that can become part of the problem. How can you detach when you aren't really attached to anything (because you aren't separate from anything)? How can you intend when there is no separation between you, the intention, and the thing being manipulated (and not even a "you" as such)?

So I agree with you in much of what you say, but I'm inclined to think those issues are sort of collateral ones, that it doesn't necessarily pay to try to address directly, because to some extent they turn out to be mirages later. Perhaps similar to saying (reasonably) that to move one's arm efficiently what you want to do is both relax and move at the same time - but when you get to grips with that through experience, it turns out to be more like a direct unbroken shifting of the whole rather than two acts on an part of the body. The description only makes sense from that perspective, afterwards, because only then does it gain meaning - and it can actually get in the way beforehand. And so, perhaps, with advocating "detachment" as an aim to work towards, rather than something which comes from, is a way of trying to describe, a more direct understanding after the fact.

We're mostly on the same page here (half the discussions on this topic are basically working out that people agree, just in different words, it sometimes seems!), except for the last section. Again, though, this might be somewhat a matter of terminology and perspective.

I suppose when I say detachment, I'm talking about a state of nothingness, a void. Technically we shouldn't need to detach from anything because there is no separation.

That's an indication that "detachment" invokes a mental image which is unhelpful, I think. It suggest something spatial, to do with contact, and that is misleading (another reason I'm not sure it's a helpful term except as a shorthand in retrospect).

It is like a blank slate. This is the state that monks are aiming for. This is the state that people often call "enlightenment".

"Enlightenment" is such a misused and mistranslated word, I'd say. For me: I would not say the void state, or the adoption of the void state, is equivalent to "enlightenment". It is another experience just like any other. There is generally a sense of "having-being an experience" even though it is not spatially or temporally structured; it is not entirely blank. That is possible too, but not completely, because otherwise you'd not come back from it. So, we should probably distinguish between a "void experience" and a "void state". The ultimate void "state" would be one where the particular distribution of relative "intensities of contribution" of all patterns would be completely flat, near-zero contributions. There would be no re-remembering a world experience afterwards. Here, then, we are talking about a "void experience".

The sense in which that is associated with "enlightenment", is that having such an experience can tip you off that the only thing is fundamentally true is being-aware or "awareness" - because you have experienced everything other than the pattern of being-observing, all object content, disappear. But the actual experience is not special in some sort of hierarchy. It is only special in that it might nudge some insight. But you can have that insight right now, simply by attending to your present experience and realising that you are "everywhere but nowhere" within it (and that what you think of as "you" is just the perspective-structuring of the moment) and it is all "made from you", thereby recognising that all boundaries are "imaginings of boundaries". That recognition is enlightenment, I would say. Which is why it is such a problem to articulate: it is not content-based and it can't be described, since it is "before" division and multiplicity and objects, and conceptualisation and language depend upon dividing things into parts and then re-relating them in a metaphorical mental space.

Looping back:

If someone wants to get real, meaningful, consistent change with their jumps, they have to detach until they reach this state of nothingness.

Your other point does still stand, though I wouldn't describe it that way. That is, that if you "cease" reacting and maintaining completely, the experience of doing (not doing!) that can be like becoming a void - then you are no longer preventing a shift simply by having held content. When in this position there is (almost) no opposition to intention since there is no conflict between the patterns corresponding to the content of the moment and the pattern you want to bring into prominence (because you have a void moment). But you don't need to do that. That's like deleting your whole street temporarily in order to reposition your sofa. You only need to avoid holding onto a pattern which conflict with the intentional pattern. Just like when you move you arm, you don't need to go all floppy or lie down first - you simply intend arm movement without also intending or implying anything counter to arm movement.

Aside - It is genuinely instructive, for those who haven't done so, to experiment with effortless intentional movement. After all, there is essentially no difference between modifying "the fact of my arm's position" and any other fact; but feedback is instant and within one's perspective.

That's why the results on this sub are usually 'tame' or rather inconsistent. Someone may do two glasses. And it works with amazing results. But when they try to replicate it or do something bigger, it fails.

That's really because it is not intended for that; it's a demonstration of a very particular thing. The two exercises (Owls and Glasses) demonstrate two specific aspects of experience - although ultimately they are the same thing of course. Owls is demonstration of direct re-shaping via intention; Glasses is a demonstration of indirect re-shaping via implication.

One of the benefits of the Glasses is that it reminds us that this experience right now is a pre-patterned image; it uses patterns of meaning already present to structure an intention, and it works even if you don't understand it conceptually. That's a valuable lesson in itself. But, inherently, it is not going to bring about discontinuities, because it is itself part of a continuous experience. Often I say that results will be in the form of events which are "plausible if seemingly very unlikely to have occurred". The Owls exercise is completely free from, and if you experiment with that, using different intentional patterns, there's much to learn about the "directness" of intention and experience. We move from abstract "owl" type patterns to more specific patterns involving spatial and temporal aspects, and then we realise that the visual (say) is an aspect of the pattern, and that you are operating with patterns directly. That helps us towards comprehending that "you are the whole scene" of your ongoing experience.

Anyway, I wrote out a bit more than was required there, just for the general benefit.

Full scale detachment is the only real way to make any use of DJ consistently and regularly.

Since "DJ" is not just about results - because there is an inherent problem with the overall concept of "results" I think - then I'd say that a full investigation of one's ongoing experience and patterning is the way to make full use of it. That is the way the exercises are set up: they are called "exercises" because they are no "methods" or "techniques"; the reason for this is that ultimately there is no "mechanism" or "how things work", and no "act" which can be formed upon the world. Unpicking that fully is the only real option eventually; everything else turns out to be just another pattern or experience which brings with it a new set of implications and hurdles, on an endless "seeker's journey". Of course, aiming for results is the perfect motivation for this! I'm not criticising that at all, just the notion that any particular piece of experiential content or conceptualisation or any apparent act is the "solution" if only we can find it. That's the idea that we should really want to take as step back from, and consider from a "meta" perspective.

I still quite like the term "imagine-that" from one of the sidebar posts - short for "imagine the fact of something being true" - as a handy term to encapsulate the nature of sensory experience and how it is shaped. If you were to, right now, "imagine-that" something in your current world experience was different, how would you go about it? Or more to the point: is there a "how to go about it"?

Q1: "DJ" is not just about results - because there is an inherent problem with the overall concept of "results" I think - then I'd say that a full investigation of one's ongoing experience and patterning is the way to make full use of it.
Since the meta-context is ultimately inaccessible and there is no "waking up" from the "dream", what is the purpose of this investigation if not to learn how to improve the content of our experience, getting the results we want?

There is no waking up in the sense of getting "outside" of experience, of course. However, there is a waking up to the fact of the dream, and the nature of the experience in terms of "you" and "the world" - and this changes the meaning of the content of your experience. Of course, we might say that this is a change in content too - but generally when people are talking about getting "results" they are talking about still having exactly the same structure of experience (apparently a person-object in a world-place) just with improved person-world circumstances. We can go further than this, though. And to not do so, when there is a possibility of digging further, is to remain wilfully ignorant, surely? It's good to be at least aware there is a choice, anyway. This change in meaning is the "meta" aspect, and is itself a change in circumstances, but not of the world.

It might be useful to distinguish, then, between the "formatting" of experience and the "sensory content" of experience. If someone is just seeking an improvement in circumstances, then they are just looking to change the "sensory content". But without pushing and investigating beyond the basic - potentially incorrect - assumptions (about the nature of experience and the nature of descriptions; our usual picture of the world; etc) and addressing the "formatting", any improvements are going to be pretty limited, I'd suggest. The underlying concept of this subreddit, ultimately, is based around an investigation via the quest for results, without necessarily making assumptions about how things are or what will be discovered. This makes it a little bit different from a "how to make my life better!" subreddit (see comment contrasting with others, here [POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be], for example). If we judge our experiments by binary success or failure of outcomes, as if we were talking about a "method" or "technique" connected to a specific "mechanism" or "how things work", we're probably missing the true value of the whole endeavour.

We might also consider, too, what the value of getting "results" is, if they are in the end just a distraction, to pass the time as it were, until we die, in much the same overall state as we were when we began.

Q1: be okay with whatever happens
Doesn't this lead to a paradox?
When dealing with something really unpleasant, for example, should we be okay also with the fact of not being okay with that?

It's really meant in the sense of "do not resist the sensory moment that is arising". Because to do so is a counter-intention which, in any case, usually isn't properly directed at a considered outcome. It doesn't mean you have to like what comes up, nor that you can't choose to intend a change in your situation. So it's not "be okay" in the sense of "be happy with", it's more "be okay" in the sense of being okay with the fact of the experience as an experience, not react to it blindly. Other ways to describe the same idea may be more useful - for example, talking in terms of an open focus, etc. It depends on the context of the conversation really.

Q2: That is all very interesting stuff, thanks for typing it all out; I will reread it several more times. Do you think there are any good ways of clarifying further for myself the reality of life? Sure I can read what other people say, but that is what a lot of people do in regards to spiritual teachers (parroting another person's words, when they aren't living from the truth) and if I feel as though I have to remember the truth from someone else' words, then I obviously haven't seen it clearly enough for myself. Sitting here, I can see that I am aware of a "person" typing on a screen, but I can't know if the website, computer, couch, family, etc. exist independently of my awareness. I've had derealization/depersonalization for several years, so things have already felt dream-like for a long time, but now my view has changed from "I feel so detached from the world, this is hell" to wondering if what I called the world was ever really there. I guess the uncertainty doesn't really lay with wondering if the world is real, but rather with how much influence I have over what I experience, which I suppose can only come with seeing how things play out for the next little while.

Try the Feeling Out Exercise in one of those links, as a starting point! As you say, if you have to "remember" (conceptually reconstruct) other peoples words or ideas, then that's not really what you are after. Actually, you simply want to directly notice how things are. Something to keep in mind, though, is that the the truth is always true. There is no "higher" experience; all experiences are of the same nature. For example, the experience of "apparently being a person sat at a computer" and the experience of "apparently being an infinite void" are both equal, both made from "experiencing" or "awarness". It's recognising that - the sort of "meta" realisation about the content versus the context of experiences - that is what you are after. And so seeking a particular special experience, including the experience of thinking an insightful thought, is an error.

Your final sentence is spot on: The search for "what is true" is the search for "what never changes". This requires experimentation and attending to experience. I would suggest that the eventual conclusion is perhaps that the only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of the property of being-aware (and so you conclude that what you are is "awareness"), with everything else (all content and patterning) being relatively true only. In other words, all experiences are on an "as if" basis only ("as if" something was true), and the only thing that is always true is that fact that there is an experience at all.

POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness

Nice and thought-provoking post. Some musings -

Firstly, how do we go about defining what exactly consciousness is?

I think it's perhaps useful to distinguish between "consciousness" (simply the property of awareness or being), "consciousness-of" (awareness, the context, taking on the shape of an experience, of content), and "self-consciousness" (the identification with a part of that content as "me"). In discussions, these often get muddled up, with people arguing about identification with a "me" as ("being conscious"), when really the core of it all is the fact of the property "awareness" (being-awareness). In that sense, then "awareness" isn't anything. That is, it is not an object, rather it is the subject to all experiential states. You can't define it as such, because it is "before" definitions - since definitions are based on the division of experience and the relation of one part to another. However, for convenience, we can talk of this property of awareness, so long as we recognise that the concept cannot capture it - since awareness cannot be thought about (it is that which thoughts are "made from") - and that there is no fundamental experience that corresponds to it (all experiences are it). In other words, there is no use looking for awareness within the content of experience, because it is "that which takes on the shape of experiences", including thoughts about experiences (which are themselves experiences: the experience of thinking about things).

Consciousness is, in simplest terms, the ability to recognize that you are a living being having an experience. The experience itself does not matter.

So this is almost it, except that "recognition" is an experience, and so it would fall into the category of content, of "consciousness-of" and maybe even "self-consciousness". But to some extent this is just an issue with words. To avoid the implication that there's an action, relation or a separation involved, we might rephrase as consciousness is the property of awareness or "knowingness" or "I am" or "experiencing" (as opposed to an experience).

This begs the question, though; where does your consciousness come from?

It doesn't come from anywhere, it is eternal (as in "before" or "outside" of time, rather than "forever"). It is not an object, and so it has no beginning nor end, nor any boundaries of any sort, nor any location (it is also "before" division and multiplicity). Basically, what it is, is "isness" - it is the fact or property of existence, without any existence itself as such.

If it arose only from the matter in this reality, how would it be possible to shift into a different frame of reference...

What we have to be careful of here, is the tendency to think about things in a 3rd-person "view from nowhere" that is never actually experienced. When we say "arose from matter in this reality", we are again imagining that consciousness is an "object" which can emerge or be created from something (has a beginning and end, and has boundaries and a location). As we've seen, though, this isn't the case. And what's more, that imagining (of consciousness being an object), is itself occurring within and as consciousness or awareness. I feel it's really important to keep coming back to your actual 1st-person experience (see this comment's exercise, for example), because that keeps you straight when you find yourself trying to think about consciousness. It's important to remind yourself that you are thinking in metaphors, and whereas with other areas a metaphor would exist as a "parallel construction in thought" at the same level as the thing you were describing, pointing to something alongside it, in this specific case the metaphor cannot do this, it points nowhere and everywhere - because we are talking about that which is the nature of the experience of metaphors themselves. The library is a nice metaphor for the "infinite gloop" of all possible patterns, eternally available in the background to be accessed, a subset of which are formatted into sensory experiences. If you haven't already, you should read The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Several of his short essays and stories are metaphors for reality, experience and identity.

Other metaphors:

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

And so on.

Is there only one consciousness... or are there many minds...

From the above, we see that this question is actually meaningless. Not in a dismissive way; this just follows from the nature of awareness not being an object. There are not "many awarenesses" and nor is there "an* awareness"; there is simply "awareness". The only fundamental fact, the only thing that is always true, is the fact of the property of being-aware. Absolutely everything else is relatively, temporarily, true only. This includes any apparent division or change in time. Again, we must constantly bring ourselves back to our 1st-person experience, because truly it is the only thing "happening" right now, and check the properties of awareness directly, noticing whether we are imagining a "view from nowhere", and where that imagining is taking place.

This question bothers me the most simply because it is the hardest to answer, as it would require looking beyond the metaphorical library.

Or, one flips things around? Instead of awareness being in the library, we have that the entire library is dissolved, eternally, within and as awareness - and awareness simply associatively traverses the content, unfolding different pages into the senses, as it were. The Infinite Grid, Hall of Records and Imagination Room metaphors linked in the sidebar try to indicate this shift in perspective (awareness as the context to all experiential content) too. The nature of awareness is such that it can't travel anywhere nor change in time, however it can select the content of its ongoing Now, by shape-shifting itself via its infinite potential, into any experience, "as if" this or that were true, even thought the only thing that is actually true is awareness itself.

Note: Don't make the mistake of then thinking that awareness "takes on the shape of" multiple people as beings, as if they were formed and arranged within some sort of place, who then go about doing things. You-as-awareness is the only being, the only intelligence. Everything else is patterns within awareness, which ripple across its metaphorical sensory screen, "as if" there were other people (and you-as-person) doing things. All that is actually happening, though, is awareness itself.

Short version: Consciousness doesn't have an inherent nature other than the property of "awareness" - and, as infinite potential, the ability to "take on the shape of" any other apparent nature.

...

Well, I probably do a "constructive rest position" lying down whenever I feel like it, a couple of times a day (lie down on the floor with feet flat and books supporting the head, let go of body and thought and also attentional focus, let things move as they will, 10 minutes). See also the Overwriting Yourself post linked in the introduction for some background. Mostly, though, it's just switching attention to an open state, and enjoying experience, whenever in the mood. I don't do a particular formal meditation or anything like that. And: yes, you should participate more often!