TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 15)
POST: Reading Robert Bruce's "Astral Dynamics" -- Why does he describe the astral plane(s) as nonphysical?
The vibrations thing can be confusing, but it's just a metaphor. Science itself is a bunch of metaphors, however they are specifically tied to particular observations, and have been felt out over time to find the best ones. You could also talk about "tuning into to levels", etc. Read the OBE/LD books (Robert Bruce, Robert Munroe, Oliver Fox, Robert Waggoner - all the Bobs!) for the reported experiences and the techniques. Reserve judgement on the "what it really means or how it really works" until you've had a chance to explore the phenomena yourself.
Metaphors don't mean much without the experience, and then they are obvious. That's why reading "non-dual" literature is so frustrating, for instance.
TL;DR: What are experiences made from? Experiencing. What are explanations made from? Thoughts. What are thoughts made from? They are made from thinking. What is thinking? An experience...
curious about your reading of the rest of chapman [http://www.reddit.com/r/OccultStudyGroup/comments/2mnogq/reading_group_advanced_magick_for_beginners_start/]
I'm in. I have read it and I often recommend it to people - and the shorter, snappier version (The Camel Rides Again) - but actually it's been awhile. I probably have quite a different way of seeing things now than I did at the time.
...
notfancy: You know the New Age penchant for misappropriating and mangling quantum mechanical concepts? Turns out the tradition goes back to the Victorian Spiritualists and Theosophists besotted with Maxwell's theories of radiation. The appropriation of ready-made, mostly opaque (or black-box) physical concepts works as generative metaphors to put into words concepts completely alien to the base or imported concept but having more or less isomorphous relations to one another.
For instance, as you increase geometrical dimensions you quickly find room for more and more strange and complicated mathematical objects, so in Theosophical parlance dimensions are organizing conceptual "planes" (another metaphor) vertically stacked in ascending order of abstraction, purity or rarefaction.
In the same way that electromagnetic waves of higher frequencies represent radio waves, microwaves, infrared, the visible colors from red to violet and so on and so forth, Theosophical "vibration" or "frequency" represent higher "colors" or "tonalities" (here the metaphor is Pythagorean and certainly of ancient coinage) in a harmonious ascending scale of some positive quality: "energy" properly as the abstract capacity to effect change, "evolution" (another appropriation, this time from Darwin), "consciousness", et cetera.
This unfortunately means that, as a newcomer to the field, you have two potentially difficult prerequisites to fulfill: one is learning the specific Theosophical, New Thought and/or New Age vocabulary used by the book, and two is keeping it all in a separate compartment from those concepts with the same name that you know from your Science education.
Edit: before you cry foul consider that usual Physical words like "energy", "current", "potential", "force", "quantum" are all metaphors. Not the denotations themselves, those are precise, but the denoting words were all appropriated from previous base meanings and coopted for specific new ones. Physics in particular and Science in general have no claim of exclusivity to their words.
I know it's been a while, but can you tell me what meaning is intended by metaphorical super-high frequency vibrations? Like, if scientific parlance is the vehicle, what is the actual nature of the tenor?
notfancy: Frequency of vibration is a scale to measure the evolution of the gross into the subtle, and in that respect it is a value judgement: low is bad, high is good, with the resulting metaphors of descent or fall and ascent or redemption and so on.
POST: You can't have anything you need.
[POST]
I've recently learned this myself. If i need something, i can't have it. Anyone know any books on this philosophy?
[END OF POST]
NeedPan: As you can see I need pan and have plenty!
Care to be more specific?
Do you mean what you must for you cannot easily obtain? Do you mean what you're looking for you won't find?
Sounds depressing
Q: Correct me if I am wrong, but I think what OP is saying is that when you say you "need" something, then the universe, kia, subconscious, whatever... it takes that as a statement of truth and manifests it into "reality". I think that you, NeedPan, are hinting at this idea, lust of result... again, correct me if I'm wrong.
NeedPan: yeah of course! that's really psychical of you because the words "lust of result" were spiraling in my head I just didn't bring it up in need of further clarification before citing Crowley but..
TIL that's part of the bedrock of (atleast) practical magick? No, it's also the bedrock of material/emotional/spiritual experience. The way that the human brain thinks it can accomplish something from a position of 'need/want'...
It's like the Inception part about life. It's the fact that we are experiencing what our subconscious expects us to. If we wish to alter the current status of our perceived reality we must begin to assume the state required. You can re-orient your thoughts and musing around the concept of being at-one with the energies you wish to merge with. The only way to do it is to do it.
So I ask OP: What would, or to take it a step father, what DOES it FEEL like to get what you need? That one day you knew you had exactly what you needed, didn't it feel great?
Very specific requests require very specific energies. Study the energy and merge!
Gods, Goddesses and archetypes I believe are part of the stepping stone to helping usher in the energy one might feel they've never before possessed. One good practice would be to find out who/what harbors what it is you need/want and attempt to invoke their vital energies while knowing you have inside you what it is you'll wish to experience materialized in the future.
If you go about deciding to want/need something, your wish is granted: you get to want/need it. If you decide you already have it, then you get that. Feeling is the secret, apparently. (Seriously: developing "feeling-awareness" is key to magick in general.)
People often do a sigil and say "I want to have a nice car". The sigil then gives them the experience of wanting, just as they requested! If they say "I will have a nice car", then that's different. Unfortunately, the default position people have is the feeling of "desire" which they refuse to let go of, or try to manipulate - even though letting go of desire is the only way for it to move location from here (the internal world) to there (the external).
EDIT: Assume the state, as /u/NeedPan says!
POST: They say practice magick every day
[POST]
==I don't know what to do besides performing rituals to manifest my will, aka mostly sigil magick. What other stuff is there for me to do in my garage/temple? ==
[END OF POST]
Explore the nature of your direct experience.
could you elaborate?
Of course.
Instead of thinking-about what's going on, actually direct your attention to your experience right now. For instance, close your eyes and listen to the sounds. Are you "here" where your body sensation are with the sound over "there" - or are you also beside the sound?
Further ones mentioned here [POST: Hell Zen.] and here [POST: You can't have anything you need.].
Basically, you want to spend some time realising directly that you are having a dream-like existence, with sensations floating in space and no central "you" doing the experiencing and doing. Also, do a daily releasing technique (basically, just lie on the floor and let go completely - of your thoughts, body and, most importantly, your "attention" - and let things unfold and unwind as they want). You'll find it really helps your work. Particularly, you'll probably find you stop wrestling with yourself so much, and it'll become a little clearer just is what's happening when you "do magick".
Q: Basically, you want to spend some time realising directly that you are having a dream-like existence, with sensations floating in space and no central "you"
I've done this all my life. I've always thought everything was connected when I was a kid. I thought if people tried hard enough, even without picking up body language, they could read people's thoughts directly. Or predict the outcome of one's actions. When I was in middle school, I thought this girl knew I liked her and I tried everything to get her to like me, but I became a victim of my own beliefs and told myself she didn't like me, when now it's pretty obvious she did. That was just one instance where I realized everything was connected, way before I read any hermetic or taoist texts or the tanakh/bible.
Later I knew that reality wasn't how we experience it when I learned about different waves of electro-magnetic energy, and also began to experiment with psychedelic drugs in highschool like pot, and learned about DMT and stuff, I realized that we're just a product of chemical reactions in our brain and it's up to our psyche to interpret them. It's funny ina way, our brain is an alchemical engine
Cool. I had much of the same thinking. So true about the belief-overly thing that happens. And thinking about interconnectedness...
But, do you experience this directly?
Right now, do you feel like you are a person who has a body in a room typing at a keyboard - or - do you feel that you are a vast space of conscious awareness in which various thoughts, sensations and perceptions arise?
It's not even about the brain, EM waves, whatever - those are just thoughts (although it's a good way to think about interconnectedness). This is about direct knowing. Literally experiencing it as real, right now.
I get what you mean, I should meditate and try to directly experience interconnectedness, any tips on stuff I should do? I like your concept that we are just a conscious awareness in which sensations and perceptions arise.
Well, there's nothing special to it. Try the links I pointed to, or check out Rupert Spira's books, Presence Vol I & II for some good guidance. And checkout the experiments at Douglas Harding's website. There's no action to be taken, it's really a letting go. It's like you been 'holding onto' thoughts or your body with your attention - and so releasing your attention you find you open out and discover the context in which that was arising.
Even just: Lie on the floor, let go, and decide that you are the space in the room. Just give up completely and say, "I am the background space of this room". And see what happens.
Mantras, prayers, affirmations, are just very indirect ways of tweaking background beliefs. If you were feeling determined, you could just constantly assert that this is a dream-like world and you are the dreamer, as you go about your day. Inserting/asserting that fact alone will make a big difference.
(Everyone always wants to "do" something, but in truth any physical or mental act is largely irrelevant. It's the decision + any accumulated habits-beliefs-expectations-memory traces, that is key. Being quiet and asserting without fighting is enough.)
Lucid dreaming is also a great way to experiment (check out Robbert Waggoner's book if you haven't already, and also this [http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-control/46571-infinite-universes-lucid-dreaming.html] interesting thread).
POST: Thoughts on narcissism? Thoughts on vanity?
I'll have a go with this...
Narcissism
A state of constant, extreme "self"-defence. A person's attention is focused on a small area of their experiential field: typically the thoughts that occur towards the rear of the head area. As a result, they are not really "in the world" and the world seems like a threat. Correspondingly, the world of thought and the self-concept (ego) seem very real. There is a grasping on to this concept and a near complete identification with it which means daily life is a constant struggle for survival. Actions are undertaken in defence of this concept; to keep the story alive. Feeling good = thinking good about oneself.
External achievements and relationships are not valued, because they are not "felt". The narcissist is disconnected from the world and his own bodily 'felt sense' and emotions.
The narcissist is an idea.
Furthermore, he is unaware of the existence of the things he is unaware of. The narcissist has no "sense of touch", while being unaware there is even such a thing. He builds theories about "hard and soft" without having the experience. He rationalises and explains - about relationships, about the world - but never knows or that he can know.
Vanity
Similar to narcissism. Identification with an image or thought, a mental construct but perhaps connected with some sensory aspects.
In both cases, the solution is to release one's focus of attention and expand it, direct it out into the world - the background space of awareness. In this way, the narcissist re-contextualises himself, reconnects to the ground of existence. He acquires direct knowledge.
EDIT: Added quotes to emphasise that I mean defence of the conceptual "self", one's self-image or internal story, which has become misidentified as one's real self or true essence, to an extreme level.
Defending yourself is not narcissistic . Speaking out against the Conservative government, or the abolition of the Canadian senate.. etc.. is not narcissistic . The people who warn you about narcissism are the same person who attack you.
I think you misunderstand - or I wasn't clear. I should have said "self"-defence. In other words, defending your concept of yourself, your internal story or self-image. This is different to defending your property or livelihood.
I will make that change.
Q: This is different to defending your property or livelihood.
Is it?
Within the context of OP's post, yes. But I know what you're getting at, Nefandi, and it would be exhausting.
Humility is overrated. Vanity has been given a bad rap. A peacock serves no greater good by hiding his feathers. Maybe we are here to be beautiful, prideful expressions of consciousness. My vanity has not been a hindrance to any of my relationships.
Thing is, a peacock is not enamoured with its own feathers; it is not vain.
But yeah, people should take care of themselves.
POST: Stupid question, but nagging me. If belief affects reality, do schizophrenics and narcissists have an advantage?
I don't think beliefs shape reality; but they do filter the "infinite gloop" of reality. More specifically: they filter the experience, but not the ability.
What does it mean to "do" something? It means: intending it and subsequently experiencing it. There is no actual "doing" involved at any point; there is only the "experience of doing". Given this, the narcissist and the schizophrenic don't have an advantage because they don't have the intention aspect under control.
The narcissist is vulnerable and self-deludes; he fantasises about status but does not intend results. He sees confirmation in existing situations through mild synchronicity but does not actively leverage them in a magickal way (I suggest).
The schizophrenic, meanwhile, is cracked wide open to an expanded experience. Again, he does not have intention under control. He is simply bombarded with extra information and massive alignments. His intensity means he is constantly willing and shifting his world. If he is lucky, he will learn to use some of it to his advantage. More likely, his lack of "formatting" will render him confused.
"Normal" people with magickal ambitions have enough trouble grasping the idea of will; these guys are further disadvantaged in that, just in opposite ways.
POST: Visualizing with your body as well as with your brain. The stretched third eye. (/r/occult/)
Well, isn't this just you noticing that all your experiences occur in the same "perceptual space"? I mean, the "head" you think you are thinking in now isn't your real head... it's just an area in your overall extended spatial experience in your mind.
The room around you is literally your mind, and you can "reach out" into it and visualise into it anywhere. If you "expand out" your attention into the space around you, you'll find you can be the whole room. Because this whole room is your imagination and anything you think in that space is your imagination.
I have a little metaphor I use to help remind me of this. (Note: in reality it's more like a "holographic conscious space" but the floor-pattern idea is quite, um, grounding and accessible.)
The Imagination Room
There is a vast room. The floor is transparent, and through it an infinitely bright light shines, completely filling the room with unchanging, unbounded white light.
Suddenly, patterns start to appear on the floor. These patterns filter the light. The patterns accumulate, layer upon layer intertwined, until instead of homogenous light filling the room, the light seems to be holographically redirected by the patterns into the shape of experiences, arranged in space, unfolding over time. Experiences which consist of sensations, perceptions and thoughts.
At the centre of the room there are bodily sensations, which you recognise as... you, your body. You decide to centre yourself in the upper part of that region, as if you were "looking out from" there, "being" that bodily experience.
At the moment you are simply experiencing, not doing anything. However you notice that every experience that arises slightly deepens the pattern corresponding to it, making it more stable, and more likely to appear again as the light is funnelled into that shape.
Now, you notice something else. If you create a thought, then the image will appear floating in the room - as an experience. Again, the corresponding pattern is deepened. Only this time, you are creating the experience and in effect creating a new habit in your world!
Even saying a word or a phrase triggers the corresponding associations, so it is not just the simple thought that leaves a deeper pattern, but the whole context of that thought, its history and relationships.
Now, as you walk around today, you will feel the ground beneath your feet - but you will know that under what appears to be the ground is actually the floor of the room, through which the light is shining, being shaped into the experience around you. And every thought or experience you have is shifting the pattern...
Q: Well, isn't this just you noticing that all your experiences occur in the same "perceptual space"? I mean, the "head" you think you are thinking in now isn't your real head... it's just an area in your overall extended spatial experience in your mind.
well of course it is, but i think what we need to realize is that our illusion is multi layered. Its not just being in an imaginary body or being an imaginary brain, its being an imaginary brain within and imaginary body, allocating all of it to one thing makes it much easier to work with.
Hmm, what I was getting at is that you don't experience a brain or a body at all, as such. You can just cut straight to noticing that what you really experience is body sensations, perceptions, thoughts and so on "floating in your consciousness space" - and all of those are literally thought/imagination/mind-stuff. You may occasionally think-about being-a-body or being-a-brain, but you never actually experience that.
(We're probably talking about exactly the same thing here, right?)
You're coming from a pure subjective idealism position.
Not really (although we do end up there). The only insight that's needed comes directly from the everyday notion of "an external world affecting the senses which the brain turns into a representation". This immediately means that the scene around you - if not its origins - is "in your mind" and you can direct your attention anyway.
In other words, the "standard model" alone leads to this. It's the error of thinking of ourselves in the 3rd-person (a body, with a brain in the head, which is us) which has led us to mistakenly configure ourselves to locate our "felt-location" in the head area. (A moment's pondering shows us that it's ridiculous though. Look inside someone else, and you don't find "their" location in the same way as you feel yourself to be located - etc.)
The next steps are what takes us to "advanced" level: realising that you can direct your attention outside your body boundary (since the sensory experience is all within mind) and then on to ponder whether there is such a thing as an "external world" (if we cannot ever experience it, is it not also just an idea in the mind), and then we get to at least idealism of a sort. All the other good stuff we've been playing with.
Under a physicalist model...
Everyday people don't have such a physicalist model, though. They have a half-hearted version of "I am a brain in a body". With a sort of naive realism hanging off that. Following through on that with "the experience I am having now is inside my brain" follows naturally from this, after a pause. From there it become reasonable that one can extend one's attention throughout the body-space - enough to allow yourself experience it. Most people haven't really thought about this at all (including fellow occultists and even lucid dreamers). They've just ended up with an assumption and don't pay to much attention to it.
I'm not jumping here to my own position - I'm simply pointing out that you can justify expanding your attention out, based on the everyday basic model of "experience is in the brain".
The problem is, if you start taking physicalism seriously enough to follow this implication, you'll also be taking its determinism seriously as well. Do you see my point?
I do, but you are thinking far more deeply that anyone normally does. Purely dealing with OP here, and having led people through this in conversation, you find you don't have to. They don't have deep convictions or a worldview - they have sketchy unexamined assumptions. Again, most people really don't have any idea about determinism and brain-states and so on. They really do just have the fluffy vague idea of "I am my brain, in my head" while promptly behaving as if they were directly seeing the world. The brain and head they are referring to are metaphorical. (Which of course they are, but not in the way they think. Although actually in the way they think. And so on.)
The simple addition of "this all must be in your brain/mind" is sufficient to allow people to get more benefit from including their body-space (for daily use and ease, for healing, and more besides). They are not really changing their "philosophical system", because they never had a philosophical system in the first place.
Of course, having made this small step which leads to experiential change, they are in a better place to explore such things if they so please.
Actually, I'll point out that my first reply I did on mobile and, a) It hadn't displayed the first part of OP and I didn't realise, b) I hadn't twigged it was cosmic, because that appears at the top too. Which is why I added a little response later.
I think of it as most people have a "bag of metaphors" rather than a philosophical system, which is why it tends to be incoherent, being unexamined - e.g. that the "we are our brains, run by chemicals" but that obviously we make choices and have free will, etc. People may ever assert that they are "machines or computers" but one second later they will state a belief contrary to that.
This is a good thing - that lack of coherence - because it means the errors can be easily overturned.
The reason I don't like calling it a "philosophical system" is because that implies some sort of coherence. And it doesn't match with people's actual experience of their thinking in this case.
They think past causes the present.
Always a trick. Since I'm lazy, I'm not going to cut-and-paste a metaphor I was discussing elsewhere, trying to show that there is just an ongoing (and effectively "dumb") pattern which evolves, including the part of the pattern which we might call "the past".
On Time and Metaphor
His [Alan Watts'] metaphor of "the ship and its wake" is excellent for capturing your true situation. From his book What is Zen?...
We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn’t explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship, and eventually disappears.
Now you would say that obviously when you see a ship crossing the ocean with the wake trailing behind it that the ship is the cause of the wake. But if you get into the state of mind that believes in causality as we do, you see that the wake is the cause of the ship! And that is surely making the tail wag the dog!
The point is this: You will never find the mystery of the creation of the world in the past. It never was created in the past. Because truly there is nothing else — and never was anything else — except the present! There never will be anything else except the present.
-- What is Zen?, Alan Watts
Now, this essentially means there isn't even really a "present" - rather, there is an "ongoing unfolding". A pattern which is evolving its shape, a bit like those video-feedback patterns you get when you point a camera at a screen showing its own image. If it's an old CRT screen with a bit of a smearing, then that captures the whole situation: the main pattern is slightly smeared as it goes with a slight after-image. This smearing, that after-image which forms part of the main image, is something we called the "past" or the "context".
Thing is, if that video image just suddenly changed dramatically and discontinuously - say, from circle-based imagery to square-based - then after a moment of tangled confusion all trace of the old circle-based imagery would be gone. All there would be, would be the square-based imagery and the square-based "smear".
In other words, our "world" always seems to be consistent as if there is a past causing it, one that is of the same structure as "the world". But in fact, the metaphor shows us that the present is either uncaused, or caused by something quite different to any image, or caused "by itself" - the "past" is simply a part of the present image, just of a different intensity to the rest of the image.
Any causal frameworks we read into the patterns are simply accidental regularities, in among the semi-randomness of feedback, which we have become fixated upon; after-images which keep being re-triggered so as never to fade completely. The patterns themselves have no such causal structure, it exists only in our interpretation...
EDIT: Did some minor editing on the last paragraph to mention the re-triggering for observed regularities. Obviously the "camera" and the "screen" and the "image" are all one, once you take this a step further, and the complexities lead to repeating stabilities, but the essence is there.
So what this means to me is, most beings are pragmatic, and will only start paying attention to something, examining it in detail, and learning to talk about it, if it somehow improves their day to day well-being.
This is a very good point. The clash between one's internal models and external situations needs to be quite severe before people are brought to reconsider things. Mostly they just avoid such situations (because they don't know how they could understand and adapt themselves).
This isn't due to a lack of intelligence, it's to do with the narrow education and information that is generally available. There is no "meta" level to the learning that people are put through.
For people who are liking physicalism and are getting good use out of it, they don't need to do anything more than go to work and have fun in the off time. Nothing in life will challenge their physicalism, so there is no practical demand to look very deeply into its implications.
Which leads to interesting conclusions: That those who are driven to investigate, dismantle, rediscover, are they always those who are disadvantaged in some way? Whether that is economically or psychologically, in some way jarring or at odds with the setup they were born into. In short, more "sensitive"?
If I didn't use words like "always" now and again, we'd struggle to find disagreements! :-)
I agree, but this might be intentional. [Lack of "meta" level to education.]
I do think this is intentional - or at least, unintentionally intentional. The education system is not really designed for free and frank inquiry, exploration into the nature of the world and oneself. It's far more a "shaping of people" to fit the predefined requirements of the economy (or aspects of the economy). Education is mostly training. And largely behavioural training at that; behavioural structuring, particularly around artificial notions of time and of "hierarchy" in the general sense.
It's actually quite disadvantageous to have many intelligent people, from a certain point of view. In fact, probably very few people who are in positions of influence are especially intelligence; it's more a matter of emotional management and "flexibility in the face of moral ambiguity".
POST: Spirit Possession on LSD.
I wouldn't take the content of your experience too literally. In my view, things like LSD simply loosen up your constraints and your experience becomes less logically structured, more associative. They are real as experiences, but they are not real in terms of there being some fundamental truth to them beyond that. All experiences are relative. This is true of everyday life as well as "unusual" experiences; they are all of the same type. They all arise in the mind, and reveal the patterning of the mind, rather than the patterning of some fictional "external" world beyond it.
For instance: The Patterning of Experience and related links.
Have you ever had a lucid dream? They can be more real than real. Sometimes they can last what seems like months, even years. Imagine if you had a lucid dream one night, but had never heard of lucid dreams. What would you make of it? ("I love lamp." [Repost: A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp])
POST: What does r/occult think of r/dimensionaljumping
People here can greatly influence what goes on there. I feel like it is a very useful idea that needs to be taught by you folks.
The problem is, we can easily end up with just one big "magickal soup" with people exchanging the same received wisdom, all "educating" one another about how this-thing is "really" that-thing, and so on.
Although the origin of /r/dimensionaljumping was people playing around with mirror rituals, over time it's become something else: a place to explore the "nature of experiencing" for people who either don't have a background in that sort of thing, or want to approach it from a relatively clean slate in terms of language and metaphysics.
I think all of us tend to get distracted by the models and concepts from the past, perhaps reify them as being special, even though with their context unavailable their meaning is often now not clear - or perhaps seems incorrectly obvious. They get taken pseudo-literally. People spend time looking for "the secrets" when there really are none; you just have to experiment. So we just put that aside. At most, there's a highly abstract base model of "patterned meaning" of an apparently subjective perspective.
So for sure, the various exercises contributors come up with do allow people to recognise that "something is going on" and get some results, but the larger purpose is to question things more deeply without becoming attached to any one narrative. And that includes the idea of "dimensional jumping" itself, which isn't meant to be "how it works" - it's simply an example of an equivalent "pattern" one can adopt, a seed for thinking this stuff out. Eventually, one realises there is no "how it works", of course, and your concept of "you" gets updated accordingly. But just reading that doesn't really help anyone get it or apply it.
Anyway, all this is why the meat of things tends to happen in the discussions rather than in the posts. The mods keep their hands off, because it's all about the experimentation. Then every now and again someone shows up to say sarcastically, "nice one so you've discovered 'sigils' eh?" - to which the answer would be: so what is a sigil and how, exactly, does it work? And so on.
That's the rationale, anyway
POST: delivered from the lust of result
Maybe that's what the mind is, our infinite void where anything can be created.
Well, you've nailed that I think.
Our mind is the void in which everything appears, and is immediate creativity itself - if we detach and allow our accumulated patterns to settle and shift. If we are holding on to "parts of the dream", though, then our creativity is compromised by or funnelled through those parts.
Do you have a link to that Peter Carroll audio clip? Not heard of it before. Makes sense to me (we have a tendency to fill our creative 'First Cause' void with surrogates which we give our power to).
Not sure the name of it. You should find it in YouTube searching Peter Carroll chaos magic. The audio clip is also in the first episode of scrolls of thoth.
"Just as daylight obscures the stars, so does wkefulneswakefulness obscure the fact that we are still dreaming"
Thanks, will do that.
The stuff about creating a mental landscape is my favorite.
Sounds like my kind of thing - great.
I read Liber Null a long time ago, but have not much recollection. The only thing I have my doubts about: he was very much of the "magick is bending probabilities" view, was he not? I think that was a restriction he, in effect, imposed upon himself?
I think he was just living in the real world.
You can visualize flying, it doesn't mean you flew. Until someone proves they can do seemingly impossible things with magic, I'll have to submit that it is the world that imposes these restrictions, not Carroll.
For sure, I don't mean we can just do anything on a whim. I was more thinking that the idea of it being probabilities might be restrictive. I've been thinking more in terms of plausibilities - something that might actually be more flexible (and helps us get rid of worries about retro-causality, etc).
Of course, that's just more words really.
Doesn't that mean the same thing? Probability is a specific measurement of plausibility I believe.
The distinction for me would be:
- Probability implies that experience is bound by a separate external world with rules which are independent of us. What we experience is dictated by the "world's formatting".
- Plausibility implies that experience is bound by the stories about a hypothesised external world - what stories we find acceptable. The rules are part of us. What we experience is dictated by our "human formatting".
As an idea, I think the second version makes it easier to envisage how magick works as part of our minds. For instance, if you're playing with synchronicity, not only will you "notice" more of the object or pattern you have in mind, you will also encounter events which "come to you". Those events will seem to have their seeds in events that predate your intention.
Probabilities don't easily account for that. Plausibilities do so more easily (anything can happen so long as you've not yet observed something that means it shouldn't happen).
Sorry - that's probably (aha!) not very clear.
EDIT: This blog post [https://web.archive.org/web/20090915212504/https://pomomagic.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/why-cant-you-teleport/] was quite a nice - and honest - comment by someone wondering what the limits are.
I would see it as an accurate and a helpful thing to say that it's easier to change something with probability on your side.
Hmm, my feeling is that it doesn't say anything, other than "we can't do miracles", and doesn't help, because it doesn't suggest a particular approach. It's maybe more honest to call this plausibility than probability - since the probability (being a mathematical notion) implies a measurement and an adjustment, but it isn't actually measurable and the adjustment detectible. What we really mean is "seems unlikely"?
But we're just talking about a language preference here. Really, I was just wondering aloud whether choosing the concept of probability vs another might influence one's magick!
You are trying to apply what he said to synchronicity which has absolutely nothing to do with causing change.
Intentional synchronicity is exactly how we cause change (or one way). But I didn't preamble this, so fair enough! To be clearer what I mean by that: Focusing upon a particular conceptual pattern, results in that pattern subsequently appearing in external and internal experience. Something I've been playing with.
Just to begin: remember, I'm not disagreeing with you here, we're just exploring how best to discuss.
It's not saying only focus on mathematically accurate probabilities. You seem to have a very strict view of the word.
Peter Carroll was approaching it exactly that way in Liber Null, via his formulae, so that's the way I was interpreting it:
M = G x L(1-A)(1-R)
Pm = P - P x M 1/(1/-p)
All factors are between 0 and 1.
M equals the force of your magic. Which is dependent upon your G (Gnosis) and L (magical Link) multiplied by two negative factors. (Things working against you). Your conscious awareness of the desired result (1-A) and your subconscious resistance to doing magic (1-R) -i.e. "Mommy told me magick doesn't work."
In the other formula, P equals the chance the event you desire occurs by itself; (1/(1/-p)) equals the chance that the result you desire will not occur. Pm equals the combination of the Probability that the event will occur combined with your magical effort to make it occur.
[Most of these are unmeasurable, and it particularly seems difficult to measure the probability of an event - TG]
Surely by probability here we just mean "what we think will happen"? There's no way to measure it other than our own opinion. Which is basically "plausibility".
Yes focusing on things makes you notice them in life. That has absolutely nothing to do with using probability. That's where you seem to be tangled up.
It's a little more than noticing. Focusing on things "being a certain way" and then find them to be that certain way afterwards, is what magick is all about. Chaos Magick particularly, right?
Do you disagree with the notion that it's easier to go with the current?
But, for sure, the closer your desire corresponds to everyday experience, the less change you will have to create - because your everyday experience is by definition the default. Apparent "habits" of the world. But this issue is with ourselves, not with the world.
Anyway I definitely agree: We should use pre-established habits where possible, just because it's more efficient. Where I disagree is that what magick is, is "bending probabilities".
EDIT: An extra observation I'd make: absolutely everything works, if properly committed to. It doesn't matter what imaginary notions you adopt for the purpose, they will work to the extent you invest yourself in them, even temporarily.
Seeing a thing a certain way and it being that way has nothing to do with the probability thing. at least that's how I saw it.
The way I was viewing it was: Seeing things as governed by probability, means you are indirectly willing it to behave that way - as a general worldview? Adopting that outlook is a piece of magick all of its own. If you view magick as being about probabilities, then your magick will go along those lines. If you view it as being about energy, the same. And so on.
He's establishing realistic expectations rather than woo and fluff, however inspiring it may seem at the time.
Perfectly reasonable. I say: everyone must experiment for themselves to find out what is possible. One caution though: Your expectations in magick (about what is possible, about how it works) plays a large role in defining what you can do. It's not like science, where there's a "how it works" and you discover the rules and leverage them. There is nothing "behind" magick.
But that's not to say you'll be flying around the place by flapping your arms any time soon. It might well be possible, but you'll probably have to do an awful lot of work to establish that "habit".
There's an old story about a student coming to a master and saying "Finally, after 40 years of study I can walk across the river unaided!". To which the master says, "What a waste of a life, you could have saved a lot of time by paying a penny for the ferry like everyone else!"
Who knows what we could do if we dedicated ourselves to it? But: who really wants to do that?
I think he's just saying don't expect magic lottery winnings and that using magic to influence business may be a better idea more prone to success.
I think he is of that view. I personally think that magick can be far more direct than he suggests. It (that view) is just another metaphor, after all. But that sounds like I'm dissing his take - not at all. It's been very successful for lots of people, and the fact that people can easily get behind it - it makes sort of rational sense to them - is part of its power at a metaphor.
Hmm. See, I'm not disparaging Peter Carroll. I'm just wondering about how adopting a way of looking at things changes how we operate.
The laws of physics do not simply exist because we believe in it. Try to understand that our laws of physics were discovered, not enforced.
Ah, I'm not saying that believing things causes them. I'm saying that the "laws" of experience should be viewed as habits - ingrained patterns that have become established over time. So they are not how it really, really works in some deeper, given sense. Gravity, for instance, is a very ingrained habit of the universe.
(The word "law" in physics does not mean something that is laid down; it means something like "observed regularity".)
Where belief comes in, is that is dictates what directions we will apply our effort with full commitment. Carroll phrases it as "your subconscious resistance to doing magic". It's more that non-belief - or adopting a worldview which says something can't happen - has a negative effect.
You can't say anything is possible but you won't fly by flapping your arms.
Let's be clearer: Anything is possible in principle but it is up to people to find out what they can accomplish in practice. Certainly, my experience of flapping my arms into flight is quite... limited. Again, I am not claiming that believing makes things happen. I'm with Carroll in saying that non-belief gets in the way.
You don't think probability affects it? So your magic always works directly?
Magick always operates directly, yes. Let me lay it out, how I think it works:
- Over time, patterns become more and more established in the universe. You might call these "habits". This includes things like gravity, the structure of your body - the way things work by default.
- Magick is just everyday intention really. Intending something is the magick. Whenever we intend something, that intention always comes about in some form, funnelled through the current patterns. e.g. We intend to move go to the door, our bodies walk there; typically we don't teleport.
- In other words, the "habits" of the world imply the most likely routes that intention will manifest along, and restrict the types of manifestation. For instance, you will often see other aspects of your intention appear in images in daily life, dreams, conversations, symbolic representations, and then as an event. The restrictions aren't because things aren't possible, they are because deeper habits or channels exist.
- The difference between what we call "magick" and everyday intention is that in magick we realise the situation (that all intentions manifest, that laws are not actually fixed rules), and therefore intend things that are against common sense. The more directly we will this, the more focused the result.
In summary, what you are calling "probability" is just a way of saying something is unlikely. It isn't forbidden or impossible. But that's hardly helpful.
Either the world is your personal dream or it isnt.
I never understood the idea that just because the world is a dream, you should be able to just "flap your arms and fly". After all, can you just think of, say, a tree in absolute detail right now? Most people can't - but your imagination really is your personal dream. You can get better at it though. Meanwhile, in llucid dreams, people find they sometimes can't fly. Why not?
My answer: because as described above, manifestation is about implied patterns, not about direct creation.
This is just "a dream". But it is "a dream that". A dream that you are in this world, organised this way - in the same way as we can lucid dream a persistent realm. Different dreams have different levels of organisation, of habit. They all obey the basic rule (intention always manifests in some way) though.
What if, in a dream, you intended that there was gravity and that gravity was always unbreakable? If afterwards you couldn't fly, would you complain that it wasn't actually a dream after all?
Physics in dreams is never that consistent.
If you experiment with creating persistent realms (as described by Hyu in his post), then it is. When you just fall asleep and end up in a dream, then it tends to be somewhat breakable because you didn't intend any rules. You can experiment with this: In a lucid dream, create a door and go through it with the intention that you will enter a stable realm and you will. You'll discover its physics is not breakable just by "wanting" to fly, for instance, even though "hey! this is my dream!"
And that's because you created the dream with rules. You would first have to change the dreamworld to make it possible to fly, and then fly. Which you'll find is incredibly difficult.
I didn't impose gravity on myself, it was imposed on me.
Perhaps you created a persistent, rule-based realm - and then forgot you did it. If you want to fly just by flapping your arms, you are going to have to first make it possible to fly doing this. Then flap your arms.
I'm not saying it's easy to break such a fundamental rule. However, there are other things that are perhaps even more disturbing that are possible. Influencing the weather, for instance, seems to me more rule-breaking than flying - because in that case, you are affecting something that is not part of your body.
No probability doesn't just say things are unlikely.
Really? If it can't be quantified then it's really just "stuff you think might happen anyway, but is unlikely". But let's skip that - you're saying that (according to Carroll) it's easier to use magick to produce an effect which you already consider to be within the realms of possibility.
Certainly that's true.
In other words, we're dealing with something which might happen anyway, it's just that we are helping it out by giving it a push. For sure. That's certainly a valid approach, but I'd hate to think people were limiting themselves to what they thought "might happen anyway" when experimenting for investigative purposes.
If he was wrong, I think every magician would have won the lottery.
The "lottery winner" thing is interesting. Personally, I don't think I'd want to win the lottery. If you want to be wealthy, there are better ways. I would wonder whether anyone who could, would...?
For fun: if you wanted to win the lottery, using magick, how would you go about it?
Yes, perhaps all the rules were created and forgotten by me. Nothing in reality suggests it and you can in no way prove that these rules are breakable.
Well, the difficult part is actually to prove there are rules. We can only say: "my experience is consistent with the notion that there are rules". Unfalsifiability and all that.
But we're just exploring ideas here. What is the evidence that our common experience is how things have to be, and that they are a result of fixed rules? No evidence, other than the experience itself. If you manage to create a contrary experience, even once, then that idea of a rule-based reality - rather than a habit-based one - breaks down.
I say rules are effectively just strong habits.
You seem to take "I can do this" as proof that anything is possible.
For the purposes of discussion, here, we're talking about hypotheticals as much as anything else, right? You seem to be saying that whatever you haven't done is proof that it's im-possible. :-)
So - you bring up a good point about the rules of physics. Flapping my arms and flying would be a no-no, but pointing at the sky and the clouds disappearing would be okay - because we could say the second case was coincidence. It's borderline plausible but it is still plausible, right?
How far can we push it and still have it be okay, do you think? Is not directly experiencing it happening one ingredient which may help things? For instance, people driving somewhere and finding afterwards they've covered a 1hr journey in 30 minutes, that sort of thing.
He used the term "higher probability" which in no way implies or suggests anything more than a vague sense.
I think we got caught up here. I just suggested that "plausibility" was a better word for general use - mainly because while in cases such as the lottery we might be able to have a literal probability, but in most cases we just mean "seems more likely". Nothing more than that!
I am talking about the real lottery, not scratch of tickets.
Yeah, I had in mind the national lottery (or state lottery, or whatever, depending on your country). I've never really given this much thought, but I guess I'd do my usual thing of asserting it as fact which is a sort of effortless willing. However, this requires a genuine desire and a bit of committed confidence. (This is where my thinking comes from that you probably can't easily do this: most don't really want it, those that do won't be able to commit due to doubt or conflict.)
What other, more "plausible-probable" things would fall into the same general category?
Yes, those rules have been proven. Scientists didn't just write down "da laws of fisics" and that was that, these "rrules" are what we have after a long time of research.
I think you're getting hung up on something that we can't be disagreeing about.
People have over time seen "observed regularities" in nature. From there they have created descriptions (models) which help us talk about the world in terms of those regularities. The most basic of those we call "laws". The law is the repeated observation. A law is "a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior". By definition, only the most common, recurring patterns are described by physics, and from there only the simplest descriptions can become "laws". These laws are an account of what we have seen, not a statement about how things work.
Which doesn't necessarily mean you'll be flapping and flying any time soon. But it also doesn't mean that the world is a rule-based mechanical place as a whole.
Forget coincidence, explain how cloudbursting breaks any law of physics.
Are you suggesting that cloudbursting by intention (rather than dumping chemicals on clouds from planes) can be described by the laws of physics?
I'm saying that not being able to just fly... is a pretty good indication that we are not living in a fantasy world where are beliefs become real.
Only you are saying that "beliefs become real". I am just suggesting that a lack of belief tends to make it unlikely you'll engage in any prolonged experimentation in that direction. And I still don't get why you would expect to be able to "just fly", any more than you'd expect to "just speak Hungarian".
It reminds me of people who oppose philosophical idealism because if everything is made from consciousness, why can't they just think objects into materialisation immediately! Which is as bad as saying, if I'm made of atoms why don't I have power over all the atoms in the world, since we're the same...
Considering that time is not a unit of measurement for distance, I would say you made up those numbers to convince yourself that you did magic.
Hmm. Surely you get the point I was making there? That making a journey in impossible time. If you've played around with this, you must have had such an experience?
But we don't have exact odds for the lottery. No equation accounts for the chance that a winning ticket gets destroyed.
Depends on the lottery. In the UK, you can work out the exact odds for a set of numbers corresponding to the randomly drawn numbers (see here [https://lottery.merseyworld.com/Info/Chances.html]). Not sure if the process is different elsewhere?
Again, I am not saying that believing in something makes it happen, or that not-believing makes something not-happen. What I am saying instead is:
We shouldn't assume that our everyday experience is the whole thing, and we shouldn't believe what other people say is impossible or possible - although it might provide inspiration. It's up to us to try things out.
I'm kind of relearning that life is a giant lie and how gleefull people are in selling that lie for free.
What kind of lie?
So we can only conclude that the universe seems to follow patterns when we have all these patterns down completely on paper?
It doesn't follow pattens. It is patterned. I'm saying it's not "rule-based and mechanical" but I'm not saying that it isn't patterned. In fact, I don't think humans can perceive anything that isn't patterned. In fact, my summary would be: "no pattern should be interpreted as being fixed and no description should be viewed as capturing a whole pattern".
This isn't controversial. This is exactly science's approach, right?
[On cloudbursting...] I said I don't see how it breaks the laws of physics. I never said that it could be used to explain it.
I agree. But many would say that it does break the laws of physics, in that it can't be accounted for and is therefore impossible. I don't believe lack of an explanation means something is impossible. And neither do you, it seems.
My point was that cloudbursting doesn't prove that anything is possible with your mind.
That can never be proved. If there's something you want to achieve, then you must experiment and see if it can't be done. If you can't, it's proof that... you didn't succeed. And maybe you never will, of course.
No, if the world is just our imagination, asking why we can't imagine something else is a valid fucking question.
It's not "just" our imagination. It's a particular imagining, right? We have imagined that we live on a planet with gravity and water and all sort of other cool stuff. I don't see why you expect to be able to wish stuff different without any effort.
Nobody ever ever has all the variables, yet we still call it probability. That's all my point wss, really. We never have all variables, even if they use really big numbers.
Right. That's true. So a theoretical probability then, based only on what we have included in our description or model. A bit like only including previous observations into a theory, and assuming that this is sufficient.
I get it now. People with enough money to not have real problems, so they play pretend, with everyone else's lives.
Well, there's something to that, certainly.
Hey, sorry, we totally got bogged down in that whole probability thing. My fault. I apologise.
Stop saying we can just change reality and only offering excuses as to why it never fucking works.
Y'know what? I've no idea how it works, not exactly anyway. That's the problem. Which means I also can't tell why things don't work. Things do change in unlikely ways. I don't think it's to do with belief or effort. When things happen, it's not about trying.
It definitely involves detachment and it definitely involves "will" via (optionally) imagination. And it always produces some sort of result, although sometimes it's just symbolic (like, encountering stuff about your desire but getting your actual desire).
Things do sorta work how you think they do. But I don't mean how you choose to think about them. I mean, how you think they do when you ask yourself how you think something works. (Sorry, that's not very well worded.) I guess that sounds like "belief" but that word is so misused now.
Really it's better to say that it's to do with your own patterning. That changing your own patterning (or "formatting") is the way to produce change, and the way to change your patterning is via will and imagination.
The occultist joins an order to learn magic and improve his life, they teach him to clear his mind so they can fill it.
I don't believe in any of that order stuff much. I think most organised occultism is pretty uninteresting or was about management. Meanwhile, people keep trying to look for explanations and reasons, and they get further away from understanding. Every new theory or technique is a step away from achieving anything.
I linked this earlier, but this blog entry on Why Can't We Teleport? is one of the most honest I've encountered (his book is pretty good actually). The problem isn't necessarily that we can't do things, it's that we don't know how to test whether we can do them or not?
It's not belief, it's not effort. I'd say it's "willed imagination without obstruction" but that's hardly a very useable description. Within that, the actual details don't seem to matter much. Which means testing possibility is an issue.
I think I am starting to see what you mean. Making assumptions of reality kind of limits what we choose to experiment with and how. Believing that we are made of complete solid matter would of course throw off any research into teleportation, just as whatever mistakes we have now likely prevent us from trying the right things or asking the right questions about certain phenomenon.
Right, you've said it much more clearly than I did, but that's what I was trying to get at.
Which might mean that the deepest, most subtle traps we find ourselves in are transparent to us - they might be things we don't even realise we are assuming!
But that's some stuff so deep that you have an actual danger of falling in and being trapped in the question.
Our sanity depends on our ability to trust our eyes and ears, two senses we consciously know are just collecting data that our brain turns into an artificial image.
Question all assumptions and you may end up not knowing what's real, or if anything is real, or if everything is real. Those thoughts are not the scary part, the scary part is how the mind sometimes copes with this deep uncertainty.
I agree: I think the basics should be largely left alone for everyday life. You don't want to destroy its fundamental continuity!
Extreme version: Some autistic children have a hard time trusting that the lessons they learned remain true without continually re-testing them - e.g. that the floor still supports their weight; that an object that goes out of sight will still be there later.
So I guess it's more assumptions about personal achievement on a more macro-scale. We don't want to be reformatting ourselves at too low a level. We don't want to have to manually handle all the details, after all.
So maybe those that must live in that world are the ones who have ready access to that creative space, but lack the raw "knowledge" needed to refine or carry it out completely on their own.
I guess I've never thought of autism in that way, interesting.
I think autism has much to teach us.
One of my ideas: that their attention is narrowed on the current sensory experience, and they have no felt-sense for the underlying facts of the world. The world has no baseline solidity for them; it's transient imagery and memory, without knowing. The "facts" don't stick or they are not aware of the place where the "facts" are stored! (Which I think is literally in the central "gut feeling" we have.)
In other words, they are an extreme. Unbalanced by one point of view, and that's technically true, but also superhuman in the sense that one or many aspects of themselves are cranked up to 10 while most of us are at 5.
In other words, the blind man is the top dog when the power goes out underground.
Maybe our society just sucks at understanding people and making certain roles available to people that are "not balanced" for normal life.
Right, nicely said. I think in other societies the autistic child and the schizophrenic and the epileptic (not equating those, just examples) would be considered as having a "connection" to a larger field of experience. Their relative lack of daily-life-handling would be allowed for, and their talents maximised.
The uniformity of western societies doesn't really allow for individuality of talent or perception. Roles are prearranged slots; society tries to mould its children into them but by assuming them to be identical and "formable".
Which, obviously, is quite a horrific approach. Not everyone takes to the "training".
POST: [deleted by user]
You're a passionate person who feels the world in a way that other people don't. Basically, other people simply don't feel the underlying emotional world situation that you do.
This means that they don't understand the world you describe, and therefore why you are upset. What at first seems like aggression and ignorance, is finally revealed to be empathy and distress, and that where irritation turns into compassion.
Unfortunately, inevitably, people have usually stopped reading what *seems * to them like abuse, before they get to that revealing point.
For sure, there have been horrors, and the planet hasn't shown itself to be a very considerate place (mostly due to ignorance, but a lot due to greed and maliciousness). I've long admitted this to myself, and figure that we can only work our corner (although that can actually have far-reaching effects).
Well, by "corner" I don't mean geographically, I mean in our areas of knowledge, expertise and influence. So if I have ideas, I contribute them; if actions occur, I take them; a helpful word, I give it. There's no point in me fantasising about transforming despotic regimes in Africa, but I can keep an eye on oppressive movements closer to home - and so on.
I need to delete all this stuff now, and stop posting for a while. Sorry. My bad. Again.
No worries. Leave all the time discussion stuff though, yeah? I think that was useful and we were getting somewhere exploring it.
Take it easy.
...
'mentally' yes. 'physically' I don't know.
If you do it "mentally" and don't come back... is that not the same as doing it "physically"?
As if you entered a lucid dream and then never resumed this waking dream.
there is no space in 'mental' unless you will it to, so you can come back.
Hmm. Is there even a space in "physical" though? Surely it's just the same as dreaming: space is part of the experiencing, not necessarily the world.
EDIT: What I'm getting at is that there's no difference between mental and physical time travel, until you experience "coming back". Just like you only know that you were dreaming (rather than being transported to another reality), when you wake up.
...maybe if you imagine hard enough/obe/astral project/whatevs that you can experience alternate realities or "time travel."
Because what would "time travel" be, I suppose, except an "experience that seemed like time travel".
Interesting on your intro. The exercise you describe is one of the first types of things I did too - found some old 1970's psychology book where people (unknowingly) did a variation of Doors of the Mind [https://old.reddit.com/r/threekings/comments/wmupr/recipe_the_doors_of_your_mind/] and explored strange new lands and reported back, bringing knowledge with them. Having experimented a little with metaphors such as [the Imagination Room] and doing lucid dreaming and the like, it's pretty hard to ever say what is possible and not, purely in terms of what we've experienced. If we follow George Berkeley [https://sacred-texts.com/phi/berkeley/three.txt] and the like, then there is no solid substrate underneath our experiences - our worlds are basically a matter of habit...
I do wonder sometimes: Where do the ideas for fiction come from? If our experience is basically "imagined" anyway, then what is the barrier between conceiving of something and experiencing something - is it just a matter of it persisting?
Regarding where ideas for fiction come from, a few summer's back I started experimenting again (post partying stage) with psychedelics but in a more controlled environment. One night during this period I started thinking about how much of my life I've lived emulating characters and lifestyles that my favorite authors had created. It was kind of intense to think about how much of my life was spent following some imagined life of someone that doesn't exist. From there I fell into Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces]
It made me start thinking about how it seems like we may just fall into this archetypal roles, but how we identify with them is beyond me. Which led me to start actually using the idea of the hero's quest to start controlling my life and trying to do things that would make an interesting story. I forget that it's a continuous experiment all the time and fall back down into my animal behaviors, but it's fun when I remember what's actually going on.
The idea of reality being habit is interesting. As in matter existing due to energy taking the path of least resistance then even society being as such because people found or were trained to acquire certain habits. I need to read up on George Berkeley.
Ah, that's interesting, playing roles. We completely do this. A book I read fairly recently - Synchronicity by Kirby Surprise (check out a good interview here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]) - had a fun section about how your life "takes on" the style of the character or storyline you have adopted, in a synchronistic way. You trigger patterns corresponding to that worldview.
I've definitely done this unwittingly before, and more consciously more recently - adopting a "character" appropriate to the task at hand. (I've also played with the Michael Chekhov acting technique for this [https://web.archive.org/web/20131224190736/http://actingtruthfully.jimdo.com/chekhov-technique/], fun.)
Yeah, Three Dialogues is the Berkeley text to read; it's quite approachable. Only caveats: Replace "soul" and "God" with "mind" and "extended mind" when reading the last dialogue, and focus on the point of the creation part rather than the Biblical reference. It basically nails the whole experience-of-reality thing; the only thing it doesn't quite touch is magickal-type influence (but then you realise you are the extended mind, filtered through a localised mind, and it becomes clear).
Without you the world stops eh?
Yeah, the buck stops here! So you better watch your mouth! ;-)
No, the world revolves around nobody. The point would be that "the world" is less like a spatially-extended place in which events happen, and more like a whole stack of dimensionless "facts".
It is the perception of the world (by a "consciousness") which is formatted in terms of time, space and so on. A bit like Immanuel Kant and friends.
Dreams sure feel like spatially-extended environments when you are having them, but they are not. So what makes us think that waking life is spatially-extended any more than a dream is? The fact that other people report the same experience? That just means that "human formatting" involves space and time as basic perceptual structures.
EDIT: Added the word "dimensionless", which I'd missed out and is sorta important here.
[QUOTE]
Transcendental idealism:
Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves.
[END OF QUOTE]
Sure every occurrence can be simplified to a bland statement of fact.
Ha, I missed the key word, and I apologise: dimensionless facts, as in they are not inherently organised in terms of space and time. We might call it "information" but even that is to frame it conceptually in a misleading way.
Time and space proven mathematical and historical realities. They are independent of humanity and will persist even with humanity's extinction.
That's plainly not true. They are experiences that people have, and the theories are also experiences that people have. Our theories describe the formatting and regularities of human minds and experiences, not of external worlds. I don't think any of our ideas predates human existence or will continue afterwards.
These perceptual structures are greater then humanity.
So, you are suggesting that human perceptual structures are greater than humanity, and exist even without humans? That's like saying that human bodies are greater than humanity, and will exist even if there are no humans.
We have a Plato in the house! ;-)
Hey, this is an interesting topic...
Could you elaborate and give an example?
Perhaps it's better to say it this way: That the world as it is "in itself" is not necessarily of the form we experience it. It is our minds that format the-world-as-it-is in our immediate perception - in terms of objects, and in terms of space and time. Beyond our immediate perception, we tend to imagine that the universe is laid out in a way that naively corresponds to our experience of, say, this room. But it is just that: us imagining the universe as something, as a "shadow sensory experience".
So without humans to bear witness unstable molecules decay instantly? Riverbeds are formed and dried? Our universe created and destroyed?
All those things may be true simultaneously, in the same way that if I see a tail and then shift my attention and see a trunk, I don't have to conclude that a tail transformed into a trunk over time. I could take the bold step of suggesting that something - let's call it "an elephant" - existed throughout this experience, as a persistent and complete structure.
Your position is ridiculous and indefensible.
What is ridiculous about it?
It seems more ridiculous to suppose that our mind-formatted experience corresponds to how the universe is in itself. That our concepts (and this is important: we perceive concepts, we do not perceive directly) are fundamental and are the "concepts of the universe".
Time, and the mechanisms the universe known and unknown continue to function with or Without a human to bear witness.
We cannot take the step of supposing that reality is organised in terms of dimensions, objects, and the like. We cannot study this.
We can only study the regularities of the human experience - and even then, we can only make models of those regularities that can be conceptualised and communicated in language. Things like "time" and "mechanisms" are human concepts. The idea that the universe "functions" itself presupposes time! The universe doesn't necessarily function at all; perhaps it simply "is".
Note, I'm not saying we should do away with the scientific method or logical thought. I'm just saying we must be clear about what we are actually studying. We are not uncovering the secrets of the universe, as popular science articles would have you believe. (This was not controversial among early 20th century physicists. Models were not confused with "truth".)
TL;DR: Theories and models are thoughts about human experiencing, and subject to the formatting and the restrictions of human experiencing. They are not thoughts about the universe as it truly is.
EDIT: Fixed some bad mobile-based typing and editing.
POST: Chaos Magic and Forgetting
You don't need to forget, you just need to stop triggering the pattern of wanting/desiring. Nobody ever desired something they already had!
One view:
- Launching a sigil creates a pattern in time which leads to a future experience that is the one you desire. It becomes true now that this will happen then.
- Thinking that this is going to happen is okay, since it leaves the pattern intact or even strengthens it, streamlines it. Looking forward to something is not a problem.
- Thinking about maybes or other stuff or desiring overwrites the pattern with something diffuse to contrary.
In other words: know that it is done and then you can think whatever you want. Forgetting not required. Think of a "time landscape" that is always there, and is being updated every time you sigilise or think about the future with intention or expectation, direct or implied.
POST: Sigil and Law of Attraction Contradiction?
Okay, but... doesn't this whole thing depend on your world-view also? Even if the sigil is apparently shown only to "you", it's effectively shown to "the universe". The whole thing moves towards your goal, including your body.
The main thing about releasing is to let yourself be moved rather than staying in the "problem state".
The shooting metaphor doesn't work for magick, surely?
This is not so consensus bound; personal facts take priority. Sigils and LOA do not operate at that consensus level; they are effectively excuses for allowing things to happen "as if". The more you experiment, the clearer this gets. What you "imagine that" things are like is what counts.
However you think that it works,
That's how it works.
If you "imagine that" the world works according to the number of views an intention gets, that's what'll happen. If you "imagine that" forgetting your sigil is important, then even a brief recall or a glance might stop things right there - while those who don't care or haven't thought about it so deeply, won't have a problem.
An extra issue is that all the associations with a viewpoint also come into effect. If you "summon Hercules" to do your bidding, his great strength comes to your aid. However, Hercules had his issues in myth, and those will start to manifest too, even though you didn't explicitly consider them. This where it gets tricky and goes beyond what you thought you asked for.
I reckon it is impossible to fully specify or constrain things unless you create your own, clean metaphor/mechanism. (Or meta-metaphor.)
Really describing any action is describing Magick
I agree with this. The shift from one experience to another in alignment with "the format of one's mind", including intention, is a description that can be applied to everything.
While from your POV you may seem independent in everything you do the reality is that we all move with each-others blessing
I don't agree with the "simple sharing" model of reality though. As a "conscious perspective", all possible experiences are available enfolded within me. Similarly for you. However, this is not a straightforward dream. Sometimes we might think of reality as a shared dream with other people in a room, each of whom have contributed to the final, consensus decor. However, I reckon it's more accurate to say that those who have chosen the same decor, end up in the same room.
Finally, it's even more accurate to say: Whatever decor you choose, you will end up experiencing a room with that decor, plus versions/aspects of others who would choose that decor, as a version of yourself who would choose that decor.
the metaphor of shooting me in the face does work for magick
The above means that I can shoot you in the face (politely, of course) and have you die, while you dodge the bullet and live. Subsequently: Different rooms, different decor.
Fundamentally, this is because you are not a person, and neither is anyone else. The "being-a-person" sensation is just part of the present moment world-experience. You are in fact a perspective, attached to a viewport amongst infinite viewports, selected by the "filter" of belief, expectation, knowledge and intention.
TL;DR: Blessing not required.
Q: [Deleted]
Yeah, I'm going to skip the gunplay for now. :-)
I've grown quite fond of you.
I say we don't need blessing because it's (implicitly) multidimensional enough in that everyone gets to have their experience. Not in the sense of actual spatially-extended universes though; only in the sense of filtered possible moments. But then, that's basically the ultimate blessing.
(The room is tesseract-shaped, and we are distributed clouds throughout it? Nah, too messy sounding.)
True connections with people occur when their filters correspond, as it were - they are literally "in the moment", together.
Q: [Deleted]
I agree with what you say.
The "filtering" I refer to is for what appears in the senses (image, sound, texture), via personal shaping and via accumulated patterns (the world), beneath or within this there is just the undivided one. So in that sense we are closer than objects can be, always.
At the fundamental level, everything is within us, and one step more and there's no "us" because even the perspective dissolves.
But if we are attending to the level of the senses, divided into time, then that connection is obscured except when the moment is shared, "when worlds collide".
Q: [Deleted]
Hmm. I don't have a conception of God as external, but the DNA idea could maybe be translated into the idea of a "format" that implies which events will be experienced - via the personal God of imagination...
Loosely, I think of myself as a boundless aware space. (Everyone is this, simultaneously.) Within that, is dissolved all possible moments and experiences already created. My ongoing 1st-person sensory experience is simply my attention shifting across this eternal structure, in accordance with my intention and beliefs. Foolishly, I confuse "myself" with the content of the experience, when in fact I am the background in which it arises.
Gives us:
- Magick is changing the trajectory discontinuously in unlikely ways, by tuning into other moments via imagination. We are always doing this, but deliberate magick makes it more obvious because we are deliberately aware.
- God is the whole, the open attention in contrast to our usual narrowed, time-focused attention. God is not a being.
- When we say that God intervenes, we really just mean when outlier actions or events are selected which we didn't have a sensory experience of choosing prior to their appearing. The "feeling" that goes with this is the opening out of attention, to the background unity.
So all events are "archived" in the sense that they are all, permanently available for experiencing? Creation is already complete, you are just choosing which parts to check out!
Not sure how to join together the two ideas of God.
- By saying 'a god' I am just talking about an entity that has a greater range of data intake and influence
Right - I see that as just ourselves, the outer reaches of our attentional focus. We are always everywhere, we are just concentrating on somewhere in particular.
- Mostly I'm asking when this construct is animated; if in our life-time do you expect this will change your spirituality? Will you increase your own intelligence or try to keep a level of "purity"
I think this 'construct' is already animated. The construct is just the universe as it is. It's a case of doing or being this knowingly. 'Purity' would then be a choice to remain human-focused, ignorant of the larger information field (or whatever). I'm all for expansion - but as I said before, different people can do different things, and not necessarily interfere with the other.
...
I see, forget the sybmol, let it go. Is it worthwhile continuing with the desire, the FACT that it will happen?
...the FACT that it will happen?
This is exactly it. Ignore the evidence, know the fact. Everything else is theatre. All that matters is that you fully accept the fact that something is going to happen. All these methods are about sneakily inserting or adjusting facts-of-the-world. It all works this way, I think:
If you move your arm right now, you don't do it directly. You request/insert the experience into your timeline (you might say), the fact that "it is now true that my arm will move". The proximity in terms of space and time makes you think that you did it by more straightforward means.
In fact (heh), you simply don't have direct access to sensory experience at all; you adjust facts, and subsequent sensory experience arises spontaneously and consistently with those facts.
So it's about creating new facts-of-the-world by any means you like. Since acceptance of its truth is what matters, anything that implies it is a fact (e.g. getting excited, looking forward to it) can only help establish it. It's a bit like Erickson hypnosis in this way - thinking and doing things that assume the certainty of the wish fulfilled.
TL;DR: Creation of facts by acceptance and implication.
EDIT: Added more facts. ;-)
Off topic:
You made me think of this condition some people have called "Mirror Touch Synesthesia" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-touch_synesthesia], basically what people observe on a daily basis are physical and mental feelings that they themselves 'feel'. This one woman explained how her ankles started to hurt painfully as she watched a women walk down the street in ankle pain. She felt her physical pain quite literally. Also, regarding empathy - they also experience mental states of the people they observe. Thus far, people afflicted with this condition are unable to control it and usually lose their sense of self when in public and often resort to a hermit lifestyle as they cannot deal with multiple sensations/feelings. There was a good discussion on this on NPR's Invisibilia podcast, the episode was on Entanglement.
Kind of makes you wonder what is really going on, what is real?
[QUOTE]
Synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music, see shapes when smelling certain scents, or perceive tastes when looking at words. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person with the perception of synesthesia differing based on an individual's unique life experiences and the specific type of synesthesia that they have. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.
Mirror-touch synesthesia:
Mirror-touch synesthesia is a condition which causes individuals to experience the same sensation (such as touch) that another person feels. For example, if someone with this condition were to observe someone touching their cheek, they would feel the same sensation on their own cheek. Synesthesia, in general, is described as a condition in which a stimulus causes an individual to experience an additional sensation. Synesthesia is usually a developmental condition, however recent research has shown that mirror touch synesthesia can be acquired after sensory loss after amputation.
[END OF QUOTE]
That's really interesting, new on me!
One thought: that our personal boundaries are "imaginary", that at some point we create filters which give us a personal space. Without them, we are wide open to all information being leaked/broadcast. Perhaps this is what's going on. Normally, children learn they "aren't meant to" experience these things, and by implication don't, but these guys missed the memo.
I used to find being in open plan offices really difficult, even small ones. Just a constant sense of "exposure". Not vigilance or self-consciousness, just being too open. Over time, my awareness would contract further and tension would increase. My "little trick" to get around this was to feel-imagine a shell around me, a Faraday Cage for others' "presence". This imaginary "fact" was enough to make it better.
EDIT: I hear "sound effects" when I see movement, in real life or in gifs, etc. I only recently found out that this is a thing too.
POST: Is this more than coincidence and how can I test it
Imagining new facts into the world.
Your sensory experience is a 'mirage' floating within an aware space in which are dissolved the facts-of-the-world, all of which can be amended.
While detached from the present moment sensory experience, in a state of "absolute allowing" where we are happy for experience to shift without restriction, we imagine that something is true, and our subsequent sensory experience falls in line with the new fact.
Something like that, anyway.
POST: How can I use the occult to make me rich?
Q1: I've used the occult to make me rich, send me $500 and I'll tell you how you can do the same.
Q2: Pfft, don't listen t this guy, send me $499 and I'll tell you the truth.
Q3: Fuck that, send me $9.99 and I'll tell you how to BECOME A LIVING GOD.
Q4: Ignore them. If you think in hundreds, you won't go anywhere. $5.000 bill & we have a deal.
Adding more decimal places to $5 isn't going to get you rich any faster! You wanna use a comma, like this:
$5,000.00
Wealth is all about correct punctuation. Trust me; I know how to use a semi-colon.
POST: Origami as offerings.
Great idea. I'd like to see a whole new branch of the art called "Sacrificial Origami". Could be much fun had.
Love the name. Now how do I represent virgins with origami...
White paper, obviously. Might be tricky doing the fine detailing...
POST: How often do you use thought experiments in your day?
There's a book called Busting Loose from the Money Game (a later edition refers to it as the Business Game) which takes a similar approach.
It presents itself as a business book, but is really more of an 'occult/enlightenment' book in disguise. The main idea: When bad things happen, and you feel discomfort, treat them as "eggs" that are dissolved by using "The Process" to "reclaim your power": basically, welcoming them and sending gratitude/love. For instance, send gratitude for the bills you receive.
Eventually, you will have dissolved all the "cloud cover", and the "open sky" of conscious flow will be your experience from then on, in matters of money and more.
Someone has a summary of the main points here. [https://sundayupdate.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/key-points-from-busting-loose-from-the-money-game.pdf]
POST: How do you see entities?
There are many hallucinations that form within your vision, called phosphenes. When you close your eyes and see all sorts of splotches and colors, these are phosphenes: seeing lights without light actually entering the eye.
These are the clay from which you sculpt visualizations and, when you're asleep or in a hypnagogic state, dreams. It's hard to do at first, but after practice with your eyes closed, you'll be able to create phosphenes in accordance with imagination and/or memories. You'll almost swear that you saw outlines of a particular scene, even for just a moment.
After practicing with your eyes closed, you can try doing it with your eyes open, albeit in minimal lighting. Eventually you can use phosphenes to visualize anything in broad daylight.
Entities communicate with us and appear before us in the form of phosphenes, at least from my experience. When an entity makes itself known, you may notice discoloring, or just some sort of form that lies before you. You may not actually "see" it with your eyes, but rather you can sense its presence with the phosphenes, a kind of sight that I associate with the "Third Eye" vision.
If you're sensitive enough, you can probably interpret random flowings and distortions as spirits that are popping in and out of your field of view, though this is an ability that usually only belongs to shamans or channelers. Most people can see major entities they have called or are at least open to noticing. They are invisible to those who are not open to their existence.
Are these phosphenes (those "sparkles" that become "things") or are they random flickers of hypnagogic type imagery, do you think? Are they totally in the mind?
Q1: The little white sparkles are white blood cells moving around your eyes. Different story, but I haven't really tried to use those in visualization. Could be possible, but I don't think I want to mess around with my body's defense system.
Q2: Not OP, but I would describe my personal experiences as hypnogogic. I thank God there's a word for it, even if it's a word no one knows! (except here)
My visualisations are induced waking hypnogogia, as far as I can tell, and sometimes it's not induced. I just see... things.
Anyway, it explains my continued obsession with dream work.
Yeah, I was doubtful about this "phosphenes" lark. I think of the initial background stuff as random "mind noise", a sort of pure background creativity, which then coalesces into fragments and imagery - and worlds. And I think it's always present, waking or relaxing or sleeping. The stuff that dreams are made of...
But everyone seems to have a different way of describing it, so it's hard to pin down whether we're all having the same experience.
POST: ShowerThought on Visualization
[POST]
I wasn't really in the shower. Instead, I was in the car listening to NPR's "This American Life".
The show was about this blind guy who can ride a bike just like a seeing person. He basically uses echo location.
It got me to thinking about how, really, everything we see is constructed by the brain.
I take in information through my eyes and my brain constructs something to see. This blind guy, he takes in information through his ears and he seems to see just fine (really worth listening to the episode). He hikes and bikes and climbed trees just like if his eyes worked.
Anyway, I had this thought: what if I am blind and just don't know it?
I'm not really blind. I mean, I don't think so. But, for a moment I looked at the world around me and thought, wouldn't it be interesting to learn that, this whole time, my eyes didn't work?
I dunno, it gave me a different perspective on visualization.
[END OF POST]
Q: Your post does raise interesting questions about the nature of perception, but it's very important not to overstate the man's ability.
He is able to "see" yes. But he and the show's host make it out to be more akin to peripheral vision than traditional vision. None of the acuity, but still plenty functional and better than total darkness.
If this sort of thing gets you going, you'll also be interested in a device known as BrainPort
I'm also reminded of someone on this sub who claimed that while meditating deeply, they were suddenly able to see their surroundings without opening their eyes. I'm more skeptical of this claim, but I wouldn't rule it out completely, and it's definitely an interesting thought.
I think the seeing-through-eyelids thing might be related to the "Darkroom Vision" phenomenon. I've had it myself when very relaxed, with my attention (where I feel I'm "looking out from") rested near the middle of my head.
When you look at how your eyes work, then it becomes obvious that you are not really seeing with them. In fact, the attempt to "use your eyes" often leads to your vision narrowing and becoming less focused.
In fact, thinking in terms of senses is maybe a bad move generally. If you sit back, as it were, it seems far more like you are "receiving a world that appears in your mind". It might be 'inspired by information gleaned from your sensory apparatus' but that's just feeding you snippets of info, which trigger patterns in your mind which constitute the actual experience.
The "Darkroom Vision" phenomenon - check out some of the links - and some of the stuff discussed in Ian Watson's book You Are Dreaming highlights that our usual assumptions-of-convenience about perception are obviously wrong, and that we basically always "dream our experience", inspired or not by the senses.
POST: New to magickal practices; starting with meditation, trying to lucid dream, and sigils; just want to clarify something
It's all just making a decision, and letting your mind or the world go there by itself.
If you set a problem, and don't resist movement and change, it'll gradually turn into the solution by itself. What is a 'desire' if not a 'problem', a tension that is to be [re]solved? The decision you make is largely about making a commitment to not resist the flow towards your goal. A decision itself is therefore always an act of intent and will. Effectively:
"[This decision means] I will have a new car".
Although most people like to feel themselves "doing" something, so in effect offset the process by one level:
"[This decision means] drawing this picture means I will have a new car".
Magick as described is mostly just theatre in experience. We do it because the actual active core of magick - intention or will or allowing or whatever, the release to and commitment to the flow of the world - cannot be experienced as an action.
EDIT: That's not to say that this "theatre" isn't valuable or powerful. There are many reason why it can be beneficial, not least because ritual can give you a direct feeling of connection to "the source", consciousness, your true self, whatever - which helps commitment, resistance and faith somewhat.
POST: Your goals.
Basically, I don't like not being "in the know" when it comes to secrets, and the cosmos holds an awful lot of them. I want in.
Is the background whispering of the Cosmos making you paranoid? ;-)
Not paranoid: more like hungry, in a manner of speaking.
I was joking, but I know exactly what you mean!
Keep in mind though that the 'Cosmos' isn't a static thing filled with secrets and information, like a library or a science experiment; it's alive and responsive to you.
It tends to give you an answer when you have a question, to give you a landscape when you open a door - it makes up stories for you when you go looking for them. Problems turn into solutions, requests turn into responses, the seeker is given an ongoing adventure, to expect is to receive. It happens all by itself.
The 'secret of the Cosmos' isn't to be found in any of the specific experiences you'll have, of course. They're just dream-fun. The secret is how the Cosmos gives you those experiences at all!
He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.
"..."
[question] magic is real. is psi real?
I suppose what I meant was, if it was possible, why isnt it more common? And what precisely have you learned to do? Telekinesis is like a blanket term and I'd like to know what you meant by that
Looks a bit like James Hydrick's dollar bill trick [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30o7_iy-O1g&t=18m20s]. Is the commencement of movement synchronised with your breathing?
Not saying that's the explanation or that it's intentional, but you need to be careful to exclude these possibilities in your experiments - both breath motion (very slight gaps under the container) and thermal changes (heat from hands or breath warming one side of the container slightly, resulting in air currents inside). With such a finely balanced object, very small changes could make a difference.
EDIT: This is a more general problem: magick always finds a way to give you the experience you truly ask for. But sometimes it can do it in an underhand way, if we're not careful.
Q: Not saying that's the explanation or that it's intentional, but you need to be careful to exclude these possibilities in your experiments - both breath motion (very slight gaps under the container) and thermal changes (heat from hands or breath warming one side of the container slightly, resulting in air currents inside). With such a finely balanced object, very small changes could make a difference.
Totally get what you're saying. I spent months checking and cross checking. I grew up being asked questions and being shown different ways in which physics works so I'm pretty familiar with countering those things. I did not allow myself to even accept the results until I was confident. This is something you'll have to learn on your own since videos never show what is going on within me. And yes, breathing is one of the many ways that you can synchronize energy flow. Not necessary but can be a very easy thing to fall into when you're first learning.
I should mention that I have spent hours staring at the wheel and have gotten very familiar with recognizing what is driven by the elements and what is driven by me. I can feel the energy move through my body and then pass out of my hands to make the object move. I've also tried blowing on the edges of the glass in all directions to verify there is no air flow happening. I have sat there with my hands directly on the glass and never once had the wheel move until I tried moving it. I've checked for static by rubbing my feet across the carpet, getting the wheel to follow my hand using the static and then discharging the energy by touching the energy saving bulb of the light on the stand only to have the wheel not move from static any longer before I start practicing. Something fun about static is that it can be manipulated.
If you try learning to do this I would recommend being patient and do lots of meditation.
This is a more general problem: magick always finds a way to give you the experience you truly ask for. But sometimes it can do it in an underhand way, if we're not careful.
I agree! Magick can definitely give what you want like that. The static was the original way that it started, then I was controlling air movement, and now it's directly related to my ability to move psi or chi. My only hope of showing this to folk is to inspire them to learn how and to help them to start developing spiritually. Come join us in /r/energy_work if you haven't yet and start discovering out what you can do.
Thanks, that was very informative! Sounds like a pretty thorough experimental approach.
Magick can definitely give what you want like that.
I guess (know) the trick is: specify the route. And you're right about really having to explore yourself. A couple of thoughts:
- Do you think this is related to, say, the "stretching out of presence" one can do to make contact with other people?
- Do you think this could be done eventually without a direct connection?
- Do you think that attempts to demonstrate this sort of thing with other people present, presents a problem? That the fact of an observer can cause difficulties? Perhaps because of the concentration required, perhaps due to "conceptual momentum" (the idea that being in the presence of conflicting beliefs is like a "counter-will").
I have duly subscribed! You might also be interested in checking out /r/Oneirosophy.
what I like to call consciousness, outside of our physical shell and having it interact with other things.
I call it "presence" to distinguish it from the background awareness that also gets called "consciousness" - Peter Ralston calls it "feeling-awareness" which is not a bad compromise actually. I might take issue with "physical shell" and "things" but that's a different thread!
So, implicitly, we all have a direct connection, even if our locations differ - eventually I might be able to render an effect at a greater distance...?
Our brains [I'd say minds] love patterns and it likes to make everything automatic.
It's all about the patterns, so true! Patterns, memory traces, automatic habits. The very stuff of the personal daydream! :-) I'd suggest that improving one's ability to create "out of the ordinary" effects depends precisely on softening these patterns, directly (addressing them specifically to dissolve them) or indirectly (repeated practice to wear them down).
Anyway, lots to explore! Thanks for giving me a new angle on this, something new to play with.
I still believe that everything is consciousness so I'm wondering how this can be accepted into or break my current view.
Everything is still "made of" consciousness - but just as sight, sound, touch are perceived as separate "modes" of consciousness, so "presence" is a mode. You might think of it as extended, subtle touch?
Going to write up another post soon which covers the other stuff, actually.
Quickly though: Try and actually find your body right now. Use your attention or "presence" to feel it out. You'll realise it's basically a big empty space, in a big empty space, with no solid boundary. Some people find the Douglas Harding experiments helpful, and you might like the one I describe here [Outside: The Dreaming Game] - in the middle.
Try 'em and feel free to PM me if they do/don't make sense!
Let me know when you have that post up if you happen to remember. I'd love to see what you write. Cheers mate!
Ah yeah, sounds like you're on it.
Will say though, that the experience you should eventually have is beyond just the body sensation - it should feel like those sensations are floating in empty background space, without there really being a "body" that connects if all together. That's what helps you realise that "you" are actually over there as well as over here - it's the difference between thinking that everything is consciousness, and actually experiencing it to be true. You are the background. (Check out this interview for Rupert Spira trying to get someone to get this.)
Will do. Cheers!
...
When you pick up a rock and throw it, you are not using mental power to do so.
You might ask though - if that's not mental power, what are you using to get your arm to move? What is the name for that and how does it work?
POST: How to start out.
"Meditate for at least 20 minuets every day. If you don't do this you are wasting your time in the long run". I see this pop up every day. thoughts?
Sort of?
- "Meditation" in its loosest sense, sure. Just lying on the floor for 2 x 10 minutes a day, letting your nervous system relax out and unwind, does the job.
- "Meditation" is the ongoing sense too: not "forcing" your mind or body as you go about your day, letting things unfold at their natural spontaneous pace.
Basically, if your "aware space" is cluttered up with "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements" then you're going to have a hard time perceiving how things are, where they are going, and find it difficult to tune into and direct things.
If you sort that out then you are inherently less scattered, and will find results naturally easy (easier!) to access. Actual ritual and action detail not necessarily mattering so much, since it becomes more about the decision of meaning (c.f. Alan Chapman, etc).
EDIT: You might find this recent post of mine of interest [Overwriting Yourself], or not.
POST: I'm going to start a business this year, but I know for a fact that a certain crazy person has a grudge against me, and he's really deep into the occult. I'm pretty sure he's tried to curse me before, and worried he might again.
A1: If there is truly someone out there actively working on doing you harm, then you're only validating it by worrying. You're doing most of the hexwork for him already. But, chances are, he's not. Your source of anxiety is opening the business, and you're looking about reasons for your anxiety.
Be a wall. Don't worry. No one can touch your life. Plow on ahead with your plans. If someone truly had a grudge against you, then "the best revenge is a life well lived" So, just go and be successful, ok?
Edit: hey, my first gold, and it wasn't about something fucking stupid. Woo!
This x 10.
Just keep focused on what you're after; don't entertain ideas of others' influence. If you make your future certain in your own mind, no other can interrupt that. (And in the end, they are kinda you anyway: your own anxieties or self-destructive tendencies might manifest as "someone else hexing you".)
POST: Rationality in your practices?
Q:[Deleted]
Nice comment. Although we must add the special sauce of the conundrum: The concepts we adopt affect our experience of the world, of the objects and narrative we encounter. So it's difficult to be truly science-like objective with magick. Doing so can destroy the effect.
No need to make things more complicated than they need to be. Either you have objective evidence (with scientists present to rule out trickery), to support your systems do something, or you don't. Easy Peasy
Do upsetting memories make you feel sad?
No. What does make me sad though is that people who want something real wind up giving up on the search, because virtually everything everywhere is lies, disinformation, roleplay and make believe nonsense. Real practices are actively suppressed in this and other similar communities, in favor of practices that generate only subjective results. It's almost as if paid government shills are actively trying to bury real practices with disinformation, and discredit them. That does make me sad. It also makes me sad that out of a thousand spiritual seekers maybe one or two, understands why objective evidence is important, and why we should demand proof that systems actually do something. The rest think you can brew potions, and chant incantations, and draw sigils, and swing around an athame and it will have any meaningful effect at all. That does make me sad. It also makes me sad that the people who would most benefit from real practices are so burnt out fake spiritual bullshit, and make believe nonsense scams that pass for spirituality, that they wind up becoming raving Atheist skeptics. I can't really blame them, with all the lies, disinformation, scams, hoaxes, etc. It's sad though, no amount of evidence would ever be enough for them.
Well actually I was building on the objective evidence aspect - I can't objectively detect memories nor the feeling of sadness in other people, so they must be excluded from my model of the world - rather than the larger issue of delusion or misleading groups.
We've talked before I think, but my own investigations have led to the conclusion that, simply put, power is in plain sight - for all to see and utilise if so inclined.
You can't know for certain if someone is really sad, or giving a performance of being sad. You can know for certain if someone could demonstrate real abilities objectively to scientists or not. There is the difference friend.
Uh-huh, but magick's most important abilities are psychological... in one sense or another. That was my point - that for those things it's subjective evidence that matters, one proves to oneself. So we can't discount the value of those things, just because they are difficult to prove objectively. In fact, it can be baked in, that problem.
Of course, that's separate from real objective abilities. It just important to be clear there are two strands (at least), and being well versed in one doesn't mean one can be dismissive of the other (in terms of its value to other people). A lot of these subreddits are more for one type than the other.
Wow, I sound so even-handed there. I'm not really, normally! :-)
Let's cut the bullshit friend. Either there is good objective evidence to support your practices do something, or there isn't. I've met plenty of magick users, and all of them are dirt poor, drive 20 year old cars, live in their moms basement, are miserable failures at life, but boy their magick sure is strong. I ask them what has magick done for them, and they go off on all the subjective benefits. From an outsiders perspective the only metric of success they have achieved is keeping themselves spiritually entertained. You either want something REAL, something you can prove is real in the presence of scientists, or you don't.
It's that simple. There is no need to write a doctoral thesis on metaphysics to figure this one out, friend.
But... I love my Mom's basement! So comfortable in the dark, with my 1990's video games! :-)
Hey, as I said, we talked before.
S'all good, each to their own, and whatever they are satisfied with.
POST: What technique (s) do you use to focus your intent?
It's ages since I've done meditation formally. I've found that anything that moves/expands/dissolves localised attention is helpful; anything you 'let go to' that isn't thought-based.
If you are one for habitually being stuck in your head, exercise expands you into your body. If localised to your body, contact with the external environment expands you into that. Painting and drawing encourage you to "reach out" with your feeling-awareness towards the subject. Gradually, that persists, and the "information" stored at those locations (the oft-ignored rest of your body, beyond perhaps) produces insight occasionally.
Interesting that you did it with the lights off - one of the best ways I found to realise that I wasn't restricted to "here" was to ignore vision, and attend to where sounds or body sensations were - it's much easier to directly realise that they occur in a "large space of awareness" with eyes closed than with eyes open. Something to do with the persistence that images have in insisting they are "over there" rather than "in here".
Another sense was being exercised.
Can you try to describe that a bit more?
Reminds me of Luke Skywalker training while while blindfolded with against floating laser beam shooting robot orbs. Same idea. You have to anticipate what is going to happen before it happens. I do think it helped me to develop an almost predictive reflex. At the time I felt like it was magic. Maybe it is?
It sort of is! I recommend it all the time, but this book by Missy Vineyard is great on the subject of 'letting things happen' when catching balls and doing other tasks. Meanwhile, this book by Peter Ralston is good on the idea of feeling-awareness.
It's basically a sixth sense, that - the "feeling out" sense. You can do it deliberately when attending to things (exploring), but also you can get the benefits by letting go (responding).
I like the idea that, at its core, we are deciding to let the environment move us appropriately, rather than holding onto our separateness and trying to control reactions manually. It takes a bit of faith, though - because there's no knowing what your reaction is going to be, you just have to trust that it will be appropriate; it happens faster than information can travel consciously.
(I always wince when watching those get-hit-with-a-stick exercises! Where's the blooper reel for that stuff? Bet it's messy.)
The two books complement each other nicely. Also, I quite like Alan Watts on this "the environment moves you" thing:
[On letting go and living in the present, unprepared,] people immediately say, however, “Now wait a minute. That’s all very well, but I want to be sure that under such-and-such circumstances and in such-and-such eventualities I will be able to deal with it. It’s all very well to live in the present when I am sitting comfortably in a warm room reading this, or meditating, but what am I going to do if all hell breaks loose? What if there’s an earthquake, or if I get sick, or my best friends get sick, or some catastrophe happens? How will I deal with that? Don’t I have to prepare myself to deal with those things?”
“Shouldn’t I get into some sort of psychological training, so that when disasters come I won’t be thrown?”
That, you would ordinarily think, is the way to proceed — but it doesn’t work very well. It is much better to say, “sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof,” and to trust yourself to react appropriately when the catastrophe happens. Whatever happens, you’ll probably have to improvise, and failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself. You have a great endowment of brain, muscle, sensitivity, intelligence — trust it to react to circumstances as they arise.
Zen deals with this. Studying Zen will change the way you react to circumstances as they arise. Wait and see how you deal with whatever circumstances come your way, because the you that will deal with them will not be simply your conscious intelligence or conscious attention. In that moment it will be all of you, and that is beyond the control of the will, because the will is only a fragment having certain limited functions.
I know that this sounds impractical to some of you, or perhaps revolutionary, or perhaps not even possible, but it is simply living in the present. It requires a certain kind of poise: If you make exact plans to deal with the future and things don’t happen at all as you expected, you are apt to become thoroughly disappointed and disoriented. But if your plans are flexible and adaptable, and if you’re here when things happen, you always stay balanced.
As in movement or martial arts, keep your center of gravity between your feet, and don’t cross your feet, because the moment you do you are off balance. Stay always in the center position, and stay always here. Then it doesn’t matter which direction the attack comes from; it doesn’t matter what happens at all.
If you expect something to come in a certain way, you position yourself to get ready for it. If it comes another way, by the time you reposition your energy, it is too late. So stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
-- What is Zen?, Alan Watts
And that's all my book references done for the day! :-)
Right on tack with my own experience! I was very into the Zen concept and the practicing thereof when I was a teenager. Fishing and spending as much time in the woods in silent openness as much as possible was my introduction to it long before I read about it. Actually, I was a little disappointed to find out what I was feeling and knew was already well known and ancient. But that was a typical teenage reaction. I'm not special anymore blah blah blah. Kind of funny now.
The fact you lead right into it gives me joy. I used to read Zen Koans and poetry when I felt off track and off my center and it would clear my mind and settle it for a while. What turmoil we put ourselves through!
Thanks again for the links and reminder. Bringing me back to myself, this whole thread.
Hey, your post reminding me to remind you helped me remind myself! :-)
Of course you are special; it's just that so is everyone else...
...
You should check out the Carlos Castaneda series.
Yes! His quote on intention really made everything clicked for me:
“To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without doing. There is no technique for intending. One intends through usage.”
–- Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming
Q: Wow, that takes me back. When I read the series back in my younger twenties, I kept a notebook of every good quote I read followed by whatever thoughts they inspired. Wish I had that notebook still! No idea what happened to it.
Same here! That quote is my favourite, because it really gets down to the fact that there's not one thing affecting another: you are 'first cause' and move yourself by yourself with yourself.
...I've had a bit of success re-acquiring notebooks for people lately, as a matter of fact...
Re-acquiring notebooks? What do you mean?
A converstation I was having elsewhere. Could still turn up, you know...
I think I need to get in the mindset to reread without trying to relive or recapture, to start where I'm at, ya know?
Yeah, sometimes a "reset' - or the acceptance of the reset - can be just the thing that's needed.
POST: Some shee folk i met in a lucid dream
TIL, lucid dreams are rare for me, and when I get them I tend to get a bit carried away. The last time I encountered an entity she was super scary but i stood firm and faced her down and broke her, this made me think that this is all i have to do, that because it's a dream i can't be harmed.
Yeah! In a dream, you are the dream and not the "character" you seem to be. So everything you encounter is a bit of you, the larger you. So there's always more to it than just, say, cool imagery and fun stuff to do. It's filled with meaning, to some greater or lesser extent.
Facing up to fears is classic fun.
So would you say that the characters that I encountered are manifestations of my own subconcious and therefor the names they gave me meaningless?
No, not meaningless. It's maybe better to put aside the notion of the subconscious, and instead say that - from the perspective of 'little you' - the 'universe' is talking to you, giving you messages or challenges to help you. The dream may be "all you", but the fact is you do identify with one part of it, one perspective. However, the rest of it all has meaning for you, because it is part of the 'big you'.
(Sorry, that wasn't very clear probably.)
EDIT: Keep in mind that "finyacluck" is just a dream character you are seeing through the eyes of, and 'finyacluck" is at the same level as any other dream character. It represents part of the whole that you are; it just so happens that you are attached to "finyacluck"'s perspective and so you confuse it with being "you".
Thank you for explaining, and apologies for my very basic, newbie questions, the only thing now that's on my mind is if anything I encounter whilst dreaming, given that I didn't try to contact it earlier, has the ability to interrupt my waking, day to day life?
Well, the changes you experience in a dream do overflow into waking life (because you have changed), but you don't need to worry about "beings" following you. If that is a concern, then simply perform some sort of banishing ritual that seems persuasive to you. Simply declaring is sufficient for this, until you feel comfortable.
And don't worry about "newbie" questions; none of this is obvious and it's all still under debate. That's why it's a personal exploration/journey of discovery!
POST: Question on sigil magic. Re: no harm...
Is the "poor guy" as real as you anyway...?
But, if you want to avoid the experience of getting a job because someone else was apparently fired, you just need to be more specific about what you request. Or intend more directly, directly into the 'external' world.
Sigils and servitors tend to operate according to your own established habits - hence, no materialisations etc, plausible unfoldings only. So perhaps experiment with taking control of the situation "personally".
POST: What was the most Epic Fail you ever had from a spell that actually worked?
Q:[Deleted]
Good story. You should have kept going though. First attempt can give you the easy result (you dream of your desire, you see a drawing of what you want, or some other reality-joke played on you). It's saying: "Are you serious? Then commit!"
You were probably half-hearted in your intention.
Not to say you are going to wake up the next day on a mattress stuffed with money. In a beautiful house. With a beautiful wife. But you may ask yourself... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvM6TxUnCDE]
My tendency is to end up seeing films which have scenes depicting what I want, or reading passages in books. I see it as a sign that I was "heard" and to keep pushing...
Q: In total agreement. This is how I (make every effort to, anyway) operate now. If I see something (a photo, an overheard conversation, etc.) that is representative of my own "heart's desire", I have gotten myself to a place where I can rejoice over that.
As in, if I want a trip to Europe - and a co-worker comes in and says she is unexpectedly able to travel to Europe, I rejoice (even if said co-worker may not be my favorite person). If I feel a twinge of envy, I... not so much "quell" it... but transform it, as best I can, into genuine gladness for the other person. I also see it as the Universe (ha - yes, sort of ME -) bringing my own wish a little bit closer to me, and still a little bit closer to me.... If a a bunch of people around you seem to be getting what you want, believe the Universe loves you and hears you and that the THING is being drawn closer to you, instead of that the Universe has played a joke on you and you should quit.
To me, the Monopoly houses & money by the bus stop sound like an amazing "yes!" sign. It's saying, "You're kind of vibrating to your house and your money. Here's some inspiration to help you along!"
ALTHO' "quitting", ie "dropping the seed into the ground" can be quite effective. "Quitting" is what brought the "bf" from my other story BACK after 2 years, so he could break my heart even more effectively by leaving again a year or so later!! (Moral: Discernment is needed. "Know thyself!" Just 'cause you wanted something desperately 2 years earlier doesn't mean you're obligated to say "yes" to it whenever it shows up. :)
"Dropping it" is easier to do with the little things, the "it would be nice but it's not urgent" things, like my chair. (I used Deepak Chopra's meditation to arrange that; I bought a worth-$300-or-more wing chair for $10, carried to my doorstep, no less.)
I also try extremely hard to stay positive and um... silent. For instance, IF I've recently failed to do this ("stay positive", that is) - today or any other day - I would not tell you about it here! :p
Hey, great response. There's also the fact that people don't dedicate themselves enough to this, don't really commit.
If you were told that, to get something you want - a complete change in your reality - you should lie down, let go, and simply strongly intend that for a day. Just assert that it is true already, without compromise. Would you do it? Basically, almost nobody would. This guy [POST: one way to get whatever i want] has the wrong intentions but the right dedication.
I also try extremely hard to stay positive and um... silent.
Yeah, it's a challenge. It helps, though, once you realise you don't need to be "thinking positive thoughts" all the time, so much as only intend positive things. It's about what you put yourself behind. If you remain detached usually, then no stray passing thing will get energised; if you spend your days being hyped up, then your dream will be all over the place.
Crowley said to use magick like this to fix sickness is deplorable.
I'd never heard that. Looking up quotes, the best I could find was:
Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.
-- Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
So, is it more that it is folly to ignore the message and learn from the sickness? That would make sense. In other words, forcing "feeling better" on top of the underlying cause, which has not been reached into and dissolved.
very good point! I'm not sure where I heard that then.
Also, could a sigil backfire if given a silly time frame, for example "By tomorrow"?
There's no reason it can't happen semi-instantly. For instance, a friend of mine was very sick, 10 minute gaps between "visits", and did the thing: "I wish I had a magic potion to cure me" (or similar). Later, he suddenly knew he had to go and buy a bottle of rum. He watches his timings, gets to the store and back again, downs the rum. Wakes up a few hours later, cured.
I feel that when the phrasings play tricks on us, it's really us being tricky with ourselves. Any slight lack of conviction or confidence on our part, and the wiggle room will be used to make it happen "off-centre".
In the story above, you've got to think that his 'larger self' was having a bit of fun, sending him on a journey outside for a distance was that going to need near-perfect timing, but was doable - just. He rose to the challenge, he gets his reward!
Meanwhile, you can skip phrasing altogether, by simply lying there and directly intending into a "feeling-state" of health. Basically, deleting/overwriting the (now temporary, historical) fact of illness. Become the larger you, and operate from there (outside > in), rather than being the small you, sending out wishes (inside > out).
This is fascinating! Any books on this technique of operating from the larger self?
You really need to feel it out for yourself - become aware of the larger background in which your experiences (thoughts, sensations, etc) arise and stand there as that, rather than as the mind or the body. Expand your presence into the world.
Neville Goddard's "summon the feeling of the wish fulfilled" technique, detailed here [http://www.thepowerofawareness.org/] for instance, is an approach. (Do a daily "update" of the universe each night to realign it with your desired version.) The feeling-awareness exploration of Peter Ralston is also helpful.
Mainly: experiment. If you 'send requests into the universe' then you are implicitly asking for the universe to do something on your behalf, as a separate entity. If you 'become' or 'recognise that you are the universe', then you are operating as first mover. (See Alan Chapman for how implicit assumptions affect work.)
Main final thought: This stuff, even the "direct" stuff, happens indirectly, in that you are operating at the "enfolded" level of experience, which subsequent "unfolded" objects and events will manifest in alignment with. You never really create that Ferrari, rather you update the "enfolded schema" of your world such that ownership of a Ferrari is part of it; subsequent sounds, images, feelings and sensations that arise in awareness will then unfold from that updated schema.
(Sorry, not sure that was very clear.)
EDIT: Remember that you are always your larger self. Sometimes you forget it and pretend to be a smaller self.
EDIT2: Another way to think of this is that each moment appears anew, unfolding based on the "enfolded schema", then disappears - and a new moment appears. The unfolded moment itself is transparent, it has no substance, and can't be altered. However, by updating the "enfolded schema" you have effectively "re-seeded the universe", updating its blueprint or script, so that subsequent moments will arise consistent with that modified architecture.
Q:[Deleted]
Good story.
I'm finding, the less specific you are the more you are vulnerable to your background beliefs of: a) what is possible, b) what you deserve.
If you secretly believe you don't deserve something, you'll set 'tests' for yourself so that you can 'prove' you are worthy. If you think that you must work hard for everything, then stressy-hurdle-jumping will be your world.
If you weren't willing to work for it, I wonder what would have happened.
...
Q: Wanted specifically "a large amount cash" to "appear in my lap." The next morning my friend called me who I haven't seen in 3 years asking if I could watch her relatively large pit bull, Cash.
You were lucky. Circumstances could have forced you into a life working at a strip-club, say, where indeed large amounts of cash would have "appeared in your lap" - when you were with your "special customers".
Tricky stuff, this.
Tricky, yes.
But could the pit bull Cash have been a symbol of the "real cash" to come? I mean, the very next morning, after 3 year absence. Hmmm. The You-niverse on the move.
(That is a funny story. I wonder if Res_hits did wind up pet-sitting and if Cash ever actually got up in his/her lap....)
Like other stories, often the first "comedy" response is a little tester. It's like "hey, I'm listening". So you should keep pushing on. Half-responses are perhaps a sign of half-hearted intention, as I said on another... oh, looks like I'm going there now > > >
Would't it have instead been a stripper being on his/her lap? I mean, if it was a good night for the stripper...
...hmm, so a life going to a strip club, and a girl called "Candy Cash" or similar sitting on their lap?
...
. . . God rewards and guides those who are aware of it's existence; even if people choose to view said God as a simple point of reference. From my own experience- God represents a Guidance System directed towards Goodness. It recognizes ones desires, wants and needs- it gives us those things when we ask for them as long as we are an active part of society- that way he (god or the universe) can work through the people of the world.
What a great way to put it - thanks for that thought-provoking reply. Interested in your "part of society / work through people" idea. Could you expand on that a bit?
If you desire something- you must be willing to go into the world so that it may reach you. You gotta be willing to meet 'God' half way in a sense. Lets say- you are looking for a specific material possession or experience; it doesn't do you any good to lock yourself up in your home indefinitely. Desires are found out there in the community / society- through networks- friendships- relationships- ect. It usually happens through a domino effect of coincidences and before you know it you are in front of what you originally wanted. Watch the Jim Carry film- Yes Man. I am not saying to be unwise about the opportunities that come your way but we naturally tend to not go along with opportunities due to lack of trust and fear of the unknown. Also sometimes life simply gives you what you need instead of what you want. There is always a lesson to be learned- even if you are not able to achieve your goals or you do achieve your goals but then fuck up. Instead of becoming angry- take a moment and retrace all your steps; things should add up if your attention span is broad enough. Thanks. Sincerely. -Al
Nice. Thanks.
...
Q: Well, I told TriumphantGeorge I would leave these forums, for I am "divesting myself of my stories" (which is great; I love it,) but lo! here I am with a story. Altho'... I don't really wish to tell it in first person, so I'll use the "let's call her Jean" tactic, which I've never liked!
Okay - so, let's say we have Abby, Bonnie, and Cara (ABC). (These folks are all in their 40s, at the time.) Abby is deeply in love with her bf, who dumped Bonnie to be with her. Abby is shy and reserved. The bf is striking and has women falling all over him all the time. Bonnie is stridently persistent, and will walk right up and grab bf's arm and drag him off when he is with Abby. (note: bf is a player; he cannot help it) Soooo, Abby detests Bonnie, who is originally from another city (Boston) 500 miles away.
"Just for fun", having no idea what she's doing ('tho she should have, having "manifested" a beautiful chair easily, & other things,) Abby begins to indulge a fantasy in which Bonnie is packed up (safely) in a big box which is all taped up and shipped to Boston. Abby loves this little fantasy, and visualizes it over and over again, enjoying the idea of detestable Bonnie in a big box on a freight train, swept off to Boston. Haha! Harmless Fun!
Well, after a little while Abby's very best friend of 20 years, Cara, who has always been local, tells Abby that her (Cara's) husband has been transferred to... Boston!! A city they've never been to! A city that never crossed Cara or husband's mind! "Detestable" Bonnie is unaffected by fantasy, but Abby's best friend and constant hang out buddy is the one swept 500 miles away.
If the foundation of the idea is negative feeling (this even goes for depressed thoughts, irritability, self-pity, blame - all that) then even unintentional musings can have a surprising "boomerang" effect.
Oh, yeah - Abby and bf break up after a year, of course, but Cara stays in Boston, having the time of her life, for over 10 years.
(I be Abby, obviously. :) I could tell you a dozen of these kinds of stories. This one is the most amusing. I won't tell the sad ones.
Heh, good, glad you broke your decision.
So here's the thing, is the "boomerang effect" a law of the universe, or a law of your-self? Just as thinking you don't deserve something can mean you don't get it, or have to 'prove yourself' when others don't - so can you having the background belief that wishing bad things means you get it back atcha be the true cause of this?
If I did such a thing - and, being ruthless and not believing anything that isn't to my own benefit - would I have got shot of "Bonnie" and kept "Cara"?
* * *
TG Comments: /r/Psychonaut/
POST: This sub doesn't feel too grounded in reality to me.
I understand in a general sense that we are all one because we are experiencing the same moment (all existence) but fail to see how this colourful language helps beyond that.
Those ideas arise from direct experiences. The same ideas come up again and again in history from various independent traditions. Sure, they are interpretations - but the core experience isn't a general sense of a lack of division or a convergence, it is a direct knowing by experience of this.
In the same way as, say, touching a table surface you know that it is a hard surface. You don't know this generally or through building a conceptual model; it is simply true.
The poetic words and meanderings are then an attempt to put into language something that can't really be put into language. Without the experience behind you, those words don't have much meaning. Just as the word "red" or - better - the world "love" wouldn't mean anything if you had never had the corresponding experiences.
Yes, you assign language meaning through experience.. language is symbolic.
Now --
-- if I have an experience that you've not had, and it's not an experience that has a corresponding visual component so you can't "see me do it" (i.e. I'm not snowboarding), does that make it less "real"?
If there is one thing we can all agree on is that there is an objective reality, Solipsism isn't what we are discussing here (and I doubt someone who genuinely believes Solipsism would budge with their opinion on the truth of it).
[QUOTE]
Solipsism:
Solipsism (i/ˈsɒlɨpsɪzəm/; from Latin solus, meaning "alone", and ipse, meaning "self") is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.
[END OF QUOTE]
No, not Solipsism but we want to be clear what we are counting as "real" and not and how the concept of "objective" is arrived at. (And it is a concept, albeit a good one which accurately describes much of our subjective experience.)
We have to admit that we infer what is objective via communication, and that there is a fuzzy area potentially. We discount certain experiences from the "shared" because we lack a way of conveying it.
What we count as "objective" becomes the lowest common denominator of subjective experience.
Yep! There is a lot of interesting aspects of life lost through language. This scene from waking life describes the problem of language in a very good way! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvnQu30kQ2c]
I am a big fan of that film, good reference!
Musing...
Actually, maybe that's a better angle. Rather than "oneness experience", the experience of lucid dreaming and even dreaming in colour are examples of areas which straddle the boundary between objective and subjective. They are subjective experiences but have objective acknowledgement. For a long time it was thought that people dreamed only in black and white - until they didn't. Similarly, our notions of consciousness precluded being awake in a dream, until they didn't.
Putting aside the content of lucid dreams, the fact of lucid dreams is becoming accepted - does this count as part of "objective reality"? Even though it requires practice and training to have the experience?
Of course, the content and meaning of dreams is a different issue. It doesn't help us say what a dream is. I suppose similarly, even if everyone had a "oneness" experience one night, and brain patterns correspondingly changed for the period, it would tell us that there was an experience, but not what it was.
EDIT: The problem with "oneness" is that it really doesn't have any correspondence to a physical act (e.g. in a lucid dreaming, people twitching their eyes by arrangement). It is simply knowledge. And not knowledge of events or relationships either; it makes no predictions. It suffers from the shared language problem, and the shared content problem.
I actually have had DMT many times and high dose mushrooms. The experiences have been reality and life changing but I understand it is brain chemistry being effected and don't feel the need to describe anything as mystical.
Do you understand that, or do you think-assume that? Certainly brain activation changes, but that doesn't explain the actual experience at all. For instance, if I reach an insight about my life during an experience, I cannot find that insight via fMRI, etc. I cannot find the experience in chemistry. So I think both sides - both angles of exploration and description - are valid, but they are "about" different things.
Q: I have never heard of someone 'think-assume'ing. I am sure you just mean 'assume' on its own.
If you think you can't track/analyse an experience down to certain levels scientifically you are very unaware of the breakthroughs in science in the last 15 years.
And even if we couldn't track an experience and measure its value it has on you with certain brain chemicals released such as dopamine that still nothing to do with whether the hallucinations from drug-related or sober experiences have any truth to the nature of our reality.
It was meant to be a "/".
Let's jump to it:
- Does anyone ever have an "objective experience"?
- How do we decide what is "objective" and what is "subjective"?
- How do we decide what is a hallucination and what is not? It's not easy.
EDIT: Just realised I've started two strands on this which kinda overlap. Let's let them both run for one more?
Q: Broadly we need to clarify what objective and subjective mean.
A proposition is generally considered objectively true (to have objective truth) when its truth conditions are met and are "bias-free"; that is, existing without biases caused by, feelings, ideas, etc. of a sentient subject.
So basically to answer all your questions; reality is objective by definition because it is what is real, we as sentient beings experience the world subjectively. There is no such thing as an objective reality and subjective reality working separately, the subjective reality feeds from the objective reality but runs it through the animalistic filter. Both are happening at once.
Yes, let's define!
Perhaps what you've done there is to define "the real" as:
- That which can be experienced subjectively, and
- Can be described to another and understood, and
- Seems to happen "over there" rather than "over here" (where my thoughts and feelings seem to be), and
- Has a stability or persistence to it over a reasonable timescale.
We suppose that it is fed by something we call "objective reality" (which is a concept we have), that this underlies our individual experiences, and that is why we can discuss experiences. However, all we are really establishing is that there is a commonality of descriptions which are a subset of our larger subjective experiences.
So, experiences we can shared descriptions of we call "real" and the rest not. The middle ground is that there are experience some people have had and others have not. Does this mean that their experiences are not "real"? What if having a particular experience requires training to have?
How many people need to have the experience before it is real - or are we only including over-there experiences?
What I'm getting at is, people who describe having a "oneness" experience can be describing an objective reality. We might detect the brain lighting up when someone meditates and they report that experience. How does this differ from the brain lighting up which someone is presented with visual stimulus, and later reports "seeing"
Subjective descriptive language has nothing to do with reality and truth.
Sorry to interject but - really?
It think that this is where you are going astray. Science is itself a subjective endeavour, which chooses to limit accepted findings to those that can be described in language and communicated easily between people. And it is very successful because of this. However, this means it deals with a subset of subjective experience; it does not mean it deals with an "objective" world.
Poetic language is an attempt to point to the aspects of subjective experience that cannot be easily described, and cannot be encapsulated in scientific conceptual frameworks. Typically, poetic language tries to capture the environment within which the subset of science operates. If there is a proposed fundamental truth to reality, if it cannot be subjectively directly perceived then it is simply an idea about reality, not reality itself.
Science never claims to find truth, only to connect "observed regularities" into a coherent description.
Q: I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing here. I am saying that language is merely a descriptive tool of reality.
Just because we can describe something with language doesn't mean it is or has to be true... or have anything to do with reality.
I can describe an amazing purple dragon in the sky above me but that has NOTHING to do with the reality that there is no dragon.
Right, perhaps we are slightly out of alignment. It's not about the dragons though. This isn't about thoughts, this is about direct experience. See if I can be clearer.
Better:
All language is surely an attempt to describe experience. All language describes a subject experience really. Science, implicitly, focussed on observed regular experiences that are seen, visual experiences. It is the most shareable aspect of experience.
Sound and texture too can be translated reasonably well into visual representations, which are then described and shared by language.
One aspect of experience that cannot be easily captured is that of feeling/sensing/direct knowing/direct intuition (we don't even have a proper word for it). Art is an attempt to render that visually. Poetic language is an attempt to invoke imagery to point towards it.
This aspect of experience is as much a part of reality as seeing, hearing, touch - all of which are actually subjective. However our inability to communicate about this particular aspect means it cannot be cleanly represented like the others.
The highlights:
- This isn't about thinking-about things.
- All experience is subjective.
- Some parts of subjective experience (seeing, hearing, touch) are more easy to create shareable representations of than others.
- Just because some aspects of subjective experience are not easy to share in this way does not mean they are not "part of reality". We call this subset "objective reality" but really we mean "easy to share via language".
- It is possible that key information about reality may come in the form of this felt-sense. Without having had the experience, other people will think the description of this as meaningless and poetic. Just as a man who has never seen colours might think descriptions of the world in terms of "vibrant red and blue" as poetic nonsense which isn't part of "reality".
POST: In your opinion, what entails being "awake", and conversely, being "asleep"?
Awakening is realising that you're not the protagonist character in the movie, you're the awareness in the cinema watching the entire drama unfold.
Or you are the screen on which the movie image is playing out. To say you're watching means you are separate. In fact you are both the experiencer and the material from which the experience is made.
This leads me to say:
- Being "asleep" means you've narrowed your attention onto the patterns of experience and are arbitrarily identifying with some of them (e.g. thoughts and body sensations, the concept or feeling thought of "me") and not others (e.g sights and sounds at a distance from body sensations).
- Being "awake" means your attention has opened out to include the context, the background space in which those patterns arise - identifying with that, with "consciousness", and realising that all patterns arise within that. In other words, "it's all you, the real you".
This is awake/asleep in the sense of direct perception, in the sense of understanding "what you really are". There's obviously political, character, and social-based awakenings that one can have too.
Depression, I'd suggest, can be a contraction of attention onto a particular pattern perhaps without knowing it - perhaps as a result of controlling and not releasing - leading to a "stuck thought" or "incomplete movement". For this, I like your analogy of getting tired of holding onto the controller. In truth, you shouldn't be holding onto the controller at all. You should be "directing from afar" by indirect request and with patience, rather than grabbing onto and forcibly pushing parts of your reality around.
POST: What is the most concise explanation of all your knowledge?
[POST]
I've had a number of profound realizations about the nature of the universe and consciousness that make it seem obvious that everything is wonderfully connected and unfolding beautifully. The problem I have though is that this requires being in a particularly high place (whether through substances or meditation) and requires being able to hold a large number of complex ideas in mind simultaneously to see how things are connected and get somewhat of a birds eye view of things. When I'm not in that state, I tend to disbelieve the realizations I had since I no longer have that perspective.
Whenever I come down from those places now I try to pack it all into a way that my normal consciousness can comprehend and believe, but I find that it's never quite enough. What is the most useful idea or ideas that you use to remind yourself of that place when you're not actually there? For example, one of the most concise things I've come across was this post on /r/DMT. I was amazed by how much it related to my own experiences in so few words . What has really summed it up for you?
THE DMT realization
- "Woah, I'm one with the universe."
- "Hold on, subjective universe/reality is a construction of my mind?"
- "Wait a second, the universe is God!"
- "I'm talking to God."
- "We are all a part of God."
- "We are God."
- "I AM GOD"
[END OF POST]
Good linked post.
"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."
-– Alan Watts
But after the experience of being the net, you withdraw to being a dew drop again - looking out, unaware and unable to directly experience that you are still reflecting everything.
POST: Does my body and consciousness makes the complete me or their individual existence is sufficient to concur who I am?
I am changing every instant of time...
This means that what you are is neither the mind or the body? My favourite little exercise for this attached below. Whatever you really, really are, it can't be something that is changing nor can it be something you are aware of as an object. The eye can see images, but it cannot see an image of itself - only an image about itself, which is not the same thing.
The 'Switch Off Your Senses' Exercise
This little thought experiment is be done '1st person', as if you are having the experience, rather than thinking-about it:
- Sit comfortably. Now imagine turning off your senses one by one:
- Turn off vision. Are you still there?
- Turn off sound. Still there?
- Turn off bodily sensations, such as the feeling of the chair beneath you. Uh-huh?
- Turn off thoughts. Where/what are you now?
- Some people are left with a fuzzy sense of being "located". This is just a residual thought. Turn that off too.
You're still there, you realise; you are a wide-open "aware space" in which those other experiences appeared. This background awareness is the only thing that does not change over time.
POST: What is truth?
Two sorts of truth:
- Conceptual Truth: Systems of thought that are coherent, self-consistent. These "feel true" simply because their parts are true relative to the other parts. Conceptual truth may or may not correspond to reality - i.e. direct perception.
- Direct Truth: The truth of direct experience. I touch a table and discover that its surface is hard. That is directly true; it is my experience right now.
The complication: Adopting a conceptual framework actually deforms your direct experience according to its patterns. We can experience our conceptual truths (beliefs) as being directly true (as filtered). Fortunately, this "overlay" can be identified, dissolved or seen through.
Is there algorithm to the processes we use to identify Direct Truth as a species?
Well, as a personal endeavour one can shift away from thinking-about to direct-sensing. A movement from thinking to knowing. However, this cannot be communicated. The universe we experience is within ourselves. Language involves dividing that experience into "parts" and "narrative". Immediately, in the effort to communicate, we have destroyed the essence of the experience. All that can be done is to point to where that experience is to be found. It cannot be spoken, or conceptualised.
We can transfer conceptual frameworks between one another, and thereby infect others with the same "overlay" or "template" which we are using, but we cannot give someone the truly direct truth by this method. Obviously, if we throw away enough and only focus on the simplest, regular aspects of experience using the simplest concepts, we can get somewhere. For instance, if we say the world is made of up lines and corners and throw away almost everything else, then we can develop shared knowledge and even deterministic predictions of what lines and corners will do in the future.
That's universal language - eventually - but it doesn't seem like something worth shooting for other than for making, y'know, tables and chairs and stuff. (Nothing wrong with tables and chairs, or electron microscopes, but their creation isn't showing us "how things really, really work".)
truth: being in accord with fact or reality
The problem is, the facts change with the being.
Q: [Deleted]
It does - except "the truth": The background awareness that you are, because that is not an object or a structure and so it cannot change. It doesn't "exist" and so it is permanent.
This is the direct truth that is always accessible, always here, because it is that from which everything else arises and fades.
POST: When do you call bullshit?
Things are useful, or not. Or fun, or not. I'll happily enjoy any way of looking at things for a while, because often it can't make your world seem more interesting and exciting - dream kicks! - and just adopting a view does have effects. Nothing is completely bullshit, but nothing is really true either.
Fundamentally, the only thing you can be sure of it that you are experiencing what you are experiencing. Everything else is up for grabs. But if anyone talks of "the nature of reality" in terms of some sort of new "building block" or relationship, then that needs to be given a wide berth.
The hipster-hippie crowd usually know the best coffee shops though. Sometimes that's worth enduring a crystal conversation or two, surely. ;-)
Q1: I usually test people with the chemtrails concept. If they laugh, we're good.
Oh yeah, good.
POST: Do not play life like a chess game
[POST]
Or you may find yourself missing out on the point of life.
[END OF POST]
A1: Checkmate!
Q1: :)
Q2: Well, the beauty of chess is there are so many different ways to play it! You can play aggressively or defensively. You can play your own strategy or try to foil your opponent's strategy. You can calculate 10 moves ahead, or react to each move as a new situation or opportunity. I think you're missing the point of chess.
Q3: Yes. But which strategy of chess is simply to enjoy the playing of the game?
Q4: I think what should be asked is. Are the players aware they are playing chess?
Or... is chess playing the players?
Q5: What exactly is the point of life? I mean, it's really what you make it be. Hell, I might even go as far as to say that is just a big game.
Q6: I prefer to think of it as a dream, either way, I am going to appreciate the experience.
Who is this "I"...?
And so on. I guess we can waste our time working it out, instead of living it. Chess can be played as an adventure, or a problem to be solved. It can be felt and lived, or stale and stale-mate.
POST: Is it possible to dream awake?
You can do direct-entry dreaming. I first got tipped off on this from David Fontana's Meditator's Handbook. Forget about "brain chemistry", just practice creating multi-modal imagery with your imagination. Then work on stepping into the imagery.
After that, creating alternate stable worlds is quite doable - see here [http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-control/46571-infinite-universes-lucid-dreaming.html].
POST: David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness? (TED Talk)
Cross posting this comment from the /r/RationalPsychonaut thread in the "other discussions" tab, credit to /u/dalebewan:
There are essentially three 'ideas' for how to answer "What is consciousness?" presented in this video.
- That consciousness is purely an emergent property of the action of our brains. This is actually something I've always been most comfortable with; that is to say, if we could perfectly replicate a brain, the consciousness within that brain would be identical to the original (until it diverged through different experiences).
- That consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like "space", "time", and the base forces such as electromagnetism, the weak and strong nucleic forces, and gravity.
- That consciousness is universal, in that it is in itself a description of information integration. The more something integrates information, the more conscious it is. A human brain is an excellent information integrator and thus 'very' conscious. A mouse less so, but still significant. A worm even less. A photon of light many many orders of magnitude less (but still non-zero). But nothing is without consciousness.
When watching the video and listening to these three ideas, what struck me is that it's quite reasonable to say they're all the exact same thing, just different ways of looking at it (primarily the first and the third; but the second still fits to a degree). Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain because consciousness is a universal property that describes information integration, and the brain is an excellent information integrator.
Agreed. Somewhat, though, they are distinct because of a confusion between consciousness and self-consciousness.
Consciousness is the "material" from which the universe is made. But without any patterns within it, it cannot experience itself. Only when the blanket of consciousness has folds within it, can it be conscious of itself. Like a sheet of eyes, it cannot see itself unless it adopts a shape, contours, that one part may "see" another part.
So:
- Consciousness is the fundamental "non-material material".
- Self-consciousness is when consciousness forms itself into a pattern, so one part of the pattern can experience itself relative to another part.
- The more structure, the more "folds" there are in the patterns, the more sophisticated and subtle this experience of content and self.
Does that join the three notions together?
POST: A paradigm shift: The Primacy of Consciousness
[POST]
Amit Goswami is a quantum physicist who is challenging the scientific community with his views on the primacy of consciousness as opposed to the unflinching scientific objectivity that is the dominant paradigm. The full documentary is incredible.
[END OF POST]
Idealism!
Q: hmm, a lot of flakes pretend to be quantum physicists to get cred in spiritual or metaphysics circles, but this guy seems to be the real deal.
I found this interview [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnQ63AOrs6s] where he's talking about awakening.
Interesting guy.
Interesting guy.
...with an interesting hat.
POST: Isn't our inability to recognize dreams from within, reason to question our beliefs of what is real?
[POST]
We all have evidence that we are inept at distinguishing dream from reality. We have all forgotten ourselves within a dream.
[END OF POST]
Yes! :-) [Outside: The Dreaming Game]
Q1: Are you suggesting that realities are interchangeable, like video games in a console? If so, why play this game? I can imagine a more enjoyable experience.
I'm suggesting, mainly, that your experience is that of being an open aware space, with content arising within it - including the dream character you call "you" - and that dreams and waking life therefore seem to be on the same level - rather than dreams being in the Russian Doll of waking life.
So, when this waking life experience fades out, another one might fade in.
Why this "game"? It seems part of the design of this game is that we don't get to remember what we were playing before, and why we chose it. I suspect that's because it makes it more exciting - to think that it's "really real". Of course, lots of us twig at some point during play that all is not as it seems. We never are in danger after all.
Q2: yes, it is. but the hard and more intersting question is, how should this realization change me and my actions?
Q3: If I suddenly found out that none of this was real I would just go sit somewhere until I "died." Refusal and all of that. I imagine if all of this wasn't real there would be some sort of being who is at a higher level. I'd basically just be saying "no" to them while hoping I persist through whatever long enough to meet them and ask "what the fuck were you thinking?"
EDIT: I should mention when I say "found out that none of this was real" I mean that I was told that it is not real. How else could you know for sure?
It is "real" - it just isn't "real" in the way you previously thought. For instance, thoughts are "real" thoughts, apparent objects are "real" apparent objects. It's just that they are only made of sensations; there's no "solid, external world" behind it. Your theory was wrong, that's all.
It is in this sense that this is a dream - and that the world around you (a dream environment) and your apparent self (a dream figure) are "dream objects", made only of "mind". You are actually the background to this experience, not the content.
Do you really only continue to live because you think this is real in some solid way? Can you not enjoy experiences for what they are, not for what you think they could be? Ever had a lucid dream? You realise you a dreaming while in a dream and now, free of fear and with the power to influence you dream more directly, you can explore it more fully...
Your comment:
I imagine if all of this wasn't real there would be some sort of being who is at a higher level. I'd basically just be saying "no" to them while hoping I persist through whatever long enough to meet them and ask "what the fuck were you thinking?"
Reminds me of this:
Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.'
And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean that's what time is. I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's two thousand and one. And there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in."
And then she [the woman I was talking to] tells me that actually this is the narrative of everyone's life. That, you know, behind the phenomenal difference, there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from the "no" to the "yes." All of life is like, "No thank you. No thank you. No thank you." then ultimately it's, "Yes, I give in. Yes, I accept. Yes, I embrace." I mean, that's the journey. I mean, everyone gets to the "yes" in the end, right?
-- Ch. 18. Trapped in a Dream, Waking Life Movie Transcript
EDIT: Just refreshed and saw the later replies.
If the experience of life is an illusion then no one is truly experiencing anything. It may feel real, but it is not real in this case.
Isn't the problem here what you mean by "real"? It's all "real". Not truly experiencing anything? Everyone is experiencing themselves, but not as a "person". Is the universe only valid if it was created by something external to us? Is there only a "point" to life in that case?
Seems a bit arrogant to go around telling people they are wrong about subjects such as this. Perhaps "I do not agree" would be better. Or do you have proof that you are right that can be verified?
Hmm. I wasn't saying you were wrong 'in real life'. The reply was in the context of the OP saying "this is a dream" and if that was the case, then our theory that there was a solid world behind it would be wrong, and you saying that "in that case, I'd just sit about". I wasn't meaning that you were wrong.
Again, please remember this was all originally about a hypothetical situation. You're talking to me like I actually believe these things and it's confusing.
Sorry, that's just for convenience - by being in the comments, I'm assuming we're "taking the OP proposal as the starting point" and so don't need to keep caveating. Assume "in this scenario" throughout.
Curiosity is the only thing that keeps me going. I feel a need to know how it all works.
That's the tricky bit. If it is a dream-like reality, then any explanation we encounter, any evidence that it was a "solid world made of matter" would also itself just be a dream experience. There is no way out of that. There turns out to be no "how it works", just "how it appears to work when we look at it today".
So instead of curiosity being the driver (it has been for me in the past), it would have to be creativity that became the driver?
Q3: How would it be wrong? If it's a dream then someone has to wake up eventually. If that's a dream too then someone else must too. My argument wasn't for a "solid world." It was talking about the highest level of existence that is being perceived whether whoever is perceiving knows it to be or not.
As far as my feelings go, I don't understand how I can make it any clearer other than saying that I will never be satisfied with existence. When awareness is dissolved I will be satisfied. That is what I consider truly being awake. That is the way out.
No, I do not agree that creativity is the driver. More like the opposite, whatever that is. I do think creativity has its place though. I say curiosity because if I were to suddenly discover proof that this wasn't the "top level capable of perception" then I would not want to go on creating anything adding to our collective awareness.
I think the idea of a "top level" implies a structured hierarchy, and I don't really believe in that - it seems to follow from the notion that we wake up from dreams, that dreams are somehow like a smaller Russian Doll contained within the Russian Doll of waking life.
The experience itself isn't like that though, surely?
I don't wake up "into reality". What seems to happen is that the dream world dissolves, and then "this" world appears - in the same space. One doesn't seem to be inside the other, or higher than the other. I can be 'lucid' inside a dream without switching levels in some sense; can I not be 'lucid' inside this 'waking dream'?
When you die, it might not be "you" that switches perspective to a higher level. If might just be that "you" remain, and the world dissolves. And something else forms in its place.
So, no, as it stands now you cannot be lucid within this "waking dream" if were in fact a dream. You can only delude yourself into believing you are.
Hmm. Thought-provoking.
In a lucid dream, we might realise that we are "dreaming" because we recall "another world" that we were in before sleeping - lucid by memory. However, the nature of our experience can be different to what we assumed, and that is a different path to lucidity.
In fact, I'd suggest that when I get lucid in a dream, it's not that I remember a larger world, rather that I recall the concept of dreaming and my experience fits that concept after that realisation. And this is something we can do in waking life - realise that our experience doesn't correspond to the "solid, mechanistic" theory that we hold of it. We don't need to wake up from the dream, we can just wake up to the dream.
For you to become truly lucid within this waking life it would first need to be proved a dream with science.
Which could never happen, because science is within the dream (following this idea along). However, I can notice that things aren't how they are meant to be. This can only be done by 1st person, personal experience though.
In a lucid dream, we awaken to the fact that we aren't just the dream character we seem to be, we are the entire context of the dream. To become lucid in waking life would to be realise something of the same thing: you are not a person, you are the background environment?
advancements in mathematics and physics
The problem with simulations is that you can always just say that the simulation is such that it looks like this. It depends on whether we mean "simulation" as in 3d mechanism (content matters), or "simulation" as in, we are each presented with a VR-like experience (content is arbitrary) - like Donald Hoffman's idea of a multimodal user interface. The first is just a different version of materialism - it just means the container is different - the latter is a version of the dream/video-game idea. Any content-based proof of a dream while within a dream is made of "dream" - even an apparent memory of there being an encompassing 'waking world' - until we actually wake up from it. So proof would have to be non content-based to wake up to it.
So I'm thinking the 3d lattice idea, for instance, isn't really a restriction that tests for the condition.
I agree that any one of us can only wake up to the dream. And, yes, this would mean knowing, with proof, that we are collectively the sum of all of all our existence. The same concept would apply even if you were to call it a simulation.
Yes, it doesn't matter what we call it, it all just means "we are not living in and as an atoms-and-structure mechanistic world after all". So, meditation and altered state and non-dual experiences, can they point to this? Because I can conceive of no 3rd person 'objective' evidence that can prove it, because that's just more "experiences" and can't really point to the nature of the experiences?
Any content-based proof of a dream while within the dream still proves that it is a dream. So I fail to see an issue with it being made of that dream.
Actually, "proof" is the wrong word, strictly speaking. My error. If a dream is truly a super-flexible space that contain any experience, then I was getting at that it would be impossible to prove with 3rd-person observation. All that can be proved is that other descriptions are incorrect in their correspondence to experience...
When you mention the memory you're talking about the dream as if it itself is the sentient being.
Memory doesn't necessarily mean this. A tray of jello has a "memory", in that if you pour warm water over it, it will "remember" the path of the water and subsequent pouring will tend to flow along previous paths. However, it the jello was "consciousness" it could be said to experience the pathways, the flow.
Note: not necessarily self consciousness, as in an ability to reflect on itself. Only the ability to experience what was within it. Of course, it might label one of those jello-impressions with the word "me" - and then get confused, thinking it was that particular jello-impression, rather than the whole jello tray.
It is a projection of a sentient being. The memory exists within you. You are the source of the dream. The dream isn't the source of you. There is no need to wake up from it to realize this.
Right, but. It depends on the "you". The character/person you seem to be in the dream - the thoughts, body sensations - that "you" is generated by the dream. The dream is the source of the "you" that you seem to be in the dream. The larger "you" is the whole of the dream, it turns out once you've woken up. You could realise this during the dream, if you could find some evidence that the "small you" was not in fact the real you, and that you were in fact the whole environment and the source of that environment. Leading us to...
I do not think meditation, or altered states, can bring anyone any closer to the nature of experiences than walking down the street. To understand the nature of experience we would need to first fully understand and be able to replicate consciousness. To say that anyone is truly experiencing anything right now is delusion. It is putting faith in unverifiable experience.
I disagree.
I'd say the way to understand the nature of experience is to fully investigate your personal experience directly. When in a night-time dream, the way (one way) to realise you are dreaming and become lucid is to note a difference between the dream and wake-time experience. However, the dream content can still be completely identical to waking life experience. How would you tell the difference if you couldn't remember a "waking level"? In most dream, in fact, we don't.
Examining dream character's brains and looking through electron microscopes in a dream wouldn't tell you that you were dreaming. Scientists have dreams like that all the time, and don't - in the dream - realise they are dreaming.
Perhaps waking life is one such dream?
If there is such a hypothetical approach - to identify we are dreaming when we don't remember a larger "waking life", or let's say "alternative world-experience to get rid of the layers metaphor - we could then apply that to this "waking level" to test, from a personal perspective, whether this daily life was dream-like in the same way. Again, the content of the dream is unreliable, it can only tell us that our in-dream theories are wrong as they apply to dream content. Examination of the content cannot tell us whether we are in a dream or not.
When I say "you" I don't mean who you see yourself as in everyday waking life. I mean whatever makes you fundamentally you, separate from everyone else.
Yeah, that's what the quotes are for, to emphasise that it's a constructed idea, a particular meaning rather than the general meaning, drawing attention to it.
A tray of jello does not have memories.
Jello has about as much memory as neurons, in the example. Y'know, it's a metaphor.
When I say "you" I don't mean who you see yourself as in everyday waking life. I mean whatever makes you fundamentally you, separate from everyone else. The dream does not create this. The dream can never create this.
And, what is it that makes you fundamentally you? If you don't know what that is, you can't comment on whether a dream can create it or not. If this is a dream, then it can obviously create everything you are experiencing.
Which scientist with electron microscopes have you been talking to? Working to figure out physics in a dream would be immensely harder due to the constantly changing environment.
I think we can agree that sleeping dreams are more flexible than waking life. It's not true that they can't be stable though: non-lucid dreams are usually more stable than lucid ones, and the variable nature of lucid dreams is down to the flaky expectations of the dreams; it's easy to have stable lucid dreams if you mentally commit to it.
And I'm pretty committed to waking life.
Are you saying if we discovered a philosophical zombie you would not begin to suspect that this is a dream?
You wouldn't know it was a philosophic zombie; you'd just think the person was a bit "strange". We meet people like that all the time. Perhaps they are p-zombies.
Examination of the content could tell us it's a dream if we collectively do in fact have a waking life we cannot remember now. It would just be a matter of locating the right information. So looking at the content for this purpose is not entirely useless.
What would the right information be?
See, I'm still not seeing how you plan to establish that this is or isn't a dream. We've put aside the ability to remember another waking life that's "higher up". So it's down to the content. Stability doesn't cut it, because some dreams are more stable than others; some are rock-solid. Any content we encounter in the dream is made of dream-stuff, it's self-referencing and so can't tell us about the nature of the background to the experience.
POST: pineal gland story/question.
[POST]
I hope this is the right place to ask, I feel like of any other subreddit I know of, my brothers and sisters could tell me. This requires some back story.
I first heard about "activating" your pineal gland threw a friend of mine, but she called it, "popping your front lobe" I've not been able to find anything on line referring to that practice. What I did find out on my own, and then afterwards some research is that you can make your pineal gland aware of its self.
I've been doing this in addition to meditation on and off for a few years. Pretty much when I reach the calm state of meditation, thoughts slow down or stop, and breathing is shallow and not forced. I begin "massaging" my brains pineal gland. I use to do this by imaging my hands coming up and reaching into my skull threw my eye sockets. Then by using my thumbs to rub part of my brain. Currently after enough practice I can do it with out meditating, and with out imagining my hands going into my skull, or holding my brain. It use to always just pulse. Just this pulsing feeling up and down threw that small part of my brain, never really did anything more than that, and I never felt that I got any benefit from it; yet, I kept doing it.
Last night something strange happened. Just thinking about it, typing it, and actively thinking; I can feel my brain cooling down. Like a cold chill, relaxing. Anyway, I was doing my normal thing while meditating. I begin to feel my brain more so that usual, like the pulsing of my pineal gland has begun to spread.
As more and more parts of my brain began to feel this it reached just over 50% and I felt this sudden chill on my brain. I could only chill about 85%. It also felt as if I was sitting further back in my mind than I normally do. Trying to explain this, my normal perception of my mind and body with my eyes closed, compared to during this "chilled brain" I felt almost disconnected from myself, but I wasn't, just sitting further back.
Afterwards I wanted to stop, I was unsure of this new territory and had already been at it for a while. My brain, with in 30 seconds had warmed up past a normal temperature and felt like I had a nice warm brain glow.... after about 5 minutes I felt normal.
No drugs were involved, and I'd like to find out more about what happened. Is this transcending into a higher state? Over activating my pineal gland to a dangerous level?
Thank you for your time.
[END OF POST]
Like seeing from the core [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml]? (Ignore the nature of the website, the article itself is from a conference and it's the only copy I could find with free access.)
Q: Thanks. I'll give it a read, about to go into work so I'll get back to you. Thanks again!!
Edit. I have enough time to read and reply before I have to clock in. I was laying in a dark room with my eyes closed so I can't recall my vision improving. I do however have pretty good eye sight. 20/13 when I was in high school and has been better than 20/20 during my yearly eye exams for work. I'll see what I can do with this new information.
From my experience, it's something more than just "things being in focus", say. It's also somehow about being "home and relaxed" and the seeing being effortless - just there and laid out before you. "Vision and awareness" rather than eye-sight?
Shifting your centre of attention - where you "look out from"; don't actually concentrate your attention there, keep it open - to different regions of your head and body (behind forehead, central line, lower base of skull, jaw, central chest, lower abdomen) gives experience quite a different "quality" I find.
Be interested to hear what you get from playing with it.
POST: I know it has been said for a long time, but I'm really starting to notice that a trend towards society waking up
[POST]
If you look at the front page of reddit right now there are advancements in science that are for the benefit of the Earth as opposed to big business. Fewer than 18% of Americans smoke cigarettes. We're seeing a population that is starting to focus their attention on the injustices of world and call BS. Ferguson may not be our brightest hour as a species, but it is a sign that things are heading in the right direction. People are fed up with nonsense and MORE importantly, willing to take action for that which makes sense.
The internet is informing us at newer and faster rates than ever before, and yeah, we're using it to spread memes - but we're using it to educate ourselves too. Mainstream media is dying out. The revolution of self-governed media intake has begun. This is huge.
I really feel society is not a lost cause anymore. I think we can salvage the good bits, with the aid of technology and action, for a future that is free and peaceful. It's not something I'm taking for granted, but it's something I have the motivation and belief that it is no longer futile to work towards. I call upon you, Psychonauts, to keep being you, and doing it in as many ways as you can or want to! Our society is no longer a place where free-thinkers must hide-away in secret societies. Upload your thoughts to twitter, start blogs, tell your friends what you truly feel about the world! Together we might just wake up in a paradise...
The truth is no longer taboo. Spread it like semen. The facets of control will try to suppress us but like a teenager who sees cleavage we are unstoppable in our desire to undress truth from the restrictive bondage of censorship that has been imposed on us for far too long.
Even now I almost went to bed without posting this, out of fear it was too melodramatic, but fuck it. We vote with our voices and actions. Use this information as you will.
[END OF POST]
The truth is no longer taboo. Spread it like semen. The facets of control will try to suppress us but like a teenager who sees cleavage we are unstoppable in our desire to undress truth from the restrictive bondage of censorship that has been imposed on us for far too long.
So, who's going to set up /r/TruthFap? ;-)
Much of what you say is true, but not in terms of the history of the planet, really just this societal go-round. The free access to historical information is the big change, but societies have risen send fallen in this cycle of understanding-and-overthrow for centuries. It is rarely about transformation; it is usually about reset.
Q1: /r/TruthPorn sounds better IMO
Probably fits a bit better.
EDIT: Deleted my bad idea in the second sentence.
Q2: It is about consistency. The best analogy of it is that it is like driving a car. Just because the car couldn't always be at 60mph doesn't mean that you should stop driving the car, when you know that is only doing it again and again to always be in that state. So, it is matter of also not judging how you need to do it again and again, because even we do same things in our lives everyday. You always have to wake up from your bed, eat, take a shit, go to work, doing what you do everyday, rest, sleep, etc.
Why would having a peaceful and connected society be any different? For corruption, crimes, and so-called injustice acts that cause an effect to society, they must be repeatedly done to continue to exist.
Perhaps peace gives rise to violence, justice give rise to corruption, calm gives rise to the storm. A reset gives rise to a overshoot gives rise to a reset.
POST: Are we just biological computers with unconscious on/off switches? Is it possible we are all being run by a program called FreeWill.exe?
"The Eyes are the WindowsTM to the Soul."
If you look really closely in the mirror at your eyes, you'll see a small piece of lettering: "Version 3.1". It explains a lot.
POST: My limbo
I feel like I can gain no further insights about life.
Just give up on it. You'll never have any intellectual answers that satisfy; you'll just keep creating more complex thought-structures (stories) that are circular. Take a step back. If there is "an answer" or a "how things really are", then the answer must already be here, and how things are now must be how things really are.
Q: This is what I try to do, but it never goes away
Stop trying even to make it go away; that persists it. Just let it sit there - and go about your other business.
Q: Thanks, I'll try
Haha, no don't try!
Today's Ill-Conceived Metaphor
Think of it as, say, having a loose thread on your shirt. The thing to do is, leave the thread (nagging question) alone. Occasionally you might catch sight of the thread, and be tempted to get 'pulled in' to pulling at the thread. But you know that's just going to make your shirt (concentration, focus, balance, thoughts) unravel - you've done it before, it didn't help - so you let go of that idea and carry on with your work. You leave it be.
Then one day you realise it wasn't a loose thread at all, but part of the overall pattern of your shirt. Suddenly you see it! It's so obvious, it's just there without any effort!
The more you concentrated on the thread, the less you could see the whole pattern. You squinted your eyes to focus, you bent your vision out of shape, you got in too close. The more you pulled at the thread, you disrupted the pattern, ruined it.
Only when you gave up, and got on with other things, could your senses and perspective settle, and be ready for the insight.
POST: What is your theory of everything?
Q1: Everything is. Maybe.
Q2: Is is what is. Its all is.
All is Is.
POST: Rupert Spira discusses the nature of awareness
Yeah. Recommend his books, Presence Vol I & II. You can read a sample here. Greg Goode's book The Direct Path is similar.
the felt sense of separation being much more persistent than the intellectual view
Yes, this. Oddly, was just talking to someone about this very point, try to come up with the best way to describe it.
Because the "felt sense of separation" is basically a persistent tension or a "stuck, attached thought" in your direct, ongoing experience. Thoughts about being separate or whole come and go, as does all thinking-about. Meanwhile, direct-experiencing persists and is literally how the world is for you, right now.
You can only get rid of it by it happening to collapse, by attending to it while also attending to space (what Spira's work does), or more forcefully by deliberately overwriting it with open space via intention.
But since people don't really understand that they are experiencing a "sensory-mind-dream" in the first place, this doesn't make any sense to them. Spiral is by far the best at leading to this in modern language, I reckon. Although Francis Lucille is a good read too (related).
Glad to hear about the book and mediations. I'm always on the look out for new exercises for myself and others.
Q1: Well said! I've had to discover this in a groping-in-the-dark kind of way as clarifying the view and settling the mind chatter didn't bring the liberation I had expected. I think of the body as a sort of data compression for the long-term storage of thought, and exploring that is a sort of "down and through" process instead of the "up and out" (mental transcendence) that I was hoping for. I guess that's why everyone's talking about embodiment these days.
deliberately overwriting it with open space via intention.
I'm not totally sure I understand what you mean. Got an example?
I'm always on the look out for new exercises for myself and others.
Same here. Please share anything good you come across. I'm sure you know of Douglas Harding's brilliant experiments. I happened to notice your link to Gendlin's "felt sense", and I've found his focusing really useful. Tom Stone has some good techniques in a PDF called Pure Awareness (can't link from phone), but there's a bit of cheese factor too.
Embodiment
Yes, quite so! One of my first insights came from trying to improve my eyesight: I found an article about "seeing from the core", which basically amounted to shifting the location you are centred in and "looking out from". Then I encountered someone who suggested that rather than attending to the head area (third eye or whatever), one should go as "deep down as possible" - effectively, your lower core.
Effectively, what you're after is to centre yourself in a body-space location that doesn't suffer from accumulated tension and hence is a source of ongoing thought-generation, nor leads to the accumulation of tension.
I'm not totally sure I understand what you mean. Got an example?
Lie down (constructive rest position), get relaxed. Let go completely. Now expand your "presence" (whatever you want to call that, Peter Ralston calls it feeling-awareness, which I like) to fill the volume of your body, and then beyond into the room. Now intend that to be open empty space. You will experience push-back because - like with Gendlin's Focusing - you are asserting something (empty openness) that isn't true. Stay with it. Gradually your current experience will move towards the intended experience, the goal you've set it, of open space. Essentially, you are simply accelerating the natural release/dissolving process.
Same here. Please share anything good you come across.
This one is fun (turning off your senses and recognising you are still there, couched in this instance of the subreddit's "life is a video game" premise), and the "where is your real hand?" exercise is good for pointing out you are in a dream (you can't point to your real hand, it is "outwith the experiential space"; if you say "in my head" you try to find your "real head", so in what sense do you have a real hand or a real head?).
Yes, Douglas Harding is very good. Although I will say that it can lead to the sense of being absent in the head area without it necessarily expanding to the experience of being a complete background to all experience, and he doesn't really talk in that way. Not heard of Tom Stone; will give him a look. Greg Goode's The Direct Path, um, what else...
Anything that isn't the Tony Parsons "you-can't-do-anything", repeat-the-same-words approach!
Q1: Great stuff, TriumphantGeorge! I'm not familiar with Ralston, so I look forward to checking him out.
I really get the lowering, or balancing of the the centre of attention, cuz I've found the sense of being behind the eyes to be the source of a lot of unpleasant energy buildup in the head.
I just got back from a week of working one-on-one with a retired Direct Path/Daoist teacher, doing all kinds of embodiment exercises and learning about the different bodies (energy, astral etc.). I'm still sorting out what seems useful at the moment.
Nice to chat with you. You've clearly done a lot of exploring. Feel free to drop me a note if you come across anything inspiring. Cheers!
edit: Oh, and by the way, your game analogy and diction was stellar :)
cuz I've found the sense of being behind the eyes to be the source of a lot of unpleasant energy buildup in the head.
It can be. The head is a tricky area. There is a spot about halfway back, on the vertical centre line, which feels like "home", but most people go too far back or too far forward. It's easier to go further down that line, to the chest or abdomen. Why do it the hard way? :-)
Nice to chat with you. You've clearly done a lot of exploring. Feel free to drop me a note if you come across anything inspiring. Cheers!
And you - happy exploring!
POST: I have crippling social phobia.
Meditation, mindfulness, daily relaxation, contemplate the nature of what you are?
The longer it goes on, the more "stuck inside" you can get. Anxiety becomes a feeling that you, ironically, become comforted by or afraid to let go of, without knowing it.
You need to expand your "attention/presence out" into the world again. You are probably tightly localised inside, stuck at the back of your head, with your crazy amygdala just loving it! Just a daily relaxation where you lie on the floor, let go, and imagine-feel 'expanding into the room around you' can help loosen off the hold. (Note: this will feel a bit daunting/exposing at first, but then it will feel great.)
Some ideas to explore: This guy [http://www.anxietynomore.co.uk/] has some interesting things to say on anxiety. The Alexander Technique can help you regain control of your body and mind without tension and effort. Rupert Spira's books are good at exploring awareness, as is Douglas Harding.