TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 4)

'No Precise Programming' - Subjectivity & Science

Article that's interesting [http://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXXII_1979/XXXII-22.pdf] on Theodore Roszak and linking objective vs subjective science. Sample quote:

I would like to help you gain an appreciation that came to me only slowly, painfully, and with much difficulty: how our intellectual concepts and beliefs limit our ability to perceive what is really happening in the world. When the world "was" flat, the heavens "had" to move around the earth. We see the world through the blinders of our own beliefs. When the world's behavior resists our expectations, as now seems to be the case in many areas of policy analysis, we need to question whether some of our important beliefs are in accord with reality. Unfortunately, our most basic beliefs are seldom accessible to our conscious mind: they appear to us as simple, unquestionable observations about reality. . . .
To truly see that one of your own beliefs is just an assumption can be liberating. This experience, though, is not amenable to precise programming. You must stretch your mind, envelop your beliefs with contrary thinking, and allow your imagination to roam in forbidden territory without automatically rejecting its perceptions as "absurdities." . . . By holding fast to certain beliefs, you may be denying a part of yourself that would come to the surface if you were willing to accept a somewhat different set of values or beliefs. . . . What I am suggesting derives from a belief in the indivisible unity of life and, therefore, in the importance of making work an integral part of the whole. . . .
To be able to integrate your life, however, you will first need to re-examine your unquestioning belief in the superiority of "objective" over "subjective" research, a belief apparent in your condemnation of what you consider subjectivity in my writing. Until you relinquish this belief, you will be afraid to approach work with feeling as well as intellect for fear of losing your much-valued objectivity. But, pure "objectivity" doesn't exist, since any observations, experiments, or analysis must always be done by a person, who inescapably must have values, emotions, and feelings that influence his or her work. . . .
You seem, however, to believe that because you desire to be objective you will be immune to those passions, prejudices, and dominating opinions which "are the abundant source of dangerous illusion." [Laplace.] What nonsense. I am sure that Laplace would agree with me that those most likely to be led into dangerous illusions by their emotions are those who would deny most vehemently that emotion played any role in shaping their opinions about "objective" truth. . .
I have no desire to deny that my views of the world influence my work. You term this "subjectivity" and denounce it soundly. I term it "wisdom" and recommend it highly. By drawing on all of my perceptions of the world, I believe I obtain a more complete and coherent view of the world processes that are unfolding than would be possible if I limited myself to information that I process intellectually and analytically. In a sense, I work backwards from my overall view of the world to the specifics of a given problem, applying tests of logic and evidence to check the correctness of the perceptions derived initially as well as from thinking.
-- Vince Taylor quote, No Precise Programming, Manas Journal, Volume XXXII 1979

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I highly recommend people start writing, speaking, and thinking using E-Prime as a way of internalizing this message. For more information read Robert Anton Wilson's great books on model-agnosticism such as Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology.

E-Prime is indeed fun. And both those books can be found at the Principia Discordia site here, for those interested. Also, simply "taking a step back from yourself" mentally can be a great help, the "I" seems less like a "me" - letting the verbs breathe, as it were.

Fantastic find! Belief has long been the cornerstone of my research into the occult.

For me also.

In fact, I think the self-reinforcing feedback loop of experience with belief or "memory" (in its loosest sense) is fundamental to the ongoing moment, whether occult or everyday (like this, for instance). It's rare to see this relationship referenced in a more mainstream (and readable) perspective though!

Change the memory, change the world?

EDIT: Credit where it's due: I found this article via a comment over at the Metaphysical Speculations forum - worth a look [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/metaphysical-speculations].

Thx for the image and for the forum. Ive never considered Belief and memory as intrinsic but that's what it is, some combination of memory and perception. Thanks!

We literally experience our beliefs as true, because our beliefs structure (seed) our experience, and back again. Sneaky eh? :-)

Cheers!

Manipulating Precog Dreams

This is a follow-up to my post on Ian Wilson's You Are Dreaming ebook [http://goo.gl/LsKUh].

There's a short interview with Wilson and Robert Waggoner in Dream Views which gets straight to the meat of it: how changing a precog dream can change the outcome:

[http://www.dreaminglucid.com/dreamspeak/DreamSpeak%2055%20Ian%20Wilson.pdf]

Quote:

It is all intent. There is no other means by which we can direct and focus our thoughts. Intent and dream control would be the best descriptor for this technique. If dreams are anything, they are organized thoughts.

Which implies that perhaps the dream part isn't so important, that asserting an outcome with intent while in a suitably detached state would work also - i.e. The mechanism of magick is dream control. A nice quote on communication:

That truth has to be experienced to be realized, it cannot always be handed to you. Each of us must find our own gold, our own truth.

Direct, Simple Magick

Has anybody had much experience with trying to simplify their approach right down to the basics - a sort of post-Chaos approach? Although there's much fun to be had chatting to entities and following rituals, is there a way of cutting this to the bone?

Alan Chapman in his book Advanced Magick for Beginners:

Could this mean that what we use to represent our desire is arbitrary? And what does this say about the sigilisation process, and therefore magick itself? It doesn't stop with glyphs; instead of a geometric doodle, you could use a number, or a combination of numbers. Or how about a word, nonsensical or otherwise? What if we decide that a gesture represents your desire instead, like a wave of the hand? Or some other physical movement, like a dance? What if we decide that a certain dance means it will rain?

In other words, our acts mean just what we decide they mean, magically speaking. Later, he suggests that altered states are just ways of circumventing doubt or poor intention (e.g. effectively unintentionally requesting "I will want a new car" rather than "I will have a new car") and are not essential.

Any experiences?

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Q1: Many of the zen masters caution against getting attached to Siddhi. Which are basically magic like powers that are obtained through meditation.
I can't think of anything stripped down further than Zen. However, it seems like even more work than traditional ritual.

I think the warning to remain unattached is so that you continue on to your final destination, that of enlightenment. A problem in all approaches. I don't think it means they're bad in and of themselves. Reminded me of this Douglas Harding interview, the 'headless way' guy:

KP: But you would not deny that certain disciplines, if practised arduously at great sacrifice, can lead to fairly extraordinary experiences, but they’re simply experiences, and we are over-looking the experiencer?
DH: Oh yes, indeed, and one of the traps, one of the side diversions of this whole thing, is at a certain stage to cultivate the siddhis, powers, that do come with the seeing of who one is— and they do come. And it’s different for different people. Some people get a good old helping, others don’t. But that’s one of the snags, one of the diversions, and it’s a very serious one.

But I see that as a little different to doing intentional magick, as we commonly think of it? I'm thinking of what 'act' we perform for our magick. How does one use the siddhis, once accessed?

Q2: I agree with Alan Chapman's quote 100%.
However, there is a difficulty there. In principle what Alan says is exactly right, and I say the same thing often too. But in practice our minds are more inclined to make some types of associations than other, and depending on what sort of results you want it may pay to work with the grain as opposed to against the grain.
If you want mental flexibility above all, working against the grain is the best practice. But if you want quick results at the cost of possibly habituating yourself even further into a narrow conception, then the fastest way is to go with the more intuitive associations.
So for example, the third eye is associated with paranormal sight. The natural place for it is between the eyes. So if you want results faster, working with the assumption that your third eye is located between and slightly above your two human eyes is easiest. However, if you want mental flexibility, you might locate your third eye in the back of your head on Monday, than on Tuesday you'd locate it in the palm of your right hand, and left on Wednesday, and so on, and then on Sunday you'll locate the third eye nowhere at all, and use it in its perfectly abstract and dissociated form. This way you don't have a steady location to work with. The results will probably be harder to achieve at least initially, because this will likely go against the grain of intuition at first. But for the sake of mental flexibility such approach is superior.
I myself strongly lean toward mental flexibility. For this reason I never work with traditional chakras or some well-defined third eye and other things of that nature. And if you notice, various systems of magick do not completely agree among themselves on the locations and the numbers of the so-called "energy centers" anyway. This isn't a coincidence. It's a reflection of the nature of mind. (Nor do they agree on the number and types of deities and so on.)
As far as experience goes, I never felt like I was lacking something or like I was shortchanging myself by following my path. I think people who stick to the dogmas are the ones losing out in the long run, although I can certainly see the short-term advantages of doing the obvious thing.

Really interesting. I tend towards thinking that your 'mental objects' are pretty flexible in terms of structure, purpose and location. You can Chapman-like just decide-and-gesture, but sometimes it's nice to create something repeatable - basically, create a 'new habit'.

In the end, it's 'whatever works', but if you want to accomplish more dramatic things, then you'll likely have to create some sort of 'mental format' to prove it with a route by which to take place, since the 'standard habits' don't lend themselves to it very directly.

Q2: Drama is in the eye of the beholder.
And habits to my mind involve tradeoff. On the plus side, habituated patterns become easily repeatable, and eventually repeatable even without conscious involvement, if needed. On the minus side, habits tend to slip out of the view. Habits tend to drift toward the unconscious regions where they can hide well past their expiration date, limiting experience well beyond their intended duration.

Good points all.

Q3: Everything is arbitrary. I know many people will disagree, but I believe all that any ritual does is convince your subconscious to place faith in your Will, which empowers your Will to change the world around you. I used to do lengthy traditional rituals to do what I now do in a short visualization bolstered by a short improvised action. The results are the same, if not better. If I don't have faith in something, I come up with something that feels powerful enough to overcome it and 90% of the time it does. I relate magick to my art training: at first you must trace things and fill in lines to learn how your hand works, then draw from life to learn how the world looks and how to recreate it, then you can draw absolutely anything you are capable of imagining. Magick is art that you create in the mind of the universe.

Magick is art that you create in the mind of the universe.

That's a nice turn of phrase.

what I now do in a short visualization bolstered by a short improvised action.

I think that gets to the heart of it. You can just declare to yourself that clicking your fingers means 'this', click 'em, and you're done. In fact, short processes leave less space for doubt and 'wishing for wishing' errors that can occur in longer, more involved approaches.

Our problem is often that we want to feel ourselves doing something to make things happen. This is a problem for daily life too: people tense up their muscles in order to feel that they are really putting effort into their work, even just walking and so on, when what they are in fact doing is blocking the natural flow by doing this - just intention is all that's required; the rest will 'do itself'.

“When you stop doing the wrong thing the right thing does itself.” - F. M. Alexander, inventor of the Alexander Technique for body movement

Q2: You can just declare to yourself that clicking your fingers means 'this', click 'em, and you're done.
From the point of view of getting the world to change according to your will, it's far more important not to have inhibiting, contradictory and blocking beliefs/commitments/expectations than how you focus your will. In the absence of inhibiting volitions every ounce of will is effortless and 100% effective.
For most people their volition is so strongly committed to ideas that inhibit magick, that they need some kind of trick to overcome the 90% of themselves (or more) that doesn't want magick to happen. People value stability and predictability that comes with solidity of experience. As long as that's the case, magick will remain difficult, and tricks like ritual and formal meditation will remain popular. Formal meditation is in principle unnecessary and neither is ritual. But we rely on those approaches because 99% of our being says that what we want to accomplish shouldn't be possible or is bad for us.

One thing I have been looking into is Dream Yoga, with the practice of gradually getting yourself to feel that this waking life is a dream (as opposed to just think it or something like it). I see this as maybe a nice way of dissolving those inhibitory boundaries: crack the experience open completely to all possibilities.

I find experiments and comparisons with lucid dreaming are often helpful, because of how 'intention' seems to work in that environment, it's the 'ideal version'.

Q4: A stable mind can get you anywhere you want. That's quite a challenge though - dropping everything and staying focused on a clear goal. But then the question comes - what should the goal be?

Q5: You just have to get focused for a bit until the spell is cast. Also not muddy the waters too much by obsessing on it afterwards -I think you end up kind off casting and recasting small spells when you do that- which is why forgetting about it helps a lot.
The hard part is definitely to know what to wish for. Many times you yourself get changed in the process, and you can also get a lot of stuff happening peripherally to finally get to the result.
Those days I mostly enjoy things as they are except if I'm in dire need, the upheaval a spell can set in motion just tires me. Or just ensure that there are easy ways of manifestation. Else it can gets way convoluted.

You make a good point. If you mostly let things alone - but pay attention - I think the things you actually want mostly come up 'by themselves'. The trick is to have the courage to follow through on any 'inspirations to act' you might have.

You and the rest of the universe will unfold as a single movement towards your goals - however you have to not hold back from your part in the movement. Often your involvement or role can be super-minimal, simply saying "yes" when offered something, but you must fulfil that role.

And on goals: Whether we write goals down or not, they are implied within us at any moment. (If you write down a goal or think it up, where did it come from? It was already within you, acting through you; you just made it conscious is all.) However, if we are conflicted then perhaps explicitly deciding via an act can help push aside any blocks we have.

TL;DR: If you stay clear-headed and allow spontaneity, then passive magick will likely give you most of what you really desire.

Q7: First, when it comes to physical result, every magick is an indirect approach to get the result.
However, the ritual with more physical element should give you more probability of getting a physical result.
Example 1;
If you strip the ritual down to just the desire alone, that's just daydreaming.
If you write your desire down on a piece of paper, that's motivational writing.
For example 2,
If your life is a mess, try tidying up around the house.
I love reverse-engineering rituals, stripping all the fluffs, leaving just the bare essential. It's intellectually enjoyable but it can be like taking protein pills when you want a filet mignon.

But... stripping things down and knowing this can be done then means your free to build it all back up again for pure enjoyment, knowing that the details are not actually essential. That can be quite freeing?

Q7: Yes and No, we can strip things down and (hopefully) go straight for god's G-spot every time. But sometime, we want the foreplay or role-play too. Freedom is to be able to do whatever ritual we want, whenever we want.

Yeah, I'm with that. There are also benefits to doing things in a group. There's sometimes a bit of an issue as to whether you 'take people with you' when you make a major change.

Q8: I do pretty much basics only (plus some specialized "tricks" every now and then, but they rely on the basics heavily as well).

What do you count as "the basics" for you?

Q8: Symbol creation and use (sigils), mantra creation and use, direct- or energetic visualization of something happening. Changing and holding the mental posture (as one website quite nicely put it). Sensing stuff with different senses (I use mostly touch and sight, sometimes sound... I've still yet to learn to completely trust that "gut feeling" type of intuition). And of course some breathing techniques, but they're more for my physical practice than for the occult side usually.
Those are pretty much all the building blocks I use to do my stuff. Even the different kinds meditation can be mostly classified under mental posture thing. I also use physical movement sometimes to enhance the visualization if I'm having a not-too-sensitive day.

"Holding the mental posture"... yes. Stealing things from other subjects, like acting for the idea of the 'Psychological Gesture', can be useful.

Q8: Actually, it seems to me like we're talking about different things; like this explanation has somewhere [https://web.archive.org/web/20111101072407/http://www.magickofthought.com/start/], holding your mind in some way is what I meant. Still, it was an interesting read with the hollywood occult. ;)

Ha, I love the idea that all those blockbuster movies with heavily choreographed action may in fact be Grand Workings. :-)

The gesture was an idea for reliably accessing a 'state' or 'posture' by associating it with a mental or physical motion, just as actors do for emotions. A bit like NLP anchoring I suppose.

I follow that blog occasionally. It's a pretty interesting approach, although I think it may be layering on the structures a bit heavily. And I don't agree that it aligns with 'materialist reductionism' as the author seems to think. Not that this matters really, if it works.

Q9: I don't get it, magick is so simple and yet people get so caught up. Taking a shit? It's causing change in accordance with will. Last time you got a date? Last time you filled up the gas tank? Last time you ate? Without simple magick you're dead, are you dead? Am I? There's your answer.

Sure, there's a sense in which you and the universe work by magick; it's just 'how it all is'. Your thoughts and actions arise spontaneously in the direction of your implied intentions, and the environment around you tends to conspire and adjust and bend accordingly also.

The point here is that lots of people put a load of effort into doing two things:

1. Deciding on what they think they 'want', on 'goals'.
2. Coming up with something to 'do' to attain those goals.

Really, though, these two points are about becoming conscious of things that are likely happening anyway.

First, just because you've not pondered and written out a goal doesn't mean it isn't "in you" already (otherwise, where would the though and the writing come from?). Second, if your goals are implicit in your character at each moment, then in fact all your actions will be aligned with your goals. And if we take the view that "you" are not separate from the rest of reality, then actually the whole universe is moving towards you experiencing your goals.

Unless you actively resist and get in the way.

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Q6: But that's so boooring.

Okay, tell you what: I'll still let you wear a silly hat. But only on Tuesdays.

Dramatic Effects

There has been some discussion here and elsewhere on the the influence of beliefs and expectations on the 'available routes for manifestation' for a magickal intention.

Meanwhile, some people quite dramatic random occurrences, appearances and disappearances and changes in their reality, and wonder how to harness this.

/r/occult people, what are the most dramatically direct results that you've had from an intentional working? And how do you think the situation differed to the more usual hum-drum 'roundabout coincidence' type of result?

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Q: [Deleted]

Thanks for that. Lots of people seem to report that their first efforts, and when they started taking it seriously, was when a "curse" worked (see here [Deleted] for a similar example that got me thinking about this, not my own). Suddenly you realise that with magick: a) It works, you get what you asked for and, b) It works whether or not it's a "good" thing you've asked for.

It's a harsh lesson to learn.

Did you try to undo it once it started to happen? (Most people report they couldn't bring back what's been sent out, only re-intend something else afterwards.)

Extra thought: Is it really possible to have something happen to someone if they don't let it/want it somehow?

I love the idea of "re-intending". I am a devoted fan of Neville Goddard, who often spoke & wrote about "revision". He taught that our world is created from our imaginations, and "whatever we can make, we can unmake".
I also tend toward the "there's nothing out there" school of thought, so it seems to be a matter of just controlling thought/feeling, and only that. Is it simple and easy to do IF we believe it is????

"The world is yourself pushed out", as he would say.

Well, for convenience of imagining this, I have a little diagram I quite like.

Think of the "ground" as containing enfolded structure - traces of previous experiences, basically. This evolves and updates automatically: as experiences arise they leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. Thinking also leaves traces, because it occurs in the same space. This leads to what we call "beliefs and expectations" or habits. Memories in the most direct sense.

Normally, people just get lumbered with whatever happens to form structurally as their "ground" or enfolded structure. Magick, however, is the realisation that you can re-form this ground directly via intention - and so doing, change the form of objects (spatial and temporal, things and narrative) that will subsequently arise as the "content" or unfolding structure of experience.

I also tend toward the "there's nothing out there" school of thought, so it seems to be a matter of just controlling thought/feeling, and only that. Is it simple and easy to do IF we believe it is????

So, yes, there's no-thing out there. What you are experiencing right now is basically a sequence of "mirages", the form of which is dictated by the profile of the dunes on the desert floor.

You don't need to control thought and feeling all the time, mostly just let passing thoughts go. Occasionally, you deliberately summon a particular experience in mind with intention, and thereby update your structure - i.e. insert new facts, draw new shapes in the sand. A fact may be now or it maybe a fact of the apparent future. It's not ongoing control, it's occasional updates, and completely letting go - not interfering at all- in between those updates.

This is great news: Mostly, you just sit back and enjoy the show in all its multi-sensory surround-world gorgeousness, unfolding spontaneously and automatically. Now and again you decide you don't like the direction this is going in, and you re-direct by inserting a new fact, setting a new target, and then let the unfolding head at that new angle.

EDIT: Neville Goddard's nightly "re-imagine the day as it should have been" exercise is exactly this. Restructure yourself each evening such that tomorrow begins from the ideal, enfolded starting point.

Q: Thanks so much. I love that. Also, just happy to see someone on this sub knows about him.
I actually had made a longer entry in reply to (and with great sympathy for) BarefootDorothy, but then deleted it. ()(See asterisks below. :)
We are so much more powerful than we realize, and when we begin to stir things up with things like meditation/focused intent, we'd better have some idea what we're doing. In my experience, any kind of "awakening" that occurs when negativity is allowed to abide can be a recipe for certain calamity, unless one changes one's course. I've created a-MAZ-ing circumstances, both desired and undesired. (Time warps, flabbergasting synchronicities, extreme changes, all that stuff.)
Two "kicks in the head" I can point to: "Instant Karma" (they weren't kidding!!) and "the boomerang effect".
I would tell you stories (one is even sort of funny, in retrospect,) but... one reason I'm beginning to think I will probably leave these sites behind (even GITM - we'll see how addicted I truly am or am not!) is that my most serious and delicious endeavor right now is ()divesting myself of my "stories" (). It's wonderful - but you probably know that!
Your posts have been really instructive and you've provided much food for thought! I thank you, Sir. (I assume you're a "Sir", but no tellin' on these sites! You could be someone's cat, for all I know!)*

You could be someone's cat, for all I know!

Quite probably. It would be worth it for the teleporting capabilities! I might look into it as a possible career move. :-)

As you point out, the speed with which things arise can be quite astounding. If you don't realise what you're doing, if you aren't making knowing decisions, it can get quite out of hand pretty quickly. You really gotta remember, "it's all you".

Yeah, you're right about those asterisks!

The reason to be in these forums is to explore your own thoughts and maybe in the process other people get something out of it too, which feeds back to your own thinking. Eventually, though, there's nothing more to be said!

Good that Neville G is getting a bit of exposure. He got the fundamental thing right (the 'felt sense' with intention) well before most people. Nothing wrong with a bit of theatre or visualisation, but it's good to recognise that it's just a means of indirectly adjusting your global felt structure of the world.

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Anyway, I wished her fat.

I sniggered aloud at that phrasing! :-)

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Q: Well, I've never tried to do anything outside of things that can affect my mind, but that's still had some amazing effects.
I have a habit of going off on tangents very easily. It's impossible for me to get out of it on my own, and it usually leads to me blowing up at someone. Well, one day, while walking home, I was in another tangent over some conversation at school.
Finally, I was tired of this shit; the constant bickering and damage in my head, so I mentally screamed "STOP!! At that moment, I got a strong vision of being surrounded in a whirlwind of fireflies. I'd never seen anything like it before, and it was beautiful. After they disappeared, I was calm, but tired. I felt like I had used an enormous amount of energy to get me out of that funk, but I still hold that memory clear.
There was another time with sleep paralysis. My second night of having it, I had woken up to me being held in place by shadow snakes. I was terrified, but again I called out the name of a servitor of mine that tried to recreate the whirlwind abilities. This time, fireflies came to my rescue and started consuming the shadow snakes in their bright lights. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but less draining then the firefly tornado.

Go fireflies! Great imagery.

EDIT: Since the fireflies came to you naturally, you should try to utilise them for other things. Send them out on missions on your behalf. Don't drain yourself though by over-intending; let them take the weight.

Q: Oh, I've actually done that before.
Looking back on it, the reason that the first time of making myself relax took so much energy out of me is probably because I had not created a servitor at that point. It's kind of the difference between breaking wood in half with your hands and with an ax.
Incidentally, I also used my servitor to save my grandmother's life. Fr about a week, she had been in the hospital on her last leg. What's worse; she had given up hope and seemed ready to die. Knowing how good I am with hope, I sent my servitor over to her to let his light shine on her, to give her some of my hope. The next day, I got a call from my mom saying that she had a renewed vigor for life.

That's a nice story!

Faith, Natural Law, Control

"People lost faith in natural law itself. Nothing seemed stable or fixed; the universe was a sliding flux. Nobody knew what came next. Nobody could count on anything. Statistical prediction became popular… People lost faith in the belief that they could control their environment; all that remained was probable sequence: good odds in a universe of random chance."
-- Solar Lottery, Philip K Dick

A picture of our day, perhaps.

Has our modern world lost faith in natural law? Lost faith in the belief they can control their environment? Forgotten how, or even that you could? Become subordinate to the rule of numbers and of chance? Nobody could count on anything - even themselves...

(More thought-provoking PKD metaphysical meanderings here [https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/metaphysical-quotations-from-the-novels-of-philip-k-dick/].)

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It's not about controlling your environment. It's about living in harmony with it

Quite possibly! :-)

Many occultists, though, would say that they are interested in the subject because it offers the hope of having influence over their (personal) environment. Getting what they want, basically, or perhaps fashioning the world into a better place.

Do you disagree with that aim?

The quote can also be interpreted as meaning that people have forgotten that what they intend/think has power, and that by forgetting this they allow the world to become less structured, to drift.

If the environment actually depends on our individual and collective focus, if we let go - what is it we're living in harmony with?

Isn't that like letting go of the steering wheel of your car so that you can "live in harmony with the engine"? Or has the universe got cruise control enabled?

Wouldn't disagree, but controlling and influencing are quite different

Not a bad point, but where is the boundary? If I kick off a pattern and let it unfold - say - then occasionally make adjustments to it (influencing it), am I not effectively controlling it?

Just because it is not constantly within my grip - I don't need to do that because the initial creative process gave it a "momentum" - does not mean it is not entirely under my control. I create it, I tweak it occasionally to ensure it's still unfolding in a pleasing direction, in line with changing circumstances.

That's basically complete control, right? Is that a bad thing? Is there something special or particularly "good" about just letting the pattern run post-creation?

To nature, there is no structure.

No inherent structure, yes I would agree with this. The structure of our minds is the structure we experience as the "world", I might suggest?

"If the environment actually depends on our individual and collective focus, if we let go - what is it we're living in harmony with?"
Can you explain please? :)

But of course! :-)

Let's say that the world is a pattern (like a ripple in some water) that is gradually spreading out, unfolding, under its own initial momentum. If we simply leave it be completely, it will just continue uninterrupted.

But if some people unwittingly influence the pattern, it will become deformed and vague in its direction. The pattern will become less structured. The more disparate and unfocussed the unwitting intentions, the less coherent the pattern will become. It is surely inevitable that this will happen.

If everyone lets go and tries to "live in harmony" with that, the world as happens to and experienced by individuals will gradually fall apart, working in nobody's interests. As you said, "to nature there is no structure". So trying to just stand back and live in harmony with nature, let nature take care of things without actually directing it at all, would be a mistake. You cannot actually rely on the pattern of nature unfolding appropriately!

Therefore our participation should be active; we should all be consciously and deliberately shaping our environments, the structure of mind.

(Maybe. I'm just exploring ideas here to see where they go.)

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Thought-provoking, thanks.

The thing I'd like to give you is that living in harmony is going with the nature of things. How things act, grow, speak, etc. It's not about resisting this flow, it's about choosing its many directions in which it flows and accept the consequences of those choices.

Well, that was particularly nicely put. :-)

I also liked the imagery you conjured in me of a family having to move house because a tree started growing in it. "Darned nature, at it again!", says Father, packing his bags for the third time in a decade. "This time, we're going to live on a barge!" ;-)

So, nature sees neither good nor bad, it just flows as it is flowing. We perceive good/bad, because we have preferences for how we'd like it to flow, from a limited partial perspective.

We are able to influence that flow directly - quite strongly in a local way (our bodies and thoughts), apparently less so in a wider sense of the apparent larger world (using magick or synchronicity). But to actively fight the larger flow as it is, is folly; it doesn't work anyway, except perhaps temporarily and as a delay mechanism, and leads to suffering. So we strike a balance, seek where to draw the line, as you pointed out...

Dominating in the sense of making something do against its nature or against its will. I agree, the line may be difficult to draw in some cases.

Some thoughts:

What we call "the flow of nature" or "the nature of something" is really just an accumulation of flowing patterns from the past. How did that flow began? How has it become what it has become? What contributions have been absorbed? Not questions that are answerable, but it is now as it is, and it is going in a particular (multi-dimensional) direction.

So, we cannot control but we can request - by submitting or contributing new patterns (intentions, wishes, prayers, rituals) to the flow - and they will be accommodate. How so? Because intentions change the shape of the mind, and so change the landscape of the world, and the landscape dictates the flow of experience. Nature flows through us, as us.

Finally, what dictates the extent of influence, the impact of our intention? Perhaps it is the extent to which we hold on to existing patterns, resisting change (basically, fighting ourselves when changing ourselves). Perhaps some patterns are simply too deeply ingrained to change within a lifetime, or are part of the body's life - such as the unfolding patterns of the body itself, or patterns such as "gravity".

There is also the view that our birth was the start of a pattern, and to let it simply unfold, to flow unimpeded, is to be the most authentic we can be to our own true nature. Our ideas about who we are and what we want cannot ever encapsulate this direct truth, which is acting to create our world at this very moment.

Still, it's fun trying. :-)

Unexpected things are totally natural and part of the infinite flow of the fundamental reality.

Unexpected things..

I guess the question would be: unexpected, by whom?
Not unexpected by nature itself, surely.

I understand and agree with your stance that nature "simply is," and does not pass judgement on itself. However, the fact that humans are able to make something like the periodic table clearly shows that nature has its own distinct dichotomies. In a solution of AgNO3 and NaBr, the two solutes will dissolve and form a precipitate of AgBr. Nature doesn't just say "do whatever you want," those two particular atoms will precipitate because of properties that make them unique. In a sense, nature cares greatly that these atoms will act in a particular way, separating them from other atoms that will act differently.

Nature doesn't "care" about this though, in a judgemental way, or even in a consistent way. Habits are formed, impersonally, and those habits persist, and those habitual patterns have subsequent impacts.

Perhaps that precipitate never formed until, one time, it did. And then a couple more times. And then it became an established habit, and mostly happened from then on.

What I'm getting at: Nature doesn't care-take, and it doesn't design or manage, it just kinda "ends up", perhaps? It looks like regularity and law now, but that's only from our perspective in the current state of ordering.

COMMENTS: Multidimensional Magick

Q: Some say that Tesseract jumping is a better version of suicide, and should only be undertaken in the same circumstances. Some say it is habit forming and leads to permanent tourist syndrome toward any universe one finds oneself in.
What do you say about that? Very intriguing concept - I've never heard of this

I'd probably offer some extra information: When "jumping" you are effectively allowing the structures and patterns of your experience to shift by letting go and allowing. This involves the enfolded "universe" of your mind, consisting of the environment but also the body and thoughts which appear to you. Any pattern that you don't "hold onto" can shift and realign!

This means:

• When you jump you are not just allowing the effective death of your original universe but also of the "person" you have been experiencing as "yourself" until this point. It is worth considering at what stage you are simply no longer "you" and have effectively committed suicide to be resurrected as someone else, because...
• Once you've jumped once, and seen changes, you will no longer be "home". Before, you accepted imperfections as just part of your solid external world. Having let things shift, you realise there is no such thing. Everything is up for grabs, and you can't go back now! "Tweaking for perfection" could become an obsession.

Sometimes, acceptance may be the better route since the balancing effects of narrowly focusing on one particular change after another might not lead to a beneficial result overall [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mdwAkWvWMw].

I'm reading it more like 'the patterns you willingly release can shift and realign'

That's an equally valid way to say it too. The reason I phrased it my way was to imply that the natural state is of letting go and that "holding on" is you resisting change unnaturally. Perhaps that's how you ended up in an undesirable universe in the first place, by blocking the direct manifestation of your desires?

...it turns the concept of faith, something that's often so difficult to get past, into a given and makes one focus instead on what their faith produces. thanks for posting

Yes. I think it captures a few solid ideas into one handy worldview/system, including resistance, identity and True Nature and all that stuff. Had the links for a while but only thought of them again when I spotted /r/DimensionalJumping. (I've been experimenting more with a direct "enfolding, unfolding dreamlike mind-space" type format of late, but actually that fits in quite well with the Multidimensional/Tesseract symbolism.)

Anyway, glad you found it interesting too.

No participation reddit?

New to me too! [https://old.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/] Seems like a domain-based way to restrict contributions to subscribers only.

words are the trouble, like usual.

Pesky words! Okay, I'm going to try and explain my choice better:

I'd say that you can only know what you are holding onto, not know what you are not holding onto - you can't make a list of all the things you you don't know you don't know - and that's the problem with this approach.

You might make a list of what you want to change. But those aren't the only things that will change. Anything that you aren't holding down will shift, subtly or dramatically depending on how extreme the main movements are.

Blanket Metaphor Time

Imagine the world was a blanket (yeah, I love the blanket metaphor) with loads of 'bumps' or 'folds' in it at different heights, representing the current objects of the world. You are one of the bumps, with a limited viewpoint. You've seen some of the other bumps, but not all. You decide to change the shape of two of the adjacent bumps you can see, while holding on to two of the other bumps. Great, yeah? Well, no.

When those two bumps change shape, say grow taller, they pull on the fabric of the blanket. Sure, the two bumps you are holding onto stay the same, and you get the changes you want, but everything else that falls outwith your scope in the world is subtly "pulled". Door handles may turn the other way now; the colour of Alfred's hair might be lighter; Nelson Mandela is alive yet again; Berenstoon Bears. No big deal?

Thing is, lots of other "folds" might have been teetering on the edge of more dramatic change. Several 'bumps' that were adjacent to each other are pulled into a single form, or one pushes into the other, collapsing it...

At the other end of the blanket to your bump/perspective, a chain reaction has started, the effects of which may not fall into your line-of-sight for days. All because you held onto (prevented the change of) one aspect of the world, keeping it static against the larger flow you have requested and so interfering with the normal self-consistency or "coherence" of the whole.

Summary

• We can list the things we are holding onto: that list is finite and within our perspective. We can't list the things we aren't holding onto: that list is infinite and beyond our scope.
• To make any change it is required that other things are allowed to change also, because each object is part of a seamless whole. Any changes that do occur "pull at" the rest of the world as part of the process.
• Artificially restricting change may destroy the previous narrative coherence and lead to more dramatic, unintended changes to compensate for it.
• It is therefore not possible to consciously control the details of the jumping process.

EDIT: Rejigged my description to make it flow better. Obviously, by making this change I may have inadvertently caused other aspects of the world to be altered. If the hair colour of your SO shifts overnight and they develop a hitherto-unlikely love of cornflakes & peanut butter for breakfast, you can blame me.

Q: that makes perfect sense - can't go wrong with the blanket metaphor.
BUT (you knew there was a 'but' coming) - how can you really 'hold on' to anything? As a made up example that hopefully illustrates what I'm thinking:
There's a boy named Tom, and Tom's life is shitty - objectively shitty. We're in an example here, so let's make it as bad as can be. He was born into a North Korean prison camp, and at that, for whatever reason, his position is as low as can be. He routinely gets beat, raped, starved, whatever you can imagine in such a horrible place. Everything is really, truly terrible, and trumps the worst that a 'normal' life dishes out.
Everything except for this certain bird that always lands on the barbed wire fence and sings beautiful songs. Tom gets lost in that bird's song, it's the only thing that gives him peace, or love, or hope or joy - maybe it's the only emotion that he feels, since pain and cold and hunger aren't really emotions. Imagine Andy in the Shawshank redemption with the opera song. Like that but worse, right?
For the sake of exposition, let's say that one day there's an older man dying and Tom happens to be around him while it's happening. He's pulls Tom close and tells him something similar to this [https://old.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/2ax00o/dimensional_jumping_for_dummies_revamped/].
Obviously Tom doesn't have much to lose, but he wants to hold on to that bird. What does he really know about it? Its song? The shape of its body? The way it makes him feel? How can any of these things be more than an 'imagining' and how to 'hold on' to such a wispy thing?
Even if he could - does he know where the bird lives? How and where it hatched? What it eats? If any of those things change - possibilities all of them, since no doubt he'll be wishing for a change of scenery to say the least - how can that bird still be there?
Example:
It's similar, in a way to Zeno's paradox - no matter how much you 'have' (there's an interesting wording) of something to 'hold on' to - the shape of the bird, it's song, the way it makes you feel, etc - you'll never have it all. There's always something missing, always something lost.
So - when you say 'you can only know what you are holding onto', and I think your argument for that was quite sufficient, what then? Tom knows that he's holding onto the bird, but how does Tom hold on to the bird?

Reply Part I

That was a nice piece of storytelling and a great point! Nice when a discussion teases out the issues like this.

To recap:

• What does it mean to hold onto something and how do we know what we are holding onto? And:
• If everything is continuous and whole then how can we hold onto a "part" of it? In other words, how do we define the perimeter of an object? Do we actually need to?

How does Tom "access" the bird and retain it in its current form when everything else is going to shift?

To answer this, we're going to have to push a little into the nature of the world. The blanket metaphor is handy for showing interconnectedness, but of course it implies a 'spatiality' that is not actually present. For this next part, we must dispense with it and realise that in actual fact the whole universe isn't out there, extended, but enfolded into the space right here - intended?

Have to go sort some stuff out. Part II later!

Reply Part II

(Readers: See Part I and the preceding discussion for context.)

Well, we’re going a bit deeper than I’d initially meant to, but let’s go with it and see where we end up, shall we?

Before we offer advice to Tom about his situation, I think we have to talk a little more about what the world is, how it appears to us and how we interact with it. Obviously, we’ll still be trapped within metaphor, but with some juggling we can work our way onwards - and arrive at a practical approach for him.

Beyond the Blanket: Into the Desert

Where is the world right now? It is not “out there”. I suggest that the world is enfolded into the space right here. We talk of the conscious and the subconscious, as if the subconscious was beyond our awareness, unavailable and secret, but it is not. We are simply being biased towards one form of experience versus another as being “real”. We attend to sights and sounds and textures while ignoring another sense that we have: the background and ever-present felt-sense.

This felt-sense contains - no is - the world enfolded. It has no spatial or temporal structure but all aspects are within it. And what we think of as the present moment experience is simply an aspect or perspective of the felt-sense, unfolded into images, sounds, sensations.

Literally, we have a sense of the world and it turns out that this actually is the world.

One can think of the experience around you as a mirage that is floating above the sand dunes of a desert floor. We confuse the mirage with the real world, when in fact the form of the world-mirage reflects the shape of the sand dunes below.

We cannot interact with the mirage directly, although we may be fooled into thinking so; in fact, we can only change the dunes and see those changes reflected in the mirage. Although we might experience single moments as unfolded sensory experience, in truth we simultaneously have access to all time and all space via the dunes.

So, in everyday life we actually make changes by intending alterations of the timeless dune landscape. We might intend our arm to move right now, and it will, and we will feel that we “did something”. However, we could equally intend that our arm move tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes it will seem to happen then. Strictly speaking though, it was always happening that day, from the moment we intended it.

In our metaphor, the mirage is the multi-sensory present moment experience, the sand dunes represents the felt-sense, and what we truly are is the entirety of the desert landscape. When we intend what we are actually doing is shifting our own shape; we become the world we subsequently hallucinate. The world, in other words, is ourselves.

This accounts for its occasionally dreamlike nature: the apparently external world is in fact symbolic of our current state. Or to be more accurate, our current state is symbolic in nature. We don’t need to delve into this to solve our current predicament. Suffice to say that the objects we encounter are in fact meanings.

To finish off, we note that just as all objects were actually continuous forms of a whole in the blanket metaphor, here all objects are dissolved non-spatially and non-temporally into the felt-sense. The difference now is that our metaphor suggests a way we can interact with the world practically.

A. Can Tom hold onto the bird?

So, armed with his new metaphor, how can Tom change his situation while holding onto the bird that has given him so much comfort?

First we must decide what it means to “hold on”. This is easy enough now: since the patterns of the world are the patterns of ourselves, we simply need to intend - basically, just decide - that a pattern is going to persist. We do this accidentally all the time, by implication. (For instance, identification with something implies a resistance to change because you 'stand as that thing'.) Here, we are simply doing it deliberately.

However, importantly, one can only make deliberate decisions about things that are unfolded as objects in awareness. Tom can easily unfold “the bird” from his background sense and intend it will persist - simply by recalling it and making the decision. He cannot do so to aspects which have not yet been object-ified, though.

So, Tom decides that the bird will persist and then relaxes completely. He ‘gives up to God’ as it were, and intends that his situation shifts to the best possible one. With the bird still present.

B. Should Tom hold onto the bird?

The thing is - if the whole world is shifting for his benefit, it’s not clear he should retain the bird. The bird fulfilled a particular purpose: it gave him comfort when the rest of his situation was dire.

Now that he has allowed his situation to flow towards a better one, the bird will no longer have the meaning it once had. In fact, it is likely that Tom’s feelings towards the bird will be quite different. He might have gratitude towards the bird, but he no longer has a requirement for it.

Which sounds harsh. The poor bird!

But what is the bird anyway? The bird was its meaning - of hope and escape. It was the aspect of him that knew there was another way. The bird was his pathway to changing the world and with the world changed, the bird has no place. The bird was actually an aspect of Tom all along, and can now be allowed to dissolve back into his awareness.

Conclusion

A key word here might be "realignment". Why would we want a world which was part changed and part not, a partial alignment to a new existence? An incoherent world means an incoherent self and experience.

In other words, it is not clear that Tom should hold onto anything. Perhaps he should actually let go completely of all patterns in awareness - let the winds of destiny shape his desert floor consistently and naturally - if what he really wants is “the best thing for Tom”.

Afterword

So, how does this apply to the specific workings in the original post? Well, it suggests that the details of the working are a symbolic representation of >3-dimensional space, and stepping from one part of the tesseract to another represents a 'releasing into' parallel possibilities. In other words, the important thing is the understanding and opening to this type of change, rather than the details of the diagrams and so on.

The felt-sense I have described has no dimensions and no limitations, except those placed upon it by the intentions enfolded into it. Recognition of this alone will improve your experience of the world - i.e. yourself.

...

Right, I'm back.

I'll begin by saying that my original posting doesn't necessarily recommend performing Multidimensional Magick; it just points out an interesting approach. For me, it's as much about how it illuminates the nature of experience. With that in mind, we're going to push it to the extreme.

Why Jump?

It may well be that "stoic acceptance" is a better approach to life rather than expose oneself to an unpredictable process that one cannot fully guide. However, what would it mean to guide, to know in advance, what was going to change? We wouldn't actually want to have to go through each aspect of the the world individually and adjust it. The key here is to ask what the nature of the change is going to be.

What's really happening?

• We're letting go of the world so that it can shift.
• We're intending certain changes.
• We're allowing the world to shift to accommodate those changes.
• In the process of that accommodation, the world rebalances as a whole.

So, potentially we get something we want and simultaneously everything becomes more harmonious at the same time. The more we try to control the details consciously, the less coherent and harmonious the result is.

To ponder: What if we just didn't do the intention, and simply let go completely? Might that perhaps give us not what we want - but what we really, really want? In other words, the question might be not so much about whether we jump, but whether we control the jump at all.

It's not Solipsism

Solipsism is when we think the "person" we are is the only person on the world. This is something different. In one sense we are saying that the whole world is the person. Taking it a step further, we realise there is no "person", there are no "people", there is only the world. You and I are both the world.

It can be hard to reconcile this mentally with an idea of a "you". One approach is to think of each of us as our own dreamworlds, which are connected at some higher dimensionality. In other words, an intersubjective idealism.

For practical purposes, you can just treat "all this" as your dream, with you being the dreamer, the dream and all its content. The "person" you seem to be is a dream character, just as the other people you encounter. Since "everything is you", you will not behave solipsistically, you will not be cruel to yourself.

Tom Falls into the Mirror

All your ideas about changing oneself, bettering oneself, escaping oneself - all of those ideas depend on what one thinks of as "oneself". Without having that clear first, we cannot really weigh up the pros and cons of apparent suffering vs transformation.

One of the problems with Tom's story and our interpretation at the moment is that we are talking about "Tom" as if he is separate from his world. We talk of meaning and what the world means to Tom. This isn't quite the correct wording though: The world is literally parts of what Tom really is. Tom is the world; "Tom-the-person", meanwhile, is just a perspective and a collection of thoughts within that world.

When Tom sees war and catastrophe, that is not just a representation of Tom's inner turmoil, it is literally part of Tom, unfolded into sensory experience.

...what now? he's not getting beaten or starved anymore, but surely his sanity must be in tatters? we can assume he lands in a 'real' place. His mom is gone. In fact, to the world he finds himself in, it's as though she never existed. The thing which made his life possible is irreparably lost.

But the thing that made Tom's life possible was not "his Mother", she was just an aspect of the experience. What would happen in this extreme case is that Tom would be confronted with his true nature: He is an "aware space" in which experience arises.

He is not any of the content of his experience. He is the background in which experiences appear. He had forgotten this, assuming an external world and that tone part of experience - his thoughts and body sensation - were "him".

Was the jump worth it? Would he be God?

Being God: Would ya?

One worry people might have is that, effectively, this sort of magick implies that one can be God. More worryingly, it implies that one already is God.

Before they've thought about the implications, people quite like the idea of Infinite Power. Actually it might not be so attractive - it could get boring pretty quick. It's cheating. It breaks down what we think is important in our lives.

• If you could change anything instantly, without going through an apparent process, it means you could do anything and have anything. It would just happen. (God.)
• Or you might change things to you liking, but choose to forget that it was different - i.e. you deliberately forget that you used your Godly Power to update the world and make it nice. Just so you could enjoy it all more. (God + Memory Wipe.)
• Alternatively, you might say it's okay to have what you want and remember asking for it, but you're going have those things arrive through seemingly normal channels. In fact, you will have updated the world to get what you want, but you will experience it as happening via coincidence and opportunity. (Magick in the World.)
• Another option is to hide from yourself the fact that you get what you want. You simply always get what you ask for, but never realise it. You live a life of struggle and triumph, terror and joy, and only at the end will you realise it was your own creation; you were chasing your own shadows in a fictional grand adventure. (Powerless Person.)

At any point, one might "realise" themselves from one situation to another via insight. The Powerless Person might notice that, hey, something is going on here => Magick in the World. They might later realise they aren't a person at all, and are effectively the world itself! For a while, you become God. Then you get bored of that, and decide that you'll make everything ideal, but then forget that you did it (God + Memory Wipe).

Then you're back to Powerless Person...

Conclusion

Aurelius has it right. As he implies, the world is yourself pushed out. All change is to the self. Live from the perspective of a person, but understand this is not the case. Objects appear and disappear; they are patterns in experience. The universe is transient and it is made from meaning. But that meaning is you.

thanks so much for your response, and for taking the time to have this whole discussion with me and flesh out the bones of what this idea can mean. A proper reply later..

Well, it's a dialogue, so we're unfolding it together for the benefit of all!

Don't you think it's strange that there 'seems' to be a self-realization phenomenon on a global scale going on these days??
I decided to check this subreddit today after 2 months of constant synchronicities, "injected thoughts", visions and divinations and all too conveniently I ran into you and your posts!!
Eschaton? Noosphere? Universe reversing itself? Everyone 'awakening'?
What do you think is going on.

When you ponder it for a bit, it actually makes sense that there should be changes on a global scale. Although I always scoffed a bit at the optimism of this in my early days, think about it:

When you become clearer about things yourself, you effectively dissolve the boundaries between your personal self and the world (realising they are the same things). Meaning that the barriers between your own thoughts and intentions and everyone else are greatly reduced. If you have "realised" how things are, you help everyone else (also you really) realise the same thing.

So you're saying that all those steps basically get boiled down to: allow the world to shift

Once you look at what you're actually doing: yes. At first though, we might think we are going through various steps, thinking things through, deciding what we want (as if we don't already know deep down), choosing something then letting go, letting it happen. The four steps I listed. But we only need to do that because we went off track at some point. In the end, what we're really aiming for is a state where we're balanced, and our desires and the world are aligned anyway. No resistance. If we hadn't "fallen" at some point during our lives - started pushing and pulling instead of flowing - we wouldn't feel the need to do magick in the first place. Our world would be us, effortlessly, whereas currently its movement is busy fighting through our defences. However, while we still feel we've got things to "work through", there will still be stuff to "be done".

correct me if I'm wrong - you're going down a sort of Alan Watts path of "God playing hide-go-seek with itself"

Well, I don't really like that angle because of its anthropomorphism and I don't quite see us as a part of anything. But I'm struggling to describe it at the moment.

Is there such a thing as transformation?

There's such a thing as a change in perspective and identification. Do you think one should have to work hard for the goodies? Might that not be like rippling the water in the hope of clearing view to the bottom of the stream?

Implicitly there are different levels to these conversations: First, everything is as it is already, so let things be. You are already whatever you are, you don't need to do anything to get there. Life will forcibly unravel you and make you clear (since the world is you and it tends toward harmony).

Second, yes but... can I make it happen? Then there are two options: Accelerate the process by deliberately searching out and working through aspects of yourself, analytically or experientially. Or quicker: Just drop straight to the non-resistance level, including letting go of more structured beliefs, and deal with the massive shift. The middle ground is intended shifts with the "collateral damage" of partial reharmonisation. (Or perhaps you could just intend to Be God Now, thanks.)

Which you choose depends on what you're aiming for and what results you want in the interim. Are you looking for harmony, a nice car, total annihilation and rebirth, or what - for instance.

a cover for not having the perseverance to really push through whatever it is...

But is the "pushing through" not just a bit of theatre? Something we just play at, which actually has nothing to do with seeing how things are or changing ourselves. You do all this stuff on the stage, getting your performance just right, so that you eventually allow yourself to exit stage right and go out into the street.

the narrative by-products of the system one chooses to live by.

That's very interesting. Is it that the basic truth is fashioned into a narrative, which implies a worldview which then impacts the behaviour of followers and therefore the world?

In other words, the end-point might be the same for all (originally) but the extra "prove you're worth it" path each organised religion sets its followers (rather than just saying let go and have faith) actually mutates the teachings and causes collateral damage. There's somethng in that (if I've followed you correctly).

if I'm a zen superhero and I can accept everything in my life with equanimity, what about the people around me and how it affects their lives? what about my kid who was depending on me to get food on the table?

Well, the position isn't so extreme. What you describe there is a "selfish solipsism", but most teach a compassionate stance. After all, you have worldly responsibilities ("chop wood, carry water") and Shiva looks out the eyes of all. It's not nihilism. Tibetan Dream Yoga, for instance, is very specific that - yeah, it's all a dream, but you still have dream bills and dream gravity, and the dream bankruptcy or dream impact won't be any more pleasant for them being part of a dream!

Rambling's good.

And, just as a final aside, I don't mean any of this as an attack against you or what you're saying...

Of course not! And obviously I'm pushing things to the edge a bit to open out our discussion, and enjoying your responses and challenges. Will reply properly tomorrow.

right - just better to throw that little caveat out there. this is the internet after all.

I agree. Those pesky t'nets! How something is read can depend on the mood - better to state explicitly where one's coming from if it might not be clear! But yeah, ideas and discussions like this are either fun or useful or interesting or less so. What they aren't, though, is personal.

...

Philip K Dick definitely felt the shifting, transparent nature of the present moment experience - but I think he did not cope with it very well, struggling to make sense of it. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Ubik, Eye in the Sky and The Man in the High Castle are all on my top list of novels which generate the "feeling" of this. You can detect him trying to make sense of his experiences within those books.

Good call on Waking Life. I think it's very smart in lots of ways and I think Richard Linklater is somewhat in-the-know (he also directed A Scanner Darkly, after all).

That part where Linkater himself tells the story of Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears synchronistic experience shows you what it's about. We all say "yes" in the end. (Transcript of that part is available here [Dead link] for other readers.)

I also love The Holy Moment chapter.

EDIT: There's also his How To Build A Universe essay [http://downlode.org/Etext/how_to_build.html]. Meanwhile, I thought I'd read Divine Invasions, but looking it up I'm not so sure!

How many countless people have been shown some sense of a way (and perhaps gained a willingness to take the first few steps as a result) becuase of Dick's burning to know the truth!

This is true of me, definitely. Just even to be led to suspect that there is "something else to all this" is a major step. The likes of Philip K Dick (and non-fictionaly people like Robert Anton Wilson) enabled the everyday reader to be opened up to these possibilities.

Agree with you about Linklater's PKD connection. I also think what his works communicate is probably a small fragment of whatever esoteric knowledge he possesses.

His film work drips with it, there is a lot going on there, especially relating to time and connection. If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy the short film On Cinema and Time at the BFI website. (Just re-watched and it actually includes the pinball scene and the holy moment scenes, coincidentally.)

I'd forgotten all about the rooftop guy who dissolves! You should check out this interview below; there's lot of interesting Waking Life stuff in it:

DAVIS: Tell me about the character who seems like an alien, the kid who speaks in a very detached monotone about human life?
LINKLATER: That scene has a funny lineage. My animation partners on this, Bob Savison and Tommy Palotta, had done a short film called Snack and Drink that I think's going to be on the DVD. And it's about that guy. His name is Ryan, and he was a 13-year-old autistic kid who they knew. They just shot some video of him walking up to a convenience store and getting a snack and a drink and talking about cartoons and music. He's kind of regurgitating a litany of things -- you know how autism works in the mind. So they were like, "Hey, you've got to get Ryan in here somewhere." I did have room for a teenager, but then I thought of another idea. I always had this idea as a kid, that you're in a science fiction sort of world and that you would encounter an alien who had been here a thousand years. He had kind of used Earth up and was departing, and you encounter him at that moment, on his last day.
-- Waking Dream, Technosis interview with Richard Linklater

I do think that Linklater has experimented a bit more than he necessarily lets on - other interviews suggest so anyway. I also think Matthew McConaughey might have asked him for some tips relatively recently. :-)

...

It's The McConaissance!

For years, McConaughey embodied complacency; he was an actor who bought too heavily into his own allure and therefore stalled out early on. The fact that he has been able to unravel that perception in a few roles shows how wrong we were.
-- The McConaissance, The New Yorker

It triggered for me when I saw The Lincoln Lawyer. I thought: something's changed here; something's going on. True Will leads to True Detective?

Meanwhile, it turns out I do have the ebook of Divine Invasions on my desktop machine but I've never actually read it! So that's something for me to look forward to. Thanks for the nudge.

Me too!

...

I'm sitting happily tethered to this projection of my life but I am aware of this concept because it is the polarized side of how I cast spells. I take parts from these other realities and bend them to my own will to shape my current one.
When I was first being initiated I used a moment of improbability and "jumped" my life track to this one but I have no idea how and can not do it again. After reading this I don't think I I'll try :3

Well, you have to give up everything if you want everything; relinquish all control to gain the ultimate control. Resistance is useless!

...

...have you ever read the term "tesseract" used to describe journey work?

I was familiar with it as a mathematical shape - a 4-dimensional hypercube - and as a way of representing time diagrammatically (and in crap films!) before I came across this, but hadn't seen it used as a concept in other esoteric practices. But I think the overall approach is intimately linked with practices involving inner and outer.

Could changes be a subtle as a plant growing where it was not growing previously?

Exactly this. Let's explore!

The World is You

What if we look at the world as your extended self; in its entirety it is your true self. If you change one part of the world, there will be corresponding adjustments elsewhere, in two senses:

1. The sense of it being a continuous material. If you tug on one section of a blanket of material, other parts of it will get changed also. If you create a new fold in one area, other folds will be changed: they will be pulled to a new location, may combine with other folds, or even collapse completely into the flat background. Self-balancing.
2.The sense that all of the world is meaning, is an aspect of you. When when you change the form of yourself, the world will correspond to that (because it is that). For instance, having a clear sense of self you may notice that the skies literally have less clouds in them. When you have a clear idea of what you want in life, you might that the winding path into the village literally has less stones or pot-holes than it used to; it might even now be a straighter path. Self-presentation.

The essence of Multidimensional Magick is also that of changing the enfolded aspects of the "inner self" because the "outer world" is just an unfolded image of that. The limits of what can happen depend on the balance of intention and of letting go - "decisions and permissions".

But how?

Inner and Outer

This sounds a bit vague initially, because we are left with wondering what/where that "inner self' is. Actually, it's right here right now.

• The "outer world" is the present moment's sights, sounds, textures, thoughts - which all arise in one mind-space. These experiences are transparent, mirages, and cannot actually be changed directly.
• The "inner world" is the subtle background felt-sense you have. Everything is enfolded into that. This is what you change with magick.

The thoughts that arise to you and the objects you encounter are both just experiences and both come from the same place, unfolding from this felt-sense. So to change yourself is to change the world, and vice versa.

Attempt at illustrating that and the feedback-loop nature of experience in this diagram. The unfolded is experienced as sensory objects; the enfolded is experienced as the felt-sesne.

The Underlying Process

So really, I think all magickal processes involve releasing our hold on the mirage of the moment to better connect with the felt-sense. It is always there, just as the stars are in the sky even at noon, they are just obscured by the brightness of the sun.

At that point, any intention will shift the enfolded structure, subject to your beliefs and identifications. Basically, we "insert new facts" into the universe at the lowest level. The more you let go of holding onto any particular pattern the more the felt-sense, and therefore the world, can shift. Most people have quite a tight hold of their personal self and of certain basic rules of reality - not to mention that many basic rules have now become quite deeply entrenched as "habits of the world" - which limits what might happen.

Fundamentally though, there might be no true limit. And even minor changes could lead to instant changes. Perhaps this explains the stories in /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix, for instance. (The ones that aren't just dreams and forgetfulness, that is.)

Meanwhile...

...the 3d projection of a tesseract from the wiki...

I try not to look at it. It's so hypnotic. One can so easily get lost in time and space... :-)

TL;DR: All magick is changing your self-world. Any changes to your self changes the world; any change you see in the world is a change in your self. This includes plants growing in unusual locations.

I really enjoyed the blanket analogy. I think I like it so much because there is a homey facility with fitting sympathetic magic into it. Even if it is one person's blanket, the shifting could make someone else have cold feet.
Thanks for the thoughtfulness of your reply!

Haha, I really liked your comment - thanks :-)

...

Q: [Deleted]

Yes, it's quite similar overall. In effect, it's another conceptualisation of possibility. In truth, it's just a scheme by which we might allow ourselves to intend over all time-and-space, across the entire enfolded world.

There are no actual dimensions and realities and many-worlds or whatever. Rather, there are inter-subjective minds. And the intersubjectivity is not a limited sort; it doesn't restrict possibiliites.

This happens to me randomly. People to whom I've spoken about it think I'm crazy and self-centered and a solipsist. I should figure out how to control it better, because to me it's currently just a curiosity and/or an annoyance (e.g. picture burning something because you turned on the wrong burner and ruining a nice dinner).

It's actually not solipsistic (something I'll pick up on in a later reply) but I think that in general for a stable world you need a stable posture, as it were. By which I mean that we are not fluctuating between detached relaxation and narrowed attention, mixing releasing and pushing.

Ctrl-Z Magick

People occasionally report "reset" events that occur when they are in danger (example [A Hiccup In Time], example [Discovered this sub and have two things I can't understand]) - such as time jumping back to before a crash, or an injury being reversed. These jumps seem to be spontaneous, and not willed.

Has anyone experimented or had experience with this "Ctrl-Z" undoing of events intentionally?

...

Q: [Deleted]

Ah yes, I remember reading about that. Thanks! Pretty fascinating. It brought to mind Rupert Sheldrake's thoughts about morphogenic fields - rats learning a maze help the skills of subsequent, unrelated rats.

My thinking then was: If the universe is basically timeless, then - like our student friends - perhaps it needn't matter when the rats are trained; the fact of maze training would help all rats to some extent. In other words, just as the later rats benefit from the first rats knowledge, so the first rats might have been benefiting from the second rats' skills. (This would need to be tested for specifically, and I'm not even sure that the nature of such an effect would even be available for testing.)

However, that's not quite the same as being able to "take time back" [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/SapphireAndSteel] when one encounters a situation they don't like. It does demonstrate that time itself isn't a sequential set of isolated moments that can only unfold in one direction though. If we can take time back, then: how? And: does the whole universe get taken back? Just your locality gets warped? Is it a case of personal realities?

It's worth considering that the original event that gets undone might be an extremely realistic, full-spectrum premonition.

That's an interesting possibility: An intense premonition that leads you to automatically take action to avoid it while in a state of 'imagery'. It's hard to separate the two possibilities though, obviously. Quite a few reports (e.g. suddenly being a mile away from where you experienced the crash, and there being two people in the car who experience the jump, etc) don't fit that idea, which makes me think there's 'something' more to it than that.

Since magick (invoking our friend Fotamecus, for instance) is known to allow us to stretch or compress time, there could be some mix of time manipulation and premonition happening. But then, at what point does that get so complicated that a "magickal reset" becomes the simpler explanation?

Another explanation is just a shared 'drop out' into a dream, so that a stretch of the experience just didn't happen at all anyway.

The reason for asking the OP question was that, since it's hard to tell the difference between the above explanations when they're not deliberate, perhaps stories of intentional resets by people who are already knowledgeable about the occult/magick could be insightful.

I "reset" losing my watch one time. I still can't explain how it happened. I was at camp, at the pool, and took it off so it doesn't get wet. When we were already on the bus to go back to camp I realized I had left it there. My first thought, this was really weird, was "No! I didn't lose my watch! That didn't happen!" Completely denying that it happened, then I noticed my watch right there on the bus seat next to me.

Thanks for that, interesting. Various "stories" of types:

• Falling on a hill badly and "willing" it undone. Ankle still broken, but bones perfectly aligned for setting.
• "Willing" a reported fatal car crash undone. Going to the site, seeing an obviously bad tyre mark pattern.
• Lots of recovered objects, lost elsewhere but discovered at home or in unusual situations after "deciding" they aren't lost.

Individual stories to be taken with a pinch of salt, but all seem to have the common theme of "asserting" a positive alternative to the situation, or "asserting" the complete absence of the situation (but not focusing on the unfortunate situation and then trying to mentally changing it).

I don't think I ever encountered anyone claiming that experience before the 2000s, but that's entirely my personal experience, and not something I'm holding up as historical canon.

Me neither, but the nature of the experience to me seems like it would be less "special" - e.g. UFOs and spirits and so on - and more just bewildering and confusing. I can imagine not really talking about it except to a friend or two, who probably wouldn't be very interested in talking further. Because it's rare, there's not really been a community for these people - until the Internet became generally accessible and various websites meant they'd hear other, similar stories. Circa the start of the 2000s, funnily enough.

I think it's all storytelling, myself, and not even a misattributed experience resulting from a stressful incident. But I could be wrong.

In general with 'odd stuff', I'd agree - but these stories tend not to be very showy or looking for attention, compared to some of the others. I tend to think the experience is genuine; what the nature of that experience is, I don't know.

The suggestion of an intense premonition/mini-dream is a possibility. Like a minor, accidental DMT hit. Or simply the adrenaline hit of a near-miss messing with the memory. (Because of course, these incidents are reported from memory, so it's their memories they are reporting not the incident.)

PKD - Punched Paper Memory World

One of my favourite Philip K Dick short stories is The Electric Ant. Give it a read first...

SPOILERS

Anyway, it makes me think: Although we don't have a punched paper roll inside us, we do have an equivalent - the memory-surface of our minds. Any experiences we have leave traces, which are then activated by subsequent experiences. We don't really see the room around us directly, we get a couple of glances, and the visual and feeling memory of the room are activated. We experience our memories, rendered as senses in a "perceptual-experiential mind-space".

So, if we were able to edit our memories - like the electric ant amending his punched paper - would we be changing our apparent reality, in a direct experiential way, not just altering what we'd recall when thinking-about something?

When in magick we "declare something to be true" by assertion, act or ritual, is this what we are really doing?

And to what extent did our world of experience have an external starting point anyway; perhaps it began with random noise which slowly formed stable patterns via feedback. In that case, reality is only memory - albeit maybe not personal memory - and so is completely flexible...

What happens when the universe forgets something?

See also this preview book [http://youaredreaming.org/assets/pdf/YouAreDreaming_04252013.pdf] which describes quite well the dream-like nature of waking reality - as a mind theatre inspired by, but not dictated by, the "senses". Or noise and memories?

...

Our punched paper is comprised of DNA

I don't think that's true. DNA may operate as a reactive surface for biological development, but it doesn't govern your experience of reality. For instance, you learned to ride a bike - is that in your DNA now? You learned how to recognise particular objects as you went along, is that?

The "punched paper" you have now is, perhaps, patterns you've accumulated in your brain. Although I think it's better to use the word "mind" since it has less baggage (and we experience our minds; we don't experience our brains).

* * *

Misc Communities Misc Posts

Magick: Just how things work anyway? (r/magick)

So, obviously there are many traditions and approaches to magick, ending up with the Chaos approach of 'freeform belief', which itself now seems to have fallen out of favour somewhat. Most traditions portray their magick as being challenging, needing many years to understand and master, symbolism and underlying structures, and so on. Even Chaos magick had an implied model-of-reality to it, which you were cleverly cheating. Alternatively, authors such as Alan Chapman in his book Advanced Magick for Beginners come to the conclusion that magick is essentially just about intention: any act can be a magickal act, if you assign a meaning to it. An act is then just an 'experienceable thing' to represent your intention to yourself, since you cannot directly experience intention (the 'doing' of magick). Even the act might not be required!

TL/DR: Given the easy access we have to all relevant information these days, do mages in general still hold to a particular approach and believe in it, or are we all becoming stripped-down utilitarian relativists?

• Do you have a favoured tradition that you really believe in?
• Has your approach become simpler, or has it become deeper, over time?
• How has this informed your view of what magick 'really is'?

Imaginary Friends & Created Characters (Aeon.co)(r/Tulpas)

An Aeon magazine article on "imaginary friends" in childhood which then broadens out into the independence of fictional characters in creative writing. It doesn't mention tulpas explicitly, but some of the content brushes very close and might be interesting. Excerpts:

[QUOTE]

I remembered that a former colleague had once told me about his son, Joe, who’d introduced a cast of invisible characters to their family. One Friday afternoon, Joe and I spoke on the phone:

Joe: I sort of think that Sweek [the planet where his imaginary friends live, basically a "wonderland"?] is actually my room, because I can’t go in a spaceship and go to Sweek, 1) because I don’t have one and 2) because Sweek isn’t real, it’s just my imagination.
. . .
[On an author's inventions seeming to come to life:] The study’s authors call the phenomena ‘the illusion of independent agency’, which ‘occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions’. An author invents a character on the page, and before long feels like that character has a life of its own, and that the author is simply there to record its independent decisions and movements.
Not long ago, I interviewed the author Hilary Mantel and she explained her writing process as being similar to that of a medium, like the character of Alison in her novel, Beyond Black (2005). This is how Mantel describes Alison at work: ‘She starts a peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the top rung; she listens at the ends of her nerves, at the limit of her capacities ... The skill is in isolating the voices, picking out one and letting the others recede...
-- Two Lands in my Mind, Aeon Magazine

[END OF QUOTE]

Heaven Sent (r/askheaven)

Where exactly is heaven located? I don't mean sky/underground, but in terms of accessing it right now. Do you conceive of it as been sort of "in the background everywhere" and you tune into it?

What is the relationship between heaven and other worlds - is it in a privileged position, or is it just basically a more flexible, dream-state type environment?

...

[COMMENT BY DreamingOrAwake]

Those are good questions..

Where is heaven exactly?
In position it is not above, nor below, it is more like an extra dimension. The physical world can be expressed in coordinates x,y,z,time. Every living being is living in a physical body or at least connected with it. If you are a bit sensitive, you can feel an aura around every living creature. This is what I call the spirit-body. The spirit-body surrounds the physical body as if it has one more dimension. So it is surrounding the x,y,z of our physical body.
And very sensitive people or animals can sense something just before it happens. So the spirit-body is surrounding the time-coordinate of the physical body. Our source (or soul-light) is even on a higher dimension than our spirit. It is connected with heaven already. There are different connections that we have with our source (soul-light). Different people have developed different techniques for it. Religions reflect these differences:

• Christians like to name their heart-connection, the place of the soul.
• Zen-Buddhists often name the mind, a connection in the center of the head. Other Buddhists use the connection in the heart, or the connection on top of their head.
• Hindustan have a connection for each chakra. Each chakra is connected to a different group of gods.
• I believe Maya-people felt connected with the stars.
• Australian aboriginals feel connected with the earth and nature.

But I believe that all are a connection with our source. It is not a privileged position, because everyone can feel at least one connection. The strength and how much we can live from these connections is different per person. A lot of small children have a good connection, and can show wonderful things. Sadly many people ignore their connection or get their connection polluted in some way. They like to reconnect, but for them the illusions in the world have become much more important. For me: I can connect to heaven at any point in time, even under stress. I have not seen many people capable of doing this. It feels I am also more connected with my inner child.

Tuning in
One way of tuning in to your source in heaven, is by connecting with your inner child. First ground (connect with a tree or a mountain), and then go backwards in time. Go back to when you were a baby. Go back to before you were born.
These stages give different feelings. But somehow you automatically connect to your source. With exercise and repetition you can heal and strengthen that connection. When I am connected, I am still aware of my body and the world around me. And I am still grounded. It may not be so easy for other people, but I think anyone can learn it.

Other worlds
If your connection is not clean, you can easily get in the many dreams (and astral worlds) that are around our physical dimension. These are not bad, but can keep us away from reconnecting fully. Sometimes these dream stages can help us. Some dreams can be wonderful and full energy. Some dreams can take us away from our grounding. Some dreams can show us what is stopping us from going further. I usually ignore all these dream states, and focus on my body and grounding instead. I invite the energy of heaven to come to me instead.

Portals
If I find some spirit that has problems, I often help this spirit to go to the light (=heaven). I do so using a similar meditation technique, but stay much more focused on my surroundings. I can often sense such spirits with my hands or aura. I ask the helpers from heaven (whatever you want to call them), to create a portal to heaven for this spirit. Different spirits often need different portals. Using my grounding, aura, and environment, the helpers can create this temporary portal. I guide the spirit to the portal ("you can go there"). And it slowly dissolves from our physical dimension, and moves to a different dimension. Usually this new dimension is a heaven like dream. It is a small dream-world created in the heaven-dimensions for this spirit where the spirit can go to. After the spirit has adapted and healed, the dream slowly dissolves. Usually they grow into a different form of themselves that is fully connected to their source.

Other worlds
So the relationship between heaven and other worlds, is that heaven is more like a higher dimension of the other worlds. It is where we are connected to our source. In all other worlds we are not fully connected. In some sense our physical world is seen as a dream-world from the heaven-dimension. The physical world is a combination of frozen dreams. According to my guides (helpers) there are more parallel physical worlds. And while we may learn in these physical worlds, all guides want to help our worlds to get unfrozen, and everyone reconnected to heaven. They don't tell me how this will be done, but help me with my personal life in the physical world instead. ;-)

[END OF COMMENT]

Much to ponder - thanks!

According to my guides (helpers) there are more parallel physical worlds.

Tell me more about guides/helpers, their purpose, nature and actions!

There is a lot to tell about it. I'll make some posts about it.

Great, looking forward.

The Feeling (r/energy_work)

I've just been reading the Daniel Barber book (listed on the sidebar) and was struck by the similarities between this...

[QUOTE]

By consciously creating a strong somatic effect (gut feeling) within ourselves which mirrors the gut feeling we would have if our desired intentions, expectations and feelings were already extant, we have a method for managing, or even manipulating, our reality. This somatic effect is our interface into The Quantum. This is how we pass commands, for good or ill, to the universe.
-- Daniel Barber, The Visceral Experience, p11

[END OF QUOTE]

...and the work of Neville Goddard ("summon the feeling of the wish fulfilled" from Feeling is the Secret and The Power of Awareness) and my own approaches for breaking down boundaries and creating a more unified experience (see latest post here, again all about stretching out and asserting a 'feeling'). Meanwhile, synchronistically I was rewatching Christopher Nolan's Inception last night and noticed the line:

[QUOTE]

Ariadne: I guess I thought the dream space would be all about the visual but, it's more about the feel of it.
-- Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

[END OF QUOTE]

I'm personally coming to the idea that things like modal visualisation (image, auditory, touch) are really only effective insomuch as they generate, perhaps just as a byproduct, this felt sense or direct experiencing/knowing of a situation being true (or how it would feel if it were true). Which implies this felt-sense is the background reality, from which appearances arise?

Do you any of you guys focus more on the direct feeling like this? Or do you tend to focus more on a particular route - picturing or sensing energy, and maybe use a feeling to tell if you're "there" yet?

...

And the way you described that really put another spin on it, thanks, because it's true that there is the 'general world felt-sense' (or signature) and object-level or situation-level 'signatures'. And the results can be quite rapid.

Maybe not that exact object or even, but one with the same spirit, it's really fascinating

That's great. It can also account for the fact that we encounter the same situations, relationships and even "actual people" again and again. In every workplace I've been in, for instance, I've had an identical mentor-type-person looking out for me (not officially, but effectively), and in any social group, similar recurrences. The same people, in different attire. It's fascinating. Fall into a general depression, a global 'felt-sense' of doom? Your apparent world will start to crumble within days. Everything will line up accordingly. Summon the feeling of achievement and stability and good luck? It switches around. I think the phrase "count your blessings" is a nice way to encapsulate that you must retain within you, your felt-sense, the 'signatures' of the aspects of life you like. Otherwise they'll gradually dissolve. Worse, if you switch track, they'll drop out more dramatically. This applies even to the body. Perhaps much body degradation is due to people's gradual withdrawal over time into their head area. Their bodies become less 'coherent' and defined; you let go of the 'feel' of yourself. I think this can be recovered to some extent though. (Can't remember the name, but there was an interesting book about a guy who created "bed exercises" for himself to bring himself back to good condition; really what he was doing - if it was true - is expanding his 'presence' again and intending a signature of health.)

all see[m/k] to remove our presence from our bodies

Yes. And it is about maintaining expanded presence of your body-area and the world around you, rather than simply "staying in the present moment", which doesn't capture it properly. Everything is to be included. It's not a holding-on, it's a aware being-with.

Part of my training is to keep my mind, spirit, energy and breath in the entirety of my body at all times. It's exhilarating and extremely healthy.

Just the ticket! :-)

Is it energy or is it realised metaphor? (r/energy_work)

When we use "energy" to accomplish something, are we really summoning and using such a thing - or are we in fact generating an experience as a prelude to our target desired experience?

In other words, does energy become an intermediary "permission slip" experience that allows us to generate our intention, even though we could make the change directly with the appropriate belief and intention?

EDIT: I should say "produce the intended result" rather than "generate our intention".

...

Energy is no more a "permission slip" for change than gasoline is a permission slip to drive

Very good :-)

My rephrased version might be: is energy our sensing of "pure potentiality". The reason I find this difficult, is that I don't see how it is moved and transferred. If I "use energy" to turn a wheel does that correspond to a physical thing that transmits and moves, or am I basically saying that I have this ability to change anything and I am "releasing the filters" to allow my change to take place.

I would like to recommend a book to you; "Akido, Aikibojitsu and the Structure of Natural Law" by John Read. I would like to explain but I am just not eloquent enough to convey it, although John Read is. His book explains this perfectly.

Thanks - will check that out! :-)

give ourselves "permission" do things which make it happen. Did I understand you correctly?

Yes. I guess I'm trying to reconcile energy work with "magick", in particular where in the latter the act itself can be irrelevant and what matters is the meaning behind the act. So if I visualise energy - even summon the experience of feeling - travelling from me to an object, how does that differ from me reaching out with my mind and simply intending. My thinking was: is that extra "sensory theatre" (excuse pun) when really it is the connection and intention that does the work, with energy being your "excuse" to allow the result to happen, making it "plausibly justified".

So the issue is not whether or not the energy is behind the effect, but whether that energy is simply the intent and we are just attempting to process it by visualizing it.

It's probably a mixture of the two - but by "intention" I mean something more than simply wanting, more akin to what you are calling energy, so this is making sense. My "intention" basically is "directed energy". Language, eh :-)

The "sensory theater" of visualizing things is a method of using your mind to channel it, although you're right, it's not truly necessary for the effect. The energy itself is though.

This makes sense to me now. Okay, I'm suggesting that the extra theatre is so you can "experience yourself doing something"... but really you can just do the directed energy and what you experience then is the result (possibly a sense of resistance or push-back, but then the desired outcome hopefully).

Point is though that, even though it theoretically should work without the visualization, this proves that, at least for me, it is definitely quicker andeasier with.

Ah, interesting. Now the extra bit would be, if you have a stronger belief that it would work with visualisation or - more what I mean - that this has become an "established route" for you, in a way that "willing" doesn't. I'm getting inclined to think that there's an element of mentally "occupying the space" of the target, whether that's the external thing (nosebleed) or a body feeling (sense of truth of other facts), before change happens. Just as if I really strongly frown and say "arm: move!" it probably won't happen, but if I mentally occupy the space where my arm is, then simply "asking-imagining-feeling" the outcome brings the result.

I think I can explain this in a way that makes sense. Reality comes from within outwards, not from outward in.

Ah, nicely written. So, would we say that magick is basically "requesting" and having results occur by apparently external available routes/mechanisms (a version of prayer), whereas energy work is grabbing reality and manipulating it directly?

:-) I think that is quite a good division.

One that possibly falls between: Neville Goddard's approach involved "summoning the feeling of the wish fulfilled", basically intensely feeling what the outcome would feel like. I guess that is a transformation of the inner, pushing it to the outer. It does muddy the inner/outer waters a bit though, perhaps.

Mind-Formatting: Synchronicity & Imagination (r/lawofattraction)

I've been having a couple of discussions elsewhere which might be relevant to this subreddit. I am always on the lookout for better metaphors to describe how the mind, perception, reality, intention work - e.g. the Infinite Grid metaphor for describing a shift from one experience to another. More recently, following a post about synchronicity:

• Synchronicity as a result of mind-formatting, followed by:
• The metaphor of The Imagination Room

You can probably see how these fit into the LOA scheme. Do you have a particular "way of thinking about things" that helps you understand and use this approach? How has it affected your success?

...

I'm majoring in metaphysics

Ah, nice. Actually, you might find Bernardo Kastrup's website and the related Metaphysical Speculations forum of interest. It's a little focused towards straight philosophical idealism perhaps, but sometimes interesting things come up.

I love the imagination room analogy

Great. It's quite good fun, isn't it?

I'm on a bit of a quest for what you might call "practical metaphysics" for describing personal experience, different metaphors that you can live from. It's easy to get into thinking-about things, without actually really adopting and experiencing them. So with things like The Imagination Room, the idea is that while you go about your day you can bring up that image, and kind of "feel it" in place and experiment.

Right, applicable metaphysics. Things people can use to improve their lives.

Yes. People can spend a lot of time trying to be "right" and think that will improve things. Actually, they are just being conceptually right - building self-consistent thought-castles in the sky. They end up feeling correct, but their lives remain the same. A decent metaphysics for living would actively shape lives into a happier form; you would absorb and become it. As Slartibartfast says on the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series (I assume it's in the more recent film too):

[QUOTE]

• SLARTIBARTFAST: I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
• ARTHUR: And are you?
• SLARTIBARTFAST: No. That's where it all falls down of course.

[END OF QUOTE]

Well, in an applicable metaphysics you'll get both!

Indeed. I personally consider the LoA to be both the truth to a lot of questions about existence, as well as the most applicable, hence why I threw myself into it so completely.

Agreed. The only problem with it is, because it's formulated as a list of instructions without a supporting structure, people get confused. They try to make changes in their world while still remaining, themselves, as they were. But - as the room metaphor points out - it's a matter of shifting or imagining the whole experience, which includes the person-experience. Neville Goddard from the New Thought era (The Law and the Promise, Out of this World, etc) was quite good on this, although his language is a little obscure sometimes for modern tastes. He had both the idea of world-as-imagination, and all-possibiliites-already-exist, but he never really wrote up a single description for it.

Right. People hear about this and the testimonials to its legitimacy, and accept and attempt to apply it. They don't realize that they will never see real results unless they put forth the effort to learn WHY it works, and the truth behind human nature. Without that understanding of the background processes, one can never truly use the LoA to full effect

My feeling is that people genuinely don't understand the difference between thinking about something, and imagining it from their own perspective. They do the equivalent of creating a little thought bubble containing their wish, looking at it, rather than summoning the experience around them. No amount of explanation seems to work. That's why I've come to think that spatial visual metaphors are the best way. For an example of how hard it is to bring people back to their present, spatial experience, I recommend checking out this conversation between Rick Archer and Rupert Spira [POST: Rick Archer interviews Rupert Spira]. You've got one guy (Archer) who is supposedly interesting in understanding how things are, another guy (Spira) who is leading him to it, and the first guy is constantly wanting to talk about it rather than have the experience. Maybe this is because: Most people are slightly dissociated, and coming back to being 1st-person and "embodied" is actually an unpleasant idea? So they wriggle and resist it. LOA and its ilk all involve confronting and being yourself fully.

Precisely, without the understanding behind it, and even sometimes with it if they don't take it to heart, people make their wishes and desires, but don't complete step 3, allowing. By not imagining it, like you said, they still offer resistance, most likely by doubting it will come, etc

"Absolute allowing" - with that, if one could truly commit to it, everything would be far easier.

I cultivate a view that I live in a kind and loving universe. By accepting that, I accept that deserved or not, good things will happen for me. It allows a lacksidasical certainty of outcome.

Nice style. The whole notion of "deserving" is an error anyway; unless you imagine that the universe operates on that principle. A true "law" works regardless of whether you've been a good boy or girl or not. The "gratitude" aspect to LOA is, in my opinion, a matter of associative triggering - in much the same way as part of a memory results in auto-completion of the recall (e.g. a smell or texture triggers a memory of a childhood event), feeling good results in filtering down to, and mechanical selection of, feeling-good-type events.

Associative triggering: same as smiling to make yourself happy. I think you are quite right, by being grateful, you are implying / accepting the outcome.

That's a nice example. LOA: The Amoral Santa Claus.

Time Travel, Personal Universes, Extended Persons (r/timetravel)

So, there are various theories and rebuttals for/against time travel. Wouldn't we have met time travellers already? The consistency principle prevents changes, surely? Various paradoxes? Multiple universes? Are there timelines? and so on. However, perhaps all of these can perhaps be tackled using the following principles, by short-circuiting the notion of a time-line and a persistent, consistent experience:

• Time travel is actually the creation of a discontinuity in your personal experience, such that it changes to resemble a different time. There is no 'travel into the past' as such - rather, you jump to a different 'dream'. This is the sense in which you branch to another universe. And that is also the sense in which time passes normally.
• The 'you' that jumps isn't physical. Rather, your everyday experience is like consciousness or awareness 'looking though a viewport' at the world - or similar to experiencing being a character in a dream. Hence, your body doesn't need to be transported, it is part of the 'world experience'.
• People are 'extended beings' in the sense that they are not simply located in a given universe/instance, they are 'extended' over all possibilities. So, your mother in one universe is your mother in another universe, but a different aspect of her being.
• It is possible that not all characters in your experience have a 'consciousness' looking through their viewport/perspective. You are not able to tell the difference. (Alternatively, all characters - including your viewpoint character - and all branches - are part-fragments of your overall experience.)

Time travel is this view is therefore an extreme version of changing the present moment, and does not involve 'time' as commonly thought. Therefore all changes are possible, and all experiences; all criticisms are valid in one present experience/viewport or another, just not in the one you are at. It also means that memories occur in the present, and so changing the past from here simply involves a discontinuity in the present moment experience, plus memories which remain consistent with this when summoned. So, can we short-circuit the problems of time travel by reframing our position in it and moving away from the notion of a 'timeline'?

Dimensional Jest (r/timetravel)

[META] Realityshifters and the Mandela Effect (r/MandelaEffect)

Cynthia Sue Larson's Realityshifters.com website was one of the first to tackle the subject of "reality shifts" online and has been collecting personal accounts since 1999, including encounters with what we would now call "Mandela Effect" experiences. Her latest extended blog post focuses specifically on the effect, on its breakout as a mainstream topic and her own view on its interpretation (invoking the concept of a superposition of states). Regardless of whether you agree with her take or not, it's a well-written piece and worth a read as a thought-provoker. Excerpts from the introduction:

[QUOTE]

The phrase “Mandela Effect” has been trending upward at an exponential rate between July 2015 and July 2016, as seen when viewing a graph produced by Google Trends. While many are surprised by the recent surge of interest in the “Mandela Effect,” those of us who have been researching and writing about this phenomenon of reality shifts and alternate histories have long been anticipating just such a rise of interest. The Mandela Effect is one of those things most people won’t believe in until it happens to them. Like falling in love or going through heartbreak, the Mandela Effect is something you have to experience in order to fully embrace. And even then, it often takes more than one or two experiences to break through the resistance most of us have to accepting the existence of something that fundamentally challenges our unspoken foundational assumption that facts and historical events don’t change.

[END OF QUOTE]

The entire article can be read here: Amazing Rise of the Mandela Effect [https://cynthiasuelarson.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/rise-of-the-mandela-effect/].

"On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect" - Aeon.co (r/MandelaEffect)

An essay on the Mandela Effect has been published over at Aeon.co which might be of interest. It begins:

[QUOTE]

On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect
[Caitlin Aamodt is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include behavioural epigenetics, cognitive evolution, and neuropharmacology.]
Would you trust a memory that felt as real as all your other memories, and if other people confirmed that they remembered it too? What if the memory turned out to be false? This scenario was named the ‘Mandela effect’ by the self-described ‘paranormal consultant’ Fiona Broome after she discovered that other people shared her (false) memory of the South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.

[END OF QUOTE]

[... ... ...]

Notes & Observations:

It does rather presume that the default interpretation of the Mandela Effect that people adopt is the "sorta quantum physics" one, but I guess this is because it's very much taking Fiona Broome's musings as its starting point (fair enough). It also perhaps misrepresents the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment as an explanation of the wave nature of particles leading to "two simultaneous macroscale realities", rather than its origin as illustration of the absurdity of this interpretation. It then later fails to truly justify isolating a "many-worlds" concept as derived from quantum physics from a philosophical version of it applied to subjective experience. ("Many-worlds" is really a philosophical notion anyway, surely: it is not something that can be tested; it's one possible narrative that can be attached to a raw mathematic structure which itself has no particular meaning. This possibly trips up the essay's own conclusion.)

Beyond that, its neuroscience-y account seems to me to be rather hand-waving as an explanation - but it's reasonable in terms of highlighting areas to think about for an audience ignorant of the topic. I do think that the conclusion that "a true scientist must test his or her alternative hypothesis by trying to disprove it", whilst cute, is a somewhat of a missed opportunity to highlight why that approach is actually highly problematic for this particular phenomenon. It's a basic issue we have that descriptions of the Mandela Effect cannot assume the "independent, simply-shared objective world" concept usually employed in scientific studies. But then, this is an essay by a neuroscientist rather than a philosopher (or a physicist, for that matter). It also mentions /u/EpicJourneyMan by name, so it may be of particular interest to him:

The Redditor EpicJourneyMan recounts an extremely detailed account of Shazaam from when he was working in a video store in the 1990s. In his post, he describes buying two copies of the movie and having to watch each several times to verify that it was damaged after renters complained. He then proceeds to describe the movie plot in great detail. Confabulation seems to be more frequent in the face of repeatedly unpacking a memory; in other words, someone like EpicJourneyMan, who regularly ordered children’s videos and watched them to find damaged tape, is more likely to confabulate a specific memory from that material.

Anyway, have a read, and there's a comment section to participate in if you feel so inclined. Meanwhile, Aeon is often a source of interesting viewpoints on a variety of topics, so it's worth checking in now and again, even if this particular essay doesn't hit the spot for you.

...

Q1: Pretty much the same debunking comments that is spread throughout Reddit and online. Again most of the explanations for false or incorrect memories work when taken on a one by one case, but ignores that it a large number of people having the exact same memories, in most cases independently of one another. Confabulation is a real thing and so is creating false memories, but creating the same false memory is something that should be explored further.

Yes, it's very much of that sort, albeit written for a publication under the author's own name and declared expertise in what they assume is a key relevant subject (hence posting it). It's somewhat of another example of starting from a particular platform, and then trying to answer to an abstract, generalised version of what the Mandela Effect experience is - providing an explaining-away, rather than approaching it on its own terms and explore the limits of (and address the inherent problems with ) developing an explanation. There's also a tendency to use a slightly fictionalised narrative about how people experience memory in daily life as regards this phenomenon: people do not really "remember" things as such except in a specific subset of circumstances, but instead have "contextual encounters". That is, the more interesting examples aren't about remembering facts as such, they are about ongoing personal encounters which are derived from facts, and its the shift in later encounters that triggers a discontinuous experience.

The previous incarnation of the sidebar tried to capture that:

[QUOTE]

DEFINITION
"The phenomenon where a group of people discover that a global fact - one they feel they know to be true and have specific personal memories for - has apparently changed in the world around them."
Note: Given nature of the effect, 'evidence' inevitably takes the form of shared personal memories; physical evidence of the previously remembered state is unavailable. If such evidence is discovered, that's proof of an alternative explanation.

• Your post should be about your personal encounters with examples of the Mandela Effect.
• Your post should include specific details indicating why you think it's a Mandela Effect.
• Your post should follow from the definition provided in the sidebar.

[END OF QUOTE]

However, it was perhaps a little opaque for the casual reader, and in any case people don't usually read the sidebar, and (a little like the author of our essay) push ahead based on their own first-level assumption about what the Mandela Effect is (and usually conflate the experience with the explanation) without much further consideration to a detailed definition.

Excerpts from 'The Akhenaten Adventure' by PB Kerr (r/deadchildren)

Excerpts from The Akhenaten Adventure by PB Kerr

I was in conversation with a user a while back (username) about all matters oneirosophic and he pointed out some passages from one of his childhood books, which are interesting in that they highlight many concepts which are common ("logical space" and "thinking means possible"), and even portray some of the same attitudes ("how it works but not really"). It's always interesting when fiction describes an underlying reality in detail, especially when it's done a way which seems a more "philosophical" than would seem to be appropriate for its audience. A case of trying to pass on a bit of knowledge into the imaginations of the young before the monotony of everyday life beats it out of them?

Anyway, I've transcribed the relevant quotes below.

´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´

Excerpt from page 111:

“Get rid of what?”

“The rhino of course.”

“What rhino?”

She looked again and saw that the rhino was gone. The sharp, animal smell that had accompanied the creature was gone, too.

“Magic,” breathed John, who was terribly impressed by Nimrod’s display of power.

“Magic? Good Lord, no, my boy. A djinn doesn’t do magic. That stuff is for kids and simple-minded adults. A djinn works his will. That is the proper way to refer to what we do. We work our will. It is, to put the case slightly differently, mind over matter. That is all.”

Excerpt from pages 166-171:

“Try and create in your own mind the impression that your word must only be used very sparingly, as if it was the red button that might launch a missile, or fire some enormous gun.

“John? You go first. I want you to open your eyes now and visualise the absence of one particular rock. Picture the rock’s disappearance as a situation in logical space. Fix it in your mind, as if the reality couldn’t possibly be any different from what you’re imagining. And then, keeping that same thought, utter your focus word as clearly as you can.”

John collected his thoughts and, remembering how Nimrod exercised his own powers sometimes, brought his feet together, raised his hands in the air at about chest height, like a footballer taking a penalty kick, and then shouted: “ABECEDARIAN!”

For ten or fifteen seconds, nothing happened, and John was about to offer his apologies and “I told you so”s to Nimrod when, incredibly, the six foot high rock he had chosen, vibrated quite visibly and a shard about the size of a walnut fell off.

“Wow,” said John. “Did you see that? Did you?” He laughed, almost hysterically. “I did it. Well, I did something, anyway.”

“Not bad for a first attempt,” said Nimrod. “It didn’t disappear but I think we’ll agree, you certainly made an impression on it. Philippa? Try the bigger one next to John’s effort. Think how your picture of the rock’s absence is attached to reality,” he suggested. “Remember, the rock’s disappearance is a possibility that must have been in the rock from the very beginning.” He paused. “When you’re ready, when you have accepted that logic deals with every possibility and that all possibilities are its facts, then press the red button that is your focus word.”

As she concentrated on the boulder and prepared to utter the word of power she had chosen, Philippa raised one hand like a ballet dancer and then waved the other like a traffic policeman.

“FABULONGOSHOOMARVELISHLYWONDERPIPICAL!”

Even as the last consonant left her lips, the boulder she had chosen began to wobble, and it kept on wobbling, quite violently it seemed to Philippa, for almost a whole minute before it stopped again. She clapped her hands together and squealed with delight.

“Yes,” Nimrod said patiently. “You certainly disturbed its molecular structure. That much was obvious. Only it seems to me you both have to get a clearer idea of nothing in your heads. You’re both confusing the idea of alteration with disappearing. A common philosophical mistake. Altering the appearance of something is very different from it not being there at all.

“Now try again. Remember, whatever is possible in logic is also permitted. A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. So what is thinkable is possible too.”

The twins were surprised at how much concentration was required to focus their djinn powers, so that it quickly seemed like hard work and left them feeling out of breath, as if they had lifted some heavy object, sprinted across a field, and attempted to solve a complicated algebraic equation at the same time. After two hours, all they had succeeded in doing was making a few largish boulders become smaller boulders, at which point Nimrod let them rest for a few mintues.

“This is hard work,” admitted John.

“In the beginning, yes,” said Nimrod. “But it’s like building physical fitness. You have to learn to develop the part of your brain where the powers are focused. Teh part that we djinn call the Neshamah. It’s the source of djinn power. The subtle fire that burns inside you. A little like the flame on an oil lamp.”

Nimrod rubbed his hands. “All right, let’s try making something appear. It’s getting near lunchtime, so how about a picnic? Here, I’ll show you the sort of thing I mean.” And so saying, Nimrod waved his arms and created a very sizeable picnic on the desert ground, complete with tartan rug and a picnic basket containing lots of sandwiches, chicken legs, fruit and thermos flasks of hot soup.

“There we are,” he said. “All you have to do is remember that you cannot create anything contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that none of us could say what an illogical world would be like. And since that is the case, the very fact that you can think of making something from the energy that is within you is enough to admit the possibility. As soon as you have convinced yourself of the possibility of creating a picnic out of yourselves, the picnic becomes easier to bring into being. Do you see?”

It took a while longer, but gradually, as the twins begin to realise that all objects contain the possibility of all situations, they started to get the hang of djinn power. Finally, after another ninety minutes of head-ringing thought and examination-level concentration, there were three very different, but apparently edible picnics lying on the ground.

Nimrod approached Philippa’s picnic first and picked up a cucumber sandwich. “The proof of the pudding, so to speak,” he said, and tasted the sandwich circumspectly. Almost immediately he spat it out.

“This tastes quite disgusting,” he said, and turned his attention to tasting one of the hot dogs from John’s picnic. “And this doesn’t taste of anything at all.” Nimrod allowed a mouthful of hot dog to fall off his tongue on to the sand like a bolus of clay. “Ugh. Like rubber.” He took out his red handkerchief and wiped his tongue. “Both of you made the same elementary mistake. You were so concerned with how the picnic might look, that you forgot to imagine how it might taste. Now do it again, only this time try to visualise yourselves having to eat the picnic. The most delicious picnic that ever was. Remember, there’s nothing worse than a picnic that looks good but which you can’t actually eat.”

After another hour and several more unsuccessful attempts the three of them finally sat down to enjoy the picnics that the twins had made with their djinn powers. The twins ate while Nimrod talked.

“Now this is much more like it,” he said, tasting their respective picnics. “John, this popcorn tastes, er… just like popcorn. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to take popcorn on a picnic, but there’s no accounting for taste. To me it has always tasted more than a little like polystyrene packing. And Philippa, I can’t remember ever having tasted a pretzel stick that tasted more like a pretzel stick.’ He shook his head. “Really, I must have a word with your mother. I can’t believe the kind of picnics you must have had.”

“I can’t believe I’m eating food that I made out of nothing,” admitted John and opened a third packet of crisps.

“That is precisely what was wrong with your first attempts,” said Nimrod, helping himself to some of Philippa’s cheesecake. “The thing is, you’re not making anything from nothing. Certainly not this cheesecake. You make things from the energy source that’s within you. The subtle fire. Remember? And the elements that surround you, of course.”

“How does it work?” asked John, forking a slice of cold ham and some pickles on to his place. “Djinn power? I mean, there must be a scientific explanation for it.”

“Er, some djinns who were scientists have tried to understand how djinn power works, yes. We think it has something to do with our ability to affect the protons in the molecules possessed by objects. Making something appear or disappear requires us to add or remove protons and thereby change one element into another. When we make something disappear like that rock, we are subtracting neutrons from the various atoms that make the rock. So you see there’s nothing magical about it. This is science. Physics. It’s impossible to make something from nothing, especially a good picnic. Now if you’d said you’d made it from thin air, you’d have been nearer the mark, John.”

Nimrod yawned. “Anyway, I think that’s enough practice for today. It’s best not to think about the science too much in case it affects your ability to use your power. It’s a bit like riding a bike in that respect; easier done than explained. Next time we’ll try you out on making a camel appear, or disappear, something alive. That’s much more difficult than a picnic. Creating something alive can make a bit of a mess. Which is why we do these things in the desert where no one really minds if you make a creature that’s inside out…”

"I got Kevin" (r/Kevin)

Over at /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix there's a story of strange phone goings-on:

Today, December 9th I go to call my mom to tell her a funny story about old people waiting for the traffic light behind the phone truck but I can't seem to get through to her, finally get through but it is really static filled and my mom says something weird is going on with my phone. I finally get home and try to call back and I hear a man's voice say hello and when I respond the phone rings again. Try and try again and I get this weird message about not saying anything, its one of those automated voices but it sounds more human. I try one last time and I get the man's voice and I ask who is this because I'm calling my mom and in a rude manner he say's "Kevin, what do you mean who's this?" and when I go to explain it rings again then clicks off.

So obviously one of you guys has been messing with the phones again. I particularly like how, being a Kevin, he is indignant that he has not been immediately recognised as such - surely it's obvious! Kevins are a class apart!

From now on, when someone's phone isn't working properly or they can't get through and get a stroppy response, they'll say that "I got Kevin".

* * *

TG Comments: /r/DimensionalJumping

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we might even just call it perseverance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I'd maybe summarise this as:

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

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

Body Movement Experiments

But it's ineffable.

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

Checking For Results; Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

Asserting For Outcomes

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

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

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

Not-so-triumphant moments?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[QUOTE]

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

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

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

[END OF QUOTE]

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Detachment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[COMMENT]

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

[END OF COMMENT]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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