TriumphantGeorge Compedium (Part 7)

POST: To answer a few very common newbie questions. The name "dimensional jumping" doesn't really describe it well.

Calling it "dimensional jumping" confuses a lot of people. It makes them think that they are jumping to an alternate dimension. It is just you making an alteration in your perception of how you perceive your reality.

Although I'd add: using words like "reality" is problematic also, though. What does it mean to "perceive your reality" and change that? Those terms are quite loaded. The problem with the term "dimensional jumping" isn't necessarily with the words, it's the assumptions that are brought to the words. Assumptions about what "you" are and what "the world" is, in the first place.

So although the name can be a source of misunderstanding (because it has associations with science-fiction type imagery), the process of unpacking that misunderstanding can be very useful - because it reveals that there is perhaps a much wider misunderstanding underlying that one.

You aren't going anywhere.

But then, in what sense are you really ever anywhere anyway? And so on. Ultimately, it might turn out that the distinction being made between literally changing dimensions and metaphorically changing dimensions is not a meaningful one - that they are, in their essential natures, identical

This is a really good point too. I really enjoy trying to wrap my head around it.
I was wrong. Thanks for disagreeing with me. I enjoy being in the wrong in this type of scenario.
Honestly right now i'm probably typing a really stupid reply to you. I have just come down from vyvanse, and i'm all jumbled.
I think that i'm going to delete my post. Or maybe i should keep it up, so others can see your comment. Yeah i'll just leave it up.

No, definitely don't delete the post. It's a good starting point for a discussion.

It's not that you are "in the wrong", it's that there are multiple ways to consider things, some of which may be more or less useful for one's purpose.

Our eventual aim should (perhaps) be to be able to take the "meta" position: that is, to consider different interpretations as relatively true while being held, but recognise that from a fundamental position those are just "as if" positions. (Of course, this is a conclusion we would arrive at via personal investigation; it is not something to 'believe in".)

This is where the literal vs metaphorical argument comes in. If you are having experiences "as if" something is true - that is, consistent with a particular metaphor - then it is, surely, indistinguishable from being literally true. We are then left to ponder what is the "nature of experiencing" itself.

I've a question that could be slightly off topic. Let's say you use "Dimensional Jumping" In order to "manifest" a girlfriend/boyfriend that is just perfect for you. Is that person a sentient being? or is that person merely an appearance arising within your awareness?

That's exactly on topic, I think. So, the place I'd probably start is, to pause and work out if and in what exact sense you are a "sentient being". (And also perhaps ponder why you used the word "merely" in your description.)

Wow, for some reason, I knew this is exactly what you would say. This reminds me of a dream I had. I was having this "serious" conversation with one of my dream characters, when I suddenly realized that he wasn't "real." Realizing this made me a bit fearful and even angry, and I lashed out saying "you're not even real!." He disappeared and I woke up. But, the funny thing is that, since I was dreaming, from the perspective of the waking-state "reality," I was not "real" either, yet I was accusing the dream character of being unreal. If I were to guess, when we manifest perfect mates, I'd say they're just as "real" as we are. But then other questions come up. Such as, does this person has an actual history, in the same way we have a history? Your thoughts probably differ here. But, let's say the "soul" concept is true, and that we've had many lifetimes. By manifesting a perfect mate, does that person also has a history stretching back countless of lifetimes? Interesting questions.

Ah, good example. So, that leads to the idea that you could "wake up" out of this current experience, and then you'd have to recontextualise this life. However, it's worth considering that you don't wake up out of anything, as such - there is no hierarchy, and hierarchies are just one way of thinking about the experience. Rather, your actual experience remains at the same level, it merely changes discontinuously.

As regards your "actual history" - in what way do you have such a thing? Your actual experience is, to occasionally have thoughts about an apparent history - in the ongoing now. If you recall a "past life", it could be the experience of "remembering something", it needn't have "really happened", and so on. Your state could change at any moment, into a state where you had a particular set of multiple lives, and then change again in an instant to apparently having had another particular set. You get the idea. "Souls" and "histories", too, are ways of thinking about experiences, perhaps.

However, we can short-circuit all of that, I would say. We might contemplate, if we are going with the "soul" idea: is the soul inside a world, or is the experience of an apparent world arising within the soul. (Here, I'm going to define "soul" as something like that-which-is-aware.) Without resolving that, it's very hard to talk about "other people", because we've not yet addressed in what sense we are "a person".

Could this be another way of saying, that, all "realities" are equally real, or unreal?

Or - that all moments of experience are of the same nature, and it's only the narratives we apply to them that organise them in terms of a hierarchy, and so on. We experience this moment then this moment then this moment (is one way to describe it); it's only our stories that label one moment as "real" and another as "dream".

We do evolve into higher and higher states of consciousness?

Well, I'd be inclined to say that all patterns and states are pre-existing, and we simply adopt them. In the same way as we might associatively flip through our memories, so we might flip through "moments". The story of "higher states" is similar to the story of "progress" in society. Really, things change, with notions of progress or improvement being a parallel narrative, I think.

If all moments are available always, then any moment can be brought into experience at any "time" (because "awareness" is "before" time), which means there is no necessary development - although "associative traversal" of moments might tend towards an experience of apparent continuous evolution of some sort.

as a conscious entity...

Are you a "conscious entity", though? It might seem pedantic, but it's important to be clear about the nature of this experience. If what you are is, for example, an "awareness" whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiential states, resulting in experiences "as if" the dominant fact-patterns that constitute those states are true - then "being a conscious entity" is a formatting of your experience, not what you are.

What you are in that case is not an object, hence not an entity, at all. There is not actually "one" of you - because what you are is "before" division and multiplicity - and therefore there cannot be more than one "awareness" either, not fundamentally. There is just... "awareness". Which cannot evolve, really. However, it can certainly "take on the shape of" the experience of apparently evolving. But equally it could just adopt, on a whim, the state of being at any point of such an apparent evolution!

And, actually, for several years, this fear of solipsism has bothered "me."

That's a key point, actually: people often push back against anything that has a hint of solipsism about it, because they don't like the idea that there's "only me" or everything is in "my" mind. However, we are not talking about "my" mind at all, because "awareness" isn't a container or a thing.

This is where we get into problems due to language, though. The very fact of using a word suggests an object, meaning we are "already wrong" (the "awareness" that can be spoken of is not the true awareness, to paraphrase). Language and conceptual thinking are already "too late", because they are experiences which are dependent upon the formatting of experience into objects, which are then related in mental space. It is not possible to think about, or have an experience of, that which experiences are "made from". That would be like trying to build a sandcastle which is the shape of both "sand" and "the beach". The sandcastle is both sand and the beach, but it cannot capture those things in form.

All of which suggests that, say, seeking "enlightenment" in experiences is pointless - because all "enlightenment experiences" are simply more experiences. You always are your nature; it is not something you can find or think about. However, you can infer this by noting the content of your experience directly, and how the only thing than never changes is the fact of being-aware - that is, a permanent contentless truth.

This is, oddly, a very freeing concept. And this is coming from someone who is very interested in "enlightenment." It's ironic, but this has been a very enlightening conversation!

Ironic indeed! And I think "ironic" is probably a good way to describe experience in general - as good as any, anyway. There's definitely something "mischievous" about the whole thing!

"Mischievous" ---It's comforting to think the entirety of "existence" is some sort of a joke. Thank you for such an awesome conversation! :)

Our own joke at our own expense, at that! Still, at least we've got a sense of humour eh? That was a nice little exploration - cheers!

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TG Comments: /r/Oneirosophy

POST: How would you detach from reality in an easy manner?

There's a saying in zen that would have helped tremendously for me to have understood at the time that says, "All fear is an illusion. Walk straight ahead no matter what."

I've never encountered that saying before, but it gets directly to the heart of it.

Ultimately, if you want to have dramatic things happen, you have to "be okay with whatever happens" and not block the unfolding of the patterns you have made - you can't be re-intending every time an uncomfortable feeling or apparently "incorrect" sensory scenario arises. Doing so results in you "thrashing your world" due to repeatedly intending something then re-asserting the previous state once the "out of control" or "happening by itself" feeling comes up (which commonly accompanies change).

The whole thing about "surrender" and "allowing" and "non-attachment" is really about the recognition that, although we might intend a specific target experience, we do not deliberately select the sequence of moments which arise between "here" and "there", and so we must give up to the mystery as the unknown path unfolds.

Definitely a good question to ask ourselves is: Am I constantly unwittingly re-asserting my starting state?

You make a good point about emphasising that it's not surrender in the sense of giving up, it's surrender in the sense of trust. You are giving up the fight, because the right thing is happening, so there is nothing to fight.

To cover "starting state", let me reuse an example:

If you are sat in a chair, and want to stand up, you should intend being-stood-up and let experience unfold accordingly. If you approach it this way, your body will feel like it moves "by itself" and there will be a sense of effortlessness - because no muscle movement is occurring other than that required to shift position. (If you are feeling muscular effort, that is the feeling of creating effort, which means you muscles have done their movement bit, and are now doing something else.)

However, what people usually do is being this be re-asserting their current position. They begin by locating themselves being-sat-down and fully establish that before beginning. They then try to overcome being-sat-down by intending their muscles "manually" in order to get to being-stood-up - which they do by keeping being aware of being-sat-down throughout. In effect they are continually re-asserting their initial state of being-sat-down as part of their strategy for being-stood-up.

So, this is similar to people who try to make changes to the world in other ways, but do so by starting with the world as it is, or be constantly checking how they are doing by comparing where they are now vs the initial state (which simply re-asserting the initial state again, to a greater or lesser extent). This is really part of the broader problem where people try to be "over here" while making changes "over there", in space or in sequence. For example, wanting to fill the room with your 'presence', but attempting to do it while remaining firmly located in your body area, maintaining a mission control aspect. This can happen because people confuse being "detached" with being spatially located separate from the world. This is not quite what is meant. "Detached" really means "allowing".

I really dislike the langauge of surrender because for me it evokes something external whereas you're trusting your own process of othering

Yeah, I don't think there's any single "best" way to phrase it.

The language for "that thing where you stop interfering which feels a bit like things are happening to you but they are the things that you have already created" is pretty tricky, and I'm inclined to think it just depends on who's on the other side of the conversation.

For someone whose main problem is that they are constantly grasping onto their sensory experience, "surrendering to the flow" type imagery probably capture the feel of it. So long as the context is one of being assertive in other ways - in other words, the reason you surrender moment-by-moment control is because you've already asserted the outcome - then it cane useful.

However, if it gives the sense of "surrendering to God's Will" without also informing you that "God's Will" corresponds to the landscape of your accumulated previous intentions and their implications (including any ideas you had about a "God"), then it's more problematic.

Some of this is unavoidable if you want to have a sense of progression.

I don't really mean this in the sense of extinguishing your notion of the past, or your memory. I mean it in a much more straightforward way of not re-asserting the current state, by looking for it or implying it.

Firstly, I want you to remember that I still continue to respect your opinion. Nothing has changed in that regard.

Likewise! Your last response is on my list, so don't regard my delay in replying as anything other than me wanting to mull it over for a bit, because I think we ended up talking about slightly different things (releasing the current state vs releasing accumulated progress over time).

Quick thoughts:

There is nothing stopping you skipping from one "frame" to another in my description, other than refusing to release your current state, or somehow re-asserting it. By "refusing to release your current state", I simply mean not continuing to assert aspects of the current frame (sensory aspect or implied pattern or fact), so that it can shift. You can't stand up if you keep focusing on the sensory experience of being sat down.

The essence of a "patterning" approach is that there is no permanent solid structure at all, even though we have built up some habitual structure over time. If you look at the grid metaphor animation, for example, the starting and ending frames are totally disconnected. All potential frames are simultaneously available and accessible.

The brutal simplicity underlying all this is:

You are an "imagination space" - that is the context. Sensory experiences arise within it, via patterning - that is the content. There are no restrictions on content. Changing the content means intending-imagining what you want (basically: intensifying the contribution of a pattern) while not intending-imagining something contrary to it, and hopefully not something that limits the manner it can appear to manifest by.

Everything beyond that simple account, is a description of specific patterns which we already have, or which have benefits if we format ourselves with them. This is the idea of "Active Metaphors" - you intensify a metaphorical pattern, and your ongoing experience starts to align with that metaphor.

So if we wanted to have the experience of teleporting, then for sure we could just intend fully and do a "frame jump", since there is no fundamental underlying mechanism to things other than intending-imagining them happening. However, another approach is to introduce into your world a mechanism or fact, to make it possible as part of the content of your world rather than an exception or jump outside of it - e.g. the "infinite grid" or whatever.

Looping back to your points:

1. For convenience, a "frame" is just any particular sensory arrangement. So it doesn't really make sense to say that a frame would be flexible internally - because that would be another frame. (Remembering, though, that the concept of "frames" is just a handy metaphor; experience is not really arranged that way, although it can be formatted to behave "as if" it were.)
2. Think I've tackled that above. There is no true model of reality. However, models can be useful for coming up with ideas for "as if" experiences.
3. I agree with what you say about "confidence". Really what one wants is to fully be the entirety of content and then shape-shift. There is no technique to that, and it is always true anyway, however we can get stuck imagining-that we are not this. Stuff like "letting go" is just one way to relax the division and settle out into being the entire space and all that's within it. It's not letting go of control as such, it's letting go of (spatial) attentional focus and, counter-intuitively, becoming fully attended as a result. It's also letting go of re-intending the current state, to allow yourself to shift. I say "also", but in effect the two turn out to be the same thing. Holding onto attentional focus is one of the last ways, having allowed body and thought to flow, that we subtly restrict our shifting of state.

Okay, I ended up typing a full response there, but perhaps it clarifies where I'm coming from and how it connects with your comment.

The everyday example is, if you're getting up from a chair to go into the next room, you don't being by feeling out with the senses to find the experience of yourself sat down, and then try to manipulate that experience into standing up. You think only the fact of being-stood-up and allow your sensory experience to apparently flow towards that position.

Pushing this further, if we were to teleport from one room to another, how would that play out? We wouldn't be aiming to forget the memory of the room we started in, but we would be aiming to completely let go of the fact of being-in-the-room, to allow it to be replaced as a relative truth by the fact of being-in-the-other-room.

So that's the sense in which I mean not checking or comparing. It's perfectly okay to spend some time contemplating how much you've progressed. But when you are actually performing a state-shift, you should not be checking on your progress by bringing up the initial state for comparison, because that re-asserts that initial state again. You keep finding yourself sat down in the chair / un-teleported again!

I probably do feel scared quite often, just in everyday life. Or maybe "nervous" is a better word. Generally though, I find unusual situations - those which reveal things to be not as they seem - to be comforting rather than scary. Although it wasn't my conscious aim in exploring these things, when I reflect on it I think that the mundane version of the world would actually be much more scary.

So, I was probably quite a fearful child I think, and to some extent that stayed with me, but a counterintuitive side-effect of it has been that I've always been good for emergency situations when things go wrong - because I was comfortable with an ongoing sense of discord anyway. Unflappableness derived from baseline flappability? :-)

For "this stuff" - mind and reality - I was interested in it from when I was in early high school, so I started playing with stuff like astral projection, did that thing of being super-scared of the onset of the experience, eventually committed to it. Over time you accept the fear as a feeling that comes up, and later when you have a sense of being-the-context as your identity you are more okay with the content that comes up, because it's within you rather than something external coming at you. So what's important is finding new moorings after unusual experiences have cut the ropes on the old ones. And being okay with not-knowing - the inherent mystery of not having pre-experience of your upcoming experiences - while also having confidence that intention is effective.

You still feel the feelings though. You're still having a "person" experience. But it's more like ripples in an ocean, rather than disturbances in a glass of water.

You know, something I was pondering lately: I think it's quite common for people to think that they want a cool "glitch" or a "manifestation" - until they get it, and then they're suddenly not so sure. There is an anxiousness that comes with it, the anxiousness of intuiting that there is potentially no inherent stability or boundary? How would you phrase it?

The implications of "high weirdness".

• The world is not a "place". That's a pretty scary thing to realise. Anything might emerge from the "gloop"!
• I am not a "person". That's troubling too, initially. The stable foundation I thought I was, has no solidity!

Without anything to replace those two negatives, we are left with just The Unknown without any sense of trusting, and that can be scary. So the story of being okay with being scared, is to have a replacement for those? When you get a fear response with "reality" stuff, what sort of thing is it that you find shakes you?

Stacked Weirdness & Power

I was feeling like I no longer knew what reality was, what was real and not, and then I started to get scared. Then I backed off toward normality again.

I think knowing that one can pull back is a definite advantage. It's an option we want - "the right but not the obligation". At least then we can experiment and still feel safe.

There is an issue that once you've allowed a level of weirdness to happen, it does tend to multiply and become dominant. It's not like you've tweaks a specific event, so much as adjusted a generalised fact, like having ticked the checkbox called "Enable Hyper-Associative Events" on your Life App, and the corresponding fact-pattern is now overlaid upon all experience.

In general, I'd say the more we react to a pattern, the more prominent it becomes. It doesn't really matter whether that's a positive intention or a negative reaction - anything that focuses on or even implies the existence of the pattern, intensifies it. And so we get that guy over at Glitch who had been fighting the ever-growing instances of "11:11" for decades, not realising that anything he does about it will persist it. This is the real danger I think: that if we don't twig, then we can end up battling against something we've triggered, and get swallowed by it.

I had a dream once, where I was floating in the void. I came across an infinite invisible wall. I pushed and pushed and couldn't get past it. It started to feel very claustrophobic and unbearable. Finally, I took a step back... and just walked through it. I think that dream was maybe trying to tell me something at that time! :-)

It's not as though I suddenly become more powerful myself.

In what sense do you mean, "more powerful myself"? If you are looking for the experience of feeling yourself "do" reality shifting things, then I'm not sure you are going to get that, since intention itself is effortless, and you sort of are the whole of everything. Or do you mean just having a more direct sense of the impact of your intentions?

I feel something shifting inside me. It's like, "Oh... I used to feel like that.. but now I don't. Hmm..." That's the best I can describe it.

Ah, that's really interesting, particularly what you say about the less you need to make deals, the more powerful you become inside. As a general approach, I think it's very good to, when you realise you have attributed power to some "outside" imagery, to intentionally draw that back into yourself (metaphorically, but also that's not a bad way to imagine it).

You mean not a human. You're still a subjectivity, which is also a kind of person. Just not a human or conventional person.

Yes. I think the phrasing of "not a human" sounds to a lot of people like we are claiming to be something else, like "non-human", but I like that term "a subjectivity" - it's similar to "a perspective" but without the implied point of view aspect.

Fear of the Unknown & Dreams

Like for example that dream where I felt things got so real that if I didn't wake up, I'd be dreaming it as my life instead of my old life... I guess unknown can be freaky if you expect yourself to have some needs in the near future.

That was a really good example and description. So, it's a variant of "not knowing how the world works anymore" and the fear that comes with it. This can happen both in "this" world when weirdness starts happening (even when that means getting something we want), and in the "other" worlds of dreams and projections when we have no accumulated knowledge.

I think perhaps we can prepare ourselves for this in our daly lives, and it's about building up confidence in something we rarely use. It doesn't necessarily required weirdness, but a sort of openness, in order to answer the question: how do I survive in an environment that I don't (think that I) know?

One of my little experiments used to be, to ask my body to go and find things, and then let it move by itself. The mild version of this was, to just ask to "know" where something or someone was. If I was late meeting up with friends and didn't know which bar they were in on that street, I would just ask my body to go to where they were. In both cases, you are intending an experience and then allowing it to arise - whether that's the experience of an action or the experience of a thought.

How doe this work? Well, if what you are is really a "subjectivity" who is currently having the experience of being-the-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person, then all facts are available and all events are possible. One simply intends an experience, and allows it to unfold as overlaid upon the currently active patterning.

A couple of examples in the dream world where one draws upon knowledge implied by the situation, via intention, deliberately and not:

However, in order to progress in your dreams you will occasionally need to make a leap of faith. Make sure that you take them sparsely, and that intuition is on your side.I started walking into a direction that took me away from where I previously was. Putting my focus on something else put my body into auto-pilot. In this case I got the idea of the key being for my spaceship mid-way. (Spaceships use ignition keys, just like cars right? cough)
My body automatically walked me towards where this spaceship is, even though I did not know where it was. Somewhere deep within my thoughts I knew that I had gotten to this space station somehow. If the key indicates that I own a spaceship, then I would have arrived in this spaceship, and I would also remember where I parked it.Putting myself in "autopilot" I can walk to locations that make sense for me to know within the dream plot, even if I don't consciously know where they are.
-- From Hyu's guide on Persistent Realms

and:

We went outside and he gave me the strongest bear-hug I've ever experienced. I couldn't breathe and soon became unconscious. It was like waking from a dream; this world was a dream and I awoke to a reality more real and vivid than this world is. I saw the illusion of this existence on Earth dispelled! It faded away and I didn't regret it. Soon I found myself in the "real" world in a huge city that I already knew. My memory seemed to return--Yes--I had gone to sleep and dreamed of a little place called "Earth" and now I was awake. "That was a silly dream" I thought, and I soon forgot all about "Earth." I continued my life, just like before I fell asleep. I lived in that fantastic city for years and years--centuries it seemed. I lived there so long that I COMPLETELY forgot all about Earth. For hundreds of years I had forgotten Earth. If someone was to ask me about it, I couldn't remember, since it happened so long ago. Then one day I was walking to a store. Suddenly a confusing loss of direction hit me and I felt myself falling. Suddenly I opened my eyes only to see strange leaves, the sky and FD and the other boy looking at me! Where was I now? How did I get here? What happened? Then I remembered: Hundreds of years ago, I fell asleep and found myself here. This place was called "Earth" and was a part of a weird dream. I must have fallen asleep again. Slowly my Earthly memory returned. I asked the boys how long I had been unconscious. They said only a few minutes. They asked me what happened, and I told them I didn't want to talk about it.
-- From Robert Peterson's OBE guide

In other words: we do not need to fear the unknown. Just because we have not explicitly thought about the knowledge, recalled it, does not mean that the "right action" is not available to us. In fact, right action is always available, because we never truly act, rather than intend or imply outcomes and experiences arise in line with those intentions. We can surely confirm this for ourselves in non-challenging everyday life and develop a confidence for fun, before putting ourselves in any situation where this would be required for survival?

So, much of interest there (and your paddling and swimming imagery was nicely evocative). I'm thinking that perhaps they can be seen as pointing to a single idea perhaps, which also takes in that option to reduce our needs rather than fulfil them (or as a way of fulfilling them). It comes down to this idea of the "tactical" move and of "power".

I'm gonna riff on that a bit -

I suggest that there is only one mechanism, only one thing that ever "happens" - and that is intending. Even the apparent actions and events that occur, they are not "happening", there are (metaphorically speaking) aspects of a landscape that is static between intentions. The experience of "time passing" is itself a static pattern.

This means that there's no such thing as "tactical" this or that, and no variation in levels of power - because all that there is, is the "nuclear option". There is only one way, and that is the pressing of the big red button. Every intention is a reshaping of the landscape, and therefore in effect the complete destruction and then creation of a world. There is no path to power; the fundamental truth of the matter never changes. Having the experience of "feeling powerful" - that is just another sensory experience, and has nothing to do with power as such (except in the sense that one uses the true and only power in order to generate an experience of "feeling powerful").

Yes, I'd agree that if you can imagine something, then you can intend it, because imagining is an intending really - an intending of the experience of an image - and only a small adjustment is required to make it "real" - to intend it 3D-immersively rather than in a separate strand of thought. And this leads us to an important point I think...

What we intend is always to have experiences. Our intentions correspond to generating experiences "as if" things were true. Experiences themselves have no causal power - one moment does not cause the next moment, they just arise sequentially is all - so there can be no tactical or developmental strategy. You have intended an experience like "this", or you you have intended an experience like "that". The content of experience is itself actually irrelevant, other than personal preferences. What we are, is the context of experience - and having recognised this, we are freed from concerns about power, mechanism, and so on!

Sp, we may desire the experience of feeling ourselves "doing" our events, rather than experience them "happening to us", but it will just be another experience. Intentions are always "global", even though experiences may be apparently localised. Knowing this, we have a choice, and that is what matters. We can have... fun. If we switched our experience to one of "seeing the entire landscape" rather than just a partial view, then we'd be having an entirely static (although blissful) experience. We'd get bored pretty quick... except that there would be no time, so that makes no sense. :-)

What else is there, except for intention? There is no other method or mechanism - it's all sensory theatre. It doesn't matter whether it's small or large changes, moving your arm or moving a house, you are always intending: "intensifying the thought that something is true".

For sure, the "infinite grid" is imagination - but so is "the world as place" and anything else we can conceive of. That is the such-ness of things, and everything exists always. It's just a matter of how prominent that particular imagining or pattern is in our experience. Relative intensities of contribution. The world is ourselves as aware imagination itself, shaped into a particular form - and intention is the reshaping of ourselves.

So I'm not saying that the "infinite grid" or whatever is how things are - the opposite really. I'm saying there is no fundamental unchanging "how things are", other than ourselves-as-awareness taking on the shape of a state. Anything beyond that, is the form we have adopted. Fundamental truth (context) vs relative truth (content). And we are free to shape ourselves however we want.

However, this does in effect mean we are always using the nuclear option - the full power of God, as it were - because there is no other option. When I interrupt the flow of things and move my arm, I'm just intending the fact of arm movement, but actually I move as the whole world in order to do so, since there is no separation. The process is always: I shift state as a whole, and my subsequent sensory experiences arise from the new state.

And of course the world - as in, the complete description that constitutes its state - is static between intentions, between reshapings. If it wasn't, then that would imply there is a power outside of ourselves, even though we have no outside!

So, to emphasise: This isn't about the any particular approach we want to experience ourselves apparently doing; it's what underlies all apparent approaches - our nature. Beyond that we are completely free to do detail work or broad shifting however we please, for the simple enjoyment of it. (Knowing that all approaches are basically optional, chosen because they fit our views at the time, how comfortable we are with them. After all, there's not much point making changes for the sake of it - the purpose is to have fun or otherwise increase the quality of our experience.)

Knowledge. There are different ways to conceive how experience should be structured.

Knowledge, I would say, corresponds to an aspect of "state", as distinct from intend-ing would be the change of state. Beyond that, of course, everything's up for grabs.

How would you define "knowledge"?

In some sense you always use the most powerful capacity of intent, but that's generally below the level of conscious awareness.

Well, that's quite the thing isn't it? You don't experience yourself intending as such because intending isn't a thing, and an intention isn't a thing but an aspect (although once can use an object to represent an intention). If you aren't "looking" at the part of the world you are shifting, then you won't experience anything - other than sort of very slight felt-knowing.

You seem to ignore the relative problems that human or recent ex-human beings have. You can't answer a real life problem with theory.

Well, it does answer problems in the sense that it shows the relationship between aspects of experience - importantly, it highlights that no structures are solid, and that cause is intention and not in the content of experience - but then we progress to specific examples to illustrate this.

I'm not sure what exactly your objection is, in terms of how it would relate to life and making changes? The base notion is of course just "relative intensities of facts = state ---> sensory experience". The conclusion is that you don't need to worry about mechanisms and techniques, except in the sense that you imagine-that you are doing something causal, then you are, and that if you decide something means-that another thing is true, that is cause. But nature of that cause is "the thought that something is the case". After that, it's playing with examples, to demonstrate that causal/acasual mix.

If you teleport somewhere, the me that you'll meet there...

We actually just can't talk about that - it's meaningless to talk about "the you" that I will meet, right?

On fears, they really have to be tackled specifically. There's the general fear of change, which I think can be answered by recognising our true identity as the context of experience - but specific fears depend on their relationship to one's identify, I'd say, so there's some unpacking to do, unless you just commit to an outcome. Eventually, it's the story of developing trust?

We hit the limits of language and metaphor here, because "intending" isn't a thing or an act, since that implies a doer and a thing done. But that's never stopped me typing away before, and it won't stop me now...

Intending vs Sensory Theatre

Firstly, you should view all of your sensory experiencing as a result. No part of a sensory experience causes another part of a sensory experience. If you feel yourself moving your arm - maybe a verbal thought then a muscle tension then an arm movement - you need to recognise that all of that was a result, and none of it was the intention.

• Intending has no sensory aspect.
• If you experience a sensory outcome, it is arising as an implication of the intending.
• You cannot experience yourself intending as such.

"Intending" can be viewed as you changing your state - where "state" means the current distribution of patterns and facts that constitute your world, dissolved into the background of your experience. One way to think of this, is as a landscape whose contours are the facts and patterns. Your ongoing sensory experience then arises, like a mirage, from this landscape. You cannot change the mirage itself, all change is indirect. You change your landscape-state, and subsequently all your experiences will be aligned with that state.

• Your state is the 'cause' of all your experiences.
• It consists of all possible facts and patterns, at relative strengths of contribution. It therefore implicitly defines the sequence of moments that are queued up into the future.
• All change is indirect and is a change of state, a change of the relative prominence of certain facts and patterns, a redistribution of the landscape. "Intending" is what we call changing state.

"An intention", then, is what we call the pattern which we are going to emphasise in our state. It is like an unbounded non-sensory thought, a dimensionless fact. Emphasising such a fact involves a literal and direct reshaping of this 'landscape'. Basically, a reshaping of ourselves. But wait - if we only sensorily experience something when intending if the intention affects the part of the landscape we are currently "looking at", how do we loop this back to direct experience?

Mostly: faith. But for the purposes of exploration, we cheat. Although we can direct without any sensory theatre, it is easier initially to use misdirection and create an experience of doing something, but have that "doing" not interfere with what we are trying to accomplish.

Back to the Chair

When people get up from a chair, they typically use misdirection by intending muscular tension (an experience of "doing") and during that the intention of standing up occurs. But in this case the misdirection and the desired outcome are opposing one another.

Instead, let's have our experience of "doing" be independent. We sit in the chair, and we place our attention on the background space of the room, and we decide that by focusing on the background space of the room, our body is going to stand up. Rather than intending that "tensing my muscles means-that I will stand up", we are intending that "focusing on the background space of the room means-that I will stand up".

Of course, one could simply non-sensorily intend the fact that "I will stand up" (the "just-decide" approach), but actually the "assignment of meaning (or causal power)" approach gives you a good experience of a general principle. That is, that intention is always the true cause even though it cannot be sense.

Once you've played with the background space example, you can try "looking out the window means-that I will stand up". Then, "saying 'stand up' means-that I will stand up". And penultimately, "being here in this position right now means-that I will stand up". After that, you are at raw intention, and are in a position to extrapolate your new understanding of causality to your experience of the world more generally.

Was that a sort of intending that I was doing or was the energy already there being unleashed from the awakening I was going through and I was just overlaying unnecessary imaginations on top of something that was already happening anyway?

I'd say that you were imagining-that something was true with conviction, and your ongoing experience was patterned accordingly. There was no energy "out there" but it is enough that you have an idea of "energy" and imagine yourself accessing it. You committed to your own logic, and everything else followed.

In terms of the parent comment, you were "intending" a situation as true by implication, and then experiencing it. (You could have directly asserted what you wanted without any of that "sensory theatre", however it's much easier to allow something to happen if you think that it "makes sense" somehow.)

What your awakening did, was free you up from your habitual patterns, crack you open. and make things more fluid in terms of what could be asserted or implied. Although, as you notice, you can make yourself quite unstructured quite quickly if you're not careful - basically, put yourself into a manic mode!

For some reason the idea of there not being any challenge at all seemed to take the fun out of things.

Indeed.

So you can directly assert something by simply just-deciding that it is true. This amounts to assigning fresh meaning to the current experience: "my current situation means-that this is true", which is equivalent to "my existence means-that this is true". All perhaps without any sensory aspect to it at all.

But as you've noted: where's the fun in that? Because where that would end up if we pursued this fully, is with a completely disconnected experience, just like everyday casual associative thinking or just random hypnagogic imagery. Getting bored, we would once again allow that imagery to coalesce into a scene and then an environment, just like the beginning of a dream, and we'd be in a world again. Although this time we know its nature.

Understanding this, we can skip that process.

So, overall, once we have the idea that the only causal power is ourselves as intentional state-shifters, this frees us from our limited concepts. Strangely, one of the benefits of the realisation is that we no longer have to burrow down to the fundamentals, because we've recast all experience and so can be high level again - while retaining our updated perspective. Basically, be more playful, treating ourselves and the world within us as "all imagination" and all imaginings as facts at different relative levels of intensity or contribution.

POST: Sensoria vs visualization.

Another good question is, why is it so easy to imagine your dream world? Not this one, your sleeping dreams. That also is imaginary.

Yet, it's completely without effort. I was talking about this elsewhere, intention + automatic pattern completion, copy-pasted below. The point is, you shouldn't be doing much of anything with your conscious mind except "requesting" - effectively raising a part of a pattern, which then naturally "raises" the rest of it.

Excerpt:

Good point about "allowing" imagination/results. I learned visualisation from David Fontana's The Meditator's Handbook which basically amounts to:

• Regularly try to visualise various objects and environments.
• Eventually realise that it's not "you" that creates the images. They arise in response to you intending to have them - if you allow this to happen.

Relevant quote:

Visualization: A Key to the Inner World
. . . [When visualizing people] At this point, notice the creative power of the mind. If you have worked through each of the visualization exercises I've given, mastering one before going on to the next, you will find that, as in dreams, the mind creates the face for you without conscious effort on your part.

The world around you might be described as appearing in the same way. Dissolved within you are beliefs, expectations, knowledge, all sorts of accumulated archetypal patterns and so on, which might be said to "filter infinity" into superimposed patterns (facts-of-the-world as 'dissolved into the background'). Your intention is a "selection" from the resulting possible patterns.

You do not need to control the details because - like the smell of a flower bringing forth all the related memories and knowledge associated with it - the result is already part of the extended pattern with which the intention is associated.

In other words: Intention is a static selection mechanism; it is an additional 'fact' you add to your world. This is why "allowing" needs to be the basic approach: you are not creating an image, you are 'letting form' or 'letting through'.

The whole point with visualization is to begin bringing subconscious/unconscious capabilities into the conscious domain.

Why would you want to bring things into the conscious (actually: present moment expanded sensory) domain? That's like people who want to be directly aware of all the "steps in between". But there aren't any steps, unless you are experiencing them. If you get whatever you want, that's enough. There is no secret mechanism behind it. There is no "how it works" to anything.

The "point" of visualisation is... to summon desired sensory experiences.

EDIT: The so-called "unconscious" is perfectly present at all times as the background to conscious experience. It just isn't experienced as unfolded image-sound-texture. It's the stars in the sky vs the midday sun.

What if you could not only begin to visualize on the level of sensoria, but also share those visuals and other senses with another being in the so-called waking sensory universe? For me this is where the interest lies, and it would be of great achievement if it were possible in a consistent way. This is real magic we're talking about. I've experienced something along these lines, so I know it to be possible in some capacity. In your scenario you describe you are simply trading one illusion for another, except you would be the God of the illusion. Perhaps that comes with its own perils, and if it is so that we are already in an illusory universe that is "run" so to speak by a God, then I'm not sure that trying to master the illusion is the correct goal - I would assume that mastery over the Truth would equally provide mastery over illusion, with the added benefit of being aware of the true nature of reality - not simply being a master of shadows.

And this is a key issue, right? Say you have the ability to create a fully convincing visualisation of an army of angelic warriors, floating in the sky above you.

If everyone can see those warriors, you're God.
If only you can see those warriors, you're mad.

Right, so I'd rather aim to be God than mad.

Good choice! :-)

Thing is, it's how deep you go to make the changes I think. Mild autosuggestion and you are creating hallucinations for a localised self (dreaming you are mad: oops). Deeper, deeper and you are creating hallucinations for consciousness as a whole (dreaming the whole world is mad: fine).

So many dilemmas of free will vs determinism when you get into that though.

Don't worry about it. You always have free will relative to the "dimension" you are standing on, which corresponds to the one you can't perceive at all. For instance, you are having a 4D experience of a 3D world right now, which means that you are "standing" on and intending from 5D. (Although actually you are awareness and beyond dimensions fundamentally, but this is a convenient way to think about it.)

I questioned how this could be. How could some other being be having free will, but also be synchronistically answering my inquiries?

It happens all the time. One may think of it as over-determination. That everything is already taken into account. So, the conversation in the bus is about whatever it is and is about your situation and is about the guy next to you's situation, all happening simultaneously. Since this is a headache, it's easier to just say: look, waking life is just as dream-like and metaphorical as dreaming life. It is filled with personal meaning because it basically is yourself as projected out.

Imagine that everything that you are is folded down into a little, tiny speck in your heart area. But what this does is, it projects out in all directions a metaphorical representation of you. You are therefore literally experiencing yourself, exploring yourself as you go about your day.

If you want to include other people in this, imagine they too have the same setup, so that everyone's projections overlap "holographically" as it were, and the final result is meaningful for all. (You can skip that part because everyone is all you anyway, in effect.)

How are you picturing this 5D world to be?

So for a 4D space (which you are viewing from a 5D stance) you can see it as the Infinite Grid metaphor I posted previously. If you then visualise each small square as being a tube, then you can go further, etc. But really there's no need, because we've already chosen one organising concept ("moments") and said that the grid is infinite. See yourself as the vast conscious space in which the (determined) grid appears, is dissolved in, and imagine traversing the moments by unfolding them one by one (free will).

Remember though, there is no dimensionality "really"; it's just a way of conceptualising things and formatting experience so that you can contemplate it and formulate intentions.

There is no time or space aside from your experience of time or space. There is no spatially-extended world beyond theses walls; the world is instead a list of facts dissolved into the background, unfolded into/as the senses as you explore it with your gaze.

How does everyone have free-will if they are me?

Other people: Think of them as "Extended Persons" with many aspects, only one of which is being experienced in-the-senses by you. But really it is easier to think of them as parts of you. Or: That every moment, every perspective, every possibility will have a turn at being experienced.

As you see, it depends how you look at it: in-time, or from outside of time, etc.

There give been reports by people of everyone suddenly looking round...

It's like a choose your own adventure story book.

Good metaphor! Everyone "on Earth" is reading the same book simultaneously, but they had different starting pages and take varying routes. :-)

...and therein lies the paradox.

Right. Eventually you'd choose limits again. You don't really want all your friends and family to be puppets, do you? Most people just opt for a little bit of influence in times of need. The very occasional "I command that this will happen", and a guaranteed result.

If you do bring about a massive discontinuity, would you want to remember it? For instance, jump back to correct a mistake? I think that once you'd done the deed, you'd opt for ignorance again.

Do you mean looking around or looking rotund?

Ha, rotund, good! I mean, people who have "waking up" moments and it seems like everything goes quiet and the other people notice, it goes all Inception. The puppets pause...

Relevant because it's a flicker of loosening grip and focus, and yet being the whole environment.

No, but I've come to the conclusion that I want my body to be my puppet.

Easy:

Relax. Decide that your body is a "shell". Tell it to do something and let it move by itself - e.g. "body, go to the shops" or "body, resurrect". Simply be the experiencer. Build from there. Read the middle sequence of the Missy Vineyard book for inspiration.

POST: Some reasons I hate this realm.

[POST]

==1) In ideal circumstances, life here is too short.

2. The body is weak and subject to damage if exposed in most environments too long.
3. Sentient beings reproduce in this realm without the permission of or consideration of the community of sentient beings in the realm
4. The body depends on material resources simply to prevent decay and death
5. Most sentient beings here are unwilling to communicate and compromise at all, and those that are willing to communicate and compromise are on the whole extremely ignorant
6. Beings here are concerned with pleasures, status, and possessions above wisdom, integrity, and virtue.
7. Magick is almost non-existent.
8. There are limited resources available, and essentially all of them have been claimed - making it difficult to pursue material games and arts or even survive in this realm without becoming a slave.
   My goal at present is to end up in a realm where these qualities are all 100% the opposite. What are your opinions on this realm?
   But, hell, at least I don't regularly have molten metal dropped upon me, get sliced into pieces, suffer from a ground made of hot iron, or get attacked by beings with iron claws and fiery weapons until I'm rendered unconscious from pain at which time I am revived, over and over for 1,620,000,000,000 years.
   Edit: oh, I forgot one
9. Sentient beings eat each other in this realm==

[END OF POST]

Nice list. Wondering: If there is only one being, being the world, does most of this go away?

7. Magick is how the world works, right now. Perhaps: What you really mean is that you are displeased with previous results (established habits in experience) and wish they hadn't become so ingrained.

If there is only one being, being the world, does most of this go away? Hmm, I'm not sure what you're asking. Would you clarify?

Well, it seems churlish to complain about the details of one's own creation (following the subjective idealist angle of this subreddit). And your desire to "end up in a realm" seems quite passive?

That depends on how you understand magick. I understand magick to be direct acts of will that break the fundamental rules of convention: the laws of nature.

I'd go with something along the lines of: the process by which desired experiences come into being.

Past intentions create patterns which may place limits on the routes by which future intentions unfold. The results of previous magickal acts may become "ordinary" with time and familiarity, may even become so entrenched as to be called "laws".

I think if we define magick more broadly than this, then the word ceases to correspond to its conventional meaning, and starts to become indistinguishable from 'will/intent' in general.

I see where you're coming from. But I'm thinking that to separate the two in this way is a false dichotomy which might obscure the flexible nature of things - the mechanism and process is identical. The "rules of the realm" aren't rules/laws so much as habits, etc.

Opening your hand and levitating are the same. But... one is less likely, apparently.

We can never know why we created a place as we created it, so that has to wait I suppose. But ...

Why do you think transforming yourself will allow you to leave this place? Or rather, that this is the way to get to another realm?

On the magick thing: You are correct of course on the distinction, but the humdrum and the strange arise by the same process, from and of the same origin. This matters because...

Who cares about "convention" and other people? If this is the realm that you created, then all that matters is what is conventional or frightening to you. The "normal" simply corresponds to habits you have developed, experiences you have fallen into repeating. The "esoteric" are just those that are less commonly experienced. There is no difference other than that.

So... the question to ask is, why have you fallen into treating some things as a big deal and not others? Is that perhaps the reason - the only reason - you find certain things more difficult?

Are you effectively just procrastinating making "the jump" by presenting it to yourself as a challenge?

If I want to create and maintain a new realm, I have to change myself.

Might we rephrase it something like - "change the form that I have taken"?

Another reason they're difficult is because a part of me thinks it's dangerous to tamper with my mind in these ways. I'm not totally comfortable with and confident in my own mental power. I think I might go insane or hurt myself. Physicalism is still a deep habit I'm fighting against, even though I intellectually reject it.

Right, and that is where the stress comes in. I was conversing with someone the other day, about how "anything might be possible" but that we actually would often choose not to be able to just, say, command people or instantly teleport, because it would break our model of the world, our sense of stability and safety.

This is why I wondered about the "procrastination explanation". And that you might want it to be a slow, gradual, effortful, challenging process where you fiddle about and transform each subtle pattern and structure.

Habits don't usually just disappear, and I'm not sure I would want them to anyway.

The second clause is key. They can and do disappear instantly. And this realm disappears every time you dream or do an OBE. You could just not come back. You could create a persistent dream world and attach to it, or create a tulpa wonderland and swap places, and you're outta here. Or a 'dimensional jump'. They're all the same thing really.

Because by investigating and experimenting you're not really accomplishing anything except making yourself more comfortable with radical change (nothing wrong with this, it's a perfectly acceptable way to progress). What you are doing is "dreaming more experiences" for yourself, only these experiences are "about" uncovering how the world work and changing it.

You can't get away from dreaming (because you and the dream are the same thing) but you can dream anything at any time. The only trick is that you have to let go of dreaming that you are adjusting this dream, and you have to stop applying effort because it implies a certain sort of dream itself.

Someone asked my a short while ago if there was a 'cheat sheet' for using the 'Infinite Grid' metaphor, and I drew this up. The key is the "allowing". Just as with visualisation or even daily perception, mastery involves coming to the stage where you let go and "let the world come to you". Effort prevents this, because it implies and creates a different experience.

Not that I think instantaneous transformation is impossible, but it's not for me right now.

That's totally fine. And the exploration-investigation aspect is pretty good fun anyway.

You got infinite power. Get used to it. ;-)

POST: The Block of Family Members

[POST]

I am having a block in my progress that pertains to family members that perhaps someone can point me a way out of.
I am finding myself making tremendous progress when I set my intentions correctly and maintain mindfulness of the situation I am in - more clearly, that I am in fact God observing the situation unfold and creating it at the same time - whilst simultaneously acting as a character in the drama. However, there is the one aspect of my life that seems to draw me back into the belief systems of being a simple human with the same limitations I have always had - and that is my family. My family, whom I see very frequently, seem to be distracting me from this truth at every turn - in part it is my temptation to speak to my father about very esoteric ideas, and our following disagreements. It is a very bizarre relationship, one that is constantly pitting me against myself in ways that I cannot fully describe. I feel forced to act a very stiff role, one where I am very limited in what I can say. It is a role of naivety, perhaps much more than I truly am. I also have some friends whom I play this naive role around. I am very tired of it and wish it to be gone. I know a healthy amount of naivety is good for business, but I do not wish to fake it any longer. Can anyone else relate to this, or have any advice with relationships with family members? Friends I'm not too worried about as I can always cut out friends I am not jiving with, and make new friends along my wavelength - but family seems to be a difficult block for me right now. Maybe I need to manifest myself a life in a place more distant from them.

[END OF POST]

Can anyone else relate to this, or have any advice with relationships with family members?

You could go directly into this. Actually, perhaps it's the perfect opportunity for you to amend some of the 'facts' of your world. Wanna be God for real? Just keep it simple. It doesn't matter how you do it, but I'm going to give you one approach.

First - Decide on a scenario that would imply that you and your father had now found a way to converse about 'the nature of the world' and all that you'd like to share and discuss. Perhaps the two of you sat at the table, talking in an animated and enthusiastic way, drawing diagrams, bantering about possibilities.

Then - Having decided, go and lie down somewhere and let yourself relax. Now, bring to mind that scenario, as it would be from your perspective, looking out from your eyes, and make it super-vivid, until you really feel like you would feel if it were happening now. Persist until it is real to you.

Really bask in the experience, in that sensation, immersed in the feeling of it being true-that-it-is-happening, right now. Then go grab a beer, watch telly.

I appreciate the approach, this could work, but it feels too much like affecting my dad's free will to be the way he is. I'd rather let him continue to be entrenched in his own ideas at this point. I have given him enough clues to the nature of reality, and will continue to. I think wanting him to see things the way I do is unnecessary, and probably limiting my progress as I try to continually skirt around these things with him.

Well, your Dad is free to experience whatever world he wants from his perspective and you can't affect that anyway. All that you can affect is the aspect of your Dad that you experience. This is not a simple shared dream - it is "highly dimensioned" and you'd be better thinking of everyone as an Extended Person. Everyone gets to experience whatever they want; including the sort of experience they have of others.

In any case, the suggestion I'm giving doesn't change him, it just means you are going to have an animated, open discussion about something, as father and son. His views can remain the same afterwards. :-)

POST: What are some of your tips for shaking off the physicalness of physicality?

...paying closer attention to the daily bodily motions that we consider automatic.

Right, but you don't need to then fix those automatic motions. That persists them. The answer is to learn to not do anything physically at all. Ask to do something, then let your body do it in its own time, spontaneously. I have to say that lots of Alexander Technique books and lessons have lost the spirit and experience of the core idea. That's why I specifically recommend the Missy Vineyard book because of its middle section; that's where the insight is. It is the realisation that you don't need to do being a body.

When you experience yourself "doing" something, you are in fact experiencing yourself tensing up and opposing spontaneous movement. And once you have the idea of body-doing in this way, it lingers. You are always subtly "holding yourself in position" - and this is what gives you a sense of being a solid body, rather than a transparent space in which sensations occasionally arise. You have basically creating a permanent, oppositional felt-experience in the body area, that you will seem to have to push through to achieve anything.

In reality, you can just decide to move and your body will do the necessary things itself. "Stop doing the wrong thing and the right thing will do itself." In fact when we make such "decisions" the whole universe moves a bit in response, in answer to the larger intention.

Over time the accumulated sensations and ill-formed ideas we've become wrapped in will naturally dissipate once you stop re-imagining them all the time, and you will feel more "transparent and open", although you can take more conscious action to help yourself if you like.

Here is a different example that uses this approach for using this to rediscover an object you've lost and can't remember where you've put it. The final step is the most important.

TL;DR: We tend to want to experience ourselves doing-the-doing. The secret core idea of the Alexander Technique is that this is impossible - we in fact only experience results - and any attempt to control the "how" of movement actually opposes it, and increases our sense of inertia.

I did this exercise a couple of nights ago, and I had the same feeling of futility... Perhaps the Missy Vineyard book will have some pointers on how to do-not-do when it comes to the body.

It can be frustrating. The book is good because it can spend the time telling the story, give you a feel for the time it takes, not something we can do in these comments. Having twigged 'something was up', she is determined to have the experience and it takes a while, until one day... her leg just "moves by itself". Remember, you've spent years maybe even decades constantly implicitly intending yourself to stay still, to stay fixed and controlled. You've created a hurdle of immobility which opposes your intention to "just allow movement". But it will happen.

Vineyard isn't necessarily correct in her explanations for things; but she describes well the process and experience for spontaneous manifestation of bodily activity.

I know this may be a tough question to answer, but in this lost object example, what does the command or deciding feel like that the body responds to?

It actually has no full sensory component. Sure, we might internally verbalise or something, but that is all just theatre. What it's like though is, the background felt-sense of the world shifts a tiny bit. It's already true, you are just waiting for it to happen now. If there's a feeling, it's of "absolute allowing". It's a state of fact and knowing, rather than an action.

Intending/deciding and free will are before sensory experience. That's why they can't really be talked about or described, even though you "know" you have them.

To Contemplate

What is the difference between your arm moving spontaneously and your heart beating and the sun moving in the sky? It's like the Zen thing about who it is that "makes the grass grow". Perhaps you "do" them all, but you ascribe authorship only to a subset of your experiences, for some reason. How do you distinguish between what you are the author of? Is this an arbitrary distinction?

Could it be that we don't "do" anything at all, we merely decide what we are and the kind of world we live in, and sensory experiences then arise spontaneously in accordance with that? Imagine that! ;-)

EDIT: Made a few tweaks, added some sentences.

POST: Invoking the Witching Hour. New exercise

[POST]

So I came up with a mental exercise today that I think that tackles the issue of both cultivating temporal lucidity and lucidity in general. Legends talk about the so called "witching hour" where witches and sorcerers would cast their spells and call upon spirits. It was traditionally around midnight but most occultists agree due to our new modern lifestyle the witching hour is around 3am. But what is so potent about the witching hour and late night time in general? Is it because it is dark outside and no one else is up. Well that is a big part of it yes, but in an oneirosophic context, it is generally the time of day when we are asleep and dreaming. In other words 3 or 4 am is the time of the day when the physical and spiritual are most closely linked because it is the time of day our selves and our meat suits associate ourselves with being asleep and in a dream.

Instead of thinking about being in a big waking dream, try to go further and assume you are actually in one of your many sleep cycle dreams right now. So the exercise I lay out is very simple, whatever time of the day it is, try to convince yourself it is around 3 or 4 o clock in the morning. If we think of ourselves at being at 1 o clock in the afternoon, its a time we associate with being awake and not dreaming, and hence not lucid. If you ever have a lucid dream, even if its the day time in the dream, there is a vague sense that its very late at night or very early in the morning even if in the dream its full blown daylight. In other words when its five o clock in the afternoon, you want to create the feeling that this is not only a dream but in actuality its very early in the morning and you are about to wake up for work/school.

And if you really want to take this to the next level pretend its no only 3 am, but since its spring right now, pretend its actually 3am and early winter or late fall. When it comes to lucidity, there is that time when a lucid dream collapses and there is nothing, but you still cant feel your body yet, the awareness of that place/state of mind is crucial IMO.

[END OF POST]

I like this.

Related-ish article here [dead link]: In olden times (because of the darkness, work hours, and lack of electricity) people would have two sleeps. They would go to bed fairly early after nightfall, then get up in the middle of the night to perhaps talk, have something to eat with the family, or spend time thinking and writing, before returning for a second stretch of sleep until morning.

Because of the sleepy-dream-time that this period of wakening occurred in, the mind would be more attuned to the symbolic, creative, dream-like realm and people's writings would reflect this.

I think it might have been me that posted it before, but since I couldn't find the comment, I figured I'd repost. I just liked the whole 'vibe' of the situation it describes. Except, how would I charge my phone?

POST: How To Grow Faster?

Define "grow"!

You're already complete; it's just a matter of having one experience rather than another. Is there a particular experience you are looking to have?

Q: You're already complete
So says you. And then a thousand people implicitly or explicitly tell him he's a piece of shit. What should he believe if he continues to solicit the opinion of others? People don't all agree with each other. If you really solicit opinions of others as something that can potentially define who you believe you are, then you're cutting yourself off at the feet, and you'll never be confident in any endeavor, including the endeavor of leisure and relaxation.

It seems obvious to me that everyone should agree with me - and indeed, will. ;-)

Good point though: Don't believe thoughts or experiences as your source of what is true - assert.

But to assert effectively one needs some stunningly glorious wisdom and understanding of one's own mind. It's not cheap. I've been at it for some time now and I am pretty serious, and still I can't rate my asserting abilities as anything above pitiful. I know I can do better, and will.

The assertion itself isn't as important as the detachment (withdrawing emotional investment from the present 3d sensory experience) and "absolute allowing" (letting any experience come through, without obstruction). It must also be an open, unbounded, spacious mindset.

These are challenging, because it feels quite vulnerable and exposing to do this. Imagine that! :-)

Very good point. Asserting is important, and finding ways to give your assertions gusto and matter of factness is important indeed. I agree with you that detachment is the more critical and perhaps more difficult step for some. I find that I can assert myself to be detached. The trick is being constantly detached without having to constantly remind yourself verbally. Would love some tips on that!

The trick is being constantly detached without having to constantly remind yourself verbally.

Yeah, once you "just decide" to become detached, it happens (because it's a change of state just like any "decision"). The trick is to never directly interfere with yourself ever again. Ever.

But... habits.

You have fallen into the trap of thinking there are "levels"... There will always be more and it will never be enough.

This is a great observation, I completely agree with it. We can think we are discovering the secrets of the universe, looking closer and closer and uncovering more detail and relationships within the world. But actually, we are not getting deeper at all. All you are doing when you investigate the world is... creating more world.

There's awareness (the background that you are). And there's experience (game content). And you are signed up for an unlimited, on-demand DLC package.

POST: Why experience exists?

Q1: The question: why does experience exist? is made of experience. So would be the answer. So how could that be satisfyingly answered?

Q2: Good point. So it seems we'll never know...

It's really that there is nothing to know - because it's not that you exist, it's that you are existence. And to exist at all is to be, and to be is to experience being, and to experience being is to have an experience.

This is a problem of language: language is "too late" for examining this sort of stuff, because to speak we have to conceptualise, and conceptualisation is thought, and thought is "shadow-sensory", and that requires division and relation of mental objects... which is unfortunate, because we are trying to talk about the thing that is "before" division and multiplicity (because it is it).

POST: What is Oneirosophy? (By cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

Oneirosophy is an idea i have been playing around with which basically is a combination of dream yoga and gnosticism but without any tradition or dogma. In a way it can be thought of as the chaos magick equivalent of dream yoga or chaos yoga if you will in that it attempts to use lucid dreaming and or lucid waking to gain a deeper level of lucidity in this dream world. What separates Oneirosophy from tibetan dream yoga is that while dream yoga seeks the dissolving of the ego and entering nirvana, Oneirosophy is only about achieving and maintaining lucidity in this ideaverse and it is up to the practitioner to decide what he or she wants to do from there. It is open to practitioners of both left and right hand paths.
Oneirosophy also has parallels to the Thelemic concept of true will, Oneirosophy is about being able to be lucid in this world to create a dream more tailored to your own unique will.
Ultimately Oneirosophy has a lot of room to be explored, whatever it really means is still somewhat unknown, but through discussion it can be explored much deeper. Many people claim to be subjective idealists and feel that this world is a dream, but there are still many challenges and obstacles that bind us to the material world. Oneirosophy proposes discovering personal techniques to maintain a sense of lucidity as well as recognizing and overcoming obstacles that hinder our progress

[END OF POST]

Perfect timing!

I've finally got around to playing more seriously with a Dream Yoga type approach (having done lucid dreaming for years), one reasonably independent from any particular traditional worldview hopefully - although various sources can act as inspiration. (The questions raised in Robert Waggoner's great book got me interested again, for instance, along with Rupert Spira and Greg Goode's writings on non-duality, Douglas Harding, and others.)

I've been experimenting with trying to be more direct, and 'overwrite' the sense of boundaries with empty space, to create a direct non-dual, open feeling - a sort of unbroken 'ideational space':

==As stated above, an important part of this practice is to experience yourself as a dream. Imagine yourself as an illusion, as a dream figure, with a body that lacks solidity. Imagine your personality and various identities as projections of mind. Maintain presence, the same lucidity you are trying to cultivate in dream, while sensing yourself as insubstantial and transient, made only of light. This creates a very different relationship with yourself that is comfortable, flexible, and expansive.
In doing these practices, it is not enough to simply repeat again and again that you are in a dream. The truth of the statement must be felt and experienced beyond the words. Use the imagination, senses, and awareness in fully integrating the practice with felt experience. When you do the practice properly, each time you think that you are in a dream, presence becomes stronger and experience more vivid. If there is not this kind of immediate qualitative change, make certain that the practice has not become only the mechanical repetition of a phrase, which is of little benefit. There is no magic in just thinking a formula; the words should be used to remind yourself to bring greater awareness and calm to the moment. When practicing the recognition, "wake" yourself – by increasing clarity and presence – again and again. until just remembering the thought, "This is a dream," brings a simultaneous strengthening and brightening of awareness

• The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche==

(Thanks to /u/Nefandi for the heads up on this sub's existence.)

Q: Very nice quote, thanks.
I've been experimenting with trying to be more direct, and 'overwrite' the sense of boundaries with empty space, to create a direct non-dual, open feeling - a sort of unbroken 'ideational space':
I feel like everything is happening in the same mind these days. Which is weird when I say this, because it's like "duh, of course" but somehow I never realized that dreaming and waking happen in the same mind, or I realized it superficially but not what it means.
When practicing the recognition, "wake" yourself – by increasing clarity and presence – again and again. until just remembering the thought, "This is a dream," brings a simultaneous strengthening and brightening of awareness
I don't like this approach at all. I actually think that to achieve what Tenzin's talking about, instead of waking up one has to fall asleep to some extent during waking. In other words, one's mind should be more dreamy, not more waky. So lucidity in waking is awareness of the dreamy aspects. Lucidity in dreaming is awareness of the waking aspects. It's a restoration of wholeness in both cases and not trying to wake up more and harder. And by "restoration of wholeness" I mean that typically we might lose the dreamy aspects in the waking experience and we might lose the waking aspects in the dreaming experience. So in a typical scenario both modes of experiencing lack aspects of the other one, they're partial and not whole.

EDIT: Reply got a bit longer than intended!

I'm with you and I'm not with you.

I think we want to be "awake" as in to have clarity of experience, but recognise we are "dreaming" in the sense of being aware that what we are experiencing has a transparency to it, that there is nothing behind the imagery, no "solid underlying". I think you need clear and expanded attention to do this; I think that's what our friend Tenzin's getting at. See if we are on the same page:

For instance, a simple exercise is getting yourself to understand directly that what you are experiencing right now is an 'idea space' in which forms are appearing. Obviously, we normally assume that we are looking out from a body and the world is "out there", and we literally feel this to be true. So that spell needs to be broken. How to do?

A couple of things I've played with:

1. If that model were the case, we wouldn't be able to direct our attention to where we are looking out from (the space in the opposite direction from the 'vision' in front of us), and we wouldn't be able to reach out with our attention and literally feel the space around us. But we can. In fact, you can 'feel' in all directions forever. And when we explore our location, where our body and head is, we find mostly just empty space, with a couple of sensations 'hanging there'. No "me".
2. Do the "where is your hand?" experiment. Put your hand in front of your face, and ask where your real hand is, try to point to it. The hand in front of you isn't your real hand (by standard thinking), it's an image created by your brain 'inspired' by received bodily sensations. But if you find yourself pointing to your head/brain as the location, then ask yourself: ah, but where is my real head? And so on.
3. If I hear a sound, and pay attention to it, I might ask "where am I relative to this sound?". The usual answer is that I am "here" and the sound is "over there". But when I really pay attention, I discover that I am right beside the sound, coincident with it, as well as being over here, where my body sensations are.

Eventually we discover that the "feeling of being over here" is usually just a particular body sensation or mental image we are attached to and that we identify with (often a sensation in the neck or middle body, or an image of a 'dot' somewhere behind the eyes, a mini-homunculus) and perhaps a sphere of extended space around our body sensations that we count as "us". But the more we deliberately summon and create a feeling of "open, empty space forever" in place of this, the more we dissolve those habits, and the more we feel that we are the 'idea space' or 'mind space' (or dream-space) in which experiences arise. Then, when we fall asleep, instead of us disappearing, we have the experience of the world dissolving, sense by sense, and then dreams forming - within us.

That's the idea anyway, I think.

TL;DR: I think we become lucid in daily life by combining an increased clarity of waking with a direct understanding of the dreamlike transparency of objects, so that waking and dreaming life are experienced as arising in the same 'mind space' = us.

You will feel more awake, but the world will feel more dreamlike.

...

I think we're very much in agreement.

But to me "waking up" means returning to the context of convention. It means returning to the body

"Waking up to the dream" is perhaps a better phrase, rather than just "waking up". You're not trying to wake up to somewhere else, you're just coming to an understanding of your actual situation. So maybe it's better to just say "becoming lucid" or some such instead, to avoid confusion.

I don't agree with your "No me" phrase. It's a popular one, and I get really tired arguing with it.

Ah yes, I used the quotes around "me" deliberately...

No "me".

...to indicate there is no "me" as in an object. (I could have been clearer.) What I discover by investigation is that I've been mis-identifying myself and mis-locating myself. I should be identifying myself with the entire space of my experience and all that arises within it.

I am 100% against the complete abandonment of oneself.

Yes, becoming lucid means a recognition of what you were all along; it's just a clarification of the oneself, not an abandonment of it. What you thought you were turns out to be a 'dream character', whereas you are 'the dream(er)'. Loosely speaking.

In this way I vehemently disagree with the Advaitans who keep harping about lack of free will.

I think they do this because of a key difficulty with volition, or intention as I tend to call it. That is, you can never experience intending or doing - you can't experience "first cause" - only the results, so they discount it. Strangely, though, their reasoning should lead them in the opposite direction:

If what I am is that 'space' then every experience and form arising in it is me 'taking the shape of that experience', like um, a blanket folding in upon itself. The blanket moves itself, one bit doesn't move the other bit, it shapes itself. Just as when we say "I moved my arm" really what happens is "our arm moves", so it is with the content of experience.

"To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without doing. There is no technique for intending. One intends through usage.” – Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming

Aside: Throughout this, I've put aside the issue of intersubjectivity - that we all have different perspectives, as if we are different consciousnesses looking through our own 'viewports' - but I think once you get to grips with the personal aspect, this comes out of it.

You always move the known universe at all times no matter how tiny and selective your movement appears to you.

Yes! Because previously you thought of you as thoughts, sensations, body vs the universe, but now you realise that all that is the universe. You intend a change, and then results appear: related thoughts arise, inspired bodily actions appear, the environment around you moves toward your goal. If your present moment universe in its entirely was an image, it's like the old morphing effect that was so popular in movies circa mid-80s, as you transition to the new desired state.

I think this could be a good sub.

Q: Yes, it's because "the arm" makes no sense by itself and it can't be moved by itself. "The arm" only makes sense in the greater context, and you have to change the relations in that context to move even one particle of dust in that context. In other words, in the picture that we see nothing is by itself. Everything contextualizes everything else. All meanings are interdependent. There is no arm without the sky, no sky without water and grain and trees, etc. It's not obvious at first, but if you trace what it means for a sky to be a sky, you'll discover it's connected to every other idea we have about phenomenal conventional reality.
So for example, the sky has to be up. Without up it's not the sky we know. The sky has clouds, sun, stars and the moon appear in it. If these didn't appear, it wouldn't be the sky we know. Clouds can produce rain. If clouds couldn't produce rain, they wouldn't be the clouds we know. Rain falls down. If rain didn't fall in the downward direction, it wouldn't be the rain we know. Rain hits the earth. If rain were to fall downward endlessly without ever hitting any earth, that wouldn't be any kind of rain we currently understand. This brings us to earth. And so on. So once you look into the ideas, it seems like they're arranged in a web. Almost like the world wide web on the internet, but 100% inside our own mind(s). This is how we structure our experiences.
The spacial and temporal contexts are all fused like this too. Something that's 100 meters/yards away from here is conceptually connected to what's right here in the same way earth is connected to the sky and is inconceivable without it from the POV of convention. Actually "connected" is not a good word. More like "inseparable."
This is why if a single thought or a single hair appear to move, what really happens is that the known universe changes its state according to your volition, but then you associate yourself with just a thought or that hair, and disown the rest of the universe as if it were something foreign to your being. The known universe is not complete without every thought and every hair, however they are experienced.

Good points. This is why so much formal instruction is about encouraging the student to perceive the space around and between objects while attending to the objects themselves, to realise that one requires the other, and that they are the same thing. In a sense, it is the surrounding context that can make a change: if you were not the space around your arm, it could never be moved.

...

A1: Dope. I'm glad this sub is taking birth now.
A few ideas that may be worth noting to help get us started...
I feel that 'enlightenment' is kind of a stupid concept in this day and age. The ideas of lucidity or my personal preference, wakefulness, better capture the process of coming into realization of our own self-envisioned nature. Moreover, the ideas of lucidity or wakefulness better capture that this is a process of gradual unfoldment, not some binary state.
With the conventional dream state, it is easy to recognize that our degree of lucidity often varies from night to night, dream to dream. The conventional waking state is like this as well. There are powerful techniques for cultivating this type of wakefulness in conventional waking reality. I have had great success with meditation in this regard.
In doing so, I have found the notions of lucidity or wakefulness to be quite literal. I am literally more awake than other beings. I don't even know how to say it, it's so literal... my awareness has ardent, alert, lucidity. I'm not saying this to sound inflated, it just shocks me sometimes. 'I' am literally more engaged with the reality around me and can discern 'my' engagement in it. There is more energy, power, and recognition of subtlety to the awareness 'I' currently experience. The level of power coming into fruition through my awareness sometimes bleeds into the perceptions of others, leading to interesting results. Perhaps this indicates my own subconscious surprise at the radical nature of my being? ;)
I'm obliged to admit that my path is heavily steeped in the Buddhistic tradition. I have studied and practiced the teachings deeply, and have been undergoing an incredible transformation progressing at a sometimes frightening and shocking pace as a result. I'm certainly open to and can work in more dynamic, (post-)post-modern, chaos paradigms.
I actually see (Post-)post-modernism as quite analogous to the Vajrayana. The Vajra-yanas are the aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that most explicitly engage with the magickal nature of conceptual adherence. In Buddhism, they call this 'Right View'. You'll also notice that 'Right View' looks really different as one progresses through the 9 yanas or levels of Tibetan Buddhism. In the same way, (post-)post-modernism is working on this conceptual level. In most cases however, this tends to occur as a merely intellectual exercise. Thus, chaos magick has the potential to take things many steps further by providing the potential to actually realize those concepts.
...so yea... what's good fellas?

POST: Trusting intention

[POST]

I had an interesting realization that has been helpful to confirm how you are literally and directly changing your experience based on your will/intention in every moment. I found it helpful for those lingering separation contexts that I find myself operating from.
Observe the simplest, most mundane things like intending to go to the store. Your body moves. You collect your things. You go to your preferred mode of transportation. You arrive at the store. You probably create a story with thought about how “individual you” did these things, but your greater self, as the whole dream, did these things.
Your body and your environment are not separate. As one, they changed in accordance with the way you expect this apparent world to work to give you the experience of going the store. If you lift your arm right now, all that happens is the will to lift it, and then the dream changes, giving you the experience of lifting the arm.
In the exact same way, bigger life things happen from your intention. There is no difference, even though you may not have the quick feedback that comes intending to walk to the other side of the room. The only difference is that based on the rules you are currently operating from, it may take some time for you to see those results. The trick is not to think that what you're currently experiencing has anything to do with what you are intending.

[END OF POST]

Yes, this is exactly right, and nicely put.

intending to go to the store ...to give you the experience of going the store.

Right. All intention is indirect, in that it effectively inserts facts into the world which subsequently arise in the senses. In effect, you are only ever requesting experiences; you are never actually "doing" anything.

We should think of time as laid out as an eternal landscape:

If we request, or imagine-that, we go to the store, a whole pattern of experience is immediately laid out across time at that moment. It becomes true now that these things will be experienced then. Our attention then traverses the landscape, as it were, and we have the moment by moment sensory experience of "going to the store" appearing in awareness.

The trick is not to think that what you're currently experiencing has anything to do with what you are intending.

So - your current experience is a particular moment unfolded into the senses, in accordance with the current facts - but just being an image, it has no causal power over you.

Meanwhile, intention updates facts-of-the-world independently of your current experience. It doesn't matter what the facts used to be, you can simply assert new ones* without justification. Only your intention has power, no events can have power over you, although your beliefs might modify the route of manifestation.

*This includes changing past facts that might contribute to future experiences, remembering that all time is available now.

an analogy i've been thinking of (and which was one source of inaction) is 'booking a flight to nepal, going through the motions of doing it, having done it, remembering it, then do i remember how i did it?' this applies also to past events, all the way back to the first action of the self

Ah. We lose our place because we don't really remember the first action, and confused experiencing with doing. We forget that we caused things.

Filling out forms and forgetting what we committed to, that's a nice way to think of it!

Very astute I like this additional perspective of the same coin. I had a brief upset today where I found myself on a path that I had very little control over it seemed, though I did, I had "fallen asleep at the wheel" for a little while and this disappointed me. I had to directly re-assert that what I was experiencing was not what I wanted to be, mentally, and it sadly took some hesitation and psyching up to be able to set myself in motion - this was because I had told myself a set of rules, which in this case were social convention, that I told myself I had to obey, for the sake of not offending anyone (many mistakes here, I know.) I did eventually excuse myself and leave but because it took so long I was disappointed with that. Needed to vent, but yes, I appreciate your comment and OP's, very spot on today. I suppose I am torn by the aspect of loving the characters of life, and not wanting to be governed by them. I think I need to give my character a little more - a lot more - independence. I will.

Sometimes it's only by ending up in certain situations that we realise who we are. If we've gone through a period of not quite trusting ourselves, loosening the grip on the rudder, we can end up bumping the boat (I'm choosing water-based transport metaphors today!) against the banks of the river. This wakes us up. Ah-ha! We reset the course and the wind picks up again.

I'm still moving into greater understanding of this myself, but I'll share what it looks like from my current point-of-view.
There is no difference in change between the intention to move your body and the intention to change your experience. Experience instantly begins changing. The difference in manifestation time is determined by your beliefs. Your body feels like you—it's the vehicle for your will/mind in this dream. So, its movement is fast.
For larger changes, there are a number of beliefs about how this world works layered on each other that were learned as the body-mind that you're identified with developed. Each belief creates a sub-intention, or context within which your intention is capable of being manifest. Simply practicing more intending is a great way to peel away these beliefs. Every time you intend, notice where your resistance comes from. That's a belief that is coloring what you think you can do. Examine it by quieting the mind and questioning its validity.
To address the speed question more directly, start noticing your beliefs about how fast you think manifestation can occur. One thing I used to do was intend things to happen and then wait for it. All that does is change your intention to I'm waiting. Feel your intention as already being here.
edit: Also, what I'm doing right now to erase doubt is based on what I mentioned in the original post: I'm making it a point to notice how my intention is the true leader of my experience whenever I do more immediate and mundane things, like walking to the refrigerator. What I would normally interpret as me getting up and walking past things to the refrigerator, I am instead seeing it as me holding an intention to go to the refrigerator while my circumstances—body + perceived environment—change to give me that experience.

We could think of it as layers of patterns over a static universe. Beliefs, expectations, knowledge, habits - they all superimpose over each other to form "more-likely" routes for experience to take over the landscape of possible moments. Then, when the pattern of intention is superimposed in addition, one route is in effect selected by becoming the more likely one.

If it weren't for those beliefs and expectations, the pattern resulting from our intention to "have a beer" wouldn't be so extended over time, perhaps.

Also, I suppose we do tend to intend in terms of the limitations we perceive, or at least not deliberately counter them: we don't intend for "a beer to appear in my hand", we do intend to "grab a beer" and the "go to the fridge" part comes with that. We unthinkingly go for the familiar route that appears in your minds when we think of what we want.

So unexamined beliefs-expectations-knowledge both shape the original intention, and limit the subsequent path of an intention.

I also don't think it's necessarily relevant to jump to beers appearing in the hand.

No indeed, it's just an illustration of how the time-delay and 'world formatting' aspect comes into effect. Most people don't want to completely dissolve solidity - and rightly not. The intermediate experiences are where the "living" is, after all!

I also get the sense that a greater portion of ourselves is facilitating and guiding from a broader perspective.

I think this can be folded into the more general picture? I'm not sure "guided" is right word - it's just an example of your intention trying to push its way into manifestation. It's inside experience rather than outside trying to push in.

For instance, we might get too narrow focused on something, perhaps on a job we don't care for anymore. We are forcing in that direction even though we don't really want be having that experience anymore, and have explicitly or implicitly intended for something else. (In a sense we've forgotten our freedom.)

Our broader intention will put things into our experience to dislodge that narrow focus, even though we have also intended for "focusing on getting this job done". It will get more forceful the more we resist.

Offers for alternative jobs might come up. If you ignore that, you might suffer an inexplicable back pain which means you take time off work (work that you don't really want to do). If you keep focusing on the job, you might start finding you overhear conversations about people in the same situation as you, who decided to quit. Then you will get made redundant. If you then get a similarly bad job, you might get framed for murder. If when you get out of jail you still go for that same career, you have a stroke which inhibits that part of your brain... And so on.

Basically, your experience will be attempting to dislodge you from that narrow focus and drag you to your true intention, kicking and screaming if need be.

Of course, if you remained in 'open focus' ("absolute allowing") none of this would happen, because your body and thought would naturally flow with the rest of the environment towards your desired situation.

Hmm. I guess it can be viewed equally from either perspective. I'm just wary of the whole "larger self" guiding as if it were a being with a personality and a will independent from our own. Although if we imagine that this is the case, I suppose we end up with that experience.

So, this process could also be seen as slowly reintegrating and rediscovering that greater part, which is never really separate and is supporting us all the time.

I think that personifies it too much?

But, I guess "reintegrating and rediscovering" is just another way of saying that we should release 'hard control' of attentional focus, admitting the whole of experience, in the spirit of "absolute allowing".

Intention is what directs experience, and any second-cause tool, no matter how subtle - be it praying or visualising or 'focusing our attention' - is just a way of giving ourselves an excuse to let it come into our lives. (We really do like to feel ourselves doing something to 'cause' results.)

There is only First Cause and that applies even to an apparent story of self-discovery.

I completely see what you're saying here. I certainly am not trying to have people create a new God for themselves. When I say that it "guides", it's more of a description of how it can feel from this perspective inside the dream. I also agree with your idea of intention pushing in with the added possibility that part of that intention that is pushing in is a greater intention that our limited perspective may be fully aware of yet. A more general 'plot theme' for life, if you will, that we offloaded to the part of our own intelligence that remains undeluded from the dream. It's never forced upon us, but we are intuitively guided to see it over and over.

Plot theme, yes! Which really just corresponds with what we truly desire.

More concretely: if we always secretly wanted to become a lawyer, but went to art school instead because our parents wanted us to, we would likely continually encounter law-based opportunities. If we remain open focused, we would feel the "rightness" feeling when those came up. It might seem that God is looking out for us in such circumstances, but really it is a pretty mechanistic, pattern-based phenomenon - a deeper intention pattern overlaid on everything else.

Which leads to something else: if there's work to be done, it's about reducing the barriers to manifestation, to reduce the time delay, rather than improving intention. Which is where the "Just Decide" stuff came from, and "Overwriting Yourself". You can't really intend any better, as a skill. You can just do less obstructing.

Living life is fun and shortcutting all the time would reduce that. However, it is occasionally beneficial to be able to go to sleep in one situation, and wake up the next day in a different one.

POST: Some insights from lucid dreams

[POST]

I've been trying to experiment more in my lucid dreams to get a better understanding of how they work, and hopefully glean some information about how to better operate the daily dream here.
Firstly, dream characters are real as fuck. You'd think after you became lucid dream characters would become very one dimensional, flat, or puppet-y, but either because I don't want that or they have a life of their own, or both, they are very lifelike even when lucid - which leads me to believe that people in the daily dream are the same. They have their own life, desires, and those are all real - but also real is the fact that they are me and I am creating them.
Secondly, if you can accept this, so can other people. This one I am a little skeptical to test out. So far, one girl in my life has admitted to me that she is me, even going so far as to admit everything is me. It's very funny though, as you can easily fall back into the trap of seeing the dream as having weight again - as I do countless times. I just did right now. Anyhow, knowing everything to be yourself can be a solipsistic nightmare - but you have to remember - these people all have their own desires, lives, will - you gave them that. You could take it away but for God's sake don't. That's solipsism and it sucks. Everything is you, but you want you to be free. It's an interesting two-way street.
Thirdly, manifesting things outside the realm of possibility. You can't do it! So, I suggest expanding your realm of possibility.
I was in a lucid dream last night. I really wanted to fly. I asked a group of my lucid dream friends what they wanted me to do. Naturally, they said "fly!" I tried, but I couldn't do it! How strange, I can always fly in my lucid dreams. Do you know when I can't fly? When I'm around people I perceive to be real. I knew these people as real, which gave my dream a weighty-ness it normally did not have. I decided I wanted to try something a little different and become an "air bender," and control the natural elemental force of air. I succeeded at first, causing a great big gust of wind, as I knew I'd be able to - but then, alas I could do it no more as I questioned how I was able to do it the first time. I created a block for myself by necessitating a reason or technique to me manifesting gusts of wind. Cleverly, one of my dream characters suggested that if I couldn't do it naturally I could find an object that I knew would enable me to. This to me was a very interesting piece of advice.
Any thoughts on the ideas I've presented?

[END OF POST]

Great observations! By the way, if you haven't already, check out the persistent realms post over at DreamViews. From that...

Firstly, dream characters are real as fuck.

You can dream anything.

Dream that anything is true, and then experience will line up with that. This works mostly by implication: behave as if something is true and the dream will behave accordingly. Look around as if something is going to be there, and it will be. Which then reinforces the sense that it is true, and so on. Dream characters are as real as... they "are".

Secondly, if you can accept this, so can other people.

Which could get a bit claustrophobic - like when synchronicity gets out of hand, and you get synchronicity about your interest in synchronicity, and it's like suffocating on your own dream-stuff!

Cleverly, one of my dream characters suggested that if I couldn't do it naturally I could find an object that I knew would enable me to. This to me was a very interesting piece of advice.

When you can't believe in 'First Cause' - the fact that you are "doing" everything directly - your fallback is 'Second Cause' - to delegate the power and allow you to believe something else is doing it. This can be technology, or a technique, or a spell, or a prayer, or any gesture.

It also deflects you from the fact that you cannot experience the act of creation, only its results. Treating one result as the "doing" (for instance, the flipping of switch, the shouting of a command) of another result stops this being debilitating.

"Intent or intending is something very difficult to talk about. I or anyone else would sound idiotic trying to explain it. Bear that in mind when you hear what I have to say next: sorcerers intend anything they set themselves to intend, simply by intending it."
""Intending is the secret, but you already know that. And there is no technique for intending. One intends through Usage."
-- The Art of Dreaming, Carlos Castenada

Another good excerpt from CC:

"You must act like a warrior. One learns to act like a warrior by acting, not by talking. A warrior has only his will and his patience and with them he builds anything he wants. You have no more time for retreats or for regrets. You only have time to live like a warrior and work for patience and will.
Will is something very special. It happens mysteriously. There is no real way of telling how one uses it, except that the results of using the will are astounding. Perhaps the first thing that one should do is to know that one can develop the will. A warrior knows that and proceeds to wait for it.
A warrior knows that he is waiting and knows what he is waiting for. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for the average man to know what he is waiting for. A warrior, however, has no problems; he knows that he is waiting for his will.
Will is something very clear and powerful which can direct our acts. Will is something a man uses, for instance, to win a battle which he, by all calculations, should lose. It is not what we call courage. Courage is something else. Men of courage are dependable men, noble men perennially surrounded by people who flock around them and admire them; yet very few men of courage have will. Usually they are fearless men who are given to performing daring common-sense acts; most of the time a courageous man is also fearsome and feared. Will, on the other hand, has to do with astonishing feats that defy our common sense. You may say that it is a kind of control.
Will is not what one calls "will power." Denying oneself certain things with "will power," is an indulgence and I don't recommend anything of the kind. The indulgence of denying is by far the worst; it forces us to believe we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves.
Will is a power. And since it is a power it has to be controlled and tuned and that takes time. When I was your age I was as impulsive as you. Yet I have changed. Our will operates in spite of our indulgence. For example your will is already opening your gap, little by little.
There is a gap in us; like the soft spot on the head of a child which closes with age, this gap opens as one develops one's will. It's an opening. It allows a space for the will to shoot out, like an arrow. What a sorcerer calls will is a power within ourselves. It is not a thought, or an object, or a wish. An act of "will power" is not will because such an act needs thinking and wishing. Will is what can make you succeed when your thoughts tell you that you're defeated. Will is a force which is the true link between men and the world.
The world is whatever we perceive, in any manner we may choose to perceive. Perceiving the world entails a process of apprehending whatever presents itself to us. This particular perceiving is done with our senses and with our will. Will is a relation between ourselves and the perceived world.
What the average man calls will is character and strong disposition. What a sorcerer calls will is a force that comes from within and attaches itself to the world out there. One can perceive the world with the senses as well as with the will.
An average man can "grab" the things of the world only with his hands, or his senses, but a sorcerer can grab them also with his will. I cannot really describe how it is done, but you yourself, for instance, cannot describe to me how you hear. It happens that I am also capable of hearing, so we can talk about what we hear, but not about how we hear. A sorcerer uses his will to perceive the world. That perceiving, however, is not like hearing. When we look at the world or when we hear it, we have the impression that it is out there and that it is real. When we perceive the world with our will we know that the world is not as "out there" or as "real" as we think.
Will is a force, a power. Seeing is not a force, but rather a way of getting through things. A sorcerer may have a very strong will and yet he may not see; which means that only a man of knowledge perceives the world with his senses and with his will and also with his seeing.
Now you know you are waiting for your will. You still don't know what it is, or how it could happen to you. So watch carefully everything you do. The very thing that could help you develop your will is amidst all the little things you do."
-- A Separate Reality, Carlos Castaneda

That's a brilliant quote. Just amazing. Thanks for typing all that, that must have been quite a bit of work. This might be worth linking in the wiki or something so it doesn't get lost.

Luckily I was able to cut/paste then format a bit.

Totally nails it though, eh? I don't think I understood it when I first read the book years ago, but with hindsight it looks so obvious! Particularly the part (emphasised elsewhere in the book also) that your acts just don't matter. They are just things you experience. It is your will that accomplishes desired change. It makes it so much clearer the distinction between will and "will-power". It reminds us nicely to be wary: Are you directing the will to bring about bodily motions that you think will accomplish your goal? Or are you directing the will to bring about the accomplishment? The former will create experiences of "doing stuff"; the latter will create the experience of accomplishment.

EDIT: Just added a new section to the recommended material wiki page, for noteworthy comments and quotes, so we can add links to things we think should be saved.

or it is to say that your will needs some external kick in the arse to get going, making will passive.

Right, it's easy to imagine there is something you do that gets your will to accomplish things. But there is no such layer. I suppose that without the understanding that your sensory experience is "empty" - like a mirage and has no solid backing - it is tempting to think that what you are experiencing now is "causing" something you experience later. One thought leads to another; pushing here results in a movement there; my plan is what leads to my goal. But... 'tis all "deluded doing" as you say.

I like that phrase :-)

This is how people come up with the idea of a mechanistic universe, materialism, physicalism, science, etc.

All of which are based on confusing metaphor with reality, and seeing Second Cause where there is only ever First Cause.

People think reality is what appears outside, and metaphor is what is sensed internally, but the reverse is true. What appears outside is only a metaphor for internal reality.

In fact, to say something is a metaphor (for something) at all is incorrect. If you fully adopt a metaphor then that is how it (apparently) works.

Or as master Yoda said, "Do, or do not, there is no try."

Yeah, that little puppet knew a thing or two. He never tried to do anything by moving himself. He always used his inner will (Frank Oz) to accomplish whatever he wanted - effortlessly!

I mean, the guy doesn't even blink, that's how laid back he is! :-)

POST: What's the biggest leap of faith into your own intentional creation of your reality that you've made?

I think I really understand something to later find out, yes I was right, but I had no clue just how and in what exact ways I was right.

Yeah, this is so true.

...

Can I ask, how are you going about setting an intention? As best you can describe it.

Q: [Deleted]

Great description!

Pretty much what I had in mind when I wrote the Just Decide post ages ago and the Imagining That one more recently, but I've always been wary of pushing a particular interpretation because (as you note) that can get in the way. It's hard to put into words without biasing it.

Our Lives... As If

If our experience is basically our imagination space then our lives work on a completely "as if" basis. Whatever you think appears immediately as a thought, and will trigger a sensory experience by association, just like triggering a memory - but filtered through the "facts" you have accepted. Any belief you have presents a hurdle or time-delay between the initial thought and the "auto-complete" of the rest of the memory.

However you imagine that it works,
That's how it works. - TG

Think that you need to concentrate in order to get something? Then the world will act as if that were true. Think time is a real thing and that you have to wait a "reasonable period" for things? There you go.

Even worse, this happens by association and implication. Like you point out, doing stuff to make your wish happen implies that it's difficult and takes effort to achieve and so it will. If the world works on an "as if" basis, then "acting as if" creates restrictions by implication.

Just the facts, Ma'am

If you would truly perceive that this is just an imagination space with a mirage-like sensory image floating in it, then all "as if" restrictions would fall away. That's pretty difficult at this stage though, as you've accumulated many patterns, so the next best thing is to just not think about how things work at all. (In the background we might attend to seeing things as imagination, though, and perhaps clear ourselves out using a technique if we feel less confident.)

Your only task is then to decide what experiences you want to have. Either by selecting an exact moment you want to experience ("it is true now that this will happen then"), or by asserting more general facts-of-the-world that will inform subsequent moments ("it is true now that things always happen like this). More generally: "I will experience the world as if this were true."

Experience arises spontaneously and effortlessly.
It does so in accordance with the facts-of-the-world you have accepted.
Change the facts, change the experience. - TG

Using visualisation and so on is perfectly fine, so long as it's used simply to clarify or formulate the "decision". For instance, you might "decide" to have a new car. If we want a particular one, though, then specifying it via an image is not a bad idea.

Decisions, Decisions...

If all this is just us, there's nothing we can "do" anyway. Our experience consists entirely of "results". So effortless deciding is something we never actually experience ourselves doing, we only experience the shift in the facts of the world that we make. This takes no power whatsoever.

We are basically just reshaping ourselves, as ourselves.

It's mechanical, this whole process. We never directly change anything in the senses. We simply make decision and sensory experience subsequently falls into alignment with it, through the simply unfolding of patterns.

But what is a "decision" in this context?

Creation by Implication

A decision is just a particular imagining which mechanically activates the extended pattern it is a part of, which then comes into sensory awareness. An example:

• I imagine an owl as vividly as I can. Subsequently, lots of random owl-based experiences arise.
• I "decide" that I'm going to see an owl at the zoo next Tuesday. Subsequently, I see an owl at the zoo that day.

Both operate in exactly the same way: an imagining is summoned which activates a pattern plus all its associated patterns (i.e. an extended pattern, like an auto-completed memory). The field of all possibilities is then filtered through this.

In the first case, I've summoned the picture of an owl (basically saying: "owl!"), which is associated with the animal owl plus all imagery associated with that, plus notions of flight, feather, big eyes, and all sorts of more subtle linked ideas. Although I may only notice the main owl imagery, actually all of this will show up in my experience, because I haven't narrowed the specification.

In the second case I have narrowed down my imagining to a more specific situation: a specific animal owl, in a specific place, at a specific time. Effectively I'm saying: "Seeing an owl in the zoo on Tuesday" and from that the larger pattern is activated. Because it is a pattern extended over time, I seem to experience it as "happening" but in fact I am simply having my attention pass across a pattern of moments.

We are using partial imagining to activate extended memories in awareness;
The extended patterns then appear spontaneously as sensory experience.
These patterns may be spread across time. - TG

EDIT:

It's worth noting that even summoning just the "overall feel" of a situation is enough to trigger the pattern. Global Feel is a sensory experience and therefore imaginable also. More broadly still, summoning emotions will trigger experiences associated with that emotion; this is why "feeling gratitude" and "feeling energised" works for things like the so-called law of attraction. Having a general sense of happiness and wellbeing filters down the possible experiences to the ones associated with that.

Another takeaway from this is that all manifestation is instant. If things aren't happening for you, it's because you are subsequently undoing them before your attention reaches that moment (something you touched on).

Effort != Action. Some things definitely do need some form of action.

Oh agreed. I probably need to emphasise a bit, "doing stuff to make your wish happen". Which is different to allowing actions to arise as part of your wish happening. The "letting go" aspect involves letting your mind and body be moved also, as part of the overall flow of the apparent world towards your goal.

From my personal experience, there is some form of action involved in almost every manifestation.

Maybe it would be better to say, "some experience of body movement is involved in almost every manifestation".

From the Just Decide post: If you do some practice you can easily discover that you are not meant to push your body around by effort, by tensing up and forcing. It actually blocks progress. If you completely get out of the way, your body moves "by itself" along the lines of your intention. You don't have to do body movement; you get out of the way and allow an experience of movement to unfold. But if you are actively asserting the contrary experience of staying still and doing nothing, suppressing movement, then obviously this won't happen.

The more towards "absolute allowing" you go, the more miraculously the world will fall in line, as you relinquish the limitations you have on what you are willing to let yourself experience. The potential "available routes" then increases.

Because all of those things that the "conscious mind is aware of", are 100% based on the "sub-conscious beliefs & desires"

Right, it's all patterning and filtering. What gives you a result isn't what you do exactly; it's a process by which you have the desired experience come into awareness. Like the post suggests, what you actually want is super-vivid, immersive remembering - because that's what daily life really is.

Which is quite an empowering idea, because you don't have to worry about some heavy, solid, material world "out there" that needs to shift and change via the laws of physics. You are just changing viewport, switching perspective, remembering something different...

what you actually want is super-vivid remembering We already have it. But the issue is that its all filled with beliefs that are not helping us in any form.

For sure, our desire is already available to us as a situation that can be accessed, but we are only having a super-vivid experience if we are having it. We can get too nested here!

The concept behind the "remembering" metaphor is that the experience is already available, the corresponding event has in effect already happened, you just need to recall the memory. You are selecting experiences, you are not making events occur.

But too much meditation may lead into a spiritual journey...

Which is a thing in itself. People who identify as spiritual seekers often have... a lifetime of experiencing seeking. Basically, by having that intention they are accidentally generating content and being distracted by it from what the content arises within. Lots of cool experiences, discoveries, insights and so on... most of which is just more world. Stopping seeking is the first step to discovery.

Here's a good question for you: what do you think about "other people"?

Q: what do you think about "other people"?
I've learned that judging others is the worst thing that I could do which in turn will make others to judge me, say "causality" or "you reap what you sow" or LOA or whatever. But at the same time, if I stopped judging others does not mean that others will not judge me. Its their own choice/freewill to do whatever they want to do whether its conscious thoughts/actions or sub-conscious thoughts/actions (which they might not be aware). So I don't really have an answer for that because when I say what I think of other people, I'm just telling what I perceive in other people and not the actual reality.
One thing that I know for sure is that we are connected with each other in some form of energy. I can even say that we both are having this conversation because of our similar thoughts & beliefs, i.e. trying to understand LOA (as I call it) or whatever you call it. Name does not mean anything, what matters is "its working". Changing the name of "law of gravity" into "law of something else" is not going to change "the way gravity works". So these days I'm practicing to "Accept everything as it is with equanimity" and also treat everyone with "unconditional loving-kindness, empathy & compassion".

Thanks for that. I have view on it but it's a bit fiddly to explain. In any case, I think you can't go wrong with: "unconditional loving-kindness, empathy and compassion".

One thing that I know for sure is that we are connected with each other in some form of energy.

If you mess a little with asserting different facts into the world, you'll notice that people's behaviour lines up with your model of them. Just as your own behaviour lines up with your model of you. In reality, there are no people. There's consciousness, and there are images, thoughts, feelings appearing in it. Experience arises "as if" there are people. At the moment consciousness is taking on the experience of "being TheQuantumZero looking at a computer". That means it's effectively an empty world, but also filled with apparent people that are all aspects of your consciousness. We are therefore all very connected because we are all just the one thing. It doesn't get any closer than that!

"causality" or "you reap what you sow"

Following from the above, "nastiness" you launch at a person doesn't hit the person at all, it's launched straight into the whole dream, which then becomes nastier. Similarly, "loving kindness" directed anywhere is directed everywhere. Which obviously better all round! :-)

The extra quirk though gives the answer to the "Why Hitler?" question:

You can do bad things without having bad things happen to you, if you think you are doing good or you "know" you are in the right. If you genuinely believe that mass killing is for a great purpose, you'll do just fine. Probably get to retire to Saudi Arabia and live out your days relaxing at "sports events, gym sessions and massage parlours".

Normal people have a struggle believing that the bad things they do are good, though, so the "loving kindness" approach is probably safest. :-)

Name does not mean anything, what matters is "its working".

Bang on.

I could see that the each & every person is unique in some form and they are more than I could understand from just my perception (or my model of them).

That's true. Maybe "model" was a poorly chosen word. They do reflect your outlook though; they do behave as aspects of you even when you just sit back and observe - "the way they are" seems to change in line with the "way you are"!

Karma will eventually catch them in the next life. :P

Heh. Well, I believe that what you might call "momentum of intention" has an effect - I don't see it in the most traditional notion of karma though. Guess we'll find out later. Hopefully much later! :-)

So nowadays I stopped interfering in the choice of others (because I'm interfering with their freewill)...

It's a good attitude to take. I don't think you can interfere with others' free will because the world isn't "simply shared" like that (I'll save you that explanation) - but just in terms of what kind of world you'd like to live in, direct manipulation doesn't seem like a good choice.

For sure, definitely help people if you can. Telling them won't do anything, by the way. However, you can "imagine them" into improved situations - provided you don't think that's interfering with their free will or karma, that is. ;-)

It has to be unconditional loving-kindless and its easier said than to apply in life.

Right, because even if it seems to be directed at a person, it is actually going to the overall world you are experiencing - which is the same as directing it at yourself and all that you care for.

I try and take a general view: What kind of world do I want to live in?

Well, don't want to live in a world of people deserving things and receiving punishments in a cycle of retribution. I want to live in a world where everyone gets their chance and life is good. Thanks for sharing your personal story, by the way, I think you have a great outlook. :-) What you are calling "karma" there, I would say is the truth of what Neville Goddard used to say:

"The world is yourself pushed out."

If you are depressed the whole world becomes depressing. If you are sneaky then the whole world takes on the personality of sneakiness. It's not just beliefs and intentions that shape the world. In fact, the more general truth is that it's your entire character that shapes the world - because there is no division. Internal and external both arise from you and are not separate, although in a way that is hard to describe!

Which is exactly what you get to the heart of in your last quote!

As Wayne Dyer says, you attract what you are (and not what you want). Good Luck. :)

Nice! :-)

POST: Let's all stop pretending we don't want infinite power.

Hmm. If you're referring to the last post, I interpreted it as saying one should be careful of thinking you have real power when in fact you are just exploring-experiencing your thoughts about power.

Fake power is when your idea of how the creative process works is incorrect. (Particularly if it depends on the belief of some unobserved entity-based.)

If you believe in the incorrect idea, then its a reduction of your power. You get the results, but from ignorance. If someone is getting results from belief-based approaches then they're no better than the chaos magicians who thought they were being belief-independent.

What I am asking is this. When you get results, how do you know whether the results are from ignorance or correct knowledge?

It becomes clear shortly after I've told you, and you've taken on the wider perspective. ;-)

What if you don't care about being better or worse than someone else? If I am the worst of the worst, but I get consistent and reliable results, what have you to say about that?

It's not about being "better or worse". It's about have a greater understanding of your process by not taking on the misunderstandings of others.

You don't judge the experience. It is an empty experience. Recognising that, is sufficient. Let's not do the "others" thing. It's the example of a process that's important. The apparent "who" is irrelevant.

Q: [Deleted]

No. There is no tell. It's just... imagery. There's nothing behind it. No inherent meaning at all. Pure subjective idealism, just as you (should) like it! ;-)

I don't think it was your point, though, right? I'm saying there is nothing to tell, nothing behind the experience. So even to talk of a result as arising from knowledge (correct or otherwise) is incorrect.

The short version: There's is nothing to believe about how things come to be. It's mechanical; it's residual patterning; it's free of meaning inherently except in its relation to other arising patterns.

"Mechanical" as in a process that does not to be guided. A "law" of subjective reality, as it were. I understand what you mean when you refer to "belief". Although I've come around to thinking it's not a great word. Something along the lines of "background formatting" or "activated patterns" seems to capture it a little better. But - y'know - just language eh.

You get what I mean by "mechanical". That's why I put it in quotes. If you imagine owls, you later get owls. Not sure of a good term for that which doesn't have baggage (and after all, the way this happens isn't a mechanism other than it funnels through current accepted patterns).

I think that the idea of "belief" is quite restrictive in and of itself. What exactly is a belief? When you go looking for one, it's a vague image which contains a feeling. The "feeling of what is true"? The feeling that you hold onto which brings into presence all the patterns which have that feeling as part of their structure.

What I'm interested in here: What is it that's filtering "this stuff" not "that stuff". The idea of beliefs doesn't help describe that in itself.

Mechanical

Uh-huh. Again, I defined the usage: a process that doesn't need guided. Other words are "spontaneous" or whatever. Really, it's best to avoid calling it anything.

It's that which you can't ignore even if you would like to.

Better to switch that around and say that it's the patterns which shape your experience. You don't so much "believe" things as have beliefs. Which sounds like wordplay, but it gets us away from the idea that beliefs are something you do.

but intent uses concepts to structure itself.

Just for language, "intent" doesn't use anything - intention is the pattern. Intending would be triggering such a pattern into an active state.

(Just translating for my own understanding.)

Let's talk about volition.

You, I think, seem to have the idea that you are continually "doing" intent. Is that right? Whereas I see intending as something you do to change the pattern, as it were. Experience itself unfolds spontaneously.

Q: [Deleted]

Okay, I'd say "experience is an ongoing process" and that intending is the way we "set a new course" (by changing our "shape"). But that's just conceptual splitting.

Q: [Deleted]

What I dislike about that is it implies I am "maintaining" something, while I know in experience I am not. There is no ongoing doing. I've checked. There can be ongoing interfering if you do that, but you don't need to.

Q: [Deleted]

No, the difference is that I see intention as a filtering pattern which "lets through" corresponding experiences. While in this sense it never "stops" - never stops having an effect - it doesn't need to be "maintained" while you are content with your direction.

Extra: I am viewing this from an "eternal" perspective, in that the intentional filter applies over all-time. It therefore also incorporates the apparent passage of time.

Q: [Deleted]

It depends on which level you slice it. But, in this view, your intentional pattern has "deterministically" defined the trajectory across the possible moments of experience, by filtering it. You will then experience the experiential patterns of that path.

I say "deterministically" but of course if you change the intentional pattern, a new deterministic path emerges.

This is why you can have precognitive dreams and insights. With the current intentional pattern, the future is defined. However this does not interfere with your freedom because, so knowing, you can alter your pattern, to give you a new future. It all exists (implicitly, if not actually extended) and so all information is available - although our per-moment 3D sensory formatting can fool us into thinking that's all there is.

Of course, there are other ways to slice this - take your stand as "this bit" which navigates and alters the "rest of it". And that slicing is itself a free choice. The trick is to go with the most flexible version, which I think is to adopt "the background" as your viewing position, have a static filter dictate what you're going to let through, on top of a time framework.

Is there a limit to how many times you can do this or when?

No. (Although there are more efficient ways.) It's like a 4D pattern that updates every time. Which is why adopting the approach to let things be except when you deliberately want a change is best. Those who don't know, constantly accidentally re-pattern themselves, and therefore dilute their "power" to fragmentation.

You can keep changing your intentional pattern all the time, just as you can keep editing a document forever. But if you want to actually "read" what you've "written", this is a bad idea. You never get a coherent narrative going, and you never sit back to actually enjoy the experiences you've cued up.

A1: I think what TriumphantGeorge is saying is that the state of not-intending is a state in which intention is dormant. I agree with you more, as I see the truth in the fact that even intending to let things play out is a... well, hang on. It's very tricky. To let things play out is a much smoother way of viewing it than claiming you are intending to not-intend. This creates an unnecessary recursive process that is useless to enter into. It works better to just frame it mentally the way TriumphantGeorge is, it allows you, rather, it allows me, to feel more at peace. Knowing intention as something that can be activated but then when not in use is dormant, to me is a better view than it being constantly in use.

So when you don't, you're continually signing off on your previous intent. Continually.

I know what you mean, but that doesn't involve intervention or activity. Here I'm talking about whether you actually have to maintain intention. The answer is no.

How would you like things to be?

Do you envisage "control" as being something you are constantly doing, grasping the world and all its facts, holding them in place? Not very God-like, I'd say. Or would you rather be the calm background that effortlessly experiences all things arising in alignment with your last "command" - until you decide to issue a new "command", at which point the patterns realign accordingly, and subsequent experiences fall in line?

I like the second one. At the very least, the second one provides the first one as an option. The other way around, not.

Are you involved in some situation? Yes, you are, at all times.

No, I'd say. Or more specifically: it's optional.

If you are not holding onto your emotional state (which is just another sense, part of the experience) then you aren't 'involved'. And without that involvement, that emotional re-triggering of patterns, then there is no effort, because each moment disappears immediately, as it should.

What you ordinarily consider as some clumsy and un-godlike strain is itself utmost purity upon final analysis.

A pointless analysis. Just as you can say "everything is consciousness, there are no obstacles really".

I think I've said that ultimately intent is effortless only about a dozen or more times. If you failed to notice that, then me saying it one more time will not help.

Everything is ultimately not even nothing, for sure. But that's not the experience you are having now, is it? "But a significant effort may sometimes be required to turn around certain tendencies", you said. Really? Why?

Or by "intent" do you mean "wishing that"? Ineffectual wishing is effortless, is that what you're saying?

It's all every well to talk about the ultimate state, and how everything should be or "really is" optional because we're all Godlike. But if you look around your life and you aren't living that way, then it's just an idea. An idea you are hopeful might be true. Or just an idea you use for comfort, if you're too afraid to take the steps - delete the boundaries - and let everything flow in. I mean, it's lovely to talk theory and fantasy, but Oneirosophy is about lucidity.

You always undergo some experience. That experience is precisely your situation. Can you talk about a time when you don't undergo an experience? Not from experience!

Surely not, not, not? You don't "undergo" experiences and an experience is precisely not your true situation, right?

Your experience is not the entirety of the true situation because there is also infinite potential which isn't directly experienced, but which is necessary for experience to make sense.

I'd say what we call "experience" we mean "current sensory experience" or pattern?

Infinite potential is always here now, it's just been patterned into the current sensory experience (by which I don't mean just images, sounds, and so on, but the object-sense and also the global "feeling-sense" of it and "a world"). If you relax your hold on those, avoiding "re-imagining" them, we might say that infinite potential gets to "shine thought" - but really we mean that we haven't obscured the sense/actuality of open possibility by crumpling it up. So the more we become non-attached (basically, stop holding onto the feeling-aspect of the current experience, via narrow attention perhaps) the more flexible the world becomes, the more next-moments are available.

On the other hand, you could say that all experiences are sensed.

That is the approach I am using. If it is being "felt" in the aware space, it is part of my present moment experience. The separation into "senses" is another pattern, so that itself isn't a good definition.

Sure, I agree. That's the basic premise behind all renunciation.

What good about this view overall is that instead of people trying to renounce by taking action or saying stuff - all of which presupposes a person who can do something about their experience - it's much clearer what is actually involved: not-triggering, not-activating.

I'm sure it's clear in your own mind, but it's clear as mud over on this end.

Okay. It's time to renounce the world. How do you go about it?

=I just do what I like and accept all consequences. Or as one of my idiot friends who knew one or two good sayings said, "Pay attention. Take responsibility." Same thing.==

See, that's not how I think of it. I mean, how - right now - do you (I mean "does one") become independent of the world's momentary whims? Do apparent events move you emotionally, affect your mood? Then the world is happening to you and shifting you. That-not-being-the-case is what I'm talking of.

Yeah, I'm working on some disagreements for future. ;-)

Again though, I mean more directly. Loosely, this about detaching, seeing sensation as floating and unbound, such that this-moment and next-moment are not bound to be continuous. So what you say is the action equivalent, as it were.

POST: The Word

[POST]

The secret is in using the Word to regain power.
The Word being all arts, essentially. I am so good at creating stories that I have been duping myself with them for centuries.
Free myself,
And free all others
Through a story
That can be shared
It's all a story, so might as well write a ______ one.
Never title your story,
Until it is finished.
The Word is a powerful tool / Do not underestimate the power of the Word to heal and restore.
Restore emptiness.
We don't know know until there is a Word for it.
Feeling is Word Sight is Word Thought is Word Only peace is not Word Peace is Eternal God
The Word is a signpost to God, and from God to any experience.
Use the Word you want more of More.
Use the Word you want less of Less.
The Word is a focuser of divine Energy.
Thoughts are the subtlest and most deadly Words. Watch your inner monologue. Always be thoughtless when doing everything with the exception of thinking.
The World is already made up of Words all around.
The Word is Form.
I am.
Observer and Speaker of Words.
My body is a Word.
The Mind produces and is a Word.
I am not the Word, or any of them...
I am the Wordless.

[END OF POST]

Q1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Q2: Oh they do say that the Word was God? Interesting, I see it differently as though the creations are not in fact the God, but rather his creations and... yes I see this separation as a little artificial, but it helps to identify with the unlimited, as that is what we are, and it is easier to identify with form than it is to identify with unlimited freedom on a daily basis.
Still, I do see the Word as being potentially what we are - also perhaps we are the container of the Word? Thoughts?
Edit: Is the Word the container of the Word?

Yeah, true: it's not The Word was "God", it's The Word was God, in the sense of:

• God is a term for "the creator".
• The Word is Man's imagination.
• To imagine is to create (by triggering patterns, in experience, which subsequently reappear in experience).
• Hence, The Word (imagination) was God (the creator of subsequent experience).

But also, as you know, current experience is also made of imagination, so The Word is part of experience too, hence the "was with God" part. So God is everywhere and all things, He is the creator and the created, and all is imagination.

Interesting, see I was using the Word for specific creations, as though they were this separate aspect of myself (each image [or frame of existence] being its own "thing"). I can't seem to shake duality. There's always infinite me and then finite me. Or the "I am" and the picture of the "I am."

Well, that's okay.

The main sense is: Imagining something instantly triggers its larger pattern across time and space, which you subsequently experience.

You may artificially consider a certain localised are of time-and-space experience to be "you", but you are literally imagining this to be so. It is just a subtle feeling-boundary floating in space, which has no effect except that it might limit what you allow yourself to conceive of.

It's a worthwhile exercise to try and work out where, in your experience of the room right now, "you" end and "everything else" begins. Most people feel that, mysteriously, although they might be located in a small dot in their head (which is obviously not the case) they also extend to a spherical region outside their body (their personal space, again obviously not true).

Then: imagine something, any object, like an owl (my current favourite) and try to work out where that thought is bounded in time and space. To do this, you will first have to locate time and space. If you can't locate that, then your thought cannot be so restricted...

I say: Anything you imagine always and instantly triggers its extended pattern across all time and space. (EDIT: I see I said that twice. So I guess it must be important.)

"The Word of God is the Imagination of Man"

...

Great topic, /u/3man!

Both are releasing an idea into the sphere of experience. Writing something down can have such immense effects.

I say - symbols don't point us to anything, and we don't release things into the sphere. That implies a space and a place that doesn't exist. Anything you can conceive of can happen, because conceiving of something is it happening. A word is just part of an extended pattern, and recalling the word is to trigger the whole pattern.

Therefore, the symbol, or Word, acts merely as a reminder to the experience.

Right, but literally a re-minder. To activate that pattern in mind. It will then automatically appear in all your experiences. In fact, as soon as you have re-called a pattern this way it is instantly activated across time and space. You then encounter that pattern you have created, as you pass from moment to moment. It's worth spending some time attending to your actual experience, in terms of what it is made up from. For instance, see your visual scene as a "flat" drawing, an outline. Note that the patterns that outline is made from seem to recur, and once you have noticed a particular arrangement, you will see it again and again.

This is the level that activation occurs at... absolutely all levels of a pattern are triggered across experience, from the abstract silhouettes to the relationship dynamics.

I suppose the caveat is that you have to have experienced something as it is, not symbolically, before you can use a Word to get yourself back there.

Well, if the word is meaningful at all, it is part of a pattern, and saying the word will summon that pattern. If you have any conception at all of something, you can have it. You don't necessarily need to have consciously (but which I mean, "have perceived sensorily") experienced it before.

It really is beneficial to see your environment as a really simple, automatic "imagination space" which you are stirring around by activating patterns. Then it makes sense why you should occasionally sit down and stop "remembering things" - to let "the swirl" settle and clear.

Giraffes!

So, the extended pattern of "giraffe" has: the visual image, outline and silhouette, that camouflage, lock necks, hooves, zoos, tall trees, personal experiences in childhood, that story your mother read you, etc. All those will be triggered across time-space and be "mixed in" with whatever is already there. Even in very subtle ways, potentially. Such as the arrangement of a chair being like a giraffe, leaning against a table with a bowl of leafy salad. If you imagined the giraffe in a particular 3D location in your perceptual field, then you might tend to encounter animals with them being located in that same location in your senses.

You get the idea.

Note that when I say time-space, I mean that for convenience because that's how experience appears to be formatted. In actual fact, there is only this imagination space and it's all a swirl of patterns now.

But my question is, is every sensory experience combining aspects of previous sensory experiences?

I'd say all patterns are combinations - superpositions? - of other patterns. And there is always something in play. So when you bite into that alien fruit, then you already have the "formattings" of, say, "taste", "fruit", visual resemblance to other things, other things currently in mind and in context.

Right, so my problem is I keep viewing the pattern that I'm viewing right now, and the pattern that is hidden.

This is tricky to think about, certainly. Here's one approach:

All patterns are always activated and always contributing to your sensory experience right now, to differing degrees. It is tempting to think that "giraffe" is hidden away somewhere, but actually it is to a very subtle extent informing your experience right now anyway. Your perceptual-imagination space is like a holographic space in which all patterns are present. "Remembering" or "imagining" is the process of increasing the intensity of a pattern briefly via attention/triggering. Once you've done that, it seems to dim from the heights you raised it to, but it is now contributing more strongly.

If you held the pattern long enough, strongly enough, or with zero interference or resistance, in an attitude of absolute allowing, perhaps it wouldn't dim at all...

So to let the swirl settle is to "stop triggering" or "stop intensifying" by letting your attention open out and dissolve.

last night I had a dream that I went through this ritual of some kind.

That's an good one. Have you experimented with music-making while lucid dreaming? I was heavily into old synths and stuff for a while and had the idea that creating new sounds in my sleep would be great, but I never actually did it.

TL;DR: Think of all patterns as being present right now. Nothing is hidden or elsewhere; they are simply not activated at an intensity level that is noticeable.

EDIT:

And by "I became formless." I mean, I stopped perceiving myself to be limited to a physical body. Gotta' be careful with language!

Ha, yes. "I was no longer identified with form", "there was no longer any experience of being identified with form", that kind of thing. I know what you mean. :-)

A question: Do you feel physical bodies are a necessary tool - and if not, what are some good alternatives and how would I facilitate it/them?

Well, physical bodies (I'd say) are an experience. They consist of sensations and appearances; they are a pattern themselves. They are like the "first enabling technology". They are an excuse or a permission to have things happen, via "action".

If consciousness is First Cause then bodies are not necessary for summoning change - all that is required is to intend. And neither is any other tool really. But in order to have an "experience of doing" then something like a body with sensations is required.

That's the trick of this whole thing, isn't it? Some may want to be All Powerful and - well, you are already. But if you just went full out and had just straight-to-the-outcome manifestation every time, you'd actually have no experiences. So the balance probably is: be aware of the nature of things and therefore avoid undesired suffering, avoid accidental creation of misery, and knowingly generate desired change or leave alone and bask in experience. The most important thing: knowing this gives us the confidence to step back and just be and allow. Without this, we feel we must interfere and "make things happen" all the time, often with accompanying ongoing physical tension.

Some limitation in certain instances allows for some very unique expressions.

Limitation is often a source of creativity, right?

As a minor example, if there was no "gravity habit" then animals and objects wouldn't be shaped as interestingly as they are. No need for legs and motion-generating structures and the like. If we didn't "need" to eat, then a whole source of pleasurable activities would be denied to us - etc.

And since you are never actually physical (you are just having sensations, thoughts, perceptions consistent with - "as if" that were true), you get the best of both worlds.

I feel like I'm going to enjoy life a little more now

Aha, then my work here is done! :-)

The balanced view is to go "yes, it's an imagination room" but life is about experiences, and immersing ourselves in them. Yes, I can use fast travel to jump between desired circumstances, but once I'm in one it's fun to let it play out. Doing these things knowingly rather than accidentally is the benefit.

Additional thought:

Just as an aside on this "words and patterns" thing (triggering, autocompletion, and all possibilities already being available), it's interesting to compare what we're talking about with older descriptions - e.g. Akasha ("primary substance") and the Akashic Records (random link - all experiences have already happened at least as potentiality, as patterns).

Even current metaphors such as "it's all a computer simulation" are really just another way of saying: the whole of infinite reality is "encoded' into the background; your current sensory experience isn't "solid" like you think it is.

POST: Choices, choices... Symmetry vs asymmetry in a worldview.

Note sure if this'll make sense but -

Can you get out of this by identifying with the "ground of being" (even just conceptually) and seeing Nefandi and Everyone Else as on the same level? As the ground, you are never elitist or non-elitist. If Nefandi plays the "educating" part or not, it is of no consequence in the larger play. Nefandi is not Godlike, but you-as-the-ground is. Nefandi has no obligations to educate unless he is so moved. And when he is so moved will be when it is the appropriate thing to do. Because the ground will have shifted him.

Y'know, maybe this is an intuitive timing thing.

Q:[Deleted]

Well, I tried. :-)
It's not an easy thing.

Q:[Deleted]

And the answer is... dream-cake!

Inevitably. But maybe the idea that you have to choose is wrong. You can flip between Nefandi and The Ground and between one approach and the other. Maybe the problem is in felt need to choose? I'm a strong opponent of the need to "have an opinion" in times when you don't actually need to act upon a view.

I'm sort of "being the ground" but guiding the experience as TG. Sometimes one thing seems appropriate, sometimes another. Usually neither was appropriate. ;-)

You are the All-Knowing Nefandi - He came from The Ground, and The Ground arises within Him. There is nothing He cannot accomplish in His World!

Maybe. ;-)

POST: Controlling feeling vs controlling material form

The idea I have is that the feeling is what is generating the vision and other forms.

It can certainly lead the other forms, and if you don't have the associated feeling of a form (what you might call the "feeling of fact" since it doesn't have to be emotional as such) then you haven't completely created it. Following on the Patterns post ideas, if you summon a particular feeling then you trigger the patterns associated with that feeling. And certainly if you behave "as if" something then that does the same thing: you are creating direct sensation which bring about the related experiences. Basically, directed dreaming.

In the end, this comes down to the usual: assert new "facts", in any way you feel inclined, and the world will being to behave as though those "facts" were true:

e.g. When imagining things, messing around with the sensory aspects directly is very inefficient and actually inhibits progress. Instead, imagining that something is true, the imagery follows automatically (provided you don't block it). This is equally true of world manifestations as mind manifestations - because they are the same thing!

If you go about the place with the constant feeling of "it's it great!" then the world falls in line with that in a general way. In fact, one of Goddard's recommendations I think is that if you can't visualise well, you can simply say "it's so wonderful! thankyou so much!" and that will generate the appropriate feeling - which in turn will produce the results because it inherently "assumes the wish is fulfilled".

EDIT: Worth taking a look at the Michael Chekhov acting technique if you'd like to expand on your "embodied imagination" (acting as-if) approach.

Let's talk about blocking it. For the most part I know how to handle my sensory blocks. What could be done in the event of this feeling-as-fact block?

If you can't get at it directly, you approach it by accepting something that implies that it is true.

Bad example but: You don't believe a door can be opened. Can't get the feeling. So instead, you approach by asserting someone being inside the room, which implies the door must be openable, hence you allow yourself to have the door openable. You lead in to plausibility.

We can get away with simply feeling how we would expect to feel during these experiences and then being detached from any expectation of what happens

I dare you to do that without actually triggering the larger pattern and essentially "asserting a fact" after all! ;-) Really they are all versions of the same thing, right?

Asserting facts is basically pattern-triggering. You can't assert something you can't conceive of, so the pattern must already exist in some sense. If it exists in some sense, then it is like a memory pattern.

So really - everything I've said is the same thing from different angles. Sometimes I chunk it up into "moments", sometimes into "patterns", sometimes "facts". The underlying is of course undivided - but we need to select an entry point in order to conceptualise an intention and make a choice.

Going about your day, just maintaining a feel of expansive space, and the feeling that goes with how you want your life to be, is alone a good idea. And ties in with...

Going to read the Michael Checkhov text, looks interesting.

Yeah, it's really just a fun thing on its own.

EDIT response:

So if the context of that was "I want to imagine a spaceship in front of me" (as in: visualising stuff in your mind), then trying to "draw" the object in the air isn't a great way to do it. Just as in daily life, sensory imagery arises from fact. Assumption implies creation. So an alternative is to "decide' that the visual object is there, make it's presence a fact, and have the imagery arise naturally that. It's similar to the "trigger the pattern by the feeling" thing. That's what happens anyway once you get good at picturing stuff: You let "the unconscious mind" do the work for you. This is a way of short-cutting it.

It's just a suggestion. I found it helpful. See if it's useful for you.

Ah I see what you mean. Know it's there but I just can't see it yet.
But then how do I give myself the ability to see it? I know the answer is just decide to.

It'll just "come". You have to let it happen. It's a bit like the "let the world come to you" thing for the senses, rather than trying to see with "eyes" and hear with "ears". Play around with it. It only really makes sense if it happens.

Sit back, and decide that a large model of the Millennium Falcon is floating a couple of metres in front of you. Let it appear in its own time.

...

My interpretation of Mr Goddard is that, having recognised that the world is made of imagination and operates on an "as if" basis, he understood that we simply need to re-imagine it. The Law and the Promise is a little clearer on this I think.

Changes thus instigated could potentially manifest (persist sensorily in awareness) instantly, however the intensity of the imagery we have created thus far tends to result in an apparent time element - i.e. it's easier to create changes that are "out of sight" sensorily and in terms of current event momentum, than it is to "condense" a new environment while we are looking at that implied time-space place.

POST: The greatest possible gift.

Lovely.

Are they there to listen, though? I suppose it doesn't really matter: at worse, you are reclaiming your power from an illusion of separation from the dream. You are giving to yourself, as you say.

From experience, lots of people don't take kindly to having their... ability pointed out to them. Getting people to create synchronicity for instance (I used to use elephants, now I use owls as the example, inspired by a book) often gets a quite traumatised response. Not so much that things appear, or that reality might be dream-like. What troubles then is that it mean that other people aren't straightforwardly real - that the "sharing model" of the world can't be a simple one.

Now (as is the way of these things), my own expectations play back to me in this as much as anything else. Interested in how other people get along with that. You can also do it indirectly, but you are basically being sneaky to yourself if you do that, of course.

For sure (on the forcing) but these are people who ask... then receive. It's an interesting muddle.

Well, it's mine to allow myself the experience of them apparently having it!

Q: [Deleted]

Quite so.

It's a funny old world. Since everything behaves "as if", including time and space, apparent history and apparent persistence, how it works it can't really be explained, only asserted. I mean, it's funny trying, but it's also like chewing your own arm. (And everyone else's arm, therefore.)

Hence "Active Metaphors": the explanations you absorb shape your experience. We do quite well, on this subreddit, considering there nothing to say really, beyond things like "how you imagine it is, that's how it is" and so on.

Q: [Deleted]

Yes. And I guess there's lots of work to do towards being able to describe something like this, in ways that work for different audiences. There's always something new to say about something which shifts a little every time you say something about it... It's a way of continuing to experience it freshly, I suppose. Like re-watching a favourite movie. Or reading another Philip K Dick or JG Ballard book (because they're mostly essentially the same).

POST: [deleted by user]

Just happened to be passing! It's a great topic and something that there are so many ways to talk about. A good one to bring up. So:

• The "you" I'm referring to in the first example isn't the "little you", the one we infer from thoughts and bodily sensation, but rather the true self: the conscious environment. I guess I'm assuming in that phrasing that people already recognise themselves as the "open aware space" in which experiences arise; that they are the dream.
• But then in the second example, when I make the dream-space reference more explicitly and say there is no "you", I mean "you" as in the "little you"!

The way I'd written the comment appears that they are different views, but really they are the same view. A good example of why we have to be careful of language here, I suppose! :-)

Actually, in the "filtering of infinite potential" metaphor, that you are experiencing "your own mind" doesn't necessarily imply there is no valuable information to be had from the environment. Because we have the perspective of a "little you" who receives information by sensory arisings, the way we learn about ourselves-as-the-world is through experience.

So listening to people, paying attention to events, tells us who we are at the moment. For instance, seeing lots of news articles about people having appendicitis may be the first sign that you should get checked out at the doctor. It's not just all about seeing owls because you've been thinking about owls, or redirecting events by reconstructing your forward imagery.

Meanwhile, changing ourselves and changing the world are equivalent, and we can only recognise our success in that when our sensory experience shifts accordingly. Again, active and interactive listening.

• Experiences are all about your current state, because the facts-of-the-world are your current state.

Taking the "two aspects" version of Transcendental Idealism, you would be the noumena (as I call it: the facts-of-the-world dissolved into the background of awareness) as much as you were the phenomenal (those aspects of the noumena that had unfolded as spatially-extended sensory experience: an experiential moment). Both are in and of awareness; awareness is what you "really are". In fact, the noumena is always as present as the phenomena, it's just that it is dissolve into the background felt-sense.

• You == world == state of you == state of the world.

To explore the apparent sensory world is to explore the current formatting of your own mind, and I'd go further and say that the overall formatting is just as present now as the particular element you are experiencing as an expanded environment. Behind that is just infinite potential.

TL;DR: The filter+potential metaphor shouldn't be construed as one-way, because it's a metaphor describing the current state of the larger "you". The environment you encounter then is the larger you, and to explore it is to explore the larger mind, so one should always be listening.

A1: Metaphors abound. Worldviews are like contortions of the body. You bend to them when you wish to be bent such a way: you sit when you want to sit, you stand when sitting is no good, you lay down when you need to rest, you run when there's a tiger. Anyone who sits forever, or lays forever, or runs forever, is either dead or effectively so. Flexibility. Always flexibility. Adapt, move, never holding on, never saying "this not that" for long.

Quite so. "Active Metaphors". Choose for purpose. Don't confuse with explanation.

A2: in a response to a recent post /u/triumphantgeorge outlined a model of reality in which there are three features: a you, a filter, and a world.
This isn't a fair representation of what George talks about because "the world" is not what you're filtering against in his model. Rather, you're filtering from infinite possibility, which isn't any kind of world. Once you're done filtering, then something resembling the world appears to your mind as your POV experience. Of course the filtering is instant, so "once you're done" is only a figure of speech here.
One of the dangers is dismissing the possibility that the other elements in this system, ie the world and the filter, might have something to say, that they might have their own agenda, intelligence, or reasons for appearing the particular ways that they do.
What's the danger here? When you talk about danger, you have to talk about the possibility of injury. Who is injured here, how, and why?

Thanks Nefandi - this is exactly right.

POST: dream poem

The Oneironauts

Expert navigators of the waking dream
Trajectories across the Infinite Grid unseen
The generators of fact
Making this out of that
Implied Creators of their world
Senses, effortlessly unfurled

Haha, and of course it also includes T-G's patented private vocabulary words and terms of art. :) I even know what some of them mean. I only know what "infinite grid unseen" means because you explained it to me.

Yeah, I should really have included the ©appropriate™ symbols® in the text, I suppose. :-)

EDIT: Although really, being a poem, the idea is to be evocative in terms of imagery, rather than necessarily precise in terms of exact (conceptual) meaning.

You're talking about something with a specific meaning, but unless people were following the right posts where you explained some of this stuff, they're going to get vague imagery instead of exactly what you're trying to say.

That's fine. These things have poetic meaning anyway. I think anyone could read that and would get a 'feeling'. The fact that there's further theory behind the imagery, is extra icing to be discovered.

After all, why does everything have to be easy? :-)

Q: The fact that there's further theory behind the imagery, is extra icing to be discovered.
That's one way to look at it.
After all, why does everything have to be easy? :-)
How would you like to be on the receiving end of such an attitude? :)

In fact, the poem is more factually correct than the theory.

Because it's pure aesthetic and the theory is not?

Try and argue with my poem! :-)

I won. Did you see it?

From now on, I only understand victory in limerick form.