TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 19

POST: Getting excited about the unknown

I'd never heard the term "bibliomancy" - it's great!

In the dreams I know that whatever comes up isn't an issue because it is undoubtedly just more dream material ... My feeling is that there isn't anything but this dream-material.

Haha, yes! The fear maybe comes from thinking that you are "real" rather than also dream material? But if it's all dream material, there's nothing to fear - it's just a matter of when you are going to say "yes" to the dream.

...Doesn't mean it won't be a bumpy ride - the first thing that'll happen is things will try to line up with how they should be, rather than how you've forced/resisted until now. But longer run, yes.

EDIT: The most important windows are metaphorical.

The issues, limitations are due to "conceptual momentum" - basically, the co-creation or co-influence aspect of this experience. Once habits are formed, you need to either dissolve them or intend across them. Dream-worlds have habits too, remember. When you walk in a dream, do you find yourself constantly falling through the floor? No. Why not? It's just a "dream floor"!

In a lucid dream, we assume we have complete control.

Hmm. And we don't have complete, direct control. We control/seed our expectations and the environment responds, within the limits of our beliefs about the dream.

A dream of being awake is the same as being awake, if it has all the properties of waking, I'd say. Right now, you are dreaming of being awake on Planet Earth.

Sure. I was just trying to make the point that a dream of total control ultimately isn't any different than a dream of total futility. They are the same essential substance, the same event. "We control/seed our expectations", In my view this is equally part of the dream as well. edit: I'm just trying to consciously know the source of all dreams. That's my goal. So I realize it kind of departs from this subreddit's point of focus.

Yep, it's all dream.

edit: I'm just trying to consciously know the source of all dreams. That's my goal. So I realize it kind of departs from this subreddit's point of focus.

I think there might be a problem with that: I think you will never be able to experience it. Experiences are made from 'dream-stuff' - sounds, pictures, sensations, all that - but 'dream-stuff' itself isn't made of anything. If you ever experience "the source of all dreams" it will just be another experience, made out of dream-stuff. The source of all dreams is: open, unstructured consciousness, shaping itself by itself, causelessly - intention unfolding.

That's how I'm seeing it at the moment anyway.

When I look honestly, it seems to be like this: there isn't anything but dream-stuff and the open knowing of dream-stuff is an inherent, inseparable property of dream-stuff. Wow!

Yes! I offer you the blanket metaphor:

The analogy of the blanket, where the blanket is "raw awareness" and ripples or folds are "objects", is quite apt. How does the universe know itself? A blanket with no folds could not experience itself, relative to itself. Only by 'taking on shapes' can consciousness experience itself.

Openness is unfolded blanket (non-stuff), while the folds of the blanket is the content of experience (dream-stuff, the blanket experiencing itself). So they're never separate. We just get confused because we think of 'dream-stuff' as separate objects rather than patterns in continuous awareness.

Dustin Hoffman knows I'm right. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfIiRKLMjDY]

Nice, never heard the blanket metaphor before. What movie is that clip from?

It's good eh. Replaced my "tray full of jello" metaphor, thank god. :-)

(Although what I said isn't quite what he says in the film really.)

It's from I Heart Huckabees. Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg become the clients of "existential investigators" Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin. Full of quirky fun but clever observations too. It's worth your while!

...

My suggestion: You can simply decide and accept that it is - it will then gradually fall into line. Or you could try lying down, relaxing, and strongly asserting it with Will to shift more quickly, on a daily basis. (Similar to how in Tibetan Yoga you are encouraged to constantly say "this is a dream" during your waking life, but x10 it.)

If you keep tinkering with the debate, though, your perception won't settle.

The mistake you are making is: "you" are not fundamentally real either. You are the dream-space (as emphasised previously here). /u/everydaymotherfucker is a dream character just as /u/TriumphantGeorge is, and your friends and family are. It just so happens what you really are is experiencing its dream from a particular perspective.

See here for instance, for an idea of how it can be if things truly dissolve.

TL;DR: You are a figment of your imagination too. Recognising the dream does not alone dissolve the habits of the dream, however it does mean you will realise how intention works, and how you can get your desired experiences.

It does all like to line up, given half a chance, which is nice. Yep, keep it dreamy . . .

POST: Anyone ever heard of Bashar before?

[POST]

[http://www.bashar.org/index.html]
I found this uniquely interesting. I don't 100% agree with it or anything, but you might check out the 'principles' under the 'about' button. A medium channeling an extraterrestrial from the future who is trying to awaken humans to their innate divine potential, basically. The stated motive is that humans are so shitty that if other beings in the universes see that humans can make themselves lucid, then they will gain more confidence in their own capacity to become lucid.
I think it is fun and interesting. What do you think?

[END OF POST]

Yeah. I'm not so sure about his "style" and the manner of his inspiration, but his 5 principles are about right:

1. You exist…you always have and you always will. You are eternal.
2. Everything is here and now.
3. The One is the All and the All is the One.
4. What you put out is what you get back.
5. Everything changes except for the first four…..

POST: A report on my recent experience.

Interesting. The pain thing, particularly: pain is like an interpretation on top of a sensation, I find.

Yes, intention should be effortless. Attempting relaxation is a great way to practice. Lying down and simply Willing to be relaxed without doing anything, feeling the initial resistance of your body before it dissolves, gives you the experience pretty directly. There is no "strength" to this Willing, you simply direct your experience or you don't. And you make sure you don't fight any resistance; you just persist instead.

One can get caught in one's own perfectly created dream, and the dream can begin to run away into random directions if one disowns it too much. I need to be careful not to be a victim of my own success.

Care to expand on this idea?

If it's effortless, it's not me.

Yes, we think that if something involved no effort, if we can't detect ourselves doing-by-pushing, then it can't be us.

...

I never quite got the language right for willing and intending either. There's the "target experience" (your intent? your direction?) and then there's the "active directional wanting", the thing that you do (willing? intending?) for your current experience to move towards and become that target experience?

...

...Good response. Yes, "wanting" isn't what I meant really. By Will, I mean that we change the 'shape of ourselves', towards a desired shape, our 'Intent'. If we were to release ourselves fully, then our experience and actions would always correspond to the desired shape. Any sense of 'resistance' against applied Will now, is due to your owns resistance, rather than the requirements for a "force". In effect, you are Willing in two directions at once, hence the tension when it is experienced. On sensing awareness as it is, this post was interesting.

Sensations are a fact of awareness, but you can be self-aware or aware-aware. The perceptual space in which experiences arise. By awareness, he means what you call mind - really. As opposed to attention, etc.

I would say to him, "If I am awareness, I should be able to change you to Bugs Bunny."

You might find this article [http://www.integralworld.net/salmon18.html] interesting in that regard. And also this talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRiVYv2ettA] on physical laws, and 'intervention'.

The way in which Spira declines striving is in the sense of using effort to look for what you are, not in the sense of wanting to be personally better and more successful, say.

However, we should return to this 'fatalism' idea. So, if you're going for all out subjective idealism (it's all you, just you, and there's no Rupert Spira guy, it's just you saying things to annoy you) then you can do anything, anything. Rabbits into roller coasters. Stay young forever. Would you say that the reason you aren't seeing other people do this is that they are "your world" and you don't believe it yet, haven't made it possible yet?

I have tried many experiments of a 'direct' nature, include some time-fiddling stuff. There have been results - revised histories etc - but I do seem to confront an inertia which isn't my personal inertia, it seems.

Meanwhile: the idea of conceptual momentum? [http://powerbeforewisdom.com/Fundamentals-of-Magick/Will-vs-Physics.html] Quote from article:

Back to my dispute. I believe that the laws of physics are able to be affected by will. I believe that the assumption that the laws of science are universal, persistent and solid actually helps make them so... until they encounter different beliefs that are either more strongly willed in a local area or which have more “momentum” for a lack of a better term.

(Several good - as in thought-provoking - articles on that site.)

...

He doesn't though. He denies the role of will. He also doesn't talk much about knowledge being important in experience.

The 'will' part is something that's problematic for most non-dualists. Other than that, he's pretty good at pointing out the experience. His TV Screen metaphor is just to show that your experience is made from consciousness, only you don't notice mostly. Most people don't get that far - it's a good first step before you do stuff. Well done you and me, but we're not the norm. I think he presents it excellently for the newcomer.

Duh, no shit! Subjective idealism is the topic of this subreddit. LOL, so finally you want to discuss it? I am pleased to hear that.

Sarcastic b*! ;-) You know what I mean. Our phrasings swing back and forth between assuming it and not. Nefandi is a dream character, of course, with human limitations. To do more, you need to become "the context".

I think of Spira as an entry door. This is how some people get introduced to thinking about the nature of mind.

Of course. This is agreed. Then read a good lucid dreaming book (Waggoner) and apply what you learn. However, "fatalism" is neither here nor there - limitations are revealed to exist or not by successful action. Anyway, the key difference is "Will" and that can only reside as a movement of the context awareness (the real you, mind, whatever). That's what's missing in discussion of brain/consciousness/free will, and so on. That's where the "magick" comes in.

Okay, that was fun. Subjective idealism, here we are. But why oh why am I not getting all the results I want/Will?

Bah, I think Spira puts it well and I like his books for getting the direct experience (for our larger audience). You, of course, are super-advanced and it's all just kindergarten for you. ;-) Wasn't comparing you to anyone, of course.

Wrong. Failure doesn't reveal limitation. Think about it.

It does; depends on the nature of the limitation though.

Because you think you're a human.

So for as long as I continue to get negative results, it will be because I still identify with being human? Sounds a bit of a get-out.

Think about it. When you control your lucid dream environments, are you doing it as the character or as a dreamer of the whole dream?

etc. Look, sure, I know this. And reabsorbing "eggs of separation" and regaining their power is not new - e.g. even business versions:

Question: Using your language, if I’m creating and experiencing the illusion of an economic downturn, the numbers aren’t working, and it seems like I need to layoff employees and take other cost-cutting steps, how do I handle that in Phase 2?
Answer: Illusions are illusions. The storyline doesn’t matter. There’s nothing unique about the illusion of an economic downturn, layoffs or cost cutting measures. . . Use the Process (reabsorb discomfort) as you see fit.

However, it seems to take far. too. long. It'd be nice to come up with a more blanket technique. My 'overwrite everything with empty space' works quite well, but you need to persist doing it in circumstances.

It's not about ignorance though. You can realise you are 'all this' but not directly experience it, still have bits and bobs of separation causing you trouble. In my experience, you do have to 'do something' to bring things back into you (or 'the one' or whatever), to dissolve boundaries when they appear.

And they're not always there, they're often enfolded - you can only dissolve them when they appear.

However, it is what you call felt-knowledge

Yes, the "felt-sense".

What happens when you become lucid in the dream? Does your feeling change? Generally for me, nothing changes other than I now suddenly know,

There is a 'clarity' though, an opening up. The quality of it does change.

That's not my experience at all. It's definitely not from lucid dreaming.

I'm talking about dissolving boundaries in "real" life, when you encounter a discomfort of separation in a particular situation, and dissolve/merge it to make it fully part of you again.

Clarity: I meant, upon it turning lucid, I find the clarity increases. Then I can do what I want, but everything does become more "so".

You should be able to treat any appearance as you would a dream. So it's strange that "real" life demands a different approach from that which I use during lucid dreaming. You have to explain why so.

It is apparently so, in terms of the reduced flexibility. However, the 'using prolonged Will' aspect is the same.

...Yeah? I find there's a bit of a shift with the knowing. But you could just say that's the "felt-sense" of recognising it to be a dream.

...Good idea. Actually, the relevant stuff for 'oneness' would be the dissolving the 'threat' of apparently external things, such as bills and other financial stuff. In fact, all boundaries correspond to, or are signified by, feelings of discomfort or tension in the situation. This is easy to do, but the things need to be happening now, first. Okay, will do that later this week.

More extreme: Time travel (experiential time travel). Possible? I often use time travel as a way to explain that arbitrary-moment view of experience. Goddard's "revise your history' is in a way similar to this. Will include an example of that too: it's basically a dissolve followed by a creation.

...Right. What I'm talking about is absorbing and dissolving the "felt-sense" of separation of something. Basically, taking the external "stuff" and making/recognising it as internal, part of you again. Once done, these things fall within your "control" - or at least, they fall into line with your Will.

Subsequently, things will not be pursued against you, people change their moods, all that. Rather than having to explicitly manipulate, doing this just means things "fall into the right direction". It was the Business Game book that first game me the idea to do this: surely if there was no sense of threat, then the threat had been dissolved?

It's not teleportation, but it's pretty useful. The "felt-sense" isn't like touch-feeling; it probably corresponds to what you are calling "knowledge" (but not "I know facts"), or "knowing" or "experiencing".

It sounds intriguing.

You encounter something. You feel discomfort. You dissolve that discomfort into yourself. You find that the corresponding "external" object, what it represents, gradually stops being a threat. For instance, people pursuing you for something - will just stop. You can replace the "discomfort" with "gratitude", which works too. Some people have experimented with returning their bills, writing "not paying, thanks very much for the opportunity" and doing this. I never went that far!

Have you encountered dangerous wild animals?

People. Yes.

...A bit of both. The dissolving of the tension feels like "taking it into you". You are doing it "within you".

No, you don't get to remember their memories, etc. Actually, it really is more of an "internal working" than a reaching out externally. You are dealing and changing with your own response (=assumptions about meaning?).

Doing magick in an LD is often a great way to get success. We need to put a bit more effort into extending around abilities into RL, though. It is not necessarily true that we'll be able to convert one thing to the other (despite our brushing aside of 'fatalism', etc).

...The timescale matter, of course. If it's not tomorrow morning, and not next year, and not by 2030, then it doesn't matter (if you'll excuse the pun). There is a separate thing there: persisting oneself beyond the "vale". However, if we can't do "amazing things" in a relatively short period of time, I'd be pretty disappointed surely?

...Okay, revisiting stuff: Have you experimented much with Neville Goddard yet? It's the most direct thing going. In fact, really, it is the only thing. Even just doing a daily "overwrite yourself with the feeling of empty space" works wonders. I've been deleting all sorts of bad ideas/assumptions along the way.

(In fact, I'd say, this is something to do whenever it occurs to you as you go about your day. Where your body "apparently occupies", create the "direct felt-sense" of open, empty space, blending seamlessly into the surrounding environment.)

...I was already thinking similarly and doing something of the sort prior. I don't deviate from my own style.

I often find the same thing. Yes, it's a good read, can provide inspiration. New take on things: just decide. That's all. Nothing else.

Yes. Usually I come across books that are already what I'm thinking about, they just expand things a little, or provide a useful context. Goddard was like that; I was already doing open-space-overwrite, and that just made the connection between that and a felt-sense for desired situations. It's inspired a mixture of things: an Alexander Technique idea (from Missy Vineyard's book, How You Stand, How You Walk, How You Live) and a sprinkling of Les Fehmi's work (The Open Focus Brain, Dissolving Pain) and Douglas Harding's Head Off Stress, seeing that you are empty space really, and Eugene Gendlin's Focusing work, particularly his larger psychology book (rather than the small introductory one). It's inspired by those, bits in each of those. It's not in any of them. Nearest is Dissolving Pain, I'd say. Maybe because I'd referenced the "summoning of the feeling" that Neville talks about at one point? There's a similarity there. Just imagining visually doesn't do it, you need to "feel" the space in place.

...That's exactly it. I used to do it just with the space in the room, then reaching out further into the structureless "place" - then I realised my body was just an idea "overlaid" on experience, and so deleted that too. At that point, you realise your "body area" is actually home to other things, such as "stuck thoughts' and "uncompleted movements" which you have accumulated over time.

In fact, your human body is already your body. Can you bend your bones as you might rubber? I bet not. And you're one with your body. So here again is evidence that oneness is useless for magick.

You probably aren't "one" with much of your body, but I recognise your point. So, what's the missing thing? Magick tends to work by synchronicity mostly, with only a few people getting further (a guy doing 'Abrupt Physical Manifestation' creating patterns in plates, etc).

The missing thing if you can't bend your bones! But if you can then the missing thing is your attachment.

...Bah. You should give it a go. "Obviously true" as in, they can be applied and correspond to observations. You will disagree with it overall, but still. Elimination of co-creating agencies is a must. How to reabsorb them?

POST: Not all insanity is created equal.

And to have no thoughts easily and reliably you literally need to have no concerns about anything. You need to be certifiably insane.

It can be a positive stance, Zen style: that you understand that the appropriate action will occur to you in any circumstances if you let it, since you are part of the larger movement of the world; and recognise that thinking about things and planning actions in advance doesn't actually help you act appropriately.

Yeah, I see two types of thought:

• Unbidden thoughts as arising spontaneously from 'tension' or conflict of some sort, so trying to eliminate the thoughts while still retaining the conflict isn't going to happen. You either get rid of the tension by investigating it and resolving your conflict, or you simply accept it and release control, let go and let it unwind.
• Intentional thinking - deliberate rumination and planning - that's optional and you can simply decide not to do that. You may be an obsessive thinker, but you can decide to give up and let it go, and decide not to follow unbidden thoughts in to rumination territory.

Trying to deliberately fight the first type of thought will not work. "Good Zen" involves simply "sitting" and letting thoughts rise and fall and finish their business, remaining with sensations rather than trying to shut thinking down.

Leading to: surely "seeing all this as a dream" is the ultimate in letting go of personal control and localised (bodily) tension, since we then identify as the whole thing? It's all an "expression of you", after all.

I don't think any authentic Zen masters considered the world something larger than themselves. And neither do I.

No, they considered the world within themselves, but the character they were experiencing was part of that world. So concerns about the character acting appropriately are misplaced. (And mostly when we talk of action in everyday life, we are speaking of that character.)

It depends on what you mean by "personal."

I mean, controlling your "body" (mental or physical) directly - intentional thought and physical control - and by retaining tension in it as a defensive/conflict management approach. What I really mean is, if you truly accept this is a dream, then many of your concerns would evaporate - you would release your grasp - because those concerns are for the survival of the character, not the dream.

Maybe? It's not 100% certain.

For sure, there are different folks and different strands. Most of the stuff I've explored seems to come to this though. Zazen is an allowing rather than a striving.

I don't equate my person with any specific body.

Sure, but most people do, and I'm talking about how a person moves from one view and way of living to another. For clarity: "who you really are" is everything, whilst "people", including "your body", are characters/mental objects within that.

Zazen allows striving and relaxation...

I don't think we're actually disagreeing. It's a "lively sitting". The point I made before (see other response) is that the point isn't to stamp out thoughts.

What do you mean by "everything"? Are you saying I am the sum total of the manifest things?

No, you are that in which the apparent manifest things appear.

If you can conceive of yourself that way, then you can conceive of yourself any way you like. If you can see yourself as a formless container that takes on the form of the objects of experience, then equally you can identify with any object, or configuration of time and space.

Once you've hit "openness", then you can pick and choose. Being able to choose to limit yourself - for fun or curiosity - is the greatest freedom.

One might say that our present localised experience is a limitation we freely chose at some point, but we don't remember. Moving on: The initial pitch was mixing subjective idealism with chaos magick, but we haven't really explored that much.

...I did spot that post, actually. I thought this was interesting:

If you tell your friends, the world will change to make the event mundane. It will turn out that someone left the pad in some sort of diagnostics mode or there will be a software bug that allows 10% of random codes to work or something like that.

This is true, in my experience. The universe (heheh) strives for self-consistency. Open the door, there's a room beyond; seek an explanation, and one is provided. But also:

Magic isn't about making unnatural things happen, it's about making natural things happen at the right times and places.

I just founding it interesting that someone would phrase it that way. I think that if one does not specify the route the result will take, then it adopts natural processes as the mechanism, in accordance with your own understanding of what "natural" is. When you look for an explanation, one will appear which, again, fits in with your idea of what a reasonable explanation would be. The alternative is for you not to retain a memory of the change. (Often others don't retain memories pre-jump.)

...He's the man. I think coherence is semi-inherent. I think things arise in patterns across time rather than events, and so the 'world' tends to keep being 'of a piece'. Once you've accepted one thing, other things tend to fall in line with it, and so on. If you're not a believer in such things, it could be that your 'reality' of your 'extended person' won't contain such experiences, and you'll subjectively 'split off' if something like that's going to happen.

...Not the best wording. That the world will tend to serve up experiences in line with your beliefs, and that your memories will tend to correspond to your current experience. Your subjectivity would 'split off' rather than give you an experience which wasn't coherent (wasn't consistent with itself). Yes. An unwitting strategy though. It's either avoided, or edited out.

In our current reality "don't like strangeness" probably describes most people, right?

Whether they realise it or not, yes. Someone over at 'Glitch in the Matrix' just posted this [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/2gqtyb/metaswitching_realities/], and I thought I'd have some fun replying. :-)

...

The problem would be, can you overcome the momentum of experiential habits such as these?

You fear a personal death. And to be sure, to genuinely confront the nature of yourself and of your world, will indeed involve your death in a fundamental sense. What seems insane on this side of the jump, won't be on the other. Say: If you genuinely experienced the world around you as a dream, and yourself as a dream figure, then the solid, material everydaymotherfucker would be no more. You would be part of a larger movement. You have to give. up. (Your personal self. Not a life.)

Stop thinking, my friend. Just stop. You cannot work this out by thinking. The other side, as it were, isn't "over there" - it's "in here" and all around you. It's not even a "side", it's where you've been (and what you've been) all along. So no need to worry! :-)

I'm going to give you a daily practice to do, and other than that you're just going to get on with your life, and see what happens, okay? Stabilisation is key. Here it is:

• 10 minutes, twice a day.
• Lie down on the floor, feet flat with knees bent, head supported by books, arms by your side or hands resting on abdomen. (Like this.)
• Decide to give up completely to gravity: to "play dead".
• Let go of your body and mind, let them move as they will. Allow them to unwind.
• Don't even "pay attention"; just let your attention be open and wide. If it focuses on some thought or pain briefly, let that happen, and let it open out again.
• After 10 minutes, decide to get up, but don't do anything about it. Wait until your body moves by itself. (This won't happen first time, but eventually it will happen.)

Basically, you are letting the "stuck thoughts" and "uncompleted movements" you have amassed unwind and dissolve themselves. You do not need to do anything for this to occur. Gradually, your perception will become clearer and clearer.

Note: Any effort to focus or do anything will get in the way. There is a method of accelerating this by "overwriting yourself", but it's nicer this way.

This is all you need to do for now. As you go about your day, if you feel yourself becoming tense or defensive or worried, take a breath and just mentally recall the last time you were there, supported, by the whole universe. Okay? Trust in that.

Thank you very much :-) I will try this exercise beginning tomorrow, but for now it is time for bed. I plan on sticking around here, this subreddit has really grabbed me. I was reading lots of the posts between yourself and Nefandi and they were very interesting. Out of curiosity, what is this "overwriting yourself", what does it entail?

I should write a post on it really...

Rather than allow the "mental objects" in the space of awareness to gradually unwind and dissolve, you can overwrite space to be empty by direct intention, summoning the extended feeling. However, it means you get no acclimatisation and you are completely evaporating the boundaries very quickly. It involves confronting an existential fear of openness. Imagine if you wished the floor disappeared, casually, and suddenly it turned into an infinite void! You might be... uncomfortable with that! :-)

There's no rush, though; I think it's better to do it the gradual way. Note that Nefandi and I are pushing the edges in our discussion; there's no reason to commit so fully in my opinion, until one feels that they are at that stage (or even ever, as you see fit).

Anyway, do update on how you get along!

...

So what you call "unbidden" I'd call "irritating." They're still your thoughts even if you don't like them.

Surely, but the difference is useful. I can sit here and generate and pursue thoughts deliberately. If thought are arising from conflict though - even if that conflict is an ongoing and maintained conflict through unconscious intention - they are still unbidden, in the sense that I was not intending thought as the outcome. All experience is intentional at route, however there is a difference between direct outcomes and indirect.

In the direct creation of thought one simply has to stop creating them. In the indirect creation of though one has to stop doing whatever-the-indirect-thing is (in this case, the maintenance of conflict or tension).

I strongly disagree. This isn't good Zen at all.

Okay, context is all: the point I was trying to make is that "Good Zen" doesn't involve quenching thoughts by trying to stamp on them, that's a problem and muddling up with modern Western meditation nonsense. It is a staying-with, and more.

Sakyamuni said to the vast assembly, "Through sitting in the lotus posture then samadhi is realized in the bodymind and its virtue and dignity can be recognized by the people. Just as the sun illumines the world so the mind is cleared of dullness, laziness, and indolence. The body is bright and not dull. Perception and cognition are also bright and supple. You should sit like dragons coiled. Just the image of the lotus posture brings fear to king of the demons of delusion. How much more so should he see someone sitting without collapsing or leaning but actually experiencing the truth?

Quite so.

All good. And nice quote. "Investigation" is a good word. It's not an effortful investigation, or a manipulative one, it's an exploration of what-is.

POST: Playfulness.

Extra one:

Imagine - feel - that beyond your field of view, the world just stops, and there's just... blankness. If you're indoors, the view out of the window is just a flat picture, nothing behind it. If you're outside, then the landscape at the end of the road or the garden is just a vertical image, then nothing. And as you walk around and the landscape unfolds, really imagine that it's being created 'just-in-time' for you to experience.

(Extended version: There's always darkness in the direction you're not looking in, in your own self portrait, and the things you see before you are just floating transparencies.)

...

Schizophrenia here we come for the first bit! :-) I really like the "live mash-up" idea, turning things into blended movie scenes. Great!

But honestly, a shift towards some healthier perspectives and philosophies makes mental issues it a totally different experience.

Hmm, so if people have a larger context then these experiences aren't necessarily so problematic. The universe does give you messages, but not always; you are connected to something larger than yourself, but you are also an individual. It's when we are consumed by the experiences that it's a problem.

... how they took a shaman from Africa and showed him the ... He says we have lost the power of ritual which brings understanding and peace to those persons.

With psychotherapy and so on being modern attempts to vent that, but only within a specific modern context. Interestingly though, more and more techniques are approaching vision-searching and shamanic types - Focusing and Reichian stuff, even the current mindfulness fashion. The more we lock ourselves down and 'externalise' aspects of ourselves, they more they will try to break through?

The truth is that normality is a variable in space and time. And delusions stem from interpreting strangeness as symptoms, instead of tools to dismantle the conventional boundary between reality and fiction, truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense.

Yes, I think a lot of modern problems arise from trying to deliberately narrow our experience within certain boundaries - our experience of what's around us and what arises within us. This is why modern life can be so stressful maybe: you are subtly engaged in a constant fight with your moment-to-moment experience.

The missing skill for the typical modern western person, I believe, is to be able to actively engage and disengage with experiences, both conventional and bizarre.

I suppose our basic model is that of "we see things directly". This isn't even about materialism/idealism or whatever - just the assumption that our experiences are unmediated, and responding to them in that way. So we tend to discount things even as simple as how our attention is directed, and that we can take control/responsibility for that, than we can widen with context, or narrow for immersion. Instead, it just all seems to "happen to us", mostly. That, and not understanding intention; trying to do everything 'muscularly' or 'bodily', not realising that the direction we "set" is the main creator - I have been thinking. Any moves in society which shift us along these lines has to be a good thing.

It seems more and more in recent years, to me, that the right way is to not append a truth value to it.

To accept the experience as is, and then have the interpretation as an additional thing, rather than having the two be blended? Then the interpretation can be judged on its usefulness. I like that.

Although this subreddit is about subjective idealism, my baseline default view I go for is much simpler and is simply that of direct experience. Upon investigation:

• It feels like there is a big open space of awareness.
• A world of objects seems to arise within that.
• Bodily sensations and thoughts appear there too.
• The experience seems to respond to my intention in limited ways.
• The response seems to include the environment, as well as my thoughts and my bodily actions: coincidences and opportunities, tuned.
• Whatever is "behind" the experience can never be known, or whether there is anything.

With the addition then that anything else is "explanatory icing on top" and should be recognised as such. Getting narrowed on any one interpretation tend to block out the arising of, or the recognition of, other paths that might come up which are better suited to your desires as they change.

("Getting narrowed" was the nature of my mistake which got me into my messes.)

...

Nice. One word: soundtracking! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJOZ8dgSLM]

Similarly, if you're bored, adding (non-matching, comedy) subtitles onto your day is good fun. Don't pre-think them, just decide you're going to have some appear when people are talking, and you'll be surprised at what comes up. Oh, and everyone should be wearing a silly hat.

...That's great, how it can be customised too; I'm going to play with using that sound. I wonder how far we can go with this, treating our current experience as the "raw material" and editing it. This is pushing towards hypnotism all this (of course, same thing really), but can we edit out sounds and so on, on the fly? I can add things in, pictures and extra sounds, with varying levels of clarity, but I'm not so good at deleting. And then, how persistent can things get.

My only beef with hypnosis is that most of it is highly associated with profit-seeking, and also...

Often, but that's more in the use than in the phenomenon itself. Actually one of the first 'esoteric' books I read was on hypnosis, by this guy whose page on fallacies is quite interesting. That and some book on visualisation by Ursula Markham, who first introduced me to the idea that visualising could affect reality (the old "create a car parking space for yourself" trick in particular).

We can, at least in principle. Isn't this known as a negative hallucination in hypnosis?

Yes, that's why I brought up hypnosis - but I don't seem to be able to do it by my own self-suggestion. And yet, I was viewing this editing process we're doing as essentially self-hypnosis. But actually, there's a bit of a difference between doing direct imagination stuff and suggesting something and accepting/allowing it.

I agree completely. But in practice, suppose you want to learn about hypnosis? . . .

This is where old-fashioned books come into their own. That the internet is the place we look for all our information means we are constrained by the 'form' that it shapes things into (websites, forums all require monetisation or that's why they were started). Authors of paperback books on a topic used to do it for the passion and for a selected audience, because the money wasn't good and the availability would be limited anyway. There are few website versions of that sort of thing, except from more academic researchers or a passion for spreading the good news (e.g. Eugene Gendlin's Focusing library).

Let's see... how about editing out pain? Am I dissolving pain or editing it out? How would I know the difference?

Good point. Pain is an interesting one. You can dissolve it just by including into the the awareness space that surrounds it. This also works for distracting sounds: it seems to be the attempt to isolate the sound or ignore it which makes it distracting. But that's not quite deletion, it's incorporation or dissolving object boundaries into the continuum.

What is the difference you think?

I'm really not sure. At root, it must be the same thing. Something like the difference between deliberately picturing a car (which means you create a particular, chosen image), say, and just saying the word "car" to yourself (which will result in a picture appearing spontaneously). Is it about the level of detail you attempt to control? "Control" seems to be at the core though.

I have about 10 books on hypnosis from the best authors, including Erickson.

Yep, I still think the best info I've got on these topics is from some of the earlier books. (Those early NLP books are probably the only decent ones, for instance.) Luckily: PDFs.

You know that some languages are pictorial to begin with. Like the ancient Chinese was just a bunch of pictures. What I mean is, pictures are not necessarily all that different from words.

But there is a difference between generic symbol and particular instance. Chinese might be a "bunch of pictures", but it's not a bunch of specific images. In the first case I'm choosing this car (controlling the details), in the second I'm requesting a car. So with deletion, perhaps dying to control the negative directly is the problem (basically "don't think of an elephant"?). I dunno.

As I've learned hypnosis is 99% hard work though. I thought there was some trick to it, but nope. Just practice, practice, practice....

I think what's being practiced, though, is intention and being passive, no? The trick to self-hypnosis was always acceptance/giving up, or that's what I found. It's both easy and very difficult (like the threshold thing when inducing an OBE). The thing I found hardest was to resist the urge to try and make it happen.

MILD - good example. WILD or direct-entry being even more so. (Just looked up for examples, and I like the images used in this guide - quite Waking Life movie-like.)

I agree. Words and symbols are more abstract. A symbol doesn't tell you about shadows, hues, and the details of the shapes.

Suggestion: Symbols are abstract, but experiences are always concrete? (Except the experience of a symbol.) So I see the word "car", but it works by triggering a bit of a "car experience" in my awareness; that's how I get the 'meaning" of the word.

What I find difficult is all the talk relating to a hard split between conscious mind and subconscious. It seems like the hypnosis books take the perspective that the conscious mind is somehow an enemy. I always had problems with that.

Yes, it was just a hangover from previous worldviews I think, and a rubbish notion that you directly control yourself and there's the mysterious "other" to be wary of. To be fair, these guys mostly weren't philosophers eh.

I don't agree. I have many abstract experiences. I would go so far as to regard myself as an abstraction. To me abstractions are just as felt and real as any concrete phenomenon.

Explain further. By abstraction I mean "does not resemble the thing it represents, is pointing to". By concrete experience I mean, an experience based on senses, even if "mental senses". So the sense of myself might not be solid like a table, but it's still a direct experience, even though I can't describe it properly. "George", however, is an abstract symbol pointing to that experience.

Actually, I should reassign my words. Let's have symbols are pointers (obviously), abstractions are non-direct-sensory experiences (although they will likely be made up of images, sensations, etc), concrete experiences are external-world-type. Because when I think of the past, although I experience it as a visual timeline from left to right in my experience, obviously it's an abstraction. And if I feel time passing, sure it's a feeling, but it's not a thing.

"I" in this case doesn't point to anything.

Well, that's a special one of course!

Maybe the distinction between concrete and abstract is purely conventional and arbitrary.

I think that's so. All experiences are "concrete" in some way (there's always a sensory component), but they may mean something else. When an experience just means itself then that's fundamental.

That's why you can't explain love, it is "just itself".

Having said that, I think the experiences you list correspond to a "landscape of feelings", bodily sensations, that correspond to the subject or idea or the experience of "being in love" or whatever. You think with your whole body. If you think of "a tree" you get a picture maybe, and some sounds, maybe the idea of an environment, but also your whole body subtly changes into a slight tension-pattern associated with that idea.

This feeling-aspect is key to experience and knowing/being, but cannot be properly verbalised.

What are feelings, if not bodily sensations? If you are scared, for instance, how does that manifest itself?

Impatience is, I'd suggest, a feeling of tension between the position you are in now (literally, physically) and the position you'd like to be in - a muscular tension pattern.

...That's okay. You hear sounds without physical ears, your see pictures without eyes, you feel touch without hands, you feel bodily sensations without a body. You don't actually ever experience a 'physical' body anyway, of course. Even if you were a materialist, you would still have to say that you experience your body "after the fact", as a mental object. We could say "body-space-located" perhaps. But anyway, the feeling of fear is, say, a tight feeling in the stomach area, a clenching of the chest, other sensations, etc.

I know what you mean. But I tell you, when I was floating in blackness in that one experience, I felt fear and I couldn't feel anything like a stomach or tightness, at least, not anything normal that would be obvious.

I do know the experience (a version of it). It still seems to me that it is a "located feeling" with a "meaning". Hmm, but it's basically going to be a felt-sense meaning. You don't need an actual spatial body to have that experience, I guess.

...Open awareness at base (how can one experience a lack of something?). "Tension" is there's a discomfort associated with the perceived lack of change.

...But what would the nature of that experience be? A tension between your expectation and what's there? For instance, there's a difference between just experiencing an empty garden, and experiencing an empty garden while expecting it to be full of trees. The basic experience is the same, but the latter has tension?

So "an apple" doesn't really refer to anything per se.

Platonic ideals! "An apple" conjurs up a "mental object" of an "apple" (in picture form, other sensations, probably a whole structure actually), that fits or becomes "attached" or anticipates a whole spectrum of experience.

(This is an unsettled topic from hundreds of years, of course.)

I'm going to suggest it's a "global sense of apple" and that it's more felt than experienced as, say, a particular image. That's what I was getting at by "probably a whole structure".

There are only experiences?

We've just got into the habit of categorising some experiences as "concrete" (tables) and some as "abstract" (not tables). More specifically, when we look deeper, we discover that we define things which are actually felt-senses and felt-knowing as abstract. Probably just because they can't be described in verbal language, and representations can't be created in terms of images or sounds or sculptures. However, these felt-senses can to some extent be evoked by other experiences. And that is what art is. The pure-blackness experience is one of the things that eyesight improvement tries to do - the Bates Method, specifically. You imagine pure blackness behind your eyes, which corresponds to complete relaxation of the eyeball, hence optimal vision. Supposedly. But it shows the overlap between imagination and perception.

I guess we feel like it's editing if we think phenomenon exists objectively in some external domain. Otherwise we feel it's more like dissolving. But I don't know if there is a clear difference.

That's an interesting point. Also, there's a warning after dissolving pain not to "go looking for it" afterwards to check it's gone or whatever, because you end up re-creating it. Hmmm....

• Dissolving is "delocalising" I suppose, de-objectifying something. That's how the pain thing works: you are dissolving the boundaries around a "stuck thought".
• Dissolving/editing a tree, what does that mean in this context? Exclusion of it from your awareness field I guess, releasing it into the background. "Inserting a new fact" into experience.

What we experience is a continuum which is "cut up" into objects, so we're not deleting that part of raw experience, we're just saying "don't interpret that as a tree", maybe?

In fact I like to check it out often, just to see if it dares to resurface. If the pain does resurface, that's good. I just remove it again, and better.

For sure. I think the advice is tailored to those less well-versed than the likes of you and I! But it's an interesting point: that you can dissolve and and recreate it at will. So it's not real-real.

"What we experience is a continuum which is "cut up" into objects, so we're not deleting that part of raw experience, we're just saying "don't interpret that as a tree", maybe?" Maybe. I've never done this, keep in mind. So I can't talk from experience.

I was thinking of how it might work in hypnosis. Thing is, I'll secretly know it's a tree; do I have to avoid "going looking for it"? I like your idea of starting by making things fuzzy. I'll play with this next time I'm bored in the garden.

...

One time I imagined that corporations had an independent being (like spirits/demons) and were possessing the employees and buildings . . .

That's good. The corporation as egregore/servitor. Probably truth in that. Interesting to actually get yourself to see things that way, though.

The void that I started to see in people's eyes began to creep me out, as did the weird feeling this created when I would walk down a street.

Shows how you "fill in" the idea that there are "actual people" inside the bodies you pass by every day. But really, you don't know. (Philosophical zombies! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie])

...Look forward to that. It seems that maybe when you "externalise" anything (basically, declaring it not under your direct control now) it takes on a bit of an independent will of its own. Basically like little servitors or spirits, but it could go quite wrong quite quickly if you're not grounded in yourself. ("Schizophrenia here we come!" again.)

This post [http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/fotamec2.html] - on the sigil/servitor Fotamecus for time compression - is what brought that thought to mind. Once something is out there, it can become its own thing. I'm not quite sure how to integrate that stuff into the 'subjective reality' worldview as yet.

Reversing heavy othering requires understanding othering, and having the heart to reverse it.

Servitors can be recalled and reabsorbed, but once you've created something that's expanded almost into a world, then it's a more daunting task, of course. Maybe more of a reset.

POST: Death

[POST]

How well do you personally know death? I've been so well acquainted we've shared conversation in dream. Everyone has met her and known her realm. We've all been there before we were us.
Death is a big thing. Friends all.

[END OF POST]

I love this topic. But what makes you think you aren't dead right now?

Because he's God, and God is eternal. Of course.

If everything in God is life, where does the idea of death come from?

Duality. We are so used to the dichotomy of object/space, existance/nonexistance. We cannot comprehend 'oneness' and 'eternity'. The idea of death comes from the temporary nature of appearances.

Where does duality come from?

Good question. The sense of here and there, from the identity we accumulate gradually from birth and from language, from the tendency of our 'attentional profile' to become 'clumpy' and jump to objects instead of spaces?

Duality is inherent to all cognition. Even non-duality is known only in contradistinction to duality.

Ah, nice. All words imply a surrounding space, implying an "other". Language guarantees seeing the world in terms of dualities.

Language / Beyond language.
Duality / Non-duality.
Conceptual / Non-conceptual. <-- this distinction is a concept, btw.
That which is beyond duality is also beyond ordinary cognition.

A-ha, I like that. So, maybe also: direct experience vs thinking-about or conceptualising.

==Well, "direct experience" suggests that there is indirect experience. But experience is always direct. Self-limited people have direct experience, not indirect.

The contrast is between, say, actually feeling the space in the room or experiencing being vastness, rather than thinking-about it. When you talk to people about this stuff, sometimes it's hard to get them to actually use their awareness, rather than just play with the concepts. Took me a while on that score.

Of course, thinking is still a direct experience - of thinking!

Much better than possibly implying people have indirect experiences.

Yes, all experience is direct, it's a case of: what is the nature of that experience. To realise what's going on, it's a matter of directing your attention to the right place. Experience is experience is experience. There can be no indirect, when experience is made from you.

And this amazing "thing" that people could be feeling, this undefined timeless place which is the site of experiencing, it isn't far away! It's closer than the veins in one's own neck. It's all right here.

Right! Intimate is the word!

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet - Tennyson

People spend years meditating and following this or that path. All of that can be fun, but it is not necessary. You can simply direct your attention to where you are looking from, and see that it is capacity for everything.

NOW you are talking. This is my favorite kind of George. :)

In a way, there's nothing more to say than that, once you've got it.

Well, that's just brilliant, and this combination appears new to me. I haven't heard it said exactly this way before.

I think I probably nicked the term from Thomas Traherne and his idea of a metaphysical space, but there you go. It fits.

Every time I go for a contemplation... Here, let's cheat.

I know what you mean. Playfulness, yes. Insanity one I'm interested in. Also, art and magick and awareness are inexplicably bound, exploring the creative process, combining the two, all that.

Our minds are infinitely creative. You don't have to work yourself over to become creative.

This is bang-on true. In fact, people applying effort to creativity is what prevents it. People try to keep busy doing stuff thinking this will make them more productive and produce more ideas. But that's not true. What you have to do is, clear space for the ideas to come. Or should I say, allow space. Creativity is the rule!

POST: On timelessness and age. (by cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

it seems a lot of humans get worked up over the concept of age, how long ones meat body has been in operation. Something i have pondered is the idea of being timeless or eternal, not defining ones self by their age. For some reason my birthday is coming up in a month and today i was mildly distressed about turning 27 mainly because i haven't accomplished that much in the material world in terms of jobs and mates and so forth. Even though i have graduated college and have a completed fantasy novel manuscript, there are so many ways this golf score we call our age binds us to the material world and reduces lucidity.
In addition to not associate with being human, i've began to realize what makes us humaned or what binds us to the material world is the ticker of age, this scoreboard that defines our worth in this materialistic society. Associating ourselves with our age seems to make us hyper aware of our physical human bodies, and i believe i want to transcend that by not identifying with my age and instead think of myself as eternal, timeless, outside of time, never born. When that ticker becomes insignificant it seems much harder to be attached to this particular dimension and harder to associate ones self with being human. Why should our dream be defined by a score we call age, i just came here to play the game and have fun. If we move the metaphor from dream to video game, its like materialists are those gamers who get way to frustrated in world of war craft and associate their self worth with there score in the game, when being lucid makes you say "dude, its just a game, chill out".

[END OF POST]

AesirAnatman: I'm glad you posted this.
It's interesting because about a week ago I was asked by some document I was filling out how old I am. I sat there for a good minute asking myself 'am I 22 or 23? I'm not sure' until I did the math for the years and figured it out. I realized that conventionally this is a very weird question to ask myself.
Age doesn't matter much to me because I've stopped identifying and caring about that aspect of my humanity. This extends beyond occasional forgetfulness of my own age - I never remember the ages of my friends or family or their birthdays. Stranger yet, when I interact with children or elderly people, I basically treat them as I would anyone else. I don't baby children (and often have ended up bringing out incredibly intelligent aspects of kids simply by treating them as such) and I don't try to appease the elderly. Granted, this isn't entirely true with me with the elderly members of my own family at present, but is basically true otherwise.
there are so many ways this golf score we call our age binds us to the material world and reduces lucidity.
YES. Right now I'm trying to learn to live ultra-minimally so that I can live in a van in order to not need to work very much. However, I'm still going to school for a CS and Philosophy degree in order to pursue a career even though I have no desire or intention to have such a career more than 2-3 years max. I want to have graduated college, with no particular benefit to myself.
i believe i want to transcend that by not identifying with my age and instead think of myself as eternal, timeless, outside of time, never born.
I feel this desire as well.
its like materialists are those gamers who get way to frustrated in world of war craft and associate their self worth with there score in the game, when being lucid makes you say "dude, its just a game, chill out".
Hahaha, I feel this way so often.

Good post. @cosmicprankster420 & @AesirAnatman:

Bringing the magickal aspect into this though: If not things, or a career, there are experiences we'd like to have, I guess? And situations we'd like to be in, and situations we'd like not to be in.

There are two approaches, and I reckon making the decision early as possible is best:

• With Plan: You can select what you want and start adopting it as your reality now (magickal techniques; Neville Goddard; etc). This is the Deity Dreamer approach: This is all your reality, under the control of your imagination.
• Without Plan: You can commit to staying relaxed and open and paying attention, deciding that you will always follow your intuition and the synchronistic opportunities that arise, no matter how you feel. This is the 'True Will' approach, or rephrased: that you already always know what you want in ways that you can't consciously think, but you'll know when to act when the time comes. Intentional purposelessness.

Either one is a form of commitment and works. Half-baked versions of either mean you just get bounced about. I've jumped between the two, and it confused things. (In college days I spent loads of time thinking and reading about relaxation, self-mastery, philosophy and magick and not them putting them into consistent daily practice and exercise or really paying attention to what I actually wanted, flip-flopping. I could have saved myself a lot of messing about.)

i believe i want to transcend that by not identifying with my age and instead think of myself as eternal, timeless, outside of time, never born.

That's great. However, you have to recognised that you will have the experience of being a particular bodily age and so on as 'time' unfolds, and you should plan to deal with that, in terms of what you 'intend' and the situation you want to be in. Better to be in that nice house with a pool and staff, than not.

"dude, its just a game, chill out".

If only there was a handy strategy guide! [https://www.oliveremberton.com/2014/life-is-a-game-this-is-your-strategy-guide]

I mean, it's always going to be better to: a) be a millionaire before 30/35/40 whatever than not, and b) to start doing things you love, with money coming from that, sooner rather than later. And if you're not really interested in CS/Phulosophy or want a career in it, but really want to be an actor, then do that now - etc. Otherwise you'll never get the $10M blockbuster action movie payday while you're still young enough to pull the moves and the ladies*. :-)

The materialism/idealism, waking/dreaming, reality/illusion philosophy or practice doesn't really change any of that, since they are about experiences. Whether you do it by old-fashioned means or by magick, you still have to make the choice.

[Amend as required]

POST: Confessions

On Fearlessness

Hmm. How to assist this state? One of the benefits of recognising that you are not 'this body' but are the whole dream should be the recognition that the whole dream moves with you towards your goals? And that apparent fears are anxieties arising from not completely embracing that viewpoint.

This may have a side-effect though: That any efforts of manipulation that imply that 'you' are separate from 'the environment' might reinforce a materialist view of stubborn not-me resisting change.

Another approach to releasing fears can be to simply to do a daily exercise where you lie down on the floor and just leg go of yourself, body and thought - basically, "play dead" and let things move and unwind by themselves. You'll find that a lot of fear is held as 'defensive tension' in the body with co-located thoughts and feelings. They gradually release and work themselves out over time if given the chance.

Actually, on exercises: Does anybody have particular daily practices they'd like to share? (S.R. or magick-related ones, I hasten to add!)

...

That's why you should have continued! That's the point! It's initially a bit daunting and can be unpleasant though: all your defences are being deleted/released, after all. The process is usually relatively gradual overall but can be very "bumpy" - as in, things might be quiet for a while and then there's a big release.

Edit: Isn't your response at odds with your being-a-deity post?

The thing is, it is scary. You are opening yourself out to "become the universe" - it's the thing all those non-dual and buddhist efforts lead to: identifying yourself with the wide open space of awareness and all its contents.

As soon as you do it, you become aware of all those bits and pieces you have generally been avoiding. And you just feel completely exposed. I guess that's why there's much talk of "faith" and so on. You only realise how hard you are holding on when you try to let go like this.

People who start doing mindfulness, for instance, are often surprised to discover they feel a bit worse when they begin! But then those feelings dissolve into the surrounding space. There's an interesting book by Les Fehmi called Dissolving Pain which has techniques for this; they are applicable here too. In fact, lots of magick/help approaches essentially boil down to the same thing.

There's a book called Busting Loose From The Money Game by Robert Scheinfeld (cheesy website here) basically written as a business self-help book, but in actual fact it's based around a "process" of dissolving "discomfort eggs" as they arise and releasing their energy. In other words, mindfulness and dissolving your reality into openness.

"become the universe" .. It's beyond that even.

Yep, so language update: From now on, let's have "universe" mean "all the objects (content)" and "place" or "ground" of awareness be the vastness with all its enfolded infinite possibilities.

We're talking about the same thing.

But what's interesting is that there are ways to express the same thing that will make people slightly afraid and recoil. And ways that will make people giddy with fun and joy.

Yes. It's a lesson to learn: when you talk to people about this stuff, you have to begin from their worldview and build outwards, leading step by step. That's why there are so many, need to be so many*, ways of saying the same thing.

I don't like this, because it tries to homogenize possibilities.

How does it? We say that "you" are the open infinity, and the "universe" is the temporary objects and processes and observations arising within it.

Only in your mind. Your level of expression hides too much. Fuck people over with insight! Slam them with truth. Maybe not always, but sometimes.

Heheh. But the thing is, they won't understand you if you don't start from their current concepts! I don't mean you start by agreeing with them, only that you begin with their terms of reference.

Your language update redefines the universe to be something completely distinct from how people typically use that concept.

Hmm. Well, maybe it's a word best avoided. I usually use the word "world" anyway, to refer to the "appearances" we experience. It reduces scale to what we're directly experiencing, and makes the bridge to "dream-world" easier. And you can indicate to people how to 'feel the background space' from there. "Universe" is too abstract actually.

You'd be surprised.

Actually, I'm with this to some extent. You don't necessarily need to walk people through from scratch, and you have to 'feel about a bit' to find where to start from, adapt as you go. Assuming the best and tuning is a good approach.

Eh, the word "world" again implies internal consistency...

A "world" does appear to have those things, like a "dream-world" but it's easier to think of it being illusory, and "hanging in space". Or I find it easier anyway. You can literally sit people down and say, 'what do you see?" and then show them that their current experience is limited and sits inside a vast open place. I mean, all this depends on who you're talking to of course!

Of course, I'm only teaching myself!

They are, of course, not so much "inside a vast open space" as rather "inside me"... Ha. Well, lack of confidence in my ability to communicate it, perhaps. This may indeed be true. But in both ways!

To understand and be understood. :-)

It's a trade-off that you can balance out later. Not so the other way. But, yeah, it's something worth considering, particular with non-face-to-face discussion.

POST: Investigation of the utility of dream manipulation

[POST]

Dreams have long been used as a form of divination, either as glass through which higher powers are seen darkly, or an interface with the subconscious mind for self understanding. What else can dreams be used for? Herein, we will attempted to break the possible applications of dreams into two primary categories:

1. practice of skills under non extant conditions, and
2. practices of skills that cannot, or do not, exist. Subdivisions of each are explored and reveal a host potential uses for dream manipulation.
   I do not wish to deny the potential of divinatory dreamwork, but since they have been long explored, I instead wish to strike fresh ground.
   The most obvious feature of dreams is that they are a natural (non-drug induced) nonrational form of cognition. Many studies exist that suggest that dreams are a way for the brain to integrate experiences, and to undergo simulation of various experiences without risk. Interestingly, a study was done in which participants practiced a skiing video game. Those who practiced it shortly before sleep learned at a faster rate, and many reported dreaming about skiing.
   It thus seems that dreams allow us to practice skills, and retain some improvement from this practice. Further, given the existence of lucid dreaming, it is possible to practice under conditions that are not physically possible, or to practice skills that could not physically exist.
   Let's examine these two possibilities separately. (1. practice under non extant conditions, and 2. practices of skills that cannot, or do not, exist)
   The former could be of clear use for practicing under dangerous conditions that could exist, but have not yet occurred. Anecdotally, many people who engage in athletics report that first visualizing a task before attempting it results in better performance. It certainly appears that way for me in regards to difficult tasks of fine motor skills, such as playing a difficult passage on piano, or drawing a long curve of relative complexity, and for gross motor skills, such as vaulting objects, and safely landing from a height.
   A subcategory of this conditional practice involves conditions that one does not expect to participate in, such as special cases of physical rules (modified gravity, or friction), or even extremely unusual topological circumstances, such as higher dimensional locales, in which one can move away from a position without apparently moving in the three directions most familiar to us.
   The utility of this subcategory is not as immediately obvious in “waking life.” It can, however, be vital to effective fiction writing and the creation of video games. Further, if memories do entail the formation of neural connections, and there is transferability between skills, then these “impossibly practiced skills” may provide insights into physical practice that would have been much more difficult to obtain otherwise.
   Now we will continue on to the second of the possibilities, the practice of skills that cannot, or do not, exist.
   The first form of utility in this category that comes to mind is that it may exercise abstract thought. In undergoing experiences that cannot exist, one must create them oneself, and thus creative, and likely critical, thinking will be involved.
   The range of environments that can be imagined is far too large to list, so let's devise some categories: literal, symbolic, neither/both literal and symbolic.
3. Literal
   Literal environments that are not possible refers to “physical” environments that are not possible. This was touched upon in the practice of skills under conditions that could not exist. The same essentially applies here. Only in dreams can one hunt the Jabberwock.
4. Symbolic.
   In this category we will find ideas that represent something other than what is sensed. Language, games, mathematics, and allegory, lie here.
   Lived hieroglyphics, while potentially possible with augmented reality, are currently not a reality. The ability to communicate directly through the creation of symbols of meaning or desire with more dimensions than typical speech is possible within dreams. Words can change color. A single person can speak in counterpoint, the precise melodies and species containing relevant information. A person can be surrounded in meaning in a way not currently possible. The environment itself can speak, and change form in linguistic meaning bearing ways based upon what is happening.
   Games that are not possible in real life can occur in dreams. These might include games like Hesse's Glass Bead Game, or could perhaps be even more abstract. Imagine a game in which one must navigate a whirling house party of uncountable rooms by changing the demeanour of each room into something congruent with a sphere of the tree of life, in attempt to create a sequence of rooms akin to the tree,
   It is already common for people to visualize mathematics, so that is not new here. Instead, one can live mathematics. While in mathematics it is possible create rules for a system without regard to its physicality, here the impossible physicality may become manifest.
   Allegory is often employed in the use of dreams for divination, so it does not need any more investigation here. Simply put, forms of symbolism already internalized may be lived out in dreams, and thus one may further develop modes of symbolic thought through ritual in which the effects are much more pronounced.
5. Neither/Both Literal and Symbolic
   Here there are two categories, 1. environments that are both literal and symbolic, and 2. environments that are neither literal nor symbolic.
6. Environments that are literal and symbolic abound in literature. A “real” world exists within fiction, but it often also contains a higher order discourse that uses people and places as its fundamental carriers of meaning.
   Environments of this sort would entail an apparently physical locale, in which every physical action incurs a symbolic response. Cutting down a tree both results in that tree being felled In the “physical world” of the dream, as well as attacking whatever symbolic associations that tree held for the dreamer.
   This is often little different from ritual in folk circumstances as evidenced in Frazer's Golden Bough. For example, Frazer writes of a range of traditions in which the last person to reap their crop is said to have “taken the old man,” “become the old man,” or “killed the old man.” This unlucky soul then undergoes various unpleasant treatments for working more slowly than the others. This may include being wrapped up in wreathes of corn and beaten, or simply having to host a party with free alcohol for all comers.
7. Neither Symbolic nor Literal
   From a rational perspective, this can be interpreted as meaningless. If a sensory impression holds no literal meaning, and it holds no symbolic meaning, where can it hold any meaning?
   To employ a Joycean distortion of language, “information” is “in-formation.” Sensory impressions that are placed into formations have already been placed into a system, and systems, being created by consciousnesses, impose meaning. Of course, many systems can be placed over the same data, but a multiplicity of meaning does not deny meaning.
   Therefore, it would seem that only pure, undifferentiated, sensory input can be meaningless. That is, it is only meaningless if no thought is made about it, if it is not organized in any way, or put in reference (in formation) to something else.
   It could be argued that the mere presence of sensory information is itself information. The fact that a sound is a sound, already means that a system has been placed over it. The same can be said for all of the other senses. For a sensory input to be neither symbolic nor literal, the person sensing must be unaware what sense the input goes with. If the sensing person is aware what sense is employed, then it has already been categorized.
   Further, the fact that something is sensed in the first place is a category! It is a distinction between sensed, and not sensed. No continuum can exist here. If it is partially sensed, then it is still sensed, but one has imposed further information onto it, namely that there is something unsensed as well.
   If one wishes to state that something can be both sensed and not sensed, and not in some partial fashion, but in its entirety, one is still categorizing it, namely into the category of being sensed and not sensed.
   If we assume that something lies in fault with the above, it remains unclear what benefit there is to experience that is neither symbolic nor literal, experience that holds no meaning, not even the concept of meaninglessness. If possible, it may be a way to simulate death, depending on the nature of death, and thus prepare themselves for what is to come, but given that view of death, time is limited, and might not be best spent practicing what they are guaranteed an eternity of.
   …
   It is apparent that dreams may be utilized for many purposes, though some theoretical categories appear to be neither possible nor desirable. With the development of virtual/augmented reality and designer drugs, some of these categories may become accessible in “waking” states.

[END OF POST]

Interesting post, but I think it might be more suited to /r/LucidDreaming or a subreddit about dream interpretation. This forum is about subjective idealism, as Nefandi mentions, and so is more about the dreamlike nature of waking experience.

Check out our Reading List if you want to find out more, get the perspective.

Whether or not "everything" is "unreal" in the sense that you mean, my points about the uses of unreality apply. It just happens that my points apply to a larger category, if subjective idealism is closer to the mark than materialism.
Details about a speaker do not determine the value of what is said. If Hitler said "exercise is healthy," the fact that Hitler is the speaker makes no difference to the truth value of the statement "exercise is healthy."

Of course, exercising didn't do Hitler much good in the end!

Yeah, everything ends.

He should have stuck to making 'keep fit' videos, made a fortune, retired to an Austrian village in comfort. This may in fact be a way around the "can't kill Hitler" problem in time travel...

Now we just have to figure how to send that message to the future...

...so that the instructions can be followed in the past. Maybe in spring 2015? (Comedy-gold)

...

That's not even the main problem. Nethodsod is not espousing subjective idealism. It's obvious he's a materialist. He doesn't understand that this world is an illusion. He thinks some shit here is real and there are molecules and atoms and shit. And brains with chemicals in them. Basically, from a subjective idealist POV he's completely clueless and his points have no worth at all. He's not showing how everything is unreal or how to get in touch with unreality. He's clinging to convention with every line he writes. I can tell he's scared more than any one of us here.

It is really the main problem. From a lucid dreaming perspective it's all good; materialism vs idealism doesn't really matter. It's just that this subreddit isn't focused on that.

That's only true if you're talking about lucid dreaming as a secular, non-yogic activity, then I agree.

Agreed.

Yes, in retrospect, this post wasn't a great fit for this sub. I was acting under the impression that lucid dreams were expected to be a tool for realizing this unreal nature, and thus figured that an investigation of the uses of dream manipulation would be helpful.

No worries! It's great to know that thoughtful people are interested in contributing.

The idea is here is that your dream and waking life are a continuity - both consist of 'dream images' with no hidden underlying solid substrate - appearing in the common background of your awareness. What they are beyond that is another thing, of course. Certainly, lucid dreams can be great for rehearsal and a host of other brilliant applications, as well as exploring your 'base'.

However, fundamentally the hope is that you might be able to apply your lucid dreaming abilities more readily to waking life (in a "magickal" sense) than is commonly assumed, if you truly accept subjective idealism and operate from it. An additional benefit (for some, the key benefit) is a recognition of your true nature and place in the world, and the nature of that world, as a 'good' in itself.

That's why the reading list is a strange mix of dream yoga, chaos magick, lucid dreaming, personal investigation and philosophy!

You know, I don't really disagree with anything you said. I used to be a very hardcore subjective idealist. However, I have since become agnostic towards the issue. That is, I don't think we can know if anything exists beyond our apprehension (noumena being what is "really real" in philosophical jargon). From that I decided (perhaps not for the best) that it is typically to one's advantage to act as though a physical objective reality exists, even if it does not.
On the other hand, I do practice magick (hermetic informed chaos magick with an emphasis on ritual in dreams, and the creation of egregores/servitores/whatever to personify parts of the mind). And I do think that the observed world (whether or not something lies beyond it) is completely mind. Thus, at least that observed reality, if not "absolute reality," can be manipulated by intent.
What I don't see the value in, is making "waking" life completely like what is seemingly a dream, even if both are hallucinations. Again, that's a result of my "acting as if" principle.

I think 'secret agnosticism' isn't a bad thing either. Thing thing is, 'waking life' does act "as if" there is a background, but it turns out to be flexible: it does adjust to your beliefs and expectations and intentions. Since 'dream world' is the most flexible possible approach, and the most relaxed approach, that is to the benefit. In a way, it's much like magick traditions that all, in the end, teach you to work on yourself and reach 'realisation'. The world does seem to try to respond "as if". There's no such thing as a servitor as such, but the world will respond to you as if there were.

The difference between the waking world and the dream world is really the depth of the establishment of habits. The waking world has been around a lot longer than any dream you're going to have, and has stabilised. It is still potentially semi-unlimited (it is just mind-imagery) though. However, the 'will' or confidence or commitment-to-worldview required to make things happen is much greater. Hence the 'Dream Yoga' style effort (if you've not read Tenzin Rinpoche's book, it's worth your time, and is "available"). I understand your 'objections' though.

Also, something that occurred was, all waking imagery is essentially symbolic too; it represents "meaning". This is something I should have taken from your post.

It is not clear that the Buddhist notion of emptiness is equivalent to "lack of substance."

I've always taken this to be that there is no solid underlying. That the world is an illusion not because it is not a real experience, it is just that the nature of that experience is not what we assume.

One examines the cup of coffee before us, and realises that it has no solidity: it is a floating image, with occasional other sensations when we 'touch' it, but nowhere can we find the 'solid cup of coffee' we imagine. Then we turn our attention to ourselves, and find that we are not solid either: empty space with the occasional sensation floating here and there!

That's my understanding at present anyway.

That's a common one, but it is also applied to other things as well. In Confucianism, the idea of self is "relationally constituted." That is, you are the sum of all your connections to other people (and maybe the state, nature, and "heaven"). This fits in well with the idea of emptiness, and for some Confucian Buddhists, allows for emptiness as no-self to exist without completely leaving behind the material world. Many Buddhists are closer to dualists, thinking that there is something physical in addition to something nonphysical. Buddhism is one of those weird systems that is very open to reinterpretation, having few core beliefs. Given that everything we "understand" is illusion, from this point of view, everything can be reduced to utility, rather than "truth," since all things will be false in some since. This utility is very "Utilitarian" in that most Buddhism involves ways to reduce suffering.

I see. Buddhism seems quite 'scientific' in some of its forms, in the same sense as this. It seems to have a 'practical' aspect that works with its flexibility.

In truth, with idealism there is nothing to say that there isn't an underlying 'X' that 'inspires' our sensory experience, it is just inaccessible and cannot be commented upon. It has to be inferred by the restrictions and limitations we observe. In that sense they cover the same ground.

...

If we assume there is no material world, how does it immediately follow that desire is the only element involved in manipulating hallucinations? Further, it is not desire in general you suppose, but "desire to hold on to the hallucination."
Might there be hallucinations that we do not desire, but seem to arise nonetheless? It is certainly not inconceivable, and thus cannot be assumed an impossibility until demonstrated as such. Then there is the issue of the degree to which unreality is consensual. Do the thoughts of others influence our own thoughts? Do we interact with others at all? Berkely, for example, (a well known subjective idealist) thought that God was all-seeing, and thus kept "unreality" stable. Of course, none of the above matters if you wish to throw out the idea of rationality altogether. However, at that point, anything goes, and there is no-thing to be obtained or lost.

Some good points. "The rope and the snake", for instance?

And, certainly, it doesn't follow that belief/expectation are the only things at work. If this is, say, a 'shared dream' then there's more to it than your personal belief. As I say elsewhere, one difference between waking and most dreaming is the longer-lasting nature of this waking world, and it's potential to have amassed 'habits'.

I say "this" because this is the 'default' world we seem to return to. In fact, it might be better to call this our 'base dream'. I'd say there is no difference to the way waking and dream realities are built and behave, but it might be that dreams build up 'habits' and 'solidity' (really: predictability and self-consistency) over time. And since our base dream is longer lasting with more active dream characters, it has stabilised to a great extend. This is why most magick seems to occur via 'useful coincidences', even if incredibly unlikely. It is rare to directly observe a discontinuity occurring.

Is reality consensual? Berkeley's problem is that he implicitly imagined that there was in a sense a three-dimensional space, but the people in it were only observing certain areas of that space - and that things outwith anyone's observation might 'go blank'. However, there is no such 3-d space. If you examine your own experience, you'll find that there seems to be a "vast unstructured place" where your experience arises. Within that, you experience a 'phenomenal space", a structured space with sensory experience, and other parallel 'ideational spaces' where thoughts are (although sometimes they might seem to be located in the 'phenomenal space' somehow). The alternative view is that the whole world is enfolded into the perspective you are seeing now, and moments unfold then enfold into the background one by one. That way, the whole world is always under observation, or 'within mind', and nobody is 'spatially located'; everyone is everywhere or rather, everywhere is within everyone.

Summary: There are some things that need to be understood by experimentation and contemplation.

The enfolded/unfolded idea is well described in physicist David Bohm's world-view of an explicate (what we see) and implicate (which is enfolded) order.

The hologram analogy applies to a limited extent: if the whole image is contained within each part of the image, then looking at any part of the image at all is to look at the whole - this fulfilling the requirement that the world must exist within consciousness at all times (= be "observed" in the most general sense).

I'm pretty flexible on interpretations; to an extent it comes down to "practicality". However, I am keen on a commonality of viewpoint between dreaming and waking, intention and magick, which I think is achievable.

Also, I don't why thoughts can't have nonspatial dimensions to them that we reinterpret into spatial dimensions.

We do have an ability to think-about. For instance, under hypnosis people can experience "square circles" and so on, because you are not necessarily bound by visual and dimensional restrictions. (You don't need to by hypnotised, you can just do this, but you'll find yourself reluctant to let go to it.)

...

Q1: Here's a direct quote from the sidebar about the stated purpose of this subreddit:
A place for subjective idealists to discuss how to get in touch with the deeper unreality of this world...

Q2: I suppose you are right, that wasn't directly on topic. I was under the impression that dream manipulation in general was a tool toward this end.
If what is dreamt and what is typically called "waking life" are essentially the same, then everything in this post should be equally applicable to the unreality of the dreamt and "waking" worlds.

Except perhaps the 'stability' factor?

POST: This is something I am contemplating currently: Stability.

In other words, intent, I now realize, has a clearly effortless aspect. I would even say that true intent, deepest intent, is always effortless.

Yes, I completely agree with this.

I wonder, is the "replacement grounding" required for a sense of stability possibly the consistent sense of identifying with background awareness, rather than any other aspects of personality or objects or whatever? If everything else is going to be changeable and transitory, all that's going to be left is that background; it'll be the only thing to hold on to.

I haven't tried thinking of making background awareness my home base precisely because it doesn't look like anything, it's like I don't know what it is...

I think its property of "always there-ness' despite having no form is why it's potentially good for grounding / identifying with, whereas intent is content (loosely) and so changes.

In one dream I've had my legs cut off and I didn't even blink... I've had dream environments disappear or drastically change...

But, you did know you were in a literal dream (i.e. lucid dream) at the time. Your ("real") body screams for its existence when it gets in danger; you'd be amazed how much it likes being alive (as we judge it). I have in the past assumed I would get to a stage where i'd not care, but then went beyond it and was surprised how... well... fighty it all is!

I still like intent better. :)

You can have both, because the content is made from / shaped from the background. So it's more a case of focus, I guess. Anyway, it's something to play with.

Actually that's something I am working with right now too...

Well, start with low-speed impacts first, yeah? ;-)

POST: Why is Oneirosophy Good?

[POST]

I'll start by saying all this sounds cool, but I'm curious why it is a good idea.
Why is it good to "feel like [you] are in a lucid dream during waking reality?"
Is there some specific reason people should do this? Is there more to the ideas here that I'm not getting? Is there something that one might gain from this way of approaching the world/reality?

[END OF POST]

The extra part of it is the "magick" part. If you've had lucid dreams, you come to a different understanding of what influence or intention means, and what "you" are, and contemplation of what this all means in waking life leads to some interesting ideas. Bits of this were brought up in other threads, but your notion of yourself becomes everything that you are experiencing or that which experiences and your notion of doing something - anything! - means changing the universe. You are performing magick every time you make a decision. What's more, the more you take on that worldview, the more it appears true. And this is important. When you change your view to see waking life as a dream, it will become more like a dream for you, in all sorts of interesting ways. The expectation is that the further you push this, the more flexible things may become...

But, there's still the issue of intersubjectivity. For which I should start a little thread soon...

I am quite familiar with magick, primarily of the hermetic and chaotic varieties. I've also been lucid dreaming since I was a child. I'm still lucid in cycles (weekly or monthly cycles) without putting any effort into it. It eventually became somewhat boring for me, and now I find non lucid dreams to be more beneficial, since the subconscious wellings are less mediated by intention. So you claim that "you" are what you are experiencing, and that you can control what you experiencing, so you can change yourself? Or do you mean something like Crowley's calling every intentional act an act of magick?
Why is it good for your life to be like a dream? Why should you want things to become "flexible?" Are you imagining something like pure intent manifesting desire?

My interest in lucid dreaming also came and went, although has returned. I stopped fiddling with them in the end, more enjoyed the experience unfolding as an observer more; it became more of a philosophical playground.

Non-duality + chaos magick, perhaps as a summary, but the Crowley quote works for me.

Flexibility in terms of free will for your own behaviour, for lifting boundaries for magickal work (what belief could be more flexible?), but primarily for clearer direct perception of the present moment perhaps.

Note: Of course, this is meant to be an exploratory sub for generating ideas as much as anything else - how far can you push this particular idea and what are the effects if you do? There is to be some fun involved.

What do you mean by non-duality?

In its simplest form, the dissolving of the experience that you are 'here' and stuff is 'there'. It's a perceptual thing, rather than a thought thing. (Many-valued logic does look interesting though. I've heard the sea battle paradox before.)

That's kind of what I was asking you! I'm not sure why direct "perception of the present moment" is desirable.

Maybe it'll just be really cool? ;-) Increased freedom of will would follow from clearer perception, I suggest. But the real point of this sub (which isn't mine actually, it just looks interesting) seems to be a question or two, not an answer: what would it be like...? what would it mean philosophically...?

Ah, you see, I figured oneirosophy would have a goal, even though it moreso appears to be a toolset. Sort of like how gnosis is a state achieved for a reason, though its uses are varied. I hope to some some interesting material come of this board!

Well, the extra question is... what can you do if you make this a dream? If you adopt that belief so completely that you experience it, as in chaos magick.

Well, let's hope so!

Beyond the question of what, are the questions of "why?" and "should I?"

Indeed. All to be explored. Or... not, depending. This is interesting though. What are your concerns about this approach?

Well, the main one is that you might not be able to reverse any undesirable changes you make to yourself.
The higher order problem is of knowing what one should use these techniques for. In many eastern religions, these techniques are used to attain something called "enlightenment," whose nature varies from culture to culture. But essentially, the goal is to be happy, or at least to avoid suffering, and in Buddhism, this is largely accomplished through not feeling attached to things.
Unfortunately, if we think about the character of the person who is merely content, and does not care about anything, does that seem like a "good" person. I certainly don't like being around those people, and don't want to be like that.

It is true that changes would be irreversible, even just because of the memory of the change.

Enlightenment, as I see it, isn't about being happy (although that may come), it's about realising there is no division between you and your environment, that there is no "you" as you conceive of it - rather, you are "the space in which experience arises". (Try Douglas Harding's experiments for a fun taster maybe. [https://www.headless.org/])

This is different to not caring or being content. In fact, it doesn't necessarily reflect on your character at all! There are plenty of grumpy, smoking, drinking enlightened people. Rather, it is simply seeing what you actually are.

This then leads to experiential subjective idealism, and from then to a more direct approach to magick. Is the idea.

POST: How I have changed my core beliefs throughout my lucid dreaming career.

I was excited to have this thought but also angry that I didn't think of it myself and needed some stupid book to remind me. I always feel like that about great ideas, lol. I feel ashamed that I didn't already know them on my own, how dare I not know them?

Of course, if this is a dream, then you created the dream book to tell yourself about the dream nature of your reality. So really, you did think of it Yourself, just not yourself. ;-)

Random quote to end the day, since it seems appropriate to this and the other thread we're running [POST: What is Oneirosophy?]:

==In my first twenty years of lucid dreaming, as I came to seek an ultimate or base reality beyond symbols and appearance, beyond dream- ing and lucid dreaming, something deep within allowed the awareness that enlivens me to experience the "clear light" of pure awareness (as described in chapter 7). After exiting that experience, I knew that each dot of awareness, each speck of aware light, existed equally with all others and equally connected to all others. The awareness of the col- lective could be accessed in the awareness of the tiniest speck.
From that moment, I sensed that behind all appearances an un- paralleled, profound connection exists at a deep, deep level. Beneath each experience lies a connectedness. Behind each life, each object, each action, an awareness exists joined to all other life, objects, and actions. The inner working of all this awareness spills out into a reality formed and experienced and connects all in a massive symphony of individual creativity and fulfilment.
In certain moments, if you allow it, you can sense that the world around you is deeply interconnected: the sound of this bird is connected to a neighbor opening his door, the wind rustling the leaves announces the car appearing around the corner, your brief sudden thought of a friend lies in synchronicity with an action hundreds of miles away. The thought, the wind, the car, the bird, all connect at some deeper level where awareness resides, intersects, creates, and fulfills. Behind all ap- pearances lies the movement of awareness.

• Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert Waggoner==

...

There's also a tendency for people to "forget" unusual experiences. The just don't get attached to the rest of their memories; they let them go. I actually found it hard to stick at lucid dreaming initially because daily life would quickly 'overwrite' the feeling and disconnect me from it, then I'd 'wake up to it' again.

If you just relax and ignore your dreams, your dream rules can remain the same throughout your human lifespan or they can drift around a bit.

Just as in life. If you never consciously 'intend' or 're-intend' (either in moving forward or resisting a direction) then you and your life environment (the same thing) will just play out automatically. Many people don't realise they can direct themselves; they just experience themselves. Hence all that talk about 'karma' in various writings; really I think this can be viewed as just clearing out 'bad intentions' (or directions) I think.

I think we can be mostly automatic - once we make our occasional intentional adjustments we can let them run - but if you make none at all, you're in trouble. Particularly because external events will, if you don't 'stay awake', adjust your 'character' and implicit direction, and send you off to the wrong place. A main thing in all this seems to be, at a minimum: pay attention and always listen. You don't necessarily need to interfere, but you need to be aware, and do a spot of magickal intention to counter 'drift'.

Nefandi means well. This kind of thing.

There is one warning regarding this practice: it is important to take care of responsibilities and to respect the logic and limitations of conventional life. When you tell yourself that your waking life is a dream, this is true, but if you leap from a building you will still fall, not fly. If you do not go to work, bills will go unpaid. Plunge your hand in a fire and you will be burned. It is important to remain grounded in the realities of the relative world, because as long as there is a "you" and "me," there is a relative world in which we live, other sentient beings who are suffering, and consequences from the decisions we make.
The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Some people can get pretty lost in this stuff, because on the one hand it works (intention via subjective reality worldview does have effects), but on the other hand there are limits and dangers.

On communication, you only need to take a look here on this very sub to see how challenging it is to refer to what you individually assume are straightforward concepts - because different words mean different things to all us different Humpties, just as you say! Especially when you are talking about experiences.

Consequences are important to consider, particularly if there's a risk that other people will be directly affected without their consent, collaterally. Part of the purpose of this subreddit will be, I hope, to explore those issues too. There are practical, philosophical and moral implications here. Subjective idealism is not solipsism. If you are right-handed, do you happily use it to cut your left hand?

Lack of consent is hovering perhaps highest amongst the top of my issues now having pulled the corruption alarm cord. I am very concerned about malevolent corruption of innocence as a result

I think that so long as you don't explicitly target a person with your intentions, you're okay. Why would you pit aspects of yourself against one another anyway?

It is true, however, that there is no filter: if you magickally intend something it will happen in some form or other, regardless of moral aspects and so on. However, how 'the dream' manages and combines the different intentions of everyone into a single movement is of course interesting (if we view it that way). One of the simplest ways is to say that 'everything gets taken into account' from a timeless level perspective, but that's a little out of scope here.

POST: Getting used to defining your own dream, letting go of objective meaning and embracing subjective meaning.

My snap response would be;: Why would something be meaningless, just because it turns out not to be made from atoms? Meaning was always (I suggest) about the relationship between one part of experience with another. That doesn't change. But...

I suppose it can be disconcerting if you find that the fight isn't a real fight - that the odds weren't stacked against you and your triumph is over yourself. But wasn't that always true anyway? And doesn't the bummer of death in the materialist view make things more meaningless?

Although I suppose realising that people, including yourself, are just sensory imagery with nothing them, might take a bit of getting used to...

POST: Dreaming Versus Being Awake

Have you ever had a lucid dream (a dream in which you realise you are dreaming)? Then you are not even a zombie; you are fully aware and can manage the dream accordingly. I'd say that waking and dreaming realities are on the same level. They are not in fact "realities", just parallel sensory experiences. Right now, you are in a room, reading this. Now, think about the room next door...

This room remains vivid but "with" it is now a shadow image of the next room. The only difference between the two is in terms of intensity and stability. If you could make the next-room sensory pattern more intense than the this-room sensory pattern, you would be in the next room...

It's remarkably hard to hold onto as a direct insight, rather than just as a concept - because any attempt to do so, loses it.[1] This is why I've been advocating that "letting go of control of attention" is the vital ingredient. We usually focus on letting go of our thoughts and our bodies, and yet still unwittingly "deform" our experiential space by manipulating "attention". In fact, you shouldn't interfere with your attention at all, as conceived of as a narrowing down to certain objects in space. Rather, you want to use activation of desired images - in other words, intend to make a pattern dominant.

I've been injecting the related ideas elsewhere to see how they take with other people coming from a different place, without the "baggage" of previous metaphysical thought. (So, ahem, please resist the urge to "contaminate" them, so to speak.)

[1] This makes senses of course; you can't hold onto "open attention" by narrowing your attention!

Open attention is just a delusion. All attention is closed in some way. You choose which way you want to close it. "Open" is just another kind of "closed."

Pffft. The essence is: "attention" is completely the wrong way to look at it. There's no such thing as attention, as in a "positive" thing, except as a concept. It's a concept which leads to a poor intention. Indeed, there is no such thing as "open attention" (apart from a concept) because it corresponds to an absence of something. The absence of deforming experience rather than triggering it.

For as long as you try to use attention to interrogate the experience of simultaneity of thought (of the room now, of the next room, of your shopping list) you disturb it.

In my view there is nothing to disturb. All is false, not just some! Therefore, we play as we want to.

Yeah, but that's just tedious and useless, like saying "all is consciousness". The fact is, when people try and use this stuff - to "play as they want to", as you put it - they unwittingly use things like concentration and attention to do so, which actually works against their efforts. Most people don't get how to imagine, that it's "taking on the shape of" thoughts, and "attention" is one of the sneakiest ideas going around. People genuinely don't realise that attention is effectively a locking down of what you are focusing on. They try to relax by using their attention; they try to dissolve and forget things by using their attention. All in the aid of "playing as they want to".

This suggests experience has a correct form that we're fucking up somehow.

It doesn't have a correct form, but each of us might have a desired from. And "attention" is something that can block our transition to the desired state, even as we try to use it to get there.

This isn't a bad thing when it happens, and it's not always locking down. There are different kinds of attention. There is acidic attention, which melts whatever it turns to. There is approving attention, which fortifies whatever it turns to.

Narrowed attention always locks down. The "other kinds" of attention are actually intention. There's a subtle difference between "bringing to the fore" in awareness such that it dominates the moment, with the intention to accomplish something (melting!), and attempting to contract space down to the target. "Attentional focus" (concentration) is not necessarily the same as "attending to something" (having that be the dominant image or pattern). Although very quickly here we're going to have trouble with language, because people's idea of what "concentration" is does vary. Those who "focus" by contracting space to the object, vs those who "focus" by allowing it to fill the space.

For most people agency is part of that desired form. We don't want to be (or feel like) passive TV watchers, guests to our own experiencing.

Agency or "the experience of agency". Because the experience of agency isn't agency; it's just another experience. It's second cause and it's a fake, like when people generate muscle tension prior to moving their body, because "that's them 'doing' the movement".

Consider too that you might deliberately want to make use of this "locking down" feature of attention. So even assuming attention had such a mechanical quality (I don't agree), it would still be useful! Once you achieve a desired state, you'd want to lock it down for some time. So even from your perspective narrowed attention wouldn't be a universally bad kind of attention.

Attention isn't the way to do this - simply declaring state-stability is the way to do this. Maintaining narrow attention is to fight against all change, you start getting pretty tense as your whole experience starts trying to cram itself into the compressed space you've created. Which is not to say it has no use - it's even useful just for a raw experience of "playing with the shape of your space" - but I don't think it's a great way to do those things. Experimenting is the only way to tell though.

To try to avoid a natural movement of attention is unnatural and wrong. Sometimes you want to narrow your attention. Why block it?

This is exactly my point - let it run free! But then you contradict yourself. You shouldn't be narrowing or expanding it yourself, you should instead by intending and there rest of it "just happens".

You've saddled attention with some very unhelpful features by declaring them to be so. And now it is so for you. Sad.

Heheh. Well, I think I've distinguished between the variations: attending as object taking dominance ("summoning an experience into awareness"),and attention as contracting and narrowing space (due to a misunderstanding arising from words such as "concentrate" and "focus").

The difference we're having is...

You don't narrow your attention at all by "doing" it. The apparent focusing of attention is a side-effect when we allow a particular object to dominate our experience. The problem arises when we try to make this happen by inferring a means ("focusing") and using those means to get the result. We feel we have to "do something" to get the result, and so mangle it up and create opposition. Just as we get confused and think that we have to "do" the process of standing up - becomes aware of our sitting position, move muscles into position, etc - when in fact we should simply bring the desired result to mind. There is no process to this, and the attempt to experience a process introduces strain.

Obviously, if that's what people want they can do that - but in the main people are under the misapprehension they need to create the transition, but that is not the case, and attempting to do so actually opposes the transition.

When you just want a result...

Rituals are fine, it's only when the details of those rituals are in opposition to the desired result. Rituals can often let you do something that you maybe can't persuade yourself otherwise. This isn't against "stepping stones" themselves, it's about having opposing intentions - intending one state while at the same time intending another. But if you are going to climb the building floor by floor, I reckon you should intend each floor at a time - allow that to be your complete experience. But life's about more than that...

I definitely agree with rituals and steps as a way to learn. After all, if you always go only for the end result, you might miss other pathways and opportunities!

And, y'know, life's about experiences not just getting everything over with. I totally agree on aesthetics. The ways and the flourishes are part of the fun. Even if we could just teleport everywhere, we might still choose to take a walk in the woods, or enter a running competition, or do some rock climbing. Y'know, cos doing stuff does feel good. The point I've probably been making is: If you want a particular experience, then summon that. There are no intermediates required though, so it's a choice. And - like you said earlier - freedom is all about choice, and part of that is knowing what you don't have to do.

So imo you should be very careful about what you say about attention.

This, actually, is the crux of the matter. What we tend to want from attention is to bring something into mind; how we often do it is by compressing the space down to that something - which turns out to be extra.

If you try to jump from A to D, but your mind is not emotionally and intellectually ready for that, your subconscious will block this attempt.

Good point. Acceptable stepping stones!

Actually, magick's been all about this, right? Because it's hard to conceive of ourselves as the direct cause of all things, we nominate something else - an object, or even a word - as the cause, and invoke that. We create and assign power to a "technology" to do what we want.

Everything is good. All meat is good meat.

It's all just experiencing! Even "bad" experiences will be, from a certain perspective, just fine. Returning a little to what we were talking about before about attention, with reference to the Imagination Room metaphor, I'd say that if we...

• Assume that what is desired is for a particular pattern to be dominant.
• If we are beholden to a "spatially-extended world" view, we will be inclined to try to somehow filter out the rest of the world in an effort to isolate that pattern. Since that view implies the world itself is kinda fixed, our only option is to compress our perception so that it includes only that pattern. This is like creating "walls" in the Imagination Room and then moving them to surround a particular pattern. (This is the misunderstanding and the uncomfortable result I'm trying to describe.)
• If instead we have the "unbounded imagination room" view, then we realise there is no spatially-extended world, there is just the current activated patterns. This leads us to instead trigger the desired experience into the room, rather than assume an experience and try to then filter it down.

The first method involves trying to narrow down an experience (narrow, bounded attention), the second involves no narrowing or bounding, we remain open and have the pattern arise within that openness?

EDIT: On consequences, that's something we should explore. We can't be aware of all consequences in advance (I suggest) and maybe not even aware of what will be necessary for us to experience to get from here to there, so every act has to be one of abandonment?

It's like when you look at a mountain range and you feel how mighty and stable nature is, then you think how fickle and weak you are by comparison.

So why is the loan difficult to recall? Given that our power can never go away, and can never change in nature, the difficulty must arise from confusion. Two possible contributors. These things combined mean we don't realise our everyday power and so we don't even try:

• The first is: time. It apparently takes time to change the world in ways that are not fully habitualised. It is "easy" to move your legs or move a pencil; it is "hard" to teleport or change the location of a mountain. Because we cannot do something in a short time-frame we tend to think it as not being possible. In fact, we do get results constantly by this method: synchronicity. These seem like weird random coincidences though, because of the second point.
• The second is: being unaware of the mechanism. That simply holding a pattern in mind for a while will result in the same pattern appearing in the "external" world. And doing so with intention (which is really just a more specific thought, the addition of definition change) even more so.

There's also our conception of the world as filled with heavy objects. A "mountain" is a massive solid mass of earth and rock so how it could possibly be moved by decision alone? But in fact, a "mountain" is more like a couple of dimensionless facts (a shape, a location) and a floating semi-transparent picture. To move a mountain you might have to "hold in mind" its change of location for some time, the first time, so ingrained is the habit of "mountains can't move". Although: the more you have accepted the notion of a transparent, depthless world the easier it should be.

In the second case [the Imagination Room] the world is completely internalized.

Saying "interalized" isn't quite right though, because there is no internal to that model. The room itself has no boundary; it is unbounded consciousness. All possible worlds are "in" it but the room itself (consciousness which is the-real-you) isn't anywhere. It can take on the shape of apparently being you-and-a-separate-world or everything-is-in-mind, but those are both just different experiential views (which one can freely flip between).

EDIT: Additional. If you were completely detached, then simply triggering a thought would overlay-combine that pattern into experience. Even saying a phrase would trigger the associated pattern into experience. This happens with synchronicity quite a bit anyway; but commanding a mountain to move and it moving! The question is: does it just move for you? We need to talk about the "world-sharing model" here.

[On magick and related]

All good points. Even if you know the deal, it's not necessarily easy to allow such a transition. Just look at people's reactions to "glitch-like" experiences. Sometimes people get excited. More often they are frightened. But why be frightened just because a car suddenly vanished, or a person changed appearance? Because it means anything at all could happen. Even being healed from an illness is problematic. If you (say) allowed your life-threatening infection to just vanish overnight, what would be the larger implications of that?

Reality would be broken (in terms of your previous notions of it).

You can make sudden transitions without having to go through a developmental process - after all, all that you're doing is learning to feel safe and let go - but it's effectively world-suicide so it's reasonable to not want to do it. You're not human anyway but you are having a human-in-a-world experience. That ends when you start altering literal landscapes. Or you memory-wipe. Or you account for it by saying it wasn't you that did it.

[The imagination room and internal/external]

I'm still not sure what you are referring to with "internal" there?

In that view, the only thing I can see that could be labeled as internal is those patterns which are not currently "bright and dominant". The whole world-so-far is literally being experienced here, now (felt-sense) so there is no outside, or inside. There's just potentially categorisation. Although what I think you're getting at later - that there is no seeking for confirmation because you have direct access to "what is" anyway; it would be like asking for confirmation of your own thought - I of course agree with.

So if we were to grow disgusted and overly unsettled by the human body, that would hurt our state of mind. So these contemplative tools, contemplating the downsides, are powerful and dangerous and effective for all the same reasons.

And our contemplations, since they lead to a transformation of worldview, are reflected in our experience, including that of the body - which, after all, is made from ideas. Interesting on the eyesight. I think I've shared this story before, but when 3D televisions first became available, lots of people reported interesting experiences. One guy had a girlfriend whose eyesight was terrible. When she was watching the 3D TV with him she became absolutely traumatised - because it presented the world to her in total clarity. She was confronted with it being there in miniature form, the distance inserted directly into her vision. She didn't want to see; she was accidentally-deliberately blurring the world out.

It's that which is within the POV. POV is a specific and partial manner of knowing, experiencing and intending.

Okay, so we're talking about the "everyday person" here rather than someone who has come to understand the revised view - in which although habitual imagery might be "as if" there is a perspective, you are actually the entirety. In other words, the "individuality" is just a thought that is activated presently; you are never actually an individual, just as the TV screen isn't a particular TV channel.

All manners of experiencing have alternatives. No matter how enlightened you become and no matter how you revise your notions of body, personality, etc... it's all optional and you don't have to live like that.

I agree with this but...

So you remain, always, an individual.

I don't with this. In what sense are you an individual, except that you are not experiencing all possible thoughts at equal intensity at the same time? You may call your experience being-an-individual but the experience itself just consists of selected patterns. Implicit here is that you are having an experience whilst in another location there is another experience - but that's surely not the case. Space and time are aspects of an experience; they are not available for there to be a "between experiences" or "separate experiences" beyond this. You and I, for instance, are not experiencing each other at the same time - but equally, neither are we not. It's a case of "the context cannot support that idea".

In the sense that in distinguish yourself by your unique choices. You distance yourself from other options, and thus individuate.

Okay, although that is quite broad. That basically saying: I am "these thoughts" right now rather than "those thoughts". In fact, it's really saying "at the moment, these thoughts are brighter than these other thoughts; I identify myself with the brighter thoughts". There is no distance. And the thoughts correspond to a world rather than to a person.

Conventional reality is an unconscious magickal assertion too, and it's groundless.

For sure, there is no fundamental ground [that is solid]. Like Narada and his Maya experience, it is all dissolved at any moment and revealed to just be sensory fluctuations and not even that. We live in a world - or rather, as a world - of "as if". But what use is freedom, if one is afraid to use it? Is it just the comfort blanket to make us feel better about our lack of courage? Could and should; I could do it any time I wanted, but won't.

It's even more subtle than that, because you don't have to identify with your thoughts.

You should identify with all of your thoughts - but not any one thought, and not their content.

You can have intellectual or emotional distance from something, for example.

But what, exactly, does this mean? It might not be an object which is located in this room, say, but it is a conceptual object that you have located in conceptual space. I suggest that emotional distance is a literal distance in imagination space, in the "parallel space" associated with that metaphor.

However when you attempt something you haven't done in you recent or any memory, you may feel doubts, and fear.

What is this a fear... of? Is all fear the the fear of annihilation, the fear of a transformation of the thought-pattern-concept that we have become identified with?

You can conceive of it that way, if you like. But is that what it really is? Or just a conception you find useful?

There are many ways to conceive of something, but (I suggest) there is no "really is" behind it. There are just different representations pointing at each other. Like George Berkeley's "objects as bundles or collections of ideas" - the "vase" is the superposition of all vase experiences and thoughts, and so on, and there is no "real vase" other than this. "Reality" literally is a collection of interconnected metaphors "about" a fictional thing we call "reality"; the metaphors simply point to one another. A castle in the sky!

Language is part of this too. If you talk in terms of "distance" then you are invoking a spatial metaphor; at the very least you have a "feel" of space between your designated location and an idea representing (and being part of) the emotion.

I don't think so. I think half of the fear is the fear of annihilation, and the other half is the fear of suffering.

Yes. Suffering - isn't that a fear of a change of the world, whereas the other side is a change of oneself? Same thing fundamentally, so the fear comes from the apparent division in both cases?

I think you're describing some portion of suffering. But not all suffering is fear of change per se. For example, our thoughts change moment by moment, but hardly anyone is afraid of their thoughts or mind. People are accustomed to this. In fact, if a thought stuck around and refused to change, that would probably elicit fear.

That's a matter of convention though. If one truly understood that both "the world" and "me" were merely particularly bright thoughts that hung around more than the others, would fear dissipate? Certain traditions would have us believe so, certainly.

Maybe? I think it would depend on what you really wanted to be true. If your understanding runs counter what you desire to be true, it will distress you.

I guess I'm implying that true understanding = acceptance in this case. Otherwise you'd be fighting against the void.

Maybe when understanding is extremely thorough, there is room for little else in the mind, which would be like acceptance.

Right. Acceptance = forgetting, in a sense. It's allowing one thought (experiential pattern) to fully brighten at the expense of all others. Although this is a special "meta" case: it's accepting all thoughts.

Attention cannot be "narrowed" because it suggests it should be wider than it is now.

That absence of narrow attention is... no attention. But singe language dictates I need an opposite for "narrow attention" I called it "open" - note, I didn't call it "wide". Remember, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having one object or detail fill your perception (attending-to, perhaps?), I'm saying that doing so by contracting your space or "concentrating" is problematic. This is not actually easy to talk about; experimentation is the way. Most people I've encouraged to "stop narrowing" seems to like the result; it's like any attending and redirecting is effortless because you are no longer trying to experience the "doing" of it.

Sure, and if you weren't paying attention, how would you know this? :) Eh? Eh? Eeeehhh???

Haha, cheeky fucker! :-) But my paragraph above should help clarify.

[Experience of agency isn't agency] There is no difference between experiential and actual in our view. :)

But in this particular case, there's a point. I could phrase it better by saying: the experiencing of apparently-causing is not itself causal, because it is a resultant. The "feeling of doing" is always a result, a generated experience.

But you'll notice that even when people do this fake, something about this fake is not fake, since they still do move around! So there is truth in the fake. And fake in the true.

No. The "doing" is actually in opposition to the movement. It's like trying to stay still and walk at the same time. As soon as you stop trying to "do" in this way, everything becomes easy. It's tricky initially, because even the "thought of being in a position" triggers that pattern. So if you are sat down and want to stand up, you must avoid "thinking of being sat" or even "thinking of the process of standing" - you must leave all that alone and simply "think of being stood up".

Because any experience whatsoever, even the experience of not having any experience, is a fact of attention.

The point here is that one selects or brings-into-awareness by a "choice" rather than by manipulating the space in which experiences arise - which is a common error that people make (I have found). It's not really a philosophical point. It's a common practical habit borne of misunderstanding.

If you think "contracting space" is problematic, please explain what the problem is, exactly.

It is problematic if you are generating unpleasant results in addition to your desire. It's the equivalent of straining to read the letters on the screen by "concentrating hard", which doesn't help and in fact even works against you.

[the experiencing of apparently-causing is not itself causal, because it is a resultant.] I don't know if this is always true.

It's a matter of recognition. Incorrectly assuming that you need to "do this" in order to "experience that" puts you at a disadvantage. Of course, it also gets used in magical work: declaring that "this" has the property of "making this happen" and then using it accordingly. But being aware of that is important, to know that you are "dreaming" it into utility.

I think you're going overboard. You can't trick yourself like that.

It's not a trick; it's how this works fundamentally. As in the room example, "you can't be in two places at once" (let's put aside talk of actual bilocation). If you bring two opposite states to mind at once, you lock your experience. If you want to stand up efficiently, you must release the thought of sitting down and indeed any other position. By triggering the "being stood up" thought, your experience naturally flows to that. This applies to more than just getting up out of a chair (which, after all, is an imaginary experience like any other)...

Right, but why should these two features bump into each other? You can do both at once!

They shouldn't but our use of language has, I've noticed, let to many people doing something they don't knowingly intend to do. This wouldn't matter so much, except that narrowed attention (reduction of experiential space, although not of awareness itself of course) leads to physical tension, lack of ease and fluidity in thought and creation, and a build-up of "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements" (as written elsewhere).

You're saying "not until you stop focusing your attention will you experience magick." You're saying I have to be inflexible toward how I use my attention.

I definitely never said that (the first sentence). And the other is sort of the opposite of what I'm saying, which is: that narrowing of attention, fixing attention, leads to an inflexibility in experience, because it "locks" the patterns you are presently focused on. Again, like the "triggering being-sat-down" and then trying to "trigger being-stood-up". Magick requires detachment, and this is at the heart of it: allowing patterns to dissolve back into the background (so to speak). Narrowed attention inhibits this.

That's true, but the way to unfuck them is to alert them, which includes alerting their attention to some heretofore ignored facts.

That's exactly what I'm doing. There's no point in messing about though; we might as well say: if you are doing this then this is what's happening. Naturally, people must should against their own experience, and they don't need me to tell them to do so. Otherwise I'd be far more introductory and explanatory, right? (And I know you don't need cushioning!)

EDIT: Although yeah I'm totally aware I'm bashing this stuff out quite "prescriptively" today. :-P

So, I'm describing the essence of it okay though? In all sorts of situations we end up creating an experience which is just extra clutter on the way to what we want, and even opposes it. If "magick" works by bringing a thought into awareness and having it become the brightest thought (if you see what I mean), then introducing intermediate states actually just gets in the way of your desired result.

It's like you can fly to the top floor just by "wishing" it, but instead you end up interfering with that by "wishing" each of the floors between here and there. Which is great if you want the tour, but often we (by which I mean: me, often) don't realise that we can "skip to the end" - provided we don't think about those intermediary steps and thereby bring them into awareness.

Agreed on this. My other response is basically that. The only thing I'd add is that, yes, slowness might be desirable, savouring the experience - but I'm suggesting is that many people (myself in the past, and still now) unwittingly create conflict and opposition in their approach.

You know that I'm just asserting a conclusion so that you can bounce back on it though, yes?

It works with you, because you immediately pick a hole in things and we deconstruct the process, and take it apart in a way that's probably totally different to how it was put together - or rather, how I think it was put together, which often turns out to involve assumptions which I hadn't have spotted, because that's how good discussion plays out.

What manner of trickery is this? :) Please carry on.

I think it might be a compliment! ;-) And just checking we're on the same page too.

To me attention is similar to a cursor on a computer screen. Intention is similar to programming. So intention is what creates content. And attention is then what is moment-to-moment emphasized in that content. They are both functioning together at once. One doesn't replace or obviate another.

So the end result is always: you've selected an experience. An alternative definition to try out: "attention" is bringing into awareness something that has already been experienced in the main senses ("already 'exists'"), "intention" is bringing into awareness something that has only been experienced in the shadow-senses ("only thought of").

Intention changes your felt-sense. Attention navigates around felt-sense.

Elegant. Can I add: "intending is the changing of your felt-sense"

Sure. Why would you even ask for a permission? Of course you wouldn't, because you're a Lord and a mage. Therefore you must be joking now.

It was a rhetorical question. And my answer was, unsurprisingly: "yes you can, and why don't you have some other cool things too".

...

Hmm, interesting thoughts! More random poking...

What I think I was poking at, is the possibility that the subjective experience is merely some epi-phenomenum of some deeper non-conscious process.

But there is never anything other than subjective experience?

We might imagine some deeper process beyond consciousness, but we do that imagining in consciousness. That amounts to making "explanatory fictions" or stories, since we'll never actually experience supporting evidence (I suggest!).

You can test this by simply closing the eyes, or putting fingers in the ears.

Voids are a subjective experience also. But why would we expect closing our eyes to stop persistence? It is not a true void. A true void is absolute complete forgetting. What makes a world seem solid? That the images are vivid with well-defined lines and (key to most) that there is a sense of solid touch. But it actually doesn't matter how focused or fuzzy something is in terms of it being a subjective experience; it's just a subjective experience... of fuzziness. A sharp dream (a dream of sharpness!) is just as much a dream as a fuzzy dream (a dream of fuzziness!).

If my subjective experience is everything, then that would have to include those voids - as the world seems to 'pop back' from them.

But you are still experiencing the world subtly!

It is tempting to say that our experience is sights-sounds-texture, but actually there is a whole complex felt-sense in the background. It is this which persists when we close our eyes and throughout our apparent movements in the world. The "current state of the world" is dissolved into this felt-sense. We are always actually experiencing everything. If it were to be dropped, then the world would completely restart - but you would never know it. And when, in this newly-born world, you went looking for memories, you would find them (on demand). Probably the key to all this is to be clear about what "you" are. If you believe you are a "thing" looking out at a world, then all sorts of problems kick in. If you instead you observe that you are a "conscious open sensory space" in which experiences arise, one of which is being-a-person-in-a-world, then it's easier to see that all experience is subjective, no matter that its qualities.

Short version: A lack of imagery or a lack of sound is not a lack of subjective experience; it is a subjective experience that happens to lack imagery and sound. Even the experience of "open empty space" is itself a subjective experience.

There is the direct experience part: the sights-sounds-texture you mention (I'd like to say sights-sounds-smell-touch - SSST!). Then there is the sensation of Time - an ever circulating loop of about two or three seconds (SSSTT).

I like the "SSSTT" thing! Hmm, so following on from that:

I see "time" as just the fading brightness of the most intense aspect of the ongoing sensory experience. That is, the "ongoing duration". 'The past" is then whatever residual patterns we've hooked onto the conceptual pattern we've got, a timeline say (basically just a retrieval concept we never quite release). I see the felt-sense as the entirety of the world to date (in the largest sense). It's all dissolved in there and it never goes away. Because if it did, the world would restart. There's a little thought experiment I played with a while back which is quite good for this. Turn off all your senses, what's left? You can get pretty much down to unlocated openness, although you still retain a sense of identity behind just consciousness. A feeling. If you switch off all the senses, the only sense left is the felt-sense.

The conclusion: You are always experiencing the entire world, right now, in every moment. Literally, sensorily experiencing it. And if you dropped parts, effectively forgot them completely, they would be gone forever.

My ordering: Open consciousness; sensory patterns within consciousness, evolving in intensity; some labelled "body" and "mind/thought" and "me", others labelled "world". All experience is subjective, to nobody.

The total sum of all your observations (intense-sensory and shadow-sensory), the accumulation of facts which are active, the current state of the pattern you call "the world". Your world right now is the culmination of all the experiences which have arisen in your consciousness space. The superposition of all patterns. For the purposes of this, we might consider each instant of sensory experiencing to be "a fact". All facts will make sense in terms of previous facts (unless there is a deliberate intervention) because the pattern is one whole. The felt-sense, then, is the constant experiencing of that entirety in your consciousness.

EDIT: Imagine that in addition to the SSSTT of this room, you also had a sense of the whole space and its contents all-at-once, like a unique dimensionless number you can "feel" that corresponds to this arrangement and has everything within it. Now have this include things that are out of sight. That, but for the whole world. SSSTTG, where "G" stands for "global".

To be clear, it's better to say that awareness "takes on the shape of" experience. So what's changed isn't awareness itself, but its content, its shape.

• Subjective experience is "made from" awareness; awareness is like a non-material material whose only property is being-aware and which takes on the shape of experience.

So the background feeling, all the accumulated experiences or patterns, like the sharks and the suncream and all the other facts and memories, that's the felt-sense. It's the "texture" of "you" in a way: it's the entirety of you-to-date, dissolved-enfolded. The rush of old feelings is a memory-experience, unfolded. The room around you now is a sensation-experience, unfolded. If neither was present, if nothing was unfolded, there would just be that "texture" to the awareness-that-you-are. (If that texture faded, it would just be void.) In the sun-stars-sky analogy: awareness is the daytime sky, the stars are the entirety of what has been experienced (felt-sense or G), the sun is the current experience (SSSTT). Actually the second T is the name for the fade-transition between different stars bring bright => sun. Experiment: When you "feel out" information within yourself you can see how it works. If you loosely placed your attention centrally in the body and assert something - e.g. "I feel great" - and allow the response to arise, you can see how a state unfolding feels, if you sit with it and let the resulting state information arise (responding with why you don't, probably).

If it's only property is being-aware how can it also have the property of taking on a shape? That's two properties. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...

Heh. Taking on a shape isn't a property, it's a capacity. Since it's not actually a material in the mechanical sense it has no properties at all (apart from being-aware). Even when it takes on the shape of something, it only apparently does so - in the same sense as a TV screen "takes on the shape of" people doing stuff in a world. It never really becomes people-stuff-world but it takes on a shape such that people-stuff-world are experienced.

The answer is: all three.

I'm struggling to put into words that there's something up with your description of awareness.

And this is where the problem lies, as you later observe: language. In order to think about something, you have to split it into parts (concepts) and then arrange them relative to one another in mental space (a conceptual framework). You are doomed to create divisions in order to understand something intellectually! So awareness is:

• The non-material material whose only property is being-aware, which takes on the shape of experience, and experiences itself relative to itself.

Which very quickly starts to sound like nonsense. We're having to create artificial divisions ("non-material material") in order to put it into language, when of course the next step is to collapse those divisions such that nothing can be said (" ").

In other other words to be aware requires structure of some sort. Another way of putting it is that awareness needs a certain amount of surprise or difference or information. Without that, there is no awareness.

No, there is always awareness - there is always "being". If awareness has no folds in it, there is not experience but there is still awareness.

Awareness is not an actor!

No, because acting implies something which acts and something which is acted upon. Awareness, instead, becomes. When "it is raining" what is the "it"? It's an error of language! It would be more accurate to say "the world becomes raining".

I knew my sloppy language would come back to bite me! :-)

The awareness of 'being' as something that carries on without experience is at best an illusion. . .

It's not awareness of being. Hmm. Okay let's see if we can arrange this better. Let's begin with:

• There is "what-is", which I have been calling awareness. Other traditions call it "pure awareness". It isn't awareness of anything. It has no inherent division, spatially or temporally; it's that which such things are formed of. In a sense it is all that exists and it does not exist (because: relative to what?). We could think of it like a blanket of material that is aware of any folds within it. Lying flat there is no experience of folds - there is simply "existing", which leaves no trace. We can't say "experience of" existing, so we might say simply "being". Regardless, it is "that such that" if a shape is adopted then the self-experiencing of that shape is the case. Maybe this is what you are meaning by "void"?
• When this takes on a shape, then that shape experiences itself - it is the experiencing of itself. No matter what happens, it has no actual "parts" or divisions, however it can apparently have parts, as folds are experienced relative to one another. The experience of division and location and change.

The awareness of being, is simply just another part of the crowd of awarenesses.

I'd probably phrase it as: there is no awareness of being but there can be awareness of being something. Now, we get onto the experience of the world itself, which is a matter of that background global felt-sense and the bright sensory aspects and thoughts. If your bright sensory experiences (which "comes together with" space and time) fades away, then you are left with a non-spatial, non-temporal experience of being-a-world or being-a-state. If that fades away completely then there is no world or universe.

Awareness as a thing is simply comprised of many parts.

Or a superposition of patterns? I would shy aware from saying "parts" for the earlier reasons, because awareness isn't "comprised of" anything if it's what those things are formed from. Patterns don't necessarily need division and their superposition just leads to a more complex form, rather than a proliferation of parts. So we retain the experiencing without saying awareness is "comprised of" parts that sum to the experience.

POST: My experience of "Just Decide"

I'm actually just imagining that I'm not using efforts to do things.

How will you be able to tell whether you are "actually" not using effort or you are "just imagining" not using effort, if the experience is identical? :-)

Good post though. Something to ponder: What if one time you allowed your body to rise up and then... never interfered with it ever again? Just allowed it to respond spontaneously with/as the enviromment as it unfolds?

For instance, the "catching exercise" is fun - having decided you are going to catch things, you let your body go and have a friend throw stuff at you, and find you catch it in efficient and unexpected ways. But what if that was always how it was? Your body automatically responding like that without the Decison-Prep? Someone throws something, your body just effortlessly catches it. A guy on a bike skids in front of you unexpectedly, your body sidesteps to avoid collision spontaneously.

That's the eventual outcome: One Decision To Rule Them All!

As you have anticipated, the realisation is that the "the only thing I'm trying to do is hold back these impulses", and that the final decision is to simply allow what is always trying to happen anyway. To get out of the way. That's something to aspire to eventually.

EDIT: This actually has the greatest potential benefit for speed and accuracy tasks, but the extent to which you need to be "the observer" is greatly increased. Think the knife trick in Aliens or more likely: playing sport or threading a needle. Video games are great for practice.

The more I let go the more fear I feel, and the more fear I feel the more faith I need to give myself.

Yes indeed, identifying with the awareness-space is the way forward. And it is an interesting thing, this matter of "faith". In some ways, it end up being that the faith is to not stop and so therefore you avoid having to restart again. Both the "letting happen" and the sense of expanded space can bring with them a sense of vulnerability and exposure, but once committed to it's actually very secure and freeing.

For me, the experience might eventually go away. At least, that's been my experience with many mental "hacks" so far.

Only if you re-trigger the previous experience by thinking about it or returning to it as your starting point. There can be a temptation sometimes to start from the beginning. You discover a way to do something, but you keep bringing to mind the old way in order to recall the new way. This reasserts the old position!

For example, when we stand up from a chair we can do so by summoning the sensory-image of ourselves standing, and just allowing the body to rise. However, if we do so by imaging our initial sitting position first and then the standing position, we effectively reset ourselves. We are intending both positions at once. Anyway, something to watch out for. This is what "releasing" into the desired state is all about. You have to resist the urge to check you are not in the old state, how far you have progressed from the old state, or even that there is an old state.

Feeling writerly this morning after my coffee. So, a little thought experiment (almost literally), based on a metaphor I've used elsewhere:

The Imagination Room Revisited

Something you might find useful as a rule of thumb, is to think of your experience as literally a responsive dream-space: the world around you is just a habitual thought. The room you are in is a strong habit - a imaginary scene that has condensed such that the thought-of-being-in-this-location triggers this thought-room. The bodily experience you have is similarly an accumulation of thoughts or "imaginings". Imagine for a moment that if you sat in a chair and imagined-that there was a vase on the table in front of you, unwaveringly, it would eventually solidify into persistence in front of you. If you didn't go the full distance, what instead would happen is that a vase would appear in your life that would seem to come via events in the world.

However, since there is no persistent spatially-extended world outside your current experience, that is only an apparently true. All that there ever is, is this "imagination space" the contents of which are shifting and changing "as if" you are a body in a world. You never go anywhere, you are never located anywhere.

Adopting this view, what does it mean to stand up?

It means to change the "shape" of the imagination space from "the experience of sitting down" to "the experience of standing up". And since you are the imagination space, what you are doing is shape-shifting yourself. The change is made by shifting this 3D-sensory-thought to that 3D-sensory-thought. So you can see why you shouldn't "look back" and think about where you were - because that means you are shifting back into the previous state, using the exact mechanism of change! And any habitual is more easily "triggered" by partial thinking in this way, so you are most vulnerable to that when trying to shift away from the habitual.

Let the movement of your imagination destroy the place from which you came, and don't be like Lot's wife!

By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
-- Genesis 19 - EDIT: "To regard, to consider, to pay attention to"

(Yeah I am not remotely religious, but some of the parables are obviously tales with reference to this stuff. The rest of that chapter has a few interesting things to say about creation too. If you read them literally, it's a sorry tale of incest! But actually it's probably describing something like creation-from-self-imagination.)

A Personal Addressable Voxel-Space

Another way to envisage this is a voxel space. Basically, imagine a complete and total void with not even space. Now, imagine a 3-dimensional array of cubes going on forever. Each cube can contain a sensory "pixel" (visual, auditory, texture, feeling). The room you are in now is basically a particular sensory pattern existing in that array. If you think a thought, that appears in the same voxel-space, only less intense and less stable. However, it leaves a trace upon the space, a slight deformation, however subtle - which results in a momentum from the current state towards the state described or defined by the thought. If you are completely detached (is in, not "persisting" other patterns) then the transition between states is effortless and clean. Otherwise, what occurs is a mangling between the present state and the thought, and any other thoughts you are holding onto or resisting. So when you "look back" you are literally re-defining the target of the voxel-space to your previous state again. That's why lots of "manifestation" type techniques recommend "letting go of your desire". Not because you need to forget what you are after, but because our tendency is to re-created the "state of desiring" when we think about it.

All good. So one interpretation of the "pillar of salt" fits in quite nicely. Earlier in the story:

Another Jewish legend says that because Lot's wife sinned with salt, she was punished with salt. On the night the two angels visited Lot, he requested of his wife to prepare a feast for them. Not having any salt, Lot's wife asked of her neighbors for salt which so happened to alert them of the presence of their guests, resulting in the mob action that endangered Lot's family.
-- Jewish commentaries on Lot's wife, Wikipedia

So, as with other parables such as The Parable of the Unjust Steward, this is about forgiveness. And forgiveness in the deeper sense of the word: to forget completely. Lot's wife had made an error relating to salt. By looking back she remained bound to that, she became once again her error - in the same way as when you look back at a habit, you are returned to that state.

Yes, it fits nicely. Also, here's a related essay which is worth a look:

For it is magic, this pruning shears of revision. It really is not only the achievement of objectives, but if you do it daily, it will awaken in you the spirit of Jesus, which is continual forgiveness of sin. In this teaching the sinner should always go free; you will never condemn him, for when the spirit is awake in you you will realize in him there is no condemnation, only forgiveness, and forgiveness is not as man of the world thinks when he omits the actual execution of his revenge.
-- The Pruning Shears of Revision, Neville Goddard

(Assuming you haven't already encountered him.) Goddard was a New Thought guy who interpreted the parables of the Bible as offering insight and instruction on how reality actually worked. His language is a bit old-style, but his concept of the "pruning shears" corresponds to recalling and "editing" the past so that it no longer participates in the ongoing moment - i.e. total forgiveness.

It's worth checking out his book The Law and the Promise and other materials. Lots of stuff here and a summary article here. You'll see how the "technique" of it corresponds well to the subjective idealist's concept of a "private view" of the world which is mutable.

POST: A physicalism-breaking experience while high last night

You can certainly bend the visual field with practice; senses and thoughts occur in the same space and the of the same thing. It doesn't necessarily negate physicality in and of itself - after all, the "standard interpretation" of materialism is indeed that the senses produce electrical signals in the brain and that's where "your world" is. In a way, this can be used as proof that perception isn't direct and is in fact brain-based!

Making that explicit does give you the first step on the way to unravelling things philosophically, though. The first chapter of The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds is quite a good read on that. It's definitely true that having direct experiences like this (which point out that you are not actually experiencing a solid 3D world even if you are in one) is far more groundbreaking that just thinking a lot about it. I'll clarify: Direct experiences of the flexibility of their perceptions rather than simply thinking about how they should-or-could be flexible. I'm more referring to bending the visual field in front of us, rather than just OP's behind-the-eyes effects.

Yeah, I think that anything can jog you out of assumption if you are being attentive, because it's attentiveness itself which does the jogging. What really changes your view is a new context: once you've noticed that everything is of-a-piece with an undivided background, the taste of transparency does it. But if you're not even attending...

I don't think playing with visuals behind the eyes is going to be of a lot of use to normal, sober, ordinary people...

Or, if it's done while already knowing what you are looking for and experimenting with. In which case you are not discovering anything, you're already a convert and are exploring it. Personally, I think even a flash of accidentally dropping your hold on attention - brief exposure to unboundedness - can achieve more insight than years of messing around with meditation and so on (valuable for other reasons though they may be). And if you are lucky enough to just put faith in those ideas, even better - because then you can knowingly "take on the shape of" the experience of openness. This is really a case where the more of a thinker you are, the longer you can end up delaying the actual direct knowledge. You are play-doh and haven't realised it; the only way to realise that you can adopt a different shape is to... adopt a different shape.

POST: Awareness and the nth dimension

The mountains in the distance can be no further than my experience of them, and nothing is closer to me than experience. The world has no depth!

But it can definitely take a while to stop "seeing your ideas about experiencing" - e.g. seeing distance as independently real - and sometimes I quite like playing with ideas like "selecting a 3d scene from 5d space" and living from them for a bit. I wouldn't say they are approximations though; surely they are applied patterns, active metaphors which actually shape experiencing if you are operating from them?

However, I think OP was talking about exactly that form of spatial-dimensional thinking. Your response about "only ready to experience them after a walk" seems to misunderstand what I'm saying though?

I am experiencing the mountains instantly, at close quarters, even as they are "smaller and less detailed" than they might be. Walking has nothing to do with how close I am to the mountains. The experiencing of walking may occur between this experience of the mountains and that experience of the mountains, but the experience won't get any closer than it already is. It will simply change in kind. This is just a matter of the nature of experiencing, nothing to do with habits and commitments or abilities. Our interpretation of the experience might change of course, giving it certain apparent qualities, but the world still has no depth (=experiencing has no depth). I'm not sure where you're going with the wall-eating-levitating stuff here? Or was that based on another interpretation of what I was describing?

Ideally I think we should talk about possibilities going from middle to stratosphere.

Just to emphasise though: the "world has no depth" and mountains comment says nothing about what can be done (you have extended it to that though), it is a comment about literally the nature of the experience. A dream about faraway mountains that are a 5-day hike away, still involves dreaming a 5-day hike to get there - however you recognise during it that you are not going anyway, it's just that your experience is evolving. Leveraging the knowledge about the world (beyond the simple relaxation that comes with it) is another step. On Effortlessness - Effortlessness doesn't mean you can just discontinuously alter everything right now (although potentially you might be able to). It does mean that the changes you do make will not involve effort. Effort is an experience, it is content. If you experience effort, it's an additional thing you've created on top of what you were focused on. Now, spending time - that's something different. I think that's what you mean by "effort". You need to spend time exploring yourself, finding that you have patterns which stand in the way of certain experiences you'd like to have, and so on.

I think you're trying to emphasise: Just because you understand the nature of things, doesn't mean you are suddenly going to have Super-Ultra-Wizard™ experiences. This is true. Having the correct map doesn't automatically let you redraw the landscape. Often the response to being told that "everything is consciousness" is something like "well, why can't I just fly?" - if this is a dream, why can't I just do anything right now? The answer is: Because it's a dream about being a person in a world made of atoms and gravity.

Everyone is going to have to spend some time changing the formatting of the dream. And in fact, some things may be so ingrained into the foundational pattern of the dream, that you'd have to detach from it and seed another one. The reformatting will itself be effortless (in the sense that you won't be using force to make the changes) but they will still take time (bringing out aspects and refashioning them or more obscure intentions will take take to come via apparent plausible paths). Actually, that's a good rule to focus on: The spontaneous content of a no-depth world is limited by plausibility from the perspective of the dream character. Anything could happen in the next moment, with no background occurrences leading up to it, however it will always seem plausible-if-unlikely. Only by restructuring the conceptual patterns we have adopted can we allow for increased unlikeliness.

On the first part, certainly - you know my adherence to the felt-sense approach to capturing this.

Effortlessness shouldn't make anyone feel, well, stupid. It's a description of the experience when it happens properly; it's not a chastisement for not being good enough. It's just what we want to shoot for. Because any effort inherently means the retriggering of previous existing patterns - the experience of effort is the experience of reasserting a pattern and then trying to overcome it. So effortlessness is "what doing it right feels like". It will take time to get there, and colloquially we might say that it will "take a lot of work". There are other words we might use: "should not involve using force' and so on, but they all have their baggage.

On the rest - I'm saying that simply recognising it's a dream doesn't mean you can instantly "fly". However, that is the first step to even considering you might make changes. You don't just wait for it (although I think even recognition does soften the habits of reality over time) you can now sift through the patterns or assert new things - it will be "effortless" in the sense that effort you apply will block your progress. It's like asserting being-sat-down while intending to be-stood-up. Opposing directions!

So, "making things plausible" is exactly the approach indeed! :-) That's what all that patterning stuff is about.

Perhaps we need to go into specifics here? Let's stick with the sitting and standing ideas, since the (apparent) body's habits is a good place to experiment.

• Effortless State Shifting: If I am in the seated position, and I want to stand, I can simply Just Decide or recall into experience the pattern of being-stood-up, and I will translate to that state. However, most people being by re-asserting the being-sat-down state first, and then perhaps assert intermediate stages while holding onto previous states. In this way, the process is experienced as being effortful. If instead one simply asserts the final state, experience moves effortlessly towards it - one they've released a hold on the previous state. Initially, this can take a long time. And since releasing isn't something you "do", the experimenter who tries to work out "how" they did it, can get confused when they try and make it happen again. So this is where spending time explicitly working on held patterns can be good. Because most of us have, over time, got into the habit of continually re-triggering out current state, re-triggering being-a-body-in-'this'-arrangement.
• Releasing Held Patterns: So, one thing we can do is spend time explicitly releasing-dissolving persistent patterns. That's where Overwriting Yourself and related approaches enter the picture. By lying down on the floor in a fully supported position, and completely letting go of mind, body and attention (letting them roam as they will) we can release ourselves to a fully self-supporting state, and then eventually the "non-pattern" of not actually maintaining a present state at all. This process is not effortful, in the sense that you don't use force and you don't try to push through to a different state (because you will likely begin by reasserting the initial state to do so). Rather, you operate either passively - where you simply allow everything to unfold and settle out in time - investigatively - you go looking for a particular pattern, so arises in awareness, you let it unfold - or active-assertively - in which you assert a state of complete openness, and when the counter-elements to your state arise in awareness, you simply be with them and let them unfold by themselves.

So in both cases (really the same case in different contexts) we spend time to work through our accumulated "facts", but we don't use effort (as in force).

I think you are bringing to it more than I am intending to give from it! Separately from that, of course they are all good points.

I'm not forgetting all the other sense, of course; that's why I often call our experience of the world a "3D-immersive multi-sensory thought". It doesn't matter for this, however: the point is that all experience is intimately close, made as it is from yourself, regardless of the nature of the content. The world's depth has no necessary implication on its ease of change - other than emphasising that everything about the world is, contrary to first impressions, here and now and always. It opens possibilities, but it does not say how exactly they are enjoyed, except that it must be effortless because effort is content and "second-cause" content is not required. It does, however, let you have "right-formatted intention" because your intention is based on the world as it is as an experience, not as you think it to be as a "place". That's not to say it's easy from one's current state to just do anything - of course not! - but the process itself cannot involve effort. Perhaps the main difficulty we all have is ceasing to push and hold on, and with that the fear that goes with completely abandoning everything for a discontinuous change. Even a slight maintaining of a pattern keeps everything in place, right? Hence all that gnosis stuff.

However, we should remember that: Right-experiencing is a value in and of itself. In fact, many if not most traditions don't go beyond this.

I don't think we live in a 3D world. We live in a world with some 3D data in it.

Right. It's the immersive thought that has a spatial component in the experiencing of it. Nothing is actually "located" anywhere except in a relative informational sense, conceptually speaking. This is exactly what I mean by the world not being "spatially-extended". The room next door is not in fact "over there" when you are not having an experience of it.

On depth: The value of it is in the massive expansion of plausibility. Right now, you could open your door and anyone at all could be stood there. There is nothing "happening" outside your experience right now. Nothing at all. The only definite fact is the current sensory "observation", although we have accumulated other contributions too. If one can truly accept that only now is the definite fact, then I feel that this is the most expansive our "plausibility sphere" can be. Again, "effortlessness" is what to shoot for. Yes, in a sense, we do practice and we "do nothing" to make things happen. Hence the Just Decide exercise. The experience should be of things doing it by themselves. Any effort you put in is actually against your goals, because it is a sign you are retriggering the current state and then trying to overcome it.

Of course right-experiencing is a value in and of itself. To literally and directly experience this moment as sensations, perceptions and thoughts floating in consciousness is absolutely important. It shows that the world is... not even subjective. This is both beyond aesthetic (it is the plain reality) and supremely practical (if you are operating from some other basis, you are shackled).

POST: Any tips, tricks or texts on remote viewing?

You should so have let it happen. Well, depending on the target of course.

I'd prefer to avoid the future...

It doesn't necessarily enter determinism as such, right? Only the future as it will be if you don't re-intend it. What you will experience if you don't make changes.

Something to contemplate:

In the old science fiction stories of teleportation, there was the concern that since the original copy of you would be destroyed, and it would be a duplicate that would appear at the destination, you had killed yourself. In this form of teleportation, it is the world that is destroyed and created anew, as you are effectively translating your viewpoint to another position on the 'Infinite Grid'.

Have you ever teleported T-George?

It's (exactly) as if one line of thought starts to fade and another becomes brighter, more immersive, and if you let it fully snap into place, you're there. But this involves the previous scene including your bodily presence fading out and being replaced; your body-experience is part of the environment-experience that changes. This makes sense, since generally you are "viewporting onto" a configuration rather than being a body physically in a place, but -

No, I've not let it follow through either in that way - because it wasn't at all clear that that's all that would shift, right? However the difference is probably one of entering a thought that one comes back from (OBE/LD) vs one you do not; there is a difference, of intent I guess. It may actually be better not to have thought so much about reality. In ignorance, you just have remote viewing and maybe a teleport and are none the wiser. In knowledge, you have to confront the fact that by doing this you are leveraging a different concept of what "the world" even is.

I think experience is self-organising though. There aren't rules, so much as ingrained habits or patterns, which become entangled with one another. Which is why things don't need maintained: experiences arise spontaneously in accordance with the current distribution of activated patterns. What we are doing here, is using the fact that it's possible to intentionally change what patterns are more active. I think the problem isn't so much that you might break habits that you like inadvertently (although this can well happen), it's that the very recognition of the possibility shows you that these habits weren't real in the way you thought they were anyway. Your friends aren't in fact stable consistent separate people with an existence independently of yours; events and people don't even "happen" when you aren't observing them; etc. Your "higher self", then, is just you with a widened POV; there is no-one "doing" anything; widening your POV will certainly give you easier access, the equivalent of extra dimensionality as it were, to go around-through obstacles. But that itself may be an uncomfortable reality breaker for many, who prefer to think in terms of guardian angels and designate some experience accordingly.

The short version is: to use these insights you must effectively commit to the idea that you have a "private copy" of the world.

EDIT: By "you" I don't mean you specially, I mean "we" or "one". Just realised this read like a presentation speech! It's meant as general thoughts I am having.

So yes, it can be said to be self-organizing, I just can't seem to fathom how it possibly organizes.

It's not easy to describe, but I think of it a bit like how layering two patterns over each other combines into a new pattern. Nobody "made" the resulting pattern, it just naturally emerges from the patterns that have been laid down so far. So wherever you look, there's always an experience apparently ready and waiting for you, since that "space" is already occupied by a combination of all the patterns or observations you have accumulated so far (previous events and previous thoughts).

On the one hand, powers are awesome, on the other hand, I know that if I can simply instantly have everything I want then, well oddly enough nothing really changes.

Completely agree - if that's what we would do. But I think what happens is, you start realising that you never really wanted to (say) actually own anything - what you've always wanted is to have certain experiences and not others. So, you don't really want to own a Tesla Roadster, you just want some of the experiences that go with that ("driving a Tesla" not "doing garage maintenance on a Tesla"). You don't really want to be rich, you just want some of the experiences that you think go with it ("not worrying about money", "doing what you want" not "handling investments, avoiding corrupt accountants"). A lot of our desires are about not needing to worry anymore, to feel safe. With this (oneirosophic) understanding of our worlds, that can go away: we can always feel safe (potentially). The most important thing is that by knowing how it works we can avoid accidentally generating experiences that we don't want, and realise that: All experiences are real-at-what-they-are.

Maybe lucid dreams are a good example of this. In a lucid dream, do we just start summoning various objects and then sit back on our sofa? Do we just go to parties or play golf?

No... just like you say, we go on adventures!

you could practice consciously controlling what you view when you visualize the card or whatever and deciding that is what is out there in the world.

Such a good point. If you think of the facts-of-the-world as the being accumulation of observations so far (and in logical space their implications), then this is about right. When you look at a location in an "undirected" way, it is creation-by-implication - the content of the observation is "filled in" according to whatever patterns are active in that context. If you do so in a "directed" way, which really just means that you are holding a particular pattern in mind when you do the looking, then you are deliberately selecting the content of the observation. Since new observations that are created by implication will always arise in a form coherent with prior observations (the world always "makes sense"), and every new observation re-triggers and entangles prior observations, it's a good idea to take deliberate control of anything important - since revising it later (although possible) is more difficult.

It doesn't matter whether the "observing" is sensory (main experience) or shadow-sensory (thought), they both count as part of the definition of the world, except for the intensity of their contribution.

(Related: All Thoughts Are Facts.)

POST: Are we immune to reductionism just because we like subjective idealism?

I take the view that concepts are always just relative truths?

There's never going to be a description of how things really are, because that already is a description - to describe it would required another description of equal or greater size. We'll never have a TOE as such - because that is basically the definition of a world, and we're surely against such definitions here except as tools? What we can have is a metaphysics where we, say, talk of patterns in the general sense and come up with better ways to lead people direct experiencing. So reductionism of some sort is inevitable - the difference it that we are not confused into thinking that it corresponds to "the truth". Instead, we might view them as active metaphors: patterns of description which themselves have a shaping power over experience. We are never just explaining something, we are defining it and deforming experience with our concepts - but the subjective idealist is aware of this. They are aware of the impossibility of separating a fact from a description. Meanwhile, all the senses and the felt-sense and spatial-extent and all that, they're the same thing (experiential content) and to focus on any one is to deform experience. It's all-of-a-piece. (Just notice how quickly people knacker their vision by trying to see visuals instead of have perceptions.) But that can't be captured in words, and so the visual sense tends to get used in discussion because it is easiest to describe in language and can be presented in a verbal or literal diagram better than any other, due to the persistence of a visual experience.

I don't think it's an easy way out - it's simply how things are? The nature of experience dictates it. Spatial extent isn't a thickness, it's actually "flat". There are lots of other "depth-type experiences" one can have too, but they are just that again. To be clear though, "the world has no depth" is more about there being nothing "happening" behind what you are experiencing, rather than just the idea that there's no distance between you. It certainly has no spatial extent other than the experiencing of it, but also there is no deeper world in the same way you are experiencing it. It's that old thing of the world not in fact being a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

To reuse a tired analogy:

• You are watching a TV show. There's a scene of an office. The door opens, and a man walks in. "Elevator was broken, had to walk up the stairs", he announces.

Did he actually walk upstairs? Was there even an elevator beyond that door? In what sense does the man even have a history, in what sense does he "happen", prior to opening the door and you seeing him onscreen? In fact, in what sense are the events after the door opening even "happening"? In what sense is that a man, other than my concept of a man?

So we should definitely look into things deeply, but the way we look into them isn't in the manner of investigating "real world", right?

[The Reframing of "Thickness":] The advantage is that now the thickness is accessible instead of being "out there" beyond reach.

See, I'm not very happy with repurposing the word "thickness" for this. Although there's a natural problem that every word we use will imply a spatial metaphor. What matters is the complexity and entanglement of the patterns; that would perhaps correspond to your use of "thickness". That's why I've turned to phrases such as "patterns" or "accumulated observations" or "dimensionless facts", depending on context, to describe the nature of the world - dissolved into the background awareness. In truth it (the unobserved world) doesn't exist in any way that can be sensorily conceived of; although we can say it is dissolve in the felt-sense perhaps. This means we can jump straight to no longer viewing the world as a "place" in the way we have habitually assumed it to be. Anyway, as you have indicated, what's important here is that it means all contributing facts are available, here and now. And this means we can "re-observe" things we don't like, and adjust them. Furthermore, we no longer need feel obliged to believe our sensory experiences, or thoughts, since they no longer represent anything; they are simply a reflection, an aspect of, our present extended state.

[A Man Takes The Stairs:] There would be a narrative for what happened while the man was absent. And this narrative isn't something trivial per se.

I think you exactly can adopt the view that there's nothing "behind" your present experience, in the sense of their being an environment that is "happening". You can assert the truth of it until it takes root and you'll find your experience shifts accordingly. And that's a key thing, right? There is no technique. There is no way to do things, or even a possibility of doing things, other than the shifting of state. And the way you change state is... to change state. There's no other way or approach. Questioning things and saying things to involve a state shift to some degree - it's inherent in the experience - and if you kept at it that shift would become stronger and one view would become "brighter" than the others. But it's a long way around?

We're just exchanging different words for the same thing. Some would equate the word "contemplation" with thinking-about, which would be wrong. Some would equate it with maintaining-in-mind, which would also be wrong. But I know what you mean. Your "contemplation" is my asserting of state. And your concerns about contemplating North and South simultaneously corresponds to my example of triggering the state of being-sat-down while asserting being-stood-up.

Again, we still come back to: detaching from one state while bringing another into experience. And since there's no way tell anyone how to recall something, there is no technique, there's not much we can say about it. As our old pal said in The Art of Dreaming:

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

Yes, we may as well stop contemplating physicalism, because you can never "solve" a point of view in order to get to another. We must leave it behind, and adopt a preferable alternative. Only by doing that do we discover if it works - but we have to do so fully, which is not necessarily an entirely comfortable proposition for most/anyone.

How, exactly? That's what's so tricky! Our conversation is an example of that, I suppose. We make a good effort though, I think. :-)

I suggest that all we can do is offer analogies and metaphors, until we come across one that clicks, one that's the nearest to the experience - on a case by case basis. Although we can say what not to do clearly enough. This is an area that requires the experience; just as talking about everything being "consciousness" doesn't really mean much until you've had that experience of openness.

Okay matey. Enjoy your dreaming until next time. But watch out for mountains, please - they sneak up on you. They're much closer than you think! ;-) Cheers for now.

POST: What are some of the implications of personhood having no substance? I'll talk about how I understand this.

Very clear, a good read. I would maybe offer one thought:

In fact, in this very moment, just how many Nefandis live in this very body?

If we were being more precise, might we instead ask:

• "How many Nefandis (conscious perspectives) are accessing the experience of being that body in those circumstances?"

Because Nefandi isn't "in" a body, it's really that a particular experience has taken shape "within" Nefandi, or rather what-Nefandi-really-is. And that answer would be, any or none - because (to use a poor analogy) the number of viewers watching a TV show is not limited by the show itself, only the number of viewers. An extra answer would be, infinite - because an individual moment of "being a body in the world" exists outside of time. The number of "experiencings" of that moment over all eternity would be uncountable and, essentially, simultaneous. I'm referring to "at time of broadcast" here, to be clear. (The show itself was never made, in a sense it has always existed.)

But then, as the next version of the answer clarifies, since this is outside of time or at least there is no relationship in time - there is no "George watched and then Nefandi watched it" - every program will "eventually have been / has been" seen by everyone. The additional part would be, there aren't any "ones" either because it doesn't make sense to talk of two consciousnesses when they cannot be distinguished between. But that's more something that can't be talked about.

So because we know we can switch, of course we subtly know more than what meets the eye.

Yes. In more practical terms, there is no distinction in type between being able to conceive of something and experiencing it. If you can think of something, then it can become an immersive experience. To know that a TV show exists is to be able (in principle) to be able to seek it out and watch it.

Just because time is endless doesn't necessarily mean you get around to watching everything possible.

Yeah, I always try to tread carefully here. More specifically, I'd say that "every program" that has been conceived of does logically exist (simply be definition). It has therefore in a sense been "seen" (thought of) - but that is not to say it has been "watched" (been adopted as an immersive experience). This is a little hard to talk about because in discussing it we imply an objective view - a space in which "every program" exists. But in truth it is more claustrophobic than that; it's not any program, it's every program that is logically implied by the current state. You can't "see outside" of that - for the attempt to do so creates an "inside" by implication.

Agreed with all. All things are here, now, just in relative states of brightness, different levels of contribution. One's present experience is then the total of all prior "observations" to the extent that they remain active/bright. This understanding is where the hope for deliberately directing one's "reality" comes from - diminish so-called previous observations, introduce new ones, and so on, to "rebalance" reality or simply assert a new pattern. Importantly, it means that the next-moment need not have any logical causal connection with the now-moment - other than that one has conceived of it.

Prior, future, and parallel. :) Not just prior.

Aha, well quite!

So, that's the interesting area: emotional readiness for discontinuous change. I'd equate that "readiness" with a willingness to release a hold on the current experience almost completely?

So, if for convenience we maybe think of "emotional state" as being a collection of bodily sensations, then the only states you will be able to shift to are states which also contain those bodily sensations. No happy states while you are holding onto your sadness, to pick a clumsy example. Since it seems relevant to the "multiple experiencing" aspect, and it's the closest I've got to writing a description of world-sharing in metaphor:

The Hall of Records

Imagine that you are a conscious being exploring a Hall of Records for this world. You are connecting to a vast memory bank containing all the possible events, from all the possible perspectives, that might have happened in a world like this. Like navigating through an experiential library. Each "experience" is a 3D sensory moment, from the perspective of being-a-person, in a particular situation. And there may be any number of customers perusing the records, and any number of customers examining a particular record. So this is not solipsism: Time being meaningless in such a structure, we might say that "eventually" all records will be looked-through, and so there is always consciousness experiencing the other perspectives in a scene. At the same time, this allows for a complex world-sharing model where influence is permitted, because "influencing events" simply means navigating from one 3D sensory record to another, in alignment with one's intention. This process of navigation could be called remembering. Practically, this would involve summoning part of a record in consciousness and having it auto-complete by association. This would be called recall. You can observe something like this "patterned unfolding" occurring in your direct conscious experience right now. You are not even the person you are experiencing, you are simply looking at this particular series of event-memories, from this particular perspective. "Reality-shifting" means to decide to recall a memory that is not directly connected to this one.

POST: Subconscious mind is helpful and problematic for the same reason.

On the "effortless" thing:

...the way in which things are "effortless" is more in the sense of alignment of intention, lack of tension cause by asserting contrary states, and the sign of this alignment is effortlessness. Like the alternative term "non-doing", it is easily misunderstood as meaning not participating at all; people think "it happens by itself" is a sign to wait around, because you can't easily describe intending. [1]

Practically speaking, it is meant as a description of using end-state intention and allowing-unfolding, rather than simultaneously intending the end-state while reasserting the state-state or intermediate states. The common examples are intending being-standing-up, while intending the process getting-up-from-sitting (creates conflict). Or trying to solve an intellectual problem by intending it-being-solved while continually revisiting the it-being-a-problem state, and so never letting the pattern make the transition. Unfortunately, it (effortlessness and non-doing) really doesn't make a lot of sense to someone until they've had the experience, like a lot of the things we discuss here.

[1] Although actually, if you use the patterning description of experience, you can lead people to be able to assert end-states using their imagination in a way that makes sense and can be discussed. You can lead them to non-doing, although in my experience in most cases it has to be done in person, as you kinda feel your way through the explanation.

So do you mean in the sense that you have a "knowingness" that whatever you intend is going to manifest because your subconscious mind and/or universe works towards aligning with your intent, therefore you comfort your anxiety through this knowledge?

Sort of. Remember: The universe is dead. Only you are alive. All time is now. It is you who scan your attention across the pre-existing moments. When you intend something, the update is immediate: it is immediately true, incorporated into the pattern of the world. Your attention just hasn't got to that moment yet. So the reason to accept and know that "it is done" is because that's the truth, and so you don't then re-update the world into another state through further meddling due to doubt. Literally, everything that arises in your awareness is a direct interaction with the world, as the world. Passing thoughts indicate the current state of it (they are it). Deliberate intentions-thoughts define the current state of it.