TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 10)

POST: The idea of imaginal metabolism.

I hadn't thought of using "digestion" as a metaphor before - really interesting.

If everyday life (and specifically the body) is basically "imagination solidified", then any imaginative act performed with intention can potentially have an effect. Although we habitually view our sensory experience and our thoughts as existing in different realms, in fact they differ only in intensity, and share the same space - which means that the connection is a matter of degree rather than possibilit-ee.

Q: [Deleted]

Yes. So, when in other comments I say that "all patterns are always present and active to some extent", it's in the same sense as that. It's not that the "embodied imagination" is a special level in terms of it being a primary structure, say. Rather, flipping it around, it's that this particular set of patterns are currently very bright, and therefore dominating our experience. Any collection of patterns could become the "embodied imagination" if they were intensified appropriately.

So, this gives us a couple of obvious ways to soften things up a bit, right?

• We can do it indirectly, via an imagination object imbued with particular meaning. For instance, vividly feel-imagine a sprinkler located in your stomach area which spins round, whose water has the property of dissolving the solidity of the world, and leave it running. Or --
• We can do it directly, by 3D-imagining/asserting over our current experience (i.e. in the same space as our present perception), an open empty unstructured space with the property of "dreamlike flexibility", for a prolonged period perhaps, such that this default of transparent malleability becomes more prominent.

Q: [Deleted]

Right, so they're the same approach fundamentally, but the implications are different.

I've not got the phrasing down for this, but let's have a go...

In both cases, you are creating something from nowhere - the sprinkler, or the "space of flexibility" - and assigning a meaning to that act, a result that it implies. It's just that the second one seems more abstract because it doesn't have an obvious "shape", and the second one also involves the creation of something which has the property of the result. However, that property is you specifying the change, it is not you making the change.

In both cases, the result is indirect. It is the changing of the fact that is implied, that brings about the result. The imagery itself cannot cause anything - one piece of transparent imagery cannot bounce of another piece of transparent imagery.

I suggest that a fact itself is a dimensionless part of an extended pattern and has no sensory aspect itself, so if you are at all aware that you are changing a fact, then you are always "creating something which implies the change of fact" (an act), not directly updating the fact.

When you go to a bar you've never been to before and open the door, you are not aware of updating the fact of the barroom; but the very first intentional step you took towards going there, implied the fact of its existence, and every other intentional act you did shifted the world and implied a particular sort of barroom - right up until you actually observed it. At the point of observation, it becomes "fixed" in the scene that an experienced scene is much "brighter" and becomes a high-contributing pattern when it comes to subsequent experiences.

And in reverse order -

I think it's also possible to make one's style of experiencing into something where experiences do not become overly fixed no matter how bright they might seem.

Yes indeed. You might view it as there being a contributing pattern/fact which corresponds to the statement: "The world is a stable place and the implications of a sensory experience constitutes a set of facts which persists once the sensory experience end". These more abstract patterns are of exactly the same nature as any other pattern: they always exist but their contribution to ongoing experience can be increased or attenuated. Which leads to some interesting questions about how far one really wants to go with messing with accumulated structures - there's flexibility available, sure, but there's decoherence if you push it too far.

Why not directly? So you're saying facts are only and ever implied? Are facts always tacit? I think this might be important, but really I have trouble feeling what you're trying to get at here.

EDIT: Warning, this is not well described. I'll probably try this again after I come up with a better way to put it into words.

Let me try and grab a hold of this. There's a couple of approaches I can think of to describe it (bear with me since I'm formulating this as I go).

So, let's begin by taking an obvious fact:

• "Everyone always loves me." (heheh, why not!)

Now, try and summon that into sensory experience. What you'll likely come up with is an audio-visual-texture-emotion sensory aspect of that pattern which includes a felt-sense of it. But remember, that particular pattern is one without a temporal restriction - it is immediately "all time everywhere forever". You can't actually experience it from a 3D-immersive single moment viewpoint, much less in a contracted image. You can't grab it completely and hold it in your hand (so to speak). You hold part of the extended pattern in the senses. And that extended pattern is part of the undivided pattern of all-patterns.

So what I'm getting at here is, while any possible intention is of course is a shift of the entire pattern (or "all possibilities"), we obviously do not experience that because we are only ever aware of a slice of it. We operate in the blind.

When I create my sprinkler, it is simply by hook onto a larger pattern which I cannot fit inside my current perspective. But since the sprinkler is connected to that, it becomes my proxy, and my manipulation or specification of that, becomes/is my manipulation or specification of the more abstract fact.

When I do this with my "softening of the space", I am doing the same thing, although it's more subtle. I am imagining, implicitly, a space and that the space is softer. I am not actually directly making my current space softer, the space I am imagining is just the partial aspect of the intention. You can see this in practice because when you do this, the form that gets triggered in experience "happens by itself" towards the imagination, like you have pulled on a piece of material.

You notice the same thing when you use imagination to move your body. You can imagine a wind blowing your body forward, and your body will respond as if that were so. Or you can imagine your body in the forward position, and your body will shift state towards that position. We might call it "intentional leading" or something like that.

EDIT: When you try to heal yourself, how do you do it? You quickly realise that grasping onto the sensations and trying to change them doesn't work. Instead, you must "be the space" around and through the area, and then either use a metaphor to change it, or imagine the replacement sensation. But I'd suggest those are both the same thing: creating a desired sensation is still a metaphor for that target state and is not the target state itself, because: time and the inability to fully specify, you can only imply.

Practically speaking, it's not that important, and I'm obviously struggling to convey it. But for as long as there are any patterns active, there will be a notion of change, and for as long as that is true, there will be a "leading" effect, I suggest.

Here I don't agree with your choice of the word "directly" in the context of the above-quoted paragraph.

The sense I'm using "directly" in that paragraph is in the experiential sense - that within the current sensory field (as you phrase it) you are experiencing performing a creative act relative to your desired outcome which you might naively interpret as being an interaction between just the sensory objects.

So, taking the "naive view" as being one where we assume that what we experience in the sensory field is what is happening, then:

• In the sprinkler example, even in the naive view it's obvious that you are taking an indirect route - in the sense that you experience yourself creating an intermediate step. You've created an object with properties, such that it will bring about the change.
• In the updating-space example, though, in the naive view we might think that you are actually interacting with the space that you have been experiencing and modifying it. Hence the potential interpretation of updating it "directly".

In fact, the two approaches are identical, it's just that the "sensory aspect" - the visible part of the iceberg, if you will - of one corresponds more closely to what the experience of being completely in the target state will be like. The "naive view" person is not doing what they think they are doing in the "actual view".

In the "actual view":

• All experiences and changes are direct - because there is no other way for anything to be. All that exists is "The Absolute taking on the shape of The Relative". So any experience of change actually is that, being and changing. You can't get more direct than actually being something.

A sensory act is like shifting the tip of the iceberg, or pulling a rope in the dark. The sensory experience is just your sensory handle onto the larger pattern you are invoking.

Some sensory handles happen to be of a form that is a more literal representation of the intended end-state, but that does not change their level of directness. The handle is always indirect (in the sense that it does not provide a naive experience of the change) but also totally direct (in the sense that it is a direct interaction with the facts-of-the-world).

We can also think of these handles as "icons". Let's use an everyday example, where there's a folder on my computer desktop and I want to remove it.

• The "folder" looks like a folder. It has all sorts of folder-concept associations for me. My tendency will be to think of it in terms of an actual folder. In truth though, there is no genuine "folderness" underlying either the icon or real-life sensory folders, other than those associations. And therefore I can create my own association.

However, in our computer example:

• I can right-click on the little picture of a folder, and select "Delete" from the popup menu. This is like the sprinkler example, where the act is more of a more abstracted form. There is nothing about the letters D, E, L, E, T, E, that correspond to the everyday sensory experience of removal. This is revealing of the principle: "the meaning you give something is what supplies its causal power".
• Alternatively, I can drag the the folder to the trash. This is like the "updating space" example. The sensory aspect of the act matches my usual notions of how the act of deletion works: a folder getting put in a bin. But really I'm just being fooled. Just as in the last example, there is no literal correspondence between the sensory experience and the form of the update. In fact, the actual update has no form and is literally unthinkable; I can only think in terms of icons/handles. This reveals to us that our accumulated historical meanings are no more direct or real than the ones we arbitrarily assign.

The conclusion is along the lines that all sensory experiences are "handles/icons" for the larger pattern, undivided from it, involving direct interactions, but not complete experiences, because they are not completely unfolded. Our habitual perspective doesn't have enough "dimensions" to experience the whole thing unpacked simultaneously, into 3D-immersive space.

So hopefully this ties your comment and my comment together? Specifically:

• All updates are direct in the sense that there is no such thing as not being direct, because all there is, is Absolute-Relative. It is always directly experienced, but not in unpacked form. Facts and patterns are "dimensionless" in this sense. (Felt-sense, global summary to the rescue.)
• All updates are indirect in the sense that our sensory experience of the act is not an actually an experience of the overall pattern changing.

As you indicate, we are left with inseparability, full responsibility, and unbounded potential or capacity - whilst also having a situation in which "all creation is finished" and always available.

Ive noticed that if I believe I am trying to enact a change, then I will experience merely trying to make the change. The change itself doesnt necissarily manifest. Ill just be manifesting a struggle.

Yes, you have to generate the experience of literally updating the world - or doing something that you have decided means that you are doing so.

Q: [Deleted]

Ah, that was enjoyable. Okay, mostly agreed.

Yes, I'd forgotten about Hoffman's icons (I was just looking for a more immediate example and, um, I was looking at a computer screen). But yes indeed. Where I differ a little is that I was more explicitly pointing to the icon as being "attached" or rather seamlessly part of the larger pattern. To "tug" on the desktop icon is to literally pull upon the extended pattern it is attached to.

And that's why I say things are unthinkable, in the sense that the computer screen cannot display the entirety of the of the computer, because not all of the computer is made from "colours" and a part cannot display the whole of which it is a part. In clearer language: we can indeed think about anything, by manipulating the sensory iceberg tips, but we cannot think of the entirety, because thinking is partial experiencing. Experiencing the whole would be... experiencing the whole.

As far as the term "Absolute" goes, yeah, it's the hypothetical state that we might call "unshaped" experience, the raw state - not my favourite term for it, but we need something, and I tend to try different ones out. I think a word is required for this, because it's only in contrast to this concept that we can fully point to the nature of relative experience. Otherwise it's like describing waves without having the concept of water. Of course, experience has no medium as such, but its difficult to discuss its arbitrariness without some concept that "all patterns" exists somehow, even if totally neutralised.

On "dimensions" - just a metaphor to better imagine selection (or relative intensity) and apparent perspectives. Specifically, that you can't simultaneously imagine a 3D-experience and imagine a 4D-experience. This connects to the thinking-with-iceberg-tips earlier, really. As you say, representation - which is really partial sensory experiencing of extended patterns - cannot be complete, at least in terms of being unfolded into a spatial context.

Meanwhile, elsewhere there's been discussion of those events where people experience reaching a catastrophic end - and then it didn't happen, but it seems the world has shifted somewhat. Interested to hear your own interpretation on that, jumping off from my response below:

Factual Updates and Collateral Shifts

If the world is a continuous and coherent pattern, a blanket of material with folds as facts, then you can't adjust one fact without tugging a little on the rest of the material, impacting the other folds. Although these "collateral shifts" would make sense in terms of the fundamental nature - the blanket - they wouldn't follow the logic of the world's apparent content - the folds.

For instance, your car tumbles off the side of the road but - flash! - suddenly it didn't happen after all. Changing that fact inevitably results in a collateral shift of the world as a whole. But it takes the form of, say, an extra tin of fruit in your kitchen cupboard, a news reporter's hair being parted at the other way, and an acquaintance you've not seen in 10 years now never existed. Those changes are causally linked to, but not logically linked to, the event.

Quite possibly you would never encounter these updated facts. However, the change in your felt-sense of things - that "global summary" sensation that you have - might mean that the world sort of "tastes" different subsequently. You intuitively know that you are no longer in the same place. There's a different "flavour" to your life after the accident somehow.

Riffing on this a bit...

So if there was just flash, and suddenly the accident didn't happen, could you recognize such an experience without the requirement of differently parted hair on a TV announcer? I think yes, you could. So it's not a hard requirement to have differently parted hair.

It's not a requirement - rather, it's an example of a possible side-effect arising because a change of one fact tends to lead to non-logical shifts in other facts, as they are of course part of the same overall pattern. So you survive the crash, get home, and notice (hey!) an extra tin of peaches. The cause is a shift of state, but in terms of everyday logic it seems nonsensical to the experiencer.

Of course, this is a case where our experiencer produced an intentional shift of state (albeit unwittingly in terms of outcome, it was probably: "I want to live!"). If they'd just let themselves die, their experience would continue but probably in a more interesting way.

So moving a hair doesn't change anything. The movement of the hair is already part of the current state, which is static and eternal. Only intention changes state. If the movement of the hair was not already patterned - it wasn't going to arise - then the intention to have it move represents a state change and will have (very minor) collateral effects, otherwise it will not.

What we might call spontaneous or "passing" experiences (in the manner of "passing thoughts") do not correspond to intentional changes of state; they are deterministic unfoldings from the current state. Only intentional redirection changes the state.

It's not like shifting can be studied objectively.

Well nothing can be studied objectively. The point I was making was, no particular collateral change is required but any change can happen by the logic of continuous, coherent patterned states.

I don't think we can talk of the state as something beyond intent, on its own.

We're not, though. The state is your current total intent so far. When we intend something, that's not something additional on top, it is the shifting of this state. So if we think of our current state as the set of all-patterns, each pattern at a different level of contribution, so there's a relative distribution of intensities:

• That state is our total intent. It is static and it completely defines our experience going forward.
• What we call "intending" is really "changing the relative distribution of intensities" such that our state corresponds to our intention.
• Because there is no separation between "intending" and "shifting of state" - it's like a blanket of material folding itself into a different shape, under its own volition: shape-shifter metaphor - then "intention" is "the state".

Our current intention is our present "shape" - just like our current physical position is the relative arrangement of our body parts. We change bodily position by rearranging the body, which we call "moving"; we change intention by changing state, which we call "intending".

Q: [Deleted]

Yes indeed, the body example was an everyday perspective comparison. Heh, perhaps we should introduce a special character (‡) that corresponds to "but of course, the whole known universe was involved in this".

"So I‡ was walking down the street‡, and I went into the shop‡, and bought an apple‡ which I ate‡."

...

Q: It's not that the "embodied imagination" is a special level in terms of it being a primary structure, say. Rather, flipping it around, it's that this particular set of patterns are currently very bright, and therefore dominating our experience. Any collection of patterns could become the "embodied imagination" if they were intensified appropriately.
I agree with you completely. However, in this I think we're slightly different from the book author because I think he feels this embodied imagination is completely special and unique and "on its own level" so to speak. It's not a philosophical book, so it's hard for me to put my finger on the author's metaphysics, but he does sound somewhat like us because he is saying that phenomena we think are physical are only quasi-physical. In other words, he's saying also that physicality is ultimately just a very impressive illusion, exactly like in a dream. However, he privileges embodied imagination and he even believes he's able to contact alien intelligence through the use of specially guided embodied imagination. So "alien" here doesn't necessarily mean "from other planets" but it only means different. So for example, if you felt yourself embodied as a bear with the mind and experience of a bear, then that would be you making a contact with the alien intelligence, as he would put it. And then this has some kind of purpose. Anyway, the way he explains things sounds very strange to me and it's not how I would explain things.
However, he kept making references to the alchemical tradition and I found it interesting.
I'll try to quote a piece of it:
The basic consistency of all substance was called prima materia, primal matter. Since alchemists considered matter as existing in a state of con- tinuous creation, primal matter consisted of sparks of live creative forces around which visible matter coagulated. This is similar to the quasi-physical substance of creative imagination, as for instance a dream. An embodied image is in a permanent state of being created. When creation stops, the dream is over. Through extreme slow motion the alchemist participated in this ongoing creative process of primal matter, which began to pervade him, exteriorizing its inner sparks to the alchemist by way of the inversion process discussed previously, so that he could know its hidden self and partake of its intelligence.
The primal matter of metals was called ‘‘alive silver,’’ argentum vivum, quicksilver, mercury. This alive silver had to be purified, cleansed of all its ill aspects, eventually producing a golden tincture which could heal all substance: turn lead (which they considered a sick form of alive silver) into gold (its most precious condition), a sick body into a supremely healthy one. This was done by the art of the fire. Alchemists would melt, in the way of ice, the crusted outer coagulation of metallic bodies, making them flow alive like quicksilver, in order to obtain the creative sparks of primal matter, the substantive intelligence around which the metal had embodied. Unveiling bodies unto their naked intelligence was necessarily a slow process, as is all embodiment work. And as the alchemist gathered sparks, the creative potency of primal matter increased. The result was to be an ultimate medicine of such creative intelligence that it could heal all bodies, ranging from lead, an afflicted metallic body, to the diseased human body itself. Many alchemists were medical doctors. They would make this medicine from poison. The word they used was pharmacon, which means both poison and remedy, from which we derive our ‘‘pharmacy.’’ Only from what is afflicted and its affliction could a medicine be made. This extraction of medicine from affliction they called the process of refinement. The ultimate medicine was named tinctura, the coloring agent. The tincture was of such refinement that it was almost a pure disembodied spirit, pure abstraction, like mathematical structures; yet almost is the operative word. While science after them went all the way through to mathematical abstraction, alchemists always worked with particular embodied sub- stances, waiting in slow motion for them to reveal their intelligence. This highly refined embodiment, called subtle body, is a pure manifestation of primal matter. Subtle bodies are embodiments existing between physicality and abstraction, in a realm of quasi-physicality, which we have called embodied imagination. Subtle bodies belong to a primal world between body and mind – less physical than matter, more embodied than mind – and their very existence annihilates the mind/body conundrum by adding a third, an in-between: primal matter. This in-between primal matter is both embodied intelligence and physical body, partaking of both inspired metaphor and physical anatomy. It was called soul-as-medium, anima media natura, soul stretched painfully between eternal abstraction and decaying flesh.

That is a very mangled piece of writing! To modern ears, that is. It seems to be rooted in the older traditions, almost like a historical study, but then linking that to the modern concept of imagination. That alone makes it quite interesting.

Have you ever encountered Jerry Epstein and his use of imagery for healing? I read one of his books a long time ago (it might have been the Waking Dream Therapy one, I was doing the lucid dreaming thing at the time) but your post reminded me of him - and he seems to have expanded things a little. The collection of imagery exercises on his website are very "dream logic" and pretty close to what we've been talking about as a modern take on this approach.

So if we take this literally, you can basically talk to the metals and convince them to change, because you'd assume they're not just dead substances, but are living beings.

Well... extended patterns. You could certainly have the world behave as if they were alive and had properties that could be described as intelligent, I suppose. However, as with everything else, it would be your intelligence, creating the maps, albeit by implication. Reading that sort of material can be great for triggering fresh ideas for causal imagery, ones that would never occur otherwise, you're leading me to think.

I'm off to make a cup of coffee and talk to a stainless steel spoon about empathy...

I might think, oh, I see, so now I really understand it, whereas when before I thought I understood it, I've only understood it partway in reality.

I completely agree on this. I've come to think that it's another aspect of the "after the dream... more dream" thing. It's in the nature of content that it is always apparently expanding; the discoveries keep coming, so the context keeps changing, so the understanding keeps evolving.

Which is another way of making it obvious that the truth you can think, can comprehend, is not the truth (because the actual truth must be unchanging). The fundamental truth is something that can only be perceived - known directly, now - and is not something that can be thought about.

I don't think the fundamental truth is ever perceived because perceptions change and are selective, whereas the fundamental truth is unchanging and is beyond selection/deselection. This is why it's so damn hard to remember what it's like to be enlightened! If the fundamental truth was plainly obvious, everyone would always and ever be an enlightened being.

Yes, I really mean that "the fact of being and being everywhere" is always available and can be known. As I've just said in a comment to /u/3man, you never experience purely being The Absolute; you are always "The Absolute taking on the shape of The Relative".

You would have to have absolutely all patterns at zero contribution for you to just "be". The blanket of material with no folds. Which is not possible, I would say, in the sense that if it ever happened, that would be it, or rather only "it", so to speak.

Why would this state be called "being" or "just being?" It seems arbitrary.

Yeah, it is arbitrary. There's no word for it. "Only awareness", perhaps. "Absence of activation", maybe. It's the only state, or non-state, which is truly meaningless. It would be "before" everything.

Meanwhile: I will reply to your other, longer comment later today. Want to read it properly non-mobile and give it due consideration.

POST: Wu Wei, pt. 2

[POST]

This idea just came out my noggin. The continued allowance of freedom to all thoughts may just allow the truest of thoughts to be created. We spend a lot of time trying to dictate our thoughts in one direction - nothing wrong with intending where you're going - but what if we're missing out on certain avenues because we ban certain thoughts. Because get this, we're afraid of what those thoughts will lead to. What if we just allowed them and then surprise, it turns out the lion was a small cat waiting to be cuddled. It's worth a shot, in my opinion.

[END OF POST]

Define "truest", I guess.

Do you mean, that the thoughts that arise will be ones where all information is taken into account - so, the "truest" reflection of the current state of the world in its entirety?

If I am the absolute how come I do not know that I am? What robbed me of this information that should be fundamental?

Interesting accidental wording! In fact, "that I am" is the only thing that we do know for certain. And that's quite a good starting point.

Even now, you don't necessarily "know" you are The Absolute, you simply "are" it. Intellectually, you can only infer that you are the absolute, perhaps by noticing that everything changes in terms of content but you (as a feeling of being) always remain. Experientially, it's similar: you find that your direct experience does not correspond to the idea of separation, and perhaps you have a particular event-experience in which all the usual content seems to drop away.

In all cases, you are The-Absolute-taking-on-the-shape-of-The-Relative or in other words, you are always what you are and having an experience. The situation where there is no shape you have taken on, "pure Absolute", is a hypothetical one. However, there is always that sense of "being"...

We maybe need to ponder what we mean when we use the word "knowledge"?

My usual metaphor: the blanket of material whose only property is awareness. The blanket has folds in it: the blanket experiences itself as one fold relative to another fold, in all directions. In what sense can the blanket "know" that it is everything?

• Conceptually - It can create a fold which represents the fact that it is the whole blanket and all folds. But that knowledge will always be a fold, it won't actually be the truth in and of itself.
• Directly - It always "knows" it is the blanket simply be being it, without reflection. When we touch a table, the "hardness" is the direct experience. But do we "know" that the table is hard before we have reflected upon it?

In other words, you never forgot that you were The Absolute, it's more a case of you never intellectually pondering it. You have always known that you "exist" though and that existing is direct knowledge of being The Absolute, just not of its implications.

Another thought experiment: how did you come to "know" that you are a body, in a general sense? In actual experience, you are always 3man-sitting or 3man-standing or 3man-walking. There is no generalised sense in which you are a body, in actual experience, surely?

But I'd say direct experience of knowing you are it all - "being" - is special because it never changes and is always there, in a way that the body isn't quite. It's sort of everywhere, and is the only fact that is always available at all times and places. It has no content, so it needs no context.

Maybe the distinction we need to make is between: the knowing and the meaning?

POST: No-self and other minds?

One approach is:

• Instead of thinking of yourself as a person, think of yourself as an "open aware space".
• Instead of thinking of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", think of it as a toy-box of all possible patterns, dissolved into the background of that space.

Right now you are experiencing a particular combination of patterns. A particular combination of patterns = a "world". In other words, you have taken on the shape of being-this-world-from-the-perspective-of-this-person.

And the same is true of everyone else. We-as-consciousness share the same world in the sense of all accessing the same broad set of patterns. However, we are not doing this in the sense of sharing the same time or space, because time and space are part of the experience, not part of the larger context.

You can conceptualise this as each of us having a turn at being a world one after the other, or as existing at the same time but separate, or as one consciousness doing both parallel-simultanously. All of those are wrong, but it gives a way to imagine it. And you tend to find that the way you imagine it, becomes reflected in your experience - so it is "true enough".

Subjective idealism but not solipsism.

Q: Right now you are experiencing a particular combination of patterns.
To restate this in an interesting manner, a particular combination of patterns is creating the "you experience" within the whole

No.

He says sternly! ;-)

Patterns are not creating anything. Patterns don't "happen". The combination of patterns is the experience. And it's not just the "you experience", it's the whole thing always. It is better described as the being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person experience. You always experience the whole, it's just that, as the intensity of the sun in conceals the stars the daytime sky, some aspects are "brighter" than others.

So if I was going to be super-picky I'd revise my wording this way:

• Right now you are an "awareness" which has taken on the shape of an experience. This experience can be described metaphorically as a pattern which corresponds of the sum of all possible patterns, each of which is contributing at a different level of relative intensity.

I guess the important thing is the idea that we are the only things that ever "happen", and that "happening" corresponds to shifting our state = the relative contributions of patterns. Our ongoing experience is not such a shifting though; it is a revealing of the current state. A state fully defines the entirety of the world over all time.

The problem is that not everyone knows about the language of selectivity as emphasis, and why that can be important, so you can be sure you're losing a lot of folks who don't follow your every word when you say stuff like "each of which is contributing at a different level of relative intensity." The only people who will know what this means are the ones who've been reading your prior posts. Other than that, they'll just be shooting from the hip when replying.

What, people aren't following my every word? Then I have no sympathy whatsoever! They should get with the programme here! ;-)

This is a problem, though, with reddit and online discussion in general: how do you build up body of knowledge and refer to it? Without any accumulation of terms and imagery it's - well, not quite like having a memory reset every time there's a new post, but it probably is like having a reset every month or two.

And if nothing else, it gets boring providing context every time, and later it gets hard to distinguish what is the default view, and what's novel with your own view.

For instance, one of the first things we have to get to grips with is that the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" beyond our sensory experiencing of an aspect of it. Perceiving this changes the context of everything, and without that foundation in place, discussions about subjective idealism are basically "structurally wrong". So, given that, do you start from the ground up every time?

Although having said that, I do try to make things progress fairly logically, albeit in abbreviated form. If something doesn't make sense but is interesting, people can ask. If it's not interesting, they can ignore.

I personally think an eclectic, mood-based approach probably works okay - because every comment isn't just a response to a post with a pre-made view, it's also an exploration of your own view, from an imposed perspective, leading to a spontaneous reshaping in real time. Sometimes this means we veer off the tracks a bit in our writing - our thinking might become a bit opaque to others, since it temporarily becomes that to ourselves - but this breaks through into improved clarity for everyone later.

Today's custom-concept-laden, insurmountable mountain of a selfish response is really the foundation for tomorrow's transparent, easily-shared, transformative insight.

I strongly agree. I don't think you're doing anything wrong at all. I hope that's not how I came across. My only point is to try to clue-in some stragglers who otherwise might be curious.

You raised a really good point though: over time, through our participation on this sub and others, we're building up a set of different perspectives that are quite powerful, but it's distributed across a few posts here, a few comments here, intertwined with discussions, and it's like we're keeping them alive by partially reposting them in responses. When we stop typing, it'll all disappear. (Apart from the sense in which it's always been there.)

Yea, it's true. Except it will not easily disappear from my heart, and probably not yours either. Of course inside all-potential everything is also available. But personally I don't want to see the ideas that I like get turned into a religion. Ugly things tend to happen when things become religions.

Agreed. What I want is for things to be useful. There is nothing to believe in. I think when "teachings" turn into "stagnant beliefs", that's when the troubling side of religion appears: it becomes all about the organisation, rather than power for the members. (The Quakers had it about right I think)

One possibility from a while back was to evolve the wiki from its current form (the "key posts" section is very recent, actually, it wasn't even that before) and expand it into something which amounted to a more thorough write-up. Particularly since many of the "goodies" are lost among the numerous discussions in the comments sections, which aren't always directly connected to the posts they appear under. This, in effect, means there's no real place to go to find the full picture from any of the authors.

We [moderating authors] probably diverge a bit on the details (e.g. my whole "patterning" thing is bit of a separate branch, I suppose, so I've tried not to go overboard on that in this sub) but I do think it would be nice, at some point, to have a more comprehensive overview of the subreddit's output, and even make a plus out of the contrasting aspects (which are really more about preferred metaphors of course).

So, good idea, thanks for the prompt.

== you'll very very likely find out how Nefandi and TriumphantGeorge were wrong too==

Yes, and I think that's an important thing: subjective idealism is, in a way, about "never having to say you're right". Because the content of experience, which includes ideas, is never correct or fundamental; it's shape is completely open for shifting. Which points us back to that whole thing of the only truth being that we are experiencing, not what we are experiencing.

If we've accomplished anything here, I think it's that we have reached ways of talking about things which are some of the most flexible available: they avoid saying anything is fundamental, while still offering a way of conceiving of things and so making changes, rather than just saying "not this, not that" or that you'll have to wait for "grace" to give you an experience of openness. We're saying: here are some ideas, and if you use them, you can have experiences which will reveal to you that things are not what you assumed, rather than just "hoping" that one day something will happen for you.

I think that's pretty good going for a little subreddit that's only being around for a year - probably because we happened to bring together in interesting mix of participants who have slightly different angles not the same thing, revealing each other's assumptions and producing a purer version of the total. Well done us! (Or should I say: well done me's!)

I guess I'd say that, being "true" means "being right for you" (which can change, obviously). Whereas we can go through periods of trying to be right for others, when all we can really be is helpful or useful, free with our insights.

Something that I notice heavily is that people want you to convince them that they can do something, or that something about their own experience is true. And you have to say really: look, only you can experiment with your own experience, only you can find out whether you can do something or not. Thinking about it, talking about it, won't do anything. It's like drawing pictures of the beach to in an attempt to see if the weather is warm at the coast, and refusing to actually go there until you've felt some heat from the crayons.

Thinking about it and talking about it can be helpful, but not in the way some people imagine.

Right, so to clarify a little: having a discussion about something does intensify within people the corresponding worldview, and they will have a little bit of the corresponding experiences as a result. But, if they never take the time to do that for themselves, then they haven't gained a whole lot. They can get addicted to thinking, talking about things because that's the only way they get a taste of the experience. They still want it to - as you say - be a "knowledge download". But it's always up to you to trigger the concepts within yourself; they don't persist otherwise, and you'll come complaining (meaning: the person will) that "it's not working". And the answer is: "because you aren't becoming".

True enough, a conversation doesn't necessarily trigger the worldview you are talking about, but it can at least trigger a variation of that, in the context of their own patterning. One might hope that this would be sufficient to pique curiosity and get people experiment for themselves; but it isn't very often the case. (Perhaps because most people don't really, deep down, want to "cheat" their accumulated patterning, even if it would transform their lives from misery.)

This might be a bit of a tangent, but I also discovered another possibility for why I might not want to cancel all the misery immediately. For me I think there is a hidden desire to be able to "reply" (as it were) to any state honestly and forthrightly. So in other words, I don't so much want to remove misery, as to be able to say freely, without reservation, without fear, "fuck you" to misery. It's like a desire to be someone other than a victim in the face of a bully. To prove that you can do this you still need someone or something to play the role of a bully so that you can blossom on the inside into someone fearless.

True, this isn't muffins, this is reformatting yourself. And once you know, although you might wish you didn't know, the fact that you know means that you will never choose to un-know, because that would be to deceive yourself, um, knowingly. Pretty much nobody wants to be the guy who likes his steak in The Matrix.

So, on the "reply" thing, that's interesting. Say I'm in a conflict situation. I know (that word again), that I could just "delete" the situation if I wanted. However, that tells me nothing about my courage to meet the situation on its own terms, and triumph. If all I ever do is delete uncomfortable situations, then I am not truly exploring my experience and all that it can be. Also - later - being certain that I am "secretly safe", I might conclude that life is all about such experiences anyway, and without them I might as well just "skip to the end" because I won't be having fun - or at least, not learning new things.

And that points to something: some people become concerned that by doing this stuff, life becomes a different sort of churn. But actually, the mystery never goes away, and in fact becomes more obvious due to its clarity: you never experience something prior to experiencing it; it's always a surprise, in the details, even if they are laid out before you, due to your intentions.

For any subjectivity that uses any non-trivial amount of othering, I agree, there must be some surprises, at least in the details. Thing is, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want some degree of othering, because it's so damn useful. For one thing, that's how we automate the boring stuff.

Well, it really is mind surgery, you're right!

Agreed somewhat on the wanting to return to oblivion re: the syndrome syndromes, although might that not be due to the lack of understanding? Depersonalisation is, I'd say, another form of localisation, just shifted spatially somewhat (in terms of the experience). You've gained an insight, but without context you are powerless to use it.

So really what we're talking about, in that latter part, is freedom - the lack of a need to do any particular thing, and therefore the ability to choose to do anything. And mystery, really, is a contributor to freedom, and to adventure.

And ironically, the more that is "othered", the freer you become: intend what matters, let the details autocomplete!

Sort of! :) But 'othering' is not a freebie. The downside of 'othering' is that processes tend to then take on a "life of their own" as it were, and there is a risk they become renegade processes which no longer serve anyone's interest but "their own."
I view 'othering' as I do fire: very very useful, if you're careful not to set your house on fire.

That's all part of the fun, though! And of course there's no certainty that micromanagement makes you any safer; "manual" operation means you can't take into account the larger context, which you get for free when you let existing patterning fill it out for you. It's a matter of taste, but I think occasional course correction probably makes for a better life overall. Either way, it's still better than "normal" life, which is blind in action and understanding.

So it's a matter of perspective (adopted, literally). If you step outside the frame completely, you've got what amounts to an "eternal static pattern of perfection" - but basically no experience. With too narrow a frame, you're left with a sort of blindness with things thrashing at you from nowhere, a completely dynamic experience with no stable platform.

Once you've calmed yourself down though, played with this for a while, then things line up a bit and the (apparent) chaos subsides, and you can trust more, especially since your intuition tends to be clearer, so you do in effect see beyond the immediate 3D-frame.

Perspectives: I really did mean "literally" on the perspective thing - as in, viewing something from here... rather than here. Seeing the whole pattern laid out, versus being "inside the maze" and not being able to see around the next corner, only having faith that your intentions are always fulfilled. That kind of thing.

Tending the garden: Well, that sounded very Biblical Parable! And that's not necessarily a bad thing at all.

The Biblical reference wasn't judgemental there; I think that book was originally a perfectly decent attempt to codify a particular description of reality (namely: the apparent internal shapes the apparent external), which has become somewhat corrupted by poor and culturally-unaware interpretations. So it's not a bad source at all to pick from, I'd say.

A perspective doesn't necessarily mean visual; it's a relational thing. It really means the balance between the explicit and the implicit - the proportion of information which is unfolded into awareness vs that which is not. If the world is an eternal informational landscape, then one's perspective dictates the radius which falls within one's perception.

The problem is that the Bible never (please correct me if I am wrong) conveys that God is the innermost person inside the person...

It kinda does, via metaphor. God, Jesus, all meant to be aspects of you, in the early interpretations. All that stuff about fathers and sons, seedtime and harvest, forgiveness and non-judgement. Unfortunately the subsequent religions (as distinct from the early Christian movements) flipped that around so that God was something external to be worshipped and pleaded with, rather than internal and to be attended to.

To me the term "perspective" means that whatever you experience is a result of a specific manner of experiencing.

That still applies here. On the landscape and radius, yes it's metaphorical. The notion of "proximity" depends upon the particular aspect we discussing. In this case, I'm referring to the ability to perceive outcomes.

Talking more plainly: right now, I may have set various intentions, but all I am perceiving is this room around me (simplistically speaking). However, I may have a sense of the next-moment, of outcomes through intuition. If I could "step back", although not 3-dimensionally, then I would have access to a greater degree of temporal or event information. We could call this our present "knowledge horizon" or something; but what it's trying to convey is that you can't have both a dynamic experience and the experience of the full set of outcomes.

What can I say? The Bible is a product of its time! That's why we have to rewrite this stuff in modern language periodically, as the old descriptions stop being understood. If those parables had been written "straightforwardly" they would have made no sense to the readers of the time. For instance, the ideas of "reality" and even of "person" probably did not exist in the way they are used now. The concept of even an individual distinct identity is relatively recent.

The Bible as it is now (the official selection, as it were), is obviously compiled from the viewpoint of a hierarchical religion with a certain power dynamic, but that doesn't mean the message is gone, if people want to use it as their entry point. (Not something I'm recommending; I'm more indicating that those who are already dedicated to Biblical studies might find the true message is not what they are being taught in Sunday School.)

It is unlikely Jesus was a historical character - probably an amalgamation of various stories and parables. Y'know, and the Old Testament is fun, right?

But this "stepping back" is moving through a different from conventional dimensions. And a dimension is a narrative. That, by the way, is a recent insight I had: dimension is narrative.

For sure, yes! It's perhaps best to think of dimensions as, rather than spatial extents, rather as stories enfolded within stories, like an origami sculpture. I see the next level up from here by "folding" this room into itself spatially, and that's what leads me to the "higher" perspective.

So even if you take only the very old documents, I don't think the Bible fares very well.

Yeah, I'm not recommending the Bible as the go-to text for today, just saying that it was an attempt to codify this knowledge, rather than a bunch of little moral tales as it often seems to be presented as. On the historicity of Jesus, I mean that the stories themselves seem to be a patchwork of different characters; but then the Bible wasn't (I suggest) aiming to be a historical account so it doesn't matter much.

It's probably unfair to compare Buddhist texts with early Christian ones; I don't think they were on the same level. The Western texts don't seem to do abstraction very well; they don't really explain, rather they guide behaviour?

One of the nice things about idealism, of course, is that we can happily construct pseudo-spatial spaces consisting of meaning, and not have to suggest they are less "real" the "proper" dimensions - since we don't reify the physical concepts anyway.

I really like your description of orthogonal narratives - very evocative. We could also apply the notion in a more granular way: orthogonal facts. One could actually create mental structures for this, perhaps, and flip through them as part of a more general organising principle.

I agree, but the Bible was never meant to be a document about transcendence and thus, never about spiritual liberation. It's a document about law. What you can and cannot do as a human on Earth. The Bible is less a spiritual manual than it is an early codex of law. So the task of the Biblical authors is almost literally the opposite of someone who writes about liberative spirituatlity. The task of the Biblical author is to ground you in this here bad dream, and make sure you can't escape it. The point of the Bible is to clip your wings! It's to put you in a small cage.

I don't agree with your assessment of the Bible. I see it as an attempt at a "how-to" manual; and early example of self help. It doesn't make sense to compare it to deeper texts, because it was never meant to be that - in fact, it was probably never meant to be a single book in the first place. As you imply, it was a bunch of oral stories, which got written down sooner or later, and combined with some other material that fitted the purposes of the 'publisher' of the day. We probably have to make a distinction, I suggest, between the original material and its purpose and context, and the 'collected works' and intention of the later compilation.

Hmm, pondering this: it's interesting that while the West has become more adept at abstract thinking, it has at the same time I think (as a culture) grown more literal. The older civilisations basically communicated in metaphor, it seems (perhaps due to that oral tradition), and what's happened here is that we've stratified: high abstraction - gap - literal structures. What we do here in our discussions, is perhaps the filling in of that gap, using the full spectrum of thought to make connections.

But do you at least agree with me that law-giving and spiritual liberation are mutually contradictory concerns?

There is the possibility that, through the application of law, one might gain insight from the experience - but I do think that it's more likely you have the experience but don't get the broader meaning.

Yeah, I bet them desert fathers had a few more secret stories on the go...

I think the re-inclusion of subjectivity might turn into a broader trend. It's relatively recently that "objectivity" was jumped upon to provide a simplifying concept to make it easier to create explanations. But a couple of recent approaches in physics are flipping it round and saying, let's start with the subjective angle ("private views") and, um, we'll worry about connecting things up "objectively" later. We may yet see a resurgence of, and a reunification of knowledge by, subjective ideas - if not idealism, exactly.

For the subjective view stuff, check out Christopher Fuchs' work on QBism. It's a fairly readable introduction. An interesting development, and (at last) a move away from many-worlds and all that other nonsense.

I wasn't talking about any particular approach, just that a revisiting of the subjective frame will lend itself to a folding back of "objective" knowledge. What the theoretical context for that would be, I don't know - it might be idealism, but I figure there would be a few stepping stones before it got to that.

Have you ever seen Tom Campbell's videos on youtube?

Yeah, Tom's good, I just dislike the implication that something is "happening" in the background, and so on, other than experiencing - that the simulation is "running" somehow. As you say though, he is thought-provoking, and he is leading lots of people in a good direction, even if they have to throw the ladder away when they get there (which applies to most metaphors). He clearly delineates the parts of the model and connects them to the everyday world, and he even brings Robert Monroe back into awareness as an interesting guy, rather than as some bloke who just messed with OBEs.

Signing off for now - check out that Quanta article and tell me what you think. You can safely skim over the parts which are too physicsy and still get the gist, I think.

Q: I am reading this QBism grimoire by Fuchs, and here's a juicy quote from it:
QBism says that every quantum measurement is a moment of creation, and the formal apparatus of quantum theory is an aid for each agent’s thinking about those “creatia” she is involved with. But surely a Copernican principle applies just as much to QBism as to any other science. QBism’s solution starts by saying the last point just that much more clearly: “Quantum measurement represents those moments of creation an agent happens to seek out or notice.” It does not at all mean that there aren’t moments of creation going on all around, unnoticed, unparticipated in by the particular agent, all the time. The larger world of QBism is something aligned with James’s vision of a pluriverse where “being comes in local spots and patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of the rest.”
So, guess what? You probably wouldn't like QBism either, based on at least this one passage.

Well, I dislike aspects of it also - but that doesn't matter, because if I loved every aspect then it would be... me! We have to be careful about "moments of creation" and so on. Better perhaps to say "moments of definition" or "moments of fixing" or "moments of intensification of the contribution of a particular fact". There are no moments of creation, in that sense, other than something unfolding sensorily into consciousness plus in effect the facts implied by the content of that moment (since the world is always coherent between shifts).

Remember what happened when I was exposed for the first time to your style of thinking? How many questions I was asking? Things like "enfolded" and "unfolded" made absolutely no sense to me. Well, just how many people have been asking you about that stuff besides me?

With the "imagination space + patterning" type metaphors it's much more intuitive generally. Since I've got people actually using that to update perceptions and create changes, it's much easier for them to connect to direct experience (which is of course the aim).

POST: New here, and I have a question.

All experiences occur inside 'experiencing'. Even ideas about an "outside" of experiencing, occur inside of 'experiencing'.

We can fantasise all we want about what is going on "out there", but it will still just be a concept "in here" - with "in here" also being a concept. You never experience inside or outside really. All we ever encounter is our own mind, taking on the shape of a particular state, from which experiences apparently arise. In fact, you can easily demonstrate to yourself there is no outside - by trying to find it, right now!

Hint: First direct your attention towards "the place you are looking out from" as you read these words right now. Continue onwards as far as you can, see if you can find a boundary. Now do the same in all directions. Now try and find where "you" are. If you think you find yourself, ask why you are able to see yourself, from the outside. Realise that this means you are the outside too, which is therefore also inside.

...

"Materialism" is a conceptual framework, which arises subjectively in people's minds. "Materialism" is made from thoughts and is nothing other than that. It's a potentially useful way of thinking; it might lead to interesting ideas for creativity and behaviour, for instance. But it cannot "give rise to subjective consciousness", because it is itself dependent upon it.

For your example -

You are already in that position, of being "objective inside of your own mind". So, in what sense do you know everything or perfectly understand the system of your own mind? You'll notice: All you ever come to appreciate is relative truth within the content of your experiences. And it doesn't matter at what scale this operates at. This is separate from the nature of experiencing, which is fundamental (unchanging) truth.

So a way to get to the heart of it, right now, is to realise that the nature of your experience remains the same regardless of its content, and that since content amounts to patterns within the mind, it makes no sense to talk of the mind arising from content.

To reuse a metaphor: If your mind was a blanket of material, and the folds within the blanket were the content of your experience, is there any arrangement of folds which could fully capture the truth of the existence of the blanket?

POST: Morning Lucidity (new lucidity technique)

[POST]

So this morning after having a ton of weird dreams from unregular sleep i had some insight into a new lucidity technique. When i woke up this morning i was super groggy and slept in much longer then i usually do, yet when i was lying in bed still awake, it kind of still felt like i was dreaming because i was so out of it.
The morning seems to be a good time to work on lucidity insight mainly because you have just been dreaming and its fresh on your mind. So this technique for lucidity is rather simple. The second you wake up in the morning instead of telling yourself you woke up, you instead try to feel that this is yet another dream in the sequence. The closer you can do this upon the ending of the dream the more effective it should be. It would probably be most effective if its after a particularly vivid and memorable dream as well.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Its not really a new technique, its called DEILD, dream exit induced lucid dreaming. A fair few of my LDs have been induced this way

Q2: this technique is used to make waking reality seem more dream like, not to induce a lucid dream just to make that clear

Q3: Is there a difference? This is one thing I've been wondering about for a while. I've had a number of experiences that lead me to suspect that waking reality is really just a lucid dream where we are dreaming that we're not dreaming.
So there's a threshold of disbelief that, once breached, makes it obvious one is in a lucid dream and so one then treats reality as such and if shit gets weird one just wakes up in bed. But if on the other hand one wakes up into a lucid dream and nothing is weird, the belief tends to be, "ah this is waking reality" and so it is treated as such.
Is the point you're getting at with making waking reality more dreamlike vs inducing a full-on lucid dream one of stability so as to not wake up from the dream? I'm not sure if I'm following.

I think what he is getting at is simply using that moment upon waking to assert to oneself that the day that is about to commence is no different in essential quality to a dream (contrary to one's usual assumptions); to bring the "sense of dream" you still have upon waking on, into the day with you.

It is true there is no difference in type between waking and dreaming, but we do not normally act as though that is the case, even if we recognise it intellectually. I think his exercise is a suggestion for bringing it over, as a feeling, into actual experience via intervention.

(I'm reminded that Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep, on our reading list, has a similar idea where you assert that "this is a dream" throughout the day, and ongoing experience starts to fall into line with that assertion over time, such that it is sensed to be a dream.)

Ah ok. Yeah I've done some practice with reminding myself, "This is a dream" throughout the day, but without that felt sense, it's not very effective. This is a pretty good idea the more I think about it. Setting that intention to do it right away in the morning would be pretty powerful. Back to the felt sense, does one need to have to felt sense in order to experience waking reality as a dream or can one come from a place of not having that felt sense and start acting as-if anyway in order to obtain the feeling?

So, of course it's always true anyway, regardless of the feeling you have. The feeling is, after all, just another experience. Reality is always a waking dream, even when it's a waking dream of "feeling that this is a world based on a solid persistent substrate". This means that the power of direct intention is always available to you (because of course that's how the whole thing came about anyway, and it's how you are moving your arms and legs right now).

Therefore, if you do want to generate the feeling, then you can just-decide it directly - or you could intend something else that implies-that you have the feeling, as part of its larger pattern. As you say, performing acts which correspond to a dreamlike reality, thereby triggering the extended "life is dreamlike" pattern, would be one way to go about that.

Again, though, you can just "know" it without having the feeling, but I do agree that having the feeling within experience means you have a constant reminder, or presence, which can prevent you getting lost in the dream-as-solid-reality again.

it even makes sense if you logically think about it - thinking about reality can be condensed into one thought strand and set about as a construct upon itself or within others
but then what makes that so? is it you? is it every poster on reddit or the people on the street or the Jews or the government? it has to be me and there are hard limits on others on what they can do
even if their souls are unaffected, their actions are limited - otherwise I would not be able to accomplish anything except at the behest of others' desires: I would have to follow all laws of whoever is in government, I would be subject to arrest for any number of things I do or say, and their religions/beliefs would tower over mine.

Strands which are thoughts about the world, are basically parallel worlds all on their own.

There is only you, so you don't need to concern yourself about the limitations of others. However, this is you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person. There are in, fact, no "worlds" or "people" at all in the sense that we usually conceive of them - as external and independent objects and beings that are "happening". Rather, they are patterns in awareness, and you-as-awareness is the only thing that is ever "happening".

There are no souls beyond the concept "souls".

right, or parallel universes

Yes. So - when I say "world", I don't mean it in the sense of "planet". I mean it as a "self-consistent coherent realm or pattern" or something like that. We could equally use "reality" or "universe", depending on the associations of those terms for our target audience. What we don't mean, though, is something like a "place".

then who is another? i mean, there must be other existences of others not-perceptible within any universe

What "another"? Have you ever encountered "another"? And what does it mean to talk about something which is "not-perceptible". If you are talking about something, then it is perceivable in some form - even if that's in the form of an idea. Which loops back to what were were saying previously: aren't ideas basically patterns and worlds, and those "just" ideas?

then couldn't i have the idea of another existing in a separate place - i.e. an entirely different being separate to every universe that could exist within the range of my all-possible universes

You could. But that would just be an idea in your current moment of awareness. It would be a thought "about" something; it says nothing of its actually happening other than it is happening in thought, now.

who is the actor in, say, my parents? even if all bodies are controlled by me , the experiencer could be different

Hmm.

What "experiencer"? Pause now, and try to find boundaries or multiplicity in awareness. Try to find an experiencer. Where is it? There is not even one experiencer; there is just "experiencing". It makes no sense to talk of multiple experiencers - or experiences. Even the idea of "other experiencers" is... an experience, one of them, now.

Are you "in" you? Are you an actor "in" you? If you are thinking of answering yes, pause more, and try and identify where it is. Now, consider again what it means to talk of an actor "in" your parents.

There are no actors, I suggest. Nothing is happening, except this experience, now.

but that is a thought about me

How can you have a thought "about" you? What does that mean? Is any thought actually about you (in the sense of capturing what you are about)?

but could i not 'let' another have an experience within my experience?

What other? There aren't any others. Strictly speaking, it's not "my" experience; it's just experience. "My" is itself an experience.

No thought can capture the medium within which it resides and of which it is constructed, surely? You can't think about the actual you; you can only think other stuff and call it, incorrectly, "you".

Direct investigation reveals that experience has no boundary, and hence no "outside". Any idea you have about an outside, is just a thought of the idea of an outside - inside.

Who says that people are liberated? I suggest that people can't be liberated, because there are no people. However, "that which has and is experiences" can shape-shift such that it is no longer under the illusion that is a particular shape (in this case, the shape of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world).

In what sense does there have to be a "purpose" to experiences? The idea of "purpose" is itself an experience - of thinking about the concept "purpose".

why bother having an experience unless it is for a reason?

Experiences - in fact just-being - is its own reason. That isn't necessarily the same as a logical reason, though. It is important not to conflate thinking (e.g. mulling over concepts about life and experience, and ideas such as "reasons" and "purpose") with the main strand of experience.

Thinking about "a purpose" is an experience. A "sense of purpose" is itself just another experience. You might as well ask, "what is the purpose in having a sense of purpose?", and so on. You can do that, but none of those answers will matter in the slightest really; they are parallel, and say nothing about the fundamental situation.

If you need something to hold onto, though, one might say that the reason to experience anything is simply the feeling of wanting to. Any unpacked, narrative reason is just arbitrary story-making to justify that feeling, or desire.

isn't that a reason? the reason to be is to be

Yes, but with a small caveat. The difficulty is, the "reason" that can be described isn't the actual reason. "Logical" reasons and "direct" reasons both appear identically in written language - and so the two get confused. It's another aspect of that thing where, when you discuss "the nature of experience" most people immediately switch their attention onto some thinking-about experience in order to explore it, rather than attending to actual experience. Often, discussion don't emphasise the difference, and so people talk at cross purposes. Not us, though, eh? :-)

as i said before i mostly see deductive / thinking-about experiences peppered with the occasional insight. this is no good to me because i never have any actual experiences involving another but instead have thinking-about time-wasting exercises.

Yeah, I get you.

Well, you do have experiences involving "another" one one level - it's just that you-as-awareness are "taking on the shape" of the experience of being this-person interacting with that-person. They are both what-you-truly-are, but since that "you" is not a personal you - and is undivided and therefore not really an object at all - then it doesn't devalue the interaction.

As with the whole solipsism thing, the error arises with from the fact that all thinking presupposes division - objects and relationships in mental space - and assumes that experiences is of that nature also, when it is sort of neither that nor not that.

i'm just fed up with the running-around-in-circles!

Just give up thinking about it, is what it comes down to eventually. You can't "solve" this in thought anyway, because it's not a "problem". Only the concept of it is. The only way to have an experience of something being a certain way, is to start viewing it that way. Things are no way in particular, inherently. That's why you can't work it out.

However, as you indicate, you can have an "insight" - an intuitive direct knowing - that things are a certain way fundamentally (that is, undivided and unchanging and containing all possibilities and all you-as-awareness). You can never reach this by thinking about it though, or by performing actions to get to it, because those thoughts and actions already imply division; that is enfolded in the intention.

All you can do, is bear in mind that it is always true that, whether you are experiencing division and location or blending and expansion, you are an undivided that which is "taking on the shape of" the experience of apparent division, or apparent expansion, and so on.

then how did i have those "insights"? if i could just have that insight perpetually - is what i'm striving for

There isn't a "how" as such, but I'd suggest it's when you cease holding onto your attentional focus, cease subtly constraining and deforming experience.

When people do relaxation or contemplation or releasing, while they might "let go of" their body movements and thoughts, letting them be, they often still hold onto their attentional focus - in spatial or content terms - perhaps just very slightly. This can be likened to allowing a piece of material to relax into a loose state, while still holding onto the edges. For sure, you not shaping the content as such, but you are still holding it in an overall state which is a deformation of its unmodified state.

So - you might have let go of 3-dimensional sensory content, but you are still holding onto the experience of 3-dimensional space itself, which prevents you having that direct intuition or knowing of the void "everything everywhere all at once in every location" truth.

But are there not infinitely many perspectives of this experience, now? How is one able to assume that what is being experienced from one perspective applies to all other perspectives?

There are infinitely many possible experiences, but that doesn't mean that there are infinitely many experiences that are "happening".

You might say that all possible experiences are "enfolded" or "dissolved" into awareness, but only one is "unfolded" or "condensed/expanded" into sensory experiences, now. Or you could think of it as having a book in your hand with 100 pages "enfolded" into it, but only one page is current unfolded as the experience of "reading". In other words, the world is basically static and eternal, and the only thing that is "happening" is the current experience of it within, and as, "awareness".

Although it's tempting to imagine that there are many perspectives or "awarenesses" that are happening at once, this is incorrect - because awareness is not an object, and has no boundary; there is no outside to it. It is not "an awareness" it is just "awareness", which you might conceive of as a sort of "material whose only inherent property is being-aware and which takes on the shape of experiential states".

Furthermore, not being an object, it does not exist within time - rather, apparent change is something which is part of an experiential state. So it is meaningless to talk of "awarenesses" or experiences happening at "the same time"; spatial-extent and passage of time are part of an experience, not part of awareness. This also means that you are not a person, as such.

The current "shape" or state you-as-awareness has taken on, then, is that of apparently being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

To take what you're saying literally seems to imply that what I'm witnessing is not two people having a conversation on the internet via the use of human bodies but rather just my own mind communicating with itself with no existence of said bodies on computers somewhere else.

It's tricky to talk about because the "I'm" you refer to isn't you-as-person and when we say "witnessing" we have to be careful we don't imply that there is some sort of separation - this isn't a situation whereby there is an observer and then a thing that is being observed.

In your current moment right now, you can easily notice that although you are having an experience of apparently "being over here with the screen over there", in fact when you go looking for yourself you discover you are sort of "everywhere". (This is best done with eyes closed: attend to your body sensations, then attend to distant sounds, and try to identify where "you" are - in particular, try and find the "edges" to your experience.) In fact, you'll discover you don't really have a human body at all as such.

So, it's not a case of "my own mind communicating with itself": there is no communication happening; there's a sensory experience "as if" two people were talking. Fundamentally, though, there are no people as we usually conceive of it. There's just a particular total pattern in awareness = a state.

Now, written down like this, that sounds quite start and lonely, but that's where we return to our early points: awareness isn't a "thing" and also it isn't made from anything; it is undivided. This means that the entire situation is always one of fundamental "aliveness" and "oneness". Therefore, you-as-awareness is in fact the total aliveness of the world, taking on the shape of anything - albeit not in the way you might have originally thought. That is, the world is more like a dissolved pattern than it is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". However, that does not make it less "real" or "existing".

In fact, it makes it more real than you might have thought, because it means that the world is more than the basic model you might have confused it with. What you had previously considered to be "real people" and a "real world" are, upon inspection, just some thoughts you were having about the world - inferior, empty concepts, parallel constructions lacking in complexity and momentum. The world-as-it-is, although of the same nature (patterns in awareness), is so much more than that; it is everything, always.

Hence, perhaps, "the world in a grain of sand".

This I can grok. I visualize it similar to a Mandelbrot set zoom. All of the patterns inherently exist as potential but only one particular pattern is in frame at any given time.

Right, that's one way to imagine it. I've used things like an infinite grid, or an origami fortune teller or an ink droplet analogy in the past. Basically, any metaphor that conveys the idea that the entirety of all possible states exists eternally "dissolved" into the background, and that from that a state is selected and a sensory experience is unfolded - but all of the same "stuff", that is "awareness". What's important is, not to confuse these descriptions with "what is really happening", because even those descriptions are themselves just more experience - and all that is every "really happening" is this exact experience, now.

Does "awareness" and "consciousness" point to the same place for you or are they different in the way you use them?

They're both rather corrupted words, I'd say. The problem with "consciousness" is that it's now used in at least three distinct ways, and those ways are conflated such that the meaning in this context can get obscured. The three ways are: "consciousness-of" (that is, the content of consciousness), "self-consciousness" (the identification with one part of that content as "me") and "consciousness" (that is, the "stuff" of experience). Here, we mean something like the final definition. I think that using the word "awareness" can be a bit better because, although it's often used to mean "the thing we have our spatial attentional focus on", it is vague enough to fit our intended meaning of "the 'material' whose only property is being-aware and which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences".

The way I've been picturing it lately is as if "The One" has all these countless fingers of awareness that it started diving into this static Mandelbrot-like hologram with.

That's fine as far as it goes, but you are still subtly distinguishing between a thing that is aware ("The One"), and the thing it is aware of ("this static... hologram"). We really want our metaphor to convey that there is "that", and "that" is adopts the shape of experiences - and that experiences actually consist of all possibilities at once, just with some possibilities being "brighter" than others, hence "take on the shape of".

All of which is a battle to avoid accidentally talking about "that" as if it is an object, as a result of language only being able to deal things in terms of objects.

Which seems to imply that there's no way to know whether any of the other people in my experience have any awareness behind their experience or if I'm just looking at empty images and assuming they do.

Well, if you follow the above reasoning, the question doesn't even arise. There is nothing "behind" anything; there is no awareness "behind" experience, because awareness is what "takes on the shape of" experience. The only thing that is happening right now, is the experience you-as-awareness have taken on the shape of, right now.

Right now, how would you describe your experience as your respond to this?

I feel like I am an open space with sensations floating in it, in the form of the experience of sitting at a computer screen typing a message with a very welcome cup of coffee to my right hand side (and therefore in danger of succumbing to any sudden mouse movements). But what matters is, what is your experience right now as you read this response?

If you are having an experience, how do you reconcile that I also am aware and having an experience?

Not at the same time though, eh? But also, not not at the same time. It is more accurate to say that this issue is about how experiences themselves are outside of time. Experiences have the shape of time (ongoing change) and space (physical extension) - experiences are formatted as space and time, space and time are aspects of an experience - but there is no space and time outside of the experience of them.

The "Hall of Records" metaphor tries to capture this point. I'll attach it below in a moment, as a reply to this comment.

I've thought a lot lately about the idea of there only being consciousness. And how I've come to think of it basically is that we are all the same thing but this thing is capable of being anything.

So, being careful there: the idea of there only being "consciousness", which is different from the idea of there only being "a consciousness". There's a big difference to that, because the latter would suggest there is only the sensory perspective you are having right now, with no other possibilities, whereas what we are saying is that all possibilities are here and now, and so you can have experiences "as if" pretty much anything is true (including all those nice metaphors you've come up with). Leading us to...

I've noticed that after hanging around conscious beings for a a day or a few that it's like their dream stuff seeps into mine. For a while after leaving them my reality will be brighter. I'll be seeing all sorts of new plants and such that I had never seen or even knew existed before.

Right, I find this also. We could think of it as, we allow our narrow attentional focus, or subset of the world-pattern, to open up, and our sphere of presence (the subset of the possibilities we allow to contribute to our ongoing experience) then incorporates all those fresh patterns and apparent interactions. When we loosen our hold on our experience this way, the world does often become more dreamlike, because we aren't gripping onto it with our habits and assumptions so much, we aren't intending in terms of our world views so much. Creativity in action! :-)

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. 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.

So in terms of "oneirosophy" you don't need to worry about another "you". You are not even the person you are experiencing, you are simply looking at this particular series of event-memories, from this particular perspective. "Intending" changes in your experience means to decide to recall a memory that is not directly connected to this one.

Note that none of this metaphorical stuff is necessarily required though - all that matters is that you are willing to let go of the current experience, and believe that you can connect to another experience which is discontinuous with it. However, these "Active Metaphors" better allow you to format yourself.

you see my body is not illusion otherwise i couldn't exist, even though the cause is imaginative and the only solution i have is to manifest mushrooms - and by manifest i mean have success in growing

Well, your body is an illusion in the sense that it is not what you might have assumed it to be. Being an illusion doesn't mean something doesn't exist - it just means our description of its nature is incorrect. In this case, the body is realised to be an experience shaped from awareness, rather than an independent external object which is being observed by a separate conscious viewer. It's an illusion in the same way that a photograph of a crowd scene is not actually a bunch of people wandering about on a street.

Other people's bodies are of the same form as yours: sensations and perceptions arising within and as you-as-awareness. Your body is just a bunch of sensations plus an idea; you don't really have a body as such. And other people's bodies are basically just visual images, sounds, and textures, just like everything else.

Note: if when you think of other people's bodies, you are thinking about them as if you were "in" those bodies, or are viewing them from a 3d-person perspective (the "view from nowhere"), then you are immediately "wrong" - because what you are doing is imagining that you-as-awareness had taken on the shape of a different experience. On the other hand, upon recognising this, you are "right", since you realise that there are no "other people" as such, except as patterns of experience, and that is what "you-as-person" is also.

so it's their fact of them existing in my presence that i'm concerned about

I'm not sure what you mean by "existing in my presence"? Firstly, what do you mean by "my presence" and then what would it mean to "exist" in that?

Q: Firstly, what do you mean by "my presence"
anyone i see
what would it mean to "exist" in that?
be seen by me
but my presence itself is the totality of awareness localized to a particular experience, as in brahma [infinite grid], paramātmā [localized experience] and bhagavān ["my" experience as 'śrī kṛṣṇa']

I meant more what your presence actually is - but going along with that: when you see "someone" what is it, exactly, that you see? What exactly are you experiencing?

i'm experiencing an experience - albeit one i don't care for

...So, putting aside any interpretation based on mushrooms or contemplation or anything else, you end up with: you are having an experience of sight-sound-texture-feeling, with nothing "behind" that. You are experiencing an experience; you are experiencing being an experience.

Given this, what are "other people"?

other people must be myself

And what are you?

परावर parāvara - totality - the universe - everything

Even that, though, is perhaps a little grand and over-reaching, referencing ideas that are not themselves persistent (although I do get that they are metaphorical and trying to "point the way' rather than capture its essence). So -

I'd suggest keeping it simple and phrasing it as something like:

• "What you truly are is 'that which takes on the shape of experiences'."

Or just "that which experiences", but I think it's useful to go with the formulation above, since it emphasises that there are not two things - the experience and the experiencer - only one thing (really: no things). And that is the only thing that is always true: the only fundamental truth. Beyond that, things are changeable and are only relatively true.

how would you encapsulate that in a word?

I think I would probably deliberate not do so, since it that word and its conceptual associations would become yet another distraction. If I had to go with one, I'd opt for: "this".

Of course, this (ahem) only makes sense once you have already worked through everything, but that's fine. It's really a recognition that no word can mean what we are talking about here, since what we are talking about here is that from which all meaning is made. (And we're back to the metaphor of no sandcastle being able to capture "the beach" and "sand", while also being both of those things.)

POST: Rick Archer interviews Rupert Spira

[POST]

Buddha at the Gas Pump: Video/Podcast 259. Rupert Spira, 2nd Interview [http://batgap.com/rupert-spira-2nd-interview/]
I found this to be an interesting conversation over at Buddha at the Gas Pump (a series of podcasts and conversations on states of consciousness) between Rick Archer and Rupert Spira about direct experiencing of the nature of self and reality, full of hints and good guidance for directing your own investigation into 'how things are right now'.
Archer continually drifts into conceptual or metaphysical areas, and Spira keeps bringing him back to what is being directly experienced right now, trying to make him actually see the situation rather than just talk about it. It's a fascinating illustration of how hard it can be to communicate this understanding, to get people to sense-directly rather than think-about.
I think this tendency to think-about is actually a distraction technique used by the skeptical mind, similar to what /u/cosmicprankster420 mentions here [ POST: The depths of the skeptical mind.]. Our natural instinct seems to be to fight against having our attention settle down to our true nature.
Overcoming this - or ceasing resisting this tendency to distraction - is needed if you are to truly settle and perceive the dream-like aspects of waking life and become free of the conceptual frameworks, the memory traces and forms that arbitrarily shape or in-form your moment by moment world in an ongoing loop.
His most important point as I see it is that letting go of thought and body isn't what it's about, it's letting go of controlling your attention that makes the difference. Since most people don't realise they are controlling their attention (and that attention, freed, will automatically do the appropriate thing without intervention) simply noticing this can mean a step change for their progress.
Also worth a read is the transcript of Spira's talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference 2014 [https://web.archive.org/web/20180312044814/http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/read/the_new_science_of_consciousness]. Rick Archer's earlier interview with Spira is here [http://batgap.com/rupert-spira/], but this is slightly more of an interview than a investigative conversation.

[END OF POST]

*Q: I think this tendency to think-about is actually a distraction technique used by the skeptical mind

This is exactly what I was and have been battling with this past year. Getting the skeptical mind (ego?) to stop worrying about things that don't matter and start allowing things to flow naturally. Whenever the flow starts my skeptical mind kicks in and blocks it immediately. Very frustrating.*

There's something you should try: Make sure your attention/focus/presence isn't centred on your head/neck area. That's where tension and resistance and fight-flight tends to kick in, plus the upper chest. Instead, try to start with a pretty open,wide attention, lightly centred on your abdomen. Then when you get a "reactive kick" it won't have quite so strong an effect. Another thing that can happen is that we keep "checking" or at least slightly holding on to ourselves. Working towards an attitude of full commitment/abandonment is the way forward.

Of course, all easier said than done, because it's a wee bit scary. :-)

I'll have to work on that. Moving my presence anywhere but in my head is pretty difficult.

Yeah, you can't do it. Rather than move it, maybe it's better to say expand it - to reach down further into your body. You'll be tempted initially to try and do this muscularly somehow but a bit of practice and you're good.

Sorry, hard to describe!

Makes perfect sense. My last two telekinesis sessions have lined up perfectly in the timing of your comment to emphasize your point. Interesting how the universe functions. I will expand on that idea. No pun intended. I have noticed that I have to do some muscular work before I can settle into a mind space that allows me to feel, sense, experience the sensation of physically making contact with my wheel and getting it to turn. It took me a full hour to get into that mind space most recently. About five or so months ago I could get int that space within the moment of sitting down to practice. I really had a bad time a couple months ago and it set me back. Now I'm working to rebuild what I once had though I do feel as though my progress is better than it was before though I need to regain the control.

Well, the universe moves all at once - it's sneaky like that. What prep do you do? Is it all concentrating, or do you a 'releasing' exercise beforehand to get rid of the day's debris?

I have begun doing a chakra prime and then grounding and aura charge before proceeding. The reason why is because I drained myself to the point of depression around October last year. I am trying to make sure that I am always filled with external energy. The chakra priming is done by expanding awareness and then absorbing energy and then pressurizing all the extra energy into a chakra. I do that twice per chakra because that tends to allow me greater sensitivity of my chakras. Then I sit for however long I feel I need and meditate until I start feeling a disconnect from my body and my focus can be at its greatest.

If it works for you, sounds good.

I didn't really spend much time exploring that side. Perhaps just lack of dedication. :-) Although I have experimented with localised body areas (different areas of the "brain area", etc) not really anything more formal.

But also it felt like "effort" and, knowing I was already operating from a tense background, I figured I'd try and get to the most open, relaxed starting point I could. I began doing a 2 x 10 minute daily releasing exercise (lie down, let go completely and absolutely, let mind and body and attention move as they want) and then mixing that with something more active (latest post is on that [Overwriting Yourself]). The final idea being that, if I hit a base state, then intention would naturally call upon the appropriate approach; the routes of "manifestation" would be more flexible, as it were.

I feel that in the end all the same things get tackled no matter what the approach though. You'll usually get drawn to the next thing, the right thing, if you're paying attention to your progress.

...

Q: Has Spira realized he has a free will yet? Or is he still droning on and on about choicelessness?
and that attention, freed, will automatically do the appropriate thing without intervention
Not necessarily! If ordinary untrained people stop controlling their attention, their attention will simply drift toward the status quo, which will not be a good outcome. Effortlessness is only a workable option for highly realized beings. Everyone else has to uproot bad habits through some amount of effort, and yes, control of attention.

I disagree that untrained people's attention drifts to the status quo. What it actually does is constantly jump and attach itself to sources of pain that need resolved, so they wilfully choose distractions. It keeps moving! That's why people have to really concentrate on tasks, because they've got a backlog of things their attention wants to... attend to and release.

Precisely. That's what I meant by status quo. This kind of choppy experience is habituated into the mind and is effortless actually. So without effort, this choppy flighty back and forth is what you get as someone under the influence of materialism and its attendant concerns for the body, social acceptance, etc.

No, it is very effortful - the effort of avoidance. It's subtle, but always there. If you truly give up, then it settles out after your "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements" resolve themselves.

If what you say were true, then stopping would be easy and natural and then everyone could become liberated in one afternoon reliably, like a machine.

It's not easy, because it can be quite unpleasant, and it's also transparent - people don't realise they are compulsively forcing their attention (deliberately contracting and deforming themselves) or compulsively creating distractions, because the thing with avoidance is you often don't know you are avoiding. And the thing with effort is that if it's constant, your can be quite unaware of it - until you stop.

"Seeing the nature of things", I can give you right now. Unravelling your accumulated patterns, wide open attention that never shifts? Longer. There's nothing to be done about it, but you do need the courage to do nothing.

People will find any excuse to avoid doing, say, a daily releasing exercise that involves simply lying on the floor - because they know things will come up. And they'll feel fear. Letting go completely is required in order to retrieve your power, but everything you've ever run away from will be waiting for you when you do and will hit you if you hold back even a little bit.

If this deformation required effort, they'd notice! They don't notice it because it's effortless.

You're wrong. Habitual effort becomes the normal background. Clench your fist for an hour and you'll not longer notice it. Try to open your fist subsequently and you'll feel pain; it'll be easier to stay clenched. If you instead let your fist go, stop holding onto it, then it'll gradually release.

That's one way. I call that non-conceptual relaxation. The thing is to practice non-conceptual relaxation you need to be highly realized already and you have to understand how it's different from ordinary relaxation.

There's nothing to understand. Just stop messing with your attention (although realising you are controlling your attention is subtle; however, that is what 'realisation' actually is).

Yes, minor movement is helpful - Tai Chi, for instance - mainly because it sneakily expands your attention to fill out the body space and beyond. It's actually a theraputic technique: drawing attention from the head-space and other locations, into the body. Lots of "character conditions" are effectively localised attention. (I found some good info and techniques in The Psychology of the Body, Elliot Greene, which is written for massage therapists. Worked well.)

However, still, these - like Alexander Technique "instructions" - are basically cheats for getting you or someone else to expand (or rather, cease contracting) your spatial awareness. Because for most people, telling them to do that directly wouldn't make any sense to them.

It's a metaphorical fist, you get the idea: opposite action does not dissolve or undo the original action.

You don't really understand the nature of habit

Habits are memory traces in "mind", and persist unless you allow them to release via recognition and acceptance, or you overwrite them. You don't need effort, just intention. What form could effort possibly take? What is effort made from?

Every object in this room is a habit.

This makes no sense. Volition isn't separate from my being and neither is attention which is a partial function of volition. I can't stop it anymore than the Space can stop allowing objects through it.

How does it make no sense? People interfere with their attention in an attempt to manipulate themselves instead of simply intending, just as they tense their muscles in order to move when they could simply direct themselves in a more general sense and let the correct movement happen.

To interfere with your attention you have to be as though outside your own attention. Attention must be alien to you. There must be a separation between you and attention.

Ah, this where we're going wrong. I'm assuming we're talking from the point of view of the background already, not a "person". Effort is imaginary, from my view. Or better: it is the experience of intending something contrary to the existing momentum. You don't do effort, it's a sensation you have.

It's much easier to just go to the doctor and fix a tooth

Easier still, the dentist! But why did you have the problem in the first place?

There is no separation between me and attention, or me and that table. Attention is a subtle object, a deformation.

For example, you walk at night and there is a scary noise. The easy thing to do is turn away and go the other way. What takes EFFORT is to NOT turn away, but keep going even though that's not what you'd rather do. So you push yourself into a situation that's unpleasant. That's the necessary effort. And even yet, even in the middle of all this, has there real effort been made? No! The whole process is effortless in just the manner you say. Effort is just a sensation. There is only effortless intent. You decided effortlessly not to be a coward and followed through, like a star flying through space, without effort. But on a human level this is known as effort.

An imaginary hammer might seem to hit an imaginary nail, but it builds towards nothing.

"Effort is a sensation" - yes, it's actually the sensation of resistance, of existing established patterns, rather than the sensation of doing or overcoming.

Attention is an object, it has shape and is relative. It is regularly removed, as in dissolves into the background. Most people fall asleep at that point.

...

He doesn't touch "first cause", but without it you can't release state into choiceless awareness in the first place. Initial understanding comes from a brief cessation of creation. At which point, interfering is optional, you can just let momentum roll, or create consciously.

This is maybe more your bag: [http://www.nonduality.com/dep.htm]

==I prefer this: [http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-nondiacritical.htm]

TL;DR? It's Friday night.

That won't do it justice. It's better to just ignore it, the same way I ignore your link. :)

Ha, you'd like that link; it's all about being God. With no tricky Indian words whatsoever! ;-)

I'm a little bit like Spira in that when talking about this I prefer that we both use our own words. The only time I use links is usually if a) I don't have the time to discuss it properly, or b) I am arguing with a dogmatic Buddhist who needs an authoritative source, and then I'll give them a link to the doctrine. But the best way to talk is directly, from our own person, based on our own understanding and experience.

Quite so. The limits of text, here, however can be a bit of a restriction. The interview highlights the battle involved and the value of in-person dialogue, the persistence of deep assumptions. Talking in person is always a "feeling out" which is quite difficult to replicate in other modes.

Why when it is so obvious are people resistant to the truth? Because it is not obvious, and in fact plainly wrong, to them.

Q: You know, I think Spira does say a lot of really helpful things. But I'll never forgive him for talking about choicelessness, because he's actually ignoring a very important aspect of experience, which is volition. I am guessing he sees volition in purely negative terms and wants to eliminate it. He doesn't see that volition can also be liberative and skillful and be the cause of liberation rather than an obstacle on the way to it.
Talking in person is always a "feeling out" which is quite difficult to replicate in other modes.
Maybe. I like text almost as much as I like to talk in person. But I do like to talk in a format where we can quickly exchange information. So for example, if I really wanted to talk, I'd prefer IRC to this, because IRC is much more immediate in terms of my ability to respond.
Why when it is so obvious are people resistant to the truth? Because it is not obvious, and in fact plainly wrong, to them.
What's obvious to them is that they are a body, and that body must be kept alive, and to keep it alive, they need to remain in good social standing, among all other things.

I think you misunderstand the choiclessless awareness thing - or I place a limit on it. One or the other. Anyway, I see it as you can experience choosing and doing but you aren't actually controlling it (that's theatre), but we do have free will but at the very base level of being: we can change the shape of ourselves by ourselves, reform our experience directly at the root. That's not choosing or willing, that's becoming.

Yeah, everyday people quite like breathing and stuff. But also, the concepts you inheret you tend to literally experience as true in your dream-world. It pre-informs the partitioning of experience into content. That's why magickal traditions focus on belief adoption or belief circumvention.

It's willing and choosing. You just don't get it. That deep level is always operative and is never absent.

It's momentum and occasional intervention. Our pal Neville had that susses: Deterministic paths occasionally re-directed by conscious overwriting.

You shouldn't talk about will as though it's distant from you or not at the very core of your being.

Not at the core. What we call "Will" just is your being changing shape. Willing implies there's a "you" and a "target", when that's not the case at all (except conceptually, when thinking-about).

Otherwise it may seem crazy to change your beliefs and unjustified.

But of course, our beliefs are all around us, so that (once understood) is justification enough.

Q: It's momentum and occasional intervention. Our pal Neville had that susses: Deterministic paths occasionally re-directed by conscious overwriting.
I don't buy it. That's not how my will functions at all. The closest I get to determinism is habit, but habit isn't 100% deterministic for one, and two, occasionally because volition is after all global, a huge shift happens that's not just a minor adjustment.
Willing implies there's a "you" and a "target",
Absolutely not! That's where you go wrong. It doesn't imply that at all. That's just how you conceptualize your will right now. Eventually you'll see that's not true, because volition completely transcends personal identity. That's why I keep saying you aren't really George, just play one on TV. And I do mean YOU, so in some sense there is a person, but it's not the kind of person you think. Not necessarily a human and not even necessarily a social person, but still a person with choices to make.

I think you are too focussed on Will as "continuous manipulation", or that's how it seems. How tiring and effortful! Take a step back and see the imagery of the moment unfold, and as the play proceeds, give occasional directorial instructions. The focus is on enjoyment, and occasional enhancement. (This is choicelessless + creation.) Kick off the domino sequence, put your finger in the way if you want it to topple elsewhere.

A power that requires constant maintenance, moment by moment effortful re-creation, is no power at all. Will as you describe it does imply separation and strain. Grasping. Fighting. Desperation.

Personal identity is an occasional thought plus a persistent sensation. Both are just "object content" within experience.

What do you mean by "too"? Like overly? Who is the judge? On what basis is such a judgement delivered?

I am the judge! :-)

My thinking about will is so different from yours that you should not make any assumptions about my will based on yours. So don't say my way is effortful.

That's how you make it sound! Exactly as if you are trying to overcome something. Destroy something and overcome something. But there are no such things. Perhaps it is just your phrasing.

So, I don't see volition as effort at all, simply a decision, a seeding and a redirecting.

You're not powerful enough. You're like a flea on my back George. You telling me to stop or do this or that is lunacy. You can keep doing it if it pleases you, but I see all such effort on your part as something akin to spitting at the moon or batting at the space. It's pointless. You have no authority or charisma in my mind. So the only way you could get inside is through a good argument. If you don't have a good argument, you really don't have any other open pathway.

Hmm. I think you misunderstand the understanding that I am assuming. It is you who are speaking from a partial personal perspective.

Of course I am speaking from my perspective, which like all perspectives has to be partial due to its exclusionary quality. I never deny this.

The key word was "personal". That is your error. You are still identified, still fighting the world, keeping it separate, but not realising.

Making a distinction between personal or other kinds of perspectives is pointless.

It is vital in terms of communication, the context changes the meaning.

How can you fight your own habits? They are you. You can change and become, but you can't fight yourself - that implies and persists the same patterns. Fighting recreates the foe.

And if you are fighting yourself, you are fighting the world. The world is just a mirage arising from the contours of your own memory traces, your own habitual structure, as subtle patterns in awareness. Freedom is the ability to change one's shape, to shift one's contours, to temporary or ongoing effect; there is no other freedom.

For example...

Seems like rather a long way round. Why don't you just change the subtle underlying pattern directly

If you see the world as being an internal image that's true

Where is "internal"?

"Freedom is the ability to change one's shape, to shift one's contours, to temporary or ongoing effect; there is no other freedom." Of course.

This is fundamental. There is "what is the nature of experience" (patterns in and of awareness) and this (how the patterns and so the world can be changed). When changing one's shape, one might feel resistance and call this "effort", but that is a sign of the stability or depth of an existing pattern, coupled with your identification with it.

What's directly and what's indirectly? I don't know how to make a distinction like that. On the basis of what is such a distinction made?

You're talking about messing around with the mirage; just change the landscape! It's like trying to change the movie by drawing on the screen or talking over the soundtrack. Just update the script!

To create or amend habits by generating experiences, thereby leaving trace memories, is the long way round. Just change the traces. On effort: it's not a good thing, or not. One shouldn't aim to create the experience of effort particularly; it's just a byproduct.

The thing is I am the director and the actor. I can't just change the script. I have to then read the new script, memorize it, and learn to act it properly to my own satisfaction. This isn't a lazy process.

Nope, you are the whole production. You don't need to do any of that, just adopt the new form. Change your nature, see it unfold.

It's not long. In fact, being in a hurry is the long way around. Where's your patience? I am ready to do this for 10 aeons.

That's your choice, so that's what you'll get. You've chosen that story! Think I'll enjoy my more straight-for-the-goodies fun.

Nobody makes effort for effort's sake, jeez. But if you say effort is a byproduct, you're saying it's not important to focus on it in your attention at all, ever. That I disagree with.

People do exactly that all the time, thinking effort is causal. Why focus on effort at all? Attend to the desired form, that's it.

Because when one attends to the desired form, there is resistance in the form of fear, habit, etc.

So what? Just accept that and continue. If you want to remember things, insert that fact directly. It's a good example, and does work.

...

TriumphantGeorge, a question: in that article it is implored that we cease the will of creation for a moment. How does one do this?
Edit: Daily releasing exercise / meditation?
Edit again, nvm I feel like I've got it.

Yeah, just... stop.

POST: The depths of the skeptical mind.

[POST]

I thought i would share this experience while it's still fresh in my head because i am still baffled by the oddness of it. I was having a dream that i was walking around my neighborhood, and i realized i don't remember how i got here. I thought to myself, is this is a dream? It feels pretty real right now. So i decided to see if i could levitate and sure enough i could. I levitated a good 20-50 feet or so up into a tree and decided to stay up there. On a nearby branch in like a birds nest or something there was a black flask nearby. Curious in this state i decided to see if this liquor would give me a buzz. But just before i began to drink this voice out of nowhere came into my head and was like "dont drink out of that it might be poison, you cant be totally sure whether or not we are awake right now". And i'm like REALLY MIND? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I just levitated 20 feet up into a tree and you are still doubtful as to whether or not this is a dream.
But i have had other occurrences like this as well, like if im pretty sure im in a lucid dream and i want to strip off my clothes, sometimes ill get this sense of "this might not be a dream, you don't want to get arrested". But there was still some legitimate doubt as i didn't do any levitating or nothing before hand, it was just a strong feeling that i was in a dream. But after levitating and having that voice go in, it really made me realize the lengths the skeptical mind will go to try to cling on to a materialist worldview. Maybe it has to do with the human part that wants to retain its survival, and maybe that has to do with that fear of dissolving boundaries and the comfort of consensus. This experience also shedded light on why materialists can take hard psychedelics and still remain materialists afterwards, the skeptical mind can always find excuses because skepticism can destroy any idea in ones mind because it is a kind of weapon, but the problem is that it can disprove truths as well as falsehoods if applied too liberally.
anyway, that's all i have to say for now.

[END OF POST]

This experience also shedded light on why materialists can take hard psychedelics and still remain materialists afterwards, the skeptical mind can always find excuses because skepticism can destroy any idea in ones mind because it is a kind of weapon, but the problem is that it can disprove truths as well as falsehoods if applied too liberally.

One of the major problems is that people literally and directly experience their viewpoints as true. The concepts and beliefs you hold actively shape your experiences, because they "snap to" the subtle structures of your/the mind, which then further embeds those viewpoints in a feedback loop (like this).

If you believe materialism (or just assume it, unwittingly - belief is not a choice usually) then you'll experience that as your truth. Things that don't fit in with it either won't be noticed, or will be explained away, or quickly forgotten. Only aspects which fit in with your established concepts seem to be clear and in focus.

On the upside, once you are introduced to new ideas and entertain them a little bit, those ideas will infect your experience and you will have confirmation of them. However, any doubt at all will revert you back to your previous, more established worldview - in much the way you describe. "Hey, I'm levitating! But, y'know, better watch out I don't get arrested for being too noisy in this quiet neighbourhood."

I cannot fully understand how you reached the conclusion about scepticism destroying any idea from materialists being materialists (and I see that as a bit of generalization, I mean do you know what's in their mind?). Also what I saw in your dream was a subconsciousness trying to protect you. Any connection with what's happening in you waking life?
Note: Thanks for sharing these thoughts. It means that it made a great impact to you. This is why the bigger the impact the bigger the "cruelty" of the other point of view it needs. Or I am just being a skeptic ;)

What is that subconsciousness do you think?

just his inner self

And where is that?

it's part of him. I feel a circle coming up.

Me too :-)

So, where is he?

I am afraid I don't know his address...

No. 1 Infinite Street, Everywhere City, Entirety NA.

Does that mean that I can visit him even from my sofa under my bed cover or does it mean that I am himself as well?

Yes and no.

Both he and you live at the same address, always, although you suffer from the illusion that you occupy different rooms.

POST: Minimalism and Renunciation.

[POST]

Every state of mind has its costs and its benefits.
The human state of mind, the humaning game, has its benefits. You get the experience of striving as a human with seemingly real pressures and potentially get the rewards and joys that success in the human world has to offer – love, sex, art/media, science, tasty food, drugs, communication with other free beings, etc.
However, in order to have these experiences and to have them seem real, certain sacrifices had to be made. You had to trick yourself into believing that you were powerless over the vast majority of reality. That you can only influence reality indirectly via pulling the puppet strings of your body. That the body could make very real demands upon you. Etc.
If you want to have human experiences, then you will want to keep the cognitive structure that generates the human world. The cognitive structure is the tool you use to have the pleasant conventional experiences that you seek (at the cost of the unpleasant conventional experiences you flee from).
If your imagination remains limited to casting for sex, money, a better job, human status, etc. with your magick, then you probably won't be interested in what I have to say. However, if your aspirations range from lucidity to telepathy and telekinesis to deification, then what I have to say may be of interest to you.
All of the latter values require an abandonment of your humanity in some way. What do I mean? Humans aren't telepathic or telekinetic – this violates the human idea of an external world that you and other beings interact with only through your limited bodies. You're going to have to start thinking about the metaphysics of other people's minds and the physical world differently as well as the relationship your mind has to those minds and that world. Thinking in these other ways is indicative of insanity in the conventional world, because you're supposed to be an ordinary human. If you could read and influence the minds of others, where is the boundary between their mind and your mind? Similarly, if you could influence a physical object, where is the boundary between your mind and the object? How could there be other people, a physical world, or even a 'you' in the limited sense you're used to thinking about yourself? These are inhuman questions, and they eventually result in a total abandonment of the cognitive metaphysical structures that keep the human world in balance (e.g. strict laws of physics, strict self v. other), which is what then allows for your magical influence.
Even if you successfully develop some psychic power by changing your cognition of reality somewhat, as long as you desire the things that require a conventional, human frame of mind, your powers will never move beyond simple magick tricks that make your human life a little easier – tricks that can be written off as coincidence or as potentially explicable by physicalist science in the future. The reason is very simple. Even if you've learned how to leave humanity and live in new realms, if you are committed to, attached to, and desire mundane things then the idea of permanently abandoning Earth for these other planes of existence will be deeply disconcerting. You'd eventually return to Earth (or something like it) and thoughtlessly reenter the human realm as you focus on attaining material desires with your limited body, rather than expanding your psychic powers and chasing after things that don't require active self-limitation and lead to self-forgetfulness.
What I'm saying is that your human attachments are the chains that bind you to this world. Human ambitions allow very little room for direct influence by your will. A being with god-like powers would eventually find itself in our position if it had strong desires for these human experiences that require self-limitation. After a period of restraint, even the memory of one's old abilities disappears. Worldly cravings will weaken your paranormal abilities and subject you to the suffering of the human world. Thus, the stronger your rejection of things that require a human frame of mind, the stronger your magick can become.
To become a Lord Mage, you must renounce your humanity.
There are many facets of the abandonment of your humanity. I think most of it can be summed up in terms of status, possessions, and the body.
Status. I think icons of status are relatively obvious. Icons of wealth, of attractiveness, of membership in certain social groups, of image, etc. These earn you all the perks a conventional life has to offer – you get the most play and the least work and the most respect by other humans. These demonstrate your success at humaning and range from sex, money, cars, clothing, ornamentation, homes, precious metals, art...
Possessions and the possessive mindset. The whole idea of material things belonging to individuals. Respecting the concept of material possessions and thinking of objects in terms of mine and not mine. Having a responsibility to maintain those possessions to use to your worldly ends (you've got to keep the house in good condition, the car, the electric razor, the lawn mower, the computer, the books, the driver's license, etc etc etc) and protecting them from damage by environmental conditions or by other individuals seeking to disrespect the possessive mindset and “steal” your stuff. Possessions are mostly either status/image symbols, are directly depended upon for pleasure, or serve a functional purpose in maintaining your life and hobbies in the world.
The body is the tool of action and expression in a world like this. The body seemingly has certain needs for it to be in ideal useful condition. Grooming, hygiene, food, water, breathing, sickness and healing, pain and injuries, medicine, the 5 sensations, heat and cold protection, etc
I think that the more you start to abandon status, the easier it is to relax possessions. As you relax your hold on possessions and status, it becomes easier to relax your hold on the body. It also works the other way. So, in a way these three are connected.
I could talk a lot about the details about what symbols of status and possessions rule your lives and how they can all be easily overcome if you decide to, but I think each of you knows for yourself where you're at in that process and what needs to be worked on. Also, you can learn not just tolerance to social rejection or non-possessiveness. You can learn total tolerance to non-eating, to non-sleeping, to cold and heat, to sickness, to pain, to disembodied states, to astral realities, etc. These are the abilities that will really help you break away from the human world – that will one day help you cope with humaning withdrawal symptoms. But these tolerance take time. Besides being annoying addictions on their own, status and possessions take up time that could be used on developing one's magickal powers, developing lucidity, or attaining liberation. Hell, even if you don't want to devote all your time to multi-life concerns, status and possessions take up time that could be used for adventures and exploration and travel in this life.
As for me, I am only holding onto a show of status until my student loans are paid off (hopefully in three years if my plans work out). Then, I intend to live in a van and work on giving up possessions and learning to live ultra-minimally until I can live with only a backpack of stuff and travel and live like that. After that, there are so many options that I have considered. It is incredible. I expect my life will be a mix of travel, adventure, and spiritual practice after that. I imagine the characters I liked and most wanted to be when I watched TV and played RPGs – unattached adventurers. That seems like a good place to get to for now and to then learn so much more about myself, my powers, and my world.
I decided to eventually move into a van quite a while ago. Recently, I became confident that I could eventually give even that up. And then I realized I might be able to go further than I'd considered after I read about an individual who isn't part of a religious order who hasn't used money in any way in over 10 years.
While he in some ways still identifies as a conventional human, he's managed to abandon possessions and money in a way that I've only heard of in ancient religious texts.
https://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
I don't know about you all, but I find this to be an inspiration.
So what do you think of all of this? How do you relate to what I've posted here? What are your spiritual plans and your plans for your human life? How focused are you on renunciation v. other practices? What do you believe and what are your values?

[END OF POST]

What, no yachts then? ;-)

• Experiences

I can relate to much of this, and have experimented a little at both ends (being rich and being less so, being status-heavy and not). I've also experimented with letting "TriumphantGeorge" be moved by the background flow of consciousness, and at other times taking direct control of "TriumphantGeorge".

For me, life is about experiences. It can be fun to experience having a Ferrari in the garage, for instance, so long as you don't think you own an "object". What you "have" isn't made of "matter", it is made of "eyes and fingers". In other words, what you have is access to a certain experience without latency.

• Destruction and Emergence

It's relatively easy to switch to an impersonal experience: Just change the context of your attention to be the open, dark, silent, present, thought-free background upon which the patterns of experience arise. As you say, though, I think it can take some time for the structures that have accumulated - become enfolded into your conscious space - to dissolve. You can do this with an "overwriting" exercise, to bring your daily experience closer to transparency. This aim surely isn't necessarily to remove those experiences, but rather to no longer be bound to them.

When I read of some people's efforts in this direction, I've sometimes thought that maybe: It is perhaps a mistake to confuse destroying your current experience, with becoming non-attached to it. The former doesn't lead to the latter, necessarily, and is not even required for the latter. In other words: Just by lying down each day and releasing our hold, the apparent world will naturally realign to our true nature. No grand physical acts of renunciation required.

I still think there's nothing wrong with yachts, so long as you understand what they are. :-)

• Maximum Power!

If you really want full power, right now - basically, a reset - then suicide while persisting attention on the background is probably the way to go. Followed by something like the "sparkles" method for OBEs. Since you get that experience in the end anyway though, I never saw the hurry.

If you do the man-in-a-van thing, or the wandering nomad, what do you think is going to be cooler about it? Not a challenge, just interested. I find it totally fascinating. I'm not sure that you have to zero-out your current 'dream contents' to have everything you want though, but maybe it can make it come quicker?

...

Great response, thanks.

Of course having a Ferrari can be fun. But there are two things that come with having a Ferrari.

I agree with where you're coming from in general. That's why I say that usually we are seeking experiences rather than status. Because status experiences, such as "ownership", are conceptual, and often come with additional experiences that aren't desirable.

Ferraris: My answer generally is that you wouldn't want to experience ownership at all, unless you had so much money that it didn't matter. Rather, the experience you want is using a Ferrari when you want it (and not having one when you don't), so surely you'd just "wish" for some sort of arrangement that gives you just that.

Aside: I used to live in an apartment block where a few people had expensive, high performance cars in the basement garage. They'd take them out for a spin periodically. Thing is, those cars aren't designed that way; they need to be constantly run and tuned, and kept in decent environments. Almost every time those guys took them out, they'd have to get the car jumped into motion, or it would have some sort of problem while they were taking their girlfriend on a trip to show off to her parents, or it'd have to be off for retuning before the trip. To be a member of a car club would make much more sense for these people - ah, but then they wouldn't have the "status" of "ownership".

This maybe fits more with what you're saying.

But... why not use magick to have Ferraris and yachts and a cool house and them not to have onerous obligations? Why not use magick to have an income stream that doesn't have burdens attached?

Perhaps... you are not being ambitious enough? ;-)

That's the thing. I see problems and conflicts between my present lifestyle and my future ambitions...

Basically, to be free of the influence of external powers (and internal powers).

I can visit... hermits (if they want to chat for a bit)

Can I just say, separately, that this is a fantastic line! :-)

Anyway, you've answered my next question which is: you seem to be focused on freedom-from rather than freedom-to. In my experience, the former takes care of itself, if you concentrate on the latter. (Magick works best by somewhat ignoring your present circumstances, and concentrating on the circumstances you desire?)

You have a student loan. Are you using magick to 'delete' that yet? Or are you going to slog through the three years?

That vs. sleeping in the same room in the same house with the same neighbors for several years, staring at screens, working for some jackass boss for the bulk of my life, having to deal with conventional humans's ignorant bullshit all the time, etc.

Thing is, in my viewpoint, you don't need to physically do anything about "human's ignorant bullshit"; it only impinges on your life to the extent you focus upon it. Like a dream where you fixate on something, then re-focus and it dissolves into the background. It was never really "there" anyway. You were just experiencing your own conceptual momentum rendered into apparent objects.

Personally, I'd least go for a Matthew McConaughey-style Airstream existence. :-)

“All your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain. It was all the same thing. It was all the same dream that you had inside a locked room. That dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams , there is a monster at the end of it.”
— Rust Cohle [Matthew McConaughey], True Detective (HBO)

Yeah, but I have this huge commitment and attachment to the material/external world. There are other people. There is a world. And my conception is that they are relatively static and fixed, though the rules can be bent a little. This is what I presently believe. If I believed that this world was a dream deep in my bones, then I would destroy it and build a different one. Ordinary people treat each other and myself like shit, and they are generally ignorant fools. Problem is, I'm still dependent on this body and I'm currently deeply dependent on them to take care of my body. Thus, I have to deal with their shit all the time. It feels like 70% of my life is consumed by my human job, my human interactions that are necessary to get what I need from people, my human chores, etc.

So much of this perhaps results from your current ongoing attachment to the material world, while your ambition is to be unattached to this, as a way of realising your potential as God. However, becoming God will be a case of recognition, not becoming. If you are not God now, you can't become God. So your path is about reaching this conclusion and accepting it, surely.

All the rest - Ferraris, money, desires - doesn't really matter much, just images in consciousness. They're here because, as God, you have implicitly created them. And your sense of limitation, the same. I think you might just be putting off the inevitable. How are you going to transition?

I repeat: If you are ever going to be God, then it must already be so, simply concealed from you, by You. You must in fact already be the whole world, and not just /u/AesirAnatman. There are no other people, and no /u/AesirAnatman, except as fragments of You.

As has been said elsewhere, the truth is that you are a vast space of consciousness, in which all experience - this world - arises. The content of this space is a direct result of your intention. All content - thought, body sensation and movement, surrounding landscape - is a response to the momentum of your intentions.

For as long as you act based upon the assumptions and concepts of a material world of limitation, your results will occur bound to those assumptions and concepts. But really, you are already free.

When you do get around to destroying the world, building a different one, how will it differ? (Given that your current world is like it is, because you are like you are: it is a reflection of you.)

What I want is to become conscious of my manifestation of the apparently external world and reclaim control over it in the same way that I am conscious of and control my manifestation of my body and thoughts.

Got ya. The thing is, as you point out later, you don't usually directly control even your body and thoughts; there is already the momentum of previous intentions. Rather you 'amend the direction' that things are going in. The larger world within you has the same problem: habits have been established, have momentum/inertia, so these days very few manifestations seem 'direct'.

I agree with you. But I am not conscious of my intentions. I don’t pay attention to them and am deeply habituated along certain mental pathways.

Yeah. It's a major difficulty, actually. You usually can't be aware of your intentions, because they are first-cause, you can only infer them. Even if you intend deliberately, what's actually happening is that you're experiencing a result, the "deliberately"; the intention already occurred.

That's why people tend to work on their assumptions and beliefs, on deleting the 'structure' they have accumulated. "Eliminating habituation", you said nicely. Or hold on to a "feeling" that corresponds to their desire, so that experience falls in line.

Magick would be a much more common power – similar to the Force, except more powerful and somewhat more common. That’s some of what I would do if I were able to consciously reconstruct reality, at least at first.

I think magick must have been more common in "the past". Our shift over the last few hundred years has been dramatic. Once people imagine the world to be a certain, other way, it tends to behave accordingly, annoyingly.

"Release all your desires from the internal, so that they are forced to manifest in the external", is an approach I've been playing with.

The problem of commitments and habits is a secondary problem. The primary problem is ignorance.

I see those as the same hurdle to overcome? You are right that we "ignore... the vast majority of our being". We attend to the surface appearances, "the show", and forget the script, the internal from which the world is "pushed out" into the external.

On intentions: I think you infer your intentions from the thoughts and events that occur to you. But then, having realised where things are going, you can redirect?

That's why people tend to work on their assumptions and beliefs, on deleting the 'structure' they have accumulated. "Eliminating habituation", you said nicely. Or hold on to a "feeling" that corresponds to their desire, so that experience falls in line. Can you explain more?

Coincidentally, I was just having a conversation earlier, see here [POST: Continuity (/r/Psychonauts)].

Experiences leave traces which influence other experiences, and so on. Uninterrupted, your world (internal and external) deterministically unfolds in whichever direction its going, in alignment with your enfolded beliefs and expectations. Unless you update those beliefs and expectations.

How do we do this, how do we detect it? If your experience is a result of your 'enfolded structure', then you can't experience it directly. But, your "feeling of how things are", your "felt sense" does contain this. It's like a global summary of the structure of your world.

To change the direction of your experience, you must change the underlying structure, which you do by asserting new facts, and having them felt to be true. Subsequent content will then fall in line. (The content of your experience is transparent and illusory, what you do with that simply doesn't matter.)

EDIT: I still struggle with wording this "intention" stuff well. So, please indulge my attempt and bounce back so I can clarify, get my thinking better on it!

Maybe some intentions are inferred. But I think many are directly recognized. For example, if I start paying attention I notice that my body is sitting right now - thus, it is my intention to manifest my body as sitting. My body is typing at the computer in response to your comment - thus, it is my intention to manifest a response to your comment.

I'm not so sure about this. I think that there is a "momentum" to events, to thoughts and actions and the environment, that continues deterministically until we use our "free will" to interfere are redirect it. At which point it becomes a deterministic chain pointing in a new direction.

Further, it was my unconscious intention to be bouncing my leg, but when I noticed/realized what I was doing, I was able to decide/intend to keep my leg still.

I'd have that as an example of interfering, but perhaps not even. This just happened automatically as a set of experiences one after the other. Your attention spontaneously moved to your bouncing leg, which then stopped, and your attention moved again... and so on.

Would you provide an example of how intentions could be inferred?

In the same way as character. Your idea of who someone is, is a bundle of experiences of that person, from which you infer what that person "is like".

Intention - as "first cause" - is a movement or reshaping of consciousness of itself, by itself. Like a blanket folding itself, or a pool of water rippling itself. You cannot find the "cause" of the fold or the ripple, only the "results": the folds and the ripple. You infer that the folds or ripples were "intended", but you cannot find the "action" that led to the "result", because they are the same.

One the "first cause" has happened, the ripples continue in a deterministic fashion, the pattern propagates automatically, until another ripple is created by "first cause", and so on. In this case, we don't "intend" everything we appear to do - all those appearance are result, patterns in consciousness. Those results could be called our "intention" (as in, what we meant to happen), but the intending itself is occasional, and cannot be experienced. Some people never intend. They are born, and they just play our in alignment with their initial nature or direction. Others constantly interfere, suppressing the spontaneous movements and responses and become disconnected and separate, internal vs external. The happy balance is to occasionally decide what you want to happen, and intend it (by declaration/acceptance or a variation there of), and then let things be.

Note: If you have a thought "I will do this" or "this will happen" and then the action occurs, the thought didn't cause the action; the thought isn't the intending. It's just another result.

TL;DR: "Intending" is a particular thing, consciousness changing itself. It is not the same as an action.

Ok, I understand. Deciding to manifest new beliefs and thus altering reality according to our will. Magick.

Yep, basically. You can "insert a belief/fact" that a particular event will happen, or you can "insert a belief/fact" that is more general, that the world now 'works a certain way' from now on.

I've come to think, though, that the best approach is first to absolutely let go of all control, of all hold on yourself and the environment. To accept everything just as it is, as an experience, with no backing or belief structure. From there, with a minimum of "enfolded forms", your assertions can take maximum effect, because they are no longer filtered in the same way.

Give it all up, to get it all.

Which a few texts make reference to actually: let everything go, to gain everything; destroy yourself to gain the universe; the meek shall inherit the Earth.

I think that momentum isn't objectively out there. We believe that the mind has a sort of momentum, and so it manifests that way.

Yes, I agree with this. The problem is where we draw the line, for convenience, when describing this. Will try to pin it down a bit more later.

I think it is possible to manifest a reality with no habit, with no momentum. Instantaneously manifesting every new whim and impulse regardless of what was manifested previously.

I think this is indeed possible, and as we relieve ourselves of what I will call "enfolded structure" then more things can happen and by more direct narrative routes (or even no route at all).

Hmm. I don't think like this. I think everyone is always intending, but in different ways. Some people are mostly creatures of habit, living out the same basic lifestyles they have lived for many lifetimes.

So, this is where we need to clear things up. We probably don't differ, but we are using "intending" and "deciding" and "momentum" differently. I probably mean something more like "redirecting". Let me try and paint a picture and we'll see. I'll begin without using those words, and then try to reach definitions by the end.

Please excuse length!

The Experiential Mind-Space: Implicate & Explicate, Enfolding & Unfolding

1. The Structure of Experience

I'm going to assert that the structure of personal experience is something like this diagram.

We have an open 'mind-space' in which our experiences arise. Experiences leave traces, "structure" enfolded into the background, and that affects subsequent experiences, which tend to unfold by "snapping to" the pre-existing traces, and so on.

. . . unfolded experience (explicate) > enfolded traces (implicate) > unfolded experience (explicate) > . . .

So we have an "implicate" level (containing enfolded forms) and an "explicate" level (the unfolded objects you are experiencing at that moment).

At this point in the description we are completely passive. Experiences are simply happening to us, and over time the memory-traces are funnelling subsequent experiences into a stable form: call it "habits" or "regularities" or "laws" or whatever. Also, these correspond to "beliefs" and "expectations" and even "facts" - the same thing!

If the universe began with random noise, gradually it would evolve into a structured environment. The way dreams start, from hypnogogic sparkles and imagery, is like this. A while world is formed by itself without input.

(By experiences, I mean both sensory and thought, they're the same, and both leave traces in the implicate order. They differ only intensity. I'll pick up on that later.)

2. Momentum and Intention

What I've called conceptual momentum is basically just the fact that, left alone, patterns of experience become more and more established and have greater influence.

When I talk of "intention" what I mean is the decision to directly interrupt this process and redirect it. Of course, you might say that not interfering is itself an intention, but I want to be more specific about the term. Intention is the act of deliberately changing the enfolded structure of the "implicate" level. Having made these changes, the experiences that unfold at the "explicate" level will afterwards be aligned with the new "facts of the world'. We cannot affect the unfolded objects of the present moment directly - they are just mirages, completely transparent and without substance. All change must happen at the enfolded level.

The changes made to the implicate level might involve the insertion of a single event ("this will happen tomorrow") or a new state ("this is now true") or a new relationship ("thinking this means that this action will follow") or broader rule ("this always happens") or statement of identity ("I am like this").

However, in all cases we are simply changing the shape of the 'sand dunes' upon which the 'mirages' are formed.

3. The Mechanism of Change

The key to this is that there is only one mind-space. So just as spontaneous sensory experiences leave traces which affect future experience, so thought leaves traces which affect future experience.

Thinking of a particular image will tend to result in experience following those images, etc. However, this is not very powerful. What you want to do is change the 'global' structure at the implicate level, not just create particular instances. This is done by the additional sense: our "feel" of the world, our "direct knowing".

By creating the feeling of something being true, we adjust our enfolded structures to correspond to that fact. All magick - visualisation, ritual, etc - is simply an indirect way of generating that 'feeling of truth'. However, it can be done directly.

What "intention" really is, in fact, is the raw summoning of that "feeling of truth", of shifting your implicate structure directly into a new state that corresponds to the world you want to live in.

4. Overwriting Yourself with Empty Space

Finally, this leads to one of my favourite exercises. What we really want to do is open ourselves out from habitual paths of experience so that more things are possible, by the quickest route (or no route: instant manifestation). How to do, given the above?

Basically, we want to overwrite our enfolded structures, our implicate level, with open unstructured space - complete possibility. We do this by literally switching our focus to the background awareness, and asserting as fact and adopting the shape of no structure, of 'dream', of open space.

When we do this, we feel the 'push back' of existing structures. It is tempting to use effort to push through this, but that's a mistake. It's not actually 'push back' you are experiencing; rather you're just becoming more aware of the existing structures. Asserting something makes you intensely aware of the contrast between your current beliefs and the fact you are asserting. Persist, and the enfolded traces will dissolve; the implicate order will move towards the shape you are intending.

I think everyone is always intending, but in different ways.

I know what you mean by that. By my formulation above, I'd say that people are implicitly choosing to remain the same by not "redirecting" their path, because they don't update their "enfolded schema" as I've described. They are not actively intending therefore. Or worse: they are affecting it unwittingly by generating thoughts from ignorance! Mostly though, everyone is just experiencing the unfolding of their current direction, forever unadjusted.

Okay, that's my best attempt at describing my thinking so far. Keen for any input or disagreement, alternatives!

EDIT: Minor grammar tweaks, clarification of wording.

I believe it's possible to manifest in a way that doesn't create any habits.

I do too. By using absolutely no effort, we leave no traces. How to do this? Edit the structure of the implicate level, with no attempted forcing of the explicate.

Also, I don't think there's a sharp division between beliefs and experiences. That is, I'm not convinced there's a sharp division between the implicate level and the explicate level.

There isn't. In reality, they are single swirling intertwined process, like waves bouncing off waves. The explicate and implicate are both just patterns in consciousness, but the implicate level is the "timeless level" whereas the explicate level is the "unfolded now".

EDIT: And you are experiencing your beliefs directly all the time in terms of a subtle "background knowing-feeling". The ongoing sensory moment is really a shape-changing time-based aspect of time-less belief: they are really all one pattern.

I don't use the word intention the way you use it here because the implication is that relaxation is non-intentional

Because my definition is that "any change from the way things are going is an intentional act", that's not a problem for me. But in fact, you can find yourself going to lie down and relax, and it wasn't deliberately intended - in the sense that is just flowed from your current momentum. Everything that happens and everything you do is always just flowing from your current momentum. Unless you are constantly re-intending. Which would be a sign of a lack of faith, really.

what I was saying above about being able to manifest without creating habits or immediately drop all forms of conceptual momentum if I choose.

If you manifest by insert single-event facts into the implicate level (i.e. declare a truth, make a change at the non-sensory level) then you are not creating habits - you are "amending the blueprint" directly. So, you might think there'd be two ways to change a habit. If you keep performing an action, that will change a habit by gradually leaving a trace. Alternatively, you can reach into the structure of habits itself, and change it directly. Magick is about the latter.

EDIT: Can we avoid creating traces simply by deciding not to; by remaining in a "dropped, open state" at all times?

I think the manifestation of all of our beliefs (felt truths?), whether new or old, is intentional. But, I understand how your use of the word works in the perspective you have outlined here.

There's no good word really. The essence is "things continue in the direction they are going, in accordance with established habits, unless you use Will to edit your implicate level". You can say that all things that subsequently arise from a change in direction are "intentional" in that you chose the direction, but that's not how I've been using the word.

"Mostly though, everyone is just experiencing the unfolding of their current direction, forever unadjusted."
I don't like the way this and the whole deterministic language sounds. I think that people are living freely in the context of freely adopted commitments and habits.

This is where we differ, and I think it's very important to the idealist/non-dual/dream-like worldview. Once things are rolling in a certain direction, then your experience is deterministic. You are however free to intervene and redirect at any time, but often you won't. You will "have the experience of making choices" but you won't really be actively interfering in their occurrence. They "choose" how to practice, but really they are just acting consistently with their current direction.

They no more "choose" than they choose the beating of their heart and the flow of their blood and the growth of their fingernails. It's all happening from and in alignment with their "enfolded schema" at the implicate level. Acting consistently with one's Current Nature isn't a choice. The only true free will we have is to change our nature, and to stop interfering all the time (if we do that).

Neville Goddard had a stab at a similar world view. Just to give air to another way of wording it, here's a bit of cut-and-paste of the relevant passage in one of his books:

MANY persons, myself included, have observed events before they occurred; that is, before they occurred in this world of three dimensions. Since man can observe an event before it occurs in the three dimensions of space, life on earth must proceed according to plan, and this plan must exist else­where in another dimension and be slowly moving through our space.
If the occurring events were not in this world when they were observed, then, to be perfectly logical, they must have been out of this world. And whatever is there to be seen before it occurs here must be "Predetermined" from the point of view of man awake in a three-dimensional world.
Thus the question arises: "Are we able to alter our future?"
My object in writing these pages is to indicate possibili­ties inherent in man, to show that man can alter his future; but, thus altered, it forms again a deterministic sequence starting from the point of interference—a future that will be consistent with the alteration. The most remarkable feature of man's future is its flexibility. It is determined by his attitudes rather than by his acts. The cornerstone on which all things are based is man's concept of himself. He acts as he does and has the experiences that he does, because his concept of himself is what it is, and for no other reason. Had he a different concept of self, he would act differently.
A change of concept of self automatically alters his future: and a change in any term of his future series of exper-iences reciprocally alters his concept of self. Man's assumptions which he regards as insignificant pro­duce effects that are considerable; therefore man should revise his estimate of an assumption, and recognize its creative power.
All changes take place in consciousness. The future, although prepared in every detail in advance, has several out­comes. At every moment of our lives we have before us the choice of which of several futures we will choose.
── Excerpt from Out of this World, Neville Goddard

EDIT: Ever played with tulpas? I haven't , but this post was an interesting attempt do discuss "realness" while faltering on the subjective/objective bit: private truth vs public truth?

This is a tricky topic, and I'll try my best to not dance about it. In order to give a sufficient answer, we have to pull in a few premises.
First: Reality is subjective.
Each and every person has control over their definition of what is real and what is not. This is not to say that there doesn't exist some kind of publicly-observable universe; rather, I am saying that each person has control over their perception of what they say, they feel is real or not. These feelings have a special term; they are called qualia, and they are the mental representation of the sensations, from the most physically founded (such as "hot" or "cold") to the most symbolic (such as "weird" or "nice"). I posit that reality is defined by some form of qualia, some attribute of realness, that makes certain concepts (including, but not limited to, perceptual concepts) seem real. That is to say, you and you alone have control over what you find to be real.
Second: Truth is subjective.
What does it take for one to find something to be true or not true? Well, in the same way there is a qualia for reality, some property of realness, I posit that there's also a qualia/property of truth. In this case, we have a convenient name for the things that are assigned this quality: belief. In many communities, including scientific ones, belief has become a "dirty word" meaning something that is taken to be true without proper evidence or support, but in the way I use it, I intend it only to mean the things taken to be true (regardless of how they've come to be regarded as such).
(Note that I am not denying that there is probably also an objective, public truth, which both science and philosophy strive to find, but it is necessary for us to think of truths as categories of concepts, the representations, and not necessarily the referents of said concepts.)
Since belief is sufficient to establish a subjective truth, it follows that, if you believe something is real, it is real--to you. This is not to say that someone else cannot come about and deny that it is real, but, since this is your mind, you are the only person you need to prove the reality of anything to (in these cases).
The most tempting counter-argument would seem to be Russel's Teapot--if I were to claim that there were a teapot somewhere in orbit about the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars, the burden would be on me to prove it--even if I evasively claim that such a teapot can't be observed at present (for any particular reason). However, the existence of the teapot is a public truth, a truth that, if it were taken to be true, would affect everyone's experience, and not just that of the claimant (myself, in my wording). If I sincerely believed, without doubt, that there was indeed a dark-matter orbitting teapot, then that would be how it is with me, and I would find no fault in seeing it as true. (If I were so inclined, I might even look oddly upon those who didn't find such a teapot there.)
Again, we're dealing with the mind, not the universe. This is an odd realm where existences can be summoned by mere thought, where the rules of logic don't apply (where you can conceptualize the statement that is true and not true at the same time--there, you just thought of it), and where the law of the land is laid by belief, oriented by, and affecting, perception.
So, what of tulpae? What of these sentient "imaginary" friends? I could not expect you to believe, without any evidence, that I'm talked to by a stuffed snake, with whom I carry out my discourse. I have established, with my logic, that the mere act of believing that he is a sentient, independent being, is sufficient to make him a sentient, independent being in my subjective truth, but is he?
This is where science would indeed be useful, but it finds difficulty in exploring these areas. Let's start with a small exercise; don't skip to the end until you've performed the step you've read. It's really quite simple: 1. Think of someone you know fairly well; it doesn't matter who (friends, family, distant relatives, co-workers, etc.) 2. Think of what would happen if you encountered that person (wherever they would normally be) and asked them if they liked your hair. Could you think of the way they would react? Congratulations, you have predicted their behavior.
Now, here's the kicker: to whom did you direct the question?
In reality, the question doesn't matter. The environment doesn't matter. Your choice of person doesn't matter, aside from the fact that it has to be someone you know well. You possess some concept, some model of their behavior that you used to predict how they would react to that environment. I call such a conceptual entity a simulant.
For the sake of brevity, I'll wrap this up. I hold that tulpae are simulants--but a special kind of simulant, or perhaps their own simulant, that is not modelled on the behavior of any physically manifested person, but of some subconsciously-created model that satisfies what it means to be a person, subjectively. The host, the primary consciousness, also no longer has, or exercises, control over the tulpa's environment. It becomes independent simply because the host believes it so.
I have ommited a great deal on topic like what it means to be conscious, or what it is like to have an identity, because that would require significantly more discourse, which would really only be appealing to the philosophers among you :P
── Grissess, on "We are /r/tulpas,creators of sentient imaginary companions. Ask us anything!" (/r/AMA/)

...

By relaxation and effort I meant not physical relaxation or effort, but mental relaxation or effort – I think what I'm referring to here is akin to what you are calling flowing with momentum v. re-intending.

Yes. They're probably related though: physical tension (being made of mind too) probably gets in the way of the other.

I think this is what I'm trying to say along the lines that you think in. Basically, we don't have to maintain stable traces (what I call habits, I think) and only adjust those maintained/stable traces when we manifest making deliberate decisions.

Right!

I think that all choices and free interventions and redirections are in a sense unfolding expressions of intent/will similar to the way that habits are unfolding expressions of intent/will.

So, this is a tricky area. Can we run over it a few times?

I'm think that there are two parts:

• When I "make a decision", that is a bit of "thought theatre" where I appear to mull things over. Really, that's just stuff happening along existing lines. I'm not actually intervening in the path.
• When I "redirect", I am actively "changing my shape" or changing my nature such that subsequent manifestations will be in line with that.

Now, I will always make a choice that is in line with my Nature - so that is deterministic - however, the options that appear to me do so creatively and cannot be predetermined - so that is non-deterministic. (That's why we are free.)

Tulpas

Never felt the urge, but came across the topic and found it fascinating. Particularly the idea that our own personality "in our heads" could be classed as just "the first tulpa", spontaneously created as a response to interactions in childhood. What you "really are" is the aware space behind that; "you" are just an experience you're having.

Identifying with one "tulpa" or another is arbitrary. So people could create a new tulpa, and then shift their identification from their default personality to this. (Probably not recommended. Who wants to become a toy stuffed snake for the rest of their life? ;-)

I think that you are the path. I think that making a decision comes in context of thinking, imagining, and contemplating. That relationship is intentional - it's a manifestation of your will.

The 'thoughts that appear' are in line with your 'underlying Will' - let's call it your current nature. But you do not deliberately choose them or control the process. It's just an experience.

When I'm walking on a trail and I come to a fork, I'm not just responsible for the first step I take down one of the forks. I can always stop, turn around, wander into the woods, whatever I want to do. Every step is intentional and my responsibility. Similarly, every thought, action, and decision is intentional and my responsibility.

Basically, when you do intervene, you can say that subsequent events are your responsibility and that by making an intervention at some point, you "intended" the path that resulted - because you never interrupted it.

We're saying the same thing, it's just that I'm emphasising that it is very rare that we actually decide/act. Mostly we just experience the unfolding results of our current path.

• Your world unfolds deterministically from its current point.
• However, you can "intervene" at any moment to change its direction, to set it on a different path. (Other words for "intervene" might be to "re-direct" or "intend" or "decide". However, most words have non-deliberate-action meanings too, so it can be confusing.)
• The fact that you can intervene at any point means that you are responsible for what occurs, and could be said to have "intended" the outcomes even though you didn't consciously choose the details of those outcomes.

I don't think we have an essential nature. If we have a nature, it is infinite freedom. No choice is deterministic, it is volitional.

Our essential nature is wide open unstructured space, yes. However, from very early in our experience we accumulate "patterns". Probably from our acquisition of a body structure as a foetus onwards, perhaps even earlier in the form of some 'felt structure' from simply having a presence in the world.

What people call "True Will" or "True Nature" is really the structure or pattern we've inherited simply by appearing in (or as) a world such as this. Further patterns get laid on top. Stripping the secondary patterns returns us to our natural place as a being-of-this-world. Stripping that back, leads us to absolute open freedom.

If we have a nature, it is infinite freedom. No choice is deterministic, it is volitional. Even if it is in line with my presently maintained commitments and habits, it is still intentional.

Hopefully, we've got to the bottom of that earlier in this reply? If not, tell me.

Deterministic is a word generally used to refer to the idea that something is externally determined and out of control. Unless you mean that I determine those choices.

I mean "deterministic" more in the philosophical/scientific sense. I mean that, once a path has been set in motion, it will follow a cause-effect narrative just like dominoes falling down. This will continue until a conscious entity intervenes and redirects the flow to a different path. Most people do not make interventions; their choices are simply experiences along the same path.

Unless you mean that I determine those choices.

It's a tricky area.

We don't determine the options but we choose which option to follow. What saves us is that there is a creative aspect: At any point (once you are free from being a particular "person") you can summon fresh, creative options to choose from - options that could not be predicted in advance, direct from the infinite creative fountain of background awareness.

That is where we get our real freedom. Freedom to choose amongst the options we see is one level of freedom - freedom to create new options that could not be predicted is a whole different level. (Obviously, the new options come from 'the whole universe' rather than 'the personality', so it's a matter of contribution. All options come from 'structure' of one sort or another.)

[On the "first tulpa":] I think this is a fascinating idea, a great point I never thought about before. I'd be interested if you wrote out your thoughts on this in more detail and made a post.

I'm trying to tie together pattern formation, "learning", personalities and world formation at the moment. If I get it sounding reasonable and coherent, I'll be doing a post on it definitely. I'd like to follow the full story from empty space to randomness to patterns to structure to world, and the implications for "me", "the world" and for "magick".

This would involve nailing the above stuff in terms of language too (which is the problem I/we have more than anything, rather than the actual content of our ideas).

EDIT: Lots of people play with the free will vs determinism thing (see here for someone who even does the dominoes metaphor). You can short-circuit it by saying: "I have the freedom to intervene according to my own interests, based on the information available to me, and that's good enough." It then becomes about how much information you have, and whether you have a "gap between impulses" which lets you intervene - which is where freedom to summon options and choose between them lies, and is a matter of (dis-)identification with mind, body and (re-)identification with awareness.

...

Related thoughts, that occur to some people when they have expanded insight: If we've got it all figured out, with absolute power, what's the point in going on?

I'm excited that you posted this because I had an intensely similar (if not a little darker) experience on mushrooms. It was my first time, and there was one guy (sober) telling me that I was literally creating my reality and could experience whatever I wanted. His tone was not that of new-agey speculation, but of knowledgable certainty. We would talk about music, and a guy would ride by on his bike and ring his bell an abnormally large number of times. We talked about girls and two girls came up and introduced themselves to us. His message was, if you want it, believe it will happen, then it will.
Later, I'm upstairs at this girls house, she had just gotten out of the shower. I should preface this with please do not try this at home**. I walk up to her while she's in a towel in her bathroom and give her a hug from behind. She dropped her towel exposing her naked self to me and let me feel her breasts. After holding her for a moment, I walked off in amazement thinking: "holy shit he was right, none of this is real, it is essentially a dream, if I believe it, it happens."
I walked back downstairs to confront the guy who told me this. He's laughing, enjoying my dumbfounded confusion of how to handle the situation. I begin to get scared. If I'm Neo, who is this guy? Then everyone goes upstairs and we read Shel Silversteins "The Missing Piece." If you don't know it, it's about a pac-man-esque circle who rolls around trying to find his missing piece so he can be a whole circle. There was a very profound feeling while we all sat around to read this childrens story book - like I was being told a story that was a metaphor for something of ultimate importance. It turns out that the circle finds its missing piece in the end, becoming whole and entirely satisfied, before realizing that was paradoxically the most unsatisfying experience it had ever had. He much preferred the thrill of finding the missing piece. All the while this guy is looking at me nodding, as if to say, you should be paying attention to this.
I'm struggling with reality at this point, not sure if I can even consider what's happening to be real. I realized that having god powers meant complete control, complete control meant no free agency for others, no free agency meant no one was real. I then had visions of my family as puppets who only did my bidding. This scared me beyond expression. I felt very alone. I asked one of the people there if I would ever be able to go back to the way things were. She asked me if that's what I wanted. I said yes, and she says "then it will." Sure enough, I fell asleep, and like dorothy waking up from the Wizard of Oz, all the craziness had disappeared. All the people there were back to being real, and the guy who had been my Morpheus for the evening was back to being a regular guy.
──3man , "Ego death from Mushroom causes Instantaneous Manifestation" (/r/Psychonauts)

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.

Q:[Deleted]

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.

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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?

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?