TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 25)

POST: If we are all God...

Not having a belief system makes it incredibly hard to set up any meaningful goals and pursue them.

This is difficult. After much messing about, and playing with 'subjective idealism' (dream-world) stuff and so on, I figured that if almost everything is arbitrary than what matters is what I am experiencing. So goals should be able the experiences you want to have, rather than things and 'achievements'. And the way to set experiences as goals is to spend regular time imagining them from a 1st person perspective, summoning the feeling of already having the experience - a la the old Neville Goddard 'adopt the feeling of the wish fulfilled approach (retro here [http://www.prayertheartofbelieving.com/]).

EDIT: This conversation reminds me of an experiment blogger Steve Pavlina tried, where he adopted the belief of a 'subjective dreamworld' and tried it out, with various results [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/09/hacking-reality-subjective-objectivity/]. There was a three part Q&A in response to readers [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/subjective-reality-qa/] and related articles [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/your-own-private-universe/] vs lucid dreaming [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/09/subjective-reality-vs-solipsism/].

Q1: Watts said that if you were God, you would probably eventually end up losing yourself just for the thrill of it.

Q2: I would definitely like to believe this to be true. :)

Q3: Could God create a creature capable of forgetting that it is God?

Q2: No doubt he could, the question I want to know is why.

For the adventure! Because he knows he'll wake up afterwards, and remember it's an illusion, it doesn't matter what happens in the dream. "Whew! What a ride!", he'll exclaim. And dive in again.

...

Q4: Okay. No. Stop this bullshit where you pretend that thousands of people dying of starvation, people sawing off other people's heads and the millions of other horrors that make up this existence are somehow 'perfect'. That's just bullshit.
I think Bhuddist philosophy (this whole, life is suffering ergo suffering is a okay) is just as damaging as any Christan dogma ever was. The Spanish Inquisition was nasty, but this 'all is okay' clap trap explains that it doesn't even matter!
It's a philosophy for the intellectually lazy, the smug and the easily satisfied and I don't believe it's okay for one second. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't either if you were to truly experience the horror of what some people's lives actually are.
The top post on this comment is a ridiculous dismissal of all that is by comparing the suffering of millions to 'god mode' on a video game. As I type this, there's the statistical likelihood that several hundred people are being raped and murdered. That's not fucking okay, and no amount of saying everything is perfect and humming a bit is going to change that.
The world is not a dream. The world is not perfect. The world is inhabited by fierce and perverted monkey creatures some of whom thrive on death and mayhem and pain and there's nothing 'perfect' about that.

Is that really what Buddhism says? I had to look it up, mind:

When we encounter phenomena, and have a feeling of dislike, worry or pain, we say that there is "suffering". This should not be generalised to "all life is suffering", because there is also a lot of happiness in life! Noises are disturbing but nice melodies bring happiness. When one is sick, poor, separated from loved ones, one has suffering. But when one is healthy, wealthy, together with one’s family, one is very happy. Suffering and happiness exist in all phenomena. Actually where there is happiness, there will be suffering. They are in contrast with each other. If’ we only say that life is suffering when things do not go according to our wish we are rather foolish.
The Buddha says, "Life is suffering". What does "suffering" mean? The sutras say: "Impermanence therefore suffering". Everything is impermanent and changeable. The Buddha says that life is suffering because it is impermanent and ever-changing. For example, a healthy body cannot last forever. It will gradually become weak, old. sick and die.
One who is wealthy cannot maintain one’s wealth forever. Sometimes one may become poor. Power and status do not last as well, one will lose them finally. From this condition of changing and instability, although there is happiness and joy, they are not ever lasting and ultimate. When changes come, suffering arises.

Seems more like, "life involves change, nothing is permanent, the experience of change is unpleasant".

The world is a dream, in the sense that we overlay our thoughts on top of our experience and so perceive our views rather than what is there. It is perfect in the sense that it is all in balance and working together in harmony (food chains, etc).

POST: How I believe time works

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The "Zipper" represents (you in) the present.

It binds all the possibilities to make one true reality.

It goes from bottom to top.

Adding perspective to it.

Looks like a book, doesnt it?

The book gets bigger and bigger every seconds.

It's huge.

Here's the book.

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Q: [Deleted]

I agree, nicely put.

Thinking-about something requires that you turn it into conceptual objects and arrange them relative to one another in space. We end up with "moments" and "timelines" and "branches" and "dimensions" and so on. But those are mental diagrams of an idea called "time". If you check your actual experience, you cannot find that "time" at all, except when you think about it. In other words, it's only ever a concept. Time only exists upon reflection.

Time is a conceptual pattern (an idea about change) upon which we hang other conceptual patterns (ideas about events). We create pretend objects then put them in a pretend relationship. It's still fun to play with though, and I doodle with that sort of thing all the time (ahem [The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments]).

POST: Continuity

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O this post could be so long but I'm going to make it brief. How much value do you guys place on continuity in your experience? Would you trade continuity for super powers? How about bliss? Nirvana?

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Discontinuity all the way.

Wow, a discussion on a 6 day old thread nice! I agree, discontinuity allows more freedom in a way, and in a sense the continuity we experience is kind of imagined. I mean, we are never the same as we were, we just think we are. Makes me feel a little less sad about losing one of my favourite notebooks (believe it or not the same notebook from my story on glitch_in_the_matrix, which I take it you read) where I wrote down a lot of my passions and dreams. They're bound to change anyway, but still it hurts.. I want it to show up. I guess that's me wanting continuity. I'm a conflicted soul in this way.

Was browsing and the title caught my attention (I love the idea of "discontinuities).
Anyway -

• We are always the same "background", but the content changes.

Discontinuities in the content would make life far more flexible. If you don't mind things appearing/disappearing, your circumstances changing dramatically, your environment shifting - you can have everything, potentially! But you can also lose everything, potentially. If you are willing to let your world be that ephemeral, then one moment may not lead to the next. All vision might fade...

Thing is, where was that notebook when it wasn't in your hands? It was just a thought in your head (or actually, a 'background feeling/knowing'). The thing itself wasn't anywhere. You never had it in the first place, much.

But, yeah, I know what you mean. Losing things hollows out a bit of your emotional self/content, and leaves a gap. A petit mort! Time for a magickal spell, perhaps, to have it re-materialise?

EDIT: Have you thought about how you might capitalise on/create discontinuities?

Isn't the world already that ephemeral, it's just I don't perceive it to be.. yet?

Yes, it is, I would say.

The Model

My general model for this is, quickly:

• Think of yourself as the background of experience, the 'awareness' in which it arises.
• Experiences arise, and leave traces.
• Those traces then structure subsequent experiences, leaving traces, deepening patterns, creating tendencies.
• Unfolded objects > enfolded forms > unfolded objects > . . .
• Experiences then tend towards stability => objects and narrative.
• We could call these laws (apparent physical laws, cause and effect), habits (repeated actions) and beliefs (lighter patterns structuring our perception).
• But: There is no "real" underneath. Like hypnogogia before sleep, sparkles > fragments > images > objects > environments > dreams. Randomness becomes stability, unfolding both deterministically and creatively.

Anyway, with that out the way, the content of our experience is just that, it's just what we perceive and nothing more. Objects are made of "eyes and fingers", with no solid backing.

In a lucid dream, if you declare a new fact (state a new belief) and don't resist it, the experience comes to be. Content aligns with your beliefs. I think that waking life is very similar, albeit more stable and sluggish, because it has been around a lot longer than your dreams; it has solidified. But all that is preventing a complete discontinuity isn't the continuousness of content - that is illusory - it is the stability of the beliefs or 'enfolded forms' in awareness.

The Implication

If you start tinkering with your beliefs and expectations, your experiences tend to adjust. You get coincidences and synchronicities. It's as if your world tries its best to "line up" with what you've decided the facts should be. This is how "magickal traditions" all work at their root.

But the kicker: Adopting a new belief, or "inserting new facts", is easy: you simply declare the new truth. No effort required. However, you must completely let go of resistance to what happens, to the change, and to the new idea. (Fun free book by Alan Chapman which discusses similar ideas, here.)

That's quite frightening. Anything could happen.

Getting extreme and unlikely: Say something happened in the past and you'd like to change it. Say you could, by simply lying down, letting go completely, and declaring it so - say you could suddenly find yourself "reset" to that time. Would you do it? If I told you (I'm not, but as an emotional experiment) that this could be done. Would you? I reckon you'd find it hard to make yourself do it. The implications for the reality of your surroundings, what "people" really are, etc, are pretty disconcerting!

An Experiment

You should try an experiment, via the Alan Chapman book maybe. Simply declare: "My book will come to me this month" or "My book is coming to me this month" - it has to be worded as a present fact - and let that become true to you. ;-)

Note: It's about the feeling of it being true, rather than imagining it in pictures or whatever. Simply the statement, and the acceptance of the feeling. It's a fun experiment. Whether it works, who can tell - - -

I've experimented a bit with discontinuities, but you have to be careful. The truths you adopt really do have an effect: So, if you start thinking poorly of yourself, for instance, then things line up very quickly to prove you right! I've seen depressive people enter massive doom-spirals because of that.

So it's important to "think positive" - but not in the cheesy, "positive thinking" way - rather, in adopting a positive, desirable vision for your life as a feeling. (A bit like old Neville Goddard's idea.)

Thank you very, very much for this reply. I feel you've given me an outline to something huge and obviously life-changing. I'm interested in what you have said, and am going to probably study this comment for quite a while. If what you are claiming is true, I want to use it for love and light and the unification of awareness with the best possible experience for it, which I currently imagine to be a really kickass story. Perhaps I am naive in thinking this way, but it is how I feel, and normally I'd say I can't change that - but I suppose according to you I can. Still, there are facets of this narrative I'd like to explore. There is a woman... I have a feeling things will start to get really, well, unpredictable, when I finally encounter her again. I suppose I'm preparing myself for that. Again, thank you for taking the time to explain all this to me, I truly appreciate you sharing your knowledge. It's nice to be able to discuss concepts that most would deem insane or unrealistic. It makes me feel freer just by doing so.

Well, personal experience is the key - decide for yourself what is true for you. Take on other people's ideas and see what they add to your own understanding/knowing. Yeah, 'love and light', that's the way.

And remember you have to live the humdrum aspects of life as well as the more random/exciting/bizarre ones, while you are still in amongst it! :-)

Have fun - - -

POST: Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman | Science

A1: I'm working on it, shmeesh, hold your horses.

A2: I'm working on my thesis at the moment, here is an early draft:

Haha, spectacular.

...

To Dennett’s opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest.

Part of the problem is maybe this idea of "inner experience". To me, all my experience appears in a conscious, aware space. So in a way, all of my experiences are inner - that chair over there, that thought over here. There's no separation. But I can't detect an outer in my experience, so really they aren't inner either. This is the background to all experience. Consciousness isn't a thing, it's a context. (Any thoughts I have about my-"self", George, also appear within that context. Which means those are just concepts and not the "real me".)

"To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named “fictoplasm”

Which is funny. But highlights the problem: those characters appear in my awareness too when I read about them. In other words, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter are made from consciousness. If consciousness is not a "thing", but rather the material from which experience is shaped, then it's either an error or a straw-man argument to dismiss consciousness by categorising it as such.

It’s like asserting that cancer doesn’t exist, then claiming you’ve cured cancer.

It's more like asserting that words and sentences don't exist, using words and sentences.

Well, it certainly doesn't help that our only means of expressing consciousness is mediated by language... a tool of consciousness.

Well, I guess... art? Art and the felt-sense.

But, yeah, as soon as we are using division or objects in our communication, we are already in trouble. How can something point to something that it is made from?

I've actually considered art before, but if you think about it, an artist can never paint anything that fully depicts his entire knowledge/understanding of art

I agree, but I think we can capture "meaning" in art, felt meaning. Sure, not the fundamental truth (because that is what the art is made from, not what it depicts), but it allows us a deeper connection than language.

. . .but as soon as we think about it, we begin to attach all of our comfortable symbols and concepts to the experience we're trying to describe, and we taint it in the process.

Yes, I think that's spot on. Even sitting quietly on our sofa, we can relax into this open feeling, but as soon as we think about it we "ripple the water" as it were. Direct perception and thinking occur in the same space, so to perceive clearly you have to let yourself settle - no forcing, no trying. That's why "there is no technique".

I'd be interested if this was also true for near death experiences...

Lots of them still seem very "content-based". Sometimes people feel peaceful, they often have a sense of a greater connected space, but it seems they are still having an object-based experience. Maybe there's a balance to be had between giving yourself to the experience, and holding back a bit. This might make the difference between dying and not, though...

It's a real shame that the Guardian article is so inaccurate.
I strongly recommend you read Consciousness Explained - it's a killer book and I think you'd have a great time with it.
In particular, Dennett does NOT claim that consciousness doesn't exist. What he's against is the Cartesian theatre model of consciousness, where a "little man" sits in your brain telling you what to do.

I did read it (about 10 years ago) and its "multiple drafts" model. It's a very enjoyable book actually; he's a smart guy with a nice style. As I recall, the problem with Dennett is actually that he's talking about content not consciousness.

It's quite a nice model for describing the formation of the apparent world as experienced in one's first-person "aware space". In fact, it's pretty close to the idea that our experience is an "ongoing dream 'inspired by' the senses". (The nature and location of "the senses" is another matter.)

But because he's determined to infer what consciousness is from that, he ends up clashing; just as he does when he confuses directed introspection with thinking-about, and therefore sees construction rather than observation. (He really implicitly assumes that we can only apprehend the content or patterns, but this is not true.)

In any other area, it would be a good approach: See what is there, then derive the terms from that. In this special area though, "what is there" and the thing being "explained" (consciousness) are the same thing and therefore outside of your examination, because it is that which all examinations are also made from. Which means in some ways that having a theory about consciousness is meaningless. One can only have theories about patterns within consciousness; that which awareness is aware of, as and within itself. In fact, I think this is exactly true. Now, it's been a while since I read him, so maybe I am misrepresenting!

POST: What are some of your "out there", unconventional thoughts about this reality and your own consciousness?

This life is a dream and each of us is a small fraction of the dreamer. Anything is possible. Nothing is forbidden. But what we do to each other, we do to ourselves.

I like this efficient way of saying it. Do you see yourself as the dreamer?

Hahaha my ego wishes! No, I think we are literally one God-soul, lost within itself.

Yeah, "Phwahaha, you are all my obedient puppets now!" :-)

Doesn't that mean you are the dream character and the dreamer and the dream environment? Meaning "duck_amuck" is a character who borrows his power from the dream, as it were, but he's still the dream and the dreamer too - just as /u/duck_amuck borrows his power from Reddit.

Actually, I quite like that idea, and it fits experience a bit:

Characters borrow their power, so they can only "submit requests" for what they want to do to the larger dream, hoping that the dream will then move them as requested. All the while, of course, they are actually the larger dream all along, pretending they have to ask...?

Here's a picture of duck_amuck hanging out with a chickeny pal, pretending to be separate.

EDIT: Better: They are the larger dream, having confused themselves into thinking they are the character.

Lol to the pic.
But yeah, something like that... Ego is the character. Self is the dreamer. Self has unlimited power, but the character is the one driving the story within its limited scope/means/belief systems.

Self-ego-character, sounds about right. "Big Self, Little Self". Would make a good title for a children's esoteric television show.

Another way is to rebrand this. Self is the universe. Ego is just a bit of that universe. What we call "you" is just the sphere of attention, perimeter of experience we are currently maintaining. We think that we are "ego" when we localise on the region of body-space where selfish thoughts seem to arise (typically, towards the rear of the head); we think we are the universe when we dissolve the perimeter; in-between and we think we make "connections" and have non-local paranormal powers.

Idk what in your post made me think of it, but it's too bad there's not a legit mystery school teaching today... The realization of consciousness and the tools to work with it should be available to everyone.

Yes. There are lots of 'cult-type' efforts and 'self-help' arrangements, but there's nothing legitimate. In school, we don't even teach the history of religions and beliefs/worldviews anymore (as opposed to the content). I am very interested in seeing insights brought into modern, accessible language, together with investigative approaches ('exercises' without any nonsense) a person can use to discover themselves and the world. People like Rupert Spira attempt this to some extent, but somehow it doesn't cover the whole subject (life!) for me.

POST: Just a reminder: There's nowhere to run.

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:D

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:-/

A1: When you can fly, there is no need to run.

A2: When you can exist in all places at once, there is no need to fly.

A1: When you are both nothing and everything, there is no need to exist in all places at once.

A2: When you simply are, there is no need.