TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 8)

POST: Speculative answers to Frequently asked questions.

[POST]

Warning: Prepare for a wall of text
I think it may be presumptive of me to consider myself an expert in this topic, but I do think I can shed some light on many of the questions that frequently come up. Rather than just reply to all of them I thought I'd make this post.
Premise: Dimensional jumping is a subset of the "Law of Attraction" and similar manifestation concepts (magick, positive thinking, etc). As such, it is more or less a metaphorical concept. It is important that you keep in mind that dimensional jumping might not literally involve moving from one dimension to another. However (for reasons that are a bit deep for this post), it is likely the most accurate metaphor for how the system really works.
FAQ
Is it possible to______?
In general, yes. You can insert literally almost anything into this box and the answer is yes. However, that does not necessarily mean it will be easy for you. In general, the system protects against things that violate what we perceive as the natural order of things (i.e. laws of physics, the continuity of reality, etc). That does not mean these things cannot be violated, but just that if your desire can come about without violating these then it is more likely to choose the path of least resistance.
For example: If you've had a pet pass away, and you'd like to go to a reality where the pet was still alive. This is possible, but it is unlikely that you would be willing to effectively rewrite the laws of physics to make it possible. The more likely event will be that you suddenly and coincidentally find a new pet who behaves suspiciously like your old pet, and fills that same emotional need. You may even suspect that the new pet is a reincarnated version of the old one (possible, but not necessary).
Ok, so if "almost anything" is possible, then what is impossible?
Though I'm sure not every here believes in channeled information --I have my doubts about much of it myself-- I do often find things from Bashar to be very insightful. In this regard I think his Four laws of creation are the best way to answer this question.
For practical purposes I think we can simplify it even further to two laws for dimensional jumpers:

1. You exist -- You cannot jump to a place where you do not exist (Though if you really stretch you could find a way to pretend you don't exist if you wanted)
2. Everything changes - You can't stop things from changing.
   What happens to the me in the reality I jump to? What happens to the me in this reality when I jump?
   This is a question that actually goes very deep. First, its important to realize that in the grand scheme there is only one you. However, that "you" may be in many realities at once experiencing itself as discrete versions of you. This is largely academic and doesn't affect anything.
   I think it may be easier to divide this into two questions that really strike at the heart of peoples real concerns:
   Am I causing harm to the alternate version of myself by taking over his/her life?
   No. It is very likely that there is no alternate version of yourself with whom you are switching places. But if there is, then that version of yourself chose to switch in the same way that you did. If there were no other way to achieve your jump than to go to a universe where there is a version of you already existing, then you will enter a copy universe.
   But going deeper, this answer isn't 100% accurate either. It is important to realize that dimensions aren't perfectly discrete. They exist more like wave functions, allowing all probabilities to exist until they need to be observed. Think of it like a computer game. In most computer games, if you walk into a dungeon, the inside of the dungeon has not been rendered yet. Once you step in, it begins to render. But even then the render is only partial because it does not render the elements you do not see yet. Instead it starts making decisions about what is probable, and what it needs to be prepared for you to see. Then when you see it, it renders those frames.
   So there isn't a dimension where you were born a different gender, 5 inches taller, or with blue hair. Instead there are multiple -near infinite-- hyperdimensions of probability where all of these things are true.
   What happens to my loved ones in this reality when I jump?
   A bigger question is : Where are your loved ones now? Going back to the idea that dimensions aren't perfectly discrete, realize that the dimension your loved ones live in is not the exact same dimension as yours. Instead, you share a hyperdimension where your individual dimensions overlap a bit. The things you do in your dimension affect those closest to you, but only if they allow it. In the same way, those close to you affect you, but only if you allow it.
   The people who are close to you, are that way precisely because you choose to be in very similar dimensions. If one of them decides to radically change themselves, you may find that they suddenly move away, die, become imprisoned, or simply change friend circles.
   So the direct answer to the question becomes a bit complicated. They may experience you dying, or moving away. But they may have already experienced this. They choose their overall experience of how they perceive you. You simply help them by filling in the gaps...you add a personal flare to the "you" they want to experience through your choices and actions. Your choices and actions tug on their reality and pull it in a certain direction. They can resist it (but usually don't).
   However, you only stay close to those who are in realities similar to yours. So if you make a change radical enough both of you will experience drifting apart from one another....except not always. If one of the people in the group does not want to let go of the experience of the other person, then that person may be replaced with a sort of "bot" to simulate the experience.
   So here is an extreme example: Your spouse is in the hospital with a terminal illness. You want to jump to a reality where they do not have this illness and you can live your lives together. What happens if your spouse truly exists in the reality where they have a terminal illness? Well, you would jump to a new reality where your spouse would miraculously recover, while they would stay in their reality and experience their choice of interaction with you. Presumably they would experience you staying with them lovingly until they died (and perhaps some version of you does exactly this).
   But then does that mean the spouse in my reality is not my spouse, but is a bot?
   Maybe, but not necessarily. As mentioned above it is possible that there are multiple discrete versions of each person. So they may simultaneously choose to experience dying in the hospital and their miraculous recovery. Perhaps, they may even choose to have one version of themselves go along with you just to aid you in your choice of realities.
   It is also possible that your spouse is only existing in the universe where you perceive them to have an illness because you are choosing that universe. They are simply agreeing to go along with you, and when you choose to go to the recovery universe then the illness universe disappears back into the cloud of probability (I choose to avoid the word "collapses" because that actually has the opposite meaning in quantum physics).
   So if you are worried about how your choice might affect your loved ones, realize that the choice you are making now to not perform an intentional jump is affecting them in some way as well. They may be anxiously waiting for you to jump.
   It is important to remember that each individual chooses their path. We do influence one another. That influence can be very strong (especially against a person who does not have strong beliefs). But we never actually "force" someone to experience something they didn't agree to.
   Wait, go back. Are you saying we live in computer simulation?
   No. Not really. But a computer simulation is a very good analogy for the true nature of reality. It is a small technical distinction, but an important one. It is more accurate to say that our idea of "computer simulation" is a way we chose to mimic reality to understand it. We do not literally live in a computer, at least not the way we understand a computer physically, but many of systems of reality are very similar to a computer's operation.
   How does that work really?
   The "computer" that is our reality has simulated any and all possibilities and carried them out in a deterministic fashion the form of a wave of probable outcomes. It biases most of its power towards the most those outcomes that the observer (the player of the game --i.e you) are more likely to choose to experience. Then when you make those choices it renders the outcome.
   This is the technical way of looking at the thing many of these enlightened people have been saying for so many years: "All is one, and everything exists right NOW".
   The whole thing is just a big collection of possibility. Time, different universes, different choices...all these things are just different points and directions inside the same thing. Further more, if you are playing a game you know that when you walk for 4 hours in a computer game, that you aren't actually physically going anywhere. It's all inside the computer. In the same way, all distance in reality is simulated. All difficulty in moving from one reality to one another (turning your hair blue and living on mars with Beethoven) is simulated. All of these things are directly right on top of each other.
   EDIT: u/TriumphantGeorge/ pointed out that I should make a distinction here. There is really no "how it works" in the grandscheme of things. (see his comment below). But for practical purposes I believe everything mentioned here and elsewhere on this sub is useful framework. But, in general, on this sub if TriumphantGeorge says it, it is usually pretty accurate. It is just unfortunate that maximum accuracy requires maximum ambiguity
   So none of this is real?
   This is as real as it gets. Have you ever really defined for yourself what the word "real" means? The concept of "real" is defense mechanism. It is the same idea that attempts to enforce the continuity of reality. It is probably put in place by the system to prevent wild jumping around in the system. When looking at reality from this high a perspective its easy to see that he concept of what is "real" has no actual meaning.
   Then how does mirror method/ two glasses work ?
   These techniques are sort of like brute force hacking. They are about allowing yourself to let go of the unnecessary hold on continuity of reality by giving yourself an excuse for glitches in continuity. So tomorrow when you ask yourself, "Wait a second, wasn't my neighbors car red and now its blue?" You can give yourself the excuse that you've "jumped". What is more accurate is that you've just allowed yourself to "jump" further and in a different "direction" than you normally do.
   There are many things that create artificial difficulty in jumping, but personally I feel the need for continuity and causality is the strongest. We fight tooth and nail for all of it to make sense, but it doesn't have to. These techniques are sort of hacks to get yourself into the mood to allow some of it to not make sense. Or rather it is a way for you to make sense of the discontinuity.
   As such, proper technique is less important focus, intention, and belief. So don't worry if you spill water doing two glasses, or you don't see anything weird with the mirrors. All of this is secondary to trusting and focusing on your goal, and allowing the technique you choose to work.
   That's all for now. If anyone has some other questions that I can add to this, I can either reply in the comments, or if the question is general enough for a FAQ, I will edit it in later.

[END OF POST]

A couple of quick points:

Dimensional jumping is a subset of the "Law of Attraction"

I'd probably say that "dimensional jumping" overall is an umbrella for all changes to experience; the specific metaphor of "dimensions", meanwhile, is a subset of that. Dimensional jumping in its broader sense attempts to be a "meta" view, prior to any particular model of experience or change, assuming only that there is some structure or "patterning" involved (the most basic description that can still "makes sense").

it is likely the most accurate metaphor for how the system really works.

Although for convenience we usually ignore this, it's definitely worth emphasising that there is no "how it really works", and that the idea of there being a "how things work" is itself a metaphor.

The actual closest we can get to "how it really works" is probably something like: "you are that which takes on the shape of experiences; you can shift your 'shape' and therefore your experiences" - that's it. Which, of course, is basically saying: you just do. This can't really be described, so we often use misdirection to help things along, in both our descriptions and in our exercises. (Everything we do say about it is a "parallel construction in thought", and is itself just another experience at the same level: the experience of thinking about the nature of experience and change. And so on. Everything is an experience, with nothing "behind" it.)

This means that if one does want to use the simulation metaphor - because they find it attractive and it suggests certain ways of thinking about change that they find useful - they should bear in mind that it is not you who is inside a simulation run by an external simulator, rather you are the simulator which is "running" the simulation within you.

Technically that's not how the computer really works deep down, but it is a method to get at the core to achieve results.

And it's worth noting, I think, that it's completely fine to go with the "simplified diagram" version of things like this. We are not saying that "this" is "that", we are simply saying that there are benefits in viewing the world "as if" it corresponded to certain aspects of "that".

[There is no "how it works."] It is, but this is such an advanced concept.

But also it can be a very simplifying one: that is, that it is "all experience, no external world" or "all patterning, no solid substrate".

As always, it depends on the aim. If it is simply to provide a method which "gets results", then it can be temporarily beneficial to just say: "this is how it is", and in acting from that model they will have experiences "as if" it were true. Ultimately, though, this is somewhat of a dead end, and people start questioning the method, which then affects the results.

To really become free and flexible, and not get lost in disruptive theorising, we have to come to the realisation that the "how it works" is also based on intentions and their implications. Not only does performing an act with intention bring about a result, it also implies the context of the intention. In other words: if you go looking for evidence that things are certain way, you will have experiences "as if" they are that way, when they change their mind, another way. Not knowing this can be very confusing.

So yes, technically in a sense using the simulation metaphor is sort of like picking an operating system and programming language.

Right, in a way. Once we are aware of this - that metaphors are "formatting" rather than explanations - then we are freed somewhat from the tyranny of trying to "understand" a mechanism that isn't there. We can treat the use of a metaphor as a choice of how we'd like things to be, rather than it having to be fundamentally "true".

At that point, we realise that we can stop looking for descriptions which explain experience (whew!) because we understand that descriptions are patterns overlaid upon - or restructure - experience. Therefore, "how things work" is a pattern in experience in exactly the same way as the pattern of events resulting from an target outcome; they differ in terms of abstraction, not of kind.

I've added an edit in the post that hopefully helps make that distinction.

Note that this wasn't about pointing out flaws in your post; I was just picking up on some threads for an expanded conversation. You should leave your post as it is - it fulfils your purpose as stated - and readers can then follow what's written in the comments, if they want to dig deeper.

This recursive logic bothers me.

The recursive logic can be problematic, but I actually think the drive to release oneself from that recursion - the "stepping back" from that - is where you shift to a different context, and grasp your actual situation.

The question that we end up asking is:

• What are "you" and what is your relationship to "the world"?

Or shorter version:

• What is the "nature of experiencing" itself? What is the context of experience rather than the content?

And the answer to that, which is arrived at by (really simple) directly looking at our experience as it is, means we don't need to battle with the recursion issue. Although it's still slightly claustrophobic to try and think of it, because it as something with no "outside" to it, it can't be thought of conceptually, only directly intuited.

Also, the "you just do" sounds suspiciously like "I am that I am".

Well, it's inevitable we end up with phrases like that, because we're trying to point out that you are the entire moment of experience. Even when you are having the experience of apparently being "over here" and the screen is "over there", in fact you discover you are everywhere, just having "taken on the shape of" that experience of apparent separation.

It sounds very exotic, but it's very simple: anyone can close their eyes right now and try to:

• a) find the "edges" of your current experience,
• b) find where "you" are in your current experience.

But of course, it can't really be put into words. We end up with metaphors like: What you are is a sort of non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which has all possible experiences "dissolved" within it. It can experience any of those possibilities simply by "shifting" itself to "take on the shape of" that experience. Right now, you have taken on the shape of the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

And a whole load of other metaphors involving blankets, beaches, water, and anything else that's vaguely malleable! :-)

[Free Will and Determinism] But I can't quite put that into words as to why that is, I just know it as an intuition.

Right! It cannot be thought about, it cannot be described.

The essence of it is, while your state between shifts is fully deterministic, you-as-awareness is not. Awareness is "before" all structure and formatting, and that includes division and multiplicity and, relations and changes in space.

So basically, there's no point in trying to work out whether you-as-awareness has "free will" because, in a sense, both "free will" and the "working out" are "made from" awareness. However, you can know it directly (intuition). And in fact, this direct knowing is the same way in which you are experiencing the entirety of your current state right now, even though only an aspect is "unfolded" as 3D-extended senses.

Aside - I think that confusing the formatting of the senses with the formatting of the world-as-it-is can be a real stumbling block, and is what leads people to think of the world being a fixed 3D-extended "place", and there being an "outside" to their experience even though a moment of directly attending to it reveals there is not. The ingrained idea of the world involving "separate people exploring a spatially-extended place unfolding in time" is a big hurdle.

Yes, but now it seems more accurate to ask what is the world's relationship to me?

Yes! And I think that urge to reverse the wording is the first thing that comes out of the contemplation of this. And then, having taken that step, the rest becomes much clearer, more easily. Yeah, time to get some dinner, that sounds like a good idea! Catch you later.

A brief addition, because someone posted a follow-up comment and then removed it, but they brought up a good point, about the difficulty in thinking about this - and the subsequent difficulty you can have trying to think about anything.

Once you've recognised that you-as-awareness as the true nature of experience, you can end up being caught in a bit of a bind. After all, you-as-awareness cannot be thought about, and trying to think about it can feel either slightly claustrophobic as you try to turn yourself almost inside-out while having no "inside" or "outside", or unmoored because you have no stable platform within experience from which to comprehend experience.

Because of this, it is good to take one particular perspective and go with that as your "default formatting". Remember: there is no special or ultimate "shape" of experience you should be aiming to adopt, you don't have to be seeking to constantly experience yourself as an unformatted space whose only property is being-aware - because: then what? It is enough to know that is the case, regardless of the experience you are currently happening. What we want, then - since there is no "correct" perspective - is to select a basic perspective which is the most flexible and beneficial.

The ideal default, I suggest, is to format yourself as "a background space within which sensory experience arises". This places you-the-observer as a pure, relaxed, background expanse, with you-the-content floating within it. This gives you a stable platform to operate from, to think from. You view the world, then, as "a three-dimensional multi-sensory thought of a world, that is floating in the space of a perceiving mind". Other thoughts are then parallel experiences, floating in mind. You can of course then choose to reshape yourself as "being a person in a world" when you want, but you will always have this format of "being a space within which the sensory thought of a world is floating" available to you going forward.

Q1: you don't have to be seeking to constantly experience yourself as an unformatted space whose only property is being-aware - because: then what? It is enough to know that is the case
the formatting i'm having at the moment is along the lines of changing my patterning from an apparent "internal/mind-only state" and expanding it to become "the world"
because before, my experiences were felt only intellectually (which is purely a fictional experience itself) so by changing that to be-the-world it should then become manifest
because all events are rooted in consciousness anyway [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqOjFC9MCDc]: the intention of creating something creates it
The ideal default, I suggest, is to format yourself as "a background space within which sensory experience arises".
this is the goal
You can of course then choose to reshape yourself as "being a person in a world" when you want
this is what i am doing by "transferring" the intention from an apparent mental-construct to an apparent-physical experience
yet both are the the same in principle being derived from an intention manifest in consciousness

The intention of something is that thing! The thought of something and the actual something differ only in their intensity and their location (3rd person vs 1st person, basically). Isn't this shift in relative position - changing from watching something to being "clothed" by it - actually the essence of what you're speaking of ?

POST: Won $500 a few days ago

Congrats on your win!

I believe dimensionaljumping and law of attraction are essentially the same thing.

The usual philosophical follow-up questions: What "thing" is it, precisely, that both "dimensional jumping" and "the law of attraction" are? How does the law of attraction work, exactly, and what does this imply about the nature of our ongoing experience - and the nature of "the world" and "you"? Strictly speaking, without answering that we can't really say that "something triggered the win" nor that two things are the "same thing".

Im guessing it was the feeling state that shifted me into an experience that matched the state?

It's potentially a way of looking at it. One possible model is that adopting a particular pattern (an image, a feeling, whatever) can trigger the associated extended pattern into prominence, and that this then informs your subsequent experience. Although we might wonder: what are "states" made from? And where are they? Or are they just metaphors which are used to formulate intentions, and which have no existence other than that?

The idea being, that the more clearly structured our description is, the more we move towards a situation where any apparent results can be linked back, and the outcome repeated (eventually ruling out coincidence or a tendency towards superstition).

It's hard to pin down what, if anything, triggered the win here, I think, because there was a bit of a muddle of activities going on in this case. Did you get paid in $100 bills, for example, as in your visualisation? Or was there a more specific intention that accompanied the image? How would you go about repeating it - what have you learned from the experiment that you could reuse?

I played the scratch offs for the sake of enjoying the game without caring if i won or lost.

Yeah, I do think the attitude of basically "being okay with whatever happens" is a key ingredient, even when it comes to managing and directing everyday life, never mind the more esoteric experiments.

I was grateful for having that experience I desire, now. Without the feelings of desiring/yearning (that would imply having it in the future).

Perhaps the stability and relationship thing didn't come with her because I hadn't gotten to that part on my list yet before she came up and said hi

Ha, I love that.

Following on from what you say about "yearning", I agree that does have an impact. We might draw the connection between this and "thinking about" vs "experience of". If you are thinking about something, imagining it in the 3rd person, then it is "over there" and you are "over here". There is a distance between it, and it is that distance, the gap between the desire and fulfilment, which leads to the yearning. For as long as the outcome is held in this 3rd-person state, then it cannot be experienced. For it to become an experience, one needs to be "clothed" by the outcome, it must be released from suspension "over there" and be allowed to dissolve into the main strand of experience "over here" - the 1st person. Basically, you must allow it to cease being a located, bounded thought, and become an unlocated, unbounded thought - because that is what ongoing experience is.

To release something, then, is to allow it to dissolve into the background, and therefore become integrated into your main strand of 1st person experience. One might skip this, however, by formulating your intentions as "unlocated, unbounded" thoughts in the first place, rather than as object-type thoughts - provided one wasn't resisting change to the main strand at the same time.

POST: Questions regarding DJ

So, for your first point, see previous answers about "dimensional jumping" and the "law of attraction": here [POST: Won $500 a few days ago ], here [POST: Speculative answers to Frequently asked questions.] and here [POST: A few questions. ].

As for the story, it's just that: a /r/nosleep type story "inspired by" the topic of dimensional jumping (although really a misunderstanding of the topic as it is described in the sidebar).

Q1: Wow, thanks for the fast reply tho, would you be able to explain the difference beetwen DJ and LoA for dummy people please? Like I though it was something like: DJ (2 glasses) might "change everything" (might change your relationship with parents, close people etc) just for your wishes while Law of attraction you're just asking for one thing while it be the only thing changing or only things around it wil change.

Your timing was good!

So, the real answer is that "dimensional jumping" and "law of attraction" are both aspects or artefacts or leveragings of a deeper truth. The difference between them is, I'd say, that "dimensional jumping" is knowingly employing this and understands there is no solid underlying "how things really work", whereas the "law of attraction" tends to be based on a hand-waving sense of there being a "how things are really". (And often a poorly-defined one, leading to almost superstitious behaviour in search of "vibrations" and the like.)

At root, though, they both work because change arises due to intentions and their implications - and the world-descriptions those intentions are structured in terms of - rather than due to a technique or method based on the world being a certain way independently of those intentions.

Q1: Thanks for all your answers :) so after all there are no big changes if you do 2 glasses if you dont really want big changes around you due to whatever you asked for, right? Since you might make the shape of whatever you want.

Right, so the idea is that when you write the labels you contemplate the specific situation you are in, then contemplate the specific outcome you want, and in each case "feel out" the words that capture those situations (that is, you let the words come to you rather than logically working them out). There's no reason for anything more dramatic to happen, other than what makes sense in terms of "this" turning into "that". You're not going to some other drastically different place, you're just tweaking up your current experience a bit by "re-patterning" it (is the concept behind the exercise).

Q1: Alright, thanks :) It sounds better than dimensional jumping wich sounds kinda shady actually compared to what it really is. Since as far as i've understood there's no jumping to other dimension (thats why you are not ocupping any other body and yours its not ocuped either)

Yeah, well "dimensional jumping" is just one of many metaphors which, the idea goes, you can use to generate experiences "as if" they were true. So, if you want radical change in your life, something that breaks the rules a bit, then constructing intentions in terms of that metaphor allows you to "re-pattern" your experience in a way that actions based on the usual world description would not. (Although there is also some misdirection involved to ensure that you don't resist, or later counter-intend, the outcome.)

Fundamentally, you never occupy any body, you just have an experience "as if" you are "a body within a world". The deeper observation referred to earlier, is realising that the only fundamental truth is the fact that there is an experience happening - that is, the fact of being-aware. The actual content of experience, though, is impermanent and has no solid underlying substrate, and hence the possibility of shifting its condition without limitation. (All of which, of course, should be checked by personal experimentation; you're not meant to take anyone else's word on this.)

Q1: What breaks my brain is that then, the world is a place of shared experiences, right? Since, as an exemple, i've met you, and you're an human being more than something that i've created.

That's everyone's favourite topic, apparently! See recent discussion: here [POST: What happens to the other 'you's when you jump?], for example.

Q1: I feel like a freak but i find these "theorys" (for scepticks or however its written in english) interesting. But, what would happen if 2 same persons make the 2 glasses method to be attached to the same person, lets say "x" and "y" want to be with "l", what would happen?

At a fundamental level there are no people and you are not actually a person! Basically, don't worry about it - you can treat it like a "private copy" of the world where everything in your experience is an aspect of a larger you. As I say, the only thing that is always true is the fact of "awareness"; everything else is true on an "as if" temporary basis only. So there are no conflicts, because there is only ever this experience happening.

Q1: Thanks for all the answers btw :) That sounds totally awesome, is this connected to the astral projection/law of attraction philosophy, i mean, we're here to live, so just do it. Or does this go in other way that people who believe in karma and so would reject this, like if this woud be cheating?

Welcome! I don't think the idea of karma as in "judgement and payback" is valid. There are no inherent rules-based morality laws or an independent benchmark for appropriate behaviour.

There is karma in the sense of, if you "pattern" yourself with a particular outcome or a particular worldview - whether by intending it or doing something that implies it - then it will become prominent in your life. But that's not the same as "balance" or whatever. Rather, it's just what a "patterning" approach means by definition: you get what you assert plus the logical implications of that assertion - i.e. if you intend something then you are also intending a world in which that intention makes sense.

So, basically just do it. There is no morality or judgement outside of yourself, so it's up to you. The nature of "patterning" does imply a certain "do unto others (unto the world-as-experience) as you would have done to you", though, of course.

Q1: wow! This is a very interesting and good point of view, mother of god. So, what do you think about the infinite knowledge that is right now in the universe? Like, none of it "exists" as it trully is, or it is really something exist and we discover over our experiences?

You could consider that the world is not so much a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" as a "toy box of all possible patterns and experiences, from which we draw to create our 'private copy'". All possibilities, then, are present eternally (which means "outside of time" rather than "forever"), "dissolved" into the background.

However, that too is basically a metaphor which you can experience "as if" it were true, albeit a metaphor which gets closer to being completely inclusive. Again, only being-aware - or "awareness" - is fundamentally true (exists), however it can "take on the shape of" any experience "as if" it were true (exists). To summarise this view:

• What you truly are is "awareness", a sort of non-material "material" whose only property is being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences.
• The experience you have taken on the shape of right now is one of apparently being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

The problem we have when thinking about it (this is covered in the last link) is that our thinking is already pre-formatted into a "shadow sensory" shape. We cannot think of things which are "before" experience, because thoughts are themselves are just experiences. We have to be careful and not make the mistake of assuming the-world-as-it-is is of the same format as our sensory moments, since they are just a particular patterning themselves. This tends to inform our idea of what "to exist" means.

Generally, I'd say that everything exists as potentiality (enfolded), and the current sensory moment exists as actuality (unfolded). However, right now you are actually experiencing absolutely everything, and this is true always - however, different pattern-facts are just "brighter" than other pattern-facts (their relative contribution to this sensory moment is stronger). We might call the current relative distribution of pattern intensities our present "state".

Basically:

• Think of the situation now that you want to change. Pause and wait for a word to come up which feels like it fits as a summary of that situation.
• Think of the situation as you want it to be. Pause and wait for a word to come up which feels like it fits for that.
• Use those words for your labels.

Follow the instructions as they are written in: these instructions [The Act is The Fact - Part One: An Exercise]. That's it!

Q1: Hi again. Tried it about last week but literally: 0 changes. Not even around me. If done the two glasses but the glasses aren't transparent at all (they have like pictures). Does It matter? I'll try again soon, but I'd like to know how to do It perfectly when I just want to thing one change while maintaining my family bounds exactly the same.

The properties of the glasses don't really matter - although it's helpful if they are transparent to some extent so that you can see the water levels and so fully experience the pouring of the liquid. So don't worry too much about that.

Other things to consider: remember to follow the last instruction; generally allow a week or so for anything to become obvious; later, if no luck, perhaps consider whether you are someone who "holds onto themselves" in everyday life, do you "control" yourself moment by moment?

Q1: What do we mean by "controlling", sorry for obvious questions but since english is not my main language (not even close to) somethings might be a little bit confusing to me.

It's not you - it's hard to put into words anyway! So, an example:

Sit in a chair. Now stand up.

Does it feel that the standing up experience just "arises" and your body "moves by itself", or do you feel that you are "doing" the standing up? If you feel that you are "doing" it, can you identify what it is you do? Are you tensing muscles? Thinking intensely? Narrowing your attention down? Do you begin by re-asserting the fact of "sitting down" before you being targeting "standing up"? None of that is required.

Now, instead of doing anything about standing up, just let your attention be open and expansive in all directions (don't narrow down onto your body parts), and just-decide that your body will stand up: simply think "being-standing-up". And then don't interfere. Allow the experience of "my body standing up" to just arise and unfold in your awareness, by itself.

Some people constantly "re-assert" their current body position and then use effort to overcome it, and they do the same with thinking, and in particular they "concentrate" their attention on the target of what they are doing. None of this is actually required (in particular, you don't need to narrow-focus on your target in order to intend it and have it happen), and what it tends to do is "fix" you in your current state, and prevent it shifting - in the example, like you are intending "being-sat-down" and "being-stood-up" at the same time!

Q1: alright, i think I got the point, so how do we transfer that to 2 glasses? And by the way, how was this method discovered? i've been looking on google but there's only reddit threads, no other websites so im curious :p

In two ways. Firstly, when performing the exercise, simply perform the acts as described in the instructions, and don't "concentrate" or "focus" or in some way try to make anything happen. Secondly, in your everyday life work towards staying "open and spacious" and go about your tasks by just-deciding rather than "manually" moving yourself (body, thoughts, attention).

The exercise itself, I put it together when someone posted a question over at /r/glitch_in_the_matrix asking whether it was possible to deliberately create a "glitch" type experience.

Q1: Got it! Thanks!
Yeah, but my point of the question, is how would someone discover the method, since lot of people on this reddit say it works im just curious why it is not famous out of reddit itself

Oh, I see. Well, it's just one example of that sort of thing, I suppose, and it probably doesn't make much sense out of context?

It's probably best described as an experiment rather than a method. Its underlying purpose really is to trigger an experience that encourages a questioning of your assumptions, and perhaps thinking along a particular direction about the "nature of experiencing". Without that larger idea backing it, the ability to have conversations like this about it in a forum, it probably isn't very valuable.

Q1: Gotcha, thank you once again!
Could I ask you to share your own experiences that have worked with 2Glasses (if not very personal) as how was it before, what you wanted to change, and how it changed and what else changed due to it?

You're welcome. I'll leave you to conduct your own experiments and check it out for yourself, but if you're interested: here is the original comment [POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!] describing the exercise, and the first responses!

...

Q2: [There is no morality or judgement outside of yourself]
yes there is - me

Hmm, you are not outside of yourself!

Q2: other people are because they are not directly me and do things I despise... judgement, see

But you are not "directly you" either. To despise them is simply to despise aspects of yourself, and for as long as you despise them, it'll persist...

Q2: for as long as you despise them, it'll persist...
that's right, because by thinking about them, I am reinforcing that "pattern". so I have to "drop" them... but realistically, they're not going to just vanish; so there must be a need for a war or something
But you are not "directly you" either
this is still confusing to me [https://youtu.be/DyOxHTLE3EE]

Drop "realistically" too, then...

POST: What happens to the other 'you's when you jump?

The content and links in the sidebar cover this, I think, but -

Although it's fun (or disturbing!) to contemplate, there are not any "other yous" in the sense of physically (in a separate space), simultaneously (in a parallel time) "happening" (unfolding in time). I'd suggest that the only thing that is "happening" is your 1st-person ongoing experience right now.

"Dimensions", as an (active?) metaphor, provide a way of conceiving of a discontinuous change in the content of that ongoing experience that breaks your usual narrative of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Other narratives might then seem more appropriate - for example, we might think of "the world" as a sort of toy box containing all possible patterns and facts and moments, from which we select our particular "private copy" experience of a world.

Q1: I rather like the "private copy" metaphor, it helps me grasp the whole idea of "patterning." The only thing I don't understand is how it can be "private" when our toolboxes seem so show the same pattern, and my patterns can influence your patterns. I'm sure you get this same question in its different forms very often, and I guess it can be boiled down to this: if objectivity doesn't exist, then why do our subjective experiences "sync up" so well?

There are a few ways to tackle this, but let's say: if objectivity doesn't exist, then subjectivity doesn't exist - there is just "experiencing". Therefore, our subjective experiences in fact don't "synch up" at all. Your current experience is the whole thing, you are being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person (and by "a world" we mean a particular shaping of the metaphorical eternal "infinite gloop").

The Hall of Records metaphor gives us one way to conceive of this. It essentially says: all perspectives exist, but the only thing that is ever "happening" is this experience, because "experiencing" == "happening". There is no "outside" to that.

However, really, we have a problem here: that our thoughts about experience are themselves experiences, and so already formatted into pseudo-sensory object-based experience. We cannot therefore think about experience; it is already "too late". What we are talking about is "before" division and multiplicity.

So, we might say that there is only one toolbox, not many, and only one experience, not many. Strictly speaking, given the above, we should say that there are not-many toolboxes, and not-many experiences. We literally can't conceive of this in the abstract, we only conceive of particular experiences, as experiences!

Although we can't think about it, we can directly attend to our experience and get an unmediated insight though. (Excuse some recycling here.) A silly little exercise illustrates this. We might close our eyes and try to:

a) find the "edges" of your current experience.
b) find where "you" are in your current experience. and:
c) investigate what your current is experience is "made from". finally:
d) think about yourself, and then note the location of that thought and what it is "made from".

The conclusions of this are the facts upon which all of experience is built. (Try it before reading the next paragraph!)

I anticipate what you discover is: there is no edge to your experience, and so there is just a sort of unbounded space of "awareness" rather than "an" or "the" awareness; you seem to be both everywhere and nowhere, you are unlocated and unbounded; the entire experience appears to be "made from" you, as in you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person; what you previously considered yourself to be is a thought of you, and that thought is located within you-as-awareness and is made from you-as-awareness.

Eventually - from this, the experiences you might generate from other exercises, and some contemplation - you conclude that the only inherent property of experience is being-aware, and that to talk of there being "other" subjective experiences or an objective world is not right or wrong, but meaningless. You can't "understand" this in terms of conceptualising it, but you can know it, directly.

I've spent my whole life using "subjectivity" basically as a synonym for "experience."

Me too, largely, which is why it's worth doing what we're doing now: just emphasising that it's a shorthand for "the subject" rather than it being a perspective that is embedded within an environment.

I'm imagining an Alex Grey painting with an infinite pattern of eyes embedded into the background, which alludes to the idea of awareness being an inherent property of all things.

A nice image. If the background is made completely from "eyes', then all objects which appear within it are also made from "eyes". Although, because that can suggest that one part of the background is "looking out" at another part, it's probably better so that it is made from "sensing" or "being". That way, we get the idea that the background doesn't go beyond itself, it simply experiences itself, in and as the shape that it has currently adopted. This is where we eventually come to the idea of calling it "awareness" and its only inherent property being being-aware.

However, it's really useful to come up with different visual images, like the one you suggest, for helping us grasp particular implications of this. So long as we bear in mind that the true situation is "non-dimensional", as it were, then we can't really go wrong.

At the core of reality I imagine a uniform, unbounded 3D grid ...

In some respects this is similar to The Infinite Grid metaphor, I suppose. These metaphors can be very useful for: a) conceiving of a structure which can be used to formulate intentions; b) providing a thinking framework to discuss certain experiences. It is important, though, to note that it is not "how things really are" - because there is no particular "now things really are" or "how things really work".

There is no stable underlying substrate within which we are operating, hence the "formatting" of your world experience at an abstract level is just as much a pattern as everything else. When we intend something, we not only intend that outcome, but we also implicitly intend the conceptual framework that was used to conceive of it. That is, that when you intend to go out into the garden, you are also implying the extended pattern of that intention, which involves apparent houses, gardens, a persistent environment, spatial extent, unfolding change, and so on.

So, every intention is a shift of the entire world! However, we tend to only intend things that are consistent with our current experience, and thus every time we go out into the garden, we further entrench this entire universe or dimension (that is: patterned state). What we are doing on this subreddit, what the exercises encourage, is intending an outcome which is not consistent with our current experience of "how things work", and thereby we reveal to ourselves that "how things work" is something we implicitly intend and which is within experience, rather than some stable independent landscape that we navigate across.

This node could be described by some as an "ego," a container for the awareness. Is this description compatible so far?

Well, the ego isn't a container for awareness. Awareness has no edges or boundaries, it is what everything else is "from", so it cannot be contained. What you think of as the ego is just a concept. In terms of what you actually experience, I'll be it's just an occasional thought that arises here and there, which you attribute to an ego. Again, what you are actually experiencing is being "awareness" with sensations, perceptions and thoughts arising within and as it.

The little four part investigation demonstrates to you this fact of experience. It is important, though, to actually do this, to attend to experience directly, rather than just think about it. Your thoughts about it won't get "behind" it, they will be just more experiences, deformations of your current experience - like rippling a pool of water that you are trying to perceive the surface of. Realising this, you discover the the "ego" is really a thought about an "ego", rather than an actual thing. It is a pattern of experience, nothing more. (I suggest.)

POST: A few questions.

I guess probably the best way to start, is to ponder:

• How, exactly, does the "law of attraction" work? (And what is the model of the world upon which it's based?)
• What are "you" and what is your relationship to "the world"?

As the sidebar says, "dimensions" are really just a concept or metaphor (as indeed is the concept of "reality"), one that is used to describe an experience and/or formulate an intention. It is not really "how things work" or "how things are". (In fact I'd suggest there is no "how things work", and "how things are" cannot be described because descriptions themselves are made from it.)

Ultimately, then, this is about generating experiences which lead one to contemplate the "nature of experiencing", and understand the relationship between experiences, intentions, and descriptions. And getting some desirable results along the way, for sure. The Two Glasses exercise, specifically, is really a structured approach to getting someone to shift state from one with "this" pattern as dominant, to one with "that" pattern as dominant - whilst making it relatively unlikely that they will counter-intend it afterwards, and in a way that naturally raises questions about causal relationships within experience.

POST: I've got a bit of a problem.

Q1: I am saddened that this subreddit seems so negative suddenly

Q2: It's the flood of all these new people. The whole "vibe" of the sub changed. There's no more teachers. And all the noobs are just relishing in their ignorance.

Q3: Imo "teacher" isn't the appropriate term.
Assuming that the core intentions of this sub are:
(a) to rise curiosity about the relationship between "I" and "the world" and subsequently between "experience" and "descriptions".
(b) Suggest tools to help individuals in their personal investigations.
What is lacking at this phase are more people willing to redirect "noob discussions" to the core theme. The modus operandi of /u/TriumphantGeorge is a good model.
My suggestion to make this task easier is to create a hypertext in the format of Question/Answer linking to previous discussions here. Maybe it could be done in a collaborative fashion utilizing a shared doc...

Indeed, those are the core themes - although they are usually best articulated as part of a dialogue, rather than a statement of intent I think, because the various terms tend to have different meanings for everyone. That's also why there isn't a basic Q&A/FAQ here. However, a wiki page linking to "historical discussions of note" may be a useful thing for us to introduce.

Meanwhile, the number of subscribers and new interest probably now exceeds what is practical for a subreddit topic like this, and has for a while. In moderation terms, we've tended to let things breathe for a bit, then reel things back in. That is, allow some basic or repeat posts to stay for a while - because they often allow a strand of discussion to develop that is valuable even if the main post is not - and later remove ones that didn't flourish. But this does mean we suffer from waves of "incomer ignorance" dominating the sub sometimes, and perhaps we need to push back on that a bit more.

...

A1: Grow a pair sissy.

A2: I agree with you. I was sitting in front of the mirror bored for 40 minutes straight. OP is just afraid of the dark.

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Oneirosophy

POST: Paul Levy - Recognizing the Dream Like Nature of Reality

There are only 6 ways you can experience: 5 senses and mind. Anything else you think is different is just a product of the mind.

A more straightforward way to begin investigating this (rather than jumping ahead as some of the earlier responses have), is the recognition that all of those things occur in the mind - by which I mean the "aware perceptual space" that you seem to be, that all your experiences arise in, be that "the senses" or "perceptions" or "thoughts".

That's basically the starting point for idealism, in fact: What is the nature of my direct experience, prior to my deductions about it? What things to do I know for certain? And what things are actually part of a constructive narrative?

Yes I agree with you the perceptions can't occur without the mind, but that doesn't imply that there is not anything outside that is causing such effect.

It implies that it is meaningless to talk about something outside the mind - since you will never experience such a thing. In fact: are there any spatial boundaries to the mind?

And logically speaking, something which has an effect on the mind would also need to be made of the same "stuff" that the mind is made of. So: what is the mind made of?

Both of those questions can be answered directly, right now, in your present moment experience.

The argument is, roughly:

...that in your direct experience, everything appears in "awareness" and is made from "awareness" (or consciousness, or whatever you want to call it). It also has no boundary. That is your starting point. You will never experience anything that does not appear within that, and of that. Furthermore, any thoughts you have "about" an outside or other materials or properties, will also be within that, and made from that.

So how does it make sense to talk of something outside of it, or made from something other than it?

Extras - Do you ever experience your brain doing anything or translating anything? In fact, do you ever experience "a brain"? When you talk of "a property your brain can translate as experience", what form would that "property" take and how exactly would it translate it from that form in into the form of "experience"? Finally, if you are imagining that right now as - what form is that imagining taking? Is it not a thought, within awareness, made from awareness?

You just talked about external things. Are you saying that what you just said doesn't make sense?

I'm trying to save on quote marks here. ;-) But I don't believe I did talk about any actual external things, things external to awareness. What would those be?

Well we are not gonna go anywhere. I am seeing how subjective idealism is just a way of interpret things. I know people here is not gonna agree.
No matter how you call the things the world is gonna still being the same.

Actually, forget subjective idealism for a bit - really it's all about two aspects:

• There is the relative content of experience.
• There is the fundamental nature of experience.

You can argue about the first one, but the second one is something that's pretty much a direct experience which is available and cannot be argued with (it just "is"). Idealism is the interpretation of the former, in terms of the latter - whereas most schemes don't even consider the latter, adopting a naive view of perceptions and conceptualisation.

So it's fine to talk about brains and the world and all that stuff, but in the background we recognise that those things all occur in the same context, of patterns within awareness.

Literally look around right now, and recognise that this is all arising within your mind-space, include your body sensations and so on. In other words, your direct experience is of being an "open space" in which sensations, perceptions and thoughts arise. Any conclusions you draw beyond this, are narrative fictions, abstractions.

For example, the idea that "the world" is of the same format as your present moment right now, is an assumption. Given the above, in what sense is the room next door actually "over there"? Spatial extent is part of an experience, it is not a necessarily a property of the world as such, just as the colour red is not a property of the world, and so on.

So idealism is really saying: throw away assumptions, start from what you know to be true directly, and build out from there - all the way avoiding the reification of abstractions.

Note - I'm not trying to sell the perspective here or persuade you of anything; I'm just trying to describe it so that you understand what it actually is.

POST: The question that would reveal everything to me.

Do I, or any other perceiving being, have the ability to choose without being conscious of the choice being made? Or to put it in another way; if subjectivity is true, and I create all of my surroundings, then how is it that I do not recall choosing my surroundings? Did I do it beforehand and then choose to do a memory wipe or do I choose in this moment what my surroundings should be?

It's because you have accumulated patterning. "Choosing" is an experience; relative creation is a shifting of state. They are not the same thing. You do not experience shifting as such, you only experience states.

Pretty much you don't choose your surroundings and actions specifically; they are simply logically implied by your current patterning, as part of that patterning. All this means your current state logically implies your entire experience right now and forever. Which means fundamental creation has already occurred, always - all you can do is redistribute the relative intensity of contributing facts via intention (=summoning a particular pattern or fact into greater prominence). Meanwhile, observing something in the senses is equivalent to "fixing" a particular fact, increasing its contributing intensity to a maximum, which is why subsequent experiences tend to be coherent with prior observations.

When it comes to intentional change and the final result ("do I choose my surroundings in detail?"), a useful metaphor to consider is that of moire fringes. Say I take one pattern and then intend another pattern over the top - can I pre-know the resultant pattern before I experience it? I cannot. Note that calculating the resultant would also be an experiencing of it.

For example, imagine a red car right now. Did you draw it in detail? No, it pretty much just autocompleted from the words "red car" into a particular instance of a red car. You could not have anticipated the form of the resulting car prior to its appearance in the senses. You had the experience of intending "red car" but you could not at that moment say you chose the actual car. Of course, if you take all the little intentions that have occurred over all time, all your accumulated patterning, then you did choose the exact red car in a sense.

Summary - You do not recall choosing because you do not generally choose your surroundings specifically. Creation does not occur in the way you are assuming. It is more like having a certain list of facts or patterns, whose distribution of relative intensity constitutes the "world-pattern" from which your ongoing sensory experience arises.

I wanna add another question. What happen with other people? Is it not a conflict that everybody choose their surroundings?

Everyone is their own copy of the world. At least in the sense that everyone is a conscious space which has "taken on the shape of" a particular state, from which arises an experience of being-a-person-in-a-world. This means that we are not sharing the world in the sense of sharing a place (in space and time); it is more like we are sharing a set of potential experiential patterns.

That doesn't answer my question. What does happen with everybody choosing their surroundings?

Everyone gets what they choose (within the limits of their own habitual patterning). As I said, the world is not a place.

...

Bah, I knew it. ;-) On the "choosing" thing, I'm pointing out that choosing itself is an experience apparently unfolding in time, the experience of choosing ("hmm, this or that, let's see") whereas a state shifts applies over all time, outside of it.

So, I'd say our disagreement is only because you are describing things in time. The subconscious mind doesn't fill in any details as such - the environment really is already there, you might say; it's just that it's very dim. Associative triggering brings it into brightness. That triggering itself happens outside of time too.

In other words, the full pattern of all experiences is within the current state, although it seems to unfold in time (because we've got a "things unfolding in time" pattern in our state). That's why we can know what's happening "next" - it's because it's already sat there, in a pre-existing landscape. Nothing is every created, it's just that the relative contours of the landscape are adjusted. That's why things can seem to be generated instantly.

What caused the patterns to accumulate?

Strictly speaking, we should say something like "redistribute" or "reshape" the world-pattern rather than "accumulate", but it's easier to think of each intention as the addition or overlaying of a pattern onto a notional baseline. We should think of the world-pattern as an already-existing landscape, which is modified by intention (actually, its modification is intention and vice versa). Where did the initial state come from? It didn't - it exists outside of time and is eternal. But since our intentions appear to occur to us in time, accumulation of modifications is an intuitive way to think of it.

Also if I intend to do something, didn't I just choose to intend?

We also need to be careful on our phrasings when referring to intention. So "intend to do something" might be better termed as "intensifying the fact of 'experiencing this action at this specific time'". But you can equally intend other, more general facts, or even quite abstract patterning.

Meanwhile, it's perfectly possible to have the experience of choosing and then the experience of doing, and there be no intending involved, if those experiences are already baked in to the landscape. And one can also intend without having the experience of choosing first, in the sense of weighing up options - although one might have the experience of ceasing to change shape, based on a feeling of coherence. It's a direct shifting. Not easy to put into words. But...

In terms of your question, "how is it that I do not recall choosing my surroundings", it's because there is always a landscape (in the sense of a world-pattern of facts, and also in the sense of a "world as content"); there are always surroundings. Your intentions can shift or define that landscape - and intending to update one element will involve a shift in the whole landscape since all intentions apply globally - but you do not need to have the experience of "choosing" it for it to be there.

Okay, that wasn't as clear as I'd have hoped, but the core to all of this anyway is: content is not created in the same sense as, say, a games programmer deliberately creates a world, through selection and in time. Right now, the landscape of experiences is laid out, including the experience of choosing. That experience itself doesn't cause or do anything, that's an illusion due to the fact you only have one part of the landscape in the senses at a time. (Back to: experiences are local; intentions are global.)

All choice is done without the chooser being aware of the choice being made. Choice is an illusion of the brain. Sam Harris's lecture on free will explores this phenomenon quite rationally and I'd recommend you watch the whole thing, but I've linked to the most relevant bla bla bla bla bla

This seems a bit muddled, because on one hand you talk of a brain "doing" things, and on the other you talk of a non-spatial and non-temporal consciousness. If things simply are, then it what sense does "a brain" do anything at all? What is a brain, in that case? If you catch my drift.

Your consciousness causes the whole reality, but the brain causes the sense of individual identity. Your brain (and body) acts like a filter of consciousness, limiting perception to just bla bla bla bla bla

The point I'm really getting at is, and I could have been more specific perhaps:

In your story of experience there, do you really need "a brain" as the substrate of your experience? What would your brain be made of? How exactly would your brain "cause" the sense of individual identity? Also, in what sense does consciousness cause reality? Does that mean reality is something different than consciousness?

From the subjective point of view (given the topic of this subreddit), would it not make more sense to dispose of the concept of a brain entirely, since we will never actually experience such a thing, and instead stick to what we can observe, which I suggest is:

• That our experiences arise within the context of an open awareness or consciousness.
• That our experiences arise as patterning of that open awareness (they are "made from" it).

More directly:

• The fundamental nature of experience is consciousness; the relative content of experience is patterns within consciousness.

We might see "brains" (grey lumps of stuff) within our experience, but we never experience being a brain - we only ever experience being consciousness, consciousness taking on the shape of an experience.

But to say that your individual experience is all there is is a solipsistic failure to account for the existence of that which you cannot experience.

I think you are still implicitly beginning with a notion of a spatial world unfolding in time, and then placing experience within that. However, it doesn't really matter for the larger point.

On the solipsism issue -

I'm not proposing a solipsistic view because I'm not talking about individual experiences, rather I'm talking about experiences which are of apparently being an individual.

Consciousness itself is "before" division or change; it is before multiplicity or relativity. We might use terms like "parallel-simultaneous", or use the metaphor of there being different experiences occurring at the same time, or sequentially, but actually we can't really speak of it at all, because "spatial extent" and "unfolding time" are themselves experiences, and out thoughts are formatted in those terms. It is already "too late" to speak of that which is before the experience. There is no context that can be thought of or described.

For convenience, I tend towards that metaphor which describes the world, rather than being a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", as a "toy box" of potential experiential patterns, because it circumvents: the mistaken impression of "parallel" or "simultaneous" experiences; the idea that there is a world that is "happening" other than the experience of it; and the idea that there is an experiencer or "doer" separate from the experience or the "happening".

On the issue of subsets -

Again here, we have to be sure to avoid the idea of there being a selection in space or time - which means we also cannot have creation events within our model. The dodge for this is to say that all possible patterns already exist, and all that changes is their relative contribution, constituting a particular state. In effect, an eternal landscape whose terrain can be adjusted by becoming a different set of contours - by shape-shifting into a new form. ("Intention" is the name for the relative intensification or reduction of one of the patterns which constitute that landscape.)

As always, though, these are conceptual tricks to some extent - the direct experience is much simpler!

Haha! Well shit, dude, then we're saying the same thing, but just describing it different ways. I suspected that with my last post. We're just each catching the other in semantic traps, which is always the problem of using language to describe that which is more fundamental than language.

Heh! Well there you go. It does seem that a lot of our conversations here come down to terminology. Nature of the business of nature, I suppose.

POST: Intention and nonduality

The next step then is, how to intend more directly? How to step behind experience and generate it?

I'd say you can't get behind anything, because you are everything. You are the "open aware space" which "takes on the shape of" the world, of experiences. Specifically, at the moment you have taken on the shape of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. You don't generate anything, you are it and you become it, and between intentions you remain static (the apparent unfolding of sensory experience is a static pattern). It's probably better thought of as a pre-existing state or landscape, a world-pattern consisting of a relative distribution of facts or patterns (including a "time passing" pattern) which you can amend the contours of, thus changing which facts are most prominent and so changing your subsequent experience. To "intend" is therefore to shift your own shape as this landscape, and all intention is direct, in that it involves amendment of this landscape. However, some intentions or re-shapings will correspond more directly and obviously to sensory experience than others.

How to intend?

Well, there is no technique, and any attempt to "do" intention is doomed to fail, since it involves you identifying with one part of experience and trying to act upon the other part (which is impossible anyway), to partial collateral success at best. How does one shift one's shape? You-as-open-space simply becomes the new state, the new pattern. For direct intention (in the sense of directness of result), basically you just decide. This might be most accessibly described as "thinking an unbounded thought that something is true" or "asserting a fact" or "summoning a pattern in mind". If that is problematic, you can assign meaning to another act, mental or physical. You decide that, say, that conjuring this mental image means-that this thing is true, or that performing this ritual means-that this event will happen.

Of course, this is a trick: you are still intending directly in the sense of asserting a fact, it's just that you are asserting one that implies the desired fact as an extended pattern. This distracts you from the fact that the conjuring of the mental image was by intention, as were the physical movements. You could just have intended the result without the intermediary, immediately updated the landscape, and experience would have apparently flowed towards it naturally, provided you did not resist what arose (thus re-intending against it).

(This also leads to the observation that: experiences are apparently local, intentions are actively global.)

The ideal?

The ideal approach is to perhaps begin with asserting that we are an open space in which experience arises - and then cease opposing sensory experiences from that point on, and to only occasionally intend particular facts into prominence. Otherwise we are thrashing our landscape, rippling the water of our world. Our experiences happen by themselves, but leveraging this requires an apparent relinquishing of control, in order to gain full control.

Your posts have been really great lately, TG. It's very no-frills. You're describing what there is, without trying to package things in accessible metaphors. Self as "open aware space", IMO, is one of the best and clearest concepts to come out of this sub.

Thanks! Where the metaphors come in, as I see it, is in that intermediate zone where we try to connect one perspective to another - for ourselves initially, and in our conversations with others later. Basically, re-encoding it to build a bridge between worldviews that allows people to move from thinking-about things to direct-knowing them.

But once we've got there and we realise our nature directly, it's all much simpler: the thought (pattern) of something literally is that thing (albeit without a context) and that applies to "me"-as-person as much as anything else. Then, metaphors take on a new role: they are not just for description, they are for actively formatting yourself. We realise that's how they worked all along, that's how we came to our new understanding. An act of explanation is also an act of creation, or creative reshaping at least. There's really nothing else to say at that point.

...

A1: I'm not sure exactly how this fits in but maybe it will be helpful to you. This is a Taoist perspective on intent from Practical Taoism translated by Thomas Cleary. There's some Traditional Chinese Medicine stuff at the beginning I left in, because who am I to edit, but it really gets good by the end.
Intent As The Go-Between
Master Ziyang said, "Is intent only the go-between? The science of spiritual alchemy can never be apart from it, from beginning to end."
The Master of Round Unity said, "The reason practical wizardry needs intent is essentially just to assess the operation and keep it in balance. Intent is associated with the spleen; that is why wizards call it true earth. True earth means harmony. Now in medical practice, a pulse may be floating or sinking, slow or rapid, empty or full, but as long as there is stomach energy, one does not die. So the stomach energy is also harmony.
"In spiritual alchemy, active and quiet exercises must not be off balance in the slightest; if there is any imbalance, it usually results in illness. Throughout it is essential to assess relative gravity, relative buoyancy, relative strength, and relative freshness and to adjust them, causing yin and yang to match each other, so water and fire are evenly balanced, not allowing excess, which would cause other troubles. If not for intent operating this assessment, how could you guarantee you won't make a mistake and go wrong?"
Zhang Sanfeng said, "What is intent? It is the outward function of the basic spirit; it is not that there is also intent in addition to the basic spirit."
Master Ziyang said, "Mind is the natural leader: when it is used without artificiality, then what activates it is the basic spirit. This is the alchemical use of mind."
So you should not overactivate intent. Once you overactivate intent, you are trying to force progress and not being natural. The problems caused by the toil of forced exercises are not trivial; even if you use them skillfully, you still do not escape attachment, contrarily increasing the ailment of intention. This is why votaries of the Sect of Life do not reach the Great Way of absolute nonresistance.
The location of awareness of basic spirit is intent; awareness without an effort to be conscious is skillful use of intent. If you have even a single thought of deliberate arrangement, then you are overactivating intent.

POST: Technique for developing intellectual lucidity

[POST]

I think that no matter how far or how deep we push our consciousness into the insane, the unbelievable, and the non logical there will always be those ideas and dreams that ultimately baffle us and come across as nonsense. Everyone likes to ponder the peculiarities of scientology, ufo cults, NWO conspiracies and such but is there utility beyond this beyond schizophrenic fantasy or amusing ideology? I like to spend time browsing these weird and peculiar dream worlds because it for some reason gives me a sense of lucidity, but I never really realized why until just now.
Depending upon how one perceives things there will be different reactions to claims such as reptilians putting micro chips in your brain. The objectivist reacts to claims such as this as ridiculous in comparison to their own worldview. The subjectivist on the other hand does not have an objective worldview to compare this reptilian fantasy too, yet the logical part of their mind cannot accept this. So the effect that takes place here is you are exploring a dream/ideology you know is not objectively real but at the same time you don't reject said ideology either and just explore the particular dreamscape as it is without judgement, which creates the similar feeling one has of being in a lucid dream. But in order for this effect to be successful you cannot have another dream/worldview to compare to, you must let it sit in the void totally as it is. This is why materialists who explore weird belief structures don't have a sense of lucidity when doing this because they are comparing x(weird belief) to y (perceived sane belief). What i'm saying is recognize the weirdness of X but do not compare it to any kind of Y. You don't want to fully believe or disbelieve in X, its kind of similar to Robert anton wilsons general agnosticism but taken to the next level.
So here is what you do. Find a book, online community, of an ideology that you could never possibly find yourself believing in under any circumstances (If you cant do that make up your own) read it but neither believe what you are reading nor disbelieve, neither agree nor disagree. Just enjoy the novelty of the strange exotic dream, and you will notice a strange sense of lucidity takes place.
To make this more evident I will give you an example. Earlier today I was browsing a subreddit known as digital cartel. Its a subreddit of a man who seems to be suffering from schizophrenia thinks he is jesus and that the NWO Is trying to control everyones mind. I was reading a section about how he was talking about how secret socieites have been planting micro chips into EVERYONES (literally every single person) for over a thousand years. This is something most rational skeptical minds of the mainstream world would not be able to accept, but instead of going with my reflexive Bullshit stance or to believe it forthright, I kind of just flowed through the ideas without emotionally or intellectually investing in them any way.
One of the goals of this subreddit is to bypass this sort of objective mind that prevents us from seeing the dream like nature of things, yet it seems it can be used for our advantage in certain circumstances such as this. Eventually if one understands this state of consciousness it can be expanded into ideologies/dreams that seem more solid and more reasonable. But I think those who are new to the oneirosophic path should start with stuff that they in no way could believe in from the context of a conventional mind.

[END OF POST]

One things that comes from viewing the nature of experiencing as being fundamentally true, but the the specific content of experiences as being relatively true, is that you are in a state of permanent "open verdict". We see that all worldviews are "castles in the sky", in the sense that they are coherent and self-consistent, but none of them have a solid substrate as their foundation. One part of a worldview is true in the context of the other parts; none of the parts are true fundamentally; there is no privileged content-based platform from which other content may be judged.

The question then becomes not whether it is possible that reptiles are running the world, but whether it is possible to have an experience "as if" reptiles are running the world. (Turquoise says yes.)

POST: So I just watched a video that I think you all may be interested in

[POST]

[https://youtu.be/BNloJT8-pfw]
This is a great summation of oneirosophic thought and a practical guide to using it. Amazing too, that I found this video after deciding I would go on YouTube and find a video instructing me to be able to manifest what I want in the world, and then gravitating towards this one. Guys, this is real. You are creating the world. Take responsibility of this, not like Atlas and have the world on your shoulders, but see that the world has no weight until you make it so godamn heavy.
There's a part at the end that didn't make sense to me. Literally the last thing he says is "let your mind starve." At first I was like, wait, what? But upon reflection what I think he means is this: Allow your mind to remain empty, and only feed it what you create. The emptier the mind, the clearer what you have to create becomes. If your mind is filled with junk you can't even create anything, is what he's saying.
How does one keep their mind empty? I would say this is where meditation comes into play. Also, T-George has a daily releasing exercise that is similar to meditation but maybe easier? If someone could link that, that would be great.
Tl;dr Mind empty = choose what mind makes. Secret discovered when you know what you think, you can find. You find it through aknowledging the relationship between thought and self.

[END OF POST]

Also, T-George has a daily releasing exercise that is similar to meditation but maybe easier? If someone could link that, that would be great.

Here you go:

Daily Releasing Exercise

Every day, for 10 minutes, lie down on the floor in the constructive rest position: feet flat, knees up, hands resting on abdomen, a couple of books under the head so that it feels supported. Lie down in this position and give up, play dead. Give yourself to gravity, the universe, whatever. Let go of your body, your mind and - particularly - let go of controlling your attention. Allow your body and mind and attentional focus to shift and move however they want. And if you happen to notice yourself "holding on" again, gripping anything, just let go once more. Now, sometimes you might find that your attention narrows on a particular sensation, which then intensifies, peaks, then releases, after which your attention opens out again. That is fine. Just let that happen. Let anything happen, for those 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, for those interested in a bit more of Neville, he put out so much material that it can be hard to navigate, so here are some key document links to help get an overview:

• Imagination Creates Reality
• Awakened Imagination
• The Pruning Shears of Revision
• The Power of Awareness

There's also a great resource with all of his books and lectures: here [Dead link]. (The talk above is there, under its original title of Mental Diets.) If there can be said to be a metaphysics behind his material, beyond simply the interpretation of the bible as a series of metaphors for the true nature of experiencing, then it's in Awakened Imagination and Out Of This World. These actually work very well in partnership with Berkeley's Three Dialogues, I think.

==Hey, thanks for reposting that. You know, I don't recall the "knees up" being apart of it, is that new? Curious why you say to that, is it to keep one from getting drowsy from lying down?=

It's just what happens when you put your feet flat on the floor! Knees together might be a better way of saying it. Anyway, the linked image makes it clear what I mean, hopefully. The reason for that particular position is that, if you have no residual tension, you'll be completely relaxed into the ground - and if you do have residual tension, your body will eventually run out of energy maintaining its position, hence "release".

Haha well yes of course! But I mean why that instead of just feet straight out, lying flat? Is that not going to allow the same release of tension?

It puts your body in the ideal posture in terms of lower back and neck positioning, particularly the tilt of your pelvis. Which is also why you do it on the floor, rather than on a soft surface (which just tends to support your current posture with held tension). The idea isn't to "feel relaxed" so much as to eventually release into full support, which translates into effortless standing and movement later (and other things too of course).

Sounds very rewarding. Thanks for the tip.

POST: Why don't we discuss our own experiences more in this sub?

It's curious how language has become a type of prison in a way.

I'd broaden this, even, to say that descriptions have become a type of a prison - because, particularly recently, people have come to view descriptions as being accurate depictions of the world, even seeing them as the world itself, rather than "parallel constructions in thought" that are basically catalogues of (a subset of) observations to date.

Where this gets tricky that, although descriptions themselves do not limit the possibilities of what might be observed because they are non-causal (apart from some mild patterning side-effects), intentions are causal - and so intentions based on those descriptions tend to imply those descriptions as their extended patterns.

For example: there may be no evil sprits as such, but if you start intending your route to the shops based on avoidance of spirit attack, your state will shift somewhat towards experiences "as if" there are such things, even though you have not specifically intended the "evil spirit world-description" as being true.

Q1: descriptions themselves do not limit the possibilities of what might be observed because they are non-causal...intentions are causal - and so intentions based on those descriptions tend to imply those descriptions as their extended patterns
so creating a description that is suitable to one's desires can be a basis for creating intentions
if i am not the source for the universe then who is watching? surya is the observer of karma (action) (and the knower of all dharmas) and i instruct surya on yoga (the process of union of saguna brahman with nirguna brahman) thus the solar system is permeated with knowledge
the result is kaivalya mukti 2 - wiki
at least that's my working description at the moment

[QUOTE]

Kaivalya
Kaivalya (Sanskrit: कैवल्य) is the ultimate goal of aṣṭāṅga yoga and means "solitude", "detachment" or "isolation", a vrddhi-derivation from kevala "alone, isolated". It is the isolation of purusha from prakṛti, and liberation from rebirth, i.e., moksha. Kaivalya-mukti is described in some Upanishads, such as the Muktika and Kaivalya Upanishads, as the most superior form of moksha, which can grant liberation both within this life (as in jīvanmukti), and after death (as in videhamukti).

[END OF QUOTE]

Since "intentions" are just "patterns you are intensifying into prominence" in order to reshape experience, those can be outcomes, facts, or something more like "formatting" (basic descriptions of how the world works). That's why metaphors are so useful, and that's where the idea of "active metaphors" comes from. If you formulated your outcome in terms of a "solid spatial world", then intending that will imply that worldview - intend that worldview - along with the outcome. If you formulate it in terms of an "infinite grid of parallel moments", then you'll be implying that worldview instead, and will find your overall experience tends to shift towards it. So you can, of course, simply intend the worldview instead to make a more general change. (Easy to test: Just go around for a couple of days intending that "life is a dream" and you'll quickly find that... it is. Then switch "life is a material world" and you'll get that happening instead.)

Your description, then, is one such "active metaphor" and you will tend to have experiences consist with that if you use it directly or implicitly. However, there is no fundamental "how things are" at all; which is why "seeking for knowledge" is an endless and pointless task. There's only one thing to understand, and that's something you do by noticing rather than working it out.

so fundamental formatting of the universe is also an intention

To slightly rephrase, just because "universe" is a bit of a messy concept: the formatting of awareness is the accumulation of intended patterns and their implications so far. And: since all intentions have a meaning, which is their extended pattern context, then to intend always implies the worldview of which that intention is a part, just as you say.

so what i notice becomes reality, but what i notice is reality

...since there's no separation between "noticing" and "reality". Which is why it can perhaps be better to phrase things as simply "experiences", because that removes the notions of an action, an actor, and an independent object. Instead, we have "experiencing" which "shifts (itself)" to take on the shape of states or experiences.

Q1: just because "universe" is a bit of a messy concept
what i mean by that ("universe") is - 'everything that exists materially' - because everything that does not exist in 'reality' exists in brahman (or as the infinite grid of all possibilities) waiting to be manifested.
the formatting of awareness is the accumulation of intended patterns and their implications so far
right - how i am now is as a result of what i have done before: i.e. the cumulative result of karma ("action") and those actions have been based upon patterns (my dharma or self-determined law of the universe -)
since all intentions have a meaning, which is their extended pattern context, then to intend always implies the worldview of which that intention is a part, just as you say.
yes, because that which is understood has meaning in context (the "extended pattern") based on the intention based on the pattern (in this case, my dharma, since i am talking exclusively about the universe)
...since there's no separation between "noticing" and "reality".
the only difference is time (i.e. actions performed) which of course is based on previous experiences (self (parabrahman, 'infinite grid') → pattern (dharma) → action (karma) ↔ all together as an experience (brahmasource - a state of consciousness)
Which is why it can perhaps be better to phrase things as simply "experiences", because that removes the notions of an action, an actor, and an independent object. Instead, we have "experiencing" which "shifts (itself)" to take on the shape of states or experiences.
yes

All good!

...

xoxoyoyo: my dick is bigger. now tell me about your dick

Q2: Well yeah I get that, but knowing about your dick doesn't offer any useful new information. I'm quite able to imagine more or less what other's dicks could possibly be like. What I'm not able to imagine are things I've never thought about or heard of before. If you've imbued your dick with some kind of amusing superpowers, now that I would be interested in hearing about.

xoxoyoyo: the point is that you are playing a shitty game of knowing yourself through comparison to others. If you are "doing better" then yeah, you can feel good about your "progress". If you are "doing worse" then you can feel bad about your lack. We tend to do this with everything. Instead of living life we live in our judgements and opinions about life. You and I are completely different people, different backgrounds, different lives. There just is no basis for comparison regardless of how much it appears there should be. Stuff like this tends to be pissing contests. That is why in many traditions they tell students to STFU about their "progress". Like at work, discussing salaries. No "good" comes of it.

Green-Moon: I agree with xoxoyoyo. The idea is not to 'compare' yourself with others. I don't know if that was ever your intention, but you will inevitably end up unconsciously comparing yourself even if that is not what you want. That is human nature.

I agree it is quite interesting to read about other's experiences but its more along the lines of "entertainment" for lack of a better word, rather than actually allowing myself to let other's experiences set a benchmark for me. If the idea is to simply read up on other people's experiences then maybe we can make a seperate sub for it. I personally believe this sub is best suited to discussion about onerisophy rather than describing personal experiences. But as mentioned before the idea isn't to look at other people's experiences so that you can get an idea of "progress". I think it can negatively affect your personal journey with oneirosophy when you begin to bring other people and their experiences into it. It is about you and only you. It is important to remember that.

But it is enticing to read other's experiences. I believe I read one of your comments about one of your experiences and it was very interesting. But I'm not sure if that's the best thing to do. We are here to discuss not to advise or show. This is our own personal journey and we can only walk this path alone.

POST: Hell Zen. (by AesirAnatman)

[POST]

http://hellzen.pen.io/
Not original content. Not to be taken as truth, of course. Use it to stimulate your own contemplation, if you find it interesting as I did.
Also, there are a couple good mind experiments in there.

[END OF POST]

A1: Here are the most interesting proposed exercises inside:
Grasping mind:
The Buddha, sitting in Jetta grove, said: "Past mind can't be grasped, present mind can't be grasped, and future mind can't be grasped." Why take his word for it? He was speaking from HIS experience. Try it for yourself and see what happens. Grasp past, present, or future mind I am waiting. Did you grasp your mind yet? Did you grasp any mind at all? Past? Present? Future? It's getting scary in here. Don't be afraid. Scary moments like these are what my Hell Zen is for. That's when it really jolts into gear.
Shiva Zen
Let's try some Shiva Zen. Ready? This will take about four minutes. Shut your eyes and, breathing in, sense your subtle energy (ki, chi, prana, or what have you) flowing up the spine. Up from the bottom. As the subtle energy reaches your head, it bursts into a golden or white radiance and goes simultaneously everywhere at once. This is Manifestation, or Creation. Your energy has become all forms, everything simultaneously, expanding like the post Big Bang universe. Breathing out, now, once you've reached the limit of your breathing in, feel the energy drop down your spine, to the bottom. Your golden-white energetic radiance, so explosive on the in-breath, is now contracting, sinking, becoming a zero point. Utter darkness. Utter stillness. Quiescence. No forms. No thoughts. Everything has now contracted into the tanden (ki-point, 2-3 fingers below navel). This is just pure and empty potential, consciousness without anything to think about. It's imageless. Yin. It's so wonderful, this Yin zero point when every phenomena has collapsed back into pure potential, isn't it? Some people want to stay here. But no. If you're going to live, you've got to breathe. So breathe in again. If you don't, your body will make you do it anyhow. Right? You're now breathing in again, the energy is going up your spine, forms are appearing, you'll see bits of dream, galaxies forming in space. It's all exploding from your head, especially just above the crown, in all directions. "Let there be light." Wonderful! A universe appears. It's fun to see the universe appear and disappear with your breathing. You'll also discover pretty quickly whether or not your personal preference is for "forms" or "formlessness." IN breath rises and expands infinitely. OUT breath sinks and contracts infinitely. In breath = everything. Out breath = nothing.
Pervasiveness of awareness
What is IT that's intensely aware of your body and its movements in space, yet mysteriously, when you look for it, is found nowhere at all? Put your hand behind you and touch the back of your skull. Feel the awareness in your hand. It is aware, isn't it? You can feel your hair. The awareness in your hand is now located a few inches in back of your brain. If it's the brain that's aware, how is this possible? You have just been introduced to the pervasive nature of awareness.
Unchangingness of awareness:
Let's try an experiment. Sit down, shut your eyes, and concentrate on trying to find your awareness in space. If it's in your head, what part of your head is it in? See if you can find the center of your awareness. Isn't it strange that your awareness seems to be as much "in" your chest, or shoulder, or feet, as it is inside your skull? Weird stuff. But even there, can you find the exact point where your awareness is? This is the interesting part: try bending forward with your eyes shut, concentrating intensely on your awareness. Now straighten, just as slowly, to your former sitting posture. Did your awareness move? Did it bend slowly forward when you did, then back? Try it from side to side. Lean back, all with your eyes shut. You're aware of all this, clearly aware, but is the awareness moving at all? If the awareness IS moving, does it move at exactly the same rate as your bodily movement? Does it lag behind? Or jump forward?

That's really good - straight to it.

Zen isn't Sutric buddhism. You understand the Void not just with your brain but your whole body, down to the cleft hooves. In Tantra, this is called the Yoga of Spontaneous Realization. It is an ongoing and unending Enlightenment you don't need to name or grasp.

And an enjoyable read.

For anyone who liked the exercises, you might like Rupert Spira's efforts, his books Presence Vol I & II are filled with one-chapter little experiments exactly like that - just questioning what your actual experience is. I put it in the reading list I think. Sample here. He gave a recent conference talk, transcript here [dead link], which is maybe worth reading to get the idea.

Not quite so much fun, though!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick thoughts:

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

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

The brutal simplicity underlying all this is:

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

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

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

Looping back to your points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The implications of "high weirdness".

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

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

Stacked Weirdness & Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear of the Unknown & Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and:

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

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

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

I'm gonna riff on that a bit -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How would you define "knowledge"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intending vs Sensory Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the Chair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

Understanding this, we can skip that process.

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

POST: Sensoria vs visualization.

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

Relevant quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good choice! :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are you picturing this 5D world to be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...and therein lies the paradox.

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

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

Do you mean looking around or looking rotund?

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

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

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

Easy:

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

POST: Some reasons I hate this realm.

[POST]

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

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: The Block of Family Members

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Contemplate

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

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

EDIT: Made a few tweaks, added some sentences.

POST: Invoking the Witching Hour. New exercise

[POST]

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

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

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

[END OF POST]

I like this.

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

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

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

POST: How To Grow Faster?

Define "grow"!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But... habits.

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

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

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

POST: Why experience exists?

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

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

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

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

POST: What is Oneirosophy? (By cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

Perfect timing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: Reply got a bit longer than intended!

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

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

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

A couple of things I've played with:

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

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

That's the idea anyway, I think.

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

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

...

I think we're very much in agreement.

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

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

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

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

No "me".

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

I am 100% against the complete abandonment of oneself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think this could be a good sub.

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

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

...

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

POST: Trusting intention

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

Yes, this is exactly right, and nicely put.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that personifies it too much?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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