TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 13)

POST: Seriously tripped out. I SWEAR there were at least 65,000 subscribers to this subreddit. I watched the number climb for quite a while too. WTF

A1: That is an improvement then, imagine 65,000 people posting this type of drama daily.

Hmm.

POST: Misunderstandings

/u/TriumphantGeorge states that "dimension jumping" is actually just a metaphor. It's all been a metaphor. I don't mean to shoot anyone down with this. If you believe you are actually jumping between dimensions and shifting the OBJECTIVE REALITY, go for it, I'm not going to stop you

However, to say it is "just" a metaphor is also misleading. That implies that metaphors are lessers things, that they are not "real" like other things which are "objective". The sense in which "dimensional jumping" is just a metaphor is the same sense in which "objective reality" is just a metaphor. To highlight:

It's a place to change your subjective perception of reality, meanwhile the objective one remains unchanged.

I have never encountered an "objective perception" of reality. In fact, strictly speaking, I'm not sure I can say that I have ever experienced a "reality" at all. The context of the statement would be all important. It is also worth considering whether there is truly a difference between having an experience that "really" happened and having one "as if" something happened. The experience certainly happened; the explanation of that experience is another thing. The explanation is in fact itself another experience: "the experience of thinking about an experience". Explanations are never "what really happened", you might say. Unless perhaps one thinks that the world is actually made from explanations! (Although: there is a sense in which that might be viewed as an accurate statement, but not by the straightforward interpretation of it.)

Anyway, you get the idea.

The sidebar text and the introduction already give the perspective to take (and there's no risk of posts or my comments being deleted; the idea behind the subreddit is that a lot of the content will be in the evolving discussion taking place within the comments). From there, the intention is that people do some exercises, contemplate the results and their ongoing experience more generally. There is, in fact, probably not much point trying to work out what this "really is" without engaging with that. It can lead to one simply creating more "castles in the sky" (self-consistent conceptual frameworks which "make sense" within themselves, but do not actually connect do the the topic of direct experience - that is, they are "conceptually true" only). Regardless, one needs to be really picky when it comes to how we use our familiar concepts and ideas here; because perhaps familiarity is the only thing making them seem valid. Some good and reasonably accessible reading related to that last point from the perspective of science and philosophy, again to be viewed as thought-provoking rather than prescriptive:

What's bad about this habit - N David Mermin, on the reification of abstractions.
The mental universe - Richard Conn Henry in Nature, covering similar ground.
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics - George Ellis on, essentially, science vs conceptualising vs philosophy.
A Private View of Quantum Reality - Christopher Fuchs on interpretation, probability, the "objective world" container concept, and more. (See also the related Nature article, Physics: Qbism puts the scientist back into science, which is also interesting for the point at which the author resists the implications of his model.)

1] It's obviously worth asking what "dimensional jumping" and "objective reality" are metaphors of or for. One answer: they are metaphors for the patterning of our experience; they are possible "as if" perspectives on them. Of course, "patterning" is itself a metaphor! However, it perhaps benefits from having less in the way of hidden assumptions between the direct experience and the description - plus it self-declares as a metaphor rather than claiming to be "what is really happening".

I don't believe I'm being that much of a poison.

Hopefully, I never seemed to suggest that you were. That's not the spirit in which I responded, which was: to clarify what was meant when I said "it is a metaphor" (my "own words", just as you say) and to elucidate the underlying approach of the subreddit. Your post was a great seed for kicking off a discussion about exactly that.

I just wanted to highlight that for newer people to this sub, so they can decide for themselves if they believe it or not.

Indeed. But it's hopefully not a matter of people "believing" something (or not) based on what they read. As the sidebar tries to underline - and it really does give you all you need to get started - it's about conducting a personal investigation and then drawing your own conclusions. In fact, "belief" is probably too strong a word: people don't believe in an "objective world", they just never really examined the idea one way or another, nor paid much attention to the structure of their own perception. I'm not even sure that most people truly understand what is actually meant by a phrase like "objective reality", beyond the vague background assumption that what they supposedly are is a person-object located within some sort of place-environment. Most people, I would suggest, have never truly examined - intellectually or practically - their assumptions about their ongoing experience in any way. And then, if prompted to, they mostly go straight into thinking-about it at a surface level, rather than attending to it. Most don't even know what attending-to even is. This tends to result in wandering around the same ideas in a circle.

solipsism is by definition unfalsifiable

That's not necessarily the case, I'd suggest. It is true that there can be no content-based falsification of solipsism. But, it might be possible to notice something about your ongoing experience, its context, which suggests that ideas like solipsism are meaningless - that they do not apply. They are "not even wrong" as a description of one's situation. Similarly, the idea of an "objective world". That is not to say that they are not useful ideas, though. Recognising that these ideas (those, and "atoms", "particles", "waves", and so on) constitute "effective theories" rather than explanations in the sense of behind-the-scenes truth, is probably quite important. (People often pay lipservice to this, but not much more than that, especially over the last few decades where increasingly descriptions are taken as literally true, actual "things".) This is one of the senses in which the "objective world" and "dimensional jumping" are both metaphors.

To emphasise, though: this subreddit is not about believing anything. However, it might be about examining - everything.

And "belief" isn't that strong of a word to describe the situation.

I think I'm just keen to have a more specific use of the word "belief" when discussing this particular topic. Certainly, as you say, the everyday use covers all those situations you allude to. But here, when dealing with a deliberate examination of the nature of experience, it's useful to highlight when something is more of an unexamined "assumption" than an explicit "belief". It can seem nitpicky, but making distinctions like that can help when digging deeper, I feel.

When all is said and done, this boils down to solipsism vs. realism

I personally don't think that's the case, and for a reason: you can observe something about your direct experience which simultaneously re-contextualises "realism" and makes untenable the common version of "solipsism". Loosely speaking, we end up with: in the former case, there is no place for a "real world" to be; in the latter case, there is no place for a countable "object" to be and hence nothing for experience to "belong" to. Now, if one has no new information - no additional experiences to add to one's memories-to-date; no fresh container concept either - then certainly it seems that we are left with an intellectual choice between "realism" or "solipsism". This is why there is an encouragement to conduct certain experiments, and why the sidebar calls them "exercises" rather than, say, "methods". (And to really ponder what a "description" actually is.)

As a side note I'd like to applaud you for keeping this discussion civil and well-meaning

Likewise. Hopefully the subreddit is all about encouraging collaborative discussion, an ongoing conversation - albeit one guided by a certain approach. That "certain approach" though, is based on engaging with ideas and beliefs as ideas, rather than fighting to "win" exchanges. After all, who knows where the next interesting or useful angle may come from? Certainly, it's unlikely that it will arise from people just viewing everything in exactly the same way and nodding their heads in precise agreement! (Or fighting in such a way as nothing is gained by anyone.)

The exercises themselves, however, are biased in favor of confirming one side over the other.

I don't think so? There is no content within the exercises themselves. And they are definitely not intended to involve a selection between two viewpoints, as such. Instead, quite possibly the conclusion would be that both viewpoints belong to a certain "type", and that the "type" is itself something to be questioned.

They can be explained through other means that don't require this.

The issue, here, is that the exact nature of "explanations" is one of the things under examination.

But I do think that some more clarification was needed for people to decide if this really is the subreddit and ideology for them

Ultimately, although it doesn't explicitly state this, it's sort of about being anti-ideology. (Although not just for the sake of it, of course.) It not "selling" a viewpoint. Rather, it's pushing a critical view of all descriptions of experience, as a category, with an encouragement to do a couple of little exercises which highlight this, directly (because there's no point in just thinking about this within any particular conceptual framework; you just go round in circles). In other words, the clarification comes from the participation, via personal investigation. There's not really any other way to do so that sticks; it's just more thoughts otherwise. The final context of it is non-conceptual (it can't be resolved into mental objects related within a representation space), which obviously poses a problem. None of this is particularly new, though, of course. The idea of "believing in" concepts and reifying them versus direct experience is a relatively new thing, I'd say - and has been retro-fitted onto past figures who explicitly criticised such an approach. For example, the key physicists of the early 20th century, and so on. As philosophy's prominence in physics diminished, and science became more like piecewise engineering built on prior conceptual platforms, we're left in quite an odd moment when it comes to the idea of "the real". Which is an interesting thing to explore, I think - hence all this.

Since the subreddit is ultimately non-ideological, the main battle is to prevent any particular "understanding" from becoming dominant to the exclusion of others (I think /u/Hooded_Rat gave quite a nice response along these lines). That would be what would constitute a "poisoning of the well". You're right that the internet is tricky when it comes to this. Now, it is true that not all newcomers to the discussion arrive at the same "level" - but that is fine, I think. With a topic such as this, intellectual elitism is quickly exposed, whilst ignorance is revealed as opportunity. From experience, though, you can't really just tell people "this is how it is". You really have to engage with them on their own terms. Fortunately, as one of the moderators, I have some influence over that! Plus we take the approach of "moderation via contribution", which hopefully ensures anything that gains momentum does not continue for long without coming under appropriate scrutiny. As a subreddit somewhat built on being against taking things on faith, though, we are generally in a good position here - even if Tom Cruise does show up and jumps on the subreddit sofa...

(Probably the real enemy for us is the casual comment declaring that "I read somewhere that this or that is the answer to your question", followed by nonsense! Corrective responses are time-consuming.)

Anyway, it is good when people (such as yourself) from all different perspectives are willing to engage, since it's not really about being "right" so much as digging into the construction and implications of this or that view (and its relationship to experience).

POST: Questions for Mr. TriumphantGeorge about reality tunnels, non-dual doctrines, books and movies.

(Replying as recently requested!)

First, on the reading recommendations front, I'd probably point you to this reading list conversation we had quite a while back.

[TG COMMENT]

POST: Witch needs help re: unintended consequences

Can you please just help me understand why no one here promotes using safety clauses.

We have had discussions in the past about being specific, particularly when someone has come up with a "monkey paw" type hypothesis. Ultimately, the generalised version of how to view this here would probably be that it's best to view things as a "dumb patterning system". That is, there is no interpretation of your target outcome taking place, there is in intermediary entity or intelligence. Rather, you are literally and directly increasing the prominence of the fact/pattern that you are intending, and the rest of the "landscape" of your world-definition is simply being deformed as a side-effect.

And so, yes, being specific is generally helpful, or appending some sort of notion of "in a way that benefits everyone" or whatever. One strategy someone came up with for the Two Glasses exercise was to add an asterisk (" * ") beside the labels, as if indicating an internal footnote, and just-decide that doing so meant that the manner of the outcome would be beneficial in a broader sense. It's worth noting something else here: that is, that the way some of these exercises were designed, was that it's not so much about the actual words you write, rather it's the state they represent or are a handle on.

For example, in the Two Glasses, you are not writing a description of your outcome, you are summoning the outcome in your mind and then retrieving a "handle" onto that, which you then write onto the label, linking it to the state. If you are doing that with full attention, then you are inherently specifying your outcome state in a way that is more complete than simply words or other symbols. So, there's a bit more to consider here, potentially, than just the general notion of "safety clauses". And obviously there's a whole lot of stuff to unpack about concepts like "forces of the universe" and so on. The approach here is (amongst other things) aimed at unpacking and defusing such patterns, and in the process I'd say that there's less to worry about as regards unintended outcomes from assumptions, since intentions are more "direct". Of course, almost all of an outcome could be said to "unintended", strictly speaking. (As in: not specified. Because if you intend an outcome - say, passing an exam - then "passing an exam" is just one little fact, but the whole landscape of your state was deformed to accommodate it. In that way, almost all of the outcome or result, almost all of your landscape, was not deliberate.)

POST: Two Glasses - А Cautionary Tale

See recent discussion on "unintended consequences" [POST: Witch needs help re: unintended consequences], too, and the idea of "safety clauses". It's important to be careful to not get too hung up on any "monkey paw" type notions here - that is, the idea that there is some sort of payment extracted for having an intentional outcome arise. What you say here isn't a bad way to phrase it:

Cause it's all about the "path of least resistance".

However - it's not necessarily the "path of least resistance" in terms of how you yourself would narrate or conceive of your situation. The way in which your outcomes (seem to) arise isn't necessarily dictated by "story" type logic; it's more like dream or "patterning" type logic. The whole thing is more like a direct "dumb patterning system". Which is to say:

If you intend an outcome, then it's like you have asserted a particular fact to be true: the fact of this-outcome at that-moment. The two certainties, right then, are that this-moment is true (because you are experiencing it) and that that-moment is true (because you are "pseudo-experiencing" it by defining it). If we conceive of our state (the set of all facts and the sequence of "sensory moments" which are implied by them) as a sort of "landscape", then it's like you have defined two particular landscape features, - like mountains or valleys or trees or rocks - one "now" and one "then". And so, just from the fact that the landscape is continuous, the intermediary ground that is the moments between "now" and "then" are defined implicitly. This is "dumb", or happens "stupidly", since there is no calculation or intelligence involved, any more than pulling on one side of a blanket results in a calculation which reforms all the folds and creases in the material. And the way in which the blanket reshapes does not necessarily correspond to any narrative we have about the current set of folds. That is, the rules of "folds in blankets" do not necessarily match up with the rules of "stories about pictures made from folds".

All of which leads to: yes, we might say that outcomes arise by the "path of least resistance", but the sort of "path" we are talking about doesn't necessarily correspond to our conception of what a "path" would be. In fact, the rules of "folds in blankets" would be "before" conceptualisation; they are literally unthinkable. So there's not much point in worry about that (because you wouldn't actually be worry about the thing you should be worrying about, anyway). The "story path" of an outcome really only an observation you make in retrospect, when it's too late. Fortunately, though, all of this is easily solved. If our worry is that the "outcome fact" will bring with it circumstances which are unappealing to us, we can simply include within our definition of the "outcome fact" that it will be appealing to us. From the other discussion:

The takeaway of all of this, I'd say, is the realisation that there is no intermediary between you and the intention and the outcome. They are all identical: intending is basically a "reshaping" of yourself into a new state, by yourself. The more specific you are, the more specific your subsequent experience. If you are not specific, then the intention is effectively "auto-completed" via triggering of the extended pattern of your intention (that is, simply due to its "dumb" incorporation into features of the current state or landscape at the time). Importantly, there is no "universe" or other entity interpreting requests or whatever, or sending you messages. Although you could intend to have experiences "as if" that were true, of course - but you would still be doing so directly.

Additional thought - It's also worth noting that the correct attitude isn't really: "if I intend something, then what if a bad thing happens as an unintended consequence?". Because if you never intend anything, you are not actually avoiding unintended consequences. Rather, your entire experience is an "unintended consequence"! You are deciding to accept however the "landscape" happens to have ended up by this point. So I suppose it's really about a transition towards taking responsibility for your experience, rather than not. And part of that is to understand and accept the limitations of knowledge as regards experiential content. There is an inherent "mystery" here: you can't pre-experience your experiences, and they aren't really "experiences" until you have experienced them.

[“there is no intermediary between you and the intention and the outcome.”] If we all had our “houses in order”, I would agree.

I think it applies regardless, and that's actually partly what's being said by it. To muse on that for a bit:

What I mean here is, that there's never a structural or active intermediary; there are no levels. The lack of order in your "house", is just a part of your current state, at the same level as any other pattern. The only thing there is to change, is the patterning of your state, directly (with no intermediary), even when in terms of a particular conceptual model that pattern would be described "as if" it were some sort of boundary or entity. Someone might, say, describe their process as "sending a message to god", and have outcomes consistent with there being a god. What "really" happened was that they shifted their state such that "outcome" was overlaid onto their existing "fact-pattern landscape" - and "outcome" was structured in terms of the pattern "god" and "message" and "response". The intention for the outcome was also, implicitly an intention for a "god message" experience. The subsequent "outcome-experience" then arises with content "as if" these things existed as intermediaries. The "outcome" is incorporated into existing patterning; a deformation of the existing overall pattern, and the "outcome" itself is defined in terms of a particular patterning. So at the fundamental level of "you-as-awareness in a patterned state", there is no intermediary, simply because there are fundamentally no "parts", just one "landscape" (you, in a particular "shape"). The state of your "house" is identical with the state of you, and there's nothing outside of that, hence nowhere for intermediaries to be. Hence "dumb patterning system" and all change being "direct". Or: it's patterns all the way down, and there isn't a "down" really, because "down" is a pattern too...

However, I've noticed you don't really discuss belief systems and definitions.

Hmm. So, what would you say a "belief system" is?

I feel that as as concepts, "beliefs" and "belief systems" can be a bit tricky, they are sort of quite hand-waving notions. There's this lack of clarity between "believing" or "belief systems" as an experience, as content of thought for example, and as the "meta" structuring or context of one's experience, what we've been calling our "state". In the view we've been exploring about, I'm not sure that the concepts are needed. Would we just be including them again from familiarity, from habit? In what sense do we actually experience a "belief" as such? And is it perhaps a partial idea which arose from a different model, an idea which doesn't translate easily or usefully?

Yes, the patterning system is dumb and it's steered by an even dumber set of generally unchecked notions about "life, the universe and everything".

Following on from the last bit, I think we have to make a distinction, perhaps, between "notions" as something one experiences thinking or inferring are at the root of thinking, versus the actual structuring of our experience. There's a hidden assumption here, perhaps, which is: that the format of our thoughts corresponds in type to the format of our state. That is, that descriptions somehow get "behind" experience, when in fact descriptions are themselves just further experiences, at the same level: the experience of "thinking about [a concept called] experience". There is no "behind the scenes".

Am I saying one should be afraid to explore their own mind/dreamscape?

Only in the same sense that one would be scared to explore their own thoughts, I suppose!

I'm saying one should... have a decent grip on how their own mind works, why they want what they want...

I definitely agree that it's quite fundamental to explore one's current state, and from that proceed accordingly. No matter what, though, you can only do this by actually experiencing your state. That can be in thought ("feeling out" your landscape in direct contemplation) or in the main strand (your ongoing "sensory" experience). So it's a funny sort of thing, that there is no "outside" position one can take. There's no way to "do something and then experience selected patterns", because the way that you select the patterns is itself by implicitly selecting patterns. So you are always exploring your current state, in fact!

The choice you make, though, is whether to intensify (increase the relative contribution of) a particular pattern, once you have unpacked it in some form or other (as a thought or as a main strand). So, it's all a bit like a rippling of self? Unfolding and refolding different aspects, electing to keep some aspects unfolded and contributing after having encountered them in our investigations, others less so. The main thing being that we can't actually "pre-decide" that we want a particular pattern in advance - we have to experience it in some way before it is available to us to choose to persist it or not.

...

Well, we're basically in agreement throughout; it's mostly terminology. As with a lot of these conversations, half of what we're doing is digging into terms to make sure we mean the same things by them - so we can then confirm we were agreeing anyway. I'd only pick up on this bit:

[Hence "dumb patterning system" and all change being "direct"] I'm simply pointing out that it's something most people will never get to truly experience for themselves.

In terms of what the description is pointing to, though, all experiences are that experience, and all intentional change is that. The extent of change (how unusual it is in comparison with the everyday-world description) doesn't matter; that would be a difference in specific content, not in type. And:

For me, descriptions and definitions sort of generate and organize experiences while, indeed, being experiences (patterns) themselves.

I'd clarify this and say that if an intention is structured in terms of a description or conceptual framework, then it could be said that the description "generates and organises" experiences. That's the difference between a description as an "experience of thinking about something" and a description as "a shaper of experience". (Now, I would agree that there's some deformation that can occur just by thinking about a description, but it's relatively negligible, might lead to broad synchronicity.)

This is where we get into the idea of extended patterns and meaning, and the view that there really is only one continuous overall pattern or shape, consisting of all possible patterns; there are no "parts". Each intentional pattern, then, essentially implies a whole world, and intending is therefore a shift of the entire world-pattern. This doesn't involve explicit formulation. To be less vague, if you kneel down and pray, then that act already has a full meaning and implied structure beyond simply the request, which is then part of the extended pattern of the intention - regardless of what you think about it, or whether you have thought about it. Now, for that example there is some overlap with the idea of "belief systems" I suppose, but:

More abstractly, even just conceiving of a desire in terms of an object, already implies a certain structure to the "format" of the world (a "place", spatially-extended and unfolding in time, and so on) which in turn implies a certain structure to the resulting experience. And so, the intention for the object is also in effect an intention of a "place"-type world, and "place"-type experiences, since the "meaning" of the intentional pattern is its extended pattern in those terms.

POST: a question to Triumphant_George

How did this subreddit start? What were your first encounters with dimensional jumping and how did you discover your methods?

Korrin85 started the subreddit based on posts you can find linked in the introduction post. I'd been following the larger context of this sort of thing for quite a while, Reddit-wise with contributions over at /r/oneirosophy and /r/glitch_in_the_matrix and so on (some links to posts there in the introduction, too). I then did some posts here, and was invited to become mod, re-organised and styled things up a little. The concept for the subreddit, beyond its initial "mirrors and dimensions" seed, has become, loosely, to encourage experimentation with, and investigation and exploration of, the "meta" aspect of such things - the context to the content - perhaps by, somewhat ironically, using further abstraction to connect them to direct experience. And so on.

The Two Glasses Exercise was originally devised in response to a question asked at /r/glitch_in_the_matrix in summer last year about deliberately creating glitches in one's experience. This and subsequent material was based on the ideas of "patterning" and "active metaphors" and the notion of exploring "the nature of experience" and "the nature of descriptions".

...

Yeah, I quite like the idea that people's "here's my experience" posts are a starting point, and the value is then in the ongoing conversation that they provoke - rather than having declarative official posts or whatever. The sidebar text and the introduction are sufficient for that, I think, to provide a jumping off point. (After which I'm just a slightly verbose contributor who also happens to intervene occasionally to keep things civilised and on topic.)

Without a fairly solid "method" for substantially increasing the effectiveness of calling potentialities into actuality...

But this is itself the problem, perhaps. The continual search for a "the" method is a mistake. Anything that is in sensory experience - that is, a series of actions, the experience of performing a "technique" - is itself a result. Methods aren't causal, at least not directly; they are simply the leveraging of a pre-existing pattern or two. The actual cause is "intention" (and the avoidance of subsequent counter-intention), which is unfortunately something which cannot be articulated, since it is "pre-conceptual" and baked into the nature of experience itself. So, methods could be looked at as already-intensified connective structures, abstract patterns which can be leveraged be associating them with situations and outcomes, which are also structures. Things like the Two Glasses exercises are, then, a sort of cheat, because they leverage pre-existing meaning, and offer the possibility of getting results (at least sufficient to demonstrate there is "something going on") without having to fully "get" the intentional aspect. The focus on methods ends up with a focus on "doing", whereas to dig deeper is to recognise that doing is itself a result, and assigned meaning and assertion of fact is where to focus.

One has to go "meta" on the whole thing of experience, then. It's perhaps a bit like having used your body to manipulate the world for years, pondering the best way to use your body, and then realising "wait, how have I been manipulating my body?" The specific body movements weren't the key thing to wonder about, it was the very fact of the movements. And this is why the subject is best presented as an investigation, experimentation and contemplation into "the nature of experiencing", "the nature of descriptions", "you", "the world", and the relationship between these.

...then there must be such a way to amplify effectiveness.

To turn up the relative intensity of one pattern - or network of facts - versus another, if you will. Exactly. But there is no specific and particular "method" for this, there is only intending, and thereby the intensification of one pattern's contribution to ongoing experience with the reduction of contrary patterns.

I'm tired of long-winded theory that doesn't translate into stuff that actually works.

Yeah, that's where the focus on "the nature of descriptions" comes in. In my view, theories should be looked upon as "patterns to be used" rather than "explanations for how things are". And any long-windedness should involve collaborative deconstruction, targeting assumptions, rather than indulgent imagery (unless that imagery is specifically for creative use; see later). Theories are, after all, simply experiences themselves (the experience of "thinking about theories"), at the same level; they don't get "behind" experience. Theories in this context are "as if" patterns which might be adopted for use; there is no actual "how things are" or "how things work" beyond that. The only fundamental fact is the fact of experiencing - of the property of being-aware or "awareness". Everything else is relatively true only. And so the search for "the" theory or "the" method is immediately a lost cause. "Understanding" something, then, doesn't necessarily lead to any results. If one adopts the pattern of a model (via intention or implication) then once might have experiences "as if" it were true, but the model itself isn't pointing to anything fundamental. Hence the concept of "active metaphors" referenced in the side bar.

. . . . .

Anyway, the larger point, with which you'll probably agree, is we need to be very clear when it comes to 'theories' and 'methods' generally, and more specifically we need to focus on what theories and methods are, in relation to experience. I think it's that spirit of investigation, in the absence of a full commitment to direct intention, that is ultimately beneficial - which is why I regularly return to the idea of this being an exploration, rather than a sort of "technology" with a particular underlying structured 'material' (or 'spiritual') mechanism. Otherwise people are at risk of taking a "cargo cult" approach to the subject (that is, emulating the visible actions only, while never grasping the "motive"). The "demo" exercises, then, are just a starting point, giving you a sense that here is something to this, and a possible avenue of investigation: the Two Glasses and the Owls of Eternity exercises are based on the two basic types of structure one might use. There will never be "the" method, because methods are themselves expressions of the insights gained about "you" and "the world" during that investigation.

(With apologies for NYE mobile typing:)

Simply being told to "intend" or to understand myself in one or another variant as experientially transparent (and so on) isn't helping.

Quite so. In terms of discussion, with the causal aspect, it's like trying to explain someone (or to yourself) how you lift your arm (when you are deliberately redirecting away from the current path of movement, not just spontaneous steps along the way to another outcome). Or think about a red car. It's just there. You just... become the experience of it. And in experimenting, it's quite possible that you just end up generating lots of other experiences (like synchronicities) rather than the target experience. This is a better starting point for a conversation, perhaps: That is, with the "form" of an intention - the "idea" we seek to make more prominent in experience - we can make some headway. Key to this, I'd say, is the recognition that all intention is "direct". In other words, you are not "over here" intending something "over there". Treating it in that way, tends to work against us. Rather, you are pulling up a pattern by the bootstraps, everywhere. In a sense, you seek to literally "overwrite" the current experience with a differently-patterned one. Condense "this fact" from the background, in preference to "that fact".

At times I veer towards the belief that a profound deranger is the only thing powerful enough to shift some habitualized center of gravity in the deep mind

Well, in a sense, that is right. If everything, the whole current deterministic state or landscape, is "dissolved" into the background of this moment, available for update - and if the only causal power is "reshaping the landscape" via intention in exactly the same way as deciding to life your arm operates, then we might ask: what is it that is being missed, if there is no actual mechanism behind things (no "behind" at all), that means I struggle to shift facts?

The property of "directness" is one possible important aspect overlooked, I'd say. If you don't do, but only become, then all that matters is that one fully enters into a state. You can't "try" to do this, or you enter the state of "trying to enter a state". You can't be "over here" attempting to enter a state "over there", because that means you inherently remain separate from it, not entering or becoming. Ultimately, you are "taking on the shape of" a state or experience, and that must be done with "full intensity" (except when we're just talking about "plausible but unlikely", non-rule-breaking, occurrences, perhaps leveraging pre-existing patterns, such as Two Glasses brings about). Let's say that one of the "fact-patterns" of one's current state is "inertia" or "solidity". Let's say that the situation right now can be described as: you can move your arms simply by intending "it is true now that my arm moves then" (the "arm movement" pattern) and due to lack of conflict the relative intensity of even a minor holding of that pattern, because that gets it integrated into your state. If we want to do something more dramatic, though - something more like a shift in the facts-of-the-world, it will require "holding" for longer. But far would we go to check if it is possible?

Would we hold for an hour? A day? A week? Perhaps a month? Gradually the obstructing, contrary patterns would dissolve out as the held pattern became primary and conflicting patterns were implicitly removed from contributing. Or perhaps we might, instead of focusing on our outcome, we might focus on the "meta" patterns surrounding it. That is, for as long as the patterning of "the world is an extended place unfolding in time", that would tend to structure your ongoing experience against dreamlike, associative type apparent events. This would be the "weaker the rules" approach, you might say. The ultimate version of this might be patterning oneself with something like the "imagination room" metaphor listed in the sidebar, or the variations described in the "owls of eternity" exercise. So, that was a bit meandering, but the general notion is: We can't talk about the ultimate cause, because it's basically like "shape-shifting", however we might be able to talk about useful patterns (e.g. "active metaphors") to play with, since undoubtedly this (apparently) being-a-person-in-a-world experience consists of a certain set of patterns already - a common starting point for shared investigation. (Putting aside for the moment the issues we hit regarding "shared" worlds.)

...death, trauma, kidnap, the world's most powerful psychedelics, etc.

The apparent power of these, I suggest, in terms of their ability to crack open experience, lies in the fact that there is no particular logical next-step that follows from them?

The lifting your arm example is interesting, because while the core of it is mysterious, nature still has a whole bunch of specific patterns for achieving it

What is this "nature" of which you speak? For certain, lifting your arm is a pattern of experience - a patterning of experience, which one summons or becomes, by essentially recalling the "idea" of it, an idea which is incorporated into the overall sensory experience when one does so. (Whether it is brought fully into the senses or not, though, the idea still exists, and is experienced.)

It is not actually mysterious as such. You know perfectly well how your arm moves. The apparent mystery is when one confuses "knowing" with "creating a set of conceptual objects and forming a coherent description out of them". But that doesn't "explain" arm movement: it simply produces a parallel experience in thought (the experience of "thinking about some concepts I've called 'how arm movement works').

This is why I implied...perhaps it is more like a "knack" sort of like juggling or riding a bicycle.

I guess you're trying to articulate the idea that one can't conceptualise and communicate, as objects and words, certain experiences, but that doesn't necessarily matter from a personal perspective - one knows these things directly, because one is the doing. You don't need to have a description of seeing in order to see, for example. You just are the experience of seeing. Similarly, arm movement just is, and it is known by recalling the idea, as a sensory experience or a thought experience (these differ only in spatial location in experience, though). There is nothing behind it. And the same applies to the description, too. Adding more experiences at the same level doesn't get "behind" any experience - there is no "behind". Now, at this point you may say something like...

My overall concern is with practical outcome While the theory is interesting...

However, we need to specify what is meant by "theory" here. The above isn't "theory", for example. Rather, it's an attempt to capture in words the direct observation of experience, as it is experienced. Unlike talking about, say, "nature" as a thing behind the scenes whose mechanism is responsible for bringing about our experience, our talk here of "patterns" is simply to draw attention to the properties of structured experience itself and to emphasise there is no "behind". The distinction we're drawing here is between thinking-about experience, and recognising thinking-about as another experience, with the same properties, which never "explains" anything - but can still be used to construct patterns which can later be used as intentional contexts. That is, used "practically". Ultimately, the distinction between "theory" and "practical" falls away, as does the distinction between "literal" and "metaphorical", because they both turn out to be exactly the same thing. By way of this, of course, we find a link between the idea of "pathways" and "outcomes":

A pathway to lifting that spoon "directly with my mind" as we would say (i.e. without using an arm or a tool) does not seem to have any established pathway and is in a sense "rogue."

They are identical in nature. But if we don't spend time actually attending to experience, to establish that fully for ourselves, then none of that matters much perhaps. What sense is there in talking about "practical" is we don't know what "practical" is, or what an "outcome" really is?

(Intermission, from previous discussion:)

Feeling Out Exercise

... a little exercise can help give us a direct experience of what it means to be the subject to all experience, to recognise that we are not an object and that we are "unlocated". 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 direct facts of your experience - the only actual facts, really; everything else is transitory. Whatever you think about your experience is also another experience within this context. You can never get "behind" or "outside" of this, because it has not edges or boundaries; there is no behind or outside. (If you think otherwise, then pause and notice that your thought about this is also "within" and "inside".)

Now, to tie the two strands together - the dissolving of the theory and the practical, and the description and the "knack" - we need to get a handle on what you might call "intentional context". Ultimately, this is simple: that if you attend to your direct experience, for sure there's the "object" bit, the localised stuff you can draw on paper or think about systematically, but also there's the "knowing" or "meaning" which is sort of non-located, "dissolved" everywhere, inseparable from it. The relevance to "outcomes" is that without the contextual aspect asserted, object-based activities are (literally) meaningless.

(Further intermission, from extended discussion elsewhere:)

Intentional Context Exercise

So, first imagine a sphere in front of you - say, a blue sphere with no particular detail, just floating there. Okay, now imagine a sphere in front of you, identical in every way to the first, except also imagine that this sphere is imbued with the special power to make the room filled with joy. But do not change the sensory aspect of the sphere in any way when you do this. This is basically "imagining the fact of something being true" abstractly. That is, that an object, or your ongoing experience more generally, has a property, without actually visualising any sensory aspects to that property. Instead of doing all the "sensory theatre" of picturing stuff, in an effort to associatively trigger the fact or as an excuse to do so, you can just directly do intending-asserting of the fact into greater prominence. Finally, after taking a pause to clear yourself out a little, instead of using the sphere image, simply directly intend that the room is filled with joy, and experience the result of that. That is, wordlessly intend the fact of: "it is true now that this room is filled with joy". And, um, enjoy.

The suggestion here is that since experience is direct - you are your experience, you are "that which takes on the shape of" experiences and there is no "outside" to you - then with any method you do, you are actually playing out the entire thing as a sort of "sensory theatre". And that's all outcomes actually are: desired moments of sensory theatre, with meaning. In effect, the only way to have something become fact, is to fully imagine-that (to "take on the shape of" the pattern or experience of) it being a fact. Imagining that you are "over here" trying to change something "over there" is like a little play; the entire experience is imaginative.

But it feels subjectively similar to trying to pick up a metal bar with an ultra ultra weak magnet?

Directly imagine being a strong magnet, then! :-)

. . . .

In short, then: "theory" is a type of "outcome", and talk of being practical is meaningless unless it is clearly seen that the "literal" and "metaphorical (that is, sensory experience and descriptions of sensory experience) are the same. However, one pseudo-practical route is to attend to one's direct experience as it is, in addition to experimenting with direct or indirect intentional strategies.

Aside - In terms of the "directness" of experience, the exercises in chapter four of The Michael Chekhov Handbook: For The Actor by Lenard Petit are worth a look, as far as it goes within its subject. You'll have to read between the lines a little when it comes to the "second body" idea (think: what is the first body, what is the whole experience) but the notion of directness, and the very specific sense in which "belief" is relevant, is in itself worthwhile.

(Quickly, for now:)

You do seem to have a fondness for these abstractions, TriumphantGeorge. I

Well, no, not at all really. What do you mean by an "abstraction" and what do you mean by "lingering in practicality" (one might ask)? Without clearly defining those things, we end up with not even abstraction - merely obfuscation (albeit not deliberate). And, you really cannot get more practical and direct than the two exercises I included in the last comment. Did you do them?

One has to actually perform them: in my experience, people tend to think-about such things rather than actually engage with them on their own terms (or at all), just as people rarely actually commit to any line of intentional focus in order to experiment. They tend to want a sort of conceptual coherence or pre-guarantee in thought, but of course that's rather part of the issue. Again: there is no method or "way it works", so the "abstractions" I might suggest are actually patterns to adopt, rather than concepts to think-about. The point is that if one want to have things, "solutions" or "outcomes", defined in the terms of one's current everyday assumptions, then one is already lost. Because those assumptions, that patterning, is exactly the problem we face. That is, if by "practical" what we mean it that we want something to "do" - like a sort of physical action that will make things happen, that still builds upon the notion of ourselves as some sort of "person object" that is in a "world" that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" - you'll eventually hit a barrier and realise that such actions are already "too late". Such actions are yet more "experiences" and have no causal power, and instead adopting abstractions as fact might be, in a sense, the way forward.

I'm guessing, I suppose, that you prefer talking about those than lingering in practicality.

One might note that "prefer talking" equates to "prefer typing" when it comes to online conversation. On evidence, it could seem to me that you "prefer typing"? Of course, it's not really a preference - it's what conversation is. Nobody can do another's exercises or insights for them. So this is all we have, here. Talking. Discussion. About insights, but not in themselves insights. "Pointing at the moon." It's like saying that a diarist "prefers writing" rather than living, simply because the record of his life, for others, exists only in text?

Some people do prefer reading, though. (Which is fine, of course.) But then, you didn't really engage with any of the content of my reply, at all?

there is an insufficient communication channel established between my waking or "surface" self and some much deeper substratum of my being

This is the ultimate in "theory" or abstraction. Have you ever encountered a "deeper substratum" of your being? Or indeed a "waking" self as distinct from some other self? Directly, I mean. Besides, that is, simply thinking-about such a thing. For me, this subject really comes down to one single insight, and realising the rest (all the rest) is, yes, in a sense talk. But that applies globally, perhaps, to everything that can be discussed at all. Al conversation stops, if we truly commit to that as purity.

(More later:)

Can pick this up tomorrow and address your points more clearly if you like. Really, the most fruitful avenue of discussion is probably on the relationship (if that is even the right concept) between "doing" and "experiencing". Noting along the way, of course, that the very fact of encoding stuff into "conversation" immediately removes us from what we're trying to discuss!

(More responses and musings, with apologies for length:)

Knacks & Doings

Again, it's my experience that some people have a "knack" for these things...meaning that a process is going on that is not identical across different "meditators" who follow identical instructions.

Hmm. Well, quite specifically these are not meditations or processes, but it's certainly true that there is a "knack" in the sense of trying to notice something that you haven't yet noticed or thought about. It is just "there", but it is in the manner of, say, noticing "redness" as distinct but also inherent to a red object. It's like a fact that is there, but you are "looking through it". I'm wary of using the word "knack" because it often implies a skill, in inherent talent. But there is no talent to this; it is always there, and is always a fact (actually the only fundamental fact). A further problem, of course, is that putting it into words (as with all putting-into-words), is unhelpful without the experience to accompany it, since the words are pointing to an experience, and absent the experience the descriptions seem abstract and meaningless (which they are, previously). This loops back to our comments on theory and "talk", earlier.

In other words, missing variables...as I implied earlier.

I'd disagree with that, or at least I'd say it's potentially a misleading idea, since it implies there is some sort of hidden structure to uncover, some secret set of facts or a mechanism. Instead, here, we are talking about the context to all such facts - the context or all content.

The verb in that suggests that people are actually doing something, are achieving that something, or at the very least that it is achievable in principle.

The sense in which one isn't "doing" something is in particular way. I don't mean that one isn't or cannot change one's experience. The point is that if one "jumps", then one is not truly translating one's body into literally pre-existing realities which are divided into "dimensions". It is not "the dimensions what did it". However, one can have an experience "as if" that is happening, just as right now one is having an experience "as if" one is a person in a world (one has "taken on the shape of" apparently being-a-person-in-a-world). And that is enough. That wasn't very clear, probably. What I'm trying to highlight is that all there is, is "experiencing", and regardless of the content of "an experience", there is nothing permanent behind it, other than the fact of "experiencing". (See: the Feeling Out Exercise earlier.)

Ultimately, then, we are noticing that experience is like a shape or pattern in liquid, which - even if it is of "a solid world" or of "jumping dimensions" - has no underlying supporting structure. It's cliche to say it, but "the water" (which is oneself, non-personal) is the only permanent fact, and the "ripple patterns" are just relative disturbances. Furthermore, any descriptions one comes up with about those patterns are just themselves patterns, more experiences. There is no depth to them; they are in parallel. Again, this sounds obscure or even wilfully opaque, but it's much clear if you take a moment to notice your experience, as per that exercise for instance. Without that, one is simply building "castles in the sky": descriptions which might be coherent and self-consistent, but have no foundation, being as they are merely unmoored thoughts within the things they would try to be about. This is why we might tend to resort to metaphors which try to be "meta" and about experience itself, rather than any content (for example: the beach, the blanket, patterned states, and so on). But let's get on to a perhaps more fruitful line of thought:

Dreams, Intentions & Meta

[Deeper substratum] Well...I would say that we encounter such a substratum every night when we dream.

Would you say that dreams are "deeper"? I think the actual experience of dreams doesn't involve any hierarchy or levels. The content is different certainly, but the experience is not different in its nature.

I think some kind of discussion of will is missing here. Intention is just a fancy word for will at the end of the day.

Actually, the word "intention" gets used over the word "will" deliberately, since the latter tends to imply one entity exerting influence over another. Meanwhile, "intention" is nearer to the desired meaning, that of a static idea or pattern which one would like to bring into play. There is no good word for this, though, because we are talking about something which is "before" objects and events. The way I tend to use the term, is this: "intending" is the increasing of the relative contribution of a particular pattern to one's ongoing experience; "an intention" is the pattern (fact or outcome or 'idea' or something more abstract) that one is increasing the relative contribution of. The is a little circular, but that is the nature of it: there is not "you" who is "doing" intending onto a "world"; instead it is a shaping of oneself as the experiencer, or "awareness", or "that which takes on the shape of states and experiences". The possible rejection of the term "will" comes from this requirement to avoid a sense of division and of objects operating on one another.

I just don't think that we know all the variables acting. But this should be seen as the beginning of an exploration and not the end of one.

I don't know about "variables", but it's true that exploration is ongoing, in the sense the one uncovers and perhaps amends the patterning of one's experience. However, the main insight as regards the context is one and done: there is nothing more to be done with that. Really, this is that experience is "imagined" and to change it one must "imagine-that" it is different, directly. Not everyone is interested in that, in what seems to be philosophical musings, though. However, without that, there are difficulties, I'd say, because there's a tendency to want to acquire a particular outcome while still defining it in terms of (implying within the intention) a "format" of the world as a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Rather than something more flexible, such as "a sequence of sensory moments recalled from a memory" or "an imagination space within which patterns are drawn", or whatever. This "meta" intending is where one really gets exploring: intending the structuring of experiential content, rather than just intending outcomes. But, again, I really think there's not much point to that if we are content-focused only. This is because then we're still looking for a "how it works, really" by attending to our experiences - and there's a big problem with that, since we tend to have experience which are implied by our own looking.

The results can be useful, of course. After all, if one has a dream of discovering a useful machine, and the machine works in the dream "as if" it can cause desired changes, then even though the machine doesn't really have any causal power (the experience of "the machine" and of "the machine working" are both just patterns; the state of the dreamer), it can still be utilised. The problem only arises if the machine is confused as being "how dreams work", when actually it is the fact of the dream itself - of "experience" more generally - that is the "how things work". Dreams are good to ponder though, I think!

What are dreams made from?
What is it that experiences a dream?
If one has a lucid dream and makes changes, what exactly is making the changes and what is it really changing?

And so on.

. . . .

This has probably drifted a little, I suppose. That's inevitable, though, when we're probably talking at slightly cross purposes, and part of our conversation is really about feeling out what we mean by various terms, and what our differing underlying assumptions might be. And we likely differ on the idea of the "nature of experience" more generally, I guess.

Now, I don't think anyone necessarily needs to think things through so deeply, though, but instead of that they need a certain bloody-mindedness and blind faith in order to commit and/or to persist without holding back. As in lucid dreams or visualising, it's not so much the doing as the full commitment to the outcome, without reservation?

...

[COMMENT]

/u/Redscale7: I've fully been where green-sleeves is, but I completely understand what Triumphant George is saying. I think I can be a good translator. What George is trying to say (and you can correct me George, but keep in mind most of us still speak English here :P) is that yes, you can certainly affect physical/sensory outcomes, and there is no theory or method behind it beyond "you get what you intend as true". The only thing that gets in the way is any patterning you throw on top of that fact (which is the only fact possible, because it's something that doesn't change). The problem (what you may be "missing") is that you are clinging to an extended systemic pattern that says "I am a separate individual trying to change a big complex world" and "I need tools to fix things" and, probably most importantly "the metaphysical act isn't actually real". George isn't saying that you have to be satisfied with just imagining something. It's that you have to take yourself to a point where you accept the metaphysical fact as being equal to a physical fact. Otherwise, you haven't fully commited your faith to your metaphysical acts, no matter what methods you used or how long you tried. You're putting more strength in your physical facts, so they are automatically dominating your attempts to use "tools" to "overcome" them. Additionally, you can only ever encounter experiences that confirm what you already "know". Currently you see other people accomplishing things that you cannot. This is in itself an outcome of experience based upon something you believe. There is no one "out there" in the world. There is no "world". There is only you, and the evidence you have created for yourself to sustain anything you currently believe. This is probably the most mind-bending thing to digest because it means you can't trust your physical world for absolutely anything. There are no true conclusions there, no methods, no supporting evidence of any kind to access. You won't find answers "out there", because out there doesn't exist. Only you exist, and so the only place to look for your "answers" is within yourself. Your world will reflect any conclusions you create and support anything you intend to see. George's "feeling out" exercise is pretty good to apply here. In that quiet space where there is only you as formless background awareness -- where then do all these rules and facts about your world come from? That is patterning. You can let go of that patterning in two ways:

Returning to "who you are" by accepting yourself as unpatterned background awareness. Everything else on top of that becomes superficial and therefor easier to drop or manipulate.
Actively training yourself into a set of new patterns through repetition, using any method of your choice, while under the firm knowledge that the method itself is not important.

Or you could simultaneously try both. The key is to remember that there are no rules and if you find yourself frustrated with a lack of physical outcomes, it's an indicator for showing you that you haven't yet accepted your metaphysical acts as powerful enough to affect physical facts. You're still too invested in the pre-existing patterns. Digging to find errors and new methods to fix them will only produce more errors and new methods of fixing them, but never the solution (because you'll only ever find what you're looking for), and meanwhile only reinforce your state of being stuck.

I hope this helps. :)

[END OF COMMENT]

It's that you have to take yourself to a point where you accept the metaphysical fact as being equal to a physical fact.

That'll do! Or, perhaps, just stop worrying about that completely, is another option, accepting things at face value (so that your worldview amounts to something like "I am an experiencer within which a series of sensory moments appears" and formulate intentions in terms of that, thus avoiding re-implying other patterns).

...

/u/Redscale7 essentially gives you my clarification below for most of that. Basically, we're talking about taking "one step back" from the discussion we're having right now. Even talking about "the subconscious" realm is already using or implying a pattern which is "too late" for what we're dealing with here. We're talking about patterning itself. To pick up on one point, though:

The sense in which there is no method, is that there is no particular method, in terms of an act one might take. This isn't to say there aren't currently present patterns that you might leverage, though. For example, we might say that the Two Glasses leverages the patterns of "translation and transformation" and "volumes and intensity", and moving your arm leverages a whole "body" postural pattern, and there are lots of more abstract patterns that we use, and so on. The pattern of "I am an object located in a world which like a 'place' which unfolds in time" is a more basic one, still. However, those patterns aren't fundamental. This includes the "world" one. And patterns don't cause anything, rather they are the current state of experience. The only cause of change is intention, which is to say, selecting a pattern into experience. As you note, in your wording, doesn't it seem that there "forces" operating against us?

The way forward, then, for major change isn't to leverage existing patterns (that is, intending the pattern "it is true now that my arm moves then" and the rest being just the existing postural pattern as the "auto-completed" extension of that), it is to amend patterns as well. But the "method" remains simply intention. It's just that the target (or better to say: the pattern being intended, intensified) is different, is more general.

To further clarify: For the sake of argument, we might say that all possible patterns exist eternally, are always "true" to some extent, we might say that patterns vary only in their relative intensity, or strength of contribution to experience. We might also say that at any moment, the world must "make sense" - that is, be an overall coherent pattern. If this is so, and we have a very strong pattern of "I am an object in a solid spatial, temporal world", then, like the arm-movement intention which is done in the context of the body posture, our intentions are structured by the context of that pattern. A synchronicity might arise here and there through the gaps and feel a bit dreamlike, but not much more than that. A reason to persist in that, though, is that the more one has synchroncity and recognises the meaning of that, the more one's intentions with will tend to intensify the pattern of "the world is dreamlike" as a byproduct, an implication. However, from what we're saying above, we could just go for intending the pattern "the world is dreamlike" directly. This is like changing our "posture" such that the manner of our "arm movement" changes, becomes more flexible. (And this is actually a way to change your bodily posture and movement - of course, because it's all the same thing, all just patterns of experience. That's why, for exploratory exercises, I quite recommend that Michael Chekhov book by Lenard Petit, and also the Alexander Technique book by Missy Vineyard.)

Putting it together: So we could summarise that with something like the following, jumping ahead a bit admittedly:

The only fundamental fact is the fact of being-aware or "awareness".
All other facts are temporary and relative, as patterns in awareness.
All possible patterns exist, eternally, and are available right now. (You can conceive of them as being "dissolved into the background" of this ongoing moment, now.)
What you actually are, is "awareness" which has "taken on the shape of" a set of patterns = a "state".
A "state" fully defines our experience, completely. That is, it defines all moments over all time, deterministically, between shifts.
To shift one's state, one simply "intends" a pattern, and that pattern then becomes more prominent in the state, and so in our ongoing sensory experience. This is like a "shape-shifting", a movement of oneself as "awareness". There is no way to describe this or explain it; it is a "becoming" rather than a "doing".
One can conceive of the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world as a single pattern, a "world-pattern", which is always self-consistent (between updates, that is).
If your world-pattern has a strong component of "I am an object in a solid stable world" then any additional minor patterns you intend such as "I will get healthy again" will be incorporated within that context (and, in some cases, will just arise as dreams plus a couple of synchronicities, rather than main outcomes).
To improve the quality of outcomes, one should consider intending the context directly, such as "the world is dreamlike, fluid, and symbolic".

Roughly, then: no facts are fundamental, intention is the only cause or method, conceiving of the world as a pattern of patterns is one of the most flexible positions to adopt - and the world is a "shape" that you take on, directly.

One further implication of the "directness" of all this, is that:

It is very important to fully decide and declare that it is a fact that your outcome is going to happen ("it is true now that this happens then"), either directly or by implying it in some way. [1]

Essentially, one must actually decide what is going to happen, and that it is going to happen, because it is this deciding or asserting which makes (is!) the change. Without that, any apparent method becomes simply an activity - in effect, an intention only to have the experience of performing a ritual, a bit of "sensory theatre". It's rather like the difference between intending to" tense your arm muscles against an object in order to move it", versus "intending to move the object into a new position". They are quite distinct things. (A good exercise for this, is to challenge a friend to an arm wrestle. First, proceed by intending to "use your muscles to move your arm". Then, instead proceed by "intending that it is true that you win the arm wrestle". Note the difference.)
__
[1] It occurs to me to add, for clarity, that of course when we say things like "intend that 'it is true now that this happens then'", we don't mean that we should verbalise or think the words. Rather, we're referring to attending to the pattern that this statement would describe. Whilst saying words, or visualising images, does bring to mind that pattern just by association (which is the experience of having the "meaning" of the words or image), when we intend we just go for it directly - otherwise we are often just intensifying the experience of saying or thinking the words, rather than intensifying what the words mean or the fact-pattern they point to. There is no particular sensory experience associated with intending, we just "know" that we are doing so. The except to that is, of course, if the intention is something that would have an impact on our current moment, because then we will experience the result - for example, if we intend that "it is true now that my body is becoming completely relaxed", or in the case of the blue sphere exercise, that "the blue sphere means-that it is true now that I am feeling joyful". (Plainly, this is all much more complex in the description than in the doing: hence experimenting with the Feeling Out and Intentional Context exercises, say, is better than a discussion about it, since they are it.)

(This got quite long, perhaps we should pick one single point of contention and expand on it, but remembering that descriptions don't really matter much, because this isn't something for which one generates 'explanations'. It may be that "intention", for example, might be better termed "direct imagination", for you, and that it is better starting with exploring exactly how that relates to body movements, rather than jumping straight to discussion about "facts of the world" and so on. Meanwhile: have you ever actually taken the time to "intend that the Earth has two moons"? Closed your eyes, just intended the fact of that for just ten minutes? Worth doing, I'd say.)

"Nature" & Patterning

I think that nature has a “patterning”…a fullness as well as an emptiness

We return here to "what is nature?", though (it is a concept) and from there we see that the "fullness-emptiness" issue is an aspect of our description, not of things-as-they-are?

Is a better way to say this, perhaps, that "my ongoing experience has a level patterning of which seems stable and unchanging, a formatting which seems more resistant to change"?

Prominence, Descriptions, Hidden Variables

But what about when it is doesn’t become prominent?

It's a metaphor. There isn't really an "it" that is there when it isn't prominent. "Patterning" is just (I suggest) the most basic sort of description we can have of structured experience. But it is just a description. The description itself is just another experience you can have (the experience of "thinking about experience"). We can have experiences "as if" that experience is true, but you can't actually describe what is true at all - because it is just: the very fact of "experiencing". That's why I say it's not an explanation of experience, because it is inherently not possible to have an explanation of experience (since "experience" is that from which all explanations are "made", in a manner of speaking). It's also why I say we have to just put thinking aside (since thinking is object-based), and notice our experience as it is, directly - and realise that what we are is the subject to all experience.

When doing this, we also notice something important: that concepts of something outside of the current experience are themselves mental objects within experience. The idea of "all patterns dissolved in the background" is a matter of convenience, a bookmark. The direct experience is that "we never experience what we don't experience", and so it is meaningless to talk of non-prominence. Because even if you are just thinking about an object, that is also a prominent pattern, just not within the main strand of experience (the 1st-person "me in a world" strand). Both the thinking-about and the main strand are arising within and of you-as-awareness. They differ in location, not in kind. The thought of non-prominence is itself a prominence!

Your "hidden variables" are a bookmark of this type also. But any experience you have of "hidden variables" will just be another experience - and they will not be causal, therefore. They will be content, they will be a "result".

EDIT: It later occurred to me you might mean something of the form "where is a fact when I am not directly experiencing it?". But I would say, in this description, that you always are directly experiencing it, as a background that is always there, just not unfolded as a sensory aspect. In a similar way as you can "know" your current situation, even though you haven't unpacked the "knowing" into words, and pictures, and so on. The parts of the world you aren't experiencing in the senses, and the "infinite eternal gloop of all patterns" of the background, are both always there, and you are always experiencing them, as you-as-awareness having adopted a state which consists of you-as-awareness (empty!) as all possible patterns (full!) at relative contribution (empty and full!).

Simplicity & Problems

It’s just not that simple. If it were, everybody would be doing this successfully all the time.

That's good point, of course. But the way in which it is not simple (going with our little model for the moment) isn't in the causation, it's in the patterns or ideas we choose to intensify.

A few of thoughts:

First: Because everything is direct (because there is only you-as-awareness and no outside to that) then the full context of the intention matters. As we were discussing previously, just verbalising or visualising isn't sufficient, it is the assigned meaning of that which also matters. More accurately, the pattern you intend has to actually be the fact you wish to intensify. It can't be a pattern about the fact, it must be directly that target fact, or a fact which in turn implies the target fact.

Second, and related to the first: There is not "you-over-here" intending "pattern-over-there". Intending or implying any pattern which consist of a division of this sort, is problematic. This is really a restatement of the notion that you must actually intend the outcome you want as the outcome, and not a relationship with the outcome.

Finally, all intentions have a context, a sort of structure they are formulated in terms of, and they re-imply that context. So, in everyday life, if you intend to change direction walk "over there", then that intention is in terms of a certain idea of the world - as a "place" or whatever, that is solid, and so on. Or you interrupt yourself to intend taking a certain route because it is well-lit and "the world is a dangerous place". This can be an issue.

Aside - We should forget hypnotists and the like and "other" people, I suggest, except as a sort of in-experience narrative. This is best handled as a 1st-person perspective topic. We should be careful, really, about "people" and "everybody", because in a sense neither they nor you, as a "person", are causal agents. Apparently being-a-person-in-a-world is an experience you have, a formatting; it is not what you are. This brings us back to the impossibility of writing a full description, though, because there is not many or one "awarenesses" - there is just "awareness", which is "before" division and objects and change.

Patterns & Practicality

So, "getting practical", we have a couple of ways in which it is "not that simple", for sure. One is that the intention is incorporated into a pre-existing formatting, and we may need to intend modifications to the formatting (intending that the world is more dreamlike and flexible, or adopting a specific model such as the "moments of memory" model). Another is that really the intention, to get the structure and relationship right, should be formulated in terms of you being "the subject to all experience" - a sort of unbounded container within which a strand of sensory experience or thought is unfolding - rather as a person-object located within a world. The final problem is that we want to avoid implying the old situation when we are intending a new one, or after doing so. People try to get around this by going into a very relaxed state, or perhaps intending as they go to sleep, using those as times of "non-obstruction". Ideally, though, one goes beyond that "trance or sleeping" approach and adopts the attitude of "letting things be however they are" always (basically "non-doing"). Then, instead of reacting to the unfolding content of the moment - thereby perhaps counter-intending and therefore re-implying, say, a "solid limited world" concept or whatever - one has adopted a stance of spontaneous flow and "allowing". Then, we are ceasing to interfere except with very occasional, specific intentions as "updates". This means letting bodily movements and mental thoughts unfold by themselves also, of course - not just the surrounding environment - because those are part of the experience of "the world".

For this last bit, when we first do it, there's often a lot of odd "stuck movements and incomplete thoughts" which seems arise, so there's definitely room for some sort of daily releasing exercise where one practices this "letting go" approach. Not because one gets better at it, but because one's posture is likely coiled and held, and there's some crazy spasming (or more) until one lets them play out. Until then, it's quite possible that one is spending a lot of time counter-intending this "open attention" movement, and thereby (since body and world are one pattern) effectively opposing all movement of one's state of experience, by implication. (Such a daily releasing can either be passive, or you can intend being "open" to direct it. There's a link in the introduction post which mentions both.)

Aside - People often do "meditation" in the hope of either realising the nature of experience, or for stabilising or clearing their ongoing experience. My feeling is that, when it comes to the former there are better ways to do it than passive meditation (it's pure luck whether you accidentally have an experience which leads you to notice, a deliberate investigation is much better). Meanwhile, for the latter you need to be quite clear about the target formatting you are after rather than just concentrating on one sensation or idea or whatever - and if you're going to spend the rest of the day in resistance and scatter-gun intending and implying, you'd be better tackling that instead.

Let me emphasize: this is not about contention for me, but about practicality.

Well, the contention would be our differences in how we think things to be, or the way in which we think about them; that is what we are exploring.

Also, I’ll simply lift the points from your post that speak to me, so I wouldn’t worry about length.

This isn't often the best way to proceed, I'd say, since lifting the points that speak to us often aren't the points where progress is made, it's usually in the areas or assumptions being overlooked - this applies to my understanding of what you are saying, too. So it's often better to take a single strand, and pursue it thoroughly. Notably, there's a couple of points I definitely haven't got across properly in previous comments, based on your "manifestation" and "meaningless of non-prominence" responses, which tie back to what it means to describe an experience (or experience a description). And the points you have engaged with have tended not to be the ones that matter, I'd say - quite possibly due to the bloat of the conversation, and quite possibly because I have not successfully made them seem to matter!

So we need to take a step back, to continue.

To what end, though? I don’t particularly want the Earth to have two moons.

To test it! To see what happens with such an "ambitious" intention. Otherwise...

The former is indeed easier to realize, in my opinion, because it can slide between the gaps in much looser-habit patterns that mostly pertain only to the intending individual, and which do not impact others with paradox or a fundamental change in the experienced world applicable everywhere.

...otherwise this is meaningless. As you say, it's just an opinion, based on untested assumptions about "others", the nature of "the world". Even saying "the intending individual" is problematic (because it is not clear at all that "the individual" intends anything). Much of your comments appear to suffer from the same issue. You are stating things based on a description of the world which, I am suggesting, is not (necessarily) the case. More to the point, based on assumptions about ongoing experience which are fairly easily examined - if you were to choose to do so (as per exercises in previous comment, for example). The reason to try to "manifest" things you don't necessarily care about, is exactly to manifest things you don't necessarily care about - to experiment and investigate the properties of experience. Otherwise you're just talking about perceived likelihood, for example, while fulfilling the prophecy through selective action.

And to the best of my (conscious) ability I do indeed try to envision the world as more dream-like and malleable.

Perhaps we could use this as our seed, to clarify what we're actually talking about here, and from what position. (Assuming you want to continue.) So I'd kick off by asking:

How, exactly, have you gone about doing this? (To the extent one can articulate such a thing, of course.)
How would you describe what "you" are, what "the world" is, and what the relationship is between those?

And also I'd suggest you try the Feeling Out Exercise and the Intentional Context Exercise and offer your perspective on the experiences. Because without that (or something similar) there is no anchor to our discussion, since my descriptions are pointing to something you've never examined, and so for you they are just a bunch of words addressed to nowhere.

I’ve tried it with other things that haven’t worked, so it is not untested.

The point was to examine more closely the way one attempts to do it, and the way in which it doesn't work. In terms of a conceptual framework, we've already covered a way of understanding why, say, you don't just decide to turn a house into a mouse, and have it happen. Specifically, I went into one way of conceptualising the nature of that apparent "inertia" and how - if - we can address it.

Not really. I'm suggesting things based on empirical accountability.

You are suggesting things based on an interpretation of your experience (which is fine), and I was attempting to discuss the context of experiences more generally - how to examine that directly, and its implications for both understanding our everyday experience and the possibility of "unusual change", and then proceed to how we might tackle particular changes. So far (quite possibly due to my own style of writing of course), we've gained no momentum on the key points, largely because I've failed to engage you in the areas I think we need to explore in order to get a better perspective on the "why can't I just change a house into a mouse" factor. Your replies have tended to be restatements of a certain point omitting what I think were the important parts of my responses that address that point, for example. It's not clear, for instance, that what you mean by "intention" is what I am referring to by that term (it is not a the same as a "wanting" or "asking" or "willing"). And your suggestion that I was referring to, say, altering "perception" rather than "really" creating change means that I've not successfully conveyed what I mean by the directness of experience. I concluded the last comment with a possible path to opening out the conversation, by connecting it to some specific questions and activities. You've not responded to those, but that was a way to ground our discussion so we'd no longer be talking past one another. It may be that our conversational styles just not a good match when it comes to this topic. Or it may be that you've actually decided that "this doesn't work" and this is due to "hidden variables", and aren't interested in exploring an angle other than one based upon that idea. (Perhaps you find particularly unappealing a perspective based on a philosophy that sees these ideas as relatively useful for leveraging, but otherwise basically fundamentally meaningless.) Either is fine, of course, but it does mean we're not going to be getting anywhere with this!

Q1: I think he just wants to know what you personally can do. He wants to clarify if you have been able to experiece dimensional jumping in a way that cant possibly be explained by the solid world model. Its about the person,triumphantgeorge himself. Like are you basing this on personal experience or not, and if so, describe something which yiu experienced that couldn,t have been a a coincidence like willing a continent in existence.

Perhaps. What good would that do, though? I'm just some (apparent) bloke on the internet - strictly speaking, a bunch of words arising within his experience, an aspect of his own patterning! Another story for someone to read! :-)

Slight joking aside, it's very much a personal investigation of oneself, this; it doesn't really matter what other people seem to do. Hence, trying to return to a particular direct experience everyone can have immediately (feeling out; intentional context) so we've got something shared and immediate to talk about, then take it from there (especially since focusing on the "philosophical" aspect wasn't taking). As per the sidebar, the subreddit isn't really about convincing someone about something - more of a: try this, contemplate the implications, now push it further, and discuss. And if someone doesn't get anything out of it, if it seems to them that there is nothing to it then, of course, they should dismiss it and move on. (As a moderator, I try to be sort of agnostic and more of a prompter than anything else.) Although: There are two things to consider in all this: a) noticing the nature of experience as it is; b) investigating our ability to change it. The first, I think, is always accessible. (And in turn hopefully changes one's ideas and approach regarding the latter; but it does require that someone actually looks.)

...

I'm not convinced that you have an answer, and you know what... because I don't think anyone here or elsewhere (including me of course) really does.

I'd agree, in a sense. Where we differ, though, is that I see some questions as not being answerable because the particular questions are prompts for a change of context; those questions are often based on assumptions that we'd want to challenge in order to progress. Nobody can give us a fundamental "how it works" type response, describing a process or mechanism, for example, because the very idea of a process or mechanism is one of the things under examination - the idea of division, one object operating on another, causing something by overlap in location or time, and so on. So we end up with responses that seem to be trying to sidestep the whole thing, because they are trying essentially trying to undercut the assumptions. That, or the responses are of the sort that indicate one simply "does" it - e.g. there is no "method" to producing a mental image, one simply does so, and if one "attempts" to produce one, one produces the experience of "attempting" rather than "picturing", and so on. Better, I think, is to try to draw attention to the properties of direct experience (which I tend to thing provides that new context which changes how we approach things), to work on clarifying the meaning of terms, and the "personal exploration" factor which is involved. For example, Paul Linden's little summary of intention is quite good:

[QUOTE]

We can begin by trying an exercise which focuses on the difference between movement and the will to move (or, to say it another way, the difference between the physical body and its programming for action). Stand up with your eyes shut and imagine that you have come up to an elevator. You have a large package in your arms that you cannot put down so you can't push the elevator button with your finger. Imagine the elevator button floating in the air an inch or two to the side of one shoulder, and imagine that you have to lean over sideways and push the elevator button with your shoulder. Actually intend to push the button. Create a real desire to push the button and intend to do so. This does not mean voluntarily moving to lean over and push the button, nor does it mean becoming stiff to prevent any movement so as to keep the exercise purely “mental”. It also does not mean merely thinking about pushing the button since “thinking about” is a symbolic process which implies a separation between the thinker and the subject about which s/he thinks. In the same way, it does not mean going into a dissociated daze and picturing yourself pushing the button. It simply means to relax, be natural and create an authentic feeling in the mindbody of desire and intention to push the button. (Most people can create this feeling when they focus on it, though many need some guidance to home in on it.) Once you establish this feeling, you will feel yourself “involuntarily” tipping toward the imaginary button.
-- Being in Movement: Intention as Somatic Meditation

[END OF QUOTE]

The later case study is an example of the exploratory process which one goes through for changing movement patterns, but applies equally to the "patterning" of experience more generally, beginning:

Case Study: As I learned how to use this approach to movement on myself, I also began to use it in my teaching and teach it as a way of moving. The final section of this article describes one example of the application of the intentional approach in teaching.

This is similar to the Michael Chekhov acting book mentioned earlier, of course. Now, I get that this might seem to be unhelpful in terms of "answers", but if the answers are non-conceptual, perhaps, or otherwise cannot be communicated, or if they involve a reframing rather than an extension of our current ideas, then "communication by shared events" (exercises) is one way forward. So that's where I'm coming from, and if other people who've tried that are "I used to be where you are", they just mean they've explored that side of things and are thinking differently about things as a result - but, of course, not necessarily correctly, eh? Only you can decide!

POST: Death

I imagine you would experience a body dying. And it might be quite painful!

Afterwards, we might hypothesise: experiencing would continue because awareness is permanent (the context), however your personal experience might not and could be discontinuous (the content). In other words, there is no guarantee that the pattern of your personal identity, the felt-memory, would persist. This might depend on whether you are identified with particular aspects of the experience, the body area or the background, and so on. However, if we're using the "patterning" model of experience, then next-moment would have to make logical sense, in some way.

Q1: Near death experiences might be not just clouds and harps [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=near+death+experiences+hell], especially after suicide.

What a downer! Maybe it'll just be very void. (There are quite a few interesting reports gathered on that site [www.nderf.org]; it's fascinating how they differ in terms of imagery and narrative, and in what ways they are similar in their more abstract elements.)

Q2: similar in their more abstract elements
I wonder if this means that there is a special home/source dimension... But, speaking of hell, what's your take on pain? From a physicalist standpoint, pain is useful. It's tough love from our genes, teaching us how to survive. Instead, what is the role of pain in the context of the patterning model? Is it just one of the available qualia in the palette, without any real ultimate meaning?

My suggestion: Discomfort is the experience that corresponds to being in a state which is not logically coherent - and pain occurs when we resist the movement that would make it so. Examples might range from the mundane and everyday, to the implications arising from intending larger world facts. For instance, intending a held physical position beyond which the body would natural move out of it, or intending an external event and then resisting the experiential content of the implied moments leading to that event. As for home dimensions - I'm of the view that there is no "special" state. All states/experiences are simply awareness "taking on the shape of" a particular structure. The idea of "specialness" surely comes from a narrative about those structures, and doesn't reside in the states themselves as such? After all, the feeling of something being special, is just an experience. However, it's interesting that the more "open" and "undivided" an experience is, the more blissful it is. So in those terms, complete eternal void is a "special state" - but it's not special as in being an ultimate goal or end-point for our investigations. That is about coming to an understanding of the nature of experience in general, rather than about the content of any particular state. Aside: Actually, this is a good point: many "seekers", I think, confuse these unbounded experiences with "being enlightened" and seek them out. But being "enlightened" is about the conclusion you draw from these experiences; it's not about the experience itself. It probably doesn't help that the term "enlightened" is now completely mangled as regards its meaning; I usually avoid it as a result.

Is logical consistency an ordinary adjustable pattern like others or an ironclad meta-law ruling them all?

I'd say that logical consistency is simply inherent in patterning, since although any pattern is applied as an adjustment everywhere like an overlay, there is only one single pattern. I sometimes use the example of moire fringes to illustrate this: adding one pattern on top of another simply does result in the final pattern; the result isn't "calculated" or "generated" by anything. Note, though, that by "logic" I don't mean "corresponds to your narrative about experience". I mean more that the pattern is internally self-consistent. This has to be the case really, because a landscape can't conflict with itself, there can't be some parts which are 3D and some parts 2D, unless they are being held in some way.

Night dreams

So, night dreams are "logical" in the sense that the experience is fully consistent with the patterning of the dream - because the experience is the patterning of the dream. The less deeply patterned, though, the more your experience tends towards being as series of associated images with a sense of there being a "world" behind them. Like, a circle turns into a sphere turns into a planet turns into a beach-ball. That is internally consistent (the beachball isn't simultaneously a square) but it does not correspond to the narrative of our everyday worlds. It is logically coherent within its own domain.

Any sufficiently constrained idealism is indistinguishable from materialism...

Very well said!

It's understandable. Who likes to chop wood and carry water???

Well, after enlightenment, everyone likes to chop wood and carry water! One of the great concerns of our age, surely, is that maybe suddenly everyone will become enlightened, and we'll run out of forests and streams to service this new enthusiasm. ;-)

But that seems an intrinsic and fully deterministic process

So I guess the question here is really: "how does it ever occur to us to intend something outside of our experience?"

Pondering this: we aren't in the world-pattern, the world-pattern is within us - or more accurately, we have "taken on the shape of" the current state of the pattern (perhaps unwittingly). However, the pattern doesn't limit the possibilities for your intention at all, except in a round about way, which is:

Descriptions & Intentions

Descriptions tend to inform - that is, become the form of - your intentions, and so those intentions imply the larger descriptive framework of which they are a part. Descriptions are not how things are, but the intentions based on them create patterns of experience "as if" they were. Thus, we tend to encounter evidence which supports our explanations, which we then use as the basis of our intentions, which further entrenches those patterns by implying them, and so on.

It's only deterministic between shifts, and those shifts are dictated by intention and its logical implications within the pattern, which includes implications about there being a change in the base formatting of the pattern. Since that "how" does matter, only the "what" or the outcome, and that outcome can be partially defined (in fact it always is really), this opens up the possibility that simply wishing for something different is sufficient to create a different experience outside of the circle of observations to date. Now, this is difficult to put into words, but in truth we are always experiencing all possible patterns or facts all the time - it's just that some facts are "brighter" than others (selected relatively by intention or attention) - and we are always experiencing that are an "open space" in which the sensory experience is floating. This means that the possibility of relaxing into that open perspective is always available, and it's more a case of ceasing to counter that rather than intend for it. This is perhaps why times of pain and desperation are often the moments where one realises the fundamental nature of experiencing (and the non-fundamental nature of content). Although sometimes people get hung up on the experience rather than the implication, it must be said.

Q2: It's only deterministic between shifts, and those shifts are dictated by intention and its logical implications within the pattern, which includes implications about there being a change in the base formatting of the pattern.
Not sure how to unravel some intricate parts of your post without a couple of NZT pills, but I can take it as a valuable mental workout. Shifts are dictated by intention. Intentions are dictated by what? It seems to me that the infinite rube goldberg causal chain works in a circular way: our intentions create/update experiences... effects are not fully predictable... so there are always some unforeseen good and bad aspects... and we intend to increase good things and decrease bad things... our intentions create/update experiences... Even if we choose to surrender, to "relax into the open perspective", it's because we believe that this is the best thing to "do". Determinism, here, seems pervasive and inescapable. What are the alternatives? Partial randomness? Fractal chaos?

The thing is: it's only deterministic between shifts. If I intend something right now, I can't pre-calculate the resulting state or world-pattern in advance, and therefore any desire that might arise from that state, and so on. Furthermore, since there is no "outside" to my state, any thinking we are doing right now about this that involves "looking at it" is implying a view point that never, in fact, exists. This is similar to how my thoughts about experience are also themselves within experience. And if I imagine there being an "outside" to experience, that "outside" is also really just an imagining within it - since awareness has no boundary, and so any apparent inside or outside are actually experiential content of the overall context. So, it makes no sense to talk about free will outside of the state or pattern, and many discussions about determinism and free will are implying exactly that. Essentially: "ah, but you can't decide to do something that cannot be thought of, and you won't decide to do something that you don't want to do". That's pretty meaningless though, right?

(We could make some extra points about how strands of thought can, in effect, be their own shiftable worlds and used as a source of creativity outside of the main strand, being also unpredictable between shifts.)

Q2: If I intend something right now, I can't pre-calculate the resulting state or world-pattern in advance
True, we can't know things in advance, but the patterning model is not time-bound...You've said that time is just an ordinary pattern, adjustable and deactivable, overlaid on the others. Doesn't this imply that, behind the tick-tocks, everything is "already" pre-calculated? And I don't mean it in the fixed-timeline-predestination sense (because, of course, there is an infinite number of trajectories on the Grid of All Possible Moments), but in the automata-programming sense -- i.e. for each state, all the possible transitions to other states are fully predetermined by precise if-then rules.
it makes no sense to talk about free will outside of the state or pattern
Neither inside. Free will is nowhere to be found. So, in a deterministic model, subjective experiences like pain or sadness or disgust or fear give a sense of cosmic unfairness. Luckily, evolution appears to be headed in the direction of eternal betterment. At least, this is comforting.

The thing is, though: from what perspective is everything pre-calculated? That perspective you are imagining, never "is". It's another example of the "view from nowhere": looking at a mental diagram within the thing it is meant to be a diagram of. I get what you are going for, though, which can essentially boil down to:

Given a full set of information, surely we will always intend what we want, so isn't that intention "pre-ordained"?

The first response to this is as above: that the mental map we're referring to in this discussion never exists in actuality. After a shift, the old state simply doesn't exist anymore, there is no memory of it, so to talk of determinism between states doesn't make sense. The second response is that "free will" is the ability to be able to, in principle, choose any option. If it so happens that we always choose the most attractive option, then that is still a free choice. In actual fact, the "making the best choice" idea is just a theory of what will happen - and it is contentless, surely? Because cannot predict the options or our desires prior to encountering them; certainly we can't predict what they will be post-state-shift. And if we cannot actually predict our own choices in advance, then they are not deterministic, and the theory is simply a narrative. I can't help but feel that this sort of thing needs actual illustrations to point at. :-)

Q2: After a shift, the old state simply doesn't exist anymore, there is no memory of it, so to talk of determinism between states doesn't make sense.
I'm way off base. I was thinking in terms of eternalism, but that seems more akin to presentism. However, I don't understand how such thing could be dynamic and timeless at the same -uhm- time. Thank you for your help and your patience. I give up on the mind-screwing theoretical stuff for now...
I can't help but feel that this sort of thing needs actual illustrations to point at. :-)
Releasing "Act = Fact, Part 2" in comic strip form would be epic. Even better with some Kung-Fu Owls kicking physicalist asses!

Well, it's "eternal" in the sense that "all possible facts and patterns are present and true always, now", it's "presentism" in the sense that you-as-awareness are in a static state (between shifts), and that state corresponds those facts and patterns being at different levels of "truth" or "intensity of contribution". Even "time passing" is a static pattern within a particular state. But - it's just a description, albeit a description which aims to be the most abstract that makes logical sense, and therefore the most flexible that is consistent with our experience. That is, intentions based on it do not imply additional complications. It's a "clean" model. You don't really need the model, any model, in order to get along. After all, it's just another "parallel construction in thought" rather than the world-as-it-is. Recognising that the world-as-it-is isn't any particular way, is probably enough (although that takes a bit of faith and the admission of uncertainty). So, the "edited highlight" would be, I suppose: Intending is the only cause, however intentions based on a description also tend to imply the pattern of that description - and hence tend to trigger experiences "as if" that description were true. If you intend something which is formulated based on the assumption that "the world is a spatially-extended place", then your intention also contains that pattern as part of the outcome you are intending. If you intend help from the Norse Gods, for example, then you will be implying their existence by doing so, and will tend to have other experiences "as if" the Norse Gods were around. Heh, I rather like your idea for "Part 2". I do think the Owls of Eternity need a starring role; it's the obvious next step after the success of their very fashionable eyewear range! (8>)=

Q3: it's only deterministic between shifts
when i shift my attention to something else than the thing i'm concerned with, then synchronicities happen (which are based on other strands of thought). e.g. what i want or expect won't happen until i become engrossed in something else. this seems silly.

Possible explanation: This is because when you are focused on something, the "boundary" between that strand of thought and the main strand of experience is fairly strong. You keep thinking about it, which implies the pattern of that thought is separate from the rest of experience. When you let of of that and look elsewhere, you are ceasing to hold that image in a constrained bubble, and it becomes a more seamless part of the overall space of experience. The possible solution: to intend into and as the main strand from the outset. For example, rather than focusing on a little bubble of thought and intending there, instead begin by either becoming aware of the background space to your main experience, or focus on an imaginary object floating within the main strand - and use that as your intentional focus. (It doesn't matter if your attention is on a small area of the main experience; intention should apply "globally" anyway even if your attention is "local".)

Q4: I remember you saying that the head gap is the background space. So to put the above into practice to go from seated=>standing, would we begin by placing our attention into the area behind our forehead, and then imagine-that we are already stood up, not interfering?

It actually shouldn't matter where your attention is, because intention applies as a whole, across the entirety. Provided it's directed in the main strand, and is not narrowed-focused on some part of your body and preventing it changing, you should be able to attend anywhere, or completely openly, and your intention will work. You can think of intending as resulting in a sort dissolved pattern across the entire world, but whose sensory aspects are only experienced if a result of that intention overlaps with your current sensory moment. So, when you intend standing up, the pattern - "the intention" plus its implication - is really a static pattern laid out from this-moment running to that-moment, which you subsequently encounter as "time passes" across it. So, I when intend to "stand up" that means: the fact-of-being-stood up is placed a few moments away, which implies a set of moments between that-moment (being stood up) and the current this-moment (being sat down). Then, I start to experience "standing up" happening as I scan across the moments from this-moment to that-moment.

Q4: Ugh, I understand everything perfectly conceptually, but the bottleneck to using this stuff practically really is - how do you insert the fact itself into your future. And of course, the answer is - well, it can't be described in words! Also, from the perspective of being-a-human, it seems to be extremely challenging to insert facts that are not at all plausible. My classic example that I use is to decide that you will receive a text message from a certain person within 5 minutes. I'm consistently unable to do it even with the firmest of deciding!
EDIT: When I say "using this stuff practically", I don't mean misdirection or assignment of meaning exercises, those often work with minimal commitment. I mean having the ability to directly insert facts when you please.

Yeah, since it just is - it's identical to being - it's like trying to describe to someone how to think a thought, or how to hear sounds, or even more mundane: how would you describe to someone how to lift their arm? In all cases, you just "become" the outcome and then you have the experience of it happening. But that's not very easy (i.e. not possible) to describe, so we end up talking about pretty much everything else instead - sigh!

Q4: To me, the implications of this is that the only route to truly figuring it out is through constant testing in your own experience. If descriptions just can't capture intending, surely there is no point to asking your dream characters how to describe it! Even though we do it anyway at some point in our exploration. Although, I have to say that I'm not willing to accept that descriptions are completely meaningless compared to firsthand experience. I think descriptions can be useful to initially point us in the right direction, which is then followed by personal experimentation to solidify understanding. Lastly, I feel that there is a luck component to all of this. It could take you 10 tries or 1,000,000 tries to finally realize how to insert a fact.

I agree that descriptions aren't completely meaningless. I think they are useful in two ways:

They provide inspiration for intentions. Also, intending based on a description also implies the extended pattern of that description, so your ongoing experience starts behaving "as if" your description is true, even thought the description itself is parallel and non-causal.
They can be useful for pointing out gaps, and thereby encouraging us to direct attention towards those gaps. Although the description, or language more generally, cannot communicate those gaps, the realisation of the "fact of the absence" can lead to us attending to the thing that can't be described.

For example, say you've got a hand-waving notion of how you summon a thought or how you summon an arm movement, but you never examine it. Now, someone points out to you that there is a gap in your description of how your world unfolds. The attempt to describe this gap, and the failure of the attempt, leads you to recognise "intention" and "experiencing", and to investigate what it is you are doing (or not doing), even though is "before" words and cannot be codified. Now, I maybe wouldn't call it luck, exactly, but there is certainly an element of discovery involved. That is, you end up attending to your own patterning and your current state. So for sure, you can't get any better at intending as such - it's not a skill, just like you can't get better at being - but you can certainly get better at constructing intentions through better understanding what it is. Typically, ending up with something like "thinking the thought of something being true", or similar - something that points to it for you. I suppose there's a luck aspect in ever encountering a situation where the gap is pointed out to you in the first place.

Q3: becoming aware of the background space to your main experience
I felt like that out for a walk today - kind of like )( observing the 'bubble' of the universe being seen from the sphere of my awareness
instead of having minor reactions/experiences I need to have something big
It doesn't matter if your attention is on a small area of the main experience; intention should apply "globally" anyway even if your attention is "local".
like for example the portals or even just waking up in another country or in another set of 'life circumstances'. at present it seems like I'm supporting a world for the benefit of everyone but me! even if my 'everyday experiences' were to change around me that would be useful (i.e. they come to me rather than me seeking it out). surely I should get to a point where the difference between intention and actualisation doesn't exist because to desire is to come from a place of want.

Perhaps something to explore is that sense of relationship between "you" and "the world" (including other people). Do you perceive the world as being a place? Or a strand of thought? And so on. Taking on different stances like this changes our basic relationship, the "framing"of the content of experience. For example, if you see intention as being injected into a 3D world that extends out in all directions, then that is quite a different implicit pattern than seeing injection as being a reshaping of your own state from which sensory experiences are a part.

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Oneirosophy

POST: On the pretentious nature of consensus reality.

All wool, no sweater!

POST: Visualizations of a few concepts discussed here

[POST]

Recalling or experiencing part of a pattern in any way triggers the whole pattern (and to a lesser extent all associated patterns) via auto-completion.
[https://i.imgur.com/gGmwmQe.gifv]
Unfolding
[https://i.imgur.com/QB7IEAp.jpg]
Enfolded Possibilities
[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WpGzXw4z05I/UysaV4CAyfI/AAAAAAAAukQ/OwY03iI0I2k/s1600/tumblr_m39qj6mK6v1qzt4vjo1_500.gif]
I may find some more in the future, but I felt these were fitting, at least for how I think of these concepts.

[END OF POST]

What a nice idea - evocative imagery. I kinda meant to pursue that avenue more after the Infinite Grid one, but animation takes time and I've not had the time - repurposing preexisting ones is a great idea. I like the first one particularly. Something which emphasises the notion of a redistribution of relative contribution of pre-existing patterns. This also reminds me I've been somewhat neglecting my Oneirosophic duties of late.

POST: Cities, civilization, and lucidity.

[POST]

So i've been on a two week vacation out in spain with my family, and while it was fun, i cant help but realize in those big city environments, not to mention not having much alone time, i had a very difficult time achieving lucidity. Like before i left i feel like i had things down but out in madrid and barcelona, all of the hundreds of people and noises seemed to scream for attention for my mind. I guess i could classify myself as a person who is prone to sensory overload at times. Also on the whole going beyond being human thing, as much as i love my parents being around them seemed to make me feel human by reminding me i'm their offspring.
What i have learned from this experience is that for one thing i now know why monks spend time in isolation, but also that there is incredible freedom in solitude. I've also realized that before i thought spending time alone in my room was limiting and imprisoning, but when i was out in those big cities i felt even more imprisoned and failed to realize how free i actually was before this experience. Say what you will about charles manson, but in ones of his interviews he said something along the lines of society being a bigger prison then the actual cell he was staying in, and now i totally get it. Mental prisons are much more insidious because not being in a physical prison creates an illusion of freedom, and mental prisons can be very detrimental to lucidity.

[END OF POST]

Madrid and Barcelona - amazing, I love those cities. But they are relentless. And that's a good thing! :-)

Surely one of the benefits of pursuing this approach is that you can find the 'space' in any situation. Even in a crowded street, elbows bumping against you, the rowdy crowds of Las Ramblas, there is quiet inside you - or should I say, that the scene is contained within a quiet. Monks are saps! ;-)

EDIT: Hint, these cities are much more fun with a bunch of pals, perhaps during a festival.

...my dad kind of follows a schedule...

Yeah, there's nothing worse than "organised fun".

i brought illuminatus trilogy on the plane to read and the person in the row next to me had the same book.

Of course they did! That's how it works. Also, your seat number was 23 and the air hostess was distributing free copies of Fnord magazine with the newspapers.

POST: TV astral projection, dimensional intersections, and reality as a dream labyrinth of dreams within dreams.

Yes, we do get "absorbed into worlds" (or rather, we absorb worlds into us?) and everyday life is just such a place. I suppose we become what we pay attention to, so we really do completely enter Mario's land. It's just a matter of directed attention.

A little related, I was just reading Francis Lucille’s The Perfume of Silence and I quite liked this passage (his version of a ‘grid of all moments’) which reminds me a bit of your TV scenario:

*We can only use metaphors up to a point. When stretched too far they don’t work. We use the metaphor of images on a television screen to understand the relationship of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to consciousness. The screen stands for consciousness, and the images for the manifestations, the energies, the appearances.
If we want to understand the relationship between consciousness and the apparent multiplicity of minds, we can also use the image of a television screen, but in a different way. If innumerable television screens, each with their own image, represent innumerable minds, then in this case, consciousness is indicated by an observer who is watching all the television screens at the same time. Sometimes two images may have some connection because they share a common object. Sometimes they may not seem to have any connection, because their fields don’t intersect.
However, one single witness observes all screens. In this metaphor the witness stands for consciousness and each screen stands for each individual mind.

and

Objectively it is limited, but subjectively it is not. One television screen cannot see the other screens, but the observer has access to all of them. In the same way, your mind does not have access to other minds, but one consciousness sees all minds. The observer is not foreign to you because it is you. It is seeing and understanding these words right now. There is not a separate consciousness for each mind. There is only one hearer, one seer, one perceiver. The apparatus with which we see is by itself inert, unable to see. A telescope is useless without an astronomer behind it. It doesn’t see anything by itself. Likewise, the apparatus of mind doesn’t see anything by itself.

POST: Differences between Oneirosophy and New Age (by cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

You know I consider myself pretty open minded when it comes to forms of spirituality, but whenever I see something that is really new agey there is a part of me that cringes a bit. I mean I believe in the possibilities of things like spirits, energy, and alternate planes of existence and so do new agers, but where is the difference? What's different I realized is that new age can have a quasi materialistic bent to its working where as Oneirosophy is all about working with perception alone. For example things like fluoride in drinking water calcifying the pineal gland so you cant astraly project, needing to be a vegan in order to access higher states of consciousness, masturbating makes you lose your chi, or the idea of electronic devices interfering with ones perception. All 4 of these things have you believing your ability to transcend the illusion of physicality relies on other physical things. If that doesn't sound like it makes sense it shouldn't. If the world is truly a dream things like chemicals in the drinking water or having the right crystals in the room should not be an aid or a detriment unless you decide it so, all is perception. Now granted getting to mired in certain habits can make one less lucid like eating too much junkfood or any other habit, but that is only the focus of attention on the bad habit not necessarily things blocking your chi (unless that's how you want your reality to manifest).
Let me make it clear I'm not trying to attack new age, if you want to clutch crystals and eat only raw food that's your business in your spiritual path but I think the reason new age can be off putting at time is because it makes spiritual ascent based on physical diet, physical objects, and physical energies where as oneirosophy can be based on perception, attention, and thought forms alone. I mean im not a vegetarian by any means (though I am eating less and losing weight currently) and I think im pretty good at astral projection and visualization. You don't have to worry about adopting some ultra healthy hippy life style (though diet and exercise doesn't hurt), you always have the power within you to become lucid in this dream, just don't get too caught up in the side shows and you should be fine.

[END OF POST]

What's different I realized is that new age can have a quasi materialistic bent to its working...

Yes, there's like an acceptance of 'this' but not of 'that' - as if there's a requirement for some solidity to base the esoteric stuff on. Which isn't the case. Everything gets much simpler if you accept that everything is non-material and aware, and therefore infinitely flexible.

If the world is truly a dream things like chemicals in the drinking water or having the right crystals in the room should not be an aid or a detriment unless you decide it so, all is perception.

I was recently reading a book on "Ho'oponopono", quite new-agey (albeit describing a traditional Hawaiian approach apparently) but with some universal ideas buried in it. Anyway, at one point our main character in this asks to go to a burger bar. Our author is surprised - surely this unhealthy food is a bad idea? The response is that he 'sends it love before he eats it'. Now, that sounds ridiculous, but then you realise what he's really saying is that he is refusing to accept the idea that the burger is bad for him. He isn't cleansing it of bad energies or whatever; he is cleansing himself of his own causal opinion that this will do him harm.

Simultaneously, it is becoming apparent to me that much of what before I would feel very much a victim of, now I simply take in stride and learn from.

The larger idea is that we can cower and "be small" within our world-experience, or we can assert and become it - in which case it is within us. When the world is within us, it is not made of "things" but of "meaning", and events unfold according to their meaning. If burgers and coughing "mean" to us that health is affected, it will be. However, if we note that burgers and coughing are merely images in awareness then they don't inherently mean anything, and we can update any meaning those ideas have inherited from our past assumptions. I guess you could call this "Active Being". In many traditions we are taught non-attachment and acceptance. This alone reduced the effect of such things. However, we do have the ability to "reformat experience" and change the "rolling theory" we are living with - interjecting when we spot a tweak that needs to be made, and letting be at other times.

this is where the idea of gods or the hga becomes useful.

This is a good point - that if you can't quite persuade yourself that "little you" has all this power, then you can outsource it as a way of convincing yourself it's possible. But that is what you are doing: creating-adjusting by implication. It's pretty hard to convince yourself that: a) you can completely cheat the game and, b) that cheating the game is a 'good idea' or morally 'allowed'. And doing things by direct assertion (including 'overwriting yourself') maybe the most direct and it does work, but it involves at least temporarily leaving personhood behind, which is a pretty big emotional hurdle (it's "death"!)

POST: Pain doesn't hurt anymore

Do you feeling more generally detached and less present in your body? Do you feel more 'localised' in your head area?

Not saying this is you, but - - -

One reaction people can have to emotional trauma is that they withdraw their 'presence' from their body; they become remote from both emotional and physical sensation. Any distraction from the 'avoided area' can come across as having ambiguous meaning, anything intense that breaks through can seem pleasurable - e.g. Being forcibly hugged really intensely, etc. Mostly, it is that for such a deadened person, any intense sensation can give a feeling of 'aliveness' again. In other words, if that is you, then this isn't a good thing. Spiritual learning allows you to feel things fully and accept them as sensations; it doesn't literally reduce the sensation itself or deaden the natural response. 'Letting go' and 'mindfulness' exercises might assist, although you might find them initially unpleasant and make you feel vulnerable, because you will be opening yourself up to sensations you've not been with for a while.

I am not detached from my body. Also not deadened or less present in general. I experience primarily through my heart and root chakra zones. I made this post out of surprise that an incidence of physical pain didn't carry that repulsive feeling usually associated with pain. I thought maybe the recent emotional pain could have some bearing but I hope people don't take this post as a cry for help, because I'm actually feeling great.

Ah, well that's all good then! :-)

POST: Everything is real, everything is unreal, or everything simply is?

It depends on the perspective. Everything is unreal in the sense that it is not what we assume - no solid objects extended in space, actually patterns in dissolved awareness. But they are real in terms of being patterns. So perhaps it's better to dodge the question and just say that everything is transparent and dreamlike?

From there it follows that as there is no solid substrate, everything is temporary and flexible, and because to experience something you must be it, all experiences and therefore the world are contained within you. "Real" and "unreal" means the world experience is being separated into two categories. But really, all experience is made from patterns of the same thing (awareness). The distinction between the two is, on examination, usually down to stability and persistence, and perhaps location - that transient thoughts are "not real" (and over here)whereas the room around you hangs around and is therefore "real" (and over there).

If real = an independent physical material, then nothing is real.
If real = awareness, then everything is real.

From a /r/Psychonaut post:

Nefelibata
Definition: A cloud walker; One who lives in the cloud of their own imagination or dreams, or one who does not abide by the precepts of society, literature, or art; An unconventional, unorthodox person.
Pronunciation: ne-fe-LE-ba-ta

POST: Understanding Beta, alpha, theta, and delta mind states in an oneirosophic context.

Could we think of the brainwaves as the 3rd-person subjective image of a 1st-person subjective experience? Is the difference between states then a different between attentional styles?

Two general styles:

A diffuse, open attentional style is a detached one where you let the world experience come to you. You are settled into the broadest state. This is an acceptance of existing patterns though non-resistance.
In contrast, a highly focussed, narrow attention style involves a "gripping" onto a pattern. If this is a pattern of existing experience, this this increases the intensity of the pattern within focus, but also preventing its change.

However, either style can be used to effect change:

An open-detached style (non-clinging to existing pattern) can allow intentions to ripples into effect easily. You are not "holding onto" existing patterns, so they can reform without resistance.
A narrow-focussed style, when focussed on the desired pattern rather than an existing pattern, can also be a mechanism for change.

Implicitly, both approaches can amount to releasing a hold on present patterns and transferring experience to a desired pattern. The open approach is far less stressful though, and you can have a focussed experience within an open state.

Q1: ok this isn't a bad way to reinterpret it. I tend to find the open detached style is better for cultivating a state of lucidity then the narrow focused style. Maybe this is because you become open to the whole experience, and to be truly lucid in a dream you have to be aware that all of the experience is a dream, not just one small section of it.

Right. I'd say the open detached style is definitely the one to go for, because you can (potentially) live every moment this way. By "letting the world come to you" you can remain completely relaxed. If you don't even interfere with the shifts of your own attention (which eventually settle anyway), you naturally become aware of the background space including the place where "you" are meant to be. The narrow-focussed bang has been used in magickal techniques as a quick way of forcing temporary detachment while holding an intention, to "release" it. But surely it's far better to be completely open and "ask and receive" instead - for everyday body movement and thinking, not just "special efforts". I guess it's about resisting the urge to want to push and feel yourself doing things. There have been some studies into the correspondence between brainwaves and "open focus" and there is value in that - see Les Fehmi's work - but for individual experiments, I think you can just go for what feels right.

...

that is a good point you make, however i know in my own personal experience i still have a lot of deconditioning to do. I only say this because i have become lucid and then have become trapped in materialism before and know how hard it is to get a way from convention.

Can you instead put aside those thoughts and then, rather than de-conditioning, leave them alone and choose to assert your preferred metaphysics and live from that?

POST: Sensory Reversal

[POST]

This evening I imagined, "If the physical world is an illusion, how can I come to access the world beyond illusion? Senses are all no-go's. What else do I have to work with?" And I thought, oddly enough, of senselessness.
So I closed my eyes very, very slowly. I watched as my vision, which seemed to take up the entire potential visible field, began to develop definite 'edges' The top and bottom of my visual field started to disappear into the lightlessness of closed eyes. And soon what remained of my vision was just a tiny, trembling flicker surrounded almost entirely by lightlessness until my eyes finally closed entirely. And I'd do this again and again, very slowly opening them back up, and very slowly re-closing them.
I started imagining an image of myself with two tiny, round TV screens floating in front of my eyeballs like the lenses of eyeglasses. And each of them was showing me a very slightly different perspective on the world in the same way that 3D glasses do to present a 3D movie.
And the interesting part really began when, as I slowly closed my eyes, I would imagine the screens compressing horizontally until they dissolved away, and as I slowly opened my eyes, the screens would emerge again and slowly expand. And I held this visual in my mind very strongly and probably spent no less than 15 minutes imagining that, as I felt my physical eyes close, the 3D screens were dissolving. I recommend you do this and pay special note to what you begin to 'see' when your eyes are closed.
The sensation settled in that as I closed my eyes, I was effectively opening my actual visual field to the "genuine" world -- and naturally when I felt like I was opening my eyes, I was actually covering up the real universe with a virtual screen.
What are the implications of this approach?
Well, it implies that the emptiness you see when you close your eyes is kind of "more real" than what you see when your eyes are open. This means that total sensory deprivation, including thoughts, would be the effective extinguishing of the physical world -- and also, therefore, might share similarities with the state of mind of an enlightened being. This may be intuitive, but what's (I think) profound to imagine is that what's left, the dark, scentless, tasteless, sensationless, thoughtless world you'd experience in total sensory deprivation, is precisely the state you return to in deep sleep, certain states of meditation, or death. When you close your eyes, you're looking at the "Real World" beyond illusion. The only illusion would be to imagine that you're seeing the backs of eyelids.
I found this to be very powerful to experiment with.
It also confirms strangely well with the scientific approach to the world which should make this practice a fairly accessible one for even skeptic-minded folks. Everything we experience, according to physics, comes at us as wavelengths of some sort. All of matter, all of our sensory experiences, all of existence, boils down to wavelengths. It's therefore, potentially, fairly easy for even the uninitiated to imagine their whole perceived reality as merely the massively complex wavelengths projected by a hyper-advanced 3D screen. Of course, it's hardly intuitive to imagine pains, scents, and visions as being projections of wavelengths, but it's approachable and comprehensible, I think, to a broad audience.
Another very interesting thing that can be done with this practice is to, while sitting in a dim-to-dark environment, perceiving all of the dark spots in your field of vision (shadows, black objects, etc.) as 'holes' in the screen. The nature of the visual field suddenly becomes very thin, 2D, and almost transparent.
Thoughts?

[END OF POST]

That's a fun approach. Like realising you've been wearing VR goggles all along. |8|-)

The Imagination Room metaphor was an attempt at something similar: to give you a way of looking at things which you can take around with you, seeing the sensory world as a floating mirage in the undefined space of...

The better version would be a "holographic space", but having the projection come from the "floor" is something that can be used to keep you, ahem, grounded during daily life.

An H.S. is kinda what you're approaching here?

Everything we experience, according to physics, comes at us as wavelengths of some sort.

I'd say you can ditch the "wavelengths" part, because one of the steps everyone has to take eventually that scientific experiments are just part of the sensory dream, as it were. And in any case it appeals to a more scientific crowd. "Observing wavelengths" is a story we experience that is made up of sensations and perceptions, so -

Instead, you can simply point out that sensations (images are harder, but sounds, bodily sensations, thoughts, emotional feelings) are all "findable" floating in your own awareness. You can literally sit someone down and take them through this, directing their attention at the different parts of experience, and they'll "get it".

What are the implications of this approach?

Vision is always the trickiest though, because it seems so obvious that "spatial extension" is a real thing outside, when it isn't. Your idea of imagining it as 'TV screens' you can push away is a good way to have people "stand back in their heads" a bit at the very least, maybe even actually learn that the visual content can be directly manipulated...

But what I'm really implying is something that goes beyond screens into a full sensory hologram.

Right! I do think it's easier to introduce the simpler version first - the "floor" in my room, the "screen" in your description. Because:

When we switch to talking about a holographic space, we're saying something a bit more: that the whole of the world is dissolved (non-spatially, non-temporally) into the background awareness, and that your 3D sensory experience is just what you are currently "selecting" with your attention. And by "the world" here, we really mean the patterns that we've accumulated within ourselves, as that space.

"You can literally sit someone down and take them through this"... I like that.

I'm always on the lookout for ways to communicate this. Another fun thing to try with people - which has worked pretty well - is the little exercise described in the post Outside: The Dreaming Game. It draws people's attention to the background space that they are. A variation on that is the "where is your real hand?" exercise, where you get people to try to point to their "real hand" (having explained that, even under the standard description, what they are experiencing right now is at best a "mind representation" of the world). If they point to their head (to indicate their brain), you ask them where their "real head" is...

The best approach, I think, remains simply lying down and giving up completely and absolutely. Vitally, this includes releasing your attentional focus to let it move as it wants - this is the real key. Given some time without being stirred by intention, the "space" settles out and naturally reveals itself to be open and unbounded. Looking for this interrupts it by deforming the space via attention; thinking-about this obscures it with the shadow-senses that constitute thought. This is why the whole "seeking" thing has to be dropped in order to be "enlightened", I suggest.

reading this post I pictured my vision as a 3d bubble in a 4 dimensional void, powerful stuff. But I would be somewhat cautious to labeling said void as "the real reality".

That's how I envisage the Infinite Grid thing. My current sensory experience is my 3D attention scanning over a 4D environment. It's always the the 'real reality', right? Just taking on different forms. Even 'void' is an experience of some sort.

POST: Some more lucid dreaming epistemology

I was talking about this over at /r/luciddreaming, responding to a post about persisting the dream (via spinning, looking at your hands, concentrating on a sensation, etc). Here's my comment:

My feeling is that all of these techniques are indirect - but they all have something in common. This occurred to me a while back when trying to improve my posture, and I realised that all the bodywork techniques were really about... expanding your feeling-sense or presence into the space around you, and everything else falling into line spontaneously. In short: maintaining a relaxed, open awareness that is expanded into the perceptual space around you. What you actually seemed to "do" to bring this about - a body action or mental manipulation - was irrelevant: you could actually just skip straight to it. In lucid dreams, if you let your attention narrow down into the body area, it's a sure-fire way to end the dream. Warnings not to contemplate the dream are essentially warnings against this. Maintaining tactile sensations, spinning around, looking at your hands, is a cheat to keep your attention open. (Implication: it's perfectly okay to think in a dream, so long as you don't mistakenly assume this requires you focus your attention down to the thoughts, thereby withdrawing yourself from the dream environment.)

So, next time you are in a dream, try expanding your sense of presence - expand your "you" and feel out into the dream, to that you are in open focus rather than narrow focus. Note, it's more of a relaxing-out than a forcing-out. Open attention is actually the default once you've got used to it, so what you are doing is leading yourself to cease constraining your attention. You can also try this in everyday life, since the situation there is exactly the same (except for the sensory content). What you'll discover is, your true situation is that of an "open, aware, perceptual space" in which experience arises - whether that's a waking experience or a dream experience. (This realisation allows us to make sense of experiences such as these [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams].)

The summary: avoid narrowing your focus when you do anything. Leave your focus open. This is a mistake we do in real life too (we "concentrate" our attention when performing an activity, rather than simply intending it).

...

The waking dream is dreamed that way; you've dreamed that you-the-character are restricted; experiments reveal this not to be the case. You can choose to dream a persistent, permadeath realm as a lucid dream if you want, and it will be pretty much like this waking life.

POST: Trying to hash some stuff out for myself, would appreciate your thoughts.

How does the oneironaut remain committed to any view in particular?

You get to choose your metaphor deliberately, and having experiences accordingly. It you don't choose or if you botch together an incoherent worldview, you'll find yourself in an incoherent world.

I think I'm just not convinced that manipulating reality is worth the effort because if normal and mundane things aren't real, why bother with trying to change them?

Well, they are only "not real" in the sense that there is no secret, hidden, solid world behind the scenes beyond the "habitual regularities" of experience. It's perfectly real as an experience, in the same way that a thought is a real thought. You can just leave things alone if you want, let your current patterns roll on...

But still, it seems like I actually can't stop manipulating reality.

You can let it alone by not updating anything (the apparent world will just run along its current trajectory). Experience will just appear in alignment with the facts-of-the-world as you left them. But it's also important to realise that you can't experience yourself doing the changing. To will is to change your own shape; you only ever experience the results, although you "know" that you are willing.

Basically I feel like there is no ground for me to take a position on that would make me feel that one way of perceiving reality is ultimately better than another.

Just choose one. For fun. You don't need to believe anything (belief isn't causal, it is simply what one thinks is worth intending, or assumes is happening anyway). You are right that there's no ground. Even your current "you" perspective is arbitrary.

There are no answers, only choices [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeC285uL6_w].

it's just that I have been taking "enlightenment" so freaking seriously

Let "enlightenment" take care of itself. Or: sit down and close your eyes and imagine that you are the empty space of the room, then expand it out. Don't think-about being that, instead actually imagine being it, adopting the shape of being it. Keep doing that until all you are is empty space. That's not quite it. :-)

But in waking life I seem to forget about this.

We let go of many things but often we forget to let go of attention. Check whether you do this: when you are doing something, such as looking at a computer screen, do you narrow your experience to it (focus your attention on it) or do you include it into your experience (leave your attention open)? Try the latter. Notice that you do not need to narrow your attention ("concentrate") in order to achieve things. It is intention that dictates what gets done, not attention. In fact, you'll maybe realise that the usual reason you narrow your attention - to block out distractions when trying to "focus" - is actually caused by narrowing attention. Distractions are actually a "here I am" signal to open out attention again, as are aches and pains, often.

Q1: This is interesting. I have noticed more and more that I feel like I am sometimes being sucked into the screen and I find myself straining or not paying attention to anything else. It's gotten to the point where when I'm done, I feel out of it. Like dissociated and separate from things. It's really uncomfortable. Do you have anything else to say about this?

I went through a similar thing. I suggest that, if you don't already do something similar, you adopt a daily exercise like the passive version of Overwriting Yourself. Basically, just lie down and let yourself - but in particular your attention - unwind without interference. If you narrow your attention down, what happens is that your whole body effectively tries to cram itself into that small space! You get very tense, and your body often ends up in what amounts to an emergency mode. Even people who know about "letting go" of their bodies and thoughts often don't realise that they are still controlling their attention, because attention isn't a "thing" or a "sensation", it's more of a filtering.

You shouldn't be controlling anything through effort. Your job is to "direct" and "let happen". So my general advice is:

Before working, imagine yourself to be the background space in the room - actually "feel out" into that space.
Rest the centre of your attention - "where you are looking out from" - somewhere along the centre line of your body. Perhaps halfway back in your head, or even in your lower body. Wherever feels good and like "home". (Probably at the moment you are "sitting" too far forward, right behind your eyes.)
When you work at the computer, do not focus your attention onto it. Instead, leave your "space" open and allow your body to move at the pace it wants to.
Do not not "effort" yourself. You are not meant to be physically wrestling with your work. If you leave your attention open, you'll probably find this subsides naturally. If you are in a calm state, you should feel that your body is "moving by itself".

I mention this all the time, but for daily body use I really recommend the Missy Vineyard book. Although it's ostensibly a book about the Alexander Technique (body use for actors, musicians, etc) it's actually a lot more insightful than that.

...

Hey, that's great - the attention thing is hard to describe, but once you've had the experience it all makes sense!

EDIT: You made a good point, which is that it's tempting to try and hold onto effortlessness or spaciousness by focusing on it, but of course that ruins it. You obviously can't "hold onto" wide-open attention by narrowing your attention.

POST: Dream is interesting

Have you checked out /r/luciddreaming? You might find that interesting if you haven't. Also I really recommend the book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner, it this area is new to you. It's probably the only non-beginners book on the subject that delves into the philosophy and status of the dream environment.

Yes, it's interesting to think that we might have given ourselves this role and forgot about it. Part of oneirosophy is recognising that you are "the dream" rather than the particular character you seem to be. If you've been practicing Buddhism and meditation, then I'm sure you've been thinking along these lines before: that what you truly are is a "consciousness" which is "taking on the shape" of a being-a-person-in-a-world experience.

i am the dream.. it also seems to mean that we are one with the world and the world is within us. if i understand you correctly.

Yes. Without getting in depth, I'd say that what we actually are is an unbounded "aware space" in which all possible experiential patterns are "dissolved". The moment you are experiencing now is just the combination of the various patterns that are active, the brightest of the patterns. You can think of this as similar to how the sun (the current moment) dominates the daytime sky, but actually all the stars are still there (all the other possible moments). This means that there is no world "out there". For instance, the room next door isn't "over there", it is dissolved into the background, here. Our ongoing experience is like a *strand of thought - it just happens to be a very bright, 3D-immersive stand of thought that seems to fill up our aware space. I've posted a long-winded version about this stuff before: The Patterning of Experience and A Line of Thought, maybe worth a look in a bored moment. The "imagination room" metaphor linked in the first post can be quite useful I think.

if the dreamer here could travel the same world we are currently residing? or the dreamer always travel in the dream realm outside the world we are residing?

I say there is no restriction. There is no difference between selecting an experience "somewhere else" or "here in this world" or even "another time in this world". It is all here, now, available. The trick is to ensure you are starting a "thought" which is seeded from this world, rather than a random creation.

POST: Anyone finding progress?

"Just deciding" is an assertion that something is fact. More specifically, it is like increasing the contribution to your experience of a pre-existing fact or pattern. (It is pre-existing, because it is thinkable; all patterns exist eternally.)

For all the reasons you identify, it is much easier for people to use misdirection for this, and use a mental or physical act and attach the meaning to it. In other words, we think a thought or perform a ritual which we have decided means-that a situation will occur, or that a fact is now true. (And we choose not to examine too closely that the thought or act itself came from nowhere.)

Elsewhere, I tried to encapsulate it with these snappy bullet points:

Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.

The problem you might be having is that this is all literally unthinkable conceptually, and you cannot experience yourself "doing" intention - you can only experience instances of it, of becoming it.

One possible illustration: if you were a shape-shifter, how would you describe the process of shape-shifting? You would just "become" the new shape; it's all you, so there's no one part causing the other part. Continuing with this: how would you work out you were a shape-shifter? The only way would be... to shift your shape. There would be no evidence of you being a shape-shifter between shiftings. Intention and deciding and all that, have similar problems. You are perhaps seeking to experience something that is "the thing 'before' experiencing".

POST: on accessing harmonic understandings in music without "learning" scales, chords, etc

Reminds me a little of this: Working With A Violinist [missing]

But that's just about allowing the physical movements to flow uninhibited and in the best way possible (without "making it happen"). That's an arbitrary limitation though, surely, borne of an assumption which limits intention. What's the difference, really, between intending to play a piece of sheet music and "letting it happen", and intending to create a new piece of music and letting that happen? It become about not obstructing what arises.

POST: Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?

I do like Hoffman. His paper on Conscious Realism is worth reading, and slightly more sophisticated talk on the Interface Theory of Perception is well worth checking out. Another Hoffman link to check out: Peeking Behind the Icons, from his older book Visual Intelligence. It's basically a sort of modern-language retelling of Immanuel Kant's phenomenal and noumenal. Of particular interest from the perspective of subjective idealism:

Are my teammates conscious?
The phenomenal teammates are, like the phenomenal volleyball, my constructions. If the phenomenal volleyball needn’t be conscious, then why should my phenomenal teammates be conscious? What differentiates the two? For now, nothing of import- ance, so I can’t conclude that my phenomenal teammates are conscious. My relational teammates, like the relational volleyball, are circuits and software. But these circuits and software receive radio signals from my “real” teammates who are conscious, so that ultimately I interact with them. Thus the relational teammates are conscious, although my phenomenal ones are not.

Potentially this is rather begging the question, because in reality we don't have access to a "pre-simulation" version of what's going on, as described in Hoffman's metaphor. Whatever it is that dictates the behaviour of my "relational teammates", whatever has set them in motion, can never be accessed. Unless it turns out that this is... me.

...

It's important to realize what Donald is talking about is not subjective idealism.

Yes. This is true, but he does skirt with it elsewhere, because he doesn't consider the world as spatially-extended, and starts to suggest that individual perspectives can be separate. I wouldn't be surprised if he does something on it eventually - but it's a step that pretty much no public figure can openly take at the moment, because it just can't be proved by "given" evidence and has no context. Anyway - I find his step-by-step discussing and imagery pretty helpful in providing a path out of materialism certainly, physicalism definitely. Especially initially, it can be difficult to make the step from "knowing" a subjective idealist perspective but being unable to "think it". Donald's pretty helpful for this. But of course: each to their own. As you've pointed out before, it's usually helpful if a link is accompanied with some discussion on how it's helped you to shift your perspective, etc, to provide context.

Q1: Subjective idealism can never be proven using evidence. In fact, subjective idealism finds fault with evidence itself. Meaning, we cannot accept appearances as evidential because of our metaphysical stance. Appearances present us only with possibilities and not with "how things are." There is no "is-ness" behind anything. So how can such appearances serve as evidence?
I find his step-by-step discussing and imagery pretty helpful in providing a path out of materialism certainly, physicalism definitely.
I don't agree. He just refines it, but doesn't do away with it. He uplifts physicalism to a realm beyond appearance, but still keeps all the bad features of it intact: objective common ground and in-time causality. This is something the scientists have always done. They've been refining their physicalism. They started with the billiard ball idea of atoms, then refined it to "almost empty space" but notice, they never say 100% empty space, it's always "almost." Etc. So they refine it. Now they have a notion of virtual particles. Now they think particles and waves are not two distinct things. They keep refining it, but they'll never rid themselves of the constraints of objective common ground or in-time causality, because they base every endeavor of science on those assumptions.

I think Hoffman is further along than you think, but your points are valid. The extra bit: having recognised that there is no inherent meaning, no possibility of evidence, we become far clearer about the will. In fact I'd say it only makes sense following those other insights.

What amazes me these days is how I used to get worked over about will, but after I realized will is always-on, I can just relax and stop working myself over like a fool. I am always willing perfectly and naturally. I don't have to work myself over and will on top of will, so to speak. Taking relaxation into the scope of volition, and removing the start/middle/end times for intentions, that's done wonders for my state. Now I exert myself as if passive and I relax as if active. It's great. Activity and passivity are only deceptive appearances. I needn't be fooled by them.

Yes, you and I disagreed (it seemed) for ages about will being always-on, but it was primarily a language disagreement because of this exact thing - the hidden assumption we can make about "efforting". But of course, once there is a willing there's a pattern change which persists it, and is it. Passive = active.

Q2: In this talk he's specifically saying that reality is group-perception generated and then at the same time generated by one and then understood by many misinterpreters. Also, that misinterpreting doesn't matter for life. So it's quite contrary, but that latter idea is surely clear. I'd say that he's reserved in what he says IF he truly thinks more than what he says. I don't care if he does or doesn't, but it was definitely an interesting and well spoken piece. What's amazing me at this time in our lives is the convergence of this idea that thought and will make. It's becoming in young art that's being endorsed by corporations. That means it sells, but it also means that massive amounts of people respond to this type of idea.
I'm starting to get a little hope for humanity in that numbers of people aren't jumping on board with a school of thought, but are getting into a deep headspace of creativity and experience on their own terms. I don't know why we chose this idea to experience, but I imagine that it has to do with procreating consciousness in the from one many are begotten sense. I genuinely think that the smarter parts of the general population are starting to get it. The, "I am I" and the "Thou art" and the "We are". I expect to see a lot more people "coming out" in this regard in the next few years. It's time that everyone was told point blank and has to fess up to the responsibility that we're all truly that thing that people deem worthy of worship.
Check out this young man [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPt0LkdM8Bc] but shit, this might all be lame in another few years.

There's a good conversation with Donald Hoffman somewhere (will try to find) where he's sat having a coffee with a colleague, and they talk about how there's no way he could have gone into all this "consciousness" stuff until he had tenure and was safe. As time goes on though, I think it's going to become acceptable again to explore this stuff without ridicule, as even neuroscientists like Christof Koch are publicly discussing panpsychism, etc, as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

POST: Insights from Music

A1: I think the illusion is, is that you're never not in flow. The whole of experience is one big flow. Every thought, every movement, every breath, just happens, naturally and without effort. Even the discomfort and disregard and pounding and your flailing wildly, just happen, without effort. Even the illusion of not being in flow, is a flowing experience. The way to be in flow all the time, is to become aware that you already are. And hopefully, you just have.

Great!

POST: I'd like to correct something I said in my last post

It's worthwhile, I think, to distinguish between passing thoughts (which we might say arise from the current state) and intentional thoughts (which we might say are amendments to a patterns's contribution). So, passing thoughts don't matter, but intentional thoughts do - and what matters is the contextual meaning of those thoughts beyond just the standard sensory aspect. For instance, you might conjure the image of an owl in front of you. Now, do this for "an owl" and do this for "an owl next month". The visual and auditory aspects might be identical in each case, however the felt-knowing of each will be different. Relevance to the topic? That you don't need to let go of the idea as such, but the details matter. If the context of your idea is "an owl will happen soon", then holding onto that idea persists it as never happening, since you are continually re-asserting the fact of a future experience. Also, when you do something you can "know that it is done", thus implying its persistence, and then not have to continually hold it in attention. If you have the idea that ideas are transitory and need maintained while doing your intention, then you are implicitly intending that too, potentially.

POST: Solidity is reinforced through continuity

My theory is that we tend to live in a primary default dream and occasionally dream secondary or tertirary dreams...

When I was playing with the idea of "strands of thought", that's how I was thinking of things. It leads to interesting questions as to the importance of the primary strand. It's not strictly necessary that there is one strand which is more stable, bright, 3D-immersive than others - I can see no need for stability in and of itself, prior to its formation, since stability is required in order to have the ability to reflect upon how nice it is to be stable. However, it's probably inevitable that one will arise eventually and become the effective default to which other strands collapse, until that primary strand itself collapses. Following the collapse of the current apparently primary strand, I suppose either another strand will be revealed, or another strand will simply unfold from the logical fragments of the collapsed strand. "Experiencing" will always continue, being as it is the "container" for all strands of experience. The question really is: at the moment the strand collapses, are you identified with part of the content of the strand which is dissolving, and therefore you continue in ignorance of your prior experience? Or have you become identified with the "container" or the nature of experiencing itself, and therefore can knowingly continue, since your stability is now (almost) independent of content?

(Obviously, "strands" and "dreams" are concepts we are using. We infer they exist for our little model, but I'd suggest that the actual experience is simply one of ongoing content with no true hierarchy. The structure of experience needn't necessarily support a time-and-continuity framework at all.)

...

The experience-of-something is a real experience, but the "something" is not real beyond the experience of it. In the sense that there is nothing "behind" the content of an experience. Sand horses aren't made from "horse" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxtyM9mFMQQ], typa deal.

I was just think about you today. Where is TG I was thinking? I mean I know you're "out there." As for your comment, of course I agree 100% with that one.

Yeah, I've been keeping an eye on things, but not had much to say that wouldn't be just interjecting for the sake of it. Not that this usually stops me, mind you! :-)

POST: You are constantly shifting dimensions already

Let's not become yet another sub where people just post "shit they found"! (I know you have the best intentions, so this isn't meant to be against you. It's a more general response.) I was originally going to set up an AutoModerator rule as has been done elsewhere, which bounces posts which are just links or which have no additional input or perspective from the poster. But we generally don't get a lot of it anyway (maybe due to the guidelines or because people feel that it's not appropriate).

Bashar is interesting, but links to his stuff appears on every "non-standard" subreddit, and there's not much value in it unless you say how exactly it ties in with the subreddit. It's just spam otherwise. See for instance: a previous time a Bashar link was posted. It doesn't necessarily take much more than that (although more would be encouraged now, I'd say). For instance, do you agree that we are "constantly shifting dimensions already"? Do you think it's a useful concept? If so, tell us why and start a discussion. Have you actually used this perspective and got results which have been beneficial or interesting? (Personally I think it really muddles up a couple of different ideas, and actually makes it harder to conceive of how to make a deliberate change in your experience.)

You get the idea.

Muddle up in what way? Could you expand?

It effectively designates each "sensory frame" of experience as a "dimension" - which isn't very helpful. It is better, I would say, to designate a "dimension" as being a particular distribution of facts - or state - which implies a particular set of experiential moments, as a deterministic path. That way can reserve the concept of "shifting dimensions" as being for an intentional change of the underlying facts or state, which effectively defines a new deterministic experiential path "as if" we were in a different dimension. (In actual fact, we never go anywhere, of course. We just have different content arise in our open awareness.)

Things like surrender, allowing, faith and intention all make more sense under this model - and it ties in nicely to the observable nature of our direct experience too, and how it relates to intending (which is the only thing which ever happens). With this, rather than being only a sort of abstract concept with "frequencies" as the bridge, "dimensions" become more clearly about the patterning of experience itself/ourself. In the end though, all of this stuff is metaphorical. We have experiences "as if" it were true, just as we tend to have experiences "as if" the world were a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", rather than more of an "infinite gloop" with us the experiencing container. So we should all feel free to pick the descriptions that we find most attractive - just so long as we remember that this doesn't correspond to "how it is really, behind the scenes" (because there is no "behind the scenes"), and that sensory content has no causal power.

You're already constantly shifting dimensions = you're already constantly fiddling with your felt sense of the world via intent.

Although you shouldn't be, I suggest?

That's one of the aims to have, I'd say: to not be constantly thrashing your world around via reactive intention to the current sensory experience. Otherwise you are doomed to spend your life trying to "maintain a vibrational state", and so on. As for "dimensions", I feel that defining the term so broadly makes it essentially meaningless, since it means you are never "in" a dimension at all, again encouraging that "fiddling and forever maintenance" mindset.

But...

I'm of the "whatever works for you is good" view overall. The problem I have with Bashar (despite all the ET stuff which is fun but distracting) is that it doesn't really go anywhere in terms of leading to methods (or non-methods), or to realising the nature of your experience and so being able to build out from that. Now of course, the Bashar audience is not really the philosophical or metaphysical audience, nor is it the "post-magickal" or nondual audience, so it's a different perspective. For me, it kinda just adds another separate strand to the New Age / LOA realityshifting catalogue, rather than consolidating it into a useful worldview that connects to direct experience.

Every second you shift to a completely new and different objective dimension.

I'm not so sure where "objective" comes into this?

I feel the Bashar, although interesting in his thoughts, doesn't give any practices that might help people start thinking the way his teachings propagate. Correct me if I have missed any such practices.

He also doesn't tell you what a state is. Most importantly though, as far as I know he doesn't connect his concepts to your ongoing direct experience. Without that bridge, there's effectively no descriptive model (even one that recognises itself as metaphor), and so he can offer no practical approach other than vague notions of "frequencies" or "tuning in".

(When we say "practical", that doesn't necessarily mean actions - because actions are "before" experience in this case, since the root of it all is intention, and nobody can tell you how to intend. However, that itself is something that needs to be covered when talking about "dimensions" or whatever other scheme we're using.)

Q1: Maybe that is why most religions dissuade channelling? Because these other species can't fathom human limitations?
When Bashar talks, I feel like he's irritated at some of the "silly questions" that people ask, as if they should know such "basic things".
BTW, I have yet to understand what the importance or application of "metaphor" is in Oneirosophy.

I suppose that rather depends on what you think "other species" are, and what "you" are, and so on. But I think that organised religions (as distinct from the originators of the ideas that seeded them) dissuade channeling because it makes you your own authority. After messing about with such things, you are in danger of discovering that it is you who are, in effect, God - albeit a different sort of "God" than the one usually taught in church. On metaphors: It is my view that by deliberately adopting a metaphor (or a conceptual structure more generally) you can reformat or "pattern" your state such that your subsequent experiences arise "as if" it were true. Furthermore, there is no sold underlying substrate to our experience other than such patterns. (Of course, the idea of "patterning" is itself such a metaphor.)

Q1: So basically metaphors make it easy for us to believe or intend, right? So, that's what is contained in more religious and occult practices.
Furthermore, there is no sold underlying substrate to our experience other than such patterns.
Could you explain that in simpler language? LOL

Ha, sorry. So, the idea is that there is no fixed world from which your experience arises. Looking around the room you are in now, for example, you see walls and the screen you are reading this on, and hands interacting with the device (all assuming things are well). Generally, we assume there is a fixed and solid world "outside" that is feeding us this sensory experience. That would be the "solid substrate". However, we never experience such an outside world. We only ever experience... experiencing. And all of your experiences, although they might seem to be "about" objects and rooms and so on, they are made from this "experiencing", and everything arises in "mind". This is no solid world behind your experiences. What you have, in other words, are habitual patterns with nothing underneath them. The way to confirm this, of course, is to try to change that "patterning" and see if your experiences change accordingly - perhaps indirectly at first, such as repeatedly bringing about outcomes that you want, to the extent that it cannot be explained away by coincidence or confirmation bias.

Related: Three Dialogues by George Berkeley is one of the swiftest ways to get an overview of this idea. (He mentions 'God' later, but just replace that when reading with something like 'mind' or 'consciousness'.)

POST: Choosing not to exist

If consciousness became completely uniform there would be no "experience" but there would be "being". You probably can't say that this "exists" because there is no state or form, but it... is. Can you ever get to that stage? Not by intention I'd say, because intention is always formulated positively. You dispose of something by shifting to a different state - a replacement pattern or even a pattern of "empty space" - but that's just a change of the form of existence. But perhaps by detachment and allowing it to fade...

But that "zero potential" would not persist. It would be outside of time and so it would in a sense last "forever" but also "eventually" there would be the adoption of form and experience would begin again. The previous "mind" (by which I mean accumulated patterns) would be gone, and a new one would arise in its place. This has probably happened an infinite number of times already.

Short answer: temporarily and no.

Sorry, I've just been editing that response to make the hypothetical aspect clearer. I'm still not happy with it. The problem is that we can't describe in language something that is before time and space. Usually I leave this as "nothing can be said" since we can only talk in terms of "human formatting". And I think that is probably the basis of the answer: You can never conceive of non-existence and so you can never intend it; which means that you have always intended a continuance of experience, and so it will continue "forever".

Maybe another approach is better: When we go to sleep at night and enter a dream, why do we return to this world? Is it simply because we have held onto the context of it? Could we enter a dream world and then decide to "let go" of this world, remaining in the dream?

Going forward from that, could we intend a contentless dream? These are fairly common, but there still persists a subtle "viewpoint" and by its very existence all logical possibilities are effectively persistent, dissolved into the background and possible to activate. The mere existence of that viewpoint implies all possible worlds.

POST: Hindu Mythology Metaphor

[Reposting my reply from elsewhere, for completeness.]

Can a Mantra be a Metaphor?

Good question! Some thoughts: If we abstract these terms out into "patterns" then, effectively yes. To say a word is to trigger its associated patterns. Meanwhile, a metaphor is simply a named set of overlapping relationships (patterns), connected and associated with an unnamed set of overlapping relationships (patterns). To say the word "owl" is to trigger the associated patterns of "birds", "wings", "big eyes", 'tree branches", "Blade Runner Voight-Kampff Test", "Rachael", "night-time", etc. To think-about an owl is to do the same.

On archetypes

Gods and Goddesses, owls and archetypes, they are all just triggers for pre-existing extended patterns which cannot be encapsulated in a word or an image, but can be triggered or intensified by them. All possible patterns are here, now, in your experience - it's just that some are more intensely activated than others. To feel better (simplistically speaking) you want to allow the "bad feeling" to fade and a "good feeling" to become more intense. How to do? "Detach" from your current experience and "allow" it to shift; trigger a pattern which implies the desired state. Literally, you are a wide-open perceptual space with some experiential patterns more intense than others. You don't "heal" so much as "allow experience to apparently shift". More accurately: you can't change anything, you can only let the present pattern dim and intensify an alternative pattern by "recalling" it.

...

Hmm, as you have uncovered more "knowledge", do you think your approach to living has shifted?

I guess I'm suggesting: is your attempt to deliberately apply metaphysics effortfully as a manipulative tool maybe presenting a barrier to your success with it, whereas before you were more flowing your life via intention from within it? I think where we go wrong is that we try to work things out, we get hung up on technique, but the truth is... there is no mechanism. Simply deciding is all that is required. To decide something is to have the pattern of "something" in mind plus the pattern of "it happening". That is sufficient, provided you do not then block it. Everything else is just... stirring the water, splashing about, obscuring things, fragmenting ourselves and therefore our experience. Actually, there is nothing to know, no structure behind things, no solid substrate supporting the world beyond imagination.

Forget mantras for that maybe, you need to take a different approach. Check out the top two posts in this subreddit. Basically, you want to lie down one day... and never get up. Switch to being the background space. Only experience "getting up happening". I really recommend this book by Missy Vineyard for this. Specifically the middle section where she experiments with waiting for movement to happen by itself. That is what you are shooting for.

Extra bit: Mantras are only needed because we don't understand willing and so need a "second cause" to allow ourselves to make a change. But all change is just will, changing the shape of ourselves by... changing the shape of ourselves.

POST: PSA: Be careful when thinking about "I"

Yes, it's a language trickiness. It's sort of awkward to constantly distinguish between "Is" and "selfs", but unless you flag up the difference it is easy for a reader to become confused, thinking you are talking about a person being "God". There is no ego-self other than the experiencing of various thoughts, perceptions, actions and the subsequent thinking-about them. And the experiencer is "the open aware space" - which you might call God - who takes on the shape of experiences. As always, when we start thinking-about things we are immediately wrong and operating in 3rd-person metaphor (although of course that can be very useful). The difference between "i" and "I" is direct 1st-person (no-"person") experiencing.

I didn't know that what I needed to do was not think and just let things be.

Yeah, that's a big hurdle. I used to use the phrase "stop generating" to describe it (Although at first I would just think it a lot or try to do "stopping", which rather missed the point of my insight, eh.)

Realising that your default should be "allowing" with only occasional pattern creation-amendment is an important step.

What do you do now if things start getting out of hand?

If you haven't read the Overwriting Yourself post, check it out. The 'passive' version of the exercise is a nice easy way of letting things settle. Following that, decide not to 'force' anything, including your bodily movements and thoughts. Try and let them "arise by themselves". This stops things building up; lets them subside naturally.

What do you mean by pattern creation-ammendment?

Just setting something going by decision and imagination. Once you've set things in motion, you should leave them be (e.g. you request success in an endeavour, the pattern is now set, so don't tinker with it). You're only dealing in updates as required, or a regular keeping-on-track.

Otherwise I'm horribly depressed.

Yeah. I do find that if I don't stay 'present' - allow my focus to remain expanded out into the space of experience - my attention gets narrowed and I feel depression. Having things 'on the go' does tend to keep you opened out more.

I like your Overwriting Yourself post. I've tried something similar to this where I just imagine that my body is empty space but haven't played with it much. Your post clarified quite a bit. How experiential has all of this become for you? Is it all incredibly obvious at this point?

It changes your perspective to being far simpler. The most important thing is that it clarifies the difference between direct-experiencing and thinking-about, and you can more obviously take the perspective of the space in which both occur.

...

The mistake in contemplation is that you can't contemplate the "I". It is the environment in which contemplation arises; it can't be conceptualised or even pointed to. The urge is so great to "grab ahold of it" somehow. It's probably something that never entirely goes away, because it's inevitable to want to think and talk about it - in subreddits just like this...

I think it would be useful at some point to do some coverage about direct-experiencing and the difference between that and thinking-about. Various metaphors imply it, but I don't think we've explored it explicitly in any post. Which is unfortunate, since detached-allowing and knowing the difference between the two types of experiencing (really the one type, improperly understood) is fundamental.

POST: The Mirror-like Nature of the Mind & Why I've come to the conclusion that Oneirosophy isn't a good strategy

The basic strategy of some on this sub seems to be "well if I believe in my own power enough, then my unconventional perceptions are true"

Hopefully not, but perhaps you are right. However that's like thinking you can simply will things to happen or by "doing" things. But it's not quite like that. And more like you say. Like I said in an earlier post, it's more like triggering patterns (or "letting experiences through") which then arise in and shape subsequent experience:

Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. (Leave shapes on your "experiential filter".)
Thoughts also leave traces, as in-form-ation, affecting subsequent experiences. (You can use this deliberately.)
Synchronicity is the name for the experiential patterns which result.

This is the reason you should treat the subjective environment (as it were) as being almost mechanical and unintelligent in nature. Only you are the intelligence. You are basically you experiencing the state of your own mind, via the senses. Yes, you might think of it a bit like a mirror - or better, that your mind is a perceptual filter. So, not much good for "messages" since you'll just be seeing what you've been thinking and experiencing, as residual indentations on your filter - except that you might get some insight into things you are thinking in the background that you're not aware of. If you spend 20 minutes today imagining owls, as vividly as you can, as if they were in the room with you... you'll spend the next week encountering lots of owls. It's as if you have created an "owl-shaped hole" in your perceptual filter, and the "infinite light of creation" (or whatever) now shines through it, giving you owl-shaped experiences.

If you believed in a deeper meaning to what you were experiencing, you might think you were getting Messages From The Eternal Owls, who were answering your questions and prayers now that you had gained power over them. If you spent time imagining being King Of The Monkeys instead, you might get experiences which you would interpret in line with that. This itself is incredibly useful - and you can live exciting storylines! - but you have to be careful not to believe the thoughts and experiences which appear in your awareness. They have no deeper meaning that being-experiences. Which is great, because you can now understand what happens when you get paranoid, and what happens when you get arrogant. You can put that aside, breathe, and let things settle out into a more authentic pattern.

Never believe what you are experiencing. They are just... experiences.

EDIT: Surely this is exactly what Oneirosophy leads to? It's the natural conclusion to living life as a subjective environment? It's what lucidity reveals to you. Subjective idealism means there is no you, just that environment, and it makes sense then that it operates and responds as a swirling, responsive dream-space.

It's not even "as if" you've created an owl-shaped hole.

I say "as if" because the metaphor of the filter and the hole is that, a metaphor. Saying "as if" doesn't mean the experience is less valid, it just indicates the description of it is arbitrary. You are not really making dents in a filter; that's just a way of looking at it for the purposes of formulating intentions.

There's no harm in learning to exercise this. In fact, it ought to be encouraged.

Are you responding to the wrong person here??

I guess I don't entirely understand OP's distinction between "being-experiences" and "believing in" them.

As I understand it - and this may be me overlaying my own interpretation - OP's underlying point is that if you are unaware of the reflection-like, "as if"-ness mechanism involved in subjective idealism, then you can fall under the impression that you have become something, created something, or are in some sort of state. However, it really is just an appearance. There is nothing "behind" your experiences, therefore nothing to believe you are and nothing to believe you have done. This is of course much more powerful than believing you are God or anything else. Believing you are something comes with restrictions; recognising it's an "as if" experience doesn't. Language, for sure, but forums throughout reddit are swamped with people wondering what they "are", claiming to be this and that, and generally taking sensory experience and history recall as causal fact.

You can't live exciting storylines without believing your perceptions. Otherwise it's just some superficial fantasy.

I'm not sure I quite agree on the latter sentence. I'd say that if you understand the process then you aren't having a superficial fantasy; you are simply enjoying experiences. But your point of identifying with a psychological narrative - be it "infinite power" or anything else - is well made. So, the Owl Generation Process is completely mechanical. "Ponder them and they will come." The exception is if you obstruct the process by disbelief. Which you might then be tempted to overcome with belief - and that's where things go wrong. You can get caught up the the believing process you (think) you used to generate the effect.

If you recognise the process for what it is though, you can enjoy the Owl Experiences and without any additional troublesome beliefs. It's up to you if you want to fully commit to "An Important Mission Personally Given To Your By The High Owl Commander". (Personally I wouldn't - he's a right grumpy bastard.)

You can't actually be angry and see the empty nature of your perception at the same time.

If you aren't "in" the story then you can't really be having the adventure. Although I think you can dip in and out, personally. All I'd argue for is that people understand the nature of the process, and thereby have the ability to make choices. You don't have to use belief as a tool (as in with many magickal approaches) and then get stuck in it, if you've observed the mechanical-like nature of the process and approach things from that perspective.

Personally, I dont try to stay fixed in one worldview, so I dont have a problem with these inconsistencies.

Hi, I make the point elsewhere that there are no true divisions, it's a matter of where you "stand". What you say is true.

An analogy I sometimes use is the superposition of patterns: combine 100 patterns together and you've still got... a pattern. Which can then be broken down into a completely different set of patterns. Depending on what you want to accomplish or which aspects you want to highlight, you might emphasise the perspective of one "component" or another. But really, there is no separation. For basic "daily navigation" and accounting for deliberate synchronicity, this formulation (filtering infinity) is quite convenient. But it is nothing more than an "active metaphor".

Implicit in all discussions here is "it's nondual", I'd say, but there's nothing else to say if we just sit there with that! It's like saying "all is consciousness". As you point out, there is no answer.

"There are no answers, only choices", as Gibarian says in Solaris.

POST: Controlling vs flowing

[POST]

I think one area I was getting hung up until very recently was taking the idea of control and trying to apply it to every instant. This was making life unnecessarily stressful as I tried to intend something out of every perceived event. It was like I tried to rewrite the story as soon as something that didn't seem to fit was going on.
If you're currently doing this I suggest you take a breather. There's really no need to control every little aspect of life and honestly it's a drag. If you're always writing the story you can't properly enjoy it as well. Control works simply, you intend for an experience to occur and it does. That simple, no added effort necessary. Then after it's set all you have to do is be detached and let it all happen (the hardest part if you're still attached to the idea of the limited person).
So ideally, one can control the types of forms one comes into contact with, and then let go indefinitely for it to play out. You can be as specific as you want, but if you don't let go, you'll never get to experience it. You simply keep rewriting things over and over and over. The better you get at letting go, the faster your manifestations.

[END OF POST]

Good stuff. Right. For sure!

So you only need to intervene now and again, which just amounts to "deciding and allowing". Mostly you should simply be relaxed and enjoying the experience unfolding. For sure, sometimes it's fun to have little tools or visualisations for things, perhaps to make it easier to specify what we want, or to "outsource" the causality and circumvent resistance - e.g. as you suggest, by imagining releasing negativity via the breath or whatever - but it's always just us "deciding". Focused "control" is when you obsessively interfere; detached "directing" is when you occasionally intervene when you want to have a different experience. The more you let go of control and stop holding back the flow, the less the apparent time between the decision and its appearance in the senses, because you are no longer restricting the potential routes by which experience can arise. Holding back is essentially you preventing yourself relaxing into your natural authentic pattern. You default state should be relaxed openness and "allowing". That's what meditation should be for - allowing releasing. (Any experiences you might have are just yet more experiences, best just to sit a while and let things settle out). Just sit for a while and re-identify as the background awareness as in the original "Just Decide" exercise.

In the ultimate version, you don't really need to interfere at all because you are completely authentic and experience is always in line with your desires, the right events at the time time.

Summary of how it works?

Deciding what will happen means you are triggering a 1st person perspective memory-pattern of that happening.
If you were completely detached, that pattern would immediately become your experience.
Because you are not, the pattern will instead blend with other patterns you are attached to, showing itself as first as synchronicity and eventually as a result that seems to arrive via a path.

EDIT: This prompted me to post my bullet-point summary of the memory-pattern view.