TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 4

'No Precise Programming' - Subjectivity & Science

Article that's interesting [http://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXXII_1979/XXXII-22.pdf] on Theodore Roszak and linking objective vs subjective science. Sample quote:

I would like to help you gain an appreciation that came to me only slowly, painfully, and with much difficulty: how our intellectual concepts and beliefs limit our ability to perceive what is really happening in the world. When the world "was" flat, the heavens "had" to move around the earth. We see the world through the blinders of our own beliefs. When the world's behavior resists our expectations, as now seems to be the case in many areas of policy analysis, we need to question whether some of our important beliefs are in accord with reality. Unfortunately, our most basic beliefs are seldom accessible to our conscious mind: they appear to us as simple, unquestionable observations about reality. . . .
To truly see that one of your own beliefs is just an assumption can be liberating. This experience, though, is not amenable to precise programming. You must stretch your mind, envelop your beliefs with contrary thinking, and allow your imagination to roam in forbidden territory without automatically rejecting its perceptions as "absurdities." . . . By holding fast to certain beliefs, you may be denying a part of yourself that would come to the surface if you were willing to accept a somewhat different set of values or beliefs. . . . What I am suggesting derives from a belief in the indivisible unity of life and, therefore, in the importance of making work an integral part of the whole. . . .
To be able to integrate your life, however, you will first need to re-examine your unquestioning belief in the superiority of "objective" over "subjective" research, a belief apparent in your condemnation of what you consider subjectivity in my writing. Until you relinquish this belief, you will be afraid to approach work with feeling as well as intellect for fear of losing your much-valued objectivity. But, pure "objectivity" doesn't exist, since any observations, experiments, or analysis must always be done by a person, who inescapably must have values, emotions, and feelings that influence his or her work. . . .
You seem, however, to believe that because you desire to be objective you will be immune to those passions, prejudices, and dominating opinions which "are the abundant source of dangerous illusion." [Laplace.] What nonsense. I am sure that Laplace would agree with me that those most likely to be led into dangerous illusions by their emotions are those who would deny most vehemently that emotion played any role in shaping their opinions about "objective" truth. . .
I have no desire to deny that my views of the world influence my work. You term this "subjectivity" and denounce it soundly. I term it "wisdom" and recommend it highly. By drawing on all of my perceptions of the world, I believe I obtain a more complete and coherent view of the world processes that are unfolding than would be possible if I limited myself to information that I process intellectually and analytically. In a sense, I work backwards from my overall view of the world to the specifics of a given problem, applying tests of logic and evidence to check the correctness of the perceptions derived initially as well as from thinking.
-- Vince Taylor quote, No Precise Programming, Manas Journal, Volume XXXII 1979

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I highly recommend people start writing, speaking, and thinking using E-Prime as a way of internalizing this message. For more information read Robert Anton Wilson's great books on model-agnosticism such as Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology.

E-Prime is indeed fun. And both those books can be found at the Principia Discordia site here, for those interested. Also, simply "taking a step back from yourself" mentally can be a great help, the "I" seems less like a "me" - letting the verbs breathe, as it were.

Fantastic find! Belief has long been the cornerstone of my research into the occult.

For me also.

In fact, I think the self-reinforcing feedback loop of experience with belief or "memory" (in its loosest sense) is fundamental to the ongoing moment, whether occult or everyday (like this, for instance). It's rare to see this relationship referenced in a more mainstream (and readable) perspective though!

Change the memory, change the world?

EDIT: Credit where it's due: I found this article via a comment over at the Metaphysical Speculations forum - worth a look [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/metaphysical-speculations].

Thx for the image and for the forum. Ive never considered Belief and memory as intrinsic but that's what it is, some combination of memory and perception. Thanks!

We literally experience our beliefs as true, because our beliefs structure (seed) our experience, and back again. Sneaky eh? :-)

Cheers!

Manipulating Precog Dreams

This is a follow-up to my post on Ian Wilson's You Are Dreaming ebook [http://goo.gl/LsKUh].

There's a short interview with Wilson and Robert Waggoner in Dream Views which gets straight to the meat of it: how changing a precog dream can change the outcome:

[http://www.dreaminglucid.com/dreamspeak/DreamSpeak%2055%20Ian%20Wilson.pdf]

Quote:

It is all intent. There is no other means by which we can direct and focus our thoughts. Intent and dream control would be the best descriptor for this technique. If dreams are anything, they are organized thoughts.

Which implies that perhaps the dream part isn't so important, that asserting an outcome with intent while in a suitably detached state would work also - i.e. The mechanism of magick is dream control. A nice quote on communication:

That truth has to be experienced to be realized, it cannot always be handed to you. Each of us must find our own gold, our own truth.

Direct, Simple Magick

Has anybody had much experience with trying to simplify their approach right down to the basics - a sort of post-Chaos approach? Although there's much fun to be had chatting to entities and following rituals, is there a way of cutting this to the bone?

Alan Chapman in his book Advanced Magick for Beginners:

Could this mean that what we use to represent our desire is arbitrary? And what does this say about the sigilisation process, and therefore magick itself? It doesn't stop with glyphs; instead of a geometric doodle, you could use a number, or a combination of numbers. Or how about a word, nonsensical or otherwise? What if we decide that a gesture represents your desire instead, like a wave of the hand? Or some other physical movement, like a dance? What if we decide that a certain dance means it will rain?

In other words, our acts mean just what we decide they mean, magically speaking. Later, he suggests that altered states are just ways of circumventing doubt or poor intention (e.g. effectively unintentionally requesting "I will want a new car" rather than "I will have a new car") and are not essential.

Any experiences?

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Q1: Many of the zen masters caution against getting attached to Siddhi. Which are basically magic like powers that are obtained through meditation.
I can't think of anything stripped down further than Zen. However, it seems like even more work than traditional ritual.

I think the warning to remain unattached is so that you continue on to your final destination, that of enlightenment. A problem in all approaches. I don't think it means they're bad in and of themselves. Reminded me of this Douglas Harding interview, the 'headless way' guy:

KP: But you would not deny that certain disciplines, if practised arduously at great sacrifice, can lead to fairly extraordinary experiences, but they’re simply experiences, and we are over-looking the experiencer?
DH: Oh yes, indeed, and one of the traps, one of the side diversions of this whole thing, is at a certain stage to cultivate the siddhis, powers, that do come with the seeing of who one is— and they do come. And it’s different for different people. Some people get a good old helping, others don’t. But that’s one of the snags, one of the diversions, and it’s a very serious one.

But I see that as a little different to doing intentional magick, as we commonly think of it? I'm thinking of what 'act' we perform for our magick. How does one use the siddhis, once accessed?

Q2: I agree with Alan Chapman's quote 100%.
However, there is a difficulty there. In principle what Alan says is exactly right, and I say the same thing often too. But in practice our minds are more inclined to make some types of associations than other, and depending on what sort of results you want it may pay to work with the grain as opposed to against the grain.
If you want mental flexibility above all, working against the grain is the best practice. But if you want quick results at the cost of possibly habituating yourself even further into a narrow conception, then the fastest way is to go with the more intuitive associations.
So for example, the third eye is associated with paranormal sight. The natural place for it is between the eyes. So if you want results faster, working with the assumption that your third eye is located between and slightly above your two human eyes is easiest. However, if you want mental flexibility, you might locate your third eye in the back of your head on Monday, than on Tuesday you'd locate it in the palm of your right hand, and left on Wednesday, and so on, and then on Sunday you'll locate the third eye nowhere at all, and use it in its perfectly abstract and dissociated form. This way you don't have a steady location to work with. The results will probably be harder to achieve at least initially, because this will likely go against the grain of intuition at first. But for the sake of mental flexibility such approach is superior.
I myself strongly lean toward mental flexibility. For this reason I never work with traditional chakras or some well-defined third eye and other things of that nature. And if you notice, various systems of magick do not completely agree among themselves on the locations and the numbers of the so-called "energy centers" anyway. This isn't a coincidence. It's a reflection of the nature of mind. (Nor do they agree on the number and types of deities and so on.)
As far as experience goes, I never felt like I was lacking something or like I was shortchanging myself by following my path. I think people who stick to the dogmas are the ones losing out in the long run, although I can certainly see the short-term advantages of doing the obvious thing.

Really interesting. I tend towards thinking that your 'mental objects' are pretty flexible in terms of structure, purpose and location. You can Chapman-like just decide-and-gesture, but sometimes it's nice to create something repeatable - basically, create a 'new habit'.

In the end, it's 'whatever works', but if you want to accomplish more dramatic things, then you'll likely have to create some sort of 'mental format' to prove it with a route by which to take place, since the 'standard habits' don't lend themselves to it very directly.

Q2: Drama is in the eye of the beholder.
And habits to my mind involve tradeoff. On the plus side, habituated patterns become easily repeatable, and eventually repeatable even without conscious involvement, if needed. On the minus side, habits tend to slip out of the view. Habits tend to drift toward the unconscious regions where they can hide well past their expiration date, limiting experience well beyond their intended duration.

Good points all.

Q3: Everything is arbitrary. I know many people will disagree, but I believe all that any ritual does is convince your subconscious to place faith in your Will, which empowers your Will to change the world around you. I used to do lengthy traditional rituals to do what I now do in a short visualization bolstered by a short improvised action. The results are the same, if not better. If I don't have faith in something, I come up with something that feels powerful enough to overcome it and 90% of the time it does. I relate magick to my art training: at first you must trace things and fill in lines to learn how your hand works, then draw from life to learn how the world looks and how to recreate it, then you can draw absolutely anything you are capable of imagining. Magick is art that you create in the mind of the universe.

Magick is art that you create in the mind of the universe.

That's a nice turn of phrase.

what I now do in a short visualization bolstered by a short improvised action.

I think that gets to the heart of it. You can just declare to yourself that clicking your fingers means 'this', click 'em, and you're done. In fact, short processes leave less space for doubt and 'wishing for wishing' errors that can occur in longer, more involved approaches.

Our problem is often that we want to feel ourselves doing something to make things happen. This is a problem for daily life too: people tense up their muscles in order to feel that they are really putting effort into their work, even just walking and so on, when what they are in fact doing is blocking the natural flow by doing this - just intention is all that's required; the rest will 'do itself'.

“When you stop doing the wrong thing the right thing does itself.” - F. M. Alexander, inventor of the Alexander Technique for body movement

Q2: You can just declare to yourself that clicking your fingers means 'this', click 'em, and you're done.
From the point of view of getting the world to change according to your will, it's far more important not to have inhibiting, contradictory and blocking beliefs/commitments/expectations than how you focus your will. In the absence of inhibiting volitions every ounce of will is effortless and 100% effective.
For most people their volition is so strongly committed to ideas that inhibit magick, that they need some kind of trick to overcome the 90% of themselves (or more) that doesn't want magick to happen. People value stability and predictability that comes with solidity of experience. As long as that's the case, magick will remain difficult, and tricks like ritual and formal meditation will remain popular. Formal meditation is in principle unnecessary and neither is ritual. But we rely on those approaches because 99% of our being says that what we want to accomplish shouldn't be possible or is bad for us.

One thing I have been looking into is Dream Yoga, with the practice of gradually getting yourself to feel that this waking life is a dream (as opposed to just think it or something like it). I see this as maybe a nice way of dissolving those inhibitory boundaries: crack the experience open completely to all possibilities.

I find experiments and comparisons with lucid dreaming are often helpful, because of how 'intention' seems to work in that environment, it's the 'ideal version'.

Q4: A stable mind can get you anywhere you want. That's quite a challenge though - dropping everything and staying focused on a clear goal. But then the question comes - what should the goal be?

Q5: You just have to get focused for a bit until the spell is cast. Also not muddy the waters too much by obsessing on it afterwards -I think you end up kind off casting and recasting small spells when you do that- which is why forgetting about it helps a lot.
The hard part is definitely to know what to wish for. Many times you yourself get changed in the process, and you can also get a lot of stuff happening peripherally to finally get to the result.
Those days I mostly enjoy things as they are except if I'm in dire need, the upheaval a spell can set in motion just tires me. Or just ensure that there are easy ways of manifestation. Else it can gets way convoluted.

You make a good point. If you mostly let things alone - but pay attention - I think the things you actually want mostly come up 'by themselves'. The trick is to have the courage to follow through on any 'inspirations to act' you might have.

You and the rest of the universe will unfold as a single movement towards your goals - however you have to not hold back from your part in the movement. Often your involvement or role can be super-minimal, simply saying "yes" when offered something, but you must fulfil that role.

And on goals: Whether we write goals down or not, they are implied within us at any moment. (If you write down a goal or think it up, where did it come from? It was already within you, acting through you; you just made it conscious is all.) However, if we are conflicted then perhaps explicitly deciding via an act can help push aside any blocks we have.

TL;DR: If you stay clear-headed and allow spontaneity, then passive magick will likely give you most of what you really desire.

Q7: First, when it comes to physical result, every magick is an indirect approach to get the result.
However, the ritual with more physical element should give you more probability of getting a physical result.
Example 1;
If you strip the ritual down to just the desire alone, that's just daydreaming.
If you write your desire down on a piece of paper, that's motivational writing.
For example 2,
If your life is a mess, try tidying up around the house.
I love reverse-engineering rituals, stripping all the fluffs, leaving just the bare essential. It's intellectually enjoyable but it can be like taking protein pills when you want a filet mignon.

But... stripping things down and knowing this can be done then means your free to build it all back up again for pure enjoyment, knowing that the details are not actually essential. That can be quite freeing?

Q7: Yes and No, we can strip things down and (hopefully) go straight for god's G-spot every time. But sometime, we want the foreplay or role-play too. Freedom is to be able to do whatever ritual we want, whenever we want.

Yeah, I'm with that. There are also benefits to doing things in a group. There's sometimes a bit of an issue as to whether you 'take people with you' when you make a major change.

Q8: I do pretty much basics only (plus some specialized "tricks" every now and then, but they rely on the basics heavily as well).

What do you count as "the basics" for you?

Q8: Symbol creation and use (sigils), mantra creation and use, direct- or energetic visualization of something happening. Changing and holding the mental posture (as one website quite nicely put it). Sensing stuff with different senses (I use mostly touch and sight, sometimes sound... I've still yet to learn to completely trust that "gut feeling" type of intuition). And of course some breathing techniques, but they're more for my physical practice than for the occult side usually.
Those are pretty much all the building blocks I use to do my stuff. Even the different kinds meditation can be mostly classified under mental posture thing. I also use physical movement sometimes to enhance the visualization if I'm having a not-too-sensitive day.

"Holding the mental posture"... yes. Stealing things from other subjects, like acting for the idea of the 'Psychological Gesture', can be useful.

Q8: Actually, it seems to me like we're talking about different things; like this explanation has somewhere [https://web.archive.org/web/20111101072407/http://www.magickofthought.com/start/], holding your mind in some way is what I meant. Still, it was an interesting read with the hollywood occult. ;)

Ha, I love the idea that all those blockbuster movies with heavily choreographed action may in fact be Grand Workings. :-)

The gesture was an idea for reliably accessing a 'state' or 'posture' by associating it with a mental or physical motion, just as actors do for emotions. A bit like NLP anchoring I suppose.

I follow that blog occasionally. It's a pretty interesting approach, although I think it may be layering on the structures a bit heavily. And I don't agree that it aligns with 'materialist reductionism' as the author seems to think. Not that this matters really, if it works.

Q9: I don't get it, magick is so simple and yet people get so caught up. Taking a shit? It's causing change in accordance with will. Last time you got a date? Last time you filled up the gas tank? Last time you ate? Without simple magick you're dead, are you dead? Am I? There's your answer.

Sure, there's a sense in which you and the universe work by magick; it's just 'how it all is'. Your thoughts and actions arise spontaneously in the direction of your implied intentions, and the environment around you tends to conspire and adjust and bend accordingly also.

The point here is that lots of people put a load of effort into doing two things:

1. Deciding on what they think they 'want', on 'goals'.
2. Coming up with something to 'do' to attain those goals.

Really, though, these two points are about becoming conscious of things that are likely happening anyway.

First, just because you've not pondered and written out a goal doesn't mean it isn't "in you" already (otherwise, where would the though and the writing come from?). Second, if your goals are implicit in your character at each moment, then in fact all your actions will be aligned with your goals. And if we take the view that "you" are not separate from the rest of reality, then actually the whole universe is moving towards you experiencing your goals.

Unless you actively resist and get in the way.

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Q6: But that's so boooring.

Okay, tell you what: I'll still let you wear a silly hat. But only on Tuesdays.

Dramatic Effects

There has been some discussion here and elsewhere on the the influence of beliefs and expectations on the 'available routes for manifestation' for a magickal intention.

Meanwhile, some people quite dramatic random occurrences, appearances and disappearances and changes in their reality, and wonder how to harness this.

/r/occult people, what are the most dramatically direct results that you've had from an intentional working? And how do you think the situation differed to the more usual hum-drum 'roundabout coincidence' type of result?

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Thanks for that. Lots of people seem to report that their first efforts, and when they started taking it seriously, was when a "curse" worked (see here [Deleted] for a similar example that got me thinking about this, not my own). Suddenly you realise that with magick: a) It works, you get what you asked for and, b) It works whether or not it's a "good" thing you've asked for. It's a harsh lesson to learn. Did you try to undo it once it started to happen? (Most people report they couldn't bring back what's been sent out, only re-intend something else afterwards.)

Extra thought: Is it really possible to have something happen to someone if they don't let it/want it somehow?

I love the idea of "re-intending". I am a devoted fan of Neville Goddard, who often spoke & wrote about "revision". He taught that our world is created from our imaginations, and "whatever we can make, we can unmake".
I also tend toward the "there's nothing out there" school of thought, so it seems to be a matter of just controlling thought/feeling, and only that. Is it simple and easy to do IF we believe it is????

"The world is yourself pushed out", as he would say.

Well, for convenience of imagining this, I have a little diagram I quite like.

Think of the "ground" as containing enfolded structure - traces of previous experiences, basically. This evolves and updates automatically: as experiences arise they leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. Thinking also leaves traces, because it occurs in the same space. This leads to what we call "beliefs and expectations" or habits. Memories in the most direct sense.

Normally, people just get lumbered with whatever happens to form structurally as their "ground" or enfolded structure. Magick, however, is the realisation that you can re-form this ground directly via intention - and so doing, change the form of objects (spatial and temporal, things and narrative) that will subsequently arise as the "content" or unfolding structure of experience.

I also tend toward the "there's nothing out there" school of thought, so it seems to be a matter of just controlling thought/feeling, and only that. Is it simple and easy to do IF we believe it is????

So, yes, there's no-thing out there. What you are experiencing right now is basically a sequence of "mirages", the form of which is dictated by the profile of the dunes on the desert floor.

You don't need to control thought and feeling all the time, mostly just let passing thoughts go. Occasionally, you deliberately summon a particular experience in mind with intention, and thereby update your structure - i.e. insert new facts, draw new shapes in the sand. A fact may be now or it maybe a fact of the apparent future. It's not ongoing control, it's occasional updates, and completely letting go - not interfering at all- in between those updates.

This is great news: Mostly, you just sit back and enjoy the show in all its multi-sensory surround-world gorgeousness, unfolding spontaneously and automatically. Now and again you decide you don't like the direction this is going in, and you re-direct by inserting a new fact, setting a new target, and then let the unfolding head at that new angle.

EDIT: Neville Goddard's nightly "re-imagine the day as it should have been" exercise is exactly this. Restructure yourself each evening such that tomorrow begins from the ideal, enfolded starting point.

Q: Thanks so much. I love that. Also, just happy to see someone on this sub knows about him.
I actually had made a longer entry in reply to (and with great sympathy for) BarefootDorothy, but then deleted it. ()(See asterisks below. :)
We are so much more powerful than we realize, and when we begin to stir things up with things like meditation/focused intent, we'd better have some idea what we're doing. In my experience, any kind of "awakening" that occurs when negativity is allowed to abide can be a recipe for certain calamity, unless one changes one's course. I've created a-MAZ-ing circumstances, both desired and undesired. (Time warps, flabbergasting synchronicities, extreme changes, all that stuff.)
Two "kicks in the head" I can point to: "Instant Karma" (they weren't kidding!!) and "the boomerang effect".
I would tell you stories (one is even sort of funny, in retrospect,) but... one reason I'm beginning to think I will probably leave these sites behind (even GITM - we'll see how addicted I truly am or am not!) is that my most serious and delicious endeavor right now is ()divesting myself of my "stories" (). It's wonderful - but you probably know that!
Your posts have been really instructive and you've provided much food for thought! I thank you, Sir. (I assume you're a "Sir", but no tellin' on these sites! You could be someone's cat, for all I know!)*

You could be someone's cat, for all I know!

Quite probably. It would be worth it for the teleporting capabilities! I might look into it as a possible career move. :-)

As you point out, the speed with which things arise can be quite astounding. If you don't realise what you're doing, if you aren't making knowing decisions, it can get quite out of hand pretty quickly. You really gotta remember, "it's all you".

Yeah, you're right about those asterisks!

The reason to be in these forums is to explore your own thoughts and maybe in the process other people get something out of it too, which feeds back to your own thinking. Eventually, though, there's nothing more to be said!

Good that Neville G is getting a bit of exposure. He got the fundamental thing right (the 'felt sense' with intention) well before most people. Nothing wrong with a bit of theatre or visualisation, but it's good to recognise that it's just a means of indirectly adjusting your global felt structure of the world.

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Anyway, I wished her fat.

I sniggered aloud at that phrasing! :-)

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Q: Well, I've never tried to do anything outside of things that can affect my mind, but that's still had some amazing effects.
I have a habit of going off on tangents very easily. It's impossible for me to get out of it on my own, and it usually leads to me blowing up at someone. Well, one day, while walking home, I was in another tangent over some conversation at school.
Finally, I was tired of this shit; the constant bickering and damage in my head, so I mentally screamed "STOP!! At that moment, I got a strong vision of being surrounded in a whirlwind of fireflies. I'd never seen anything like it before, and it was beautiful. After they disappeared, I was calm, but tired. I felt like I had used an enormous amount of energy to get me out of that funk, but I still hold that memory clear.
There was another time with sleep paralysis. My second night of having it, I had woken up to me being held in place by shadow snakes. I was terrified, but again I called out the name of a servitor of mine that tried to recreate the whirlwind abilities. This time, fireflies came to my rescue and started consuming the shadow snakes in their bright lights. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but less draining then the firefly tornado.

Go fireflies! Great imagery.

EDIT: Since the fireflies came to you naturally, you should try to utilise them for other things. Send them out on missions on your behalf. Don't drain yourself though by over-intending; let them take the weight.

Q: Oh, I've actually done that before.
Looking back on it, the reason that the first time of making myself relax took so much energy out of me is probably because I had not created a servitor at that point. It's kind of the difference between breaking wood in half with your hands and with an ax.
Incidentally, I also used my servitor to save my grandmother's life. Fr about a week, she had been in the hospital on her last leg. What's worse; she had given up hope and seemed ready to die. Knowing how good I am with hope, I sent my servitor over to her to let his light shine on her, to give her some of my hope. The next day, I got a call from my mom saying that she had a renewed vigor for life.

That's a nice story!

Faith, Natural Law, Control

"People lost faith in natural law itself. Nothing seemed stable or fixed; the universe was a sliding flux. Nobody knew what came next. Nobody could count on anything. Statistical prediction became popular… People lost faith in the belief that they could control their environment; all that remained was probable sequence: good odds in a universe of random chance."
-- Solar Lottery, Philip K Dick

A picture of our day, perhaps.

Has our modern world lost faith in natural law? Lost faith in the belief they can control their environment? Forgotten how, or even that you could? Become subordinate to the rule of numbers and of chance? Nobody could count on anything - even themselves...

(More thought-provoking PKD metaphysical meanderings here [https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/metaphysical-quotations-from-the-novels-of-philip-k-dick/].)

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It's not about controlling your environment. It's about living in harmony with it

Quite possibly! :-)

Many occultists, though, would say that they are interested in the subject because it offers the hope of having influence over their (personal) environment. Getting what they want, basically, or perhaps fashioning the world into a better place.

Do you disagree with that aim?

The quote can also be interpreted as meaning that people have forgotten that what they intend/think has power, and that by forgetting this they allow the world to become less structured, to drift.

If the environment actually depends on our individual and collective focus, if we let go - what is it we're living in harmony with?

Isn't that like letting go of the steering wheel of your car so that you can "live in harmony with the engine"? Or has the universe got cruise control enabled?

Wouldn't disagree, but controlling and influencing are quite different

Not a bad point, but where is the boundary? If I kick off a pattern and let it unfold - say - then occasionally make adjustments to it (influencing it), am I not effectively controlling it?

Just because it is not constantly within my grip - I don't need to do that because the initial creative process gave it a "momentum" - does not mean it is not entirely under my control. I create it, I tweak it occasionally to ensure it's still unfolding in a pleasing direction, in line with changing circumstances.

That's basically complete control, right? Is that a bad thing? Is there something special or particularly "good" about just letting the pattern run post-creation?

To nature, there is no structure.

No inherent structure, yes I would agree with this. The structure of our minds is the structure we experience as the "world", I might suggest?

"If the environment actually depends on our individual and collective focus, if we let go - what is it we're living in harmony with?"
Can you explain please? :)

But of course! :-)

Let's say that the world is a pattern (like a ripple in some water) that is gradually spreading out, unfolding, under its own initial momentum. If we simply leave it be completely, it will just continue uninterrupted.

But if some people unwittingly influence the pattern, it will become deformed and vague in its direction. The pattern will become less structured. The more disparate and unfocussed the unwitting intentions, the less coherent the pattern will become. It is surely inevitable that this will happen.

If everyone lets go and tries to "live in harmony" with that, the world as happens to and experienced by individuals will gradually fall apart, working in nobody's interests. As you said, "to nature there is no structure". So trying to just stand back and live in harmony with nature, let nature take care of things without actually directing it at all, would be a mistake. You cannot actually rely on the pattern of nature unfolding appropriately!

Therefore our participation should be active; we should all be consciously and deliberately shaping our environments, the structure of mind.

(Maybe. I'm just exploring ideas here to see where they go.)

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Thought-provoking, thanks.

The thing I'd like to give you is that living in harmony is going with the nature of things. How things act, grow, speak, etc. It's not about resisting this flow, it's about choosing its many directions in which it flows and accept the consequences of those choices.

Well, that was particularly nicely put. :-)

I also liked the imagery you conjured in me of a family having to move house because a tree started growing in it. "Darned nature, at it again!", says Father, packing his bags for the third time in a decade. "This time, we're going to live on a barge!" ;-)

So, nature sees neither good nor bad, it just flows as it is flowing. We perceive good/bad, because we have preferences for how we'd like it to flow, from a limited partial perspective.

We are able to influence that flow directly - quite strongly in a local way (our bodies and thoughts), apparently less so in a wider sense of the apparent larger world (using magick or synchronicity). But to actively fight the larger flow as it is, is folly; it doesn't work anyway, except perhaps temporarily and as a delay mechanism, and leads to suffering. So we strike a balance, seek where to draw the line, as you pointed out...

Dominating in the sense of making something do against its nature or against its will. I agree, the line may be difficult to draw in some cases.

Some thoughts:

What we call "the flow of nature" or "the nature of something" is really just an accumulation of flowing patterns from the past. How did that flow began? How has it become what it has become? What contributions have been absorbed? Not questions that are answerable, but it is now as it is, and it is going in a particular (multi-dimensional) direction.

So, we cannot control but we can request - by submitting or contributing new patterns (intentions, wishes, prayers, rituals) to the flow - and they will be accommodate. How so? Because intentions change the shape of the mind, and so change the landscape of the world, and the landscape dictates the flow of experience. Nature flows through us, as us.

Finally, what dictates the extent of influence, the impact of our intention? Perhaps it is the extent to which we hold on to existing patterns, resisting change (basically, fighting ourselves when changing ourselves). Perhaps some patterns are simply too deeply ingrained to change within a lifetime, or are part of the body's life - such as the unfolding patterns of the body itself, or patterns such as "gravity".

There is also the view that our birth was the start of a pattern, and to let it simply unfold, to flow unimpeded, is to be the most authentic we can be to our own true nature. Our ideas about who we are and what we want cannot ever encapsulate this direct truth, which is acting to create our world at this very moment.

Still, it's fun trying. :-)

Unexpected things are totally natural and part of the infinite flow of the fundamental reality.

Unexpected things..

I guess the question would be: unexpected, by whom?
Not unexpected by nature itself, surely.

I understand and agree with your stance that nature "simply is," and does not pass judgement on itself. However, the fact that humans are able to make something like the periodic table clearly shows that nature has its own distinct dichotomies. In a solution of AgNO3 and NaBr, the two solutes will dissolve and form a precipitate of AgBr. Nature doesn't just say "do whatever you want," those two particular atoms will precipitate because of properties that make them unique. In a sense, nature cares greatly that these atoms will act in a particular way, separating them from other atoms that will act differently.

Nature doesn't "care" about this though, in a judgemental way, or even in a consistent way. Habits are formed, impersonally, and those habits persist, and those habitual patterns have subsequent impacts.

Perhaps that precipitate never formed until, one time, it did. And then a couple more times. And then it became an established habit, and mostly happened from then on.

What I'm getting at: Nature doesn't care-take, and it doesn't design or manage, it just kinda "ends up", perhaps? It looks like regularity and law now, but that's only from our perspective in the current state of ordering.

COMMENTS: Multidimensional Magick

Q: Some say that Tesseract jumping is a better version of suicide, and should only be undertaken in the same circumstances. Some say it is habit forming and leads to permanent tourist syndrome toward any universe one finds oneself in.
What do you say about that? Very intriguing concept - I've never heard of this

I'd probably offer some extra information: When "jumping" you are effectively allowing the structures and patterns of your experience to shift by letting go and allowing. This involves the enfolded "universe" of your mind, consisting of the environment but also the body and thoughts which appear to you. Any pattern that you don't "hold onto" can shift and realign!

This means:

• When you jump you are not just allowing the effective death of your original universe but also of the "person" you have been experiencing as "yourself" until this point. It is worth considering at what stage you are simply no longer "you" and have effectively committed suicide to be resurrected as someone else, because...
• Once you've jumped once, and seen changes, you will no longer be "home". Before, you accepted imperfections as just part of your solid external world. Having let things shift, you realise there is no such thing. Everything is up for grabs, and you can't go back now! "Tweaking for perfection" could become an obsession.

Sometimes, acceptance may be the better route since the balancing effects of narrowly focusing on one particular change after another might not lead to a beneficial result overall [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mdwAkWvWMw].

I'm reading it more like 'the patterns you willingly release can shift and realign'

That's an equally valid way to say it too. The reason I phrased it my way was to imply that the natural state is of letting go and that "holding on" is you resisting change unnaturally. Perhaps that's how you ended up in an undesirable universe in the first place, by blocking the direct manifestation of your desires?

...it turns the concept of faith, something that's often so difficult to get past, into a given and makes one focus instead on what their faith produces. thanks for posting

Yes. I think it captures a few solid ideas into one handy worldview/system, including resistance, identity and True Nature and all that stuff. Had the links for a while but only thought of them again when I spotted /r/DimensionalJumping. (I've been experimenting more with a direct "enfolding, unfolding dreamlike mind-space" type format of late, but actually that fits in quite well with the Multidimensional/Tesseract symbolism.)

Anyway, glad you found it interesting too.

No participation reddit?

New to me too! [https://old.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/] Seems like a domain-based way to restrict contributions to subscribers only.

words are the trouble, like usual.

Pesky words! Okay, I'm going to try and explain my choice better:

I'd say that you can only know what you are holding onto, not know what you are not holding onto - you can't make a list of all the things you you don't know you don't know - and that's the problem with this approach.

You might make a list of what you want to change. But those aren't the only things that will change. Anything that you aren't holding down will shift, subtly or dramatically depending on how extreme the main movements are.

Blanket Metaphor Time

Imagine the world was a blanket (yeah, I love the blanket metaphor) with loads of 'bumps' or 'folds' in it at different heights, representing the current objects of the world. You are one of the bumps, with a limited viewpoint. You've seen some of the other bumps, but not all. You decide to change the shape of two of the adjacent bumps you can see, while holding on to two of the other bumps. Great, yeah? Well, no.

When those two bumps change shape, say grow taller, they pull on the fabric of the blanket. Sure, the two bumps you are holding onto stay the same, and you get the changes you want, but everything else that falls outwith your scope in the world is subtly "pulled". Door handles may turn the other way now; the colour of Alfred's hair might be lighter; Nelson Mandela is alive yet again; Berenstoon Bears. No big deal?

Thing is, lots of other "folds" might have been teetering on the edge of more dramatic change. Several 'bumps' that were adjacent to each other are pulled into a single form, or one pushes into the other, collapsing it...

At the other end of the blanket to your bump/perspective, a chain reaction has started, the effects of which may not fall into your line-of-sight for days. All because you held onto (prevented the change of) one aspect of the world, keeping it static against the larger flow you have requested and so interfering with the normal self-consistency or "coherence" of the whole.

Summary

• We can list the things we are holding onto: that list is finite and within our perspective. We can't list the things we aren't holding onto: that list is infinite and beyond our scope.
• To make any change it is required that other things are allowed to change also, because each object is part of a seamless whole. Any changes that do occur "pull at" the rest of the world as part of the process.
• Artificially restricting change may destroy the previous narrative coherence and lead to more dramatic, unintended changes to compensate for it.
• It is therefore not possible to consciously control the details of the jumping process.

EDIT: Rejigged my description to make it flow better. Obviously, by making this change I may have inadvertently caused other aspects of the world to be altered. If the hair colour of your SO shifts overnight and they develop a hitherto-unlikely love of cornflakes & peanut butter for breakfast, you can blame me.

Q: that makes perfect sense - can't go wrong with the blanket metaphor.
BUT (you knew there was a 'but' coming) - how can you really 'hold on' to anything? As a made up example that hopefully illustrates what I'm thinking:
There's a boy named Tom, and Tom's life is shitty - objectively shitty. We're in an example here, so let's make it as bad as can be. He was born into a North Korean prison camp, and at that, for whatever reason, his position is as low as can be. He routinely gets beat, raped, starved, whatever you can imagine in such a horrible place. Everything is really, truly terrible, and trumps the worst that a 'normal' life dishes out.
Everything except for this certain bird that always lands on the barbed wire fence and sings beautiful songs. Tom gets lost in that bird's song, it's the only thing that gives him peace, or love, or hope or joy - maybe it's the only emotion that he feels, since pain and cold and hunger aren't really emotions. Imagine Andy in the Shawshank redemption with the opera song. Like that but worse, right?
For the sake of exposition, let's say that one day there's an older man dying and Tom happens to be around him while it's happening. He's pulls Tom close and tells him something similar to this [https://old.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/2ax00o/dimensional_jumping_for_dummies_revamped/].
Obviously Tom doesn't have much to lose, but he wants to hold on to that bird. What does he really know about it? Its song? The shape of its body? The way it makes him feel? How can any of these things be more than an 'imagining' and how to 'hold on' to such a wispy thing?
Even if he could - does he know where the bird lives? How and where it hatched? What it eats? If any of those things change - possibilities all of them, since no doubt he'll be wishing for a change of scenery to say the least - how can that bird still be there?
Example:
It's similar, in a way to Zeno's paradox - no matter how much you 'have' (there's an interesting wording) of something to 'hold on' to - the shape of the bird, it's song, the way it makes you feel, etc - you'll never have it all. There's always something missing, always something lost.
So - when you say 'you can only know what you are holding onto', and I think your argument for that was quite sufficient, what then? Tom knows that he's holding onto the bird, but how does Tom hold on to the bird?

Reply Part I

That was a nice piece of storytelling and a great point! Nice when a discussion teases out the issues like this.

To recap:

• What does it mean to hold onto something and how do we know what we are holding onto? And:
• If everything is continuous and whole then how can we hold onto a "part" of it? In other words, how do we define the perimeter of an object? Do we actually need to?

How does Tom "access" the bird and retain it in its current form when everything else is going to shift?

To answer this, we're going to have to push a little into the nature of the world. The blanket metaphor is handy for showing interconnectedness, but of course it implies a 'spatiality' that is not actually present. For this next part, we must dispense with it and realise that in actual fact the whole universe isn't out there, extended, but enfolded into the space right here - intended?

Have to go sort some stuff out. Part II later!

Reply Part II

(Readers: See Part I and the preceding discussion for context.)

Well, we’re going a bit deeper than I’d initially meant to, but let’s go with it and see where we end up, shall we?

Before we offer advice to Tom about his situation, I think we have to talk a little more about what the world is, how it appears to us and how we interact with it. Obviously, we’ll still be trapped within metaphor, but with some juggling we can work our way onwards - and arrive at a practical approach for him.

Beyond the Blanket: Into the Desert

Where is the world right now? It is not “out there”. I suggest that the world is enfolded into the space right here. We talk of the conscious and the subconscious, as if the subconscious was beyond our awareness, unavailable and secret, but it is not. We are simply being biased towards one form of experience versus another as being “real”. We attend to sights and sounds and textures while ignoring another sense that we have: the background and ever-present felt-sense.

This felt-sense contains - no is - the world enfolded. It has no spatial or temporal structure but all aspects are within it. And what we think of as the present moment experience is simply an aspect or perspective of the felt-sense, unfolded into images, sounds, sensations.

Literally, we have a sense of the world and it turns out that this actually is the world.

One can think of the experience around you as a mirage that is floating above the sand dunes of a desert floor. We confuse the mirage with the real world, when in fact the form of the world-mirage reflects the shape of the sand dunes below.

We cannot interact with the mirage directly, although we may be fooled into thinking so; in fact, we can only change the dunes and see those changes reflected in the mirage. Although we might experience single moments as unfolded sensory experience, in truth we simultaneously have access to all time and all space via the dunes.

So, in everyday life we actually make changes by intending alterations of the timeless dune landscape. We might intend our arm to move right now, and it will, and we will feel that we “did something”. However, we could equally intend that our arm move tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes it will seem to happen then. Strictly speaking though, it was always happening that day, from the moment we intended it.

In our metaphor, the mirage is the multi-sensory present moment experience, the sand dunes represents the felt-sense, and what we truly are is the entirety of the desert landscape. When we intend what we are actually doing is shifting our own shape; we become the world we subsequently hallucinate. The world, in other words, is ourselves.

This accounts for its occasionally dreamlike nature: the apparently external world is in fact symbolic of our current state. Or to be more accurate, our current state is symbolic in nature. We don’t need to delve into this to solve our current predicament. Suffice to say that the objects we encounter are in fact meanings.

To finish off, we note that just as all objects were actually continuous forms of a whole in the blanket metaphor, here all objects are dissolved non-spatially and non-temporally into the felt-sense. The difference now is that our metaphor suggests a way we can interact with the world practically.

A. Can Tom hold onto the bird?

So, armed with his new metaphor, how can Tom change his situation while holding onto the bird that has given him so much comfort?

First we must decide what it means to “hold on”. This is easy enough now: since the patterns of the world are the patterns of ourselves, we simply need to intend - basically, just decide - that a pattern is going to persist. We do this accidentally all the time, by implication. (For instance, identification with something implies a resistance to change because you 'stand as that thing'.) Here, we are simply doing it deliberately.

However, importantly, one can only make deliberate decisions about things that are unfolded as objects in awareness. Tom can easily unfold “the bird” from his background sense and intend it will persist - simply by recalling it and making the decision. He cannot do so to aspects which have not yet been object-ified, though.

So, Tom decides that the bird will persist and then relaxes completely. He ‘gives up to God’ as it were, and intends that his situation shifts to the best possible one. With the bird still present.

B. Should Tom hold onto the bird?

The thing is - if the whole world is shifting for his benefit, it’s not clear he should retain the bird. The bird fulfilled a particular purpose: it gave him comfort when the rest of his situation was dire.

Now that he has allowed his situation to flow towards a better one, the bird will no longer have the meaning it once had. In fact, it is likely that Tom’s feelings towards the bird will be quite different. He might have gratitude towards the bird, but he no longer has a requirement for it.

Which sounds harsh. The poor bird!

But what is the bird anyway? The bird was its meaning - of hope and escape. It was the aspect of him that knew there was another way. The bird was his pathway to changing the world and with the world changed, the bird has no place. The bird was actually an aspect of Tom all along, and can now be allowed to dissolve back into his awareness.

Conclusion

A key word here might be "realignment". Why would we want a world which was part changed and part not, a partial alignment to a new existence? An incoherent world means an incoherent self and experience.

In other words, it is not clear that Tom should hold onto anything. Perhaps he should actually let go completely of all patterns in awareness - let the winds of destiny shape his desert floor consistently and naturally - if what he really wants is “the best thing for Tom”.

Afterword

So, how does this apply to the specific workings in the original post? Well, it suggests that the details of the working are a symbolic representation of >3-dimensional space, and stepping from one part of the tesseract to another represents a 'releasing into' parallel possibilities. In other words, the important thing is the understanding and opening to this type of change, rather than the details of the diagrams and so on.

The felt-sense I have described has no dimensions and no limitations, except those placed upon it by the intentions enfolded into it. Recognition of this alone will improve your experience of the world - i.e. yourself.

...

Right, I'm back.

I'll begin by saying that my original posting doesn't necessarily recommend performing Multidimensional Magick; it just points out an interesting approach. For me, it's as much about how it illuminates the nature of experience. With that in mind, we're going to push it to the extreme.

Why Jump?

It may well be that "stoic acceptance" is a better approach to life rather than expose oneself to an unpredictable process that one cannot fully guide. However, what would it mean to guide, to know in advance, what was going to change? We wouldn't actually want to have to go through each aspect of the the world individually and adjust it. The key here is to ask what the nature of the change is going to be.

What's really happening?

• We're letting go of the world so that it can shift.
• We're intending certain changes.
• We're allowing the world to shift to accommodate those changes.
• In the process of that accommodation, the world rebalances as a whole.

So, potentially we get something we want and simultaneously everything becomes more harmonious at the same time. The more we try to control the details consciously, the less coherent and harmonious the result is.

To ponder: What if we just didn't do the intention, and simply let go completely? Might that perhaps give us not what we want - but what we really, really want? In other words, the question might be not so much about whether we jump, but whether we control the jump at all.

It's not Solipsism

Solipsism is when we think the "person" we are is the only person on the world. This is something different. In one sense we are saying that the whole world is the person. Taking it a step further, we realise there is no "person", there are no "people", there is only the world. You and I are both the world.

It can be hard to reconcile this mentally with an idea of a "you". One approach is to think of each of us as our own dreamworlds, which are connected at some higher dimensionality. In other words, an intersubjective idealism.

For practical purposes, you can just treat "all this" as your dream, with you being the dreamer, the dream and all its content. The "person" you seem to be is a dream character, just as the other people you encounter. Since "everything is you", you will not behave solipsistically, you will not be cruel to yourself.

Tom Falls into the Mirror

All your ideas about changing oneself, bettering oneself, escaping oneself - all of those ideas depend on what one thinks of as "oneself". Without having that clear first, we cannot really weigh up the pros and cons of apparent suffering vs transformation.

One of the problems with Tom's story and our interpretation at the moment is that we are talking about "Tom" as if he is separate from his world. We talk of meaning and what the world means to Tom. This isn't quite the correct wording though: The world is literally parts of what Tom really is. Tom is the world; "Tom-the-person", meanwhile, is just a perspective and a collection of thoughts within that world.

When Tom sees war and catastrophe, that is not just a representation of Tom's inner turmoil, it is literally part of Tom, unfolded into sensory experience.

...what now? he's not getting beaten or starved anymore, but surely his sanity must be in tatters? we can assume he lands in a 'real' place. His mom is gone. In fact, to the world he finds himself in, it's as though she never existed. The thing which made his life possible is irreparably lost.

But the thing that made Tom's life possible was not "his Mother", she was just an aspect of the experience. What would happen in this extreme case is that Tom would be confronted with his true nature: He is an "aware space" in which experience arises.

He is not any of the content of his experience. He is the background in which experiences appear. He had forgotten this, assuming an external world and that tone part of experience - his thoughts and body sensation - were "him".

Was the jump worth it? Would he be God?

Being God: Would ya?

One worry people might have is that, effectively, this sort of magick implies that one can be God. More worryingly, it implies that one already is God.

Before they've thought about the implications, people quite like the idea of Infinite Power. Actually it might not be so attractive - it could get boring pretty quick. It's cheating. It breaks down what we think is important in our lives.

• If you could change anything instantly, without going through an apparent process, it means you could do anything and have anything. It would just happen. (God.)
• Or you might change things to you liking, but choose to forget that it was different - i.e. you deliberately forget that you used your Godly Power to update the world and make it nice. Just so you could enjoy it all more. (God + Memory Wipe.)
• Alternatively, you might say it's okay to have what you want and remember asking for it, but you're going have those things arrive through seemingly normal channels. In fact, you will have updated the world to get what you want, but you will experience it as happening via coincidence and opportunity. (Magick in the World.)
• Another option is to hide from yourself the fact that you get what you want. You simply always get what you ask for, but never realise it. You live a life of struggle and triumph, terror and joy, and only at the end will you realise it was your own creation; you were chasing your own shadows in a fictional grand adventure. (Powerless Person.)

At any point, one might "realise" themselves from one situation to another via insight. The Powerless Person might notice that, hey, something is going on here => Magick in the World. They might later realise they aren't a person at all, and are effectively the world itself! For a while, you become God. Then you get bored of that, and decide that you'll make everything ideal, but then forget that you did it (God + Memory Wipe).

Then you're back to Powerless Person...

Conclusion

Aurelius has it right. As he implies, the world is yourself pushed out. All change is to the self. Live from the perspective of a person, but understand this is not the case. Objects appear and disappear; they are patterns in experience. The universe is transient and it is made from meaning. But that meaning is you.

thanks so much for your response, and for taking the time to have this whole discussion with me and flesh out the bones of what this idea can mean. A proper reply later..

Well, it's a dialogue, so we're unfolding it together for the benefit of all!

Don't you think it's strange that there 'seems' to be a self-realization phenomenon on a global scale going on these days??
I decided to check this subreddit today after 2 months of constant synchronicities, "injected thoughts", visions and divinations and all too conveniently I ran into you and your posts!!
Eschaton? Noosphere? Universe reversing itself? Everyone 'awakening'?
What do you think is going on.

When you ponder it for a bit, it actually makes sense that there should be changes on a global scale. Although I always scoffed a bit at the optimism of this in my early days, think about it:

When you become clearer about things yourself, you effectively dissolve the boundaries between your personal self and the world (realising they are the same things). Meaning that the barriers between your own thoughts and intentions and everyone else are greatly reduced. If you have "realised" how things are, you help everyone else (also you really) realise the same thing.

So you're saying that all those steps basically get boiled down to: allow the world to shift

Once you look at what you're actually doing: yes. At first though, we might think we are going through various steps, thinking things through, deciding what we want (as if we don't already know deep down), choosing something then letting go, letting it happen. The four steps I listed. But we only need to do that because we went off track at some point. In the end, what we're really aiming for is a state where we're balanced, and our desires and the world are aligned anyway. No resistance. If we hadn't "fallen" at some point during our lives - started pushing and pulling instead of flowing - we wouldn't feel the need to do magick in the first place. Our world would be us, effortlessly, whereas currently its movement is busy fighting through our defences. However, while we still feel we've got things to "work through", there will still be stuff to "be done".

correct me if I'm wrong - you're going down a sort of Alan Watts path of "God playing hide-go-seek with itself"

Well, I don't really like that angle because of its anthropomorphism and I don't quite see us as a part of anything. But I'm struggling to describe it at the moment.

Is there such a thing as transformation?

There's such a thing as a change in perspective and identification. Do you think one should have to work hard for the goodies? Might that not be like rippling the water in the hope of clearing view to the bottom of the stream?

Implicitly there are different levels to these conversations: First, everything is as it is already, so let things be. You are already whatever you are, you don't need to do anything to get there. Life will forcibly unravel you and make you clear (since the world is you and it tends toward harmony).

Second, yes but... can I make it happen? Then there are two options: Accelerate the process by deliberately searching out and working through aspects of yourself, analytically or experientially. Or quicker: Just drop straight to the non-resistance level, including letting go of more structured beliefs, and deal with the massive shift. The middle ground is intended shifts with the "collateral damage" of partial reharmonisation. (Or perhaps you could just intend to Be God Now, thanks.)

Which you choose depends on what you're aiming for and what results you want in the interim. Are you looking for harmony, a nice car, total annihilation and rebirth, or what - for instance.

a cover for not having the perseverance to really push through whatever it is...

But is the "pushing through" not just a bit of theatre? Something we just play at, which actually has nothing to do with seeing how things are or changing ourselves. You do all this stuff on the stage, getting your performance just right, so that you eventually allow yourself to exit stage right and go out into the street.

the narrative by-products of the system one chooses to live by.

That's very interesting. Is it that the basic truth is fashioned into a narrative, which implies a worldview which then impacts the behaviour of followers and therefore the world?

In other words, the end-point might be the same for all (originally) but the extra "prove you're worth it" path each organised religion sets its followers (rather than just saying let go and have faith) actually mutates the teachings and causes collateral damage. There's somethng in that (if I've followed you correctly).

if I'm a zen superhero and I can accept everything in my life with equanimity, what about the people around me and how it affects their lives? what about my kid who was depending on me to get food on the table?

Well, the position isn't so extreme. What you describe there is a "selfish solipsism", but most teach a compassionate stance. After all, you have worldly responsibilities ("chop wood, carry water") and Shiva looks out the eyes of all. It's not nihilism. Tibetan Dream Yoga, for instance, is very specific that - yeah, it's all a dream, but you still have dream bills and dream gravity, and the dream bankruptcy or dream impact won't be any more pleasant for them being part of a dream!

Rambling's good.

And, just as a final aside, I don't mean any of this as an attack against you or what you're saying...

Of course not! And obviously I'm pushing things to the edge a bit to open out our discussion, and enjoying your responses and challenges. Will reply properly tomorrow.

right - just better to throw that little caveat out there. this is the internet after all.

I agree. Those pesky t'nets! How something is read can depend on the mood - better to state explicitly where one's coming from if it might not be clear! But yeah, ideas and discussions like this are either fun or useful or interesting or less so. What they aren't, though, is personal.

...

Philip K Dick definitely felt the shifting, transparent nature of the present moment experience - but I think he did not cope with it very well, struggling to make sense of it. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Ubik, Eye in the Sky and The Man in the High Castle are all on my top list of novels which generate the "feeling" of this. You can detect him trying to make sense of his experiences within those books.

Good call on Waking Life. I think it's very smart in lots of ways and I think Richard Linklater is somewhat in-the-know (he also directed A Scanner Darkly, after all).

That part where Linkater himself tells the story of Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears synchronistic experience shows you what it's about. We all say "yes" in the end. (Transcript of that part is available here [Dead link] for other readers.)

I also love The Holy Moment chapter.

EDIT: There's also his How To Build A Universe essay [http://downlode.org/Etext/how_to_build.html]. Meanwhile, I thought I'd read Divine Invasions, but looking it up I'm not so sure!

How many countless people have been shown some sense of a way (and perhaps gained a willingness to take the first few steps as a result) becuase of Dick's burning to know the truth!

This is true of me, definitely. Just even to be led to suspect that there is "something else to all this" is a major step. The likes of Philip K Dick (and non-fictionaly people like Robert Anton Wilson) enabled the everyday reader to be opened up to these possibilities.

Agree with you about Linklater's PKD connection. I also think what his works communicate is probably a small fragment of whatever esoteric knowledge he possesses.

His film work drips with it, there is a lot going on there, especially relating to time and connection. If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy the short film On Cinema and Time at the BFI website. (Just re-watched and it actually includes the pinball scene and the holy moment scenes, coincidentally.)

I'd forgotten all about the rooftop guy who dissolves! You should check out this interview below; there's lot of interesting Waking Life stuff in it:

DAVIS: Tell me about the character who seems like an alien, the kid who speaks in a very detached monotone about human life?
LINKLATER: That scene has a funny lineage. My animation partners on this, Bob Savison and Tommy Palotta, had done a short film called Snack and Drink that I think's going to be on the DVD. And it's about that guy. His name is Ryan, and he was a 13-year-old autistic kid who they knew. They just shot some video of him walking up to a convenience store and getting a snack and a drink and talking about cartoons and music. He's kind of regurgitating a litany of things -- you know how autism works in the mind. So they were like, "Hey, you've got to get Ryan in here somewhere." I did have room for a teenager, but then I thought of another idea. I always had this idea as a kid, that you're in a science fiction sort of world and that you would encounter an alien who had been here a thousand years. He had kind of used Earth up and was departing, and you encounter him at that moment, on his last day.
-- Waking Dream, Technosis interview with Richard Linklater

I do think that Linklater has experimented a bit more than he necessarily lets on - other interviews suggest so anyway. I also think Matthew McConaughey might have asked him for some tips relatively recently. :-)

...

It's The McConaissance!

For years, McConaughey embodied complacency; he was an actor who bought too heavily into his own allure and therefore stalled out early on. The fact that he has been able to unravel that perception in a few roles shows how wrong we were.
-- The McConaissance, The New Yorker

It triggered for me when I saw The Lincoln Lawyer. I thought: something's changed here; something's going on. True Will leads to True Detective?

Meanwhile, it turns out I do have the ebook of Divine Invasions on my desktop machine but I've never actually read it! So that's something for me to look forward to. Thanks for the nudge.

Me too!

...

I'm sitting happily tethered to this projection of my life but I am aware of this concept because it is the polarized side of how I cast spells. I take parts from these other realities and bend them to my own will to shape my current one.
When I was first being initiated I used a moment of improbability and "jumped" my life track to this one but I have no idea how and can not do it again. After reading this I don't think I I'll try :3

Well, you have to give up everything if you want everything; relinquish all control to gain the ultimate control. Resistance is useless!

...

...have you ever read the term "tesseract" used to describe journey work?

I was familiar with it as a mathematical shape - a 4-dimensional hypercube - and as a way of representing time diagrammatically (and in crap films!) before I came across this, but hadn't seen it used as a concept in other esoteric practices. But I think the overall approach is intimately linked with practices involving inner and outer.

Could changes be a subtle as a plant growing where it was not growing previously?

Exactly this. Let's explore!

The World is You

What if we look at the world as your extended self; in its entirety it is your true self. If you change one part of the world, there will be corresponding adjustments elsewhere, in two senses:

1. The sense of it being a continuous material. If you tug on one section of a blanket of material, other parts of it will get changed also. If you create a new fold in one area, other folds will be changed: they will be pulled to a new location, may combine with other folds, or even collapse completely into the flat background. Self-balancing.
2.The sense that all of the world is meaning, is an aspect of you. When when you change the form of yourself, the world will correspond to that (because it is that). For instance, having a clear sense of self you may notice that the skies literally have less clouds in them. When you have a clear idea of what you want in life, you might that the winding path into the village literally has less stones or pot-holes than it used to; it might even now be a straighter path. Self-presentation.

The essence of Multidimensional Magick is also that of changing the enfolded aspects of the "inner self" because the "outer world" is just an unfolded image of that. The limits of what can happen depend on the balance of intention and of letting go - "decisions and permissions".

But how?

Inner and Outer

This sounds a bit vague initially, because we are left with wondering what/where that "inner self' is. Actually, it's right here right now.

• The "outer world" is the present moment's sights, sounds, textures, thoughts - which all arise in one mind-space. These experiences are transparent, mirages, and cannot actually be changed directly.
• The "inner world" is the subtle background felt-sense you have. Everything is enfolded into that. This is what you change with magick.

The thoughts that arise to you and the objects you encounter are both just experiences and both come from the same place, unfolding from this felt-sense. So to change yourself is to change the world, and vice versa.

Attempt at illustrating that and the feedback-loop nature of experience in this diagram. The unfolded is experienced as sensory objects; the enfolded is experienced as the felt-sesne.

The Underlying Process

So really, I think all magickal processes involve releasing our hold on the mirage of the moment to better connect with the felt-sense. It is always there, just as the stars are in the sky even at noon, they are just obscured by the brightness of the sun.

At that point, any intention will shift the enfolded structure, subject to your beliefs and identifications. Basically, we "insert new facts" into the universe at the lowest level. The more you let go of holding onto any particular pattern the more the felt-sense, and therefore the world, can shift. Most people have quite a tight hold of their personal self and of certain basic rules of reality - not to mention that many basic rules have now become quite deeply entrenched as "habits of the world" - which limits what might happen.

Fundamentally though, there might be no true limit. And even minor changes could lead to instant changes. Perhaps this explains the stories in /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix, for instance. (The ones that aren't just dreams and forgetfulness, that is.)

Meanwhile...

...the 3d projection of a tesseract from the wiki...

I try not to look at it. It's so hypnotic. One can so easily get lost in time and space... :-)

TL;DR: All magick is changing your self-world. Any changes to your self changes the world; any change you see in the world is a change in your self. This includes plants growing in unusual locations.

I really enjoyed the blanket analogy. I think I like it so much because there is a homey facility with fitting sympathetic magic into it. Even if it is one person's blanket, the shifting could make someone else have cold feet.
Thanks for the thoughtfulness of your reply!

Haha, I really liked your comment - thanks :-)

...

Yes, it's quite similar overall. In effect, it's another conceptualisation of possibility. In truth, it's just a scheme by which we might allow ourselves to intend over all time-and-space, across the entire enfolded world. There are no actual dimensions and realities and many-worlds or whatever. Rather, there are inter-subjective minds. And the intersubjectivity is not a limited sort; it doesn't restrict possibiliites.

This happens to me randomly. People to whom I've spoken about it think I'm crazy and self-centered and a solipsist. I should figure out how to control it better, because to me it's currently just a curiosity and/or an annoyance (e.g. picture burning something because you turned on the wrong burner and ruining a nice dinner).

It's actually not solipsistic (something I'll pick up on in a later reply) but I think that in general for a stable world you need a stable posture, as it were. By which I mean that we are not fluctuating between detached relaxation and narrowed attention, mixing releasing and pushing.

Ctrl-Z Magick

People occasionally report "reset" events that occur when they are in danger (example [A Hiccup In Time], example [Discovered this sub and have two things I can't understand]) - such as time jumping back to before a crash, or an injury being reversed. These jumps seem to be spontaneous, and not willed.

Has anyone experimented or had experience with this "Ctrl-Z" undoing of events intentionally?

...

Ah yes, I remember reading about that. Thanks! Pretty fascinating. It brought to mind Rupert Sheldrake's thoughts about morphogenic fields - rats learning a maze help the skills of subsequent, unrelated rats. My thinking then was: If the universe is basically timeless, then - like our student friends - perhaps it needn't matter when the rats are trained; the fact of maze training would help all rats to some extent. In other words, just as the later rats benefit from the first rats knowledge, so the first rats might have been benefiting from the second rats' skills. (This would need to be tested for specifically, and I'm not even sure that the nature of such an effect would even be available for testing.)

However, that's not quite the same as being able to "take time back" [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/SapphireAndSteel] when one encounters a situation they don't like. It does demonstrate that time itself isn't a sequential set of isolated moments that can only unfold in one direction though. If we can take time back, then: how? And: does the whole universe get taken back? Just your locality gets warped? Is it a case of personal realities?

It's worth considering that the original event that gets undone might be an extremely realistic, full-spectrum premonition.

That's an interesting possibility: An intense premonition that leads you to automatically take action to avoid it while in a state of 'imagery'. It's hard to separate the two possibilities though, obviously. Quite a few reports (e.g. suddenly being a mile away from where you experienced the crash, and there being two people in the car who experience the jump, etc) don't fit that idea, which makes me think there's 'something' more to it than that. Since magick (invoking our friend Fotamecus, for instance) is known to allow us to stretch or compress time, there could be some mix of time manipulation and premonition happening. But then, at what point does that get so complicated that a "magickal reset" becomes the simpler explanation?

Another explanation is just a shared 'drop out' into a dream, so that a stretch of the experience just didn't happen at all anyway.

The reason for asking the OP question was that, since it's hard to tell the difference between the above explanations when they're not deliberate, perhaps stories of intentional resets by people who are already knowledgeable about the occult/magick could be insightful.

I "reset" losing my watch one time. I still can't explain how it happened. I was at camp, at the pool, and took it off so it doesn't get wet. When we were already on the bus to go back to camp I realized I had left it there. My first thought, this was really weird, was "No! I didn't lose my watch! That didn't happen!" Completely denying that it happened, then I noticed my watch right there on the bus seat next to me.

Thanks for that, interesting. Various "stories" of types:

• Falling on a hill badly and "willing" it undone. Ankle still broken, but bones perfectly aligned for setting.
• "Willing" a reported fatal car crash undone. Going to the site, seeing an obviously bad tyre mark pattern.
• Lots of recovered objects, lost elsewhere but discovered at home or in unusual situations after "deciding" they aren't lost.

Individual stories to be taken with a pinch of salt, but all seem to have the common theme of "asserting" a positive alternative to the situation, or "asserting" the complete absence of the situation (but not focusing on the unfortunate situation and then trying to mentally changing it).

I don't think I ever encountered anyone claiming that experience before the 2000s, but that's entirely my personal experience, and not something I'm holding up as historical canon.

Me neither, but the nature of the experience to me seems like it would be less "special" - e.g. UFOs and spirits and so on - and more just bewildering and confusing. I can imagine not really talking about it except to a friend or two, who probably wouldn't be very interested in talking further. Because it's rare, there's not really been a community for these people - until the Internet became generally accessible and various websites meant they'd hear other, similar stories. Circa the start of the 2000s, funnily enough.

I think it's all storytelling, myself, and not even a misattributed experience resulting from a stressful incident. But I could be wrong.

In general with 'odd stuff', I'd agree - but these stories tend not to be very showy or looking for attention, compared to some of the others. I tend to think the experience is genuine; what the nature of that experience is, I don't know.

The suggestion of an intense premonition/mini-dream is a possibility. Like a minor, accidental DMT hit. Or simply the adrenaline hit of a near-miss messing with the memory. (Because of course, these incidents are reported from memory, so it's their memories they are reporting not the incident.)

PKD - Punched Paper Memory World

One of my favourite Philip K Dick short stories is The Electric Ant. Give it a read first...

SPOILERS

Anyway, it makes me think: Although we don't have a punched paper roll inside us, we do have an equivalent - the memory-surface of our minds. Any experiences we have leave traces, which are then activated by subsequent experiences. We don't really see the room around us directly, we get a couple of glances, and the visual and feeling memory of the room are activated. We experience our memories, rendered as senses in a "perceptual-experiential mind-space".

So, if we were able to edit our memories - like the electric ant amending his punched paper - would we be changing our apparent reality, in a direct experiential way, not just altering what we'd recall when thinking-about something?

When in magick we "declare something to be true" by assertion, act or ritual, is this what we are really doing?

And to what extent did our world of experience have an external starting point anyway; perhaps it began with random noise which slowly formed stable patterns via feedback. In that case, reality is only memory - albeit maybe not personal memory - and so is completely flexible...

What happens when the universe forgets something?

See also this preview book [http://youaredreaming.org/assets/pdf/YouAreDreaming_04252013.pdf] which describes quite well the dream-like nature of waking reality - as a mind theatre inspired by, but not dictated by, the "senses". Or noise and memories?

...

Our punched paper is comprised of DNA

I don't think that's true. DNA may operate as a reactive surface for biological development, but it doesn't govern your experience of reality. For instance, you learned to ride a bike - is that in your DNA now? You learned how to recognise particular objects as you went along, is that?

The "punched paper" you have now is, perhaps, patterns you've accumulated in your brain. Although I think it's better to use the word "mind" since it has less baggage (and we experience our minds; we don't experience our brains).

* * *

Misc Communities Misc Posts

Magick: Just how things work anyway? (r/magick)

So, obviously there are many traditions and approaches to magick, ending up with the Chaos approach of 'freeform belief', which itself now seems to have fallen out of favour somewhat. Most traditions portray their magick as being challenging, needing many years to understand and master, symbolism and underlying structures, and so on. Even Chaos magick had an implied model-of-reality to it, which you were cleverly cheating. Alternatively, authors such as Alan Chapman in his book Advanced Magick for Beginners come to the conclusion that magick is essentially just about intention: any act can be a magickal act, if you assign a meaning to it. An act is then just an 'experienceable thing' to represent your intention to yourself, since you cannot directly experience intention (the 'doing' of magick). Even the act might not be required!

TL/DR: Given the easy access we have to all relevant information these days, do mages in general still hold to a particular approach and believe in it, or are we all becoming stripped-down utilitarian relativists?

• Do you have a favoured tradition that you really believe in?
• Has your approach become simpler, or has it become deeper, over time?
• How has this informed your view of what magick 'really is'?

Imaginary Friends & Created Characters (Aeon.co)(r/Tulpas)

An Aeon magazine article on "imaginary friends" in childhood which then broadens out into the independence of fictional characters in creative writing. It doesn't mention tulpas explicitly, but some of the content brushes very close and might be interesting. Excerpts:

[QUOTE]

I remembered that a former colleague had once told me about his son, Joe, who’d introduced a cast of invisible characters to their family. One Friday afternoon, Joe and I spoke on the phone:

Joe: I sort of think that Sweek [the planet where his imaginary friends live, basically a "wonderland"?] is actually my room, because I can’t go in a spaceship and go to Sweek, 1) because I don’t have one and 2) because Sweek isn’t real, it’s just my imagination.
. . .
[On an author's inventions seeming to come to life:] The study’s authors call the phenomena ‘the illusion of independent agency’, which ‘occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions’. An author invents a character on the page, and before long feels like that character has a life of its own, and that the author is simply there to record its independent decisions and movements.
Not long ago, I interviewed the author Hilary Mantel and she explained her writing process as being similar to that of a medium, like the character of Alison in her novel, Beyond Black (2005). This is how Mantel describes Alison at work: ‘She starts a peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the top rung; she listens at the ends of her nerves, at the limit of her capacities ... The skill is in isolating the voices, picking out one and letting the others recede...
-- Two Lands in my Mind, Aeon Magazine

[END OF QUOTE]

Heaven Sent (r/askheaven)

Where exactly is heaven located? I don't mean sky/underground, but in terms of accessing it right now. Do you conceive of it as been sort of "in the background everywhere" and you tune into it?

What is the relationship between heaven and other worlds - is it in a privileged position, or is it just basically a more flexible, dream-state type environment?

...

[COMMENT BY DreamingOrAwake]

Those are good questions..

Where is heaven exactly?
In position it is not above, nor below, it is more like an extra dimension. The physical world can be expressed in coordinates x,y,z,time. Every living being is living in a physical body or at least connected with it. If you are a bit sensitive, you can feel an aura around every living creature. This is what I call the spirit-body. The spirit-body surrounds the physical body as if it has one more dimension. So it is surrounding the x,y,z of our physical body.
And very sensitive people or animals can sense something just before it happens. So the spirit-body is surrounding the time-coordinate of the physical body. Our source (or soul-light) is even on a higher dimension than our spirit. It is connected with heaven already. There are different connections that we have with our source (soul-light). Different people have developed different techniques for it. Religions reflect these differences:

• Christians like to name their heart-connection, the place of the soul.
• Zen-Buddhists often name the mind, a connection in the center of the head. Other Buddhists use the connection in the heart, or the connection on top of their head.
• Hindustan have a connection for each chakra. Each chakra is connected to a different group of gods.
• I believe Maya-people felt connected with the stars.
• Australian aboriginals feel connected with the earth and nature.

But I believe that all are a connection with our source. It is not a privileged position, because everyone can feel at least one connection. The strength and how much we can live from these connections is different per person. A lot of small children have a good connection, and can show wonderful things. Sadly many people ignore their connection or get their connection polluted in some way. They like to reconnect, but for them the illusions in the world have become much more important. For me: I can connect to heaven at any point in time, even under stress. I have not seen many people capable of doing this. It feels I am also more connected with my inner child.

Tuning in
One way of tuning in to your source in heaven, is by connecting with your inner child. First ground (connect with a tree or a mountain), and then go backwards in time. Go back to when you were a baby. Go back to before you were born.
These stages give different feelings. But somehow you automatically connect to your source. With exercise and repetition you can heal and strengthen that connection. When I am connected, I am still aware of my body and the world around me. And I am still grounded. It may not be so easy for other people, but I think anyone can learn it.

Other worlds
If your connection is not clean, you can easily get in the many dreams (and astral worlds) that are around our physical dimension. These are not bad, but can keep us away from reconnecting fully. Sometimes these dream stages can help us. Some dreams can be wonderful and full energy. Some dreams can take us away from our grounding. Some dreams can show us what is stopping us from going further. I usually ignore all these dream states, and focus on my body and grounding instead. I invite the energy of heaven to come to me instead.

Portals
If I find some spirit that has problems, I often help this spirit to go to the light (=heaven). I do so using a similar meditation technique, but stay much more focused on my surroundings. I can often sense such spirits with my hands or aura. I ask the helpers from heaven (whatever you want to call them), to create a portal to heaven for this spirit. Different spirits often need different portals. Using my grounding, aura, and environment, the helpers can create this temporary portal. I guide the spirit to the portal ("you can go there"). And it slowly dissolves from our physical dimension, and moves to a different dimension. Usually this new dimension is a heaven like dream. It is a small dream-world created in the heaven-dimensions for this spirit where the spirit can go to. After the spirit has adapted and healed, the dream slowly dissolves. Usually they grow into a different form of themselves that is fully connected to their source.

Other worlds
So the relationship between heaven and other worlds, is that heaven is more like a higher dimension of the other worlds. It is where we are connected to our source. In all other worlds we are not fully connected. In some sense our physical world is seen as a dream-world from the heaven-dimension. The physical world is a combination of frozen dreams. According to my guides (helpers) there are more parallel physical worlds. And while we may learn in these physical worlds, all guides want to help our worlds to get unfrozen, and everyone reconnected to heaven. They don't tell me how this will be done, but help me with my personal life in the physical world instead. ;-)

[END OF COMMENT]

Much to ponder - thanks!

According to my guides (helpers) there are more parallel physical worlds.

Tell me more about guides/helpers, their purpose, nature and actions!

There is a lot to tell about it. I'll make some posts about it.

Great, looking forward.

The Feeling (r/energy_work)

I've just been reading the Daniel Barber book (listed on the sidebar) and was struck by the similarities between this...

[QUOTE]

By consciously creating a strong somatic effect (gut feeling) within ourselves which mirrors the gut feeling we would have if our desired intentions, expectations and feelings were already extant, we have a method for managing, or even manipulating, our reality. This somatic effect is our interface into The Quantum. This is how we pass commands, for good or ill, to the universe.
-- Daniel Barber, The Visceral Experience, p11

[END OF QUOTE]

...and the work of Neville Goddard ("summon the feeling of the wish fulfilled" from Feeling is the Secret and The Power of Awareness) and my own approaches for breaking down boundaries and creating a more unified experience (see latest post here, again all about stretching out and asserting a 'feeling'). Meanwhile, synchronistically I was rewatching Christopher Nolan's Inception last night and noticed the line:

[QUOTE]

Ariadne: I guess I thought the dream space would be all about the visual but, it's more about the feel of it.
-- Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

[END OF QUOTE]

I'm personally coming to the idea that things like modal visualisation (image, auditory, touch) are really only effective insomuch as they generate, perhaps just as a byproduct, this felt sense or direct experiencing/knowing of a situation being true (or how it would feel if it were true). Which implies this felt-sense is the background reality, from which appearances arise?

Do you any of you guys focus more on the direct feeling like this? Or do you tend to focus more on a particular route - picturing or sensing energy, and maybe use a feeling to tell if you're "there" yet?

...

And the way you described that really put another spin on it, thanks, because it's true that there is the 'general world felt-sense' (or signature) and object-level or situation-level 'signatures'. And the results can be quite rapid.

Maybe not that exact object or even, but one with the same spirit, it's really fascinating

That's great. It can also account for the fact that we encounter the same situations, relationships and even "actual people" again and again. In every workplace I've been in, for instance, I've had an identical mentor-type-person looking out for me (not officially, but effectively), and in any social group, similar recurrences. The same people, in different attire. It's fascinating. Fall into a general depression, a global 'felt-sense' of doom? Your apparent world will start to crumble within days. Everything will line up accordingly. Summon the feeling of achievement and stability and good luck? It switches around. I think the phrase "count your blessings" is a nice way to encapsulate that you must retain within you, your felt-sense, the 'signatures' of the aspects of life you like. Otherwise they'll gradually dissolve. Worse, if you switch track, they'll drop out more dramatically. This applies even to the body. Perhaps much body degradation is due to people's gradual withdrawal over time into their head area. Their bodies become less 'coherent' and defined; you let go of the 'feel' of yourself. I think this can be recovered to some extent though. (Can't remember the name, but there was an interesting book about a guy who created "bed exercises" for himself to bring himself back to good condition; really what he was doing - if it was true - is expanding his 'presence' again and intending a signature of health.)

all see[m/k] to remove our presence from our bodies

Yes. And it is about maintaining expanded presence of your body-area and the world around you, rather than simply "staying in the present moment", which doesn't capture it properly. Everything is to be included. It's not a holding-on, it's a aware being-with.

Part of my training is to keep my mind, spirit, energy and breath in the entirety of my body at all times. It's exhilarating and extremely healthy.

Just the ticket! :-)

Is it energy or is it realised metaphor? (r/energy_work)

When we use "energy" to accomplish something, are we really summoning and using such a thing - or are we in fact generating an experience as a prelude to our target desired experience?

In other words, does energy become an intermediary "permission slip" experience that allows us to generate our intention, even though we could make the change directly with the appropriate belief and intention?

EDIT: I should say "produce the intended result" rather than "generate our intention".

...

Energy is no more a "permission slip" for change than gasoline is a permission slip to drive

Very good :-)

My rephrased version might be: is energy our sensing of "pure potentiality". The reason I find this difficult, is that I don't see how it is moved and transferred. If I "use energy" to turn a wheel does that correspond to a physical thing that transmits and moves, or am I basically saying that I have this ability to change anything and I am "releasing the filters" to allow my change to take place.

I would like to recommend a book to you; "Akido, Aikibojitsu and the Structure of Natural Law" by John Read. I would like to explain but I am just not eloquent enough to convey it, although John Read is. His book explains this perfectly.

Thanks - will check that out! :-)

give ourselves "permission" do things which make it happen. Did I understand you correctly?

Yes. I guess I'm trying to reconcile energy work with "magick", in particular where in the latter the act itself can be irrelevant and what matters is the meaning behind the act. So if I visualise energy - even summon the experience of feeling - travelling from me to an object, how does that differ from me reaching out with my mind and simply intending. My thinking was: is that extra "sensory theatre" (excuse pun) when really it is the connection and intention that does the work, with energy being your "excuse" to allow the result to happen, making it "plausibly justified".

So the issue is not whether or not the energy is behind the effect, but whether that energy is simply the intent and we are just attempting to process it by visualizing it.

It's probably a mixture of the two - but by "intention" I mean something more than simply wanting, more akin to what you are calling energy, so this is making sense. My "intention" basically is "directed energy". Language, eh :-)

The "sensory theater" of visualizing things is a method of using your mind to channel it, although you're right, it's not truly necessary for the effect. The energy itself is though.

This makes sense to me now. Okay, I'm suggesting that the extra theatre is so you can "experience yourself doing something"... but really you can just do the directed energy and what you experience then is the result (possibly a sense of resistance or push-back, but then the desired outcome hopefully).

Point is though that, even though it theoretically should work without the visualization, this proves that, at least for me, it is definitely quicker andeasier with.

Ah, interesting. Now the extra bit would be, if you have a stronger belief that it would work with visualisation or - more what I mean - that this has become an "established route" for you, in a way that "willing" doesn't. I'm getting inclined to think that there's an element of mentally "occupying the space" of the target, whether that's the external thing (nosebleed) or a body feeling (sense of truth of other facts), before change happens. Just as if I really strongly frown and say "arm: move!" it probably won't happen, but if I mentally occupy the space where my arm is, then simply "asking-imagining-feeling" the outcome brings the result.

I think I can explain this in a way that makes sense. Reality comes from within outwards, not from outward in.

Ah, nicely written. So, would we say that magick is basically "requesting" and having results occur by apparently external available routes/mechanisms (a version of prayer), whereas energy work is grabbing reality and manipulating it directly?

:-) I think that is quite a good division.

One that possibly falls between: Neville Goddard's approach involved "summoning the feeling of the wish fulfilled", basically intensely feeling what the outcome would feel like. I guess that is a transformation of the inner, pushing it to the outer. It does muddy the inner/outer waters a bit though, perhaps.

Mind-Formatting: Synchronicity & Imagination (r/lawofattraction)

I've been having a couple of discussions elsewhere which might be relevant to this subreddit. I am always on the lookout for better metaphors to describe how the mind, perception, reality, intention work - e.g. the Infinite Grid metaphor for describing a shift from one experience to another. More recently, following a post about synchronicity:

• Synchronicity as a result of mind-formatting, followed by:
• The metaphor of The Imagination Room

You can probably see how these fit into the LOA scheme. Do you have a particular "way of thinking about things" that helps you understand and use this approach? How has it affected your success?

...

I'm majoring in metaphysics

Ah, nice. Actually, you might find Bernardo Kastrup's website and the related Metaphysical Speculations forum of interest. It's a little focused towards straight philosophical idealism perhaps, but sometimes interesting things come up.

I love the imagination room analogy

Great. It's quite good fun, isn't it?

I'm on a bit of a quest for what you might call "practical metaphysics" for describing personal experience, different metaphors that you can live from. It's easy to get into thinking-about things, without actually really adopting and experiencing them. So with things like The Imagination Room, the idea is that while you go about your day you can bring up that image, and kind of "feel it" in place and experiment.

Right, applicable metaphysics. Things people can use to improve their lives.

Yes. People can spend a lot of time trying to be "right" and think that will improve things. Actually, they are just being conceptually right - building self-consistent thought-castles in the sky. They end up feeling correct, but their lives remain the same. A decent metaphysics for living would actively shape lives into a happier form; you would absorb and become it. As Slartibartfast says on the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series (I assume it's in the more recent film too):

[QUOTE]

• SLARTIBARTFAST: I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
• ARTHUR: And are you?
• SLARTIBARTFAST: No. That's where it all falls down of course.

[END OF QUOTE]

Well, in an applicable metaphysics you'll get both!

Indeed. I personally consider the LoA to be both the truth to a lot of questions about existence, as well as the most applicable, hence why I threw myself into it so completely.

Agreed. The only problem with it is, because it's formulated as a list of instructions without a supporting structure, people get confused. They try to make changes in their world while still remaining, themselves, as they were. But - as the room metaphor points out - it's a matter of shifting or imagining the whole experience, which includes the person-experience. Neville Goddard from the New Thought era (The Law and the Promise, Out of this World, etc) was quite good on this, although his language is a little obscure sometimes for modern tastes. He had both the idea of world-as-imagination, and all-possibiliites-already-exist, but he never really wrote up a single description for it.

Right. People hear about this and the testimonials to its legitimacy, and accept and attempt to apply it. They don't realize that they will never see real results unless they put forth the effort to learn WHY it works, and the truth behind human nature. Without that understanding of the background processes, one can never truly use the LoA to full effect

My feeling is that people genuinely don't understand the difference between thinking about something, and imagining it from their own perspective. They do the equivalent of creating a little thought bubble containing their wish, looking at it, rather than summoning the experience around them. No amount of explanation seems to work. That's why I've come to think that spatial visual metaphors are the best way. For an example of how hard it is to bring people back to their present, spatial experience, I recommend checking out this conversation between Rick Archer and Rupert Spira [POST: Rick Archer interviews Rupert Spira]. You've got one guy (Archer) who is supposedly interesting in understanding how things are, another guy (Spira) who is leading him to it, and the first guy is constantly wanting to talk about it rather than have the experience. Maybe this is because: Most people are slightly dissociated, and coming back to being 1st-person and "embodied" is actually an unpleasant idea? So they wriggle and resist it. LOA and its ilk all involve confronting and being yourself fully.

Precisely, without the understanding behind it, and even sometimes with it if they don't take it to heart, people make their wishes and desires, but don't complete step 3, allowing. By not imagining it, like you said, they still offer resistance, most likely by doubting it will come, etc

"Absolute allowing" - with that, if one could truly commit to it, everything would be far easier.

I cultivate a view that I live in a kind and loving universe. By accepting that, I accept that deserved or not, good things will happen for me. It allows a lacksidasical certainty of outcome.

Nice style. The whole notion of "deserving" is an error anyway; unless you imagine that the universe operates on that principle. A true "law" works regardless of whether you've been a good boy or girl or not. The "gratitude" aspect to LOA is, in my opinion, a matter of associative triggering - in much the same way as part of a memory results in auto-completion of the recall (e.g. a smell or texture triggers a memory of a childhood event), feeling good results in filtering down to, and mechanical selection of, feeling-good-type events.

Associative triggering: same as smiling to make yourself happy. I think you are quite right, by being grateful, you are implying / accepting the outcome.

That's a nice example. LOA: The Amoral Santa Claus.

Time Travel, Personal Universes, Extended Persons (r/timetravel)

So, there are various theories and rebuttals for/against time travel. Wouldn't we have met time travellers already? The consistency principle prevents changes, surely? Various paradoxes? Multiple universes? Are there timelines? and so on. However, perhaps all of these can perhaps be tackled using the following principles, by short-circuiting the notion of a time-line and a persistent, consistent experience:

• Time travel is actually the creation of a discontinuity in your personal experience, such that it changes to resemble a different time. There is no 'travel into the past' as such - rather, you jump to a different 'dream'. This is the sense in which you branch to another universe. And that is also the sense in which time passes normally.
• The 'you' that jumps isn't physical. Rather, your everyday experience is like consciousness or awareness 'looking though a viewport' at the world - or similar to experiencing being a character in a dream. Hence, your body doesn't need to be transported, it is part of the 'world experience'.
• People are 'extended beings' in the sense that they are not simply located in a given universe/instance, they are 'extended' over all possibilities. So, your mother in one universe is your mother in another universe, but a different aspect of her being.
• It is possible that not all characters in your experience have a 'consciousness' looking through their viewport/perspective. You are not able to tell the difference. (Alternatively, all characters - including your viewpoint character - and all branches - are part-fragments of your overall experience.)

Time travel is this view is therefore an extreme version of changing the present moment, and does not involve 'time' as commonly thought. Therefore all changes are possible, and all experiences; all criticisms are valid in one present experience/viewport or another, just not in the one you are at. It also means that memories occur in the present, and so changing the past from here simply involves a discontinuity in the present moment experience, plus memories which remain consistent with this when summoned. So, can we short-circuit the problems of time travel by reframing our position in it and moving away from the notion of a 'timeline'?

Dimensional Jest (r/timetravel)

[META] Realityshifters and the Mandela Effect (r/MandelaEffect)

Cynthia Sue Larson's Realityshifters.com website was one of the first to tackle the subject of "reality shifts" online and has been collecting personal accounts since 1999, including encounters with what we would now call "Mandela Effect" experiences. Her latest extended blog post focuses specifically on the effect, on its breakout as a mainstream topic and her own view on its interpretation (invoking the concept of a superposition of states). Regardless of whether you agree with her take or not, it's a well-written piece and worth a read as a thought-provoker. Excerpts from the introduction:

[QUOTE]

The phrase “Mandela Effect” has been trending upward at an exponential rate between July 2015 and July 2016, as seen when viewing a graph produced by Google Trends. While many are surprised by the recent surge of interest in the “Mandela Effect,” those of us who have been researching and writing about this phenomenon of reality shifts and alternate histories have long been anticipating just such a rise of interest. The Mandela Effect is one of those things most people won’t believe in until it happens to them. Like falling in love or going through heartbreak, the Mandela Effect is something you have to experience in order to fully embrace. And even then, it often takes more than one or two experiences to break through the resistance most of us have to accepting the existence of something that fundamentally challenges our unspoken foundational assumption that facts and historical events don’t change.

[END OF QUOTE]

The entire article can be read here: Amazing Rise of the Mandela Effect [https://cynthiasuelarson.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/rise-of-the-mandela-effect/].

"On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect" - Aeon.co (r/MandelaEffect)

An essay on the Mandela Effect has been published over at Aeon.co which might be of interest. It begins:

[QUOTE]

On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect
[Caitlin Aamodt is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include behavioural epigenetics, cognitive evolution, and neuropharmacology.]
Would you trust a memory that felt as real as all your other memories, and if other people confirmed that they remembered it too? What if the memory turned out to be false? This scenario was named the ‘Mandela effect’ by the self-described ‘paranormal consultant’ Fiona Broome after she discovered that other people shared her (false) memory of the South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.

[END OF QUOTE]

[... ... ...]

Notes & Observations:

It does rather presume that the default interpretation of the Mandela Effect that people adopt is the "sorta quantum physics" one, but I guess this is because it's very much taking Fiona Broome's musings as its starting point (fair enough). It also perhaps misrepresents the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment as an explanation of the wave nature of particles leading to "two simultaneous macroscale realities", rather than its origin as illustration of the absurdity of this interpretation. It then later fails to truly justify isolating a "many-worlds" concept as derived from quantum physics from a philosophical version of it applied to subjective experience. ("Many-worlds" is really a philosophical notion anyway, surely: it is not something that can be tested; it's one possible narrative that can be attached to a raw mathematic structure which itself has no particular meaning. This possibly trips up the essay's own conclusion.)

Beyond that, its neuroscience-y account seems to me to be rather hand-waving as an explanation - but it's reasonable in terms of highlighting areas to think about for an audience ignorant of the topic. I do think that the conclusion that "a true scientist must test his or her alternative hypothesis by trying to disprove it", whilst cute, is a somewhat of a missed opportunity to highlight why that approach is actually highly problematic for this particular phenomenon. It's a basic issue we have that descriptions of the Mandela Effect cannot assume the "independent, simply-shared objective world" concept usually employed in scientific studies. But then, this is an essay by a neuroscientist rather than a philosopher (or a physicist, for that matter). It also mentions /u/EpicJourneyMan by name, so it may be of particular interest to him:

The Redditor EpicJourneyMan recounts an extremely detailed account of Shazaam from when he was working in a video store in the 1990s. In his post, he describes buying two copies of the movie and having to watch each several times to verify that it was damaged after renters complained. He then proceeds to describe the movie plot in great detail. Confabulation seems to be more frequent in the face of repeatedly unpacking a memory; in other words, someone like EpicJourneyMan, who regularly ordered children’s videos and watched them to find damaged tape, is more likely to confabulate a specific memory from that material.

Anyway, have a read, and there's a comment section to participate in if you feel so inclined. Meanwhile, Aeon is often a source of interesting viewpoints on a variety of topics, so it's worth checking in now and again, even if this particular essay doesn't hit the spot for you.

...

Q1: Pretty much the same debunking comments that is spread throughout Reddit and online. Again most of the explanations for false or incorrect memories work when taken on a one by one case, but ignores that it a large number of people having the exact same memories, in most cases independently of one another. Confabulation is a real thing and so is creating false memories, but creating the same false memory is something that should be explored further.

Yes, it's very much of that sort, albeit written for a publication under the author's own name and declared expertise in what they assume is a key relevant subject (hence posting it). It's somewhat of another example of starting from a particular platform, and then trying to answer to an abstract, generalised version of what the Mandela Effect experience is - providing an explaining-away, rather than approaching it on its own terms and explore the limits of (and address the inherent problems with ) developing an explanation. There's also a tendency to use a slightly fictionalised narrative about how people experience memory in daily life as regards this phenomenon: people do not really "remember" things as such except in a specific subset of circumstances, but instead have "contextual encounters". That is, the more interesting examples aren't about remembering facts as such, they are about ongoing personal encounters which are derived from facts, and its the shift in later encounters that triggers a discontinuous experience.

The previous incarnation of the sidebar tried to capture that:

[QUOTE]

DEFINITION
"The phenomenon where a group of people discover that a global fact - one they feel they know to be true and have specific personal memories for - has apparently changed in the world around them."
Note: Given nature of the effect, 'evidence' inevitably takes the form of shared personal memories; physical evidence of the previously remembered state is unavailable. If such evidence is discovered, that's proof of an alternative explanation.

• Your post should be about your personal encounters with examples of the Mandela Effect.
• Your post should include specific details indicating why you think it's a Mandela Effect.
• Your post should follow from the definition provided in the sidebar.

[END OF QUOTE]

However, it was perhaps a little opaque for the casual reader, and in any case people don't usually read the sidebar, and (a little like the author of our essay) push ahead based on their own first-level assumption about what the Mandela Effect is (and usually conflate the experience with the explanation) without much further consideration to a detailed definition.

Too Many Worlds: MWI and You (r/deadchildren)

...

Particularly nice - Most MWI popularizers think they are blowing our minds with this stuff, whereas in fact they are flattering them. They delve into the implications for personhood just far enough to lull us with the seductive uncanniness of the centuries-old Doppelgänger trope, and then flit off again. The result sounds transgressively exciting while familiar enough to be persuasive. You see, for some reason, Tegmark doesn’t trouble his mind about the many, many more almost-Maxes, near-copies with perhaps a gene or two mutated – not to mention the not-much-like Maxes, and so on into a continuum of utterly different beings. Why not? Because you can’t make neat ontological statements about them, or embrace them as brothers. They spoil the story, the rotters. They turn it into a story that doesn’t make sense, that can’t even be told. So they become the mad relatives in the attic. The conceit of ‘multiple selves’ isn’t at all what the MWI, taken at face value, is proposing. On the contrary, it is dismantling the whole notion of selfhood – it is denying any real meaning of ‘you’ at all. Is that really so different from what we keep hearing from neuroscientists and psychologists – that our comforting notions of selfhood are all just an illusion concocted by the brain to allow us to function? I think it is. There is a gulf between a useful but fragile cognitive construct based on measurable sensory phenomena, and a claim to dissolve all personhood and autonomy because it makes the maths neater. In the Borgesian library of Many Worlds, it seems there can be no fact of the matter about what is or isn’t you, and what you did or didn’t do.

Excerpts from 'The Akhenaten Adventure' by PB Kerr (r/deadchildren)

Excerpts from The Akhenaten Adventure by PB Kerr

I was in conversation with a user a while back (username) about all matters oneirosophic and he pointed out some passages from one of his childhood books, which are interesting in that they highlight many concepts which are common ("logical space" and "thinking means possible"), and even portray some of the same attitudes ("how it works but not really"). It's always interesting when fiction describes an underlying reality in detail, especially when it's done a way which seems a more "philosophical" than would seem to be appropriate for its audience. A case of trying to pass on a bit of knowledge into the imaginations of the young before the monotony of everyday life beats it out of them?

Anyway, I've transcribed the relevant quotes below.

´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´

Excerpt from page 111:

“Get rid of what?”

“The rhino of course.”

“What rhino?”

She looked again and saw that the rhino was gone. The sharp, animal smell that had accompanied the creature was gone, too.

“Magic,” breathed John, who was terribly impressed by Nimrod’s display of power.

“Magic? Good Lord, no, my boy. A djinn doesn’t do magic. That stuff is for kids and simple-minded adults. A djinn works his will. That is the proper way to refer to what we do. We work our will. It is, to put the case slightly differently, mind over matter. That is all.”

Excerpt from pages 166-171:

“Try and create in your own mind the impression that your word must only be used very sparingly, as if it was the red button that might launch a missile, or fire some enormous gun.

“John? You go first. I want you to open your eyes now and visualise the absence of one particular rock. Picture the rock’s disappearance as a situation in logical space. Fix it in your mind, as if the reality couldn’t possibly be any different from what you’re imagining. And then, keeping that same thought, utter your focus word as clearly as you can.”

John collected his thoughts and, remembering how Nimrod exercised his own powers sometimes, brought his feet together, raised his hands in the air at about chest height, like a footballer taking a penalty kick, and then shouted: “ABECEDARIAN!”

For ten or fifteen seconds, nothing happened, and John was about to offer his apologies and “I told you so”s to Nimrod when, incredibly, the six foot high rock he had chosen, vibrated quite visibly and a shard about the size of a walnut fell off.

“Wow,” said John. “Did you see that? Did you?” He laughed, almost hysterically. “I did it. Well, I did something, anyway.”

“Not bad for a first attempt,” said Nimrod. “It didn’t disappear but I think we’ll agree, you certainly made an impression on it. Philippa? Try the bigger one next to John’s effort. Think how your picture of the rock’s absence is attached to reality,” he suggested. “Remember, the rock’s disappearance is a possibility that must have been in the rock from the very beginning.” He paused. “When you’re ready, when you have accepted that logic deals with every possibility and that all possibilities are its facts, then press the red button that is your focus word.”

As she concentrated on the boulder and prepared to utter the word of power she had chosen, Philippa raised one hand like a ballet dancer and then waved the other like a traffic policeman.

“FABULONGOSHOOMARVELISHLYWONDERPIPICAL!”

Even as the last consonant left her lips, the boulder she had chosen began to wobble, and it kept on wobbling, quite violently it seemed to Philippa, for almost a whole minute before it stopped again. She clapped her hands together and squealed with delight.

“Yes,” Nimrod said patiently. “You certainly disturbed its molecular structure. That much was obvious. Only it seems to me you both have to get a clearer idea of nothing in your heads. You’re both confusing the idea of alteration with disappearing. A common philosophical mistake. Altering the appearance of something is very different from it not being there at all.

“Now try again. Remember, whatever is possible in logic is also permitted. A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. So what is thinkable is possible too.”

The twins were surprised at how much concentration was required to focus their djinn powers, so that it quickly seemed like hard work and left them feeling out of breath, as if they had lifted some heavy object, sprinted across a field, and attempted to solve a complicated algebraic equation at the same time. After two hours, all they had succeeded in doing was making a few largish boulders become smaller boulders, at which point Nimrod let them rest for a few mintues.

“This is hard work,” admitted John.

“In the beginning, yes,” said Nimrod. “But it’s like building physical fitness. You have to learn to develop the part of your brain where the powers are focused. Teh part that we djinn call the Neshamah. It’s the source of djinn power. The subtle fire that burns inside you. A little like the flame on an oil lamp.”

Nimrod rubbed his hands. “All right, let’s try making something appear. It’s getting near lunchtime, so how about a picnic? Here, I’ll show you the sort of thing I mean.” And so saying, Nimrod waved his arms and created a very sizeable picnic on the desert ground, complete with tartan rug and a picnic basket containing lots of sandwiches, chicken legs, fruit and thermos flasks of hot soup.

“There we are,” he said. “All you have to do is remember that you cannot create anything contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that none of us could say what an illogical world would be like. And since that is the case, the very fact that you can think of making something from the energy that is within you is enough to admit the possibility. As soon as you have convinced yourself of the possibility of creating a picnic out of yourselves, the picnic becomes easier to bring into being. Do you see?”

It took a while longer, but gradually, as the twins begin to realise that all objects contain the possibility of all situations, they started to get the hang of djinn power. Finally, after another ninety minutes of head-ringing thought and examination-level concentration, there were three very different, but apparently edible picnics lying on the ground.

Nimrod approached Philippa’s picnic first and picked up a cucumber sandwich. “The proof of the pudding, so to speak,” he said, and tasted the sandwich circumspectly. Almost immediately he spat it out.

“This tastes quite disgusting,” he said, and turned his attention to tasting one of the hot dogs from John’s picnic. “And this doesn’t taste of anything at all.” Nimrod allowed a mouthful of hot dog to fall off his tongue on to the sand like a bolus of clay. “Ugh. Like rubber.” He took out his red handkerchief and wiped his tongue. “Both of you made the same elementary mistake. You were so concerned with how the picnic might look, that you forgot to imagine how it might taste. Now do it again, only this time try to visualise yourselves having to eat the picnic. The most delicious picnic that ever was. Remember, there’s nothing worse than a picnic that looks good but which you can’t actually eat.”

After another hour and several more unsuccessful attempts the three of them finally sat down to enjoy the picnics that the twins had made with their djinn powers. The twins ate while Nimrod talked.

“Now this is much more like it,” he said, tasting their respective picnics. “John, this popcorn tastes, er… just like popcorn. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to take popcorn on a picnic, but there’s no accounting for taste. To me it has always tasted more than a little like polystyrene packing. And Philippa, I can’t remember ever having tasted a pretzel stick that tasted more like a pretzel stick.’ He shook his head. “Really, I must have a word with your mother. I can’t believe the kind of picnics you must have had.”

“I can’t believe I’m eating food that I made out of nothing,” admitted John and opened a third packet of crisps.

“That is precisely what was wrong with your first attempts,” said Nimrod, helping himself to some of Philippa’s cheesecake. “The thing is, you’re not making anything from nothing. Certainly not this cheesecake. You make things from the energy source that’s within you. The subtle fire. Remember? And the elements that surround you, of course.”

“How does it work?” asked John, forking a slice of cold ham and some pickles on to his place. “Djinn power? I mean, there must be a scientific explanation for it.”

“Er, some djinns who were scientists have tried to understand how djinn power works, yes. We think it has something to do with our ability to affect the protons in the molecules possessed by objects. Making something appear or disappear requires us to add or remove protons and thereby change one element into another. When we make something disappear like that rock, we are subtracting neutrons from the various atoms that make the rock. So you see there’s nothing magical about it. This is science. Physics. It’s impossible to make something from nothing, especially a good picnic. Now if you’d said you’d made it from thin air, you’d have been nearer the mark, John.”

Nimrod yawned. “Anyway, I think that’s enough practice for today. It’s best not to think about the science too much in case it affects your ability to use your power. It’s a bit like riding a bike in that respect; easier done than explained. Next time we’ll try you out on making a camel appear, or disappear, something alive. That’s much more difficult than a picnic. Creating something alive can make a bit of a mess. Which is why we do these things in the desert where no one really minds if you make a creature that’s inside out…”

"I got Kevin" (r/Kevin)

Over at /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix there's a story of strange phone goings-on:

Today, December 9th I go to call my mom to tell her a funny story about old people waiting for the traffic light behind the phone truck but I can't seem to get through to her, finally get through but it is really static filled and my mom says something weird is going on with my phone. I finally get home and try to call back and I hear a man's voice say hello and when I respond the phone rings again. Try and try again and I get this weird message about not saying anything, its one of those automated voices but it sounds more human. I try one last time and I get the man's voice and I ask who is this because I'm calling my mom and in a rude manner he say's "Kevin, what do you mean who's this?" and when I go to explain it rings again then clicks off.

So obviously one of you guys has been messing with the phones again. I particularly like how, being a Kevin, he is indignant that he has not been immediately recognised as such - surely it's obvious! Kevins are a class apart!

From now on, when someone's phone isn't working properly or they can't get through and get a stroppy response, they'll say that "I got Kevin".

* * *

TG Comments: /r/DimensionalJumping

POST: Today I Learned: The guy who created Sigil Magick and Dimensional Jumping may have a lot in common

I've never noticed the connection between Spare and the mirror method before - well spotted! Others have proposed alternative, potentially more enjoyable, versions of the "death posture" (AKA exert-until-exhausted) approach, but I'll leave that to the readers' imaginations.

Q1: "I'm off to charge a Sigil" the Chaos Magician said as he headed off to his favourite porn site. Haha. Not too big a fan of said method myself though - tiring if you charge Sigils often, and never quite worked as well for me as the death posture. My alternative more recently though is just regular yoga poses. I'll pick one that's uncomfortable (easy enough, I'm about as flexible as a plank of wood), attempt it until I feel the need to stop, then on release imagine the Sigil's image bursting into white light/flames in front of me. I'm definitely going to have to try the mirror method for Sigils now though. I feel like that weird blank slate of consciousness gets achieved quickly when jumping with the mirror method, so it might even beat the death posture for Sigils too. :)

Whatever works, I say. Although let's think of the trees. So long as we understand our purpose - which is basically to cease re-triggering our current state and thereby allow it to shift with intention unopposed - it's good. You can just lie down and give up completely and get much the same effect I'd suggest, but you have to give up control of your spatial attentional focus, not just your body and thoughts, and some people find it hard to get their head around that slippery idea. Fundamentally, all of this is a little like starting a new "world-dream" and just never coming back...

Q1: Fundamentally, all of this is a little like starting a new "world-dream" and just never coming back
Great analogy. I just posted something similar, a super short method where you visualize your ideal dimension, like watching a movie on a screen...and then you jump through the screen to permanently merge with the new dimension.

Yes. So, if what you truly are is basically an "imagination room" in which there are several "lines of thought" - well, jumping into a dimension is merely taking one such thought strand and making it your 3D-immersive one, by imagining that you are doing so while not imagining something else. There is nothing deeper going on behind the scenes than that; no real mechanism and no technique that isn't at root just a bit of "sensory theatre" for dramatic effect or self-persuasion. You are always just imagining-that something is happening or something is true. The trick is to find an imaginative path that logically implies the outcome you want to experience.

Yes, this is true. Kinda reminds me of this, only you're creating the images, not the TV...[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW0WRqnLYMw]

You are taking on the shape of experiential states, really. Previous attempt to depict how we might choose to imagine a jump here [The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments], but actually it doesn't matter what we choose; it what we've decided it means-that which is important. That's why it's creative and fun to play with.

Q1: That's why it's creative and fun to play with.
Indeed. Can you imagine if you were taught this as a kid? When I have kids, I'm totally teaching them this. It makes you realize how most adults have been living a lie when they abandoned their imagination, as they became older, in favor of being more "realistic."

Agreed. I think what happens usually is that we tend to unteach them this stuff. We lock them into a particular state. Denying them their ability to imagine, we also deny them the ability to intend, and that's the only power there is! No intending, no state-shifting, means full determinism - because actions don't help, only the assigned meaning of an action does, and intention is required for that. But, y'know, that's why the "DJ kids" will be great!

POST: Is time travel possible?

Initial thoughts - I think it's probably better to not frame this as "time travel" as such, because that comes with a lot of conceptual baggage. If instead we consider what we're experiencing right now to be like a "sensory dream" or a "strand of thought" of being-a-person-in-2016, then what you're aiming to do is start a new strand (of being-a-person-in-1996, say) and then never revert back to this one. This at least gives you a sense of what exactly it is you want to accomplish, and where you might begin. For starters, it involves completely releasing your attachment to this strand of experience. A few people have reported experimenting with this sort of thing, but not permanently (yet). Some people are taking it particularly seriously, albeit for different reasons than you: see here for example [POST: Perception, reality, time travel and temporal dysphoria].

Something that is helpful, I think, is to stop considering "universes" as things which are "happening" at the same time as your experience is happening. If you can embrace the notion that all that is ever "going on" is your actual experience - like you are scanning your attention across a static landscape of pre-existing sensory moments - then conceiving of this sort of change becomes simpler. What you are seeking to do, is to discontinuously move from "this moment", with the current facts implied by it, to "that moment". The rest would potentially take care of itself, just as when a dream begins. When a dream begins, if you are aware when it starts, what happens is: your body goes quiet, you get something like sparkles appearing in front of you, which turn into sensory fragments, which eventually coalescence into a scene, which then pops into being a 3D-immersive environment. From that moment on, all subsequent "moments" follow from that first scene, logically, without any direct intending on your part. It is also done by "autocompletion", in the sense that the first moment implies all the others. Since we are an undivided whole, like a metaphorical blanket of material, to define one part is to define the entirety, like how making a fold in a blanket inherently implies the shape of the rest of the blanket. Therefore, all you need seek is a single sensory 3D-immersive moment which implies-that you are back in 1996. It is hard to put this stuff into words, isn't it? It's like trying to talk about something that is "outside of thought", but using being able to use thoughts!

In the case of something huge (waking up in the past, in a different body, having missing limbs return, a different gender, etc), it would require you to in a sense believe you are that person already, then let reality force "rationalism" down your throat and insist that the previous moment was just a dream and you always were the new person.

In one sense, though, it's not really a "huge" jump - because you aren't going anywhere! You're not doing something you don't already do every night anyway; it's just that you're not going to be returning to this thread of experience. But it doesn't necessarily matter how you conceive of it, so long as you conceive of it in a way that has an internal logic to it. You could certainly go down the route of rationalising a large change in the way described so that you could accept it - while still retaining your current concept of what a "world" is. But equally, you could work on changing your concept of what "worlds" and "experiences" are more generally - effectively changing what "rational" means - and therefore have discontinuous changes make logical sense anyway. In other words, you can work on believing that you are "already that person", or you can work on believing that the nature of experience itself is different than you have been thinking up until now (which effectively involves realising that you are not actually any "person"). By taking the latter path, you are opening up all sorts of possibilities without having to go through the theatre of convincing yourself about individual things.

Perhaps then that is just a personal hang up of mine. Fear is a strong word, so maybe it is better to say that I am "concerned" with the idea of breaking the fundamental way I see reality. It seems to me that once you get over that hurdle then you've opened yourself to a more dreamlike reality, where anything goes. So at the very least, I know I couldn't do it the way your saying, because I'd be too afraid of breaking my sense of reality. To me its far easier to make changes that can be self-rationalized.

And that's totally fine. I guess the point is that you can recognise you have a choice, and you can go with the approach that feels right for you having deliberately selected it, rather than just having ended up with it by default.

POST: Color changes in the header?

Yes, is the short answer! Of course, just because there's a "plausible explanation" doesn't necessarily preclude there having been a change (since for the world to make sense, every change is coherent, meaning that subsequent experiences will support it, including those of encountering an apparent in-world reason for the change).

unless i start overtly creating a new world-view

That's one way - basically, "reformatting" yourself with a different worldview, and having subsequent experiences arise that are "as if" that were true. This is what Active Metaphors are about. The other way, is simply to repeatedly perform experiments such that the outcomes have accumulated so much that to dismiss the results as coincidence would be ridiculous.

POST: Will the latest 2 glass overide previous ones?

You should consider each two glasses session as being a separate, independent operation. In other words, it's fine to do the exercise for one thing, and then another time, do it for another. Just make sure that each session is focused on a single intention, though; don't do batches. In the spirit of research (conducting experiments to see if there is anything to this whole thing or not), I'd generally leave a gap of about a week between sessions, to allow a bit of breathing space, and see what happens. And do remember to follow the final instruction for the exercise.

The final instruction being carry on with life?

That's the one! The idea is that the change has been made at the moment of the exercise - it becomes "true now that this happens then" - and there's no need to tinker with what has already been laid out, and indeed doing so excessively tends to counter-intend what you've just put in place. You might find some additional detail from a previous comment useful:

Something to note: there is a difference between writing out a description, say, and actually linking objects (mental or physical) to particular situations or patterns. So no matter what the format, be sure to actually ponder your current and target states, and let the words come from that contemplation, rather than just writing out something or working out the words to use intellectually. That way, the words will be "handles" onto those specific states, rather than simply unattached words that will trigger a more general extended pattern. Apart from that, as someone else mentioned, you are meant to do this once, then put the glasses away and carry on with your life. The change happens when you do the exercise - it becomes true now that things will happen then. Checking and tinkering afterwards tends to imply the initial pattern again, essentially re-intending the starting point, a bit like being in a standing position and confirming just how "standing" you are by sitting down again.

Basically, if you do feel moved to do something, then you follow your intuition and do it - but you don't need to worry about that or check whether there's something to do; it'll arise of its own accord if there is something. So don't even worry about whether to wait x months, or whether to do something or nothing - just leave the whole issue be. It'll take care of itself; you don't need to "work it out".

...Well, that's the trick: generally you can't "pre-know" your experience, because to know your experience is the experience of it! But in your everyday life, you already operate on the faith that your intentions are going to follow through by themselves anyway. Walking along the street depends on it, for example!

Anyway, as always you build up trust in an approach by trying it, and repeating it, until you find you can rely upon it. And after all, in many cases where you are applying this exercise, what's the alternative? It's not like there is another approach that would give you certainty. So why get hung up on being certain in advance with this approach?

You get the idea! :-)

So, treat this as a sort of experiment or an investigation - you do the exercise, and then later you see what the results are. That'll make it easier to let it happen. Good luck!

POST: Visualizing or manifesting feelings/emotions?

If you conceive of yourself as being literally an "imagination space", with the current world around you just being a particularly strong image unfolding within it, then things are a bit clearer. If that were the case, if you truly were an "imagination space", and you wanted a particular experience, how would you go about summoning it? Well, you'd sort of "overlay" or "refocus on" the desired experience versus the current image, as if it were actually happening, including the visual, auditory, textural and emotional aspects. You'd imagine-that it was true, here, now. Now, if you ponder how thinking works, it tends to happen associatively. That is, if you think "red car" then from that point your line of thought could go to any thought where "red car" is incorporated. Basically, from the infinite possibilities of all thoughts for ever, you have selected out a subset that contains "red car" imagery or ideas. The more refined your thought, the narrower the selection criteria, the more specific you are being - the more defined the pattern. And so it is with this. If you "picture" something then that selects out a certain subset of possibilities, the experiences within which that image appears. If you also "feel" something with that picture, then that further narrows the outcomes, to ones with that feeling. If you just do the feeling - say, feeling happy and lucky - then you select all possibilities where that feeling is a part of the experience. Viewing it as direct selection in this way, makes it clearer that you are doing something like associative filtering, rather than a hand-waving "request" or "programming" type operation.

Aside - Note that "visualisation" doesn't just mean a visual image (or it's not meant to just refer to that). It's a multi-sensory image. It includes sound, texture, and if you are visualising immersively (from the 1st-person, as if it were happening, being "clothed" in the image) then the emotional content and felt-meaning of the experience also. Unless you are doing symbolic operations, then that is what you want to aim for: you do not think-about images and feelings, rather you imagine-that they are happening here, now, as if you were overwriting your current scene with the target scene. You imagine-that you are experiencing a scene, but with the meta level where you know-that doing so means-that your outcome is being defined as a part of your world experience.

POST: No offence, but I think you're telling porkies...

When involving the free will of someone else, it has an effect on the outcome.

That's only really a problem, though, if you adhere to the assumption that "the world" is simply-shared, as a "single, shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and that what you actually are is an "object" within such a place. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, it's one of the assumptions that some experimentation and contemplation might lead you to challenge.

The world is both separate and not separate. The truth is that this is no dichotomy. However, with being limited by the perception of being human, on the "surface", there is a type of separation, but the surface of things is also the connector of things. While it is correct to say we are all one, if the intention isn't of that, or of it is focused on a separation based thought, with love not being involved, only fear based want, then don't expect an outcome that is the best one for you in that moment.

I think we can be more focused about this. Namely, we might observe that our intentions often are constructed upon, and therefore continue to imply (are also intentions of), our assumptions or conceptual frameworks. That is, if we intend something in terms of a spatially-shared, temporally unfolding place, then in addition to our outcome, we also get a further entrenchment of that context.

A1: Dimensional jumping, LOA, etc. Whatever you wanna call it...it's ultimately the same thing. You focus on a desire with a feeling of it absolutely done already in the present. And what you have you don't need. Gotta have that faith and conviction that it is DONE. So you have it DONE in your mind. Next step is to let go. It's all about playful curiosity and wonder. The same as a child would have. If you need or want it and approach it like that. All that you will get is more absense. Dimensional jumping is simply another way to approach this. THIS NEVER FAILS. However your doubts and fears will prevent manifestation because it implies desperation and you will get more things in your reality that evoke further desperation. Look into the work of Neville Goddard.

POST: [Non-intentional jump?]My laptop screen was cracked..

We jump unintentionally all the time. [edit: Why is this downvoted. lol]

Although, if a jump requires an intention - that is, if "to intend" is equivalent to "to shift", and a "shift" is a re-patterning of oneself from one fully-defined deterministic sequence of moments to another - then it is, by definition, not possible to shift "unintentionally". Intention will always be involved in such a shift. (Here, "an intention" refers to a fact, outcome or pattern that is being brought into experience by increasing its contribution, and "intending" is the act of increasing that contribution. The result is a "shift" of state and hence deterministic path.)

Whether it is done knowingly and deliberately, though, is another matter. It is not necessarily the case that we have deliberately chosen a particular outcome; it may be a collateral result of (something that is implied by) another intention. I'd argue that many people, in fact, pretty much never intend deliberately. Some people may never intend at all, and largely run through their deterministic path without ever redirecting it in a meaningful way. (Of course, others may be regularly counter-intending against their present state as the corresponding moments arise - that is, resisting and thereby shifting against their own experience and prior intentions.)

So it might be better to say, "most people, when they intend, do so without realising what they are doing, or even that they are doing it".

I drive up to a drive-thru restaurant to eat. I want their "Terrific Burger"

Did you intend to have the "Terrific Burger" at that point, though, by making the decision to have it (if formulated as a fact rather than a mere possibility)? The sequence of moments could be a done deal before you even enter the drive-thru! Scenario B could be deemed an intentional outcome if so.

Scenario A: two realities exist at that moment one in which I will have cheese or one where I won't

We could say that all possible scenarios exist always. However, in any state then it is already the case that one particular sequence of moments is deterministically laid out. That's what will play out if you don't deliberately redirect (although you won't know what that is, until it does). The devil's in the details, though. If one "intends to go to the drive-thru and order a burger and ask for cheese", then that is different to "intending to go the the drive-thru and have a cheese burger". One defines an act as a fact (with the possibility of cheese), one defines an outcome as a fact (cheese burger will happen).

Both shape their reality, one is just purposeful and with meaning, the other is passively accepted as being what it is ...

What we were talking about, though, was the idea that people are "jumping all the time". In the latter case, the person isn't "jumping" (that is, redirecting their ongoing experience) at all. They aren't "shaping" anything; they are remaining in whatever "shape" they are in. And actually, even in the former case they might not be...

We should note, here, that having the sensory experience of apparently thinking or deciding or performing actions is not the same as intending/reshaping/shifting your state to incorporate a particular outcome or fact. One could experience "the act of ordering cheese" and there be no intention at all involved in this; it can simply play out as a sequence of moments already defined as one's state. "Shifting" involves updating the facts of the world (and therefore the sequence of moments one will experience), and is not an action as such (since it is "before" that, although action might be used as a "handle" onto an change). That's why I think the idea of "we are jumping every xx fractions of a second" isn't much use, since it conflates the concept of "moments" with the concept of "dimensions", and makes "intention" (or "shifting state") meaningless, potentially.

Yet they are but they just didn't know that their failure of intent and choice led them to their consequent result but you know they jumped because prior to receiving the 'Terrific Burger' they did not have a burger to receive. The new dimensional state is different from the previous dimensional state.

This makes it seem as though "not having a burger" and later "having a burger" is a sign of a state change in and of itself, but that is not the sense in which one is in a "state". A state is not an inventory, or a set of facts of the moment. Rather, it is the definition of your entire path of experience - all moments. It is the full definition of the world (or "world-pattern", to keep things suitably abstract). So, at the moment before our friend goes into the drive-thu, he is in a particular state - or rather, the moment is part of a particular state - and he will remain in that state eternally, unless he intends a change. At that moment it is "true now that he will receive a burger then". A state is "outside of time" or "before" time (in fact, "time passing" could be said to be a particular static pattern that is a component of a state) and since moments are aspects of states, it doesn't make sense to use events as indicators of state shifts (unless they were done knowingly and deliberately - perhaps). In other words, "receiving the burger" is an aspect of a particular state, and it was true from the point of his last intention/shift onwards. And this last intention may have been a long time ago, about something completely different (e.g. "it is true now that I win this game of golf then"), with "receiving the burger" just happening to be a fact in the resulting state, as collateral outcome or implication. If he does deliberately intend the specific outcome of "receiving the burger", then that could be seen as a shift - or perhaps better phrased, an assertion of a particular fact in order to guarantee its presence within his state.

It is not a situation of 'I tried and it didn't succeed' but rather 'I didn't know I could and now I can guide my success'.

This, I think is fine. The recognition of one's ability to update the facts-of-the-world and have their experience correspond to a new setup from this moment onwards, is ultimately the most important thing. The structure of a conceptual framework is secondary.

Q: This makes it seem as though "not having a burger" and later "having a burger" is a sign of a state change, but that is not the sense in which one is in a "state".
Right, that is why this was just a metaphor of how the concept works and not the literal concept. lol.
This, I think is fine. The recognition of one's ability to update the facts-of-the-world and have their experience correspond to a new setup from this moment onwards, is ultimately the most important thing. The structure of a conceptual framework is secondary.
Which is / was the point. :D You are jumping dimensions anyway so why not intend what jumps you want to make instead of unintentionally jumping to a reality you never desired in the first place.

Yeah... but if it's not a self-consistent illustration of the concept of "dimensions", then there's not much point in having a metaphor ("ordering at a drive-thru") of another metaphor ("dimensional jumping"). Of course, this stuff can get tangly pretty quickly anyway!

Ultimately, there is nothing really "behind" descriptions such as "law of attraction" and "dimensional jumping" - they are never "what is really happening" because there isn't anything behind the scenes, as it were - but I do think they can be useful for formulating intentions, and thereby asserting a pattern onto experience (i.e. defining a state). The problem is, I think, that a lot of descriptions don't actually give a stable platform from which to make the change ("law of attraction" particularly), whereas I think if you follow the "dimensions==states" concept carefully to its end, you get a very good context to use which isn't entangled with content. That's why keeping the "state" concept as the base structure is fairly important (to that description), because otherwise it becomes yet another unfocused "wishing" structure like LOA.

Q: whereas I think if you follow the "dimensionsstates" concept carefully to its end, you get a very good context to use which isn't entangled with content.==
Right. Just like there are audio learners, visual learners, audio/visual learners, and kinetic learners, I believe that explaining it only one way disadvantages others who, by nature, understand things differently because it is how they are wired. So, one way of understanding makes you feel good and understand the concept, might alienate the other 75% who don't see it in that same light.

As I touch on in the other comment (we've bifurcated!), though, what I have in mind here is maintaining coherence so that there is a model that can be understood at a detailed level, and therefore used as a framework. "Dimensional jumping" is just a name - it can't be understood in and of itself. It's the description that it is the name of that can be understood. If that description just amounts to "hey we're always jumping dimensions so let's choose nice ones", then the model actually has no content. It's back to "wishing" and "feeling" again, LOA-style; you can't really build on it. (For instance, the formulation of the two glasses exercise doesn't follow from such a vague notion.)

Like you said, the two glasses exercise doesn't follow from a vague notion, but at the same time I figured out how to jump without the two glasses exercise simply because I knew how it could be accomplished without it.

Indeed, the two glasses exercise is constructed to leverage a pre-existing pattern of the world. However, no component of the exercise is the "cause" of the change as such - a neither are you, the apparent performer of the exercise (in the sense of you-as-person). The main purpose of the exercise is really to produce an experience which becomes the starting point for further contemplation and experimentation.

Like I said in a previous discussion: "As people experiment with different methods, these too are just examples of how other people achieved their desired outcome and not necessarily the reason or cause of the outcome."

Yes, all apparent outcomes are really examples of experiences. Ultimately, if one pursues this, the very idea that there is a "how it works" falls under suspicion, and all experiential content - including the experience of apparently "doing" or "causing" something - is seen as results rather than causes. The cause is sort of "before" experience, if it can strictly speaking be called a "cause" at all.

Yet, my understanding of what happened too is not necessarily the reason or cause of the outcome.

I think one comes to recognise that "understanding" is not, in fact, a description of "how things are", but rather a pattern one can adopt or impose upon oneself, in order to have experiences "as if" it were true. You can't actually understand (that is, think of conceptually or discuss in language) the "nature of experiencing", because understanding is itself an experience, and as such cannot get "behind" the primary strand of experience (of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world, typically). You don't explain these experiences in terms of causal mechanisms, because there is no mechanism behind (or anything else) them. All you can do is create "parallel constructions in thought" which may or may not be useful when it comes to patterning one's experience (that is, imposing particular patterns or facts upon one's state) in future.

Which is / was the point. :D You are jumping dimensions anyway so why not intend what jumps you want to make instead of unintentionally jumping to a reality you never desired in the first place.

I do get why you like the idea of "hey you're jumping anyway so why not make it count" - that's fine. It was more the "jumping xx times per second" idea which I think goes too far, creates conceptual problems when it comes to designing a good thinking framework for formulating intentions.

Note, though, that what I have in mind isn't just "intending for outcomes in situations" here, but actually intending modifications to the "formatting" of our ongoing experience. It's that extra bit that's the motivation for being a bit more careful on this.

I believe we are saying the same thing. :D

Heh, quite possibly so, such is the way of these discussions!

POST: My personal experience with the two cups method

Could you give some tips on how to "carry on with life" after doing the exercise? I recently did the exercise but I can't stop thinking about it.

Passing thoughts are fine. You don't need to "solve" those. Treat them like they were an itchy elbow or something - your attention is briefly drawn to them, then you carry on with what you are doing. You wouldn't obsessively focus on a passing twinge or itch on your skin, so why would you pause and focus on a passing thought? They're both just passing sensory imagery, and equally unimportant. Some people don't actually realise they can choose to not bother thinking about something, to do something else instead - they assume they have to complete the line of thought before they can move on, as if thoughts were always special and meaningful. This isn't the case. It's optional. By deliberately attending to a thought, you are choosing to make that pattern more dominant, and a doubtful thought or a worry means a "doubtful outcome" pattern. A passing thought is just a possibility, an aspect of your state, flickering briefly into the senses. Focusing on a thought, though, is an increase in its contribution. So leave them be. There's a book, non-esoteric, called Stop Thinking Start Living by Richard Carlson, which is quite a good read for people stuck on this in life generally.

POST: more feedback on my jump

Q: Is it in poor taste or rude to ask for proof in this sub? Only because paychecks would be pretty good proof, and fairly easily shown? Beyond strange, happening upon those cards reminds me of finding drawings in my sketchbook I can't remember drawing, but so much more intriguing...

It wouldn't really prove anything, though, I suggest? Someone could easily, upon receiving a pay rise, just say that they'd intended for it beforehand. Also, I think, it perhaps misses the point. That is, that the only way to truly satisfy yourself whether there's something to this (or not), is to conduct your own experiments and observe the results. Other people's stories are, to an extent, irrelevant except as an inspiration to check things out ourselves, or maybe provide different ways of approaching the "investigation". Meanwhile, the "meaningfulness" of an outcome tends to be quite personal I'd say (meaning that it's hard to convey the impact getting a result has, because a surface-level description just sounds like a coincidence, and it's the larger context of the situation which tends to make it - occasionally - astonishing or disruptive of one's usual perspective). To an outside observer, they often seem kinda irrelevant or unlikely or mistaken.

Q: Sure, like any "proof" of that nature it's not worth much on its own, but I suppose occaisonal attempts at giving some sort of evidence would make skeptical people more inclined to believe, or at least give this sub an appearance of something more than just storytelling- and this seemed much more "provable" than some others. It was a genuine question, and it seems that it /is/ a bit poor etiquette, so my apologies.

It's a completely fair question for you to ask: is there value in requesting evidence that a story happened?

If the overall project was to document instances of an objective phenomenon, then there could well be value in it. However, ultimately the underlying topic here is "the nature of experiencing", so in the end it's always down to personal exploration - and then sharing your stories and thoughts in order to inspire others or gain their insight. I think we have to mostly go with the notion that the posts themselves are trustworthy (as per Rule #1) because there's no real way to prove authenticity of the report overall, only (irrelevant) elements of it. Or, rather, we should keep an "open verdict" until we conduct our own experiments and see results for ourselves (or not, of course). It's actually okay that the sub has an appearance of storytelling, because the sub isn't trying to persuade anyone of anything. The guidelines specifically suggest that you shouldn't "believe" anything here (or anywhere else, for that matter), until you've looked into it properly yourself. You (probably) can't prove "dimensional jumping" itself (to others), any more than you can prove that you are aware.

...

No, I disagree. This isn't about "believing" as such (although, for sure, if we define "belief" carefully, when can connect it somewhat to a broader idea of "patterning" experience). You do not need to "believe" in the owls or two glasses exercise in order to get results - at all. In fact, the exercises deliberately omit the underlying thinking upon which they are constructed, so it's hard to believe in them as mechanisms at least, even if you want to.

...Not even that? What does matter, though - and this is where a specific idea of "belief" comes in - is that you don't interfere or counter-intend subsequently. That is, you don't allow doubt to cause you to tinker with your state, and perhaps pattern yourself with the idea that things cannot or unlikely to happen. This is a "non-thing", though, rather than a "pro-thing". So it is better to neither believe nor disbelieve, and instead just do the thing, and then "carry on with your life"!

POST: OCD making me visualise really bad things - will they come true?

Don't worry about them (easier said than done, I suppose). Passing thoughts are just that: passing. The aren't causal. It's not the same as sitting down and focusing on an image with intention. Don't try to wrestle with them; you don't need to "solve" those thoughts and images; just let them be. It's actually the wrestling or solving that is the issue. (Fighting the images basically persists them - that is, fighting something implies that there is something to fight, further narrows your attention upon it.)

You could consider a thought to be like an artefact on the overall infinite static landscape of experience: sure, you can stare at that tree forever and worry about it falling in the woods, or you just look elsewhere (or "carry on with your life", as the final instruction in two glasses says). It is your choice to continue to engage with the thought, even though you might not realise this; you can choose to leave them alone. This is easier to recognise if you can put the thought in context, for example by doing the Feeling Out exercise quoted in this comment. You might find this essay on OCD [missing] an interesting and useful read, and also these books for the perspectives they offer: Richard Carlson's Stop Thinking Start Living, and David K Reynold's Constructive Living.

so if I'm understanding correctly, without intent these thoughts won't happen

Right. A passing thought is just that: a passing image across your "screen" of experience, just like any other passing sensory fragment. Images are not themselves causal; intention is the only true cause. It can be useful to distinguish, perhaps, between "passing thoughts" and "active thoughts". In the active case, one is deliberately summoning and focusing on an image with the intention (or implied intention) that doing so means-that the content of the image will later arise in daily life. In the passive case, it's like having, I dunno, an itchy elbow or something. If you have an itchy elbow, do you stop everything you are doing and focus on that itch, worry about its meaning for the future of your elbow, spend the rest of the day returning to check your elbow sensations for signs of itching? Of course not! You scratch it, move on, if it remains ticklish, you just go "oh okay" and get back to work anyway. If you want, if it's the same thought again and again, you can experiment with the equivalent of "scratching the itch". After all, that thought is just an image - that is, a visual, auditory, motion, textural composite image, which is made from you. You can alter its properties, in fact, and thereby change its "intrusiveness". For example, you might play with reducing the visual brightness, making the image black and white, adding or removing a frame around the image, making it a still image (if it's a moving one), changing its distance from you, changing the image size, make it silent, and so on. Try each property and see what effect it has on how impactful the thought is. Do this just for fun, even, to find out more about what makes a thought or image have an emotional intensity or not. However, in this particular case, it's really just easier to just-decide that it doesn't matter and then return to whatever actually needs doing in the moment, now, in your life.

...

Q: ?!#&/!

Please ignore that reply; it's really not appropriate for what you are describing. You really have no need to worry at all about this. (No disrespect to the commenter, I just think it's important not to be too casual about advice in this specific sort of situation, because it can easily spiral.)

POST: I don't know what to say.

[POST]

My life is in shambles. I wont get into the specifics of it. I love my SO, but our life is falling apart. I've been reading this sub almost obsessively for the past week. Not that I am looking for a "miracle cure", but I felt hopeless. For every step forward we were launched a mile back. I kept toying with the idea, but Im never up between midnight and 3 am. Even then my bathroom mirror isn't that big, I dont have candles, blah blah blah. I read the post (or link, I dont rightly remember) about laying on the floor, head slightly elevated with feet on the ground and to just....be.

So I laid on my bed today. (I used the bed because we have family living with us and the living room floor would have been an odd choice and I would have been asked if I finally snapped.) I am just done with life (not suicidal, just needed to check out for a bit). I turned my tv off, put unplugged headphones on and just tried to melt away. As I laid there, I tried to imagine myself in a white luminescent room (sorry if I spelled that wrong). I didnt so much say to myself as just try to feel it "Body, Im done. If you want to get up and go, get up and go". If I got fixated on a thought, I wiped it away. I continuously went back to the white room. If thoughts did come through that were negative, I turned them to positives before I wiped them away. At one point, I either fell asleep or legitimately let go (my vote is for let go). I felt as though my body started to lift my head up and then my consciousness realized what was happening and slammed me back into my brain. Thats the only way to describe it. My heart was pounding and my mouth was so dry. So I calmed myself. Went back to my good thoughts (usually trying to turn a negative thought or emotion to a good one involving money, since that would fix a LOT of my problems right now), and back to my white room. This same feeling happened 2 more times. Where I felt like my body was just going to do what it was going to do and I was just an outsider watching until I was slammed back into my brain. I dont know what to make of this. It both excites me and scares me. It wasnt normal. Ive meditated before and this is nothing like what Im used to. I feel stupid and silly sharing this. I feel like an irrational person using psuedo-science to rationalize my feelings of lost-ness. But I am literally at the end of my rope. Im not hoping for miracles.... just enough change to make it in life and be genuinely happy. I am going to continue to do this every day. Maybe there is something to this dimensions thing.

Edit: I wrote this right after I came back to "reality" (meaning I sat up, turned the TV back on, listened to my SO's family fighting in the other room, etc etc etc) and as I sit here... I have a massive headache and I feel nauseous and kind of... out of it. This has never happened in other meditation sessions Ive done. I dont know what to make of any of this. Ideas? Conjectures? Theories?

[END OF POST]

Well, that sounds quite fun. (You were doing a 'daily releasing exercise' with the 'imagination room' or a variation, sounds like?)

And your later experience is the beginning of an OBE/lucid dream. You detached and shifted your attention away from your sensory surroundings and your experience followed through. Next time you try it, don't worry - have the confidence to let go more completely, to just allow whatever happens to happen, and you'll have some interesting experiences. If you're not familiar with lucid dreaming, check out Robbert Waggoner's Lucid Dreaming book. If you've not heard of OBEs, Donald DeGracia's free class notes are worth a read. The hypnogogia technique described is similar to what you accidentally did. Don't worry about "evil spirits". A good quote from DeGracia:

Sepherial went on to explain how it's really important to realize that fear is something we create in our own minds and that if we are to get involved in [these] things, we must learn NOT to fear things anymore. You can replace fear with understanding. When you understand something, you no longer need to fear it. If it is truly a dangerous thing, but you understand it, you will not fear it, you will avoid and respect it. And there are other things we fear that, in reality, are not dangerous things. These are the worst kinds of fear [...] to have. These are fears you have created in your own mind, for whatever reasons. These fears are like weeds that grow in the garden of your mind, and you should eliminate these.
-- do_obe class notes, Donald DeGracia

Q1: I have not read of lucid dreaming (I have heard of it, though). I will definitely have to read this book and read up on this, thank you!

It's great. You can have this life and a radically different parallel life (or lives) in dreams as well. Much fun!

...

Have you ever encountered an evil spirit? You can certainly summon demons into your life but... they are you. In these things, you bring a lot of your own beliefs and fears into it. That's why the 'transition point' can be very frightening. But really... treat it like lucid dreaming, access to the larger realms of mind. I've never known anyone had have any problems.

I honestly believe they are real, external things.

That may be the problem! ;-) Joking aside, you can certainly have experiences of apparently independent forms, but I wouldn't view them as external except in a notional sense. The main point is, nobody should allow fear of that to prevent them doing AP/etc. If you encounter things you are uncomfortable with then, just as in waking life, you give them a wide berth. (I suggest.)

If you can! I actually always wanted to do AP growing up, but was terrified of doing so because our house was haunted as fuck. I'd be open to trying it again now that I've moved out, I dunno.

Really, just do it. You seem to be imagining that you are some powerless dot that is at the mercy of anything that happens by. Really not. The best way to dispel your fears is to read accounts by people who have explored it thoroughly: Donald DeGracia as mentioned, Robert Monroe, Oliver Fox. There are many reasons to choose to interpret your experiences as "part of you" and to accept the fear as fear of aspects of yourself. This applies to dreams, OBEs, and waking life (which are the same really). If you occasionally have a startling experience, it'll be no worse than having an intense dream - only you'll be conscious and able to manage it accordingly. Are you scared of going to sleep at night? ;-)

POST: Jumping ship?

What happens to a memory when you aren't recalling it?
What happens to your name when nobody is calling it?

That sort of thing.

A "dimension" isn't a place so much as an experience that you're having.

Q1: But where do "I" come from? How did the collection of experiences that is me start?

A very good question, and there are various ways to approach it. The simplest is: a hypnogogia type process in which random sparkles became patterns, shapes, images, a scene, and finally a full-blown environment, apparently centred around a certain perspective. You-as-consciousness, an open aware space, were always there. However, the world-pattern that is arising within you now, the content of your experience, was formed as a sensory dream. That includes the basic formatting of time and space. This is The Forever-Now World.

POST: Questions! I don't have anything holding me to a dimension, I want to see how far away from this reality I can get.

But there is nobody to accept you just the way you are, except for yourself...

Perhaps to get to a universe (state) where you have reached self-acceptance and therefore the experience of others accepting you. Oh, and have cool things.

Anyway, wait, why am I listening to you? You're not even real!
Sha-la-la-la I can't hear you!
[puts fingers in ears] . . .

;-)

EDIT: Of course, maybe you enjoy the thrill of the fight and overcoming (apparent) adversity.

POST: How to shift universes by Bashar

Hi, if you're going to post a link can you include text with your own discussion and experiences? There's no point in this place becoming yet another Bashar link fest. Thanks!

I've never seen any Bashar links here, hence why I posted it. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding how parallel universes work and how to shift here.

Bashar, fun though he is, is just one of hundred of different versions of the same underlying idea - which is essentially that there are different patterned experiences available, which individual private views can select amongst. Parallel universes aren't "places".

(You can even channel your own version if you like: sit in front of a computer, type "How does reality really work?", get comfortable and relaxed and then - whenever you feel ready - just start typing out your answer without thinking about it in advance.)

Hmm, how about you give me a quick summary (two paragraphs) of how you think parallel universes work and how to shift, based on Bashar's output?

Q1: Well, that's just it, you've perfectly illustrated that you don't understand parallel universes. Forget about bashar for the moment just look at quantum physics. Every out come/choice is its own real universe. Bells theorem shows the observer creates their universe by observation. So you are just one version of infinite versions of you that all exist. Shifting to another parallel reality happens all the time, it's by your conscious higher self controlled by emotions, thoughts, frequency, beliefs, vibration and visualisation that decides which universe you shift to. There is a recent book called the afterlife of billy fingers, where he explains how everything is recorded in the Akashic records, and you can sift through all the decisions/actions in your life and see what happened if you made a different choice, they are played out and recorded for real. That's how the law of attraction works. It's a physical law, there simply are infinite number of universes of you. It's all holographic you see, it's not real, like a computer running millions of versions of gta at once. That computer is God, as God wants to experience everything. You are just a tiny piece of God running In a simulation. I suggest you take some LSD to find out. Better still die. You can by accident thus having a NDE. Or just leave your body by means of an out of body experience OBE by astral projection. Once you aren't in your physical,body and outside of the hologram you can see this really clearly. So until you take the red pill, reality is exactly what you fool yourself or believe it to be. Clever eh?

Okay, you should forget about quantum physics: Quantum physics is a mathematical theory used to create a description of available energy states and their probabilities in certain narrowly-defined situations. It does not involve creating parallel universes; that's an interpretative fiction which although fine for fun, isn't scientific, since there can never be evidence for it.

(Recommended reading: George Ellis on MWI and the like; N. David Mermin on reification of concepts; Christopher Fuchs on QBism.)

And also forget about "infinite versions of you", because to pursue that notion you will have to work out what a "you" is and how there can be multiple versions. Really there is only one you: the subjective conscious perspective in which experiences arise. The world is not a "spatially-extended place, unfolding in time" and you are not a person in it. Rather, you are a conscious perspective having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Which is what allows you to change that experience using intention. There is no fixed underlying substrate. What you are doing, it seems, is confusing one particular metaphor (many worlds imagery, computer simulation imagery) for "how it is really". But the thing is, there is no "how it is really", except for consciousness taking on the shape of experiences. From the sidebar, you'll notice that both The Hall of Records and The Infinite Grid are basically versions of the same idea that 'Akashic records' is based on: that all possible experiences are available, and that one can select one's trajectory through them. Have you read any of the "related posts" as listed in the sticky post? Particularly useful are this one (plus links) for establishing your personal perspective, and maybe this one to give yourself a good metaphor for direct experience. If you don't even have the understanding of what "you" are sorted, then everything else is meaningless and immediately wrong. Parallel universes are metaphors; experiences are like an ongoing dream that never ends. You are never "in" your physical body in the first place.

So until you take the red pill, reality is exactly what you fool yourself or believe it to be.

Exactly right! And that includes any concepts of personhood and the structure of "the world" or "the universe". This is why we talk in terms of "active metaphors" here: the adoption of a metaphor shapes the experiences you have. The short version:

"However you imagine that it works, That's how it works." -- The rule of metaphor

Right now, you probably believe yourself to be something like a conscious soul that is in a place, believe that the world is a "place" made from parts and unfolds in time, and believe that events happen and that actions are performed. None are correct. All good fun!

[COMMENT]

Q1: You are confusing "remote viewing" with " parallel worlds ". Time doesn't exist, and the world you sense is a holographic illusion. Parallel world are a real thing, not some imaginary construct. If you want to really know the truth, you have to leave your physical body and the 3d dimension illusion. In order to do this you have to either :

1. Die, that is have a NDE, near death experience.
2. Take red pill, that is enthogens like LSD, DMT, Aya, shrooms.
3. OBE, astral projection, out of body experience.
   All of the above will take you out of the physical dimension, for real. Until you grow the balls to really leave this dimension, you are simply living in an holographic illusion. But I really don't think you are smart enough to discover the real truth for yourself by real practical experience. Think about it, wouldn't you rather know for real ?

[END OF COMMENT]

Sigh. There is no physical dimension. Don't you get it? That's the whole point. There are no physical places. Everything other than your conscious perspective, that open structureless aware space, is an imaginary construct. Everything. Any discoveries you make are just... more dream. Your current experience right now is in effect a remote viewing "from nowhere", an immersive thought about being a person in a world. You are never anywhere, in fact. You can't leave a dimension, because you aren't ever in one. However, you can use the concept as a nice way to change your experience dramatically and discontinuously. I've done the tour - but really you don't need to. And in fact people who do often get the wrong idea, because they view their everyday world as a stable platform and the mystical as some special state (they think they leave bodies, see infinity, etc, instead of realising they were never in one, and infinity is in the room right now).

The reality is: there are no fundamental facts. All content is arbitrary.

I have a feeling you've never really directly changed your world...

I'm not mocking any experiences you've had which have helped you; if you've benefited from them then that's great. But remember, they're just... more experiences, more dream.

Q1: You are really not getting this. I already said many times reality is a holographic illusion, it's not real. This is really ultra basic spiritually 101. You can leave this holographic illusion. More specially this lower frequency vibration 3d reality hangs on. Now instead of talking bollocks all your life, why don't you take the real red pill and find out? What are you so scared taking LSD will shatter your completely wrong view of reality ? Surely you should take it, just to prove to yourself all your false assumptions are correct ? Really what are you scared of ?

No, I think you're not getting it. But maybe we're just using different ways of talking about it. So:

• Tell me what you mean when you say "reality" and what you mean by it being a hologram?
• And then: what exactly do you think you are? Do you think you are a person, in a location?
• And then: what do you think taking a chemical does? Does it affect "your brain"?

[Transcriptor note: He never answered...]

POST: Can't Jump? Dimensional Jumping from a Skeptical Perspective.

The easiest approach is to do something minor, just to test the water. Belief itself isn't really the problem - except that it prevents someone from trying things out, or they keep tinkering with things they've already done. The process of change itself is "dumb, automatic, mechanical". The hardest bit is getting yourself to actually do anything in the first place. The simplest ones are, in the spirit of just having fun:

• Create a synchronicity involving the owls. Basically, sit down for five minutes and imagine an owl in the space in front of you, with the intention that your life is going to be filled with owls from this point onwards. That's it. Since there's nothing at stake, there's nothing to worry about.
• Try the situation shifting experiment. This has the benefit of involving no commitment at all in terms of belief or indeed effort. Provided you have running water and somewhere to put it, you're sorted.

The purpose of doing these is to demonstrate to yourself that there is indeed "something going on". After that you can get more focused - although once you've witnessed results, you can probably think of ways to adapt even these simple ideas to your advantage.

POST: Not getting results...

Just "play dead". Don't worry about how or what. Don't bother tinkering with your thoughts, or try to suppress them. The way to think of this is:

• Performing the act is a direct manipulation of the world.

Once you've performed the intentional act, "your work is done". You can just go about your life. And the results will show up in time. You might imagine the world as a landscape that you are traversing. As you walk across the terrain, only a small section of it is unfolded into 3D-sensory experience; the rest of it is present but dissolved into the background. Despite this, intentional acts operate on the whole landscape, instantly. So your change has already been made, there's nothing more to be done - you just haven't reached that part of the landscape yet. When you perform the intentional act, you will quite likely note a shift in your background felt-sense (that sort of 'global summary' feeling), but actual confirming experiences will appear later. The important thing is to resist constantly, intentionally tinkering about with the landscape (mentally or physically) on the assumption that nothing has happened, because you will be reshaping it again!

Main points -

• Don't overcomplicate things. It's tempting to want to "do more" than just doing the imagining (the owls) or pouring the water (the glasses exercise), to somehow make things happen. But this is before action. Trying hard is an experience; trying hard is not causal. Just decide what the act means, then perform the act.
• Do it then forget about it - but in the sense of not picking at a wound, rather than you actually attempting to prevent thoughts and memories.

POST: Do you think dimensional jumping can explain something like reincarnation?

If the rule is that "experience always continues" then, yes, in the sense that when you run out of "plausible moments" in whatever trajectory you are on now - a discontinuous jump would happen. A "rebirth" in the sense that you would no longer experience being-this-person-in-this-world, but would still have an experience of some sort. Over at the Glitch subreddit there are lots of stories of people having a crash and it being "reset" to before, with memory, or suddenly a switch so it doesn't happen. If it did happen though, then your other next moment options could be a reset without memory, a new person with or without memory (at birth or after), or some sort of non-Earth type experience. What you actually get (assuming you haven't planned ahead) might be a composite of whatever patterns you have accumulated at that stage (I suggest). After the dream... more dream.

Aside: The Buddhist idea of preparing for bardo sounds quite a lot like our ideas of releasing accumulated patterns and intending states.

...

...I guess that's one reason to give this some attention, sooner. Who knows how many times you've already been through it. (Maybe you've even "been" me one time.)

One thought: how long would it be before you'd maybe choose to forget again?

...A really good analysis. So, I'm inclined to think you'll go along a while, enjoying not being afraid, getting what you want. But: Eternity is a long time. And since you now know that suffering is an illusion - that there's nothing to worry about really, because you are never a person - you might go, well, I'm bored, it's time for another adventure, and an adventure means the stakes must seem real...

This probably (definitely: since you are here, now) means that you will always "eventually" choose to forget, at least "temporarily". However, you might be able to set some things up in advance to help your newly-ignorant manifestation have an okay time - some basic patterning, maybe - provided they don't resist it and do listen to their intuition...

...Maybe you'd choose to wake up in North Korea, as a bit of a challenge? After all, you know that at the end of it, it won't have mattered, because all you were doing was browsing through the Hall of Records. There was no danger of a final sort. The good thing about life, is that it's definitely temporary? Ahem. But yes, lots to ponder.

Nothing matters, but we need to hold on to the thoughts that it does or experiencing itself becomes meaningless, then we would become "prisoners of the dream".

So, forgetting it means adventure but fear... and eventual exhaustion, then remembering it. Remembering it means safety and comfort... but eventually boredom, then forgetting it. Seems like a cycle is the ideal solution, or a bit of adventuring between the bliss.

maybe that's how it's supposed to be by "default"

I don't think there is any intended default. Or rather, any default must have been a "decision" you made previously, implicitly or explicitly. Any "meant to be" must have been triggered by us at some point.

Like using the law of attraction, not questioning the underlying structures?

Well, I meant more that after you've sussed it out, you could perhaps embed a pattern such that you will forget - and then remember. A "memory worm"? Since patterns are triggered associatively, you could link it to a pattern than can only come into experience when not-being-a-person. But then, this is theoretical fun really. There's nothing beyond what we're experiencing now, but who knows what is dissolved into it? (Well the answer is: everything, potentially.)

the experience of being a human seems to come with the pattern of limited lifetime by default

I see what you mean. Yes, I've been thinking about this lately. Although I suppose our actual experience is one of being-a-world-viewed-from-the-perspective-of-one-human. The limited lifetime is part of the definition of the world-pattern.

I guess we will never find out, as free as we feel we're still caged for eternity on a big scale

Well, I'm not sure we're caged at all; it's sort of the opposite, right? All possible patterns are within us. Our human-patterned limitation is that we cannot experience as unfolded everything at once, as 3D-sensory experience. Our overall limitation is that we cannot cease, because we are eternal and undivided. In other words, our final limitation is that we are unlimited.

the ability of analysing, interpreting and understanding your experiences (intelligence) seems to fall into this too.

At a more subtle level, yes, good point. The ability to identify with one part of the pattern and manipulate other parts, even though actually you are shifting shape as a whole.

it's disappointing, that finding out what's behind consciousness is impossible.

We are disappointed that there is no behind, I guess. One of the issues human thought has, is that it cannot capture this, because thought is a form of this. In truth, there is not even consciousness, since it is everything. It's really just a way of saying that the forms we encounter have no fundamental existence, they are all the same thing, but that thing is that which takes on form. If everything is you, then nothing is "you" because there is no other thing to contrast it with, meaning that it's not even a thing.

Well, that's nice and clear, isn't it? :-)

...I think that the intellectual exploration helps us strategise - gives us a framework for discussion. It also helps us format our experience, because thinking is itself the triggering of patterns (hence "active metaphors"). But really we have to attend to direct experience to fully get it. It's then very obvious that you are unbounded consciousness in the shape of an experience. What can be difficult at first is the ironic sense of claustrophobia: that you can't get away from yourself-as-the-world, since everything you think-intend-assert-attend to is a literal shift of the world. If you re-identify with the background space as your viewpoint, though, this sorts that out. You basically choose to identify as a "container" and therefore you can intend without "standing on" any part of experience.

If I would be truly convincend that the world is a computer simulation it would behave as such.

Right!

There is no definite truth, and you have to take on some shape. The worldview you adopt becomes the basic formatting for your experiences, implicitly defining the "plausible paths" for your intentions to shine through into sensory moments. Here, in this subreddit, we assert our formatting knowingly and deliberately - which means it's all about finding the least complex, most flexible description, realising that it will shape our experience accordingly. That's why I suggest metaphors like The Imagination Room. They give you a "place" to be as the experiencer - you are the unbounded background - without interfering with the potential experiences available to you, or opposing intentional shifts.