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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Q: [Deleted]

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 :-)

...

Q: [Deleted]

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?

...

Q: [Deleted]

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).

* * *

TG Comments: /r/DimensionalJumping

POST: Can you expand your awareness after you jump and gain memories you otherwise wouldn't have?

I guess not. If you change a tv channel and you begin watching a show already half way, you are experiencing it now, but you don't know what happened previously.

Well, unless it's a marathon showing all the episodes, where you might get a "Previously, on neonledge" type segment. Or maybe there's a way to pause for a moment, introspect and check out the wiki for the show...

There's some debate on this - it probably "depends". From your own perspective, you have a history or trajectory which you remember, and may or may not agree with the observed "facts" of your present world. If you make a dramatic shift, that world starts there for you, but there is an implied history at least - which you should theoretically be able to access (or 'invent'). People who've experienced shifts spontaneously note varying degrees of urge-to-forget, conflict-of-memory, or no revised memory at all. This may be linked somewhat to intention.

My feeling is:

• If you do a shift deliberately then you will have your trajectory memories, and remain slightly separate from the world configuration you switch to.
• If you suffer an accidental large shift, you are more likely to suffer an urge-to-forget the event (if it was an experience) and 'lose yourself' in the resulting configuration.
• Minor shifts will lead to discrepancies like "Mandela Effects" but with personal relevance (e.g. people's hair a bit different, etc, not liking coffee when they used to, etc.)

There are lots on /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix which might give you some food for thought. Overall, I'm concluding that if you do a proper directed change, then this isn't too much of a problem.

POST: ITT: Theories

There are no other selves!

Previously answered here [POST: What happens to the other-dimensional you you switch places with?], here [POST: What happens to the other you when you jump?], here [POST: What happends with the other you?]. It's an understandable question though, perhaps it needs to be put in the sidebar or (oh no) we might need an FAQ. Read the Hall of Records metaphor, for a way of visualising why this is the case. The idea is that you are shifting your experience. You are a consciousness connecting to a 1st-person perspective.

What evidence is there that this is true, though? Where did we learn this? Basically, how do we know that we're just switching our perspective, and there isn't some Other Me on the receiving end of our old life?

The quick response: What makes you think there are millions of different "You"s? And would they be "You" if they were having a different experience? And why would there be only one of each type of experience - why wouldn't there be multiple identical worlds for you to experience?

The longer answer is: You need to do a bit of contemplation and meditation to realise this. A couple of things: to realise that you "having an experience" rather than "being a person" (that you are a "conscious space"), and that the world isn't spatially-extended other than in your experience of it (there are not literally multiple physical universes out there).

For directly investigating the first, you might try out this little exercise to get a feel for it for fun. But after there, you might check out Rupert Spira and his book Presence, or Greg Goode's Standing As Awareness. For the latter, philosophers such as Berkeley and Kant are worth your time.

I am changing experiences other than my own through this practice.

I know exactly what you are referring to. You truly only change "your" own experience though - however that includes your experience of other people, and of yourself. The effect is indeed "as if" there were literal dimensions (hence the naming). The trick to understanding this is that you do not live in a "simply-shared world". It's more like parallel-simultaneous-timeless dreaming. The oft-used metaphor that consensus reality is like, say, a bunch of people in a room collectively choosing the decor is incorrect. The truth is everyone has their own room, and implicitly chooses aspects of other people as well as the decor. If I had to describe it overall, I'd say it was like a personal dream, with you as the dreamer - except eventually you dream every possible aspect of yourself and everyone else. You can choose whatever experience you want, but eventually you will (or rather: already have) experience the other side of it. In actuality, it's sort of "all-at-once". This means: other people are real, but they are all you, eventually.

The Hall of Records metaphor is a way to simplify all that, but keep the key ideas in place. But... the fact is that the apparent world and apparent people do seem to change, particularly if you do an undirected approach like the mirror method. That's why I advocate more focused methods.

there absolutely are other literal dimensions and other literal "me"s.

You can have experiences consistent with that - but they are just more experiences. When you are dreaming, no matter what secrets you uncover and what discoveries you make, all you are really ever finding is... more dream.

...but my personal experiences have lead me to believe

Fancy sharing your experiences?

Certainly! You can read about my most recent jump here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/37o40v/make_sure_no_one_changes_the_lights/]

Ah. I missed that! To make a broad point: The metaphor you adopt dictates the overall pattern of the experience you get, and: if you're doing something major it pays to be specific because the result will take the easiest route. Spent time beforehand forming the intention in detail via your imagination, envisaging it exactly as if it were true now.

does this create any time-travelesque paradox, where if you did not lose a loved one, you wouldn't have had the motive to shift? it seems safe, but i'm unsure.

The "time travel version" of the Infinite Grid metaphor explicitly dodges this. No paradox, because you are always "experiencing moments" rather than "intervening via action" - in everyday life as well as in more adventurous scenarios.

i agree that i think it's safe, because i don't think you're hopping around on a singular thread, so to speak, and it could break. but your response sounds like you're dismissing free will. this seems odd because DJing is intrinsically a willful act.

You select your experiential trajectory via will, of course, it's just that you do not ever "physically" do anything. You just have "experiences of doing". In fact, it's this that makes free will possible - since it means intention is a filtering of experiences, a selection of a world, rather than something that occurs within a world.

POST: Just discovered this place. I have some thoughts I'd like to voice.

A good read, that. Couple of points:

• Yeah, inherently you can only prove these things to yourself. Even if you convince others, that can just be part of the effect. One of the things this stuff reveals to you is that you do not live in a "simply-shared world". In some ways, you are totally alone. In another way, you are everywhere - but we're getting a bit metaphysical now.
• In terms of "multiverses", if you follow this through what you end up with is more like "all variations can be experienced in consciousness". The overall result in terms of personal experience is kinda the same, but it does mean the analogy is more like "a conscious being watching a particular TV channel" (in super-surround-sensory-3D) rather than "your consciousness shifting from inside one brain to inside another brain".

I find the Imagination Room metaphor quite a useful way to envisage this situation. (Although the more accurate metaphor would use something like "a holographic space in which all possible experiences are dissolved", imagining that there are patterns on the floor is a nice visual way to bring this to life.)

...If this stuff even just makes people explore their ideas more thoroughly, it's a good thing!

EDIT: Slight repetition below. Sorry: lost track of which thread I was replying to!

Something to ponder: things don't necessarily exist in the form that we experience them in the senses. For example, recall what you had for dinner yesterday. See it, smell it, taste it. Now, where was that recall experience before you brought it into your imagination? Was is stored somewhere in the same form (spatial, temporal and multi-sensory) as that experience? Consider: was it "dissolved into the background" of your current experience all along, just waiting to be triggered and intensified - like a holographic image, sort of everywhere and nowhere? Could all possible experiences be present in this way, awaiting "recall"?

Perhaps the present sensory experience is like the sun in the daytime sky. All the stars are there, but concealed by the sun's brightness. What if you could choose which of the "stars" would be "the sun" tomorrow?

POST: Second update, noticed a lot of small changes, even a few with this sub

basically there are no correct or wrong metaphors

Exactly. However, the metaphors you adopt implicitly or explicitly will format your experience; your experiences will start lining up with them. This is true of any pattern your trigger: they amount defining the facts that future observations will remain consistent with; they amount to a pattern which is "overlaid" over your life. I shy away from the word "belief" though, because that has a fuzzy meaning, including ideas like "opinion". If we stick to something like "formatting" we are closer to the truth. I mean, would you say you "believe" in time and space and colour and cause-effect?

I can now understand why man created the idea of god and why he worships it.

Because we cannot experience ourselves doing anything - in other words, if intending means to change the shape of ourselves, we can only see the results, and so cannot conceive of our willing - we in ignorance ascribe cause to parts of experience. We feel muscular tension and call that "doing" when body movements arise, or we associate "this thought" with "next thought" and label that as cause, but when other things happen that cannot be so obviously linked, we try to find somewhere else to hang it - hence the invention of an "entity god". Having a god becomes a metaphor you can call upon to be the "cause" of the changes you are doing.

Stable ground

Although what you are is all of the world, it's beneficial to declare one part of it "you" and therefore hold that part stable. Otherwise the whole thing can shift all over the place, and there will be no persistence, because the there will be nothing for the rest of the world to hang from. Traditionally, this is the "ego" concept coupled with a small physical sensation or tension which us maintained - but if you choose your identity as the "background space within which experience arises" then you get the best of all worlds. You are not letting everything collapse into void, but you are also not constraining the evolution of the world-pattern.

I feel we all need to be one with our subconscious.

We always are, really. Reusing a metaphor: the whole world-pattern is right here, being experienced by you right now. It's just that some parts are brighter than others at a given moment, like the daytime sun obscuring the other stars in the sky. What we call shifting our attention is actually different stars having their turn at being the brightest.

EDIT: Which is why we don't need to deliberately focus our attention; that makes us feel that we are one tiny part by over-intensifying one aspect - deforming it with intentional change. Your "being one with the subconscious" would translate as letting attention open and expand?

How do I change my formatting? How do I decide? Is it a sort of feeling?

That's what this stuff is all about really. Detaching totally (basically: release the patterns) and intend-will-decide-summoning how you want it to be. Unfortunately, because of its nature (changing the shape of oneself), we can't describe how to intend; we simply do so, as "first cause". In general, you want to get relaxed and "allowing" such that summoning an image, etc, is completely effortless. There should be no pushing or tension involved in intending; it's more of a "releasing" or "letting happen".

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

Something to ponder: How we think about something is that something. For example, if you think about tomorrow, the pattern that appears is actually tomorrow. It doesn't represent tomorrow; it really is the idea-aspect of tomorrow. Same with anything else you pull up from the background into sensory experience. So long as you are "calling it up", rather than just messing with imagery without intention, you are actually pulling up the actual thing from the "world-pattern".

POST: Problem with the original story

The general answer is: because when changes happen to you, you can still remember how it was before, so you can tell the story. Otherwise of course nobody would ever know of changes happening, since the world and their memory would remain in step (which may actually be the case sometimes).

I don't know. It seems like there should only be 2 options: The kid doesn't remember his old dimension's father or he's contaminating the new dimension that doesn't have an abusive father with slander; In other words - we should be getting the story from the perspective of this dimension's story creator - not the kid who left the bad dimension!

That doesn't make sense. So, the summary is that a kid had an abusive father and he jumped to a dimension where his father is not abusive. Naturally, the only record of this is in the memories of the kid and anyone who experience the change with him. The kid who did the jump is the author of the change and the story is from his perspective. Are you saying that the story should not be told? And are you suggesting that saying "my Dad was abusive in another dimension, but he's a nice guy in this one" is slander? Because I don't think Other Dimension Dad will be suing anyone for defamation... interdimensional law sounds tricky! :-)

I'm assuming he never told the story to his current nice Dad. But maybe I'm misunderstanding. What do you mean by "contamination" here?

The story should be told from the perspective of the kid who had is body stolen about how the mirror took his body somehow. Any recollection of having a bad father wouldn't exist since this dimension's story teller only knows of a good father. Why would this dimension's story teller all of the sudden start saying his father used to be abusive when that never happened - hence why he left?! Any memory of the bad situation would be contamination in this dimension - the story would not be told from the perspective of the mirror version of the author.

Okay, I see what you are trying to say: That from your perspective some kid just suddenly says his Dad used to be abusive but isn't anymore. So for the moment let's put aside the "jumping" metaphor and approach this another way. Now, there is only one dimension/world:

• Imagine that I sat an exam last week, and got a low grade.
• I now decide to cast a "spell" so that I got a good grade. The world is "updated" so that I now did well in the exam. The world has been shifted so that in effect this has always been true; there is not trace of the old state of the world, except in my memory.
• If I tell people about this, it will be as if I suddenly say "hey I failed the exam but now I have passed". As far as they are concerned, I had always passed.

This is what was happening with the kid. But wait, what if someone else is wishing that I failed and the same time as I wished I passed? It doesn't matter, because:

• Everyone has their own copy of the world.

You can have any experience you want, including updating the world's facts and history. The "other people" you see are just images of other people, the versions of them that correspond to your current intentions (aspects of their Extended Person). Meanwhile, sensations and perceptions and thoughts of "yourself" are a version of "you" that corresponds to your current intentions. What you actually are, it turns out, is the "conscious space" in which your experiences appear - the experiences of yourself, other people, and the world. Our experiences do overlap with other spaces but in a non-simple way that can't be explained easily, because it is "before time and space" (and unfortunately we can only conceptualise in terms of moving parts arranged in mental space). I've copy-pasted a comment from elsewhere which tries to explain this a bit more, kinda based on the Imagination Room metaphor:

On The "Sharing Model" Of The World

You are not a person, you are a conscious space having a "person-perspective experience" - senses, perceptions, thoughts, floating in awareness. The "person" you are might be considered as The First Tulpa. Meanwhile, it is just not possible to conceive in thought of the way in which there is overlap between apparent perspectives. It is not a "simply-shared" world model. The other people in your experience are your aspects of those people - and the "you" you experience is similarly an aspect of that idea. Often people talk about a "consensus reality" as if it's a bunch of people in a room, choosing the decor together. In fact, it's more like everyone has their own room, choosing versions of the other people and the decor. In fact, it's even more like everyone is a room, and is choosing versions of themselves and other people and the decor. In fact again, not even a room because the room represents time and space, which are themselves "contextual formatting" within you... you get the idea...

And "idea" is the key word. People are "ideas" or patterns, and it is those ideas which appear in your experience. "You" are just an idea you have associated with yourself. However, even a little bit of self-examination reveals that you are more like the stuff that worlds are made of...

In the future, people should set up their dimension jumping stories like this:

That's not quite right though. It's all about perspectives. From the kid's perspective (who is telling the story) the story is actually:

• "I always had a problem with my father being abusive to me. Then one day I looked in the mirror and had a really weird experience. It felt like I was somehow swapping places with the reflection in the mirror. After that experience my father was a nice guy. But what's even more strange - it was as if the world had changed so that he had always been a nice guy. Nobody remembered him ever having been a bad guy! It was as if I'd shifted to a new dimension where my father had always been a good parent."

Dimensional jumping stories can only be told from the perspective of the person who makes the jump, or perhaps with people who deliberately jumped as a group (see the Multidimensional Magick post for a comment on this: it amounts to "deciding" that you will have the experience of sharing the jump results.)

Of course, the methods suggested in the sticky tell you to say "swap" to trade places with the mirror person so you're giving the person who once had a good father an abusive one. How interdimensionally selfish, right?!

Haha, yes. But the swapping places thing is a metaphor. There is no "other you" out there who is getting a bad deal. What you are doing is switching from one experience to another. If you have a green car and decide to paint it red, that doesn't mean that some other person is forced to paint his nice red car green!

EDIT: It occurs to me you might be thinking from the perspective of "a dimension" or a "god's-eye" perspective of all dimensions, but there is no such thing. There is only the perspectives of particular subjective consciousnesses. All experiences and all stories are 1st-person-view.

POST: Schrödinger's cat and a new way of looking at "Dimensional Jumping"

Good read!

So what if our own expectations were enough to "lock" the state in place. I.e. if we were in our minds completely sure that the cat had to be alive

This is pretty much the idea of "false observations" behind descriptions such as All Thoughts Are Facts: It makes no difference whether an "observation" is supposedly internal or external, since they arise in the same perceptual space. What matters is in the intensity of the contribution. And anything you can conceive of can potentially be "observed" in this way, so all possibilities are here, now - just like you say.

Basically: we cheat.

If the world is defined by a series of observations (Observation Accumulation) and all observations must be consistent with previous observations (Law of Coherence), then:

• The only rule is that the apparent world remains self-consistent as an entire pattern. [1]
• If you "force" an observation using deliberate imagination, it will have as much contribution as a "spontaneous" observation.
• If a forced observation is about the past then subsequent observations will contribute as if it were an observation in the past.

And "Jumping" is the allowing your experience to be shifted as a whole (detaching) by inserting an observation that corresponds to what you want, while allowing the whole pattern to shift to accommodate it.

I think many cases of "jumping" are merely an effect similar to hypnosis, NLP

NLP and hypnosis is pretty close to jumping in some ways? Manipulation of the contents of mind. It's just that in this case we are accessing the world-pattern in mind rather than the personal-pattern. Although the distinction is sometimes hard to make.

how people can come back here and claim to have jumped, without seeming to have left?

I think that jumps are on a continuum in terms of apparent localisation of effect and the extent to which we still seem to share the world. You can have quite drastic changes and still have a reddit conversation here, because it's not a complete shift to an entirely different state; it's a modification of your state to a greater or lesser extent. The whole "world-sharing" aspect of reality is pretty impenetrable anyway, though.

[1] If you fancy a relevant slog through some related comments to that, there's this post about the "delayed choice experiment" and this comment was an early attempt to describe pattern-shifting in that context.

...Hey, that's the trick though isn't it? :-)

We can think of lots of interesting ways that "overlap" might take place, but we can never experience the actual overlapping process, so it will always remain an abstract notion - with us imagining how overlapping might work. Which is a problem, because: If your imagination dictates the content of our experience (the basis of jumping), then it also dictates the types of overlapping which can occur. This means that we select which aspects of other "private views" to incorporate into our own. Which means we can't distinguished between allowing content overlap from other views, and just simply dictating content. Every model fudges the objective reality part (P2P networks, QBism, etc) of how subjective views might overlap, because inherently the overlap would occur outside of the concepts of space of time. This makes it literally unthinkable, and hence meaningless. So I tend to take my working model as the world being a shared resource (of patterns) rather than a shared environment (spatially-extended world). Of course, this still leaves us with the option to imagine that we are co-creating, and have an experience which corresponds to that. For the fun of it.

EDIT: There is a notion that when we are "in overlap" with other perspectives, then we share a trajectory together, and that is the experience of "love" and connection. That's what differentiates the background people (nothing is looking through those eyes) and the close people (other perspectives experiencing it). That still suffers from the same problem of differentiation though; it's just a commitment to a particular "knowing".

if we are consciously directing our experience, then maybe even our memories are tied in to what locks us in our current state

Yes, because if memories are parts of the current "world-pattern" then they are contributing, shaping present moment experience. They are "facts" which current observations must be consistent with. If you bring up a memory (which is to say, ask for one and then it appears in mind) and edit it, there is no trace other than that, and it would be "as if" true going forward. The trick, I'd say, is that you have to be careful whether you are editing "the world's memory" or a personal memory.

merge with the consciousness of the businessman you, bring it back here, and accept that your prior "inserted memories" are now no longer inserted memories but actual memories.

Sounds like an approach. In fact, I think the "keep a diary of how your ideal would be" has been used to switch mindset. A bit like Neville Goddard's The Pruning Shears of Revision plus a switch. I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to go straight for the desire though, without bothering with the updating, since what you want is a discontinuous switch anyway? But it could be a way to run in parallel or something.

I think it's part of the reason visualisation alone is so powerful, but beer . . .

Rule #1 of the universe: Beer is always more powerful than visualisation! :-)

Q1: I've used this framework for years, and it's extremely effective (look for retro psychokinesis in my post history). I think it's an idea which time has come. You got me thinking: I always thought that once you observed something, you set in stone whatever outcome you observed. It figures then that your reality had fewer and fewer options has time goes on. But jumpers say you can change what has already happened. Strangely, this fact just only hit me. And this is a total game changer.

Yeah, it's the total game changer!

Have you read Neville Goddard's essay on The Pruning Shears of Revision? Detach from the old observation, amend it or create a new observation to replace it, is the summary. Multiply that up and and you realise that the apparent past doesn't matter much. What matters is the observations you make now. The extreme version would be to detach completely from the current experience, kick off a new strand of thought, let it become immersive, and then never return to the old strand...

What happens is, it resolves itself. You don't focus on the sensation, you don't narrow your attention, you let it stay open and wide and just allow the fear to be there. After a while it becomes stronger (but really it always was that strength, it's just that you were averting yourself from it) and then at that point it kind of expands into being nothing. If you take a step forward and then try to stop the movement, then you are left there with tense muscles and maintaining an off-balance position. The more you aver your attention the worse it gets. The only way to solve it is to allow the postural pattern to "follow through" and complete itself. This will involve temporarily having a strong experience, but that's necessarily part of the movement and release.

Q3: Using what I mentioned above, I like to think of things as such: once we've observed/ascertained a thing to be so, the related things required for it to have happened, the event itself, etc, are all "set in place" and certain. However that doesn't mean they can't be set back to uncertainty, and I believe no matter how firmly in place it is, it can be changed with an equal amount of effort.
The reason this is important is you'll find that it's VERY easy to make something happen the way you want (whether via this or via other methods) if there's already some uncertainty about it. A lot of people assume that means that's all you can do, but the fact of the matter is you just need to work out those prior beliefs and dissolve your framework back into a state of uncertainty before proceeding with inserting a new outcome. :)
Just my 2c :)
Edit: Someone gave me a really nice way of looking at it a while back. They asked me to think back to all those silly cartoons you'd watch as a kid where say a statue would start moving and stop moving whenever the main character turned around to look at it. My friend said to think of the universe in a similar way, at its core, the universe contains all of the infinite possibilities of people, states, objects, interactions, occurring simultaneously forever, but when an observer of any kind looks at it from a limited perspective it takes on their beliefs and assumptions about how it must behave and "freezes" into place with all the variables required to fit what they expect to see. That'd fit why a state of non-duality/unity with the infinite only ever comes exactly when we stop seeking and lose all expectations about what we are to experience, and shed our observer perspective completely.

I love the statue analogy!

Going off track a bit, Jesus, I think the biblical notion of "forgiveness" means something closer to "forgetting and letting shift" than saying sorry, which means the parables are describing that exact thing: allowing your previous observations to sink back into the gloop so that they no longer limit your next observations. That previously-activated pattern fades away because it is no longer being re-triggered by association. It's basically saying: yeah, what I saw before was true then but that doesn't mean it has to be true now. Those statues could be anywhere; they needn't be permanent "pillars of salt" unless I constantly look back to check their state. Neville Goddard like his statues too, being a big fan of Blake's “Sculptures of Los’s Halls”, which is a metaphor for eternal states. So it's like "letting your statues move", but it's also like shifting to a state in which your shadows are arranged in accordance with a different blueprint.

POST: I have attempted dimensional jumping twice now.

I think you're trying to do something quite dramatic without having really done the groundwork. Have you checked out the "related posts" in the sticky post?

You're trying to do something like a "reset", it sounds like.

...Actually, replied to the wrong post, sorry. Although the sticky links still apply. See my other response!...Then skip the mirror approach, go for something like the Neville Goddard version with a specific aim in mind (literally!)...Completely relax and detach, summon the corresponding imagery, maintain immersive focus until it becomes the dominant part of experience. Like direct-entry lucid dreaming, with coming back being optional, perhaps.....Yeah, don't try that standing up. Lie down, eyes closed, enter a relaxed state, then relaxed-focus on your target, allowing imagery and sensations to arise. What you're really asking for here is for one 3D-immersive thought to supersede another.

Just quickly...

Another example of a change was that a scar on your friend's arm has disappeared, or new buildings have appeared. But really, your just noticing for the first time.

Yes, noticing is nice way to put it. But we must understand that the environment in which we do the noticing has (I hate to say this but let's go with it) "higher dimensionality" than we usually assume.

Definition:

To "notice" something is to bring into perception something that was already there, but had not yet been experienced in sensory space.

The way in which something is "there but not yet experienced" is the important part. Specifically, we are not dealing with a 3D spatially-extended world which we explore - even though that is how it usually appears, so quick are we to "fill in the gaps" as we go. If we suddenly notice a book on our bookshelf which we haven't seen before, was that book always there? Yes, in some way. However, in order to see it we had to adjust our angle to the world. So, the effect can be both mundane and continuous, or dramatic and discontinuous, depending.

For your main post questions, you should check out the last couple of edit links in the Neville Goddard post. For "jumping back in time" there have been people who've reported experiences "resets" of a sort (/u/MemoryEchoes and various glitch reports), it's not something I've wanted to do myself so I can't comment. However, the principle is the same no matter what: you are seeking to allow one 3D-immersive strand of thought fade and another one brighten and take its place. In any case, you could do worse than start doing the exercises described in this comment [POST: [AMA Request] TriumphantGeorge].

Yeah, I've had to explain to three people so far that you can't literally change dimensions. People are saying to try jumping to a slightly better dimension, like for example one in which you have an extra $50 in your wallet. I don't understand how people think that you can really change dimensions just like that, but I guess if your superstitious you could fall for it since there's nothing to clarify the subreddit' purpose.

Indeed! There's no such thing as a "dimension" other than as a concept. Mind you, there's no such thing as "space" or "time" other than as concepts either (they are bad habits). You can't literally change dimension, but you can't literally move in (conceptual) time or space either. What you can do is leverage concepts to trigger a change in ongoing experience, in perhaps surprising ways. I don't think this subreddit actually has a purpose other than supporting personal experimentation into the limits of how experience can be changed. It doesn't even have a worldview other than maybe "experience = fact, results = truth". That's why the sidebar isn't prescriptive.

So don't feel obligated to take on the burden of explaining things to people, I reckon; it's for them to explore the world on their own terms I think! In my own view, people shouldn't actually "believe" anything - including anything about themselves. Until we do an experiment, we don't know anything, we are just recycling thoughts.

POST: Need help with intended goal

As someone else said, Neville Goddard is full of good examples. Although unfortunately his language makes for obscure reading. Generally I'd concentrate on what you want rather than the mechanism. Do you actually want to go back in time, or do you want to join the armed forces without that incident being a problem? Surely it's the second!

Think: what's the actual experience you want to have, if it were happening around you now, that would mean you would have got what you wanted?

Random example:

Yesterday morning's mail brought me one, where, in San Francisco, this captain, a pilot, and he writes me that I saw him backstage after one of my meetings, and there he said, "But Neville, you are up against a stone wall. I am a trained pilot; I have gone all over the world, all over the seven seas; I'm a good pilot and I love the sea, not a thing in this world I want to do but go to sea; yet they restrict me to certain waters because of seniority. No matter what argument I give them the Union is adamant and they have closed the book on my request." I said, "I don't care what they have done, you are transferring the power that rightfully belongs to God, which is your own imagination, to the shadow you cast upon the screen of space.
"So here, we are in this room; need it remain a room? Can't you use your imagination to call this abridge. This is now a bridge and I am a guest on the bridge of your ship, and you are not in waters restricted by the Union; you are in waters that you desire to sail your ship. Now close your eyes and feel the rhythm of the ocean and feel with me and commune with me and tell me of your joy in first proving this principle. and secondly in being at sea where you want to be. He is now in Vancouver on a ship bringing a load of lumber down to Panama. He has a complete list that will take him through the year what this man has to do. He is going into waters legitimately that the Union said he could not go. This doesn't dispense with unions, but it does not put anyone in our place- -no one, kings, queens, presidents, generals, we take no one and enthrone him and put him beyond the power that rightfully belongs to God. So I will not violate the law but things will open that I will never devise.
-- Awakened Imagination, Neville Goddard

See the "letters example" in that document for what you might actually do, to focus your mind on what you want to achieve.

POST: Seriously, has anyone used this for romantic/hedonistic pursuits?

Oh look, is it...? Yes, it is...! It's that guy! ;-)

Well, the same applies to this as to everything else. Doing the Goddard type thing, the usual approach is that you come up with an experience (imagined 3d-immersively from a subjective point of view) that means things are working out well, and live from it. You could do that with celebrities and, taking it seriously, you could well end up with chance meetings and opportunities to get what you wanted (random job offer in LA, invited to a party, actress is there). Y'know, but most people don't really want those things, they wouldn't really commit to it, or follow through. Anyway, top tip because you don't want everyone to be your puppet: Think of everyone as if they are an "aspect of you" and so your ultimate aim is that everyone should be happy in the world. Because a world full of happy people is a happy world for you to be in.

So when you, say, create "fake observations" in your mind that mean you and girl had a great time, the focus is on how great it is for both of you. (For instance, your "scene" might be talking to a friend at a cafe and talking about "what a great time she and I had together" rather than "I totally had that girl last night".)

Q1: Haha. Yeah I think it is about time I read on Mr. Goddard's books. Does the Power of Awareness suffice? Or is there more I could also expand on?
Ah I see. So it also helps that I help imagine a non-ego oriented imagining? Take it from her side of it too? Can one expand to what other people would observe, say those who would be watching us at the cafe?

There's nothing to it really, but yeah, check out that or the ones in the edit in the relevant post for a quick take. Just imagine it from your perspective, through your eyes, being there. What I was getting at is that the circumstances you are implying should be ones where everyone is happy and independently for the situation - i.e. that you and the girl were on the same wavelength, it's an equal situation, with no apparent manipulation or one-sidedness. Just as you'd like it to be, of course.

POST: Just stumbled accross this sub. Questions...

What proof is there of anything subjective except anecdotal? The only proof is to try something out, and satisfy yourself that either: a) there's something in it or, b) there isn't. A good comparison would be: lucid dreaming, or satori. They sound apparently unlikely, but if you actually pursue them you discover that apparent unlikeliness is no barrier to experience.

Well, dreams are probably not a very good example because almost everyone has dreams, we know that dreams are impulses in our brains, and we can control conscious thought so the stretch to controlling dreams isn't that far fetched. Satori seems like such a vague concept that trying to use it as an example doesn't strengthen the argument.

To be clear: I'm not making an argument, so I'm not intending to strengthen one. There is no argument that can be made for the existence of an experience.

However, lucid dreams are not a bad example, since it was argued very strongly for a long time that one could not be conscious within a dream. In retrospect we can say things like "we can control our thoughts so it makes sense we can control our dreams", but it was vehemently opposed at the time. Those who claimed the experience were dismissed, based on the theory of dreams at the time. (Although to this day we don't know what dreams are or indeed why we sleep at all. And "impulses in our brains" is not an explanation.)

Similarly, although satori is of course a vague concept, it is a concrete experience. It just cannot be captured in language; it cannot be described to someone who has not had the direct experience; it also cannot be anticipated from within a conceptual framework. So what I'm getting at here is: in general, you cannot use logic to make a judgement on the possibility of a novel subjective experience, you can only use it to explore a conceptual framework. Inevitably, without a novel intervention from outside of that framework, logic and argument lead you to the same actions, and hence to more of the same experiences. At best, you can use it to decide you don't care to know for certain one way or the other, that you aren't interested in exploring anything that has not already got a fully-developed narrative available for it.

From elsewhere:

My own guidelines are: experiences are real experiences; explanations are useful narratives. We must be careful not to treat the concepts we invent as actual things, even when they seem to work really well. Our observations are what define our stories, our stories don't define what it is possible to observe. That's why we should welcome different ideas, because fragments of them might be useful later on.

TriumphantGeorge, I think we have a negative nancy here. He is scared. It's cute. Do it or don't. What do you want? A perfect life? That is not this subreddit. If he finds one. We'll never know, now will we?

If we're being fair, his post does seem to present an open but skeptical mind, which is a good stance to take. And I think a lot of people, unknowingly, want to be sure there is an explanation in place for something before they allow themselves to try (not realising that science or any avenue of study has always been based on the idea that observations take priority over theories). So perhaps he should be scared - because absolutely anything could potentially happen! ;-)

Q1: No shunning here, friend. I'm just going to say that all "logic" is subjective and basically amounts to theory... that includes modern science (which is more a less an ever evolving belief system). And quite honestly, the more you really dig at the heart of any matter, you will find that damn near everything is anecdotal. Not sure what proof you're really looking for. The best way for you to prove it for yourself is to give it a heart-felt try and see if works for you. That's the only way you're going to know.

Q2: Glad to see level headed responses. Think this whole thing is a bit too philosophical for me but I agree, when it comes down to it everything 'known' is really just believed. I'll leave you guys be and who knows, maybe even see you on the other side. :)

Yeah, something like "applied philosophy/metaphysics" is probably not a bad summary of what this is about. Anyway, welcome anytime. Watch out for the owls...

POST: How my mother used the Just Decide Technique and got the result she wanted in 20 days.

Yeah, it's fun eh?

The more you do this stuff, the more you'll find that "other people" are telling you how they are doing it too...

It's not solipsism or co-creation though. Solipsism implies that you are the only person. But really you are not even a person. Co-creation implies that there are multiple contributors to your perspective, but this is not the case. Actually, you are the whole world (or at least: a version of the whole world is in you-as-consciousness) but are looking out from one apparent perspective. The "other people" and "you-as-person" are aspects of this world, parts of its continuous pattern, all arising within your consciousness.

But what about multiplicity? Multiple conscious beings having their own experiences? Is there no overlap?

We tend to think that the world is shared in a simple way: like a spatial environment that is unfolding in time, such that we are all seeing the same place at the same time. But it's more like every being is a conscious space, selecting into themselves the patterns they like from a "toy box" which contains all the possible experiences of being-a-person-in-a-world. That way, every being can be having a different experience and be overlapping, albeit indirectly.

(In truth, when you follow this to the end, consciousness is indistinguishable so there's only one consciousness, with a multiplicity of experiences which cannot be described because it is "before" time and space. Unfortunately though, because our thinking is of a 'shadow-sensory' form, we end up having to use spatial and temporal metaphors to talk about it.)

Anyway, the final result is still that: you have control over your own "private copy" because you choose, explicitly or implicitly, what set of patterns you have triggered into brightness, what facts-of-the-world you are allowing to contribution to your ongoing experience.

EDIT: Fixed paragraphs, changed phrases, reformatted for clarity.

I've covered it a bit elsewhere - see the above comment as an example - but let's go with this, and see where you would agree and where you wouldn't.

It'll be a bit of a ramble but - onwards... EDIT: Sorry, it really was.

Parts and Relations

The truth is there is no way to talk about this in language. Immediately when we try to talk or think about this, we have to invoke a spatial metaphor, because to think of something we have to have a concept consisting of parts, and arrange those parts relative to one another. But consciousness doesn't have parts - or spatial extent or temporal relationship - those are aspects of an experience. So as soon as we conceptualise this situation, we're wrong. Because the thinking of it is a structured experience, and this is "before" experience. It is evident from direct introspection that consciousness has no properties of itself; there can be no "two" consciousness(es). We can come up with a label "consciousness" and imagine that there are parts which are related to one another, but they are not. That's just a diagram in our mind. No matter how we approach this, it's incorrect. Conscious spaces do not exist in anything since there is no outside, because it is "before" division; and there is only one or actually not even, because it is "before" multiplicity.

Again: it is literally not possible to think about this. It cannot be represented, because it is that which takes on the shape of experiences, and representations are just more experiences. However, we can use a metaphor which at least breaks some of the usual assumptions, and so...

Sharing without Space and Time

In an attempt to avoid using time and space as the framework in which we relate perspectives, I use this picture:

• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". We are not people sharing an environment.
• We are "that which has experiences", basically conscious spaces which take on the shape of the experience we are having.
• There is no temporal or spatial relationship between conscious spaces.
• Instead, the world can be thought of as a collection of all possible patterns. It is more like a shared resource than a place.
• So the sense in which we "overlap" is in the format of the experiences we have; the shared subset of patterns.
• This means that our ongoing experience is more like the associative traversal of a memory block. It's a strand of thought about being a person in a world - rather than actually being a person in a world.

When you tie this up with the fact there is only one consciousness, that the conscious space you are right now is the only one there is, that the has no boundaries and there is nothing else, you realise there is no outside of this. However, although there is no "outside", there can be a very detailed "inside". The relationship we can potentially talk about is shared patterns, even though we cannot talk about relations in a time or space context. Right now you are "God" of this copy of the world - and so is everyone else of their copies - and they don't clash! So this is not solipsism because it is not personal and "everyone else" is in the same situation (or one consciousness is in lots of situations, whatever).

Why Bother?

Why bother with all this? If it wasn't required we wouldn't bother, and most people can just ignore it. But...

If you experiment a little, the fact is that your world does not behave like a co-created place. You can wake up tomorrow and everything has shifted, including people you know, and it will "always have been that way". Facts can completely change and "always have been that way". Your world actually behaves as if it is one continuous pattern - your pattern, dissolved in consciousness - which includes the apparent properties of "you-as-person" and "other people", a pattern that responds to your intention in an unrestricted manner. So this gives us a way to conceptualise that, while avoiding misleading metaphors.

It's not like "private views" are a new idea of course - QBism, as a recent example, uses it to describe the subjectivity of quantum physics. The tricky step is realising that there is no objective world - no CPU - that links or synchronises the subjective worlds, and that in effect there is just one subjective experiencer.

TL;DR: Solipsism is actually meaningless in this context. The world is best thought of as a resource, rather than a place.

Is it possible for there to be a concept such as 1+1=2, that exists before experience?

They exist purely within experience. You can use such abstractions to create a narrative about experience (within experience), but it is meaningless to say they exist "before" experience. (I use "before" in quotes because, of course, there is no such thing.)

What I mean by within experience -

It's tempting to think of the bright 3D-immersive sensory element (a "scene") in experience to be "the world" and somehow everything else is behind the scenes - but there is no behind the scenes. It's all present but dissolved, being experienced now. Metaphor: like the sun in the daytime sky, where the stars are still there but obscured; it's a matter of relative brightness. Layers of patterns, some of which are shining through into prominence. So we do end up with a situation where our experience is "formatted" and structured, depending on what level of prominance certain patterns have, and hence our narratives within experience will also be so-formatted. (The senses, objects separation, spatial extent, all arise-with particular scenes, for instance.) And at the limit, we might imagine that the format of narrative approaches the more simple patterns of experience. But that again is part of experience and it is only "about" partitioned experiencing; the narrative cannot accurately describe the formatting.

Meanwhile, things like the global background felt-sense, which could be said to be the direct experience of the current state, can't be given that narrative. And of course "unformatted consciousness" itself - which was what we were focusing on before - cannot be conceptualised at all. You can only be it.

To summarise -

• Mathematical concepts are within experience (being thoughts, this is so by definition), and any "formatting" to which it refers is part of experience too.
• It's the "sandbox" problem. You can make shapes in the sand which represent other shapes in the sand, but you cannot make a shape which represents sand or the sandbox itself.

EDIT: Relinking: I like this N. David Mermin article on reification of abstractions, although it's a bit physicsy for some. It's good at marking out the difference between (direct) experience and narrative, in the context of creating and using theories.

Q2: Every act of magic that get a result follows the same template:
Decide what result you want Equate an act, any act, with the result Perform the act Get result
You don't need to enter into any fancy state of mind. Forgetting about the working does help. It's so incredibly easy and simple that people usually tend to complicate it to no end.

It's true you don't need to enter a state of mind - any declaration of fact, explicit or implicit, has effect - but the more 'surrendered' you are, the more completely things can shift, and the more efficiently the result can appear. Which is why metaphors are useful; they provide "plausible paths" for things to arise that are beyond the norm. But yes, it's super-simple. Unfortunately it inherently doesn't "make sense" though (it's "before" conceptual frameworks), so people generally need some sort of outlook to hang it on. So long as you choose a very flexible and abstract one, it's okay.

The dimensional jumping idea in itself is extremely interesting because it breaks you out of causality even more, since things that already are can become different.

Yes, you’ve totally nailed this - that’s exactly the point of it.

Pretty much every other methodology makes the assumption that what I call Observation Accumulation is irreversible. In other words, that new observations must always be consistent with prior observations - so that the world always “makes sense”. That you can only shift parts of the world-pattern that you haven't "seen" yet, because the parts you have seen are now "defined". However, this is an overstatement of the Law of Coherence - which in fact only states that the world-pattern must be self-consistent at any particular moment (which follows because it is a single continuous pattern). It doesn’t say that the next moment-state necessarily needs to be consistent with all previous moment-states. So: the world-pattern can shift as a whole and coherence is still fufilled. Dimensional jumping and its metaphors say that there are no external laws enforcing the persistence of prior observations; the basic version of the Law of Coherence is the only law that applies. Established facts don't change because... you don't allow them to or you don't even make the attempt.

Anyway, this means that we can assert things in order to:

• Effectively “re-observe” prior observations and correct the associated “facts”.
• Create new "fake" observations and have them count as “facts”.

And the world-pattern will shift coherently, meaning that all subsequent observations will be consistent with its new state. The main problem for people is that committing to this involves throwing away (or better: just not thinking about) their usual way of conceiving of the world: it is no longer a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" that we all share; it's a "shared resource" of possible patterns that we individually select and trigger into our conscious perspectives, as a "private view".

....

Can someone explain this method?

It's what's underneath everything: declaring that something is a fact, and the world unfolds "as if" that were true.

(Taking the mother's perspective:) In this case, his mother - believing in a "soul" - sends it out to do her work for her. Implicitly, she has decided that performing that act means-that her situation will be resolved. Her world shifts accordingly. This works in the same way as the Two Glasses Exercise works by implicitly deciding (asserting) that transferring the water shifts the state. By making that decision, you are literally connecting the situation to the water, and by pouring it you are literally updating your world.

...

What did that mean order your soul? What exactly did she do?

I imagine she just said, "soul, go out and sort things out for me!". Subsequently, she had an experience "as if" such a thing existed, and that it sorted things out.

POST: Relationship of D Jumping to the Law of Attraction

Well basically everything is based on the same thing. The law of attraction is pretty much just a very unstructured way of trying to use patterning to make changes; it doesn't have much of a metaphor or philosophy underlying it other than the vague concept of "attraction" (which I'd say actually gets in the way of a good description).

Like all things of that ilk it roughly boils down to:

• detachment
• mental/physical act + intention = state modification
• subsequent appearance in sensory experience

But the devil's in the details.

The underlying concept of this subreddit is, it's recognised that the implicit or explicit adoption of a metaphor is itself a formatting of experience; metaphors are "active". And this is because all of experience arises from a patterning of consciousness (see: philosophical idealism, nondualism). Importantly, this means we can arbitrarily assign meaning to things and have experiences arise "as if" it were the case. None of this necessarily matters in order to use a technique to get some result, but formatting yourself with an appropriate metaphor in effect defines new "plausible paths" by which results an occur - and it also gives you the possibility of "knowing what you are doing". The confusion associated with LOA is because it has no solid framework.

In /r/DimensionalJumping, we realise that frameworks are arbitrary. We take a super-flexible, low-level one ("patterning") as the basic foundation. Everything beyond that can be chosen according to usefulness and elegance, as the situation dictates.

See: The Patterning of Experience and the other key posts listed in the sticky.

POST: Musings about the nature of reality

EDIT: This is a bit meandering too. Still, why not eh? Be good to kick off some discussion. Usual caveat: add an imaginary "as I think of it..." in front of everything.

Making changes to our own 'reality' must affect 'source.'

That's a nice phrase. It points out something vital: you don't change your experience by messing around with it on its own terms. You don't move your arm by messing around with your body sensations; you do so by intending a new position. You don't change your circumstances by wrestling with your sensory imagery; you do so by asserting a change in some way.

On the other stuff...

Dimensions, Moments, 'Reality'

So, I think it's probably important to emphasise that you can use any model you want (and I like some of the imagery you used there), but it's also important to emphasise that none of them are "how it is really". Even in quite fundamental ways, such as the idea that there is a continuous space, that time unfolds, other than your experiencing of it. At least not in the way that you experience it.

The fundamental truth it is: there is nothing "happening" other than the experience you're having now, in the way that you are having it. This is literally unthinkable though. However, realising this can save us wrestling with trying to "work it all out" - that is the equivalent of trying to see the bottom of a pool by splashing the water. Then we are free to use whatever attracts us.

Patterns like the Infinite Grid are useful because they break the notion that you are a body, in a world that is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", giving you a taste of the "true" situation, but still give you a fun structure to play with. But of course, you can just as well take on the idea that you are a body walking around in a 3D-world which behaves like a very flexible dream, responding to your intentions. It's a case of: whatever works, whatever you like. But none of it is "true" in a deep sense, at the "source". There are no dimensions, worlds, paranormal entities, all that, in a deeper sense. All experience is, in effect, "imagined" or recalled from a large resource of possible thoughts.

The true situation is, traditionally speaking:

• There is The Absolute, which has no divisions and never changes. Everything is in it and yet it is nothing (like all possible shapes are there, but presently balanced by their opposite, which are of course also there). It is All Creation. This is what is real about your experience: this is reality.
• There is The Relative, this is where one shape is emphasised relative to another, resulting in the apparent existence of objects and of change. This is what is illusory about your experience. This is often referred to as a "projection", to capture the idea of a movie projector (The Absolute, containing all frames) and a screen (The Relative, the display or emphasising one frame at a time).
• The two are one and the same thing. Nothing is ever created, it is only emphasised. All relative content is an illusion.

That's where things like The Imagination Room come from: an emphasis that there is nothing other than your "perceptual space" emphasising different shapes versus others. In a way, it's like the "world is a dream" metaphor but with a bit more structure. But practically speaking, and for enjoyment, just operating as (say) a conscious space with patterns dissolved in it is not particularly exciting. It's something to know, and flexibility is something to know, but that is meant to be freeing, rather than a new sort of burden.

But what does this say about manipulating reality?

Well, reality can't be manipulated; it's already been created in its entirety and it never changes. All we can do is select from it. But this is great, because it means if we can think something, then it already "exists", and it can be brought into experience in some way. I say "some way" because, inevitably, to transition from one state to another, requires you to let go of things as they are now. To get to a standing position you have to let go of being-sat-down. To get to other states, you might have to let go of your usual notions of time, or your ideas about cause and effect, other people, and so on. You might not always like the idea of doing that. That's the "price" you pay. In effect - if you ponder it - the more extreme the change, the more you have to let go of your humanity a little, and of the idea of your world being a "place" rather than just a series of images within consciousness.

Why is there not just always instant change? Why are there apparent collateral changes?

Because you are not completely 'fresh'. Metaphorically speaking, you have layers and layers of patterns activated right now, which are structuring your ongoing experience. None of the "facts" of your world-pattern (the selected aspects of The Absolute that are contributing to your Relative experience) stand alone; they only have meaning due to their entanglement with all their associations.

Even your concept of "people" and of "memory", of the idea that there is a stable "past", all operate as drags on how your intentions eventually become visible in experience. They contribute from the moment you have them, but are immediately entangled with all that other stuff, and they only "shine though" when an appropriate context becomes available; when the clouds part briefly. Meditation and releasing and detachment are about letting the clouds dissipate, for faster results. But all this is a good thing. Would you really want to have an existence which literally consists of your thoughts immediately persisting as 3D-immersive environments, as your "reality"? Basically, a dream with absolutely no inertia?

The 'sluggishness' that we experience in certain directions is a benefit more than it is an obstacle. For example, our experience tends to be continuous and make logical sense, and the things we done so far tend to persist rather than need constantly reactivated.

POST: Philosophy and Dimensional Jumping

It's not a bad line of thought, that. Although the underlying philosophy is probably more based on Berkeley, Kant plus non-dualism, those lack a well-defined notion of choice and freedom which Sartre provides. If we take his "in-itself" and "of-itself" and see them as one and the same, and his "radical freedom" as therefore applying to experiencing itself rather than the given content, then that's definitely one way to look at it. (With apologies for rustiness and maybe slightly misusing terms.)

As a separate thing: I do think that philosophy can sometimes lead to complex ways to circle around "that which cannot be described" without ever getting there (fair enough: because we're trying to describe "the thing that experiences and descriptions are made from"), so although I love it, I've kind of stepped back from it more recently - thinking that in the end simpler models, ones which can be adopted as immersive metaphors and more easily tested out subjectively, are probably better for actually making progress "in real life".

EDIT: But of course, without the philosophy to start with, you can't make the models!

Q1: When you say "in-itself" and "of-itself" are you referring to Kant's "a-priori" and "a-posteriori" distinctions?
This always reminded me of the Platonic theory of forms (the reality of the form versus its mere appearance - very Brahma/Maya here IMHO). I'm sure that it is much more nuanced than I have articulated it.

That's Sartre-speak, but I pretty much believe that all of these strands of philosophy were an attempt to capture the same thing (which make sense right?). Mostly, wrestling with the idea that The Absolute takes on the shape of The Relative, and they are one and the same - like a blanket of material whose only property is "awareness" experiencing folds within itself. (The "patterning model" I use here sometimes is another version of the same: eternal patterns which vary only in their relative intensity, their "brightness" dictating how much each contributes to experience, the overall distribution constituting a "world".)

I like to think of it like Moire fringes. If all possible patterns are latent in the background (a blanket of material which can take on any shape), then triggering one pattern, "A" (a set of folds in the blanket), and then triggering another pattern, "B", doesn't take up any more space - you still end up with "a pattern", "C". You've still got exactly the same material shaped into a single pattern, just a more complex set of folds.

...

Good note. Hinduism is rich in stories which point to the fundamental (awareness/being/experiencing) vs relative truth (content/state/dimensions), and they're much clearer than the Christian parables. Favourite:

Narada, Vishnu and Maya
In Devi Bhagwata Purana, it is mentioned that once Narada asked Vishnu about the secret nature of Maya (Illusion).
“What is Maya?” asked Narada.
“The world is my Maya. He who accepts this, realizes me,” said Vishnu.
“Before I explain, will you fetch me some water?” requested the Lord pointing to a river.
Narada did as he was told. But on his way back, he saw a beautiful woman. Smitten by her beauty, he begged the woman to marry him. She agreed.
Narada built a house for his wife on the banks of the river. She bore him many children. Loved by his wife, adored by his sons and daughters, Narada forgot all about his mission to fetch water for Vishnu.
In time, Narada’s children had children of their own. Surrounded by his grandchildren, Narada felt happy and secure. Nothing could go wrong.
Suddenly, dark clouds enveloped the sky. There was thunder, lightning, and rain. The river overflowed, broke its banks and washed away Narada’s house, drowning everyone he loved, everything he possessed. Narada himself was swept away by the river.
“Help, help. Somebody please help me,” he cried. Vishnu immediately stretched out his hand and pulled Narada out of the water.
Back in Vaikuntha, Vishnu asked, “Where is my water?”
“How can you be so remorseless? How can you ask me for water when I have lost my entire family?”
Vishnu smiled. “Calm down, Narada. Tell me, where did your family come from? From Me. I am the only reality, the only entity in the cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Everything else is an illusion – a mirage, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp.”
“You, my greatest devotee, knew that. Yet, enchanted by the pleasures of worldly life, you forgot all about me. You deluded yourself into believing that your world and your life were all that mattered and nothing else was of any consequence. As per your perspective, the material world was infallible, invulnerable, perfect. That is Maya.”
Thus Vishnu dispelled Narada’s illusion, bringing him back to the realm of reality and making him comprehend the power of Maya over man.

...Great eh? Now look around the room you are in, and realise your true situation at this very moment...

Q: [Deleted]

It's quite nice, isn't it? It brings you back to the simplicity of actual experience, rather than the tangle that thoughts about it can become. When it comes to searching esoteric texts for explanations, my general advice is: don't. You just end up in a synchronicity whirlwind, because every path you take apparently opens up a right seam of connections and evidence. But really: there are no deep underlying reasons for experiences. What I'd do if you've had a complicated experience - put it aside for a week, leave it alone. Then, after that, right down what you literally experienced, stripped of any interpretations or explanations. Literally: I saw this, then this happened, then that happened. And take it from there.

Who knows what insights you might uncover for yourself? Please don't interpret me as being dismissive on that score. You will likely uncover things which are subjectively meaningful, within yourself. However, I think you can't go wrong with standing back and starting with a basic account of the observations, as it were, before doing the interpretation or model-building.

Random thoughts -

My own position is that experiential content is just that: content. It only has meaning relative to itself, and it has no fundamental meaning. The metaphysical truth is content-independent. And the fundamental truth is known only by direct experience, and cannot be conceptualised at all. Experiences are just experiences, no matter how amazing. Their benefit is that they point to the arbitrariness of the content of experience. If things shift and change a lot, eventually you twig that: hey, all that ever happens is more dream! It never ends, and I never really get any deeper into it. Every door opened generates a new landscape, every dig uncovers more fossils, every time I go looking for an explanation, I find one... plus more questions. It goes on forever, so The Answer can't be within the content of experience.

Q: [Deleted]

Well, I keep good company apparently! But there's no good way to say it, really, although I do think modern metaphorical language can offer more streamlined descriptions because we've got access to a richer set of abstractions (or so it seems to us, anyway). Mathematics is the ultimate language for describing abstract relationships - i.e. patterns - for instance. Shapes without substrates, objects which don't take up any space and be simultaneously existent and non-existent, in perfect balance. Etc.

Q: [Deleted]

Do it. The reason it got removed was because: a) it was very hard to follow and, b) it didn't seem to be about an intentional shift, which is what this subreddit is really about. (There are other subreddits for reporting spontaneous strange experiences.)

As I say in the other comment, if I were you I'd not bother with the research right now, not until you've settled out a bit - you'll just end up with a whole load of self-referencing synchronicities. Take some time out from it, then return to it with a fresh mind.

POST: Is it possible to jump without using any of the techniques?

All the "techniques" take the form of performing a mental or physical "act" with the intention that it means-that something is true (a fact, or a future situation). There actually is no technique for intending; one simply asserts, but that's impossible to describe and you can't "try" to do it, so the misdirection of an act is helpful. Practically speaking, there's probably always something that can be interpreted as an "act". Meanwhile, the majority of people are constantly re-asserting their current state. For instance, most people continually re-trigger their current physical position, which is why movement has a sense of effort or overcoming a hurdle: they are simultaneously intending being-sat-downl and being-stood-up, for example. This is why some trick which leads to "detachment" is included.

So you can indeed apply the formula directly, without a technique:

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

In your case, the "focus on my belief system" will be the act, and the "change that I want" would be the intention. As with the owls exercise you will get some results simply by focusing on your belief system (the pattern activation will make it contribute to your experience more prominently), but having the deliberate intention with it will make the difference. And you have to complete the bargain (as it were) by surrendering to whatever shifts arise.

Basically: experiment.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by detachment?

In general terms: ceasing to oppose spontaneous movements in the world / allowing shifts to occur without interference. To give you a direct example right now:

READ: If you're sat down, pause a moment, and let go of your attention, let yourself become aware of the background space in your body and in the room around you. Now, just "decide' that you are going to stand up, but don't do anything deliberate about it. Let whatever's going to happen, happen, and be okay with it.

NOW DO IT BEFORE CONTINUING.

What happened? Did your body stand up "by itself"? Or did you feel something happening and you halted it? Or did you feel yourself sitting "more intensely" than before, and no standing?

I felt something akin to the urge to stand up, or the expectation of me standing up shortly, but I never made it there. Is it possible this is what's holding me back? How might I get better at it?

It's not so much you get better at it - there's nothing to get better at in terms of the intending side - but you stop obstructing it. What you are probably doing is continually asserting and re-triggering your current state as the starting point for a movement. Take a moment to try this out and see if it make sense. Sit down somewhere again, and this time you are going to get up as you normally do, but paying attention to what actually happens. Stand up. Did you do this by shifting your mind to the state of being-stood-up and your body followed, or did you in fact begin by "finding your body" - basically, looking for the being-sat-down state - and then beginning from that point?

Two things to play with:

1. Taking this phrase in mind: "release into the movement", try intending standing again.
2. Centre your attention in your forehead, withdrawing your "presence" from the rest of your body (this prevents you triggering states). Try intending standing again.

Once you've had the experience, it all makes more sense, the whole "states" thing and so on.

Would a deprivation chamber be considered, in your opinion, lack of re-assertion of a current state? You wouldn't really have the Act+Intention+Detachment=Shift paradigm at work, though perhaps Detachment may be entailed. Or am I completely misunderstanding? Thanks.

It's a possible route, but having done floaty tanks ages ago (although before developing this view) I don't think it's necessarily any better than lying on the floor and giving up your attention. You can be in a tank and still be held onto, if not your body arrangement, then still the sensation of location and world. Isolation from input isn't the problem, it's an attentional thing. There's also an issue that you are not necessarily fully supported, in the sense that you are on the floor. The water accommodates your distribution of muscular tension, because it doesn't imposed any particular position on your. If you like down in the constructive rest position, then gravity imposes a release and your body, mind, attention feels more comfortable with releasing.

Having said that, floating is very pleasant and it's probably a great environment to experiment. I keep meaning to go back to it.

POST: i only just read about dimensional jumping. is this stuff real ?

Well, it's not the sci-fi type concept that you might be thinking about (although "other realms are available"). But let's just say that your apparent world is a little more "flexible" than you might have assumed, and isn't of the same form you have probably assumed. Maybe start off by creating some owls, then do the The Glasses Exercise, just to convince yourself there's "something going on", and take it from there.

I see it as occultism for people who don't actually want to put the mental effort into occultism.

I dunno, at its best I'd say it's more like the "Reality 101" lesson that nobody got given at school. It's how stuff works anyway; you're just noticing what you've been doing accidentally all along. Many occultists seem to have swapped one hardline worldview for another, too busy pissing around with the content of experience to have spent time getting to grips with what the nature of experience is. (Chaos magick looked interesting at one point, but it got bogged down in its own ideas about "beliefs", and never really fulfilled its initial promise I think.) I think the deeper ideas in this subreddit have the potential to connect these two things together, while avoiding the arrogance and snobbery that plagues the followers of other approaches.

I do however believe that alternate realities do exist and that eventually when technology permits, we might actually be able to jump and record events in other realities.

I have to say, I don't think that will ever happen, in an objective way, if you're imagining something like portals opening and people walking between places - unless you're thinking of Contact (you have an experience and come back, but physically you went nowhere and there's no trace in "this" reality). I don't think realities are "places" at all really, except (using the bad metaphor) in the sense that a video game environment is a "place".

Until an actual physicist comes out and proves or even explain how something like this could be possible...

That kinda misses the point though, maybe?

The whole underlying basis of this sort of thing is the nature of observation itself. It's more a metaphysical or philosophical issue (the nature of consciousness and our experiences of the world) than a scientific one (observing regularities in the content of our experiences of the world and building models). You can only do subjective experiments on the subjective experience, not objective ones. Science is "inside" subjective experience; you can't really do objective experiments on it. Although maybe theories like QBism might one day provide a framework to use to describe subjective viewpoints. (QBism says, in effect, we each have a "private view" of reality.)

[Excuse length, but I think it's worth spending time trying to clarity this, and see if we can reach an agreement in this area.]

Sciencing the Shit Out Of Reality

I agree with this, but then if something can't actually be recorded and measured, how do you know you are really experiencing it?

You are "really experiencing" everything that you experience - it's your interpretation of it that's up for grabs. But interpretations are essentially connective fictions anyway...

We have to be careful here: many popular science enthusiasts have reversed the idea in their thinking of what lies behind the process. In science, observations are primary; they are the only thing that is "real". The conceptual frameworks that we use to link those observations, are constructed narratives.

• Observations dictate what models are valid.
• Models do not dictate what observations are valid.

Science does not seek to find what is true. It's basically an endeavour to find useful descriptions which have predictive power. As a result, it limits itself to:

• Observed regularities - i.e. subjectively experienced patterns which noticeably repeat and are relatively easy to distinguish.
• Observations which leave a trace which can itself be repeatedly observed later, by multiple observers.
• Observations which can be captured as descriptions - in practice, this restricts us to visual observations as the end result.

And there is further filtering:

• Observations which can be defined in terms of presently available conceptual frameworks - this has narrowing effect, and can lead people to take the view that if something doesn't fall within the current framework, it is not "possible".
• Observations which be intersubjectively agreed upon - this has the effect of being lowest common denominator, in the sense that any observer-dependent aspects of reality are filtered out. By definition, only the most basic common aspects of the world experience can be included.

All together, this means that science does not deal with reality or the world as it is or that which is experienced - it's dealing with a very specific subset and for a very specific purpose. Science's purpose is calculation rather than understanding or meaning. It is very good at that - but it's important not to confuse it with "how things work or what things are".

Experiencing vs Really Experiencing

And so, returning to your question:

if something can't actually be recorded and measured, how do you know you are really experiencing it?

You know you are experiencing it, because you are experiencing it - it is directly and immediately true. In fact, observations are the only things that ever truly "happen". On the other hand, you cannot know if you have experienced something in the past. Mainly because there is no such thing as "the past". All you can ever do is have an experience, now, of a shadow-sensory object that you call "a memory". This applies even to what you see around you in the world. It is an act of "narrative faith" to assume the world is stable, and that external records are trustworthy as regards indicating a thing we call the past. That we tend to trust the "world's memory" more than our "personal memory" - even though both are merely present moment subjective experiences which arise in your mind which, upon investigation, basically come from "nowhere" - is a matter of convention and hope, and not much more.

The Mandela Effect & Friends

Well, let me be upfront and say I'm not a particular fan of the discussions which hang off that whole Berents#in Bears thing. As you rightly point out, practically speaking it would be very difficult to discern whether one's "personal memory" has shifted, or if the "world memory" has shifted. All you can be certain of, is that there is a discrepancy between the two. And since it's already happened, there's no much point in theorising about the cause. Nothing is "more likely" than another thing, if you can't test it. We are really just saying "seems more plausible to me", which is different. If you wanted to truly test for certain whether there is some sort of effect, you would have to attempt to bring it about deliberately, and observe the results.

In short, you would have to perform an experiment.

Subjective Experimentation

I really don't think a human could DJ without some kind of technology involved, its all made up but its still neat to read.

So, the way to find out whether that was true or not, would be to conduct an experiment and see what effects arose, right?

However, the in-built problem with this would be that you might only ever be able to prove it to yourself. The very nature of an experiment where you attempt to shift your experience of reality, would be that it might not be open to intersubjective study. Of particular difficulty is that it's inherently the case that there is no mechanism to study. If the whole of reality shifts a little, then there is no "one part" which cab be observed pushing against "another part". The end result is always going to be of the form:

• Perform some mental or physical act.
• Observe whether the world as it is now, differs from the world as it was (as I recall it).

But such a change in the world takes the form:

• World Memory =/= Personal Memory

It is never possible to tell whether the World Memory changed state such that it's now as I desired it to be, or if my Personal Memory changed state such that it seems that the world shifted towards my desire. However... That doesn't matter, practically speaking.

Thinking More About Doing

In terms of not believing that thought (really: intention) can shift the world, you might try raising your arm. Then really pay attention to what you experiencing happening when you do this. How, exactly, do you change the position of your arm? (Really do this, it's quite informative.)

Do you feel yourself "using your brain" to do it? How did people lift their arms before brains were discovered?

In fact: aren't brains actually just a subjective observation? In other words, doesn't it seem that brains are inside experience, and they do not cause it? If I had a lucid dream where I was being operated on, and surgeons were prodding my brain and then my arm was moving - in what sense would my experience of seeing the surgeons' actions be linked to my subsequent experience of arm movement?

You get the idea.

POST: I think that it is possible to jump dimensions without knowing it for a long time, if ever.

If we were to take the view that our experiences consist entirely of "aspects of ourselves", this would mean that every time we had a change of state the (apparent) world would shift a little. "Jumping" is then just a knowingly deliberate and specific version of something that is in fact happening constantly, to some extent. Ponders: if we are always in effect exploring our own minds, what does it mean to "make our minds up"?

That is interesting. Do you then think that it is possible that we have the power to shape reality, albeit subconsciously? It seems unlikely, but perhaps it is possible.

It's an important question, and one that can't really be answered by thinking it out, I'd say. Since reality for us is our experiences - any theories we have are also experiences (of thinking) - it's not like we can ever get outside of it and do experiments on it; there is no "outside" to experience. So I think all you can do is conduct personal experiments, and see how your experience of the world changes as a result, and infer things from that. Really, that's what this subreddit is about. Other places discuss the philosophy of experience (/r/onierosophy) or report spontaneous unusual experiences (/r/glitch_in_the_matrix), here the idea is that you don't believe anything in particular, you explore things for yourself by deliberate, direct experimentation and see what happens. The overarching concept is that is that of "active metaphors", which is to say that the metaphors you adopt tend to shape your experiences "as if" they were true, and soften the paths of change in that direction. It is a "content agnostic" view, which says there is no fundamental truth, there is just experiences "as if" things were true. How far can that go? Well, finding that out is the source of the adventure!

That's where things like the Two Glasses Exercise come in: simple ways to check for yourself whether an apparently non-causal change can be made, by pattern shifting alone.

Q1: About a week ago I noticed that there was a path of bricks across a grass lawn at the local university that I don't think was there, but I very well could have just not noticed it until now.
Heh. That is what you are supposed to think. These things just sneak into reality. I have an entire city reshaping itself (or being reshaped) all around me. Land sort of just grows when you are not looking, but it comes with a history. Roads widen, shrubberies show up, etc. Campuses are especially suspect for me. Also look for roads which used to be straight but are now crooked and signs of places where the ground has risen.

It is true, things do apparently "sneak". However, I would recommend that people be reasonably mindful when it comes to this: when we step back and allow things to autofill with less direction, it does become more dreamlike, but with that there's a temptation people have to think that it is being done or managed externally. This becomes a self-fulfilling path, generating "as if" evidence for itself, that gets some people into trouble; they got lost in it for a while. Fortunately it doesn't take much experimentation to realise that it's a "dumb" patterning process, effectively an "autocomplete" using currently active elements, that can be directed by intention.

Some of it is automatic. Some of it is being intentionally manipulated.

Uh-huh, right. And recognising the intentional part, doing it knowingly, is what's important (and makes it clearer, though experience, the nature of the experience more generally).

Oh, I did mean to say, that I like this wording very much:

Land sort of just grows when you are not looking, but it comes with a history.

I'd maybe tweak it up to say: "but it comes with an apparent history" - which is revealed in subsequent experiences "about" its past, although these experience take place in the ongoing present.

Yeah. That is actually really important. It turns out that the present is not caused by the past. Rather, whatever present you are in at any given moment causes its own past.

You might phrase it as: the story is discovered as you go along, at the moment of discovery, implied by the current patterns.

For example, (0) a new tree appears in my garden. (1) I go to examine it, it seems large and old. (2) I ask the neighbours about it, it's always been there, they say, and rumour has it the tree was planted by the guy who built the house. (3) I look up old photographs of the house, and there's one of the original owner planting it. It seems like I've moved to a "new reality" where a tree has been there for 100 years. In actual fact, this history is 'created', observation by observation, as I uncover it: observations 1, 2, 3. First, there was just one observation 0, the new tree. That was the only change. However, my subsequent observations must be coherent with what came before, hence the apparent history I uncover, as the observations accumulate. In other words, there was no defined history until I went looking for it.

...

...Well, if it that's a narrative that you enjoy and find meaningful, then you're right to pursue it. (And I'd apply that view to everyone. "There are no answers, only choices.")

Personally though - inevitably our perspectives will differ here, but that is of course part of the fun - I don't think "space-time" needs healed, because it is not a thing. There is an argument for helping people "heal" though, in terms of resolving difficulties and so on (from which improvements in "space-time" generally follow).

...

A1: What is reality? Is it a piece of paper? Fold it. What is reality? Is it clay? Shape it. You have the ability to form reality around you, you do it all the time. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every time you touch the water, a wave will form. Touch life with the intent to shape the wave you want to see.

"Go shape yourself!"