TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 25)

POST: Myth buster: who here personally has gone temporarily insane from magick?

I just feel like the dangers are massively overstated. My consciousness, for good or ill, is extremely tenacious.

The danger is one of focus and perspective. You can end up locked into a worldview at the expense of daily practicality. Hence needing to stay grounded. Magick works with normal life, in face normal life works by magick. There's nothing "special" going on, it's just the practising magick brings about more extreme versions of what's already happening - and that can be very disorientating if you let it consume you.

POST: I have a question about a very popular type of "magic".

Q1: I know a very powerful witch that told me once the key to working love spells successfully is to love yourself. He said you should indulge in your beauty and masturbate like crazy. You don't want to WANT love. You want to BE loved.

Yeah, classic approach: Summon the feeling of the situation that you want to have, as the key thing.

POST: Anyone else feel like this when first beginning?

RAW got me started: Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising. You can really overthink this though: it, of course, is actually super, super simple. The more you think about it, the more you will obscure it. You "are the dream, are consciousness" right now - you are just obscuring it by looking and thinking. There is no theory to this, it is not made of concepts and cannot be understood in that sense. It can be talked about, but really it is something you experience. Do a daily practice like this:

  • 10 minutes, twice a day.
  • Lie down on the floor, feet flat with knees bent, head supported by books, arms by your side or hands resting on abdomen.
  • Decide to give up completely to gravity: to "play dead".
  • Let go of your body and mind, let them move as will. Allow them to unwind.
  • Don't even "pay attention"; just let it be open and wide. If it focuses on some thought or pain briefly, let that happen, and let it open out again.
  • After 10 minutes, decide to get up, but don't do anything about it. Wait until your body moves by itself. (Thus won't happen first time, but eventually it will happen.)

Basically, you are letting the "stuck thoughts" and "uncompleted movements" you have amassed unwind and dissolve themselves. You do not need to do anything for this to occur. Gradually, your perception will become clearer and clearer. Note: Any effort to focus or do anything will get in the way. There is a method of accelerating this by "overwriting yourself", but it's nicer this way.

...

Q1: I feel like the objective truth is Inifity itself (the All-That-Is, God, etc). But, if this is the case, then it become a giant paradox due to spawning paradoxes all over the place. Infinity would say that nothing is true and that everything is true (or CHAOS and ORDER coexisting at 100% for both of them), but in our limited ability to understand the duality of this, we see that the two currently cannot exist at the same time, but they have to. We just don't know how, but we can make some damn good guesses, yet they will never really be 100%, because they will always be a part of the whole and not the whole itself. Hopefully you understand what I am trying to say :)

Perhaps chaos is enfolded into order, or vice versa?

Q1: How many you's ARE there?
As I understand it, it can be an infinite amount. Depends on how far down the rabbit hole I want to take it.
How can an ego dissolve itself?
Not quite sure, but I feel it comes about from not having a need to protect the Self or a need to identify and separate the Self from the Whole. It dissolves from knowing that it is Infinity, but it is hard if not impossible to do when you are seeing all this from your individual conscious perspective. How can you describe infinity in its wholeness when you can only work from within it, never all of it unless you become all of it, and never from outside of it because there is nothing outside of it.
Some of the most basic thoughts are the 'craziest'...
And also some of the most True.

My thoughts:

The ego is just a mental thought that you (that is, consciousness) are having. You are infinite - you can "feel out" into space forever, right now, you will find - but you do have a perspective. There is no way to conceptualise this or intersubjectivity. You basically have to give up trying to work that out. The best way is to think of yourself as being All That Is, on a "time-share" basis. In moments when it is your turn, you are the whole thing. Or for convenience, just treat this as a dream, where you are the dream. The bunch of body sensations in the middle you have tended to think of as "you", but they are within the larger consciousness (the actual you, the dream and the dreamer and the dreaming, same thing), you just got in the habit of misidentifying with that part of the dream experience. You are an infinite self-aware blanket, which forms itself into the shapes of experiences, thereby experiencing itself. The blanket truth! [https://youtu.be/XfIiRKLMjDY]

Dunno what you've been reading, but I found certain things keep my sense of reality "loose". Read Rupert Spira and Greg Goode on non-duality. Read Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman. Check out idealism, and lucid dreaming (Robert Waggoner's book is great). Shake up your direct experience! :-)

Magick is just committed intention, and it always works in some way or other (even if it just results in a dream of your desire). If you can get into the mindset of expanding your a Will and Presence into the whole dream, you will find that helps.

POST: how i think sigals work

A desire, almost by definition, is something you're holding on to. Nobody ever held onto a fulfilled desire. Magick (sigils, whatever) is a method of letting go of desire, releasing it psychologically, so that rather than being within you, it appears in the external world. Which is also you. It's a simple change of location, really.

POST: What is magick?

New fun definition for today: A desire, almost by definition, is something you're holding on to. Nobody ever held onto a fulfilled desire. Magick (sigils, whatever) is a method of letting go of desire, releasing it psychologically, so that rather than being within you, it appears in the external world. Which is also you. It's a simple change of location, really.

Everything works by magick. Intention => result. It's just that some results seem more linked - spatially or temporally - than others. The more distant the link, the more amazed we are (also, the more unlikely we are to intend such a result). The trick is, though, that experience is structured according to the concepts you have accepted. This applies to both the more advanced esoteric efforts, and to the everyday movements of your body and mind. Once you've tried some more exotic "requests" and had them answered, it'll mangle your notion of your sphere of influence, and perhaps what "you" are.

Q: Once you've tried some more exotic "requests" and had them answered, it'll mangle your notion of your sphere of influence, and perhaps what "you" are.
This is interesting. When you mean exotic "requests" you mean something slightly past that threshold of believably right?

Right. Something that pushes the temporal, spatial limits.

POST: Any Artists experienced in Sigil Magik?

Q1: There's an easy way to do it yourself. Just write out what you want the sigil to do, remove all vowels and letters that repeat, rework the remaining letters into a pattern that looks good enough, then charge it. Since you're doing it for a band, I'd suggest finding a musical or vocal way to charge it.

Q2: That is actually a really cool Idea!

Or - write out the purpose of the sigil. Remove all letters that don't correspond to those associated with musical notes. Maybe designate capital letters as 'sharps', lower case as unmodified. Then rearrange into a melody, or use as the basis of a chord progression - to create a sigilised song. Work that represents your work!

Very meta! :-)

POST: help name suggestion for a new music label that will attract goodgood fortune

Hmm. How about something like: 'Just My Luck!' Records.

And here is your logo:

Alt Tag

  • It's a vinyl record because you're a music label.
  • It's slightly amended to be shaped like the outline of a fortune cookie, because you want to attract good fortune.
  • It's purple because that's one of the lucky colors for the Year of the Horse, which is what 2014 is.
  • And, of course, the record player needle is formed into a 'J', the initial of the label name - but also a 'smile'.
  • The label name appears underneath in the style of a fortune cookie slip. (Alternate, cleaner version without the outlining here.)
  • The font used throughout is PT Sans, which falls under the open user licence for commercial and non-commercial use.

Basically a sigil and a logo and name and good fortune, all wrapped into one handy package. ;-)

Yours to do with as you please.

POST: I have an honest question for people who practice occult things.

Most "Spells" are handed down by to person to person and books etc. What is stopping anyone from creating new spells or occultic practices that are unique to that person or that persons circle of friends?

Look up chaos magick or Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners. People invent new approaches all the time, if they're into that sort of thing. They might not easily be called "spells" though. That's a bit 'Harry Potter' / cheesy websites [https://www.spellsofmagic.com/spells.html].

Q1: [http://www.spellsofmagic.com/spells/love_spells/commitment_spells/14662/page.html]
I call naivety! Look at this piece of.... Gold I found

Call naivety at me? (As in, you do realise I included that link as a joke, yeah?)

I didn't mean at you (I just woke up!). I mean at the website!!

Aha, just checking! :-)

There are some classics! Thing is, a couple of them almost correspond to genuine spells in older literature. (One of the 'invisibility' ones is the classic 'quiet yourself down' approach to be less conspicuous, so someone is doing a bit of reading sometimes.) Most, however, are - um - not!

Gonna do me some teleporting/time travelling, definitely - - -

...

But... but... it tells me how to time travel! Come on! I want me some 'flying ointment' too.

Actually in comparison to the first-mentioned website, it's not that bad.

POST: I just had a strong experience while meditating gazing into a mirror.

Q1: Any advice on what the hell happened?
This is a common question. People have experiences and they're trying to fit them into a conventional framework of some kind, so they ask peers to help categorize the experiences. If you understand why it's good to have some things stay outside convention, then the need for this will be reduced.

But, y'know, it's fun! ;-)

POST: How do you attain Buddha nature with a roof tile?

Simply sitting in meditation "exclusively" does not change anything, and by doing so you are not "polishing your character" to make it clear, you are simply being-as-you-are, unchangingly without investigation or examination. The tile remains the same old tile after Nangaku's efforts; Baso remains the same old Baso after his unexamined sitting.

POST: How reliable are the spells listed on this website?

That is a "fun" website really. Having said that, you can potentially use anything, with the backing of proper intention, to get what you want, so it could be used for inspiration to spice things up once you know more about what you are doing. Some people use "spells", others less so. Depends on your taste. Pretty much, you should invent your own approach in the end, once you've become accustomed to the ideas. For 'traditional' stuff, read Aleister Crowley. For chaos magick, a more relaxed approach, try Phil Hine's Oven Ready Chaos. For an even more free-form approach (anything goes, any act is magickal with intention) but which covers most areas, I recommend Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners. (Follow links or Google in each case, pretty much everything is out there somewhere or is reviewed and discussed by someone.)

Then you might decide you love ritual and potion, or something more direct, or come up with your own crazy mix. There is much fun to be had.

P.S. If you ever manage to create yourself a time travel watch using that website, I want one!

POST: I'm asleep all the time

Where about 'in your body' do you experience yourself to be 'looking out from' - if at all?

Yes, I see things "from my body".

So, you might imagine/feel that "you" look out from a location just behind your eyes, or in your chest even. Where it is can change how the world seems, so maybe play with that: centre your attention in your abdomen, or your forehead, and see if that makes a difference? Being on the centre line can make things clearer, vision and perception wise - see here [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml] for instance.

POST: It's been fun but I've failed

Don't give up; I know where you're at.

There are lots of types of "magick", some of which may not fall obviously under that banner. For pain, for instance, try John Sarno's The Divided Mind (just reading the book helps some people) and Les Fehmi's Dissolving Pain (awareness-based techniques, opening out and relaxing).

For depression though, keep busy! Stop thinking. Completely. Life can't be worked out, it's not something that can be "solved", and depression doubly-not. Wash the dishes, clean the bathroom, make tasty meals for yourself, make yourself socialise no matter what. Decide to get on with life no matter how you're feeling (easier said than done, but you can't solve the depression and then live, it works the other way around). Physical pain often comes hand-in-hand with depression; the ongoing "compression" feeling can be the problem itself. Do a daily relaxation exercise (lie on the floor, head supported, and "give up completely" for 10 minutes) to let yourself settle out at least once a day. Main thing is to be good and compassionate to yourself, and forgiving! I was always super-harsh on myself when I wasn't "happening", and that was the worst thing to do.

Good luck! :-)

(Meanwhile, Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners helped get me back into it in a post-chaos way, if you are looking to rekindle your interest more generally. Anything done with intention is magick.)

POST: A request for help with Astral Projection

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the trick is to ignore the sensations and continue to focus on what you want to achieve. In the hypnogogia approach (which seems to be what you are trying to do?), let the sensations alone and continue to attend to letting the fragments and images form, and then crossing over (better description here). You'll get all sorts of wobbles and vibrations and perhaps noises; leave them be. You are not trying to enhance that sensation, it's just a byproduct for what you are doing.

POST: Hi Occult. Who Am I and What Can I Do?

Q1: If an Object existed long enough to have all it's parts replaced, is it the same Object?
Didn't this happen to some axe in a museum somewhere? I think it may have been Abraham Lincoln's.
EDIT: Nevermind, apparently this is a hypothetical axe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Enlightenment_era]. Nevertheless, good question.

[QUOTE]

Ship of Theseus
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, usually one after the other.

[END OF QUOTE]

Yes, you are basically "shiny and new" on a surprisingly regular basis, even your brain. Good article here. Your body is a pattern, not a thing.

...

*Q2: Hey like I said on a previous answer, professionals arent serious all the time. They fuck about more than regular folks. Ask any firefighter or military member. If you think doing something at a high level that you must be serious and "on" all the time, and start to think to that so many things are beneath you, that is the surest way to go insane, whatever field you take.
And if you havent caught on to the analogy, I am retired. I would like to enjoy wasting my time as much as possible.
And no it is not cleared up because it wasnt muddy to begin with. I wasnt asking clarification with what you were trying to do, I was calling out your lack of manners. Which I take special offense to because I was very generous with my answers to you.
Maybe I should try out whether Im a liar or not by fucking your shit up from all the way over here. Or you could just apologize for being rude. Up to you, Duke.

Hey, he was having a little joke - about himself really. As in, his idea of an enlightenment person would be some beyond such physical-world trivialities as reddit posting, so now he's (pretend) "disappointed" because it's not true, because you've posted on reddit!

Q2: Lol come on, I understand humor. Im a humorous fucking guy. But...
"better at language"
"more humble"
"reddit shitposting"
thats not humor, those are verbal jabs. especially after Ive tried to answer every question and comment he had respectfully, thats really asking for it.
good on you for trying to peacekeep though.

Aw well, it was worth a go. :-)

Q2: Nigga kept using "fount of consciousness", and he thinks Im bad at communication? Loool I can just smell the crease on his fedora. Fucking loser. IF YOU SEE THIS YOU LITTLE FAGGOT ILL BE WAITING ON THAT APOLOGY FOR 24 HOURS. AFTER THAT THE CONSEQUENCES BELONG TO YOU.
Anyways, you seem like a good dude. Whats your story?

Nowt wrong with a fedora. Unless you're Shia Lebeouf. Me? Enlightened, re-integrated Ruler Of All That Is. Y'know, usual everyday stuff. Dream-weaver, etc.

Q2: :) What do you mean by Ruler of All That Is?

Where do you think you are right now?

Q2: Do you ask that in the physical sense? The philosophical sense? Or the you know youre on reddit so nothing is serious sense?

Excellent response. The answer to all three, of course, is: in my mind. (You're lucky I keep it so nice and tidy and have maintained the air conditioning. Sorry about screwing up the world peace thing though.)

Q2: Ah ok.

More seriously, how does your experience compare with this, as in:

Awakening => Liberation => Enlightenment

As a stages model of development.

Q2: Like comparing going to fat camp vs being a pro athlete.

Nice. I say, jump straight to delete.

POST: Anyone else practice magick rather loosely?

I think the most important thing is that you feel a "fit" with your approach, or you won't commit yourself properly to the intention. At root, the acts don't necessarily matter in themselves. Check out Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners for the most open version of this (basically, an act is what you decided it to mean; the rest of it is theatre).

Generally, the more you invest in something, the more results will take that form and the more your experience will adjust to match up with it. Getting yourself to invest can be the real trick - to "get out of your own way" - and that's where a lot of the extra bits and bobs appear. Also, philosophically speaking there are and have been lots of ways to "view the world"; it makes sense that peoples magickal viewpoint emerges from that. But what was 'obvious' even 100 years ago is less so now. This stuff has to be reinterpreted and reinvented regularly, to retain its meaning and utility.

POST: Serious inquiry. The occult has always been a big part of my life, but lately I've been experiencing quite a bit of negative happenings. Could I have done something wrong?

Were you... drinking, at the time of the accidents? Forget the occult, just start focusing on putting things back together. Depression is a spiral: events will arise consistent with that "vibe".

Learn some powering up is good though, as other poster suggested. Try lying down and visualising "golden energy" engulfing and liberating you, etc. Let go to it, abandon yourself to the image completely.

Also, decide to give up analytical thinking: do it today.

POST: Personal Perception of the Human Condition

Interesting. The purpose of life is... living!

Some questions:

  • Is "Me" under my control?
  • Is "Me" something I am, or something I am aware of or 'perceiving through', like a viewport onto the world?
  • What is consciousness vs God? Are you a "fold in God's awareness" or are you a separate thing with it's own consciousness?

Q: Interesting how you're talking about Gnosis. I generally agree with you, except on one point: God is not the whole of humanity. It is tempting to think so, but in reality, we are all separate entities sharing the same world, or realm. There are different aspects of the realm that only a minority of humanity can reach or tap into, and it is up to the individual to discover that. God may exist, but humanity's conception of him is an egregore, used to shape and control the various societies and cultures. It exists in effect, but not in actuality. We are not one, as much as we love to think. In order to come to terms with oneself (which is basically the point of Gnosis), one has to see in fullness what he or she is, and what separates him or her from everyone else. This is critical.

Hmm. "God" exists as an egregore, but God is the name given to the ground of all existence, surely?

POST: Are Psychics real?

Real... what?

POST: Best Beginner Book?

I'd say Alan Chapman's book, which has been mentioned elsewhere, and Phil Hine. Also SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic, by Ramsay Dukes, the precursor to Chaos Magick but much more philosophically structured than most books. (Revised edition circa 2000.)

Q1: I don't think there is a "best book" for an absolute beginner. It depends where each individual is coming from, everyone has a scope of experience/perspective that they are going to fit information about the occult into. Say for example, you happen to study psychology best book to start with would be Jung's Red Book as it delves into the magickal mindset in a way that will speak to your knowledge base. English major? Try Poulet's Phenomenology of Reading for a primer on subject/object unification theory.
Best couple of books to start with might be: Modern Magick, Tao Te Ching, Chicken Qabalah, Upanisads (specifically Chandogya, Brhadaranyaka), Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous, Garden of Pomegranates, Liber Psychonaut.
The thing is that there is no best book to begin with. You have to read a lot of books before you start to even get an idea of what this whole magick thing is about.
I suggest instead of worrying about a best book to start with you should start thinking about a list of books.

Totally agree with no best book, but it's definitely easier to start by reading something modern and perhaps not too steeped in ritual or wordplay.

Q1: Agreed. It's hard to tell what reading level people are coming from. With these "I'm a noob" posts I wish people would include. 1.) What got you interested in magick/occult and what would you like to get out of it. 2.) What are your preconceived notions about it. 3.) Do you prefer structure or flying by the seat of your pants. That would be helpful.

It's half the problem: They don't even know that stuff yet! It's just, hey I'd like to get into magick, whatever it is, then see what I can do, and see what styles there are. I guess that these days the wealth of material available is actually confusing. When it used to be there was just "whatever book was in the library, or your friend had" then there was no choice and so it was ironically easier to get started. I just say "the Chapman book" these days, because it touches on everything and is written in modern sarcastic language, then they can jump off and see what they like afterwards.

Q1: I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've never read Chapman but I guess I should.
I think you are right about an over-whelming amount of material. It doesn't help that half of it is tripe! It can be daunting to think, okay there is all this material, but everyone disagrees on it, who do I listen to? Everyone should get a good primer on sourcing and rhetoric in my opinion. Teaching people how to find reliable sources is way more important than finding a first book per se. I also think that instead of pointing out "theory" or "how to" manuals it's also important to direct them to biographies and letters. The history of people is important! I think we tend to forget that there are people behind those books, with their own flaws and motivations. I mean it's important to know about all the splits in factions and why. For example, people frequently ask about AA lineage and want to know what the "right" one is but they don't want to do the digging to find out why Achad was disowned, why Kenneth Grant's order was disparaged.
Instead of a best book to start with page I'd like to see suggestions for mindsets to incorporate. Like question sources and find primary documents, laugh at yourself, play games with your mind, break yourself once in a while, as you read keep a running dialogue in your brain about what you disagree/agree with and why, embarrass yourself, do a random act of kindness, do a random act of meanness, have enthusiasm, doubt yourself regularly.

And the disparity between people's theories and their actual lives. Someone once told me that, when in a particular job or whatever, you should look around and "see if you'd want to be any of those people". That applies to much of this.

Mindsets: That's a very good suggestion. And, slightly related, an awareness of the metaphysics behind (a) magick.

POST: How do you think magic works?

Random screed. Magick works...

By intention, limited only by the structure and habits caused by previous intentions. Magick is simply a self-conscious version of what's happening all the time anyway.

Focus on a 1st person perspective here: The experience you are having right now. Left to its own devices, your world will unfold and flow in the same direction, unless interrupted and redirected. (By 'your world', I include your thoughts and your bodily actions and the larger environment; none of these are "you", they are all 'effects' and 'results'.) Intention is the way we do that redirection. The acts you perform don't matter, the intention behind them is what causes change.

Every act always has an intention. For instance, when you grab a cup of coffee the intention associated with that act could be "to grab a cup of coffee". However, it can equally be "to win the lottery". The actual act is irrelevant. If we view magick as "the means by which we summon a desired experience", then intention is the 'seeding' of that desired experience, which then ripples out. Intention is 'setting a target' for your world, and your world then unfolds towards it.

There is no underlying "solid" reality beyond the dream-like experience of the senses, therefore any experience is possible. However, because your world has developed certain 'habits' and a certain 'stability', this generally happens according to "explainable routes". In other words, there is rarely a sudden discontinuity in your experience. (If there is, then your memories would fall into line with it anyway.)

You can work on yourself and your beliefs, to make results appear sooner and more 'miraculously'.

Q1: I believe that reality is constantly self-generating itself at the will of consciousness (I), so if we are able to alter our consciousness, then we are able to alter our reality. I feel that this is supported by the double-slit experiment, and in fact you could say it's the foundation of my personal theory, though I didn't consider the DSE when creating it.
Simple, I know, but it allows "magic" to be extremely accessible and armed with a LOT of potential. It basically labels reality as illusory, and when you see it this way you can do anything you want with it.
EDIT: Other posts have inspired me to go further...so existence is like a pyramid, right? As our consciousness ascends into higher places, we encounter concepts and archetypes that grow more and more distant from physical reality. These archetypes are within us humans, since we are both animal and divine, but our animal minds cannot fathom these archetypes and their scope; attempting to do so would render us mentally blinded. So we make these archetypes more easily accessible by humanizing them and associating them with things in the macrocosm; after all, it is all part of the same source, right?
When we do this, we create a path upon which our intentions and desires can travel to the top of the pyramid, like the path that a seed takes as it grows into a fruit-bearing plant. All we have to do then is pick the fruit when it is ready, or wait for it to drop into our hand. ;)
All of this takes place from within, because we have the whole universe inside us.

I believe that reality is constantly self-generating itself at the will of consciousness (I), so if we are able to alter our consciousness, then we are able to alter our reality.

How does this accommodate the different intentions of multiple magicians?

Q1: Could you elaborate a bit?

So, I agree with what you say. My own picture is that everything resides within consciousness, all possibilities are contained within it. What we do with intention is that we "seed" a new experience, enfolded into consciousness, which then unfolds, ripples out, until it is manifested as an experience we have. (Whether that is the "experience of owning and driving a Ferrari" or "the experience of meeting that nice girl" or "the experience of doing well in my exam.)

However, how do we account for "other people" here? Are they separate from us? And surely different people are intending for different, conflicting things? How is that resolved?

Q1: I think I see what you're saying...and it's actually a good observation to make.
I'm honestly having a really hard time answering this. There's a definite philosophical element to this...sort of like merging the gap between objectivity and subjectivity. We need to take this one step at a time...and I hope I explain my reasoning clearly.
The most difficult part of answering this seems to be the paradox that we are individual souls, even though we come from the same source. At the core, we may have different ideas of satisfaction, different images of the perfect fruit, but it all starts with the same principle: a seed. It is a universal principle.
So it's sort of like planting seeds in a garden. The soil nourishes all seeds just the same, even though in the end, the fruit that each seed bears will be very different from each other. What you're asking is like asking how the soil accommodates the growth of all plants.
When we see it like this, we reach a sort of understanding, a logical dead end, if you will, and we could technically use this analogy as an answer...but it can go further.
The real question here is not answered by asking "how," but by asking "why?" Why are we able to manifest our own intentions, even if they may be different from others'? Why are we able to live out our own subjective experiences when we derive from the same source?
You've opened up a philosophical Pandora's box, my friend...
EDIT: Object agreement

My suggestion is: "Maybe it is all taken into account, all the time."

When we 'seed' an intention, it applies to all time and space. The whole of reality is reformed with that taken into account, and everything else taken into account. So it doesn't matter if you ask for a limited edition Ferrari, and slightly later I do too. The narrative of the universe will accommodate this. If when I did it, there was one Ferrari, when you do it, there will be - and will always have been - two.

There is no timeline of history and events that we move along, fixed or otherwise. Intention is fact insertion at the root, essentially, and the universe/mind always tends towards a coherent narrative. (See the bottom of my post here [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams], for an example in dreams.)

Something additional to contemplate: The reason we don't often experience discontinuities - say, when I 'magick' a taxi to be waiting round the corner, it doesn't seem to just materialise, the driver always has a story about how he came to be there - is because everything is reworked this way. If the taxi did materialise this second, our minds/memories would return a 'story' to explain it when we went looking for such a memory/explanation. (This happens a lot in hypnosis: Tell someone that John will now vanish in mid air, and they'll say he "must have left the room, out the door, when I was distracted".)

Meanwhile, we might imagine ourselves to be experiencing the world from different perspectives on a sort of "timeshare" rather than spatially and at the same time. We each get a mini-turn at being the whole universe. (This isn't exactly true: it can't be either spatial or temporal, but it provides an alternative way to conceptualise it.)

POST: At this point, wtf is the point?

7 principles, 42 laws? Sounds a bit much to me! I mean, surely it's just: relax/delete and intend/decide and get out of the way? Belief, or actually lack of unbelief, being key.

However, until you get materialisation sorted, you're going to go hungry. Do you have that sorted yet?

Q: And some, what really gets me, as i said before, is we aren't just moving away from the stress and just making the zone. That's what i want to discuss, what can we do so that it's based and no one feels like they are carrying anything and at the same time we can make shit happen for the other shit to experience, unless you just want to forget the rest of it and just see a small degree - there's so much more.

Hmm. I always thought the fun of this was using magick in amongst the muggles - to be super-cheesy. Making the maximum out of living in the city or wherever, making things happen. It we were all in a 'Special Delimited Zone' it would be a bit boring.

For instance, lucid dreams are a lot of fun. Everyone tends to begin by harnessing it and taking control. After a while, though, you usually stop doing that, and explore... tweaking things occasionally to make them more to your liking, but not radically redefining the reality.

POST: Do you guys ever get stumped when you are trying to decide just "what" to do your magick for?

Yep, sounds like depression. So - - -

Maybe just don't bother about wanting stuff; that might be the wrong approach. Instead, concern yourself with what needs done, and use magick to help you with that?

The approach: Ask yourself, "what needs doing now?". And then go and do it, no matter how you feel. After that task is complete, ask yourself again. Maybe the task will be "go wash the dishes", doesn't matter. You're being constructive.

As you go along, you might encounter things where magick will help: You need to get some paint of a particular colour, so you "do a magickal act" to make that available, etc. You don't always have to be working towards some "big goal"; being busy is enough. In fact, there are arguments against having goals [https://zenhabits.net/no-goal/].

Christopher Walken said once that he never planned his career, he just did what came up, and that he wished he could live his life by cue cards. Why not do that, using the method above? Who knows what may turn up!

Q: Why don't you do magic FOR Motivation? I often start with that when I just don't seem to get myself to do anything for months

He can't be arsed.

POST: Astral Travel clarification please...

Yes, it's a muddle. I think you can help select the "correct" version by choosing a method that's not too ambiguous. For instance, trying to OBE from a dream or during the night can lead to a dream-like experience, using visualisation you might just enter an image fragment which then expands into a dream.

If you do something more direct, like the "rope technique", then you remain conscious throughout and are actively choosing to "leave your body and stay here" rather than "explore the worlds within", so to speak?

The 'sparkles' technique from this [https://www.oniros.fr/A1417.pdf] is quite reliable, but leaves doubt as to whether you're just seeding a new world to experience. (It's a good read anyway though.)

Rope Technique

Forget visualisation, as in "picturing"; the rope technique is all about generating the feeling of the rope. You lie down, and feel your hands take hold of a rope that's dangling from above, end up at your chest level. Then you feel yourself pulling up on that rope, hand-over-hand, pulling yourself out of your body. You do this from the perspective of it actually happening, right now. It sounds like you might have fallen into the common trap of thinking-about or visualising-about (3rd person perspective or 'elsehwere') rather than trying to generate a direct experience (1st person perspective and 'here, now').

Does that make sense?

Buhlman's pretty enjoyable. You should read Oliver Fox and Robert Monroe too, if you haven't. Fox is good because he was an early pioneer, and his early diary-form is very much from the perspective of a personal experience.

POST: Help a soon-to-be Beginner?

Perhaps you need to realise that Christianity itself is a magickal tradition. Much of the New Thought movement of the early 20th Century was based around an interpretation of the Bible as a reality/magickal manual (e.g. Neville Goddard). This subreddit [https://old.reddit.com/r/ChristianOccultism/] might be of use. You can't push through things with willpower, rather you need to embrace them and include them within yourself, let them become part of your momentum. The reason you are so passionate about this is probably exactly because of this need to embrace and overcome your guilt.

...You just need to push through. It's just conflict/resistance. Don't take it too seriously. Any step forward into a new world or a different way of doing things has this associated with it.

On your other question, the meaning of the word "sin" is to "miss the mark" - it's not "evil", it just means to not be at your best. And those passages do not mean quite what you think. Each essentially says: there are behaviours which get in the way of getting in touch with your true path and nature (that is what "God" is), and because they obscure your deeper intuition (distracting your attention) you will not pick up on the directions and actions you should be following. There is the notion of "True Will" which is essentially Your Nature and what you should really be doing. The warnings against mediums and manipulations is that they can turn you away from looking within, to your deeper knowledge. "God" is your inner self, your true self, and the "Son" is that which arises in the world from this. That is why so much of magick is focused on inner exploration and clearing out perception. There's nothing wrong with doing magick, therefore, but you might find that as time goes on you do more 'inner magick' and find that your life flows better and you don't feel the urge to try to directly influence the world around you. 'Passive magick' where you are open and synchronicities arise to help you along, and what happens to you is what you "really, really want", arising spontaneously from within you.

TL;DR: If you feel drawn to this, then pursue that. This 'inner momentum' is what you should be trusting. The scriptures are not saying what you think they are saying. Go for it.

...Hey, that's great. The thing you did there, you'll find useful for dissolving all sorts of barriers. The world is now yours!

...Yep. So long as you are honest about how you feel before you push through it (faking yourself doesn't work). When you know what to do, sometimes you've just got to get a hold of yourself and the world, and make it move along! :-)

"Yeah, but..."

It depends a bit on belief and intention. If you believe that "what goes around, comes around" then wrapped in the intention associated with your magickal act will be the idea that you should get hit by it. You will be effectively "wishing for that". You get what you think you deserve!

There's that way of looking at it, and also the notion that "all of this is you", so by intending harm on an aspect of the world, you're basically directing harm towards yourself. Magick can be viewed as the skill of generating desired experiences. If that is so, then you should really only work on generating positive experiences for yourself. Blockages, barriers - whether situations or people - should be allowed to fade or dissolve, or be turned into benefits, not be destroyed.

...I wouldn't get too hung up on that. It's the intention behind the ritual that matters most, with filtering by your background beliefs / expectations of how things work. The world happily gives you what you want, good or bad, it doesn't care. You don't need to watch your individual thoughts so much as take care with the "posture" you adopt. That should be expansive and positive. And you should always question why your are trying to summon something. Note, there are other ways to approach stuff besides formal ritual. See Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman, SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic by Ramsay Dukes, or Oven-Ready Chaos by Phil Hine for example. Every intentional act is an act of magick: If you drink your cup of coffee while saying "every sip of this coffee means my day will be luckier", then that is magick. Of course, most people drink their cup of coffee while intending... to drink their coffee. Is there something specific you are trying to achieve?

...No don't worry. Recognise those thoughts and just let them pass, returning to what you are actually focusing on. Just keep coming back to your purpose. Stray thoughts, like anything, are only a problem if you divert your energy to them and let them carry you away. This is no different to, say, if you are studying and you let the thought of going to watch TV instead carry you away!

POST: Beginner here. Is there a wikia style guide or an online source of encyclopedic knowledge that would be a good place for some one to start their journey?

Depends what you want. If you want rituals and mystery and so on, then you can immerse yourself in that. If you just want to get practical, then you can simplify things a bit. There are probably two sides: finding out about 'magickal practices' and then exploring 'the nature of reality' (which turns out to be about 'the nature of the self').

There's a free copy of Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos available here [Dead Link]. Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners is definitely worth your while. And perhaps a mix such as Magick on the Edge to give you a flavour of different people's approaches.

To explore about reality/yourself, you should consider looking into non-duality (e.g. Presence by Rupert Spira, The Direct Path by Greg Goode, the work of Douglas Harding.) It's a nice thing to be doing in parallel to any more esoteric stuff; keeps your perspective intact perhaps. If you're feeling daring, George Berkeley, or later authors, exploring things more philosophically.

Have fun.

POST: Anyone else feel like this when first beginning?

Q: First off, if anyone finds how I will be writing difficult to follow it is because I am trying to tie together several ideas at once to make a big idea, trying to pull a bit of my history and experiences together to let you know why I am trying to say what I am saying. Another way of looking at it is trying to describe in words (a limited thing) an intuitive knowing, which language is not the best at doing. Bear with me here... (and sorry if I irk any grammar nazis out there).
I feel like my ultimate goal, currently, is transcendence and the accrual of knowledge in order to try and find Truth, absolute Truth (or as close as I can get to It). I know there is so much more than this physical world we live in, and I want to ultimately experience that "outside" of my physical body and really outside of time itself (although I know it is possible to learn a bit of it while in this physical world with this physical body
[as above, so below- looking deep within perhaps as another way], but not on the level that I want to experience it at).
I have several ways of looking at Magick, but I really fall in line and enjoy the R.A.W. outlook of it. He is the author that started it all for me and I agree (currently) with much of what he writes. My main go to for playing with 'reality' is through Chaos Magick and what little I know of it.
This is where it gets a bit confusing, because I can look at all of this from several ways. The two main ideas at the moment are 1)There is a physical world and legit "spiritual world", and magick is a way to bridge the gap and work in one to affect the other utilizing Universal Laws (think 'The Kybalion'), and 2) The Universe is a way for the infinite Source of everything to kind of do its thing and bridge out into infinity (as I understand it because I have to account for time in this Experience) through the experiences of consciousnesses (hard to describe...), and we are a part of it as it is a part of us. Our consciousness/Mind affects the reality we live in and perceive, and by changing the Mind (magick one way of doing this) we can change the reality and thus the Universe, and perhaps visa versa to some extent... Both of these could be true, or false (such as this physical existence is "it" and everything is just a result of chemical reactions within the body to to make and experience through what we call consciousness), or a mix... That is part of the Grand Mystery of it all.
One way of describing my trouble is that there are a lot of maps of the territory, and I can choose one to see a certain part of the terrain I want to see (Meta-programming), but the map is not the territory and I want to be able to SEE and KNOW the territory all at once (much like reading a map except the only real way to know the territory is to experience it, but I can only experience a little bit at a time and I am not sure if what I am experiencing is the REAL/TRUE terrain, or if it perverted because of the "instruments" i use to sense it).
For a bit of personal info, once i get out of my current career obligation (military), I plan on going into psychology and exploring the mind/reality aspects more deeply. I kind of lean more heavily toward this relationship to describe how "this" (this world, these experiences, the processes, etc) works.
I basically will follow a path till it leads me into a circle, which causes a lot of mental frustration, but then it tends to take me to a higher sense of understanding, only to go down a new path and repeat the process. A lot of this shit starts to 'break down' and fold into itself only to re-emerge out of itself, one way of describing it is as if you keep discovering/running into "reality koans" all over the place.
Logic only gets me so far, then it leads me to a state of intuitive knowing... but I want to be able to take this intuitive knowing and be able to but it into logical terms, which is the fucking HARD part, if possible at all. I mean, how can you absolutely describe infinity? It is impossible because you will always be describing it from within (yet you 'can' describe it as if from outside, kind of, but then we get back to the whole circles and koans bit....). Eventually, you can start to gain a deep intuitive knowing of it (enlightenment?), but then how can we put this knowing into words/symbols so others can know of it in in a minimalist way?
I hope this kind of makes a bit of sense to you. I wish I could just Matrix you what I know and feel so you could understand where it is I am coming from, but words only go so far in describing something of this magnitude.

RAW got me started: Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising. You can really overthink this though: it, of course, is actually super, super simple. The more you think about it, the more you will obscure it. You "are the dream, are consciousness" right now - you are just obscuring it by looking and thinking. There is no theory to this, it is not made of concepts and cannot be understood in that sense. It can be talked about, but really it is something you experience.

Do a daily practice like this:

  • 10 minutes, twice a day.
  • Lie down on the floor, feet flat with knees bent, head supported by books, arms by your side or hands resting on abdomen.
  • Decide to give up completely to gravity: to "play dead".
  • Let go of your body and mind, let them move as will. Allow them to unwind.
  • Don't even "pay attention"; just let it be open and wide. If it focuses on some thought or pain briefly, let that happen, and let it open out again.
  • After 10 minutes, decide to get up, but don't do anything about it. Wait until your body moves by itself. (Thus won't happen first time, but eventually it will happen.)

Basically, you are letting the "stuck thoughts" and "uncompleted movements" you have amassed unwind and dissolve themselves. You do not need to do anything for this to occur. Gradually, your perception will become clearer and clearer. Note: Any effort to focus or do anything will get in the way. There is a method of accelerating this by "overwriting yourself", but it's nicer this way.

...

Q: I feel like the objective truth is Inifity itself (the All-That-Is, God, etc). But, if this is the case, then it become a giant paradox due to spawning paradoxes all over the place. Infinity would say that nothing is true and that everything is true (or CHAOS and ORDER coexisting at 100% for both of them), but in our limited ability to understand the duality of this, we see that the two currently cannot exist at the same time, but they have to. We just don't know how, but we can make some damn good guesses, yet they will never really be 100%, because they will always be a part of the whole and not the whole itself.
Hopefully you understand what I am trying to say :)

Perhaps chaos is enfolded into order, or vice versa?

Q: How many you's ARE there?
As I understand it, it can be an infinite amount. Depends on how far down the rabbit hole I want to take it.
How can an ego dissolve itself?
Not quite sure, but I feel it comes about from not having a need to protect the Self or a need to identify and separate the Self from the Whole. It dissolves from knowing that it is Infinity, but it is hard if not impossible to do when you are seeing all this from your individual conscious perspective. How can you describe infinity in its wholeness when you can only work from within it, never all of it unless you become all of it, and never from outside of it because there is nothing outside of it.
Some of the most basic thoughts are the 'craziest'...
And also some of the most True.

My thoughts:

The ego is just a mental thought that you (that is, consciousness) are having. You are infinite - you can "feel out" into space forever, right now, you will find - but you do have a perspective. There is no way to conceptualise this or intersubjectivity. You basically have to give up trying to work that out. The best way is to think of yourself as being All That Is, on a "time-share" basis. In moments when it is your turn, you are the whole thing.

Or for convenience, just treat this as a dream, where you are the dream. The bunch of body sensations in the middle you have tended to think of as "you", but they are within the larger consciousness (the actual you, the dream and the dreamer and the dreaming, same thing), you just got in the habit of misidentifying with that part of the dream experience.

You are an infinite self-aware blanket, which forms itself into the shapes of experiences, thereby experiencing itself. The blanket truth! [https://youtu.be/XfIiRKLMjDY]

Dunno what you've been reading, but I found certain things keep my sense of reality "loose". Read Rupert Spira and Greg Goode on non-duality. Read Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman. Check out idealism [https://www.bernardokastrup.com/], and lucid dreaming (Robert Waggoner's book is great). Shake up your direct experience! :-)

Magick is just committed intention, and it always works in some way or other (even if it just results in a dream of your desire). If you can get into the mindset of expanding your a Will and Presence into the whole dream, you will find that helps.

POST: Occultism and Depression

Also, how does being an occultist change your approach to depression? Are you more likely to try to solve things yourself? Are you more likely to interpret the symptoms "esoterically"? And can you treat yourself "magickally" from the outset?

I wonder whether the sense of increased personal power can work beneficially and against too.

The seratonin-uptake model of depression is in doubt these days, for instance, and many depression medications have been criticised for being little more than placebo. If that's the case, then coming out of depression really is a work of magick (as in, intention and commitment, interpretation/declaration of an act as causal, rather than the nature of the act itself).

And 'consciousness-widening' acts might well loosen its hold?

I think this question is very relevant. I struggle with depression and often I lose interest in occult topics, stop reading, etc.
I'm not inclined to use psychiatric drugs to treat depression. I can understand OP's perspective that the drugs could be seen as magickal, but I'd be more inclined to use meditation and entheogenic approaches as a magickal treatment.
I think that being an occultist means having (or striving to have) an awareness of your inner state, and working to be able to alter that state in accordance with Will. So from my perspective, although depression can affect anyone, the primary difference with an occultist would be their way of viewing the depression, and perhaps an increased motivation to face and resolve the pain at the root of the depression with tactics of ritual, divination, meditation, etc. rather than with therapy/pharmaceuticals alone.

Hmm, yes. I think the occultist is better placed to do things such as experiment or understand their attention and their state and transform that.

Even simple things, like hypnosis/visualisation to "energise" oneself or change one's "mental posture" can be good. And an occultist is more likely to have developed the ability to "commit" to an act such as this. I think that having some sort of daily practice is more common for development generally, and might help depression too.

Another thought was: The occultist is likely to have long terms aims to succeed at this or that, and Will for particular results or life-changes in the future. This can help "keep life running" whilst depressed, if they can at least stick to that, because things have been set up in advance.

POST: Are you studying too much?

My thought: keep purpose in mind.

It's lots of fun to read-about and explore and experiment, but you have to keep the balance between your outer life and your inner life. They are undivided and the same, and both need your attention so that they support one another. If you can tie your occult studies to definite outer aims, that can help. Why not combine your art with your magick? Whether that's summoning inspiration, or actually embedding magick into it.

There's an infinite amount to "learn", but also nothing much to learn. Your life is just made up of experiences. At the moment you are choosing to experience "reading a lot" and "thinking about this topic a lot". Sometimes the implicit fantasy-dream element of magick can be a whole lot more attractive than the apparently mundane everyday life stuff, but:

The true purpose of practical magick is to summon/improve your experiences, whether that's to clear out some misconceptions so that you have a clearer view of reality (inner), or to generate specific experiences you desire (outer). (Note: "experiences" includes "the experience of owning an object", etc.) So, decide what experiences you want to have, and start using magick to access them. If you don't do this, then you are reading and studying without focus - just for the wank of it basically - and that'll go on forever.

All magickal traditions have the same underlying idea, because they are dealing with the same underlying universe. Be sure to read some stuff that tries to strip it back, such as Neville Goddard, Phil Hine or Alan Chapman. This just helps stop you getting too lost in the more fantastical elements (which do exist, but are not necessarily required).

Having said all that, coming to your own personal "worldview" is very beneficial, whether that's "the world is a lucid dream, amongst many" or whether "we are but fragments of a turtle's shell". So that's one aim you can have when doing all your reading: synthesising your own approach and working out its implications for your real life.

TL;DR: Uh-huh, but remember to live your life.

POST: I have a little bit of an emergency... Could use some perspective.

You are over-using and over-thinking, I think?

Possibly over thinking. Like, trying to hard to put meaning behind all of it.
Over use, though... Read what I pointed out to mysterymoth. I see no real difference between LBRP, prayer, chakra cleansing, etc., in so much as they both provide release of internal negative energy. I'm pretty sure that as long as it's not interfering with your everyday responsibilities, you can't really overuse LBRP.

Yeah, you're really searching for the meaning. As to LRBP, you just don't need it that much: a morning refresher, a calming in the evening, that's enough? But, hey, it depends a little on what system you're using. To me, it's just a "reset".

You sound like you've become a bit ungrounded. Do you do anything to keep your focus centred?

I do regular meditation which usually starts with some kind of banishing. I fluctuate between Chakra grounding and LBRP depending on what feels right at the time, and actually, up to this point, I was feeling pretty great about everything in general. That's part of why I was a bit startled by the dramatic shift in both external and internal environment for both me and my fiance. Do you do anything to keep you grounded that you wouldn't mind sharing? I'm always open to new ideas.

I don't do much: I do a lie-down-on-the-floor exercise twice a day, where I let go, expand out into the room, and "overwrite myself" with empty space. (I also then make sure my attention stays open and loosely centred either on my centreline - somewhat behind my eyes or lower abdomen - during the day.)

POST: the seemingly opposing view points in occultism

A1: all realities exist. you need to find the one that is relevant to you

Q1: I don't tend to believe this way. I think there is logical issues with it. If I have two view points that are saying total opposite things then one must be right and one must be either wrong or not totally correct. I believe there is an objective reality. So to say that you can have multiple realities is admitting that they are not actual realities. they might be subjective points of view but to be a reality it has to be anchored in objective truth.

A2: if your not willing to step outside of Aristotelian logic and apprehend paradox you wont get very far in occult studies.

Q2: If the many worlds interpretation of QM is correct, then we do live in a multiverse, all possible realities do exist and you navigate a field of infinite potential futures with each choice you make.
All worlds being equally real and populated in each moment with minds as real as your own.
Before you scoff and say it is nonsense, the majority of physicists believe in the many worlds interpretation even Hawking.
[http://www.physics.wustl.edu/alford/many_worlds_FAQ.html]
[http://www.quora.com/Why-do-60-of-theoretical-physicists-believe-in-the-many-worlds-theory]
It is not a fringe view.
David Deutsch of Oxford has shown that the math of the many worlds interpretation checks out, and agrees with our observations.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20071121085925/http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=paUniverse_sun14_parallel_universes&show_article=1&cat=0]
The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.

I scoff and say "nonsense"! ;-)

Since we only live in one reality, this is effectively just story-making? If we never experience the branching, and only experience one sequence of choices, how does it help?

Except as a mathematical or diagrammatic 'aid' to describing or visualising probabilistic processes, but that doesn't correspond to there literally being multiple universes...surely?

Q2: correspond to there literally being multiple universes...surely?
The earth was the center of the universe not to long ago, there is only one universe and only one version of you observing it today.

I do take the point. However, the heliocentric alternative is something that could be tested and observed, there is no suggestion for how multiple-branching / many-world can be observed.

I'm all for alternative configurations / theories for the same data - having different 'stories' can provide real insight - but I don't think those two are in the same category, as I see it at the moment.

Q2: Here is Geordie Rose founder of D-Wave, maker of the first proven quantum computer.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyUbWl8jPQU]
Skip to the 4 minute mark.
He comes out and says they believe the many worlds interpretation is correct, and they are sharing processor resources between these many worlds.

Thanks for that, will check it out when I get a moment.

Translation I have the attention span of a goldfish and will never watch it ever.

Right, just had a look: it's the David Deutsch quote.

Copenhagen interpretation, many-worlds view, they are reasonable attempts to account for - to provide a 'visualisation' for - the apparently probabilistic nature of quantum physics. However, there are alternatives: David Bohm's ideas, 'active information', extensions to the de Broglie pilot wave idea. In the end, as Bohr said: look, the maths works and is predictive, maybe you just have to put aside the notion that it's understandable. Many-worlds is just a placeholder for people who don't like the idea of a literal wavefunction collapsing into a single outcome.

Somewhat, much of this is a matter of taste.

Having said that, it's certainly fun to think about all this, and it can provide inspiration for things.

Q2: Since you aren't going to watch it here is a transcript I took the time to type up, not that you will be bothered to read it.
There is a quote on screen from David Deutsch
"Quantum computation ...will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes."
David Deutsch @ TED 2005
3:57-4:27
This quote is from a respectable scientist in fact one of the founders of this field that may look a little strange to you who don't follow theoretical physics, but there is a very clear prediction that our most successful theory of nature makes and that is there are an enormous number, mind-boggling large number of parallel realities as real as this one that have different consistent histories
4:44
Quantum mechanics makes a very specific prediction that all of those (parallel universes with different histories) are as real as the thing that you remember
4:55
But science has reached the point now where we can build machines that exploit those other worlds and quantum computers are perhaps the most exciting of all of these
12:07-14:00 imagine that there really are parallel realities out there and imagine that you have two that are exactly identical in every respect all the way out to the horizon as far as we can see down to last little atomic detail of every single thing with only one difference and that is the value of a little thing called a qubit on this chip (contraction of quantum bit) and that qubit is very much like a bit or a transistor in a conventional computer it has two distinct physical states which we call zero and one per bit in a conventional computer these are mutually exclusive that device is either one or the other and never anything else. In a quantum computer that device can be in the strange situation of where these two parallel universe have a nexus, a point in space where they overlap and when you increase the number of these devices, every time you add one of these qubits you double the number of the parallel universe you have access to until such time you get to a chip like this which is about 500 of these bits you have something like two to the five hundredth power of these guys living in that chip so the way I think about it is the shadows of these parallel worlds overlap with ours and if we are smart enough we can dive into them grab their resources and pull them back into ours to make an effect in our world now this may sound very odd to you and bizarre and in fact I am using language that a normal theoretical physicist probably wouldn't use, but this is what I am telling you is absolutely correct and in line with the way these things actually work.

Thanks for your effort, I appreciate it.

Seeing it earlier triggered a memory of a profile I'd read on Deutch a few years back. Tracked it down to here. You might find it a good read if you've not already seen it. It's pretty balanced; it's the New Yorker and so doesn't gave an agenda!

There's a good quote:

The strangeness of superposition is, as Deutsch explains it, simply “the phenomenon of physical variables having different values in different universes.” And entanglement, which so bothered Einstein and others, especially for its implication that particles could instantly communicate regardless of their distance in space or time, is also resolved. Information that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light and along no detectable pathway—spookily transmitted as if via E.S.P.—can, in Many Worlds theory, be understood to move differently. Information still spreads through direct contact—the “ordinary” way; it’s just that we need to adjust to that contact being via the tangencies of abutting universes. As a further bonus, in Many Worlds theory randomness goes away, too.

And this gets to the heart of it. The Many Worlds theory is a way to get back to determinism for people who don't like the 'randomness' and, most importantly, that a system can hold itself multiple states at once, and multiples of multiple states at once.

It provides a 'picture-able' approach to the problem, rather than being left with the raw maths. It's a cool way to imagine it, but it seems clumsy to think that it is really happening as described. Inelegant. Nothing wrong with that, but to take it literally is not I think useful. I suspect a better view will be invented eventually.

But if it works then that is fine. The history of physics is filled with ideas that worked, led to new insights, but were then discovered to be kinda-wrong of just 'useful fictions', and on we go (see Paul Feyerabend [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method] for fun on that).

The problem with quantum mechanics is that the maths works but there are several different interpretations, all leading to the same result, so it's hard to distinguish between them, except by preference. Seemingly opposing views which, in terms of result, aren't really opposed. They all work.

I don't have a problem with 'multiple states' that collapse on observation, so Many Worlds just seems like a bit of fun. I quite like the idea that it's the whole environment that collapses the state. But there you go.

It's a great topic though.

Final quote:

An example of the agnostic view is given by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who, while participating in a colloquium at Cambridge, denied that the Copenhagen interpretation asserted "What cannot be observed does not exist." He suggested instead that the Copenhagen interpretation follows the principle "What is observed certainly exists; about what is not observed we are still free to make suitable assumptions. We use that freedom to avoid paradoxes."

Q2: Thanks for your effort, I appreciate it.
You appreciate something you couldn't be bothered to read.
Right...

Um, I did read it, and then I took the time to respond thoughtfully.

Let me say: this isn't news to me. I studied this stuff. Did you read my response? The New Yorker article is pretty accessible to the non-scientist. The Many Worlds view is an interpretation. Amongst others. Most physicists just don't care much. Most don't agree.

There's not much to separate the idea of 'Many States, all of which contribute, only one of which you observe' from 'Many Worlds, all of which contribute, only one of which you live in'.

There are silly reasons to reject Many Worlds (this [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the-many-worlds-formulation-of-quantum-mechanics-is-probably-correct/] is a good article covering that), but when you examine it you find that the 'worlds' idea itself doesn't really make much of a difference to people's actually work in detail; really it's just 'states'. (But there's nothing wrong in that as such.)

You might find this interview interesting reading [deleted]. Just came across it. Both a physics and philosophical angle. Anyway, check it out.

Q2: The thing is George, Let's say we prove without a shadow of a doubt that there are parallel universes and they very weakly interact via gravity, and we enable communication between ours and another. No one would ever believe it even with proof. It takes an army and a revolution to change paradigms.

Point well made. Generally I am happy to go with usefulness of concepts while being aware that I am doing this. Of course, we are never at "the end of history" and recognising this is quite freeing.

For this, I think we can operate more directly, conceptually.

...

A1: so you are saying some of it is bullshit, whereas scientific research says all of it is all bullshit
you might have problems making progress with that view

Q3: I mean sure I am saying somethings are not true. Unless you expect me to believe everything I hear which is just silly. Scientific research has nothing to say about it they often are not capable of measuring anything or devising experiments to test claims of an occult or spiritual nature. Now as human beings they may be saying it's bullshit but that isn't really fair and not in the spirit of science. If they cannot measure it or test it they should say nothing until they can approach it experimentally or disprove it mathematically which they have not been able to do.

Q4: Scientific research has nothing to say about it
Yes sir it does.
they often are not capable of measuring anything or devising experiments to test claims of an occult or spiritual nature.
Sure they are. The entire point of me being here is to find people who want something real, and showing them the best scientific evidence to support it.
If they cannot measure it or test it
Of course they can and have.

One key thing: Many good results are "life results", as in they are personally meaningful but are one-offs and can be explained away as coincidences with a describable chain of events. Most useful magick - or I mean, the magick most people are seeking in the end - probably isn't of the psi / spontaneous materialisations / researchable kind. It all falls within the normal laws of physics.

Not many people seem to be deliberately pushing for something more than this.

Q4: One key thing: Many good results are "life results", as in they are personally meaningful but are one-offs and can be explained away as coincidences with a describable chain of events.
You are debating in a vacuum, as you don't now what it is I am referring to.
What I am referring to is something real you can quantify and objectively demonstrate.
Most useful magick - or I mean, the magick most people are seeking in the end - probably isn't
Drawing sigils, chanting incantations, performing rituals, making seals, making potions, visualization, all of that nonsense is make believe.
It is only useful as entertainment.
Not many people seem to be deliberately pushing for something more than this.
There are maybe 5 people on the entire internet that I am aware of pushing for something more.

This brushes most "magick" aside, as generally conceived and practiced, which is fine. It is impossible to test objectively, it is subjective experience by its nature.

What can we quantify and objectively demonstrate at present? Or what can we aim to in future?

If you can't test it objectively it is make believe nonsense or spiritual roleplaying. What I am talking about is something real you can demonstrate.

The problem is, we are reducing the scope of what is real to what is repeatable within very limited constraints. One-hit results, for instance, aren't testable by those methods. We can't say they aren't real, just that they don't fall within the parameters that allow us to examine the phenomena; they can't be proved by those methods. There are some things you can only test for yourself.

Lucid dreaming, for instance. Now there is lab work done with that, but for the longest time that was dismissed, because it is very much a subjective experience, and even now it is argued that it is an imagined state.

Let me be clear: The fact I'm saying that some phenomena might be excluded from this approach doesn't mean, a) That I believe all these things exist or are as described and, b) That I don't think efforts using those methods to explore phenomena that do fall within their scope should not be pursued to the fullest.

Anecdotes aren't evidence, but they are personal data.

Not something I discuss in pubic.

Oh, give me a hint. It'll make all the difference! :-)

Q4: The problem is, we are reducing the scope of what is real
It isn't so complicated. How many millions of people chase magick and occult bullshit daily? How many people are rich as a result of it?
That says plenty right there.
Sure there are plenty of famous authors, and maybe they make money selling bullshit to people who are willing to pay to read bullshit, but other than their fame among a group of sad delusional idiots they have nothing to show for their efforts.
Oh, give me a hint. It'll make all the difference! :-)
No.

Yeah, it's not "movie magick" and anyone expecting that is in for a shock, but who really pushes that idea except a few very populist Chopra-like authors anyway?

Most people who aren't fantasists and have experimented would say that it simply smooths the way via increased fortuitousness, sometimes absolutely ridiculously so. And that it's hard to tell the difference between chance and cause, but that the 'unlikeliness' and personally meaningful aspects of the experience make an impression, and seems repeatable as a phenomenon, but not controllable as a science.

No.

Aw, no fun! ;-)

Q4: imply smooths the way via increased fortuitousness, sometimes absolutely ridiculously so. And that it's hard to tell the difference between chance and cause, but that the 'unlikeliness' and personally meaningful aspects of the experience make an impression, and seems repeatable as a phenomenon, but not controllable as a science.
Translation, it's a game of spiritual roleplay and make believe.

The role-play is optional. It's simply intention and direction. But nobody should take anybody's word for these things - they have to experiment themselves, be brutally honest, and come to their own conclusions. It's a subjective experience, but also can be a shared subjective experience.

If I had to describe it, I'd say that - yes, basically magick as described isn't real - but the world does have a 'clumpiness' to it, and correlation and causation are muddled here. Someone's "ritual" doesn't cause anything, however the ritual and whatever-the-apparent-result both arise from the same place.

That sounded a bit 'woo', really what I'm getting at is that it can be seen as part of a single movement (see Wholeness and the Implicate Order or similar), so it's not surprising that events should arise in patterns - our actions and thoughts also being events - and that we might attribute direct causality where there is none. The unfolded events were enfolded together. This doesn't matter in terms of the apparent results, or their usefulness.

(This of course has implications for free will.)

But, y'know, I'm not really an advocate, I just find it interesting to think and explore, and a spot of experimentation does show some curious effects.

[QUOTE]

Wholeness and the Implicate Order:
Wholeness and the Implicate Order is a book by theoretical physicist David Bohm. It was originally published 1980 by Routledge, Great Britain.
The book is considered a basic reference for Bohm's concepts of undivided wholeness and of implicate and explicate orders, as well as of Bohm's rheomode. The book is cited, for example, by philosopher Steven M. Rosen in his book The Self-evolving Cosmos, by mathematician and theologian Kevin J. Sharpe in his book David Bohm's World, by theologian Joseph P. Farrell in Babylon's Banksters, and by theologian John C. Polkinghorne in his book One World.

[END OF QUOTE]

Drawing sigils on paper, performing rituals, chanting incantations, and all of the other nonsense.

Oh, I agree with you on that. None of those acts do anything. Any results are coincidental (in the literal sense of coinciding) and were not caused by those acts. There is some skew, but most ain't true. But one can obtain effects. Experimenting there and moving along is one way to make progress.

For all the millions of newagers, occultists, or whatever, the few who seem to make progress sure seem to keep their mouths shut about it.

Well, most people are just talk, they're enjoying "the thing of it". They're doing it wrong, or they're not really doing anything at all, and they're looking in the wrong direction anyway. But why does it continue? Because they get a taste of something, just enough.

Q4: You got my meaning, they aren't presenting any good evidence their practices are giving any results other than how they make them feel emotionally.
they're enjoying "the thing of it".
They are roleplaying, it is a game of spiritual make believe, it's purpose is spiritual entertainment.

Yeah, it's about the "zing" for many, and for most it's just a personal thing, Baader-Meinhof or not [https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/]. That is not to dismiss it all, however. Baby and bathwater.

EDIT: I don't know that it's "spiritual entertainment" though, it's the excitement of there being a deeper reality, something 'more than is here', and the possibility of exerting control over what previously seemed uncontrollable.

Q4: EDIT: I don't know that it's "spiritual entertainment" though, it's the excitement of there being a deeper reality, something 'more than is here', and the possibility of exerting control over what previously seemed uncontrollable.
Obviously they aren't in a deeper reality, exerting control over the uncontrollable, etc. Otherwise they would be getting some results. Either that or they keep their mouths shut real well.
Either you get results you can display in a lab or you don't.
Either you have objective evidence to ground your beliefs in or you don't.
It's that simple.

This is the attraction though, for people.

But: The results that one can display in a lab are a particular subset of possible results, and probably not the result people into this are seeking. That's why people won't bite on the whole evidence thing. They're not interesting in affecting instruments and so on, or even localised control of themselves at all. They want that job interview to go successfully, that person to show up, that object they like to appear. Some are interested in pushing a bit further, bending things a little more, in a direct-reality way, but not many. The idea of that being possible has fallen away over time.

Meanwhile, you can do awareness training and direct influence work with much practice, but that's a different sort of effort, and not something most people would find an attractive way to spend their time. Not "wizardly" enough! :-)

Most people aren't really "here" much in the first place, and that's the place to start.

So I have heard no tales of anyone's magick affecting their lives any more than prayer.

Exactly right. There's a whole book on that technique, actually.

"You can do awareness training and direct influence work with much practice." Results there are none. None.

Those results are martial arts skills if so desired, the various benefits of Qigong, and a clarity of awareness without the usual perceptual boundaries. But that's all another thing. The only way to get real results is by direct presence and intention. This need not be local, however.

"There's a whole book on that technique, actually." Listen I could create a fake pantheon and teach it to ignorant children living in isolation...

Um, so that was a joke actually.

It's simple: You develop direct access to your extended underlying experience, you intend directly, you get results. You might need to clear a few things away beforehand if you've been messing around with other conceptual frameworks, but that's it. The mechanism or representation is irrelevant. There's no energy to play with, no servitors, no symbols, etc, other than as experiential crutches or routes. I've played with them all, and they're just additional forms.

Anyone promising a secret path or new knowledge is just adding to the layers of obfuscation.

Q4: Um, so that was a joke actually. It's simple: You develop direct access to your extended underlying experience, you intend directly, you get results. You might need to clear a few things away beforehand if you've been messing around with other conceptual frameworks, but that's it. The mechanism or representation is irrelevant. There's no energy to play with, no servitors, no symbols, etc, other than as experiential crutches or routes. I've played with them all, and they're just additional forms.
You make things way more complicated than necessary.
You listen to those people who get results and you ignore everyone who doesn't.
That simple.
You come back and lecture on why whatever method you think works, works when you have some evidence to back that up.
Anyone promising a secret path or new knowledge is just adding to the layers of obfuscation.
Unless they can offer good hard objective evidence they get some results...

You seem to be having an argument with someone who isn't having an argument with you. Your tone is well out of order and there's no excuse for it in a constructive exchange.

Nobody was lecturing you. I apologise if I came across that way, it was unintended, on re-reading it did sound preachy, but I was just summarising my position.

That is my technique and it works well within its parameters. It also appears to be the basis for other techniques when they work. If there are alternatives, I'm interested; I'm not bound to any one approach and don't identify with any technique. As far as I'm concerned, any discoveries and progress are all good.

To be honest you might be a nice guy, but I am not interested in your opinion unless you have some evidence that is convincing.

That's better. There's no excuse not to be civil. :-)

I'm not really interested in getting into evidence-exhange though, it's just a slog with little reward (in my experience) - just like most conversations about it eh.

There are already studies out there that cover the basic lab stuff, and anything more extended doesn't fit easily into a small study, is expensive to set up, and unpleasant to be involved in - so has to remain in the 'unproven' box as far as a global skeptic audience is concerned. (For now.)

My apologies. I am just burnt out from arguing with people non stop.
I guess you are just trying to have a civil discussion.

No worries. It's not always easy to have conversations on these topics and on these forums: people either don't want to listen, or they don't want to talk! :-)

Take it easy.

POST: Can we get a synchronicity thread going?

/r/sychronicities covers this but can descend into just 'hey, two things happened'. If we could have a thread that ups the quality - i.e. meaningful coincidences that seem like messages - then this could be worth having.

Not "I bought a red bicycle and now I see lots of red bicycles".

Q: At the risk of sounding like a jerk, those are some pretty tame "synchronicities" that I would tend to just call coincidences. To me, a synchronicity is when something happens that is meaningfully related to something relevant to your life (whether a dream, emotional situation, dilemma, etc.), and is so clearly significant that it almost feels like a message, of which the meaning is easily interpreted.
Example: While struggling with disease, a young man dreams that his hair has turned completely white (in Eastern cultures, white is the color of death). The next day he receives a surprise birthday gift: A white rabbit! Years later, the man succumbs to his disease, and just few hours after him, the rabbit dies too.

Yeah, they are meant to be personally meaningful coincidences rather than just coincidences, and sometimes things really ramp up at key moments.

For instance, when I was in a particularly tight spot I went for some coffee in a cafe and at the table opposite me two random guys started talking about the exact situation I was in, about a friend of theirs, and what he should do and what he should watch out for.

I'd made a few mistakes and ignored some synchronicities, and bit by bit the universe started screaming at me it seemed, giving me multiple escape options and advice. This eventually ended with having an absolute gravitational pull that I just had to meet a certain person at a certain place that night, or else.

POST: Solipsism... this thread needs to happen

Doesn't really matter. The sense in which "there is only you" isn't in the same sense that you would say "there is only cosmicprankster420", because "cosmicprankster420" is illusory (just a bunch of bodily sensations and thoughts floating in space) - a 'dream character', basically - as is everyone else (just images and touch sensations).

The real "you" is the awareness that experiences "cosmicprankster420" and it turns out that this awareness can't be divided; everything emerges from it and is of it. Everything you experience is an aspect of you. It's only in that sense that you are all there is.

Practically speaking then, that means you (the apparent individual) should treat everyone else as part of yourself. Which is a pretty good way to treat people anyway: with compassion. In fact, it might be a better worldview to have for behaviour.

(Being selfish is okay when it's the capital-S version of Self.)

POST: Is this legit?

Q1: This is from a documentary named "Verbotene Aufnahmen" and it was aired on the German TV-Channel "ARTE".
It is supposed to be fake and is on purpose filmed like that. A french guy directed the whole thing.
As a kid I really loved watching this documentary, because it was somehow mysterious and scary.
For everyone out there understanding German or French, watch it!
German Wiki:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbotene_Aufnahmen
Original Title:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258528/]
Full Video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPupIkjspN8] - German
[http://youtu.be/5TOFD-pEIhg] - French

Q2: Thanks. For lack of not knowing german, what is it about?

Translation from the German wiki:

Forbidden photographs
Forbidden photographs (franz. Original title: Les of document interdits) short film series of the French director are Jean teddy Filippe.
Those altogether twelve films with a length between 4 and 13 minutes are in the style of amateur photographs and treat together all puzzling, amazing or inexplicable phenomena and things, for example humans supernatural Abilities. The films developed in the year 1989 and fictitiously, are to arouse the impression however that it concerns material, together-collected amateur photographs, which are commentated by a speaker documentarily and dramatisierend. The most different time epochs are processed, for example 1940er years, 1980er years.
The Erstausstrahlung on the German television took place via the transmitter arte. There some the Kurzfilme not as obvious falsification to recognize are, these of few persons as genuine are not regarded, what also the intention of the director was.
See also:
Mockumentary [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockumentary], Pseudo documentation

So, it's a bit of fun really. As an early instance of the "fake found footage" genre, the films supposedly inspired the movies [REC], Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Good article here:

Filippe make no serious attempt to get us to believe his films are real, but simply launches freely into the pleasure of the hoax, tweaking and suggesting just enough, and taking joy in exploring and exploiting restraint rather than the overt excess that invades so many later “found footage” films. Some, like Siberia are in fact fairly dull, but even in that lies a certain charm, as though we’re watching a classified instructional film that makes to pretense at asking for our interest or offering sordid details; the ordinary looking “cyborg” getting his arm trapped in a window isn’t much of a story and Filippe knows that the trick is not trying to turn it into one.

And here is that particular show described:

Ghosts (8'33) : Guided by his mexican friend y, x goes hiking to be presented to " The Nameless Ones " , entities living in the desert and able to move instantely from one point to another.

POST: The question is not "Which god created the world?", it's "Which god created YOUR world?"

I created my world, including the character of "TriumphantGeorge", which I later confused myself with, forgetting that I was the whole world, and not just that named part of it. You are your God.

I'm having some trouble reconcing the ideas of "pride is bad" and "I am god".

Who says pride is bad? And who said "I am God" is something to be proud of? Are you proud of being a person? Or of being the gender you are? You can't be proud of facts!

You just use facts.

Pride is the greatest of the opposing forces within us. It causes our anger, jealousy, greed etc. but the way you explain it, I think I get how to view it.

Yes. Pride is bad in the sense that we can end up not doing things because it involves actions which are against who we think we are as a person. But we are not really that person, so that is to make decisions based on a "false self".

"I am God" is a way of pointing to your true nature, which cannot be prideful if you understand it properly.

I may just read too much fantasy, but when a prideful person achieves godhood, it never ends well. I'd rather get over myself before I put myself over everything.

Well, what saves you is: A prideful person never achieves the recognition of Godhood, because you have to get over yourself (your 'small self') in order to do this.

Seeing yourself as "everything", or an undivided part of "everything", means you have to let go of that individual sense.

There is a concept in the New Thought movement which sorta goes "Your image of God is what you become." Kinda similar to this. Personally, I can't choose one deity that created my world because it changes often. But today, a chthonic earth goddess of some sort feels appropo. Thanks for asking.

"The world is yourself pushed out", says Neville Goddard for instance.

POST: Are sigils with built-in time constraints doomed to fail?

A1: In my experience, Magic generally works in a way consistent with the thoughts of the caster. If you subconsciously expect time constraints to hinder the work, they will.
This seems to function with a feedback loop, the results tend to reinforce your thoughts about how Magic works/doesn't work.
The initial thoughts about how Magic should work usually originate with literature and film exposure, as well as the opinions of nurturing influences (parents, relatives, friends).
Preprogrammed and reinforced limitations can be overcome by study, analysis, and meditation. You must reprogram the subconscious by answering the question of "What beliefs do I have which cause me to think time constraints cause sigils to fail?" and deeply analyzing "What do I know about magic which indicates time constraints should not be a problem?"
For example, many people program themselves by adopting idioms/memes such as:
"No such thing as a free meal." "Everything happens in its own time." "Nothing in life is easy." "In due time."
And so their experiences will manifest consistent with the idioms they've programmed themselves to accept as true. If you believe everything happens in its own time, then you're swimming up a river when specifying a time because you don't actually believe you're capable of changing when things happen. So you have to ask questions like "Why do I think things happen in their own time? Who told me that and why did I adopt that statement as true? Who/What determines when something's time is?"
A person with a strong belief in scientific materialism will find that beliefs about a strictly causal universe interfere with temporal determination. If one believes the past determines the future, then things can only happen when a prior event leads causally towards a future event.

What a great response. It's also worth experimenting with 'impossible things' that aren't impossible - e.g. seeing with your eyes closed (see here [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams], it can be done because what you're seeing right now is a dream or constantly-updating-memory 'inspired by the senses', at best).

The idea being that visceral experiences that are counterintuitive can loosen the hold of constraints and open you up. Anything that can change your feeling from being "this is a solid, material place" to something a bit more flexible, will be helpful.

Also, check out Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners, which pretty much encapsulated the "how this works is how I think this works" view of magick, especially sigils.

...

Q1: My theory is that sigils work the way the caster thinks. Like, if you were a sigil, how would you get your caster what they wanted? That's how it'll work.

Q2: Be careful about assuming that. You never know if you'll come into a lot of money because your dad got hit by a bus.

You can specify against that. That sort of thing only happens if you quietly don't want things to go nicely, think that there is a price to pay, etc.

"The harvest was indeed plentiful that year, because half of the population was killed by the plague. And the sharknado."

POST: Is a Creator necessary?

There is "God" and there is God - ?

  • "God" is an entity who can be called upon, one of many.
  • God is the universe itself, the conscious space in which all experience arises, and is made from. He is not an entity, he is first-cause, the larger Self from which your 'self' appears, and is a fragment. You have no power other than the power of God, for you are he and he is you. You are moved by his Will, which is your True Will, although you can equally intend from the perspective of your self, against this, to a limited extent.

/r/Pantheism much, yessss?

More idealism, I'd say: Consciousness is fundamental; everything, all content, is patterns in and of consciousness.

Rocks, having no complexity, are not self-conscious, but they are made of consciousness. Humans are also made of consciousness but, having complexity, are self-conscious because they can attend to concepts within themselves, including a concept of 'self'.

It seems like you could take your use of "consciousness" and swap it out for "energy." If you've got an explanation for why the universe would have to be conscious, I'd be interested to hear it.

No, they can't be swapped. If at some point you want to move from the start of the universe to a person that can be aware of things, and have 'self' awareness, consciousness has to "emerge" somewhere.

If the material of the universe is inherently conscious, then this isn't a problem. Note, this doesn't mean that everything is thinking! Rather, it means that a certain region is aware of the patterns within its boundary.

For instance, your nervous system is aware of the contents of your nervous system, including "thoughts" (shadow sensations), but cannot be aware of itself (as in, its own boundary). Self-consciousness for humans is: a feeling of being aware (this is inherent), and an awareness of a thought of oneself (which appears within the boundary).

The Metaphor of the Blanket

Imagine a blanket. The blanket is "aware". But laid out flat, there is just "openness", no structure, no content to be aware of. Now, the blanket folds itself, creases itself. The blanket is now aware of the structure within itself, relative to itself: one side of the fold relative to the other. It is in this sense that consciousness (or "awareness", to escape from some of the baggage attached to the c-word) is fundamental, and this is how it becomes "aware of" something, of content, formed from itself.

The brain is a very complex area of blanket (whose pattern border marks the limit of our personal experience), which is part of a larger blanket (the universe).

(An alternative metaphor is whirlpools in a stream: everything is made from water, whirlpools represents patterned regions such as brains which are aware of the structure within themselves.)

It seems to me that "emergent" consciousness as a result of complexity of the nervous system (in the same way that enzymes have emergent functionality as a result of their structure versus other assemblies of matter) is a lot easier to explain than consciousness as an inherent principle to the universe. From a purely material view, I can agree that the capacity for consciousness exists in the universe (in the same way that the capacity for television exists - the matter and energy that compose the universe make it possible), but I don't see it as an underlying force or inherent principle (like strong and weak nuclear, and all that jazz). Unfortunately, that's us drawing different conclusions from the same set of data, so I doubt either one is going to change the other's mind. That being said, that's far and away the best explanation I've seen of the idea and how it works, which I really appreciate (all the previous discussions I've had about it quickly descend into "because I said so" territory). Thanks!

I'm pretty open minded! The problem is, that the personal experience of consciousness is hard to reconcile with the "emergent" view. You end up with questions such as, where in the brain does consciousness begin and end, at what point does something get complex enough to be conscious, and so on. It's not an underlying force, or that sort of thing, but it needs to be a pre-existing property of some sort. Awareness is a better word than consciousness for this basic property though. I've not come up with anything better than this version of 'idealism + nonduality', so far.

Of course, these questions have been around for a long time!

Another way of thinking about it: Imagine that the blanket is made up from eyes. Laid flat, the eyes perceive nothing, the blanket is not aware of anything. The eyes are "aware", but not aware of anything. With the blanket having folds and creases, however, the eyes see the themselves; consciousness-of the pattern of the folds and self-consciousness can arise.

Yeah, I don't see this as being resolved any time soon. :-) Cheers.

...

That's quite nice. Quite a few folk - physicist David Bohm for instance with his quantum potential, implicate order, and active information - go for something akin to a mind-like and matter-like combination of aspects. My take is that you don't need the matter aspect (and who's heard a decent definition of matter lately?) if you re-introduce it as a self-referencing pattern of the mind aspect.

Rocks and the like aren't self-aware or conscious exactly but they have a relationship to their surroundings that's relatively static so they can function effectively as a kind of memory.

That's a nice way to put it. I'd say that rocks are "static memory" or rather - since they do change - very slowly-changing memory. We, on the other hand, are "dynamic" or very fast-unfolding memory.

Constantly unfolding, changing patterns in a background - everything is its own memory.

The fact that we're conscious is definitely a byproduct of the nature of the world around us. You might think this sounds like the materialist perspective.

I agree with that. Materialism and idealism are basically the same thing, with a new level inserted at the base: consciousness or awareness as the basic no-thing "non-stuff" from which things ("actual-stuff") arise as patterns. That's it. Basically, it introduces a mind-aspect by saying that the mind-aspect is the basic reality; a matter-aspect follows as patterns within the mind-aspect, which subsequently at an advanced level leads to patterns which are aware of their own content patterns.

  1. There is a background (like water).
  2. Things we experience are patterns arising and unfolding in that background (like ripples).

As always, the important point is that the background when undisturbed isn't conscious - which people use to mean conscious-of - it is consciousness. It is only conscious-of when there is a pattern within itself. Like a rock. Or a brain.

POST: How can I do this Magick stuff when I can’t visualize? | The Gates of Horn

This is spot on. Visualisation - and seeing - isn't about the location of the picture or the target, it's about where you see from: where you centre and rest your attention, where you 'look out from'.

Ignore the hosting website, but check out this article [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml] on 'seeing from the core':

Another student called me the other day and said, “When I remember the quiet place inside my head, it really improves my vision.” It gives one a little sense of distance from the eyes, a sense of space, so that one can sit back, so to speak, and receive the images. This prevents the habit of straining. We are giving the eyes the opportunity to move freely and see, just as Bates said. Sometimes it’s the acuity that sharpens; sometimes it’s the visual field that expands and sometimes it’s the double images that resolve into one.

EDIT: I'd add that visualisation doesn't matter for magick though. It's really about located presence and intention, and the picturing aspect can be incidental to that. The important bit is to realise the difference between thinking-about and being-at.

POST: Dream magic question - how to?

Enter his dream directly?

  • Relax and get ready for sleep.
  • Wait for your body to release and enter a calm state.
  • Wait for "the sparkles", which then turn into image fragments.
  • At this point, decide that you are going to enter the dream of this person that night.
  • Remain conscious as the fragments gradually coalesce into an environment.
  • Mentally step into the dream environment.
  • Go looking for him.

POST: Reading Robert Bruce's "Astral Dynamics" -- Why does he describe the astral plane(s) as nonphysical?

The vibrations thing can be confusing, but it's just a metaphor. Science itself is a bunch of metaphors, however they are specifically tied to particular observations, and have been felt out over time to find the best ones. You could also talk about "tuning into to levels", etc. Read the OBE/LD books (Robert Bruce, Robert Munroe, Oliver Fox, Robert Waggoner - all the Bobs!) for the reported experiences and the techniques. Reserve judgement on the "what it really means or how it really works" until you've had a chance to explore the phenomena yourself.

Metaphors don't mean much without the experience, and then they are obvious. That's why reading "non-dual" literature is so frustrating, for instance.

TL;DR: What are experiences made from? Experiencing. What are explanations made from? Thoughts. What are thoughts made from? They are made from thinking. What is thinking? An experience...

curious about your reading of the rest of chapman [http://www.reddit.com/r/OccultStudyGroup/comments/2mnogq/reading_group_advanced_magick_for_beginners_start/]

I'm in. I have read it and I often recommend it to people - and the shorter, snappier version (The Camel Rides Again) - but actually it's been awhile. I probably have quite a different way of seeing things now than I did at the time.

...

notfancy: You know the New Age penchant for misappropriating and mangling quantum mechanical concepts? Turns out the tradition goes back to the Victorian Spiritualists and Theosophists besotted with Maxwell's theories of radiation. The appropriation of ready-made, mostly opaque (or black-box) physical concepts works as generative metaphors to put into words concepts completely alien to the base or imported concept but having more or less isomorphous relations to one another.
For instance, as you increase geometrical dimensions you quickly find room for more and more strange and complicated mathematical objects, so in Theosophical parlance dimensions are organizing conceptual "planes" (another metaphor) vertically stacked in ascending order of abstraction, purity or rarefaction.
In the same way that electromagnetic waves of higher frequencies represent radio waves, microwaves, infrared, the visible colors from red to violet and so on and so forth, Theosophical "vibration" or "frequency" represent higher "colors" or "tonalities" (here the metaphor is Pythagorean and certainly of ancient coinage) in a harmonious ascending scale of some positive quality: "energy" properly as the abstract capacity to effect change, "evolution" (another appropriation, this time from Darwin), "consciousness", et cetera.
This unfortunately means that, as a newcomer to the field, you have two potentially difficult prerequisites to fulfill: one is learning the specific Theosophical, New Thought and/or New Age vocabulary used by the book, and two is keeping it all in a separate compartment from those concepts with the same name that you know from your Science education.
Edit: before you cry foul consider that usual Physical words like "energy", "current", "potential", "force", "quantum" are all metaphors. Not the denotations themselves, those are precise, but the denoting words were all appropriated from previous base meanings and coopted for specific new ones. Physics in particular and Science in general have no claim of exclusivity to their words.

I know it's been a while, but can you tell me what meaning is intended by metaphorical super-high frequency vibrations? Like, if scientific parlance is the vehicle, what is the actual nature of the tenor?

notfancy: Frequency of vibration is a scale to measure the evolution of the gross into the subtle, and in that respect it is a value judgement: low is bad, high is good, with the resulting metaphors of descent or fall and ascent or redemption and so on.

POST: You can't have anything you need.

[POST]

I've recently learned this myself. If i need something, i can't have it. Anyone know any books on this philosophy?

[END OF POST]

NeedPan: As you can see I need pan and have plenty!
Care to be more specific?
Do you mean what you must for you cannot easily obtain? Do you mean what you're looking for you won't find?
Sounds depressing

Q: Correct me if I am wrong, but I think what OP is saying is that when you say you "need" something, then the universe, kia, subconscious, whatever... it takes that as a statement of truth and manifests it into "reality". I think that you, NeedPan, are hinting at this idea, lust of result... again, correct me if I'm wrong.

NeedPan: yeah of course! that's really psychical of you because the words "lust of result" were spiraling in my head I just didn't bring it up in need of further clarification before citing Crowley but..
TIL that's part of the bedrock of (atleast) practical magick? No, it's also the bedrock of material/emotional/spiritual experience. The way that the human brain thinks it can accomplish something from a position of 'need/want'...
It's like the Inception part about life. It's the fact that we are experiencing what our subconscious expects us to. If we wish to alter the current status of our perceived reality we must begin to assume the state required. You can re-orient your thoughts and musing around the concept of being at-one with the energies you wish to merge with. The only way to do it is to do it.
So I ask OP: What would, or to take it a step father, what DOES it FEEL like to get what you need? That one day you knew you had exactly what you needed, didn't it feel great?
Very specific requests require very specific energies. Study the energy and merge!
Gods, Goddesses and archetypes I believe are part of the stepping stone to helping usher in the energy one might feel they've never before possessed. One good practice would be to find out who/what harbors what it is you need/want and attempt to invoke their vital energies while knowing you have inside you what it is you'll wish to experience materialized in the future.

If you go about deciding to want/need something, your wish is granted: you get to want/need it. If you decide you already have it, then you get that. Feeling is the secret, apparently. (Seriously: developing "feeling-awareness" is key to magick in general.)

People often do a sigil and say "I want to have a nice car". The sigil then gives them the experience of wanting, just as they requested! If they say "I will have a nice car", then that's different. Unfortunately, the default position people have is the feeling of "desire" which they refuse to let go of, or try to manipulate - even though letting go of desire is the only way for it to move location from here (the internal world) to there (the external).

EDIT: Assume the state, as /u/NeedPan says!

POST: They say practice magick every day

[POST]

==I don't know what to do besides performing rituals to manifest my will, aka mostly sigil magick. What other stuff is there for me to do in my garage/temple? ==

[END OF POST]

Explore the nature of your direct experience.

could you elaborate?

Of course.

Instead of thinking-about what's going on, actually direct your attention to your experience right now. For instance, close your eyes and listen to the sounds. Are you "here" where your body sensation are with the sound over "there" - or are you also beside the sound?

Further ones mentioned here [POST: Hell Zen.] and here [POST: You can't have anything you need.].

Basically, you want to spend some time realising directly that you are having a dream-like existence, with sensations floating in space and no central "you" doing the experiencing and doing. Also, do a daily releasing technique (basically, just lie on the floor and let go completely - of your thoughts, body and, most importantly, your "attention" - and let things unfold and unwind as they want). You'll find it really helps your work. Particularly, you'll probably find you stop wrestling with yourself so much, and it'll become a little clearer just is what's happening when you "do magick".

Q: Basically, you want to spend some time realising directly that you are having a dream-like existence, with sensations floating in space and no central "you"
I've done this all my life. I've always thought everything was connected when I was a kid. I thought if people tried hard enough, even without picking up body language, they could read people's thoughts directly. Or predict the outcome of one's actions. When I was in middle school, I thought this girl knew I liked her and I tried everything to get her to like me, but I became a victim of my own beliefs and told myself she didn't like me, when now it's pretty obvious she did. That was just one instance where I realized everything was connected, way before I read any hermetic or taoist texts or the tanakh/bible.
Later I knew that reality wasn't how we experience it when I learned about different waves of electro-magnetic energy, and also began to experiment with psychedelic drugs in highschool like pot, and learned about DMT and stuff, I realized that we're just a product of chemical reactions in our brain and it's up to our psyche to interpret them. It's funny ina way, our brain is an alchemical engine

Cool. I had much of the same thinking. So true about the belief-overly thing that happens. And thinking about interconnectedness...

But, do you experience this directly?

Right now, do you feel like you are a person who has a body in a room typing at a keyboard - or - do you feel that you are a vast space of conscious awareness in which various thoughts, sensations and perceptions arise?

It's not even about the brain, EM waves, whatever - those are just thoughts (although it's a good way to think about interconnectedness). This is about direct knowing. Literally experiencing it as real, right now.

I get what you mean, I should meditate and try to directly experience interconnectedness, any tips on stuff I should do? I like your concept that we are just a conscious awareness in which sensations and perceptions arise.

Well, there's nothing special to it. Try the links I pointed to, or check out Rupert Spira's books, Presence Vol I & II for some good guidance. And checkout the experiments at Douglas Harding's website. There's no action to be taken, it's really a letting go. It's like you been 'holding onto' thoughts or your body with your attention - and so releasing your attention you find you open out and discover the context in which that was arising.

Even just: Lie on the floor, let go, and decide that you are the space in the room. Just give up completely and say, "I am the background space of this room". And see what happens.

Mantras, prayers, affirmations, are just very indirect ways of tweaking background beliefs. If you were feeling determined, you could just constantly assert that this is a dream-like world and you are the dreamer, as you go about your day. Inserting/asserting that fact alone will make a big difference.

(Everyone always wants to "do" something, but in truth any physical or mental act is largely irrelevant. It's the decision + any accumulated habits-beliefs-expectations-memory traces, that is key. Being quiet and asserting without fighting is enough.)

Lucid dreaming is also a great way to experiment (check out Robbert Waggoner's book if you haven't already, and also this [http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-control/46571-infinite-universes-lucid-dreaming.html] interesting thread).

POST: Thoughts on narcissism? Thoughts on vanity?

I'll have a go with this...

Narcissism

A state of constant, extreme "self"-defence. A person's attention is focused on a small area of their experiential field: typically the thoughts that occur towards the rear of the head area. As a result, they are not really "in the world" and the world seems like a threat. Correspondingly, the world of thought and the self-concept (ego) seem very real. There is a grasping on to this concept and a near complete identification with it which means daily life is a constant struggle for survival. Actions are undertaken in defence of this concept; to keep the story alive. Feeling good = thinking good about oneself.

External achievements and relationships are not valued, because they are not "felt". The narcissist is disconnected from the world and his own bodily 'felt sense' and emotions.

The narcissist is an idea.

Furthermore, he is unaware of the existence of the things he is unaware of. The narcissist has no "sense of touch", while being unaware there is even such a thing. He builds theories about "hard and soft" without having the experience. He rationalises and explains - about relationships, about the world - but never knows or that he can know.

Vanity

Similar to narcissism. Identification with an image or thought, a mental construct but perhaps connected with some sensory aspects.

In both cases, the solution is to release one's focus of attention and expand it, direct it out into the world - the background space of awareness. In this way, the narcissist re-contextualises himself, reconnects to the ground of existence. He acquires direct knowledge.

EDIT: Added quotes to emphasise that I mean defence of the conceptual "self", one's self-image or internal story, which has become misidentified as one's real self or true essence, to an extreme level.

Defending yourself is not narcissistic . Speaking out against the Conservative government, or the abolition of the Canadian senate.. etc.. is not narcissistic . The people who warn you about narcissism are the same person who attack you.

I think you misunderstand - or I wasn't clear. I should have said "self"-defence. In other words, defending your concept of yourself, your internal story or self-image. This is different to defending your property or livelihood.

I will make that change.

Q: This is different to defending your property or livelihood.
Is it?

Within the context of OP's post, yes. But I know what you're getting at, Nefandi, and it would be exhausting.

Humility is overrated. Vanity has been given a bad rap. A peacock serves no greater good by hiding his feathers. Maybe we are here to be beautiful, prideful expressions of consciousness. My vanity has not been a hindrance to any of my relationships.

Thing is, a peacock is not enamoured with its own feathers; it is not vain.

But yeah, people should take care of themselves.

POST: Stupid question, but nagging me. If belief affects reality, do schizophrenics and narcissists have an advantage?

I don't think beliefs shape reality; but they do filter the "infinite gloop" of reality. More specifically: they filter the experience, but not the ability.

What does it mean to "do" something? It means: intending it and subsequently experiencing it. There is no actual "doing" involved at any point; there is only the "experience of doing". Given this, the narcissist and the schizophrenic don't have an advantage because they don't have the intention aspect under control.

The narcissist is vulnerable and self-deludes; he fantasises about status but does not intend results. He sees confirmation in existing situations through mild synchronicity but does not actively leverage them in a magickal way (I suggest).

The schizophrenic, meanwhile, is cracked wide open to an expanded experience. Again, he does not have intention under control. He is simply bombarded with extra information and massive alignments. His intensity means he is constantly willing and shifting his world. If he is lucky, he will learn to use some of it to his advantage. More likely, his lack of "formatting" will render him confused.

"Normal" people with magickal ambitions have enough trouble grasping the idea of will; these guys are further disadvantaged in that, just in opposite ways.

POST: Visualizing with your body as well as with your brain. The stretched third eye. (/r/occult/)

Well, isn't this just you noticing that all your experiences occur in the same "perceptual space"? I mean, the "head" you think you are thinking in now isn't your real head... it's just an area in your overall extended spatial experience in your mind.

The room around you is literally your mind, and you can "reach out" into it and visualise into it anywhere. If you "expand out" your attention into the space around you, you'll find you can be the whole room. Because this whole room is your imagination and anything you think in that space is your imagination.

I have a little metaphor I use to help remind me of this. (Note: in reality it's more like a "holographic conscious space" but the floor-pattern idea is quite, um, grounding and accessible.)

The Imagination Room

There is a vast room. The floor is transparent, and through it an infinitely bright light shines, completely filling the room with unchanging, unbounded white light.

Suddenly, patterns start to appear on the floor. These patterns filter the light. The patterns accumulate, layer upon layer intertwined, until instead of homogenous light filling the room, the light seems to be holographically redirected by the patterns into the shape of experiences, arranged in space, unfolding over time. Experiences which consist of sensations, perceptions and thoughts.

At the centre of the room there are bodily sensations, which you recognise as... you, your body. You decide to centre yourself in the upper part of that region, as if you were "looking out from" there, "being" that bodily experience.

At the moment you are simply experiencing, not doing anything. However you notice that every experience that arises slightly deepens the pattern corresponding to it, making it more stable, and more likely to appear again as the light is funnelled into that shape.

Now, you notice something else. If you create a thought, then the image will appear floating in the room - as an experience. Again, the corresponding pattern is deepened. Only this time, you are creating the experience and in effect creating a new habit in your world!

Even saying a word or a phrase triggers the corresponding associations, so it is not just the simple thought that leaves a deeper pattern, but the whole context of that thought, its history and relationships.

Now, as you walk around today, you will feel the ground beneath your feet - but you will know that under what appears to be the ground is actually the floor of the room, through which the light is shining, being shaped into the experience around you. And every thought or experience you have is shifting the pattern...

Q: Well, isn't this just you noticing that all your experiences occur in the same "perceptual space"? I mean, the "head" you think you are thinking in now isn't your real head... it's just an area in your overall extended spatial experience in your mind.
well of course it is, but i think what we need to realize is that our illusion is multi layered. Its not just being in an imaginary body or being an imaginary brain, its being an imaginary brain within and imaginary body, allocating all of it to one thing makes it much easier to work with.

Hmm, what I was getting at is that you don't experience a brain or a body at all, as such. You can just cut straight to noticing that what you really experience is body sensations, perceptions, thoughts and so on "floating in your consciousness space" - and all of those are literally thought/imagination/mind-stuff. You may occasionally think-about being-a-body or being-a-brain, but you never actually experience that.

(We're probably talking about exactly the same thing here, right?)

You're coming from a pure subjective idealism position.

Not really (although we do end up there). The only insight that's needed comes directly from the everyday notion of "an external world affecting the senses which the brain turns into a representation". This immediately means that the scene around you - if not its origins - is "in your mind" and you can direct your attention anyway.

In other words, the "standard model" alone leads to this. It's the error of thinking of ourselves in the 3rd-person (a body, with a brain in the head, which is us) which has led us to mistakenly configure ourselves to locate our "felt-location" in the head area. (A moment's pondering shows us that it's ridiculous though. Look inside someone else, and you don't find "their" location in the same way as you feel yourself to be located - etc.)

The next steps are what takes us to "advanced" level: realising that you can direct your attention outside your body boundary (since the sensory experience is all within mind) and then on to ponder whether there is such a thing as an "external world" (if we cannot ever experience it, is it not also just an idea in the mind), and then we get to at least idealism of a sort. All the other good stuff we've been playing with.

Under a physicalist model...

Everyday people don't have such a physicalist model, though. They have a half-hearted version of "I am a brain in a body". With a sort of naive realism hanging off that. Following through on that with "the experience I am having now is inside my brain" follows naturally from this, after a pause. From there it become reasonable that one can extend one's attention throughout the body-space - enough to allow yourself experience it. Most people haven't really thought about this at all (including fellow occultists and even lucid dreamers). They've just ended up with an assumption and don't pay to much attention to it.

I'm not jumping here to my own position - I'm simply pointing out that you can justify expanding your attention out, based on the everyday basic model of "experience is in the brain".

The problem is, if you start taking physicalism seriously enough to follow this implication, you'll also be taking its determinism seriously as well. Do you see my point?

I do, but you are thinking far more deeply that anyone normally does. Purely dealing with OP here, and having led people through this in conversation, you find you don't have to. They don't have deep convictions or a worldview - they have sketchy unexamined assumptions. Again, most people really don't have any idea about determinism and brain-states and so on. They really do just have the fluffy vague idea of "I am my brain, in my head" while promptly behaving as if they were directly seeing the world. The brain and head they are referring to are metaphorical. (Which of course they are, but not in the way they think. Although actually in the way they think. And so on.)

The simple addition of "this all must be in your brain/mind" is sufficient to allow people to get more benefit from including their body-space (for daily use and ease, for healing, and more besides). They are not really changing their "philosophical system", because they never had a philosophical system in the first place.

Of course, having made this small step which leads to experiential change, they are in a better place to explore such things if they so please.

Actually, I'll point out that my first reply I did on mobile and, a) It hadn't displayed the first part of OP and I didn't realise, b) I hadn't twigged it was cosmic, because that appears at the top too. Which is why I added a little response later.

I think of it as most people have a "bag of metaphors" rather than a philosophical system, which is why it tends to be incoherent, being unexamined - e.g. that the "we are our brains, run by chemicals" but that obviously we make choices and have free will, etc. People may ever assert that they are "machines or computers" but one second later they will state a belief contrary to that.

This is a good thing - that lack of coherence - because it means the errors can be easily overturned.

The reason I don't like calling it a "philosophical system" is because that implies some sort of coherence. And it doesn't match with people's actual experience of their thinking in this case.

They think past causes the present.

Always a trick. Since I'm lazy, I'm not going to cut-and-paste a metaphor I was discussing elsewhere, trying to show that there is just an ongoing (and effectively "dumb") pattern which evolves, including the part of the pattern which we might call "the past".

On Time and Metaphor

His [Alan Watts'] metaphor of "the ship and its wake" is excellent for capturing your true situation. From his book What is Zen?...

We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn’t explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship, and eventually disappears.
Now you would say that obviously when you see a ship crossing the ocean with the wake trailing behind it that the ship is the cause of the wake. But if you get into the state of mind that believes in causality as we do, you see that the wake is the cause of the ship! And that is surely making the tail wag the dog!
The point is this: You will never find the mystery of the creation of the world in the past. It never was created in the past. Because truly there is nothing else — and never was anything else — except the present! There never will be anything else except the present.
-- What is Zen?, Alan Watts

Now, this essentially means there isn't even really a "present" - rather, there is an "ongoing unfolding". A pattern which is evolving its shape, a bit like those video-feedback patterns you get when you point a camera at a screen showing its own image. If it's an old CRT screen with a bit of a smearing, then that captures the whole situation: the main pattern is slightly smeared as it goes with a slight after-image. This smearing, that after-image which forms part of the main image, is something we called the "past" or the "context".

Thing is, if that video image just suddenly changed dramatically and discontinuously - say, from circle-based imagery to square-based - then after a moment of tangled confusion all trace of the old circle-based imagery would be gone. All there would be, would be the square-based imagery and the square-based "smear".

In other words, our "world" always seems to be consistent as if there is a past causing it, one that is of the same structure as "the world". But in fact, the metaphor shows us that the present is either uncaused, or caused by something quite different to any image, or caused "by itself" - the "past" is simply a part of the present image, just of a different intensity to the rest of the image.

Any causal frameworks we read into the patterns are simply accidental regularities, in among the semi-randomness of feedback, which we have become fixated upon; after-images which keep being re-triggered so as never to fade completely. The patterns themselves have no such causal structure, it exists only in our interpretation...

EDIT: Did some minor editing on the last paragraph to mention the re-triggering for observed regularities. Obviously the "camera" and the "screen" and the "image" are all one, once you take this a step further, and the complexities lead to repeating stabilities, but the essence is there.

So what this means to me is, most beings are pragmatic, and will only start paying attention to something, examining it in detail, and learning to talk about it, if it somehow improves their day to day well-being.

This is a very good point. The clash between one's internal models and external situations needs to be quite severe before people are brought to reconsider things. Mostly they just avoid such situations (because they don't know how they could understand and adapt themselves).

This isn't due to a lack of intelligence, it's to do with the narrow education and information that is generally available. There is no "meta" level to the learning that people are put through.

For people who are liking physicalism and are getting good use out of it, they don't need to do anything more than go to work and have fun in the off time. Nothing in life will challenge their physicalism, so there is no practical demand to look very deeply into its implications.

Which leads to interesting conclusions: That those who are driven to investigate, dismantle, rediscover, are they always those who are disadvantaged in some way? Whether that is economically or psychologically, in some way jarring or at odds with the setup they were born into. In short, more "sensitive"?

If I didn't use words like "always" now and again, we'd struggle to find disagreements! :-)

I agree, but this might be intentional. [Lack of "meta" level to education.]

I do think this is intentional - or at least, unintentionally intentional. The education system is not really designed for free and frank inquiry, exploration into the nature of the world and oneself. It's far more a "shaping of people" to fit the predefined requirements of the economy (or aspects of the economy). Education is mostly training. And largely behavioural training at that; behavioural structuring, particularly around artificial notions of time and of "hierarchy" in the general sense.

It's actually quite disadvantageous to have many intelligent people, from a certain point of view. In fact, probably very few people who are in positions of influence are especially intelligence; it's more a matter of emotional management and "flexibility in the face of moral ambiguity".

POST: Spirit Possession on LSD.

I wouldn't take the content of your experience too literally. In my view, things like LSD simply loosen up your constraints and your experience becomes less logically structured, more associative. They are real as experiences, but they are not real in terms of there being some fundamental truth to them beyond that. All experiences are relative. This is true of everyday life as well as "unusual" experiences; they are all of the same type. They all arise in the mind, and reveal the patterning of the mind, rather than the patterning of some fictional "external" world beyond it.

For instance: The Patterning of Experience and related links.

Have you ever had a lucid dream? They can be more real than real. Sometimes they can last what seems like months, even years. Imagine if you had a lucid dream one night, but had never heard of lucid dreams. What would you make of it? ("I love lamp." [Repost: A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp])

POST: What does r/occult think of r/dimensionaljumping

People here can greatly influence what goes on there. I feel like it is a very useful idea that needs to be taught by you folks.

The problem is, we can easily end up with just one big "magickal soup" with people exchanging the same received wisdom, all "educating" one another about how this-thing is "really" that-thing, and so on.

Although the origin of /r/dimensionaljumping was people playing around with mirror rituals, over time it's become something else: a place to explore the "nature of experiencing" for people who either don't have a background in that sort of thing, or want to approach it from a relatively clean slate in terms of language and metaphysics.

I think all of us tend to get distracted by the models and concepts from the past, perhaps reify them as being special, even though with their context unavailable their meaning is often now not clear - or perhaps seems incorrectly obvious. They get taken pseudo-literally. People spend time looking for "the secrets" when there really are none; you just have to experiment. So we just put that aside. At most, there's a highly abstract base model of "patterned meaning" of an apparently subjective perspective.

So for sure, the various exercises contributors come up with do allow people to recognise that "something is going on" and get some results, but the larger purpose is to question things more deeply without becoming attached to any one narrative. And that includes the idea of "dimensional jumping" itself, which isn't meant to be "how it works" - it's simply an example of an equivalent "pattern" one can adopt, a seed for thinking this stuff out. Eventually, one realises there is no "how it works", of course, and your concept of "you" gets updated accordingly. But just reading that doesn't really help anyone get it or apply it.

Anyway, all this is why the meat of things tends to happen in the discussions rather than in the posts. The mods keep their hands off, because it's all about the experimentation. Then every now and again someone shows up to say sarcastically, "nice one so you've discovered 'sigils' eh?" - to which the answer would be: so what is a sigil and how, exactly, does it work? And so on.

That's the rationale, anyway

POST: delivered from the lust of result

Maybe that's what the mind is, our infinite void where anything can be created.

Well, you've nailed that I think.

Our mind is the void in which everything appears, and is immediate creativity itself - if we detach and allow our accumulated patterns to settle and shift. If we are holding on to "parts of the dream", though, then our creativity is compromised by or funnelled through those parts.

Do you have a link to that Peter Carroll audio clip? Not heard of it before. Makes sense to me (we have a tendency to fill our creative 'First Cause' void with surrogates which we give our power to).

Not sure the name of it. You should find it in YouTube searching Peter Carroll chaos magic. The audio clip is also in the first episode of scrolls of thoth.
"Just as daylight obscures the stars, so does wkefulneswakefulness obscure the fact that we are still dreaming"

Thanks, will do that.

The stuff about creating a mental landscape is my favorite.

Sounds like my kind of thing - great.

I read Liber Null a long time ago, but have not much recollection. The only thing I have my doubts about: he was very much of the "magick is bending probabilities" view, was he not? I think that was a restriction he, in effect, imposed upon himself?

I think he was just living in the real world.
You can visualize flying, it doesn't mean you flew. Until someone proves they can do seemingly impossible things with magic, I'll have to submit that it is the world that imposes these restrictions, not Carroll.

For sure, I don't mean we can just do anything on a whim. I was more thinking that the idea of it being probabilities might be restrictive. I've been thinking more in terms of plausibilities - something that might actually be more flexible (and helps us get rid of worries about retro-causality, etc).

Of course, that's just more words really.

Doesn't that mean the same thing? Probability is a specific measurement of plausibility I believe.

The distinction for me would be:

  • Probability implies that experience is bound by a separate external world with rules which are independent of us. What we experience is dictated by the "world's formatting".
  • Plausibility implies that experience is bound by the stories about a hypothesised external world - what stories we find acceptable. The rules are part of us. What we experience is dictated by our "human formatting".

As an idea, I think the second version makes it easier to envisage how magick works as part of our minds. For instance, if you're playing with synchronicity, not only will you "notice" more of the object or pattern you have in mind, you will also encounter events which "come to you". Those events will seem to have their seeds in events that predate your intention.

Probabilities don't easily account for that. Plausibilities do so more easily (anything can happen so long as you've not yet observed something that means it shouldn't happen).

Sorry - that's probably (aha!) not very clear.

EDIT: This blog post [https://web.archive.org/web/20090915212504/https://pomomagic.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/why-cant-you-teleport/] was quite a nice - and honest - comment by someone wondering what the limits are.

I would see it as an accurate and a helpful thing to say that it's easier to change something with probability on your side.

Hmm, my feeling is that it doesn't say anything, other than "we can't do miracles", and doesn't help, because it doesn't suggest a particular approach. It's maybe more honest to call this plausibility than probability - since the probability (being a mathematical notion) implies a measurement and an adjustment, but it isn't actually measurable and the adjustment detectible. What we really mean is "seems unlikely"?

But we're just talking about a language preference here. Really, I was just wondering aloud whether choosing the concept of probability vs another might influence one's magick!

You are trying to apply what he said to synchronicity which has absolutely nothing to do with causing change.

Intentional synchronicity is exactly how we cause change (or one way). But I didn't preamble this, so fair enough! To be clearer what I mean by that: Focusing upon a particular conceptual pattern, results in that pattern subsequently appearing in external and internal experience. Something I've been playing with.

Just to begin: remember, I'm not disagreeing with you here, we're just exploring how best to discuss.

It's not saying only focus on mathematically accurate probabilities. You seem to have a very strict view of the word.

Peter Carroll was approaching it exactly that way in Liber Null, via his formulae, so that's the way I was interpreting it:

M = G x L(1-A)(1-R)
Pm = P - P x M 1/(1/-p)
All factors are between 0 and 1.
M equals the force of your magic. Which is dependent upon your G (Gnosis) and L (magical Link) multiplied by two negative factors. (Things working against you). Your conscious awareness of the desired result (1-A) and your subconscious resistance to doing magic (1-R) -i.e. "Mommy told me magick doesn't work."
In the other formula, P equals the chance the event you desire occurs by itself; (1/(1/-p)) equals the chance that the result you desire will not occur. Pm equals the combination of the Probability that the event will occur combined with your magical effort to make it occur.
[Most of these are unmeasurable, and it particularly seems difficult to measure the probability of an event - TG]

Surely by probability here we just mean "what we think will happen"? There's no way to measure it other than our own opinion. Which is basically "plausibility".

Yes focusing on things makes you notice them in life. That has absolutely nothing to do with using probability. That's where you seem to be tangled up.

It's a little more than noticing. Focusing on things "being a certain way" and then find them to be that certain way afterwards, is what magick is all about. Chaos Magick particularly, right?

Do you disagree with the notion that it's easier to go with the current?

But, for sure, the closer your desire corresponds to everyday experience, the less change you will have to create - because your everyday experience is by definition the default. Apparent "habits" of the world. But this issue is with ourselves, not with the world.

Anyway I definitely agree: We should use pre-established habits where possible, just because it's more efficient. Where I disagree is that what magick is, is "bending probabilities".

EDIT: An extra observation I'd make: absolutely everything works, if properly committed to. It doesn't matter what imaginary notions you adopt for the purpose, they will work to the extent you invest yourself in them, even temporarily.

Seeing a thing a certain way and it being that way has nothing to do with the probability thing. at least that's how I saw it.

The way I was viewing it was: Seeing things as governed by probability, means you are indirectly willing it to behave that way - as a general worldview? Adopting that outlook is a piece of magick all of its own. If you view magick as being about probabilities, then your magick will go along those lines. If you view it as being about energy, the same. And so on.

He's establishing realistic expectations rather than woo and fluff, however inspiring it may seem at the time.

Perfectly reasonable. I say: everyone must experiment for themselves to find out what is possible. One caution though: Your expectations in magick (about what is possible, about how it works) plays a large role in defining what you can do. It's not like science, where there's a "how it works" and you discover the rules and leverage them. There is nothing "behind" magick.

But that's not to say you'll be flying around the place by flapping your arms any time soon. It might well be possible, but you'll probably have to do an awful lot of work to establish that "habit".

There's an old story about a student coming to a master and saying "Finally, after 40 years of study I can walk across the river unaided!". To which the master says, "What a waste of a life, you could have saved a lot of time by paying a penny for the ferry like everyone else!"

Who knows what we could do if we dedicated ourselves to it? But: who really wants to do that?

I think he's just saying don't expect magic lottery winnings and that using magic to influence business may be a better idea more prone to success.

I think he is of that view. I personally think that magick can be far more direct than he suggests. It (that view) is just another metaphor, after all. But that sounds like I'm dissing his take - not at all. It's been very successful for lots of people, and the fact that people can easily get behind it - it makes sort of rational sense to them - is part of its power at a metaphor.

Hmm. See, I'm not disparaging Peter Carroll. I'm just wondering about how adopting a way of looking at things changes how we operate.

The laws of physics do not simply exist because we believe in it. Try to understand that our laws of physics were discovered, not enforced.

Ah, I'm not saying that believing things causes them. I'm saying that the "laws" of experience should be viewed as habits - ingrained patterns that have become established over time. So they are not how it really, really works in some deeper, given sense. Gravity, for instance, is a very ingrained habit of the universe.

(The word "law" in physics does not mean something that is laid down; it means something like "observed regularity".)

Where belief comes in, is that is dictates what directions we will apply our effort with full commitment. Carroll phrases it as "your subconscious resistance to doing magic". It's more that non-belief - or adopting a worldview which says something can't happen - has a negative effect.

You can't say anything is possible but you won't fly by flapping your arms.

Let's be clearer: Anything is possible in principle but it is up to people to find out what they can accomplish in practice. Certainly, my experience of flapping my arms into flight is quite... limited. Again, I am not claiming that believing makes things happen. I'm with Carroll in saying that non-belief gets in the way.

You don't think probability affects it? So your magic always works directly?

Magick always operates directly, yes. Let me lay it out, how I think it works:

  • Over time, patterns become more and more established in the universe. You might call these "habits". This includes things like gravity, the structure of your body - the way things work by default.
  • Magick is just everyday intention really. Intending something is the magick. Whenever we intend something, that intention always comes about in some form, funnelled through the current patterns. e.g. We intend to move go to the door, our bodies walk there; typically we don't teleport.
  • In other words, the "habits" of the world imply the most likely routes that intention will manifest along, and restrict the types of manifestation. For instance, you will often see other aspects of your intention appear in images in daily life, dreams, conversations, symbolic representations, and then as an event. The restrictions aren't because things aren't possible, they are because deeper habits or channels exist.
  • The difference between what we call "magick" and everyday intention is that in magick we realise the situation (that all intentions manifest, that laws are not actually fixed rules), and therefore intend things that are against common sense. The more directly we will this, the more focused the result.

In summary, what you are calling "probability" is just a way of saying something is unlikely. It isn't forbidden or impossible. But that's hardly helpful.

Either the world is your personal dream or it isnt.

I never understood the idea that just because the world is a dream, you should be able to just "flap your arms and fly". After all, can you just think of, say, a tree in absolute detail right now? Most people can't - but your imagination really is your personal dream. You can get better at it though. Meanwhile, in llucid dreams, people find they sometimes can't fly. Why not?

My answer: because as described above, manifestation is about implied patterns, not about direct creation.

This is just "a dream". But it is "a dream that". A dream that you are in this world, organised this way - in the same way as we can lucid dream a persistent realm. Different dreams have different levels of organisation, of habit. They all obey the basic rule (intention always manifests in some way) though.

What if, in a dream, you intended that there was gravity and that gravity was always unbreakable? If afterwards you couldn't fly, would you complain that it wasn't actually a dream after all?

Physics in dreams is never that consistent.

If you experiment with creating persistent realms (as described by Hyu in his post), then it is. When you just fall asleep and end up in a dream, then it tends to be somewhat breakable because you didn't intend any rules. You can experiment with this: In a lucid dream, create a door and go through it with the intention that you will enter a stable realm and you will. You'll discover its physics is not breakable just by "wanting" to fly, for instance, even though "hey! this is my dream!"

And that's because you created the dream with rules. You would first have to change the dreamworld to make it possible to fly, and then fly. Which you'll find is incredibly difficult.

I didn't impose gravity on myself, it was imposed on me.

Perhaps you created a persistent, rule-based realm - and then forgot you did it. If you want to fly just by flapping your arms, you are going to have to first make it possible to fly doing this. Then flap your arms.

I'm not saying it's easy to break such a fundamental rule. However, there are other things that are perhaps even more disturbing that are possible. Influencing the weather, for instance, seems to me more rule-breaking than flying - because in that case, you are affecting something that is not part of your body.

No probability doesn't just say things are unlikely.

Really? If it can't be quantified then it's really just "stuff you think might happen anyway, but is unlikely". But let's skip that - you're saying that (according to Carroll) it's easier to use magick to produce an effect which you already consider to be within the realms of possibility.

Certainly that's true.

In other words, we're dealing with something which might happen anyway, it's just that we are helping it out by giving it a push. For sure. That's certainly a valid approach, but I'd hate to think people were limiting themselves to what they thought "might happen anyway" when experimenting for investigative purposes.

If he was wrong, I think every magician would have won the lottery.

The "lottery winner" thing is interesting. Personally, I don't think I'd want to win the lottery. If you want to be wealthy, there are better ways. I would wonder whether anyone who could, would...?

For fun: if you wanted to win the lottery, using magick, how would you go about it?

Yes, perhaps all the rules were created and forgotten by me. Nothing in reality suggests it and you can in no way prove that these rules are breakable.

Well, the difficult part is actually to prove there are rules. We can only say: "my experience is consistent with the notion that there are rules". Unfalsifiability and all that.

But we're just exploring ideas here. What is the evidence that our common experience is how things have to be, and that they are a result of fixed rules? No evidence, other than the experience itself. If you manage to create a contrary experience, even once, then that idea of a rule-based reality - rather than a habit-based one - breaks down.

I say rules are effectively just strong habits.

You seem to take "I can do this" as proof that anything is possible.

For the purposes of discussion, here, we're talking about hypotheticals as much as anything else, right? You seem to be saying that whatever you haven't done is proof that it's im-possible. :-)

So - you bring up a good point about the rules of physics. Flapping my arms and flying would be a no-no, but pointing at the sky and the clouds disappearing would be okay - because we could say the second case was coincidence. It's borderline plausible but it is still plausible, right?

How far can we push it and still have it be okay, do you think? Is not directly experiencing it happening one ingredient which may help things? For instance, people driving somewhere and finding afterwards they've covered a 1hr journey in 30 minutes, that sort of thing.

He used the term "higher probability" which in no way implies or suggests anything more than a vague sense.

I think we got caught up here. I just suggested that "plausibility" was a better word for general use - mainly because while in cases such as the lottery we might be able to have a literal probability, but in most cases we just mean "seems more likely". Nothing more than that!

I am talking about the real lottery, not scratch of tickets.

Yeah, I had in mind the national lottery (or state lottery, or whatever, depending on your country). I've never really given this much thought, but I guess I'd do my usual thing of asserting it as fact which is a sort of effortless willing. However, this requires a genuine desire and a bit of committed confidence. (This is where my thinking comes from that you probably can't easily do this: most don't really want it, those that do won't be able to commit due to doubt or conflict.)

What other, more "plausible-probable" things would fall into the same general category?

Yes, those rules have been proven. Scientists didn't just write down "da laws of fisics" and that was that, these "rrules" are what we have after a long time of research.

I think you're getting hung up on something that we can't be disagreeing about.

People have over time seen "observed regularities" in nature. From there they have created descriptions (models) which help us talk about the world in terms of those regularities. The most basic of those we call "laws". The law is the repeated observation. A law is "a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior". By definition, only the most common, recurring patterns are described by physics, and from there only the simplest descriptions can become "laws". These laws are an account of what we have seen, not a statement about how things work.

Which doesn't necessarily mean you'll be flapping and flying any time soon. But it also doesn't mean that the world is a rule-based mechanical place as a whole.

Forget coincidence, explain how cloudbursting breaks any law of physics.

Are you suggesting that cloudbursting by intention (rather than dumping chemicals on clouds from planes) can be described by the laws of physics?

I'm saying that not being able to just fly... is a pretty good indication that we are not living in a fantasy world where are beliefs become real.

Only you are saying that "beliefs become real". I am just suggesting that a lack of belief tends to make it unlikely you'll engage in any prolonged experimentation in that direction. And I still don't get why you would expect to be able to "just fly", any more than you'd expect to "just speak Hungarian".

It reminds me of people who oppose philosophical idealism because if everything is made from consciousness, why can't they just think objects into materialisation immediately! Which is as bad as saying, if I'm made of atoms why don't I have power over all the atoms in the world, since we're the same...

Considering that time is not a unit of measurement for distance, I would say you made up those numbers to convince yourself that you did magic.

Hmm. Surely you get the point I was making there? That making a journey in impossible time. If you've played around with this, you must have had such an experience?

But we don't have exact odds for the lottery. No equation accounts for the chance that a winning ticket gets destroyed.

Depends on the lottery. In the UK, you can work out the exact odds for a set of numbers corresponding to the randomly drawn numbers (see here [https://lottery.merseyworld.com/Info/Chances.html]). Not sure if the process is different elsewhere?

Again, I am not saying that believing in something makes it happen, or that not-believing makes something not-happen. What I am saying instead is:

We shouldn't assume that our everyday experience is the whole thing, and we shouldn't believe what other people say is impossible or possible - although it might provide inspiration. It's up to us to try things out.

I'm kind of relearning that life is a giant lie and how gleefull people are in selling that lie for free.

What kind of lie?

So we can only conclude that the universe seems to follow patterns when we have all these patterns down completely on paper?

It doesn't follow pattens. It is patterned. I'm saying it's not "rule-based and mechanical" but I'm not saying that it isn't patterned. In fact, I don't think humans can perceive anything that isn't patterned. In fact, my summary would be: "no pattern should be interpreted as being fixed and no description should be viewed as capturing a whole pattern".

This isn't controversial. This is exactly science's approach, right?

[On cloudbursting...] I said I don't see how it breaks the laws of physics. I never said that it could be used to explain it.

I agree. But many would say that it does break the laws of physics, in that it can't be accounted for and is therefore impossible. I don't believe lack of an explanation means something is impossible. And neither do you, it seems.

My point was that cloudbursting doesn't prove that anything is possible with your mind.

That can never be proved. If there's something you want to achieve, then you must experiment and see if it can't be done. If you can't, it's proof that... you didn't succeed. And maybe you never will, of course.

No, if the world is just our imagination, asking why we can't imagine something else is a valid fucking question.

It's not "just" our imagination. It's a particular imagining, right? We have imagined that we live on a planet with gravity and water and all sort of other cool stuff. I don't see why you expect to be able to wish stuff different without any effort.

Nobody ever ever has all the variables, yet we still call it probability. That's all my point wss, really. We never have all variables, even if they use really big numbers.

Right. That's true. So a theoretical probability then, based only on what we have included in our description or model. A bit like only including previous observations into a theory, and assuming that this is sufficient.

I get it now. People with enough money to not have real problems, so they play pretend, with everyone else's lives.

Well, there's something to that, certainly.

Hey, sorry, we totally got bogged down in that whole probability thing. My fault. I apologise.

Stop saying we can just change reality and only offering excuses as to why it never fucking works.

Y'know what? I've no idea how it works, not exactly anyway. That's the problem. Which means I also can't tell why things don't work. Things do change in unlikely ways. I don't think it's to do with belief or effort. When things happen, it's not about trying.

It definitely involves detachment and it definitely involves "will" via (optionally) imagination. And it always produces some sort of result, although sometimes it's just symbolic (like, encountering stuff about your desire but getting your actual desire).

Things do sorta work how you think they do. But I don't mean how you choose to think about them. I mean, how you think they do when you ask yourself how you think something works. (Sorry, that's not very well worded.) I guess that sounds like "belief" but that word is so misused now.

Really it's better to say that it's to do with your own patterning. That changing your own patterning (or "formatting") is the way to produce change, and the way to change your patterning is via will and imagination.

The occultist joins an order to learn magic and improve his life, they teach him to clear his mind so they can fill it.

I don't believe in any of that order stuff much. I think most organised occultism is pretty uninteresting or was about management. Meanwhile, people keep trying to look for explanations and reasons, and they get further away from understanding. Every new theory or technique is a step away from achieving anything.

I linked this earlier, but this blog entry on Why Can't We Teleport? is one of the most honest I've encountered (his book is pretty good actually). The problem isn't necessarily that we can't do things, it's that we don't know how to test whether we can do them or not?

It's not belief, it's not effort. I'd say it's "willed imagination without obstruction" but that's hardly a very useable description. Within that, the actual details don't seem to matter much. Which means testing possibility is an issue.

I think I am starting to see what you mean. Making assumptions of reality kind of limits what we choose to experiment with and how. Believing that we are made of complete solid matter would of course throw off any research into teleportation, just as whatever mistakes we have now likely prevent us from trying the right things or asking the right questions about certain phenomenon.

Right, you've said it much more clearly than I did, but that's what I was trying to get at.

Which might mean that the deepest, most subtle traps we find ourselves in are transparent to us - they might be things we don't even realise we are assuming!

But that's some stuff so deep that you have an actual danger of falling in and being trapped in the question.
Our sanity depends on our ability to trust our eyes and ears, two senses we consciously know are just collecting data that our brain turns into an artificial image.
Question all assumptions and you may end up not knowing what's real, or if anything is real, or if everything is real. Those thoughts are not the scary part, the scary part is how the mind sometimes copes with this deep uncertainty.

I agree: I think the basics should be largely left alone for everyday life. You don't want to destroy its fundamental continuity!

Extreme version: Some autistic children have a hard time trusting that the lessons they learned remain true without continually re-testing them - e.g. that the floor still supports their weight; that an object that goes out of sight will still be there later.

So I guess it's more assumptions about personal achievement on a more macro-scale. We don't want to be reformatting ourselves at too low a level. We don't want to have to manually handle all the details, after all.

So maybe those that must live in that world are the ones who have ready access to that creative space, but lack the raw "knowledge" needed to refine or carry it out completely on their own.
I guess I've never thought of autism in that way, interesting.

I think autism has much to teach us.

One of my ideas: that their attention is narrowed on the current sensory experience, and they have no felt-sense for the underlying facts of the world. The world has no baseline solidity for them; it's transient imagery and memory, without knowing. The "facts" don't stick or they are not aware of the place where the "facts" are stored! (Which I think is literally in the central "gut feeling" we have.)

In other words, they are an extreme. Unbalanced by one point of view, and that's technically true, but also superhuman in the sense that one or many aspects of themselves are cranked up to 10 while most of us are at 5.
In other words, the blind man is the top dog when the power goes out underground.
Maybe our society just sucks at understanding people and making certain roles available to people that are "not balanced" for normal life.

Right, nicely said. I think in other societies the autistic child and the schizophrenic and the epileptic (not equating those, just examples) would be considered as having a "connection" to a larger field of experience. Their relative lack of daily-life-handling would be allowed for, and their talents maximised.

The uniformity of western societies doesn't really allow for individuality of talent or perception. Roles are prearranged slots; society tries to mould its children into them but by assuming them to be identical and "formable".

Which, obviously, is quite a horrific approach. Not everyone takes to the "training".

POST: Chaos Magic and Forgetting

You don't need to forget, you just need to stop triggering the pattern of wanting/desiring. Nobody ever desired something they already had!

One view:

  • Launching a sigil creates a pattern in time which leads to a future experience that is the one you desire. It becomes true now that this will happen then.
  • Thinking that this is going to happen is okay, since it leaves the pattern intact or even strengthens it, streamlines it. Looking forward to something is not a problem.
  • Thinking about maybes or other stuff or desiring overwrites the pattern with something diffuse to contrary.

In other words: know that it is done and then you can think whatever you want. Forgetting not required. Think of a "time landscape" that is always there, and is being updated every time you sigilise or think about the future with intention or expectation, direct or implied.

POST: Sigil and Law of Attraction Contradiction?

Okay, but... doesn't this whole thing depend on your world-view also? Even if the sigil is apparently shown only to "you", it's effectively shown to "the universe". The whole thing moves towards your goal, including your body.

The main thing about releasing is to let yourself be moved rather than staying in the "problem state".

The shooting metaphor doesn't work for magick, surely?

This is not so consensus bound; personal facts take priority. Sigils and LOA do not operate at that consensus level; they are effectively excuses for allowing things to happen "as if". The more you experiment, the clearer this gets. What you "imagine that" things are like is what counts.

However you think that it works,
That's how it works.

If you "imagine that" the world works according to the number of views an intention gets, that's what'll happen. If you "imagine that" forgetting your sigil is important, then even a brief recall or a glance might stop things right there - while those who don't care or haven't thought about it so deeply, won't have a problem.

An extra issue is that all the associations with a viewpoint also come into effect. If you "summon Hercules" to do your bidding, his great strength comes to your aid. However, Hercules had his issues in myth, and those will start to manifest too, even though you didn't explicitly consider them. This where it gets tricky and goes beyond what you thought you asked for.

I reckon it is impossible to fully specify or constrain things unless you create your own, clean metaphor/mechanism. (Or meta-metaphor.)

Really describing any action is describing Magick

I agree with this. The shift from one experience to another in alignment with "the format of one's mind", including intention, is a description that can be applied to everything.

While from your POV you may seem independent in everything you do the reality is that we all move with each-others blessing

I don't agree with the "simple sharing" model of reality though. As a "conscious perspective", all possible experiences are available enfolded within me. Similarly for you. However, this is not a straightforward dream. Sometimes we might think of reality as a shared dream with other people in a room, each of whom have contributed to the final, consensus decor. However, I reckon it's more accurate to say that those who have chosen the same decor, end up in the same room.

Finally, it's even more accurate to say: Whatever decor you choose, you will end up experiencing a room with that decor, plus versions/aspects of others who would choose that decor, as a version of yourself who would choose that decor.

the metaphor of shooting me in the face does work for magick

The above means that I can shoot you in the face (politely, of course) and have you die, while you dodge the bullet and live. Subsequently: Different rooms, different decor.

Fundamentally, this is because you are not a person, and neither is anyone else. The "being-a-person" sensation is just part of the present moment world-experience. You are in fact a perspective, attached to a viewport amongst infinite viewports, selected by the "filter" of belief, expectation, knowledge and intention.

TL;DR: Blessing not required.

Q: [Deleted]

Yeah, I'm going to skip the gunplay for now. :-)
I've grown quite fond of you.

I say we don't need blessing because it's (implicitly) multidimensional enough in that everyone gets to have their experience. Not in the sense of actual spatially-extended universes though; only in the sense of filtered possible moments. But then, that's basically the ultimate blessing.

(The room is tesseract-shaped, and we are distributed clouds throughout it? Nah, too messy sounding.)

True connections with people occur when their filters correspond, as it were - they are literally "in the moment", together.

Q: [Deleted]

I agree with what you say.

The "filtering" I refer to is for what appears in the senses (image, sound, texture), via personal shaping and via accumulated patterns (the world), beneath or within this there is just the undivided one. So in that sense we are closer than objects can be, always.

At the fundamental level, everything is within us, and one step more and there's no "us" because even the perspective dissolves.

But if we are attending to the level of the senses, divided into time, then that connection is obscured except when the moment is shared, "when worlds collide".

Q: [Deleted]

Hmm. I don't have a conception of God as external, but the DNA idea could maybe be translated into the idea of a "format" that implies which events will be experienced - via the personal God of imagination...

Loosely, I think of myself as a boundless aware space. (Everyone is this, simultaneously.) Within that, is dissolved all possible moments and experiences already created. My ongoing 1st-person sensory experience is simply my attention shifting across this eternal structure, in accordance with my intention and beliefs. Foolishly, I confuse "myself" with the content of the experience, when in fact I am the background in which it arises.

Gives us:

  • Magick is changing the trajectory discontinuously in unlikely ways, by tuning into other moments via imagination. We are always doing this, but deliberate magick makes it more obvious because we are deliberately aware.
  • God is the whole, the open attention in contrast to our usual narrowed, time-focused attention. God is not a being.
  • When we say that God intervenes, we really just mean when outlier actions or events are selected which we didn't have a sensory experience of choosing prior to their appearing. The "feeling" that goes with this is the opening out of attention, to the background unity.

So all events are "archived" in the sense that they are all, permanently available for experiencing? Creation is already complete, you are just choosing which parts to check out!

Not sure how to join together the two ideas of God.

  • By saying 'a god' I am just talking about an entity that has a greater range of data intake and influence

Right - I see that as just ourselves, the outer reaches of our attentional focus. We are always everywhere, we are just concentrating on somewhere in particular.

  • Mostly I'm asking when this construct is animated; if in our life-time do you expect this will change your spirituality? Will you increase your own intelligence or try to keep a level of "purity"

I think this 'construct' is already animated. The construct is just the universe as it is. It's a case of doing or being this knowingly. 'Purity' would then be a choice to remain human-focused, ignorant of the larger information field (or whatever). I'm all for expansion - but as I said before, different people can do different things, and not necessarily interfere with the other.

...

I see, forget the sybmol, let it go. Is it worthwhile continuing with the desire, the FACT that it will happen?

...the FACT that it will happen?

This is exactly it. Ignore the evidence, know the fact. Everything else is theatre. All that matters is that you fully accept the fact that something is going to happen. All these methods are about sneakily inserting or adjusting facts-of-the-world. It all works this way, I think:

If you move your arm right now, you don't do it directly. You request/insert the experience into your timeline (you might say), the fact that "it is now true that my arm will move". The proximity in terms of space and time makes you think that you did it by more straightforward means.

In fact (heh), you simply don't have direct access to sensory experience at all; you adjust facts, and subsequent sensory experience arises spontaneously and consistently with those facts.

So it's about creating new facts-of-the-world by any means you like. Since acceptance of its truth is what matters, anything that implies it is a fact (e.g. getting excited, looking forward to it) can only help establish it. It's a bit like Erickson hypnosis in this way - thinking and doing things that assume the certainty of the wish fulfilled.

TL;DR: Creation of facts by acceptance and implication.

EDIT: Added more facts. ;-)

Off topic:
You made me think of this condition some people have called "Mirror Touch Synesthesia" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-touch_synesthesia], basically what people observe on a daily basis are physical and mental feelings that they themselves 'feel'. This one woman explained how her ankles started to hurt painfully as she watched a women walk down the street in ankle pain. She felt her physical pain quite literally. Also, regarding empathy - they also experience mental states of the people they observe. Thus far, people afflicted with this condition are unable to control it and usually lose their sense of self when in public and often resort to a hermit lifestyle as they cannot deal with multiple sensations/feelings. There was a good discussion on this on NPR's Invisibilia podcast, the episode was on Entanglement.
Kind of makes you wonder what is really going on, what is real?

[QUOTE]

Synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music, see shapes when smelling certain scents, or perceive tastes when looking at words. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person with the perception of synesthesia differing based on an individual's unique life experiences and the specific type of synesthesia that they have. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.

Mirror-touch synesthesia:
Mirror-touch synesthesia is a condition which causes individuals to experience the same sensation (such as touch) that another person feels. For example, if someone with this condition were to observe someone touching their cheek, they would feel the same sensation on their own cheek. Synesthesia, in general, is described as a condition in which a stimulus causes an individual to experience an additional sensation. Synesthesia is usually a developmental condition, however recent research has shown that mirror touch synesthesia can be acquired after sensory loss after amputation.

[END OF QUOTE]

That's really interesting, new on me!

One thought: that our personal boundaries are "imaginary", that at some point we create filters which give us a personal space. Without them, we are wide open to all information being leaked/broadcast. Perhaps this is what's going on. Normally, children learn they "aren't meant to" experience these things, and by implication don't, but these guys missed the memo.

I used to find being in open plan offices really difficult, even small ones. Just a constant sense of "exposure". Not vigilance or self-consciousness, just being too open. Over time, my awareness would contract further and tension would increase. My "little trick" to get around this was to feel-imagine a shell around me, a Faraday Cage for others' "presence". This imaginary "fact" was enough to make it better.

EDIT: I hear "sound effects" when I see movement, in real life or in gifs, etc. I only recently found out that this is a thing too.

POST: Is this more than coincidence and how can I test it

Imagining new facts into the world.

Your sensory experience is a 'mirage' floating within an aware space in which are dissolved the facts-of-the-world, all of which can be amended.

While detached from the present moment sensory experience, in a state of "absolute allowing" where we are happy for experience to shift without restriction, we imagine that something is true, and our subsequent sensory experience falls in line with the new fact.

Something like that, anyway.

POST: How can I use the occult to make me rich?

Q1: I've used the occult to make me rich, send me $500 and I'll tell you how you can do the same.

Q2: Pfft, don't listen t this guy, send me $499 and I'll tell you the truth.

Q3: Fuck that, send me $9.99 and I'll tell you how to BECOME A LIVING GOD.

Q4: Ignore them. If you think in hundreds, you won't go anywhere. $5.000 bill & we have a deal.

Adding more decimal places to $5 isn't going to get you rich any faster! You wanna use a comma, like this:

$5,000.00

Wealth is all about correct punctuation. Trust me; I know how to use a semi-colon.

POST: Origami as offerings.

Great idea. I'd like to see a whole new branch of the art called "Sacrificial Origami". Could be much fun had.

Love the name. Now how do I represent virgins with origami...

White paper, obviously. Might be tricky doing the fine detailing...

POST: How often do you use thought experiments in your day?

There's a book called Busting Loose from the Money Game (a later edition refers to it as the Business Game) which takes a similar approach.

It presents itself as a business book, but is really more of an 'occult/enlightenment' book in disguise. The main idea: When bad things happen, and you feel discomfort, treat them as "eggs" that are dissolved by using "The Process" to "reclaim your power": basically, welcoming them and sending gratitude/love. For instance, send gratitude for the bills you receive.

Eventually, you will have dissolved all the "cloud cover", and the "open sky" of conscious flow will be your experience from then on, in matters of money and more.

Someone has a summary of the main points here. [https://sundayupdate.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/key-points-from-busting-loose-from-the-money-game.pdf]

POST: How do you see entities?

There are many hallucinations that form within your vision, called phosphenes. When you close your eyes and see all sorts of splotches and colors, these are phosphenes: seeing lights without light actually entering the eye.
These are the clay from which you sculpt visualizations and, when you're asleep or in a hypnagogic state, dreams. It's hard to do at first, but after practice with your eyes closed, you'll be able to create phosphenes in accordance with imagination and/or memories. You'll almost swear that you saw outlines of a particular scene, even for just a moment.
After practicing with your eyes closed, you can try doing it with your eyes open, albeit in minimal lighting. Eventually you can use phosphenes to visualize anything in broad daylight.
Entities communicate with us and appear before us in the form of phosphenes, at least from my experience. When an entity makes itself known, you may notice discoloring, or just some sort of form that lies before you. You may not actually "see" it with your eyes, but rather you can sense its presence with the phosphenes, a kind of sight that I associate with the "Third Eye" vision.
If you're sensitive enough, you can probably interpret random flowings and distortions as spirits that are popping in and out of your field of view, though this is an ability that usually only belongs to shamans or channelers. Most people can see major entities they have called or are at least open to noticing. They are invisible to those who are not open to their existence.

Are these phosphenes (those "sparkles" that become "things") or are they random flickers of hypnagogic type imagery, do you think? Are they totally in the mind?

Q1: The little white sparkles are white blood cells moving around your eyes. Different story, but I haven't really tried to use those in visualization. Could be possible, but I don't think I want to mess around with my body's defense system.

Q2: Not OP, but I would describe my personal experiences as hypnogogic. I thank God there's a word for it, even if it's a word no one knows! (except here)
My visualisations are induced waking hypnogogia, as far as I can tell, and sometimes it's not induced. I just see... things.
Anyway, it explains my continued obsession with dream work.

Yeah, I was doubtful about this "phosphenes" lark. I think of the initial background stuff as random "mind noise", a sort of pure background creativity, which then coalesces into fragments and imagery - and worlds. And I think it's always present, waking or relaxing or sleeping. The stuff that dreams are made of...

But everyone seems to have a different way of describing it, so it's hard to pin down whether we're all having the same experience.

POST: ShowerThought on Visualization

[POST]

I wasn't really in the shower. Instead, I was in the car listening to NPR's "This American Life".
The show was about this blind guy who can ride a bike just like a seeing person. He basically uses echo location.
It got me to thinking about how, really, everything we see is constructed by the brain.
I take in information through my eyes and my brain constructs something to see. This blind guy, he takes in information through his ears and he seems to see just fine (really worth listening to the episode). He hikes and bikes and climbed trees just like if his eyes worked.
Anyway, I had this thought: what if I am blind and just don't know it?
I'm not really blind. I mean, I don't think so. But, for a moment I looked at the world around me and thought, wouldn't it be interesting to learn that, this whole time, my eyes didn't work?
I dunno, it gave me a different perspective on visualization.

[END OF POST]

Q: Your post does raise interesting questions about the nature of perception, but it's very important not to overstate the man's ability.
He is able to "see" yes. But he and the show's host make it out to be more akin to peripheral vision than traditional vision. None of the acuity, but still plenty functional and better than total darkness.
If this sort of thing gets you going, you'll also be interested in a device known as BrainPort
I'm also reminded of someone on this sub who claimed that while meditating deeply, they were suddenly able to see their surroundings without opening their eyes. I'm more skeptical of this claim, but I wouldn't rule it out completely, and it's definitely an interesting thought.

I think the seeing-through-eyelids thing might be related to the "Darkroom Vision" phenomenon. I've had it myself when very relaxed, with my attention (where I feel I'm "looking out from") rested near the middle of my head.

When you look at how your eyes work, then it becomes obvious that you are not really seeing with them. In fact, the attempt to "use your eyes" often leads to your vision narrowing and becoming less focused.

In fact, thinking in terms of senses is maybe a bad move generally. If you sit back, as it were, it seems far more like you are "receiving a world that appears in your mind". It might be 'inspired by information gleaned from your sensory apparatus' but that's just feeding you snippets of info, which trigger patterns in your mind which constitute the actual experience.

The "Darkroom Vision" phenomenon - check out some of the links - and some of the stuff discussed in Ian Watson's book You Are Dreaming highlights that our usual assumptions-of-convenience about perception are obviously wrong, and that we basically always "dream our experience", inspired or not by the senses.

POST: New to magickal practices; starting with meditation, trying to lucid dream, and sigils; just want to clarify something

It's all just making a decision, and letting your mind or the world go there by itself.

If you set a problem, and don't resist movement and change, it'll gradually turn into the solution by itself. What is a 'desire' if not a 'problem', a tension that is to be [re]solved? The decision you make is largely about making a commitment to not resist the flow towards your goal. A decision itself is therefore always an act of intent and will. Effectively:

"[This decision means] I will have a new car".

Although most people like to feel themselves "doing" something, so in effect offset the process by one level:

"[This decision means] drawing this picture means I will have a new car".

Magick as described is mostly just theatre in experience. We do it because the actual active core of magick - intention or will or allowing or whatever, the release to and commitment to the flow of the world - cannot be experienced as an action.

EDIT: That's not to say that this "theatre" isn't valuable or powerful. There are many reason why it can be beneficial, not least because ritual can give you a direct feeling of connection to "the source", consciousness, your true self, whatever - which helps commitment, resistance and faith somewhat.

POST: Your goals.

Basically, I don't like not being "in the know" when it comes to secrets, and the cosmos holds an awful lot of them. I want in.

Is the background whispering of the Cosmos making you paranoid? ;-)

Not paranoid: more like hungry, in a manner of speaking.

I was joking, but I know exactly what you mean!

Keep in mind though that the 'Cosmos' isn't a static thing filled with secrets and information, like a library or a science experiment; it's alive and responsive to you.

It tends to give you an answer when you have a question, to give you a landscape when you open a door - it makes up stories for you when you go looking for them. Problems turn into solutions, requests turn into responses, the seeker is given an ongoing adventure, to expect is to receive. It happens all by itself.

The 'secret of the Cosmos' isn't to be found in any of the specific experiences you'll have, of course. They're just dream-fun. The secret is how the Cosmos gives you those experiences at all!

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

"..."

Edit

Pub: 10 Oct 2025 23:37 UTC

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