TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 6)
POST: An Experiment I'm Doing
[POST]
I doubt I'm the first person to do this experiment, though at least in my explanation, doing it will serve a dual purpose. For the past 16 or so hours, I haven't looked in any mirror/reflective surface. I'm doing this so I forget what I look like so I can only experience my ideal appearance (in thought) without any "this is how things actually are" image conflicting with that. I also thought this would be helpful for getting rid of the idea of viewing my body as the "center" of my experience. Even after having realizations of there being no separation in experience, the old perspective of your body being who you are can still come back. I figure with not remembering what you look like as much will help loosen the idea of "being a body" because that idea relies heavily on having a clear mental image. As someone who usually looks in the mirror 20+ times a day, due to being rather preoccupied with appearance, I already feel the effectiveness of doing this for just the short time I've done it so far - there's almost no resistance to feeling as though my ideal is true, because the opposite has no fuel to run off of. I will keep doing this experiment, though I don't know for how long.
[END OF POST]
One possible approach to this - or maybe something to use in addition - is, rather than to try to forget the mirror image, instead recontextualise it.
For example, shift your attention to the idea of a "background space" within which a "sensory moment" of experience is unfolding. From that perspective, an image in the mirror becomes simply a part of this overall 3D-multi-sensory moment-image, and belongs to it rather than to you. In fact, what you are is that within which all of it appears. (Note that when I say "the idea of" I don't mean to think about it; I mean to seek out that background space directly in your actual experience, now.)
To further emphasise this, you should include the "direction you are looking out from" in your attention. That is, if you were to be stood looking at a mirror, your attention is in the direction of the mirror. Now, in addition, extend your attention into the opposite direction, to the space which you are apparently looking out from. You'll typically perceive this to be a sort of "void" that has no end, and then you'll realise that this void is in all directions - again leading to the experience of a void/space with an image floating in it, with you as that void/space and also the image. (This was Douglas Harding's old trick for noticing your actual relationship to experiential content, mirror images included. His books On Having No Head and particularly Head Off Stress are still worth checking out.)
A version of this approach is described in the Feeling Out Exercise, which seeks to recontextualise both your sensory experience and your thoughts about sensory experience, and dispel the notion of anything being "behind" or "outside" them.
Even when I looked at "myself" in the mirror without being in the midst of a realization type experience, I didn't feel very much ownership of what I saw, because it didn't seem like me.
Somewhat like the image in the mirror is part of the "visual wallpaper" of the room; the images of your body parts as you move through the day are part of the "visual wallpaper" of the scene. Just because those images aren't "you", though, doesn't mean we can't want to adjust them. After all, our main strand of experience unfolds "as if" we are that body in that world. If the wallpaper in our house is looking a bit rough, we don't just go "never mind, that wallpaper is not me" and sit in squalor!
(The irony being that, in a particular way, the wallpaper in your house and the mirror image are in fact you - just not in the way we would normally think of it, and not in a way that is burdensome.)
POST: Letting go
[POST]
Any good advice on this topic? I know it's one of the most basic concepts, but this seems to be a really big fuck up for me. I made a very important jump and everyday that I wake up and nothing has changed or when check the thing that's supposed to be changed, and it hasn't, I feel like it didn't work and I feel really hopeless.
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So, it's perhaps useful to see that "letting go" isn't something you actually do - although language tends to imply that. There's no technique. If you look for a method, you'll end up doing something else instead but calling it "letting go".
First, I'd think of it more like a not interfering after having intended an outcome. The idea being that when you have made a change, then it becomes "true now that this happens then" and any further tinkering amounts to counter-intending. That's why the final instruction of the Two Glasses exercise is as it is.
Second, there's "letting go" in the sense of non-attachment. Now, sometimes people say "detachment" but I feel that can get us muddled up with the idea of trying to be separate from what's happening somehow, which would actually be a sort of interfering or holding - the opposite of what you want.
"Non-attachment", then, would correspond to allowing the ongoing moment to unfold without obstruction no matter what its content - as above - but also means not trying to "make" things happen when intending. Intention has no inherent sensory component, after all - sensory experiences are always "results". Attempts to force or manipulate experience in order to "experience doing the intending" is basically an intention to create a particular sensation, and if that sensation is associated with your current state, you are effectively re-intending that instead of your target outcome.
Generally, it is probably useful to conceive of your current patterned state as the full definition of your world. That "world-pattern" consists of all the current active facts, and therefore fully determines the sequence of sensory moments that will follow. And so, if you successfully shift this via a "jump", then from that point onwards the new target fact has been incorporated and taken into account - even if you have experiences which aren't filled with joy or whatever afterwards, or passing doubtful thoughts or whatever (simply leave those alone).
For sure, you might experience synchronicities afterwards, just as a side effect of "patterning" your experience, but there is no reason why you must experience any indications of success prior to experiencing that actual outcome. Basically, this isn't a "signs form the universe" type deal. (In fact, in this view, there is no independent "universe" as we usually conceive of it.) "Letting go", then, becomes somewhat a matter of trust, acceptance, belief, faith and so on - but only in the sense that those tend to lead to you not interfering; they are not in and of themselves a cause of results.
You don't even know how much you've helped me George, thank you! This may sound like a stupid question, but now that I realize that I've been interfering with my intention big time, should I redo my jump minus tinkering?
Why not? Decide to have a clean slate, and begin your experiment again.
You can also play with carrying this over into everyday life: for example, lots of people move their bodies by straining and controlling their muscles, instead of, say, intending an outcome then allowing their body movements to arise spontaneously. After all, "body movement" is another experience like any other, the nature of it and its relationship to intention is identical, so that's a good way to practice. For example, sit down in a chair and then intend to be standing up - or to be standing over there by the door, whatever - but don't do anything about it, nor obstruct any movements that arise. By doing this you'll become aware of whether you are, for instance, habitually intending your current position and then having to strain to overcome it, or whether you are intending muscle tension (for "doing") as well as the outcome. (Which would be like intending "stay still" and "move freely" simultaneously, producing the experience of effort and strain.)
One might consider, then, that to intend these unhelpful ways is actually to regularly re-intend your current state, in preference to your target state. "Resistance" to change isn't necessarily about fighting back in obvious ways; it can be more like returning to an overall extended or postural pattern by unwittingly re-intending a part of it. (I don't mean to overstate this though: you are not undoing all your good intentions every time you struggle to get out of a chair!)
Don't get too hung up on that last bit though; there's nothing to be done about them, it's more about recognising the benefit of, and experimenting with, "ceasing to interfere" and allowing the moments between now and the outcome to unfold without obstructing.
Thanks, George! I really needed to read this. I've noticed that it can be hard to perfect the "detachment values" as I call them (I'm a programmer, I usually discuss this all like it's a program, makes it easier to understand). But I've compared it to hypnosis. If you are thinking to yourself "Okay, now I will be hypnotized", then it won't work. You have to just relax and allow to happen. It's not much different here. I wasn't able to get hypnotized for the first time until I was really tired and not really focusing on it. This is when it actually happened. Thanks for this thread, I really needed to read this!
Yeah, I sometimes think viewing things in programming terms - or other mechanistic analogies - can be a hurdle, perhaps, because it tends to imply that there are processes and mechanisms whereby one thing operates on another, which is not the case when we are talking about the nature experience (whether that is unobstructed experience or intentional shifting) rather than its content.
(Further thoughts:)
I do keep returning to a model whereby we have ourselves-as-world as a single patterned landscape which self-shifts, and is static in between such shifts. The only thing that "happens", then, is intention - and that is not a process nor does it have a mechanism. Your ongoing "unfolding moment" appears to be changing, happening, but really it is static from an overall perspective (we could say that "time passing" is a static pattern in our landscape).
Which is why you can't do anything in order to be non-attached [1], because any attempt to do so is actually an intention, a deformation or obstruction of the situation which was already there, an example of interference we are supposedly trying to avoid!
Actually, I suppose part of the problem with getting a handle on this is that people assume that in their daily lives they are always "doing" their movements and thoughts and so on, and this means they just don't have the concept of experience just happening "by itself". But if you pay attention to your everyday life, you'll find that this is very much what happens (and that's why doing silly little experiments with body movement can be quite helpful, to dispel incorrect assumptions).
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[1] Again, I used "non-attached" instead of "detached" there to emphasise that there is no attempt to somehow separate ourselves from experience involved. That's what "detached" seems to imply for some people, even though it is meant to indicate detachment in the sense of "being okay with and non-resistant to whatever arises", rather than putting distance between the (apparent, supposed) experiencer and their experience. Having said that, I do tend to use those terms somewhat interchangeably myself.
POST: Which method to use to achieve future goal?
Just for super clarity, I'd probably highlight issues with the use of "unconsciously" with the word "choosing", because of how loaded that term is, and how varied its uses.
It's easier, I think, to reserve "choices" for intentions, where "intending" means deliberate selection and intensification of a pattern to make it relatively more prominent in our experience ("the intention"). I'd perhaps strip it back to simply: we can intend outcomes or facts - shift ourselves - but sometimes the extended pattern implied by those intentions is not anticipated.
For example, you might react to an encounter with someone you like but are shy of by intending them to "go away"; and they do. You could say that you "unconsciously chose" to make it so you never have a relationship with that person, but I think that doesn't really capture what's actually going on. "The unconscious" is a problem because people tend to think of it as both a place and a process, somehow separate from ongoing experience, but which has a mind of its own and does things - whereas it's really just a way of saying "aspects of your current patterning which are not unpacked into this expanded sensory moment", like Bohm's ink droplet analogy.
You are the only mind, and the state of your world is a static landscape that cannot shift unless you shift it/yourself. You are the only thing that "happens". So, "unconscious" in the sense of not being explicitly aware of what we have done - not having a thought about that - but not in the sense of there being something "happening" behind the scenes.
But then, of course, our entire state right now is of that "unpacked" type. Our current patterning is, other than this current "sensory moment", in the background rather then unfolded into explicit knowing (=experience). Only the current "sensory moment" or an explicitly chosen intention, while being intended or recalled, are not of that type.
Perhaps it's a better term to use overall, but it only makes sense if you truly know what you're doing.
The problem is, when we begin with these terms we've already created a hurdle for understanding it properly. "Conscious-unconscious", given that people tend to conceive of these things as "happening" independently in some sense, is already built upon an error and rich with unhelpful associations, some of which are very difficult to point out, to the extent that it's better to put them aside.
Of course, in casual conversation, unlike here, then we start with whatever way in might be easiest, and then try to lead things around. But at some point, inevitably, you have to just assert the viewpoint - either by asserting that there is such a thing as "intention" and building out, or by leading them through an exercise like Feeling Out and so on - and build out from that, as a parallel picture of things.
In these conversations, naturally, we're all about digging into these things, and I'm not particularly aiming at generating snappy few-liner descriptions that can be given to people without establishing a background first. However, a side effect of this tends to be the generation of new metaphors which can be helpful in that area.
Why would negative feelings arise if that's not what I'm focusing on anymore?
They are aspects of your current state, which will always have some patterning from previous intentions and implications - which typically become less conspicuous over time. (Remember, here, that the state is static, so more accurately they don't "become" less conspicuous, it's just true now that the pattern is less dominant across the static set of moments.)
With passing thoughts and feelings, then, just let them be and they'll just be left behind. Wrestling with the content of every moment is a sure way to get into trouble. If a thought or feeling persists, then intend the desired feeling. And, again, let it be too. You are not meant to be managing your ongoing experience in some sort of constant maintenance mode.
so it does seem like this could improve drastically as I keep putting more focus into it.
I'd say it's not necessarily about "putting focus into" so much as "do not subsequently interfere" - depending on what is meant by that ("putting focus"). This is something to experiment with a bit, but since your intentional reactions to surroundings can be in terms of a depressed state, you can end up recreating it. After which, when you notice this has occurred, you can re-intend feeling good again of course - but:
I'd like to caution against "keeping focused on" in some sort of ongoing sense, like a "forcing" more than simple one-hit "decisions". This can become another version of holding yourself in a fixed position in opposition to the moments that you have defined in your state previously. Intention can best be considered as as "redirection" or "assertion", not as a process that needs maintenance, otherwise you are in fact holding a moment, rather than modifying your state while avoiding obstructing the unfolding of your sensory experience.
"Putting focus into" in the sense of "intending when I notice that I have counter-intended" is perfectly fine, of course.
It's fine to invoke any concept, but we just have to be more careful than we would when discussing other topics - because in this case the thing we are discussing is also about the nature of concepts (or descriptions). Every concept comes with baggage, and accumulates more over time. Worse - "God" being a classic one, but "consciousness" too - many concepts turn out to be sort of meaningless, because we tend not to take the time to define them. (For example, reading "consciousness explained" type articles is often fascinating, because usually - inevitably - the article turns out to be about this other thing, but with it being labeled "consciousness".)
As you pointed out earlier, though, this just means we need to engage in a dialogue to whittle down what exactly we mean by the terms we are using. And I do think that, if we introduce the "meta" idea of "experiencing" as being independent of, the context to, any content, then we've always got a platform we can retreat to in order to regain our footing.
Anyway -
There's probably an interesting point to be made about whether or not to treat any content as "important" (or as "signs"). It's best to treat them just as they are actually experienced: multi-sensory 3D imagery, within awareness, with a feeling of "meaning" with it. Any further interpretation is itself a further experience: the experience of "thinking about" that experience.
Meanwhile, if you don't regularly re-imply something, then the pattern tends to fade, simply because other intentions towards desired "fact-patterns" will tend to imply the reduced contribution of that something, simply as part of the world-experience being fairly consistent. As I say, though, there's nothing wrong with regularly intending "being happy" or whatever, but this is not the same as manipulating or maintaining the ongoing sensory moment. It is more like "asserting a fact" into the background of experience, such that subsequent sensory moments arise in alignment with that, later.
The total simplicity of this does, ironically, lead to lots of verbiage in an attempt to capture it. Ultimately, we are talking about an undivided non-thing - but since words and concepts require division (that is, the breaking up of things into "parts" and then relating them within a "conceptual space"), we immediately create an error even in the attempt to capture it (if we are talking in terms of divisions, we are already not talking about the undivided thing), and flip from zero complexity to endless complexity.
Trying to talk about "awareness" suffers from this. It's not a thing at all, and nor is it even the material that things are made from, although that's still a useful metaphor. The concept "awareness" is immediately inaccurate, because simply the fact of dealing with a concept means we aren't talking about awareness-as-it-is, which is "before" concepts.
And talking about "intention" suffers from the same issue. Intention is not about entertaining thoughts or feelings or whatever. Intention is the reshaping of oneself, by oneself. "Entertaining thoughts" is a result - an experience. So it cannot be a cause. Experiences are results of intention, so if we find ourselves talking about something to "do", we are already talking about something other than intention.
It's actually better to start with the concept of a "state" and have intention simply be a modification of the state, with sensory experiences being aspects of the current state. That way, you have a nice clear model:
You are "awareness". The only inherent property of "awareness" is being-aware. Awareness contains all possible patterns, eternally. Awareness can be in a "state" where some patterns are more prominent than others. Your ongoing sensory experience is the sensory aspect of that "state". "Intending" is the name given to increasing the relative prominence of a pattern ("the intention") in your state, such that ongoing sensory experience reflects that (because it just is an aspect of that patterned state). All experiences are results. The only cause is the state/intention.
Of course, this inherently means that neither "awareness" nor "intending" can be described, since descriptions are themselves experiential patterns, and are "made from" awareness. Just like you can't build a sandcastle which is the shape of "the beach" and "sand", even though the sandcastle is both "the beach" and "sand". (And if you make sandcastles and label them "the beach" and "sand", they are still not those things, although it is likely we will get confused and start treating them as such. Which loops back to where we came in, with our unpicking of terms in order to be certain we meant what we think we meant.)
It's not really passive, though, although I get that the language seems to suggest it.
Saying that the only inherent property is being-aware is just to say that the "shape" of it is always inherently an experience. It can then causelessly shape-shift itself into any experience (but don't conflate experience with the current "expanded sensory moment" only; something I keep accidentally implying I must admit).
Sometimes, as a brief mental image even though it slightly misleads, I refer to "awareness" as:
- "The non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware and which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences; right now it has 'taken on the shape of' apparently being-a-person-object-in-a-world-place".
Which is more suggestive of the complete idea. Implicit in this description is that all possible patterns are present eternally, are always available, and it's a matter of the "relative intensity of contribution" rather than their existence as such.
Following from that, then: "intending" is the reshaping of you-as-awareness such that a given pattern ("the intention") becomes more prominent in its contribution to ongoing experience; "volition" would be a little bit of experiential or imagination theatre whereby you browse patterns and select one to then adopt more fully.
As always, we should highlight that experience just is and there's nothing "behind" is - and that includes this description, which is itself just an experience (an experience of "thinking about experience"). So, the description doesn't get "behind" experience or "explain" experience, however it provides a framework for thinking about the essence of a structured experience independent of specific content - it is closer to the "basic experience" - and is useful as a platform for formulating intentions "as if" it were true (which of course intensifies the apparent truth of the description, because whatever patterns an intention is asserted in terms of, is also brought into prominence, as part of its extended pattern).
To avoid going astray, though, so that we don't start thinking that this is "how it really works" or gives us a method or mechanism, we keep re-iterating that the only fundamental truth is the fact of "awareness", and all other aspects of experience are relatively true (patterning, temporarily) only.
The shape-shifting metaphor makes passivity go away, but the adverb "causelessly" seems to bring it back.
The issue here is one of language, again. Language requires that there be a "doer", a "doing", a "done". You can't really describe "movement" without it sounding passive unless you invoke a "mover" - but in this case we are talking about self-shaping or self-movement, with no "mover" distinct from the "movement", because of course you are the entirety of the experience.
As an attempt to illustrate this: move your arm. Attend to the experience. Do "you" actually "move" your arm, or does the experience of "my arm moving' simply arise? In what sense do you "cause" your arm to move? If you have an experience of "doing" the movement, then what causes that experience? Is it not itself a causeless experience, in terms of there being something within your experience that makes the arm move? Is it not the case that the entirety of your ongoing experience is a "result" and not a "cause"? Something to play with, anyway.
So, there's nothing "behind" it, but maybe there is something inside it.
Again, this is perhaps best viewed as an issue with language and conceptual thinking - which always involves arranging object-ideas within a conceptual space, almost like as sort of imaginary "thinking room". There are in fact no hierarchies or locations in what we're talking about here, but there's actually no way to talk about this, since thinking requires division and relation, which is "after" this.
So, really, we must simply accept that we are using metaphors to point to aspects of our experience, and sometimes those metaphors will apparently even clash or contradict one another in the details because they are all "wrong" to an extent. The descriptions we are using aren't "explanations" for our experience, they are our best attempts to communicate insights that are observed. "How things are" is never captured by the description, never are them; the descriptions merely point to them.
The implicate/explicate orders are one useful image, certainly. But: the implicate order is not actually intended to be spatially located at all, since it is "before" even the formatting pattern of "spatiality". It is useful to refer to it as "enfolded within" our experience, because it gives a sense of the relationship, but the spatial metaphor is not really accurate (since only spatially-extended experiential content has spatial extent and this is not that).
Similarly, the "patterning" model tries to use the concept of patterns or ripples, all existing simultaneously and summing up to a state. A bit like Moire fringes. The idea here is to use the minimum required concepts to represent a structured experience, whilst avoiding invoking spatial or temporal metaphors as much as possible. The "sensory aspect" is the current "unfolded" part of that total image, in this description: sensory experience is spatial, but patterns themselves are not. But again, that description is not "true" because no description can be; it is simply an attempt to capture certain aspects of experience such that they can be discussed and, then, used as formulations for intentions.
The summary, then:
Experience is as it is and is primary; descriptions are pointers to that and are themselves experiences, so it is not possible to have a model which is experience. There is actually no "how things are" or "mechanism" or "structure" which is inherent. Models are meant to be "effective" (that is: useful) rather than "true", so arguing about the models can sometimes be a distraction, and that's why the sidebar encourages conducting experiments.
Aside - Models are never "true" even outside of this more "meta" analysis, although unfortunately they are often presented as such at the moment by many people who really should know better. Even in the standard description, the world is not actually, say, made from "atoms". That model was never intended to capture "what is really happening"; it is simply a useful - "effective" - description for many purposes. "The atomic world" (a certain conceptual framework) is made from "atoms", but the-world-as-it-is, experience, is not. See, for example, two handy articles: The mental universe [https://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf] and What's bad about this habit [https://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf].
When seeing this, it seems kind of pointless trying to meddle with whatever you're experiencing, because it's not seen so much as an impediment to get somewhere else.
Another way to say this is: If all things already exist, and they are brought into experience by intensifying them, then trying to tinker with the content of the moment is misguided, or at the very least it is limiting. There is no need to "transform" the current experience into the desired one; one simply needs to assert the desired pattern into relative prominence.
Furthermore, the very idea of trying to operate upon the "image" is (in this context) really in error, because the current experience is a result or sensory aspect, and is not the fact itself. That is, if the sensory aspect is the flames atop a stack of glowing coals, their shape reflecting the arrangement of the stones from which the flames arise and are a part, then trying to modify the flames, while it may adjust their position slightly, does not tackle the pattern of which the flames are merely a visual aspect.
You needn't be parroting positive things to yourself all day, but if it arises for a while, then go ahead. If negative stuff like "I look like crap" arises, then let that be there, just don't be interested in it. Does that sound accurate?
That sounds accurate.
The notion that one must always be "feeling good" or "thinking the right thoughts" - as passing aspects of experience - in order for the desired outcome to arise, is flawed. There are two aspects to that:
First, those feelings or thoughts are results. Like the flames above. Altering the flames does not alter the facts or the state, beyond perhaps a little intentional extended patterning. The flames are not casual. One moment does not cause the next moment: they are both images arising from one's state, which is a static definition which fully determines the sequence of moments (that is, between occasional intentions/shifts of course).
Second, it you intend a particular outcome, then at the moment of intending the state is shifted (because intention is the shifting of state) such that the new fact-pattern ("the intention") is incorporated. At that moment, it becomes "true now that this happens then", with the series of moments between now and then being fully defined by implication. But:
There is no reason why all those intermediate moments will be filled with "loveliness" and "joy" or "signs of success".
A silly example: If I intend to bump into someone I am attracted to, this may actually come about because I wake up one morning feeling depressed and hopeless, this lasts for a week, eventually I decide to take a walk and go for a coffee in that new coffee shop that's opened even thought it's not my sort of place and shake myself out of it, and they happen to be in the coffee shop.
You could say everything falls under that rule, since there is no division...
That's where the idea of this all being paradoxical comes in. It isn't really, though - the paradoxes lie in our attempt to construct a conceptual framework for it, not in "the thing itself". It's generally convenient to have "awareness" as indescribable, but notionally something like:
- "The non-material material whose only inherent property if being-aware but which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences - and which has presently 'taken on the shape of' apparently being a person-object in a world-place".
but is it fair to say that you wouldn't be entertaining those thoughts unless you already intended the outcome in which the thoughts are related
I'd suggest that it's better to side-step this because it implicitly suggests a deliberate causation that isn't necessarily so, plus a notion of an initial starting point which doesn't exist.
If "awareness" is eternal, and all possible patterns exist eternally, then there is no time (in fact: no time!) where there wasn't a patterned awareness. In that context, saying that our experience (of "the world" or of "thoughts", the same really) is only because we intended the outcome is misleading, potentially.
If we reserve "intention" to refer to our deliberate intensification of a pattern, we're on better ground, and our current state is a the sum of all intentions and their implications (their implications given that the intention is a modification of an existing state). These intentions may not be about outcome events as such, though. If you intend the experience of the image of an owl in front of you, then that is an intention (bringing into prominence the experience of "an owl image" and also the extended pattern of "owl") but it is not necessarily a selected outcome. You have shifted your state, but the results are not so clearly defined as having intended an event.
Intentions, then, can be really quite abstract, and not necessarily structured as events or objects or world-facts - that's why I use the concept of "patterns", since it does not assume a spatial or temporal aspect.
From here, we can loop back to the idea that because there is no division, because the "world-pattern" is continuous and undivided, then if there is any "world-fact" at all, then there is immediately, by implication, an entire world. That is, if the world-pattern was a metaphorical landscape, then as soon as there is anything other than uniformity, any slight hill or valley, then there is immediately a full topology. This is why we can't say that it is the sum of deliberate choices, but we can say that it is the (effective) sum of all intentions and implications, even if those intentions are not in the form of "choosing world-events or world-facts" or whatever.
If the above explanation has any weight, then intention is the cause of you letting go of another pattern, right?
So, if the world-experience is to be a self-consistent thing, then bringing one pattern into relative prominence will, simply from the property of a continuous pattern, mean that contradictory patterns will be relatively reduced. If you select "happiness" into prominence, then that is also a reduction in "depression".
You don't "detach" from anything, though. I think I know what you mean by "attaching" to a sensory experience, but for clarity it's better to say that you increase the prominence of a pattern, and that pattern implies a particular sensory experience, subsequently.
There's also a bit of exploration to be done in terms of what something like "depression" is. If the way we change our state is by, essentially, "leafing through" potential patterns by a sort of "associative browsing" of the eternal memory of all possible patterns, there's an interesting issue to ponder. That is, there's perhaps a difference between identifying and increasing or decreasing the pattern which is associated with the word or concept "depression" (following the word!), versus identifying the patterns associated with your actual experience, and increasing or decreasing that (following the direct feeling!). They may overlap, but it isn't necessarily the case. Because experience and intention are "direct' (that is, there is no intermediary), it's important to actually attend to the pattern itself, rather than just a proxy, or at least ensure the proxy means-that you are addressing the pattern itself.
Aside - I'd like to highlight here that none of this is an "explanation" in the sense of explaining "how things really work". The overall insight is that there is no "how things work", no mechanism or method. What it does instead, is propose a conceptual structure which is the minimum required for discussing a structured experience without specifying any particular instance of content. And then, it is also a structure which can be used to formulate intentions and conceive of their potential impact, while avoiding the associations usually implicit in more content-based descriptions (of which this is the "meta" perspective).
POST: The world does not seem like a private dream
But I can't deny that this "world" does not feel like a private, subjective dream.
The sense in which it is a private reality or view, though, is not in the sense of it being a personal view. That is, it is not you-as-person who "owns" the experience, it is you-as-awareness who has "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. This world which is patterned, typically, as an apparently "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". The thing we explore is the extent to which that apparent default corresponds to some solid independent thing, as we tend to assume.
This can get tricky, though, because we are always investigating in terms of a perspective (a world view, plus a desire or lack thereof). For example, if you were to intend something from the perspective of a person, then the ongoing experience of a personal viewpoint is implied within your intention, because you have intended in terms of it. This includes intentions which try to wrestle with it, to transform it (since those are also in terms of it; they re-imply the pattern) rather than intentions which detach from it.
We have to keep this in mind, then when we are investigating whether you can have experiences "as if" it were a shared world and/or "as if" it was a private view. The main possible outcome is that there is nothing actually "behind" your experience (or rather: behind "experiencing"). Experience is patterned that-which-experiences; patterned awareness, you might say. So the only fundamental truth is that there is a property of "awareness"; all content is relative. You can't experience that lack of such a thing directly, though; you can only have experiences so varied versus your initial assumptions that it becomes obvious, by deduction or direct intuition, that it must be the case.
And so, we might conclude that there is no persistent "how things are", and...
My attempt to understand why and how it works is probably making it harder for me to find success in this, so I'm going to try to stop caring about how and why it works.
...there is also no "how things work".
Here, the notion of "patterning" is an attempt to have description which doesn't end up assuming or implying some sort of "mechanism", because apparent "mechanisms" and "how things work" are themselves simply patterning of experience.
One implication of this is that if you focus on a particular idea of "how things work" - whether you are seeking evidence for it or seeking evidence against it or simply thinking in terms of it, implicitly - then you tend to get experiences patterned accordingly, to some extent. (Making investigating somewhat difficult.)
And since it is all "you" (as in you-as-awareness), you can't really deliberately make yourself intend an experience that you don't commit to, don't really think is possible, or don't actually really like the notion of. It's hard to fool yourself into something you don't want, when there is no "outside" of you that you can use to fool.
"People as patterns" is one such unattractive idea, for many. Although it doesn't actually end up as solipsism, people often anticipate that it will, and that's an unattractive idea: that there is only "me". (Even though it is not that "me" that we are referring to.) The idea of an unstable, non-"location" world is also pretty unattractive idea for many, also.
To return:
But I can't deny that this "world" does not feel like a private, subjective dream.
Then it isn't (currently, in your understanding of the concept).
It is not ever "really" that anyway, of course, I suggest, but you can have experiences "as if" it were that (corresponding to your notion or description of such a situation). Doing so reveals the more important observation that, fundamentally, "the world" and "you" are not "really" any-thing, other than the experiencing of those apparent things. This is always true, and your descriptions and concepts about the world and you are "parallel constructions in thought".
Although - it would be good to ponder what it would "feel like", in your view, if it were a private, subjective dream. Are you anticipating that a simple wish would bend the world accordingly and instantly? What would be the signs of a private, subjective dream, for you? Because it might be that you are really thinking about something else, here. That is, a private, subjective dream where there is no stability - basically just a dim and transitory thought - rather than a stable one, that is like a bright and persistent thought.
Have you ever had a lucid dream where characters seem independent, have their own will?
This is a catch 22.
Somewhat, it may seem.
However, it is possible to commit to something without regard to belief or disbelieve, liking or disliking. So it's about no longer indulging in thinking about possibilities or lack of possibilities, wheher something makes sense or not, is appropriate or not. Instead, it's about treating it - as we might say - as a "dumb patterning system".
In a dumb patterning system, holding a pattern in mind - we might saying "thinking it" or "intending it" or "imagining-that it is true" or "thinking the fact that something is true" or "shifting state", although there's really no way to describe it - intensifies its relative contribution while, simply because there is only "one thing", intensifying its extended logical pattern while diminishing anything contradictory to it. It doesn't matter whether you "believe" in it or your view of it in moral or potential terms, therefore, so long as you don't spend a lot of time holding a contradictory pattern in mind (during the intention, or subsequently). An example of this would be, not so much believing, but resisting the urge to indulge in "doubting", in the form of imagining-that something contradictory to the outcome, or fact, is true. (Which is a sort of faith, really, I suppose; or a willingness to allow. Mentioned again below.)
This does lead to something else important, though. That is, that the exact pattern that you are holding, its form or content, does make a difference. You might say to me that, for instance, you have been "intending to win the competition" - but the thing you are actually doing may in fact not really be that, not in the sense meant above. The structuring you are using needs to correspond to the structuring of your conception of experience, in some way, in terms of meaning.
Just simply summoning a picture of you on a winning podium for example, probably won't do much, probably bringing about some coincidences in the same way that the owl exercise brings about the extended pattern of "owls" in a sort of general overlay.
[private, subjective dream] But I do think reality would be a lot more responsive to my intentions, and nothing would be outside of my control.
I suggest that a private, subjective dream does not have any specific inherent properties, because any content could fit into that description (including that of apparently being in a physical shared world). There is no difference in nature between a flexible lucid dream and everyday life; what's different is the level of inertia, the depth of the patterning (metaphorically speaking). However, that "depth" or "inertia" is itself patterning of experience, and one can experiment with it.
But it does take some commitment, which isn't necessarily easy to come by when the world seems "so obviously" a stable and external place (except when it suddenly isn't for a moment). I guess that's why people talk about needing "faith", since there often isn't any sensory experience corresponding to an outcome - until there is. (It's also why this subreddit, for example, uses the perspective of this being an "investigation", where nobody else's ideas, including mine, should be taken on trust.)
[lucid dream characters] as soon as I became lucid... and they were no longer autonomous as they were when I wasn't lucid, so it ruined the fun.
Well, there is something of a lesson in there, perhaps. It is however possible to create (or should I say, summon the patterns into experience of) autonomous populated worlds: "persistent realms" standard link, and so on. Basically the same as this current experience.
As I mentioned before, though, it's important to note that the dream comparison/observation isn't saying that "you are the only real person and it's all under your control". Rather, it's that you aren't real either. (Where by "real" I mean independent and external to direct experience, separate and solid and "out there".)
The only thing that is "real" - which is to say, unchanging and therefore always true - is the fact of the property of being-aware, or "awareness". This is something you could conclude from noticing the content of everyday mundane experience, of course.
I can't tell if I ever actually successfully intended something.
You can sort of "know" you are intending, but unless the result of the intention overlaps with the sensory aspect of the current moment, then there's no "experience" of intending as such. There is no "doing" involved; it's a sort of "shapeshifting" or "becoming".
This is true even of things like deliberately moving your arm: you intend the fact that your arm is going to move, a short time later the experience of your arm moving is encountered in the senses. As an exercise: move your arm, and try to find yourself "doing" it, find the "cause". (If you then ascribe it to you having a thought of "lift my arm", then take a step back and try to find the cause of that thought. And so on.)
Aside - To reemphasise, here, "intending" means "to increase the contribution of a fact or pattern to ongoing experience" and "the intention" is "the fact or pattern whose contribution is to be increased". (And the pattern or fact already exists, eternally.) There really isn't any good way to describe it in words, to be honest. It just is. Language tends to divide things into a "thing", a "thing doing" and a "thing done". Here, though, they are all the same. This problem also arises when trying to describe the nature of "you" (you are that-which-experiences and the content of the experience and its context).
POST: Base Patterns… "Shared?" patterns
I see /u/Scew has helpfully replied already, but I'm not going to read his response before writing mine, and that way we'll get a couple of angles on the same topic, and maybe even something to enjoy disagreeing about! Here goes -
Scene Setting
I think I'll begin by just layout out the bare-bones description of our situation, so that we're all talking in the same terms, and then I'll focus on the points your raise in your post. So, we have something like:
- "Awareness" is the non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware. This fact is the only thing that is fundamentally - that is, unchangingly - true.
- Because awareness is "before" division and multiplicity and change, awareness is not an object; it is not a thing. Awareness itself has no edges, and it makes no sense to talk about "an awareness" or "the awareness" or "my awareness"; it is simply "awareness".
- Awareness can take on the shape the 1st-person experience of apparently being a particular thing, however it is always actually all of the experience.
- All possible facts, patterns and experiences already exist - and can be thought of as being "dissolved" into this awareness.
- What you actually are, is awareness.
- Your current experience corresponds to the distribution of intensities of these patterns, their relative contribution to your overall state.
To illustrate this to themselves simply, anyone can close their eyes right now and try to:
- a) find the "edges" of your current experience,
- b) find where "you" are in your current experience.
What you discover is that, although you are apparently "over here" and the screen with these words on is "over there", actually you discover that you are "everywhere". Upon closer inspection you recognise that the whole experience is "made from you", and that there are no edges to this experience/you; there is no "outside" to your experience.
It's worth emphasising here that the sense in which awareness "takes on the shape of" an experience is in the sense of a 1st person experience. This is not saying that "the world is made from awareness" in the same sense as one might say "the world is made from atoms" - as a spatially-extended place "out there" with "you" in it. Rather, awareness takes on the shape of "sensory moments" which are aspects of a state, a state which corresponds to a particular dissolved "definition" of the world - a "world-pattern".
Therefore, it is meaningless to talk about space and time outside of experiences. And, in fact, your thoughts about such things are themselves experiences formatted in terms of spatial and temporal patterns. If you are imagining an outside of awareness or experience, you are immediately "wrong" and that imagining is "inside" awareness/experience.
Patterns & Pals
For this next bit, I'm not exactly sure what you were asking, to be honest - hopefully the outline above will help tease out any hidden assumptions there might have been, and we can better pinpoint where there might be a misunderstanding. In the meantime, though -
it seems like there is a point where "base" patterns are defined and are not quite as easily controlled/altered/influenced via intent.
I think it can be helpful to outline some groupings, perhaps. The patterns that contribute to your current experience would include: base formatting (spatial extent, change), world formatting, general world facts, perceptual formatting, outcomes and event patterns, abstract patterns overlays, and so on - all giving one single resultant pattern or state.
Here, the base formatting could be viewed as being the most intense or deepest of the patterns - we're basically talking about the abstract patterns that mean there is such a thing as apparent "division" and hence "objects". To stop having an experience in terms of that is difficult - a void experience - because everything you intend as an action will tend to further imply those patterns! Which leads us to an important point:
Patterns become more dominant because either we intend them, or because our intention implies them. If you intend walking to the door, then that intention already implies the pattern of the room, the door, a body, plus spatial extent and temporal structure. In fact, one might say that every intention implies a whole world, because for an intention to have meaning at all, it must be part of an extended pattern, an entire context.
This is important to realise, because it flips our usual thinking around. It is not for us to examine the current world and then work out the best intention given that world - all we are doing, then, is re-asserting the current world. Rather, we select an outcome and implicit within that intention will be a world that has that outcome as part of its extended pattern.
It seems that it would make sense that the base pattern is a composite/aggregation of the many shapes/experiences/patterns from awareness.
From the above, we have that all possible patterns already exist, and any state is an aggregate of every pattern, just at different levels of contribution.
I don't think each pattern (me/you/others) would independently render/create all the content of experience for its entire private copy of the "universe".
First, "me/you/others" doesn't make sense in this context; there are no independent people at all. No person ever does anything. There is only "awareness" and it is the only power - which is, to reshape itself.
Secondly, that sentence implies that the world is "designed" - that facts are deliberately chosen. This is not the case. From a single intention, a whole apparent could be implied - that is, a sequence of experiential moments "as if" a world existed and you were a person in it. "Creation" is already done, remember; everything already exists. What is happening might be better termed as "recall" from a memory block, or associative thinking in the form of a strand of 3D-formatted multi-sensory thought. Meanwhile, there is no "mechanism" involved in this; nothing is "rendered". Intention is the only "mechanism" and is the only thing that ever truly happens. (See also: The Hall of Records for a metaphor of this type.)
Take the case of direct-entry lucid dreaming. You lie down comfortably, allow you body and mind and attention to release, wait patiently and passively until hypnagogic imagery begins: sparkles, shapes, image fragments, visual objects, eventually a scene appears, and then that scene pops into a 3D-immersive environment. From that single scene, that single 3D-immersive multi-sensory "frame" or "moment", an entire world is implied! For sure, it is based on the current relative distribution of abstract patterns active as your state, however the dream world, in terms of its "facts", was never deliberately chosen or designed. And yet no matter how far you seemingly wander, that world will have no gaps or edges.
So it is, I suggest, with this experience you are having right now - this experience taking place "as if" you were a person in a world reading words on a screen.
My question is centered around how these "infinite" shapes of experiences might contribute to the formatting (patterning) of one another.
So, I would suggest that they don't, as such, but just as you say, it can be tricky to keep our terms in line, and I think what you are getting at towards the end of your post corresponds to how I'm thinking of it. But to be super-clear, let's pick out a couple of things below.
Note: because of the nature of the topic, it's sometimes difficult to pick out what is being assumed, so sometimes we might say things that seem obvious, and sometimes it may seem we miss an obvious point. In other words: just pick away at whatever doesn't make sense, and obviously my own description might actually be inconsistent anyway!
World, Context, Division
Should I call this world level pattern a context, a stage?
I'd call it a state, because I feel that "context" or "stage" implies that something is happening inside of that pattern. I'd say that awareness is the context of all experience, which adopts a state corresponding to a particular relative distribution or intensity of all possible patterns, and that everything else is best considered as content. Between a intentional shifts, the state is completely static, and fully defines all the moments of experience. Even "time is passing" is a static pattern.
I take Awareness dividing (achieving multiplicity) to mean it is taking on ALL the possible shapes of experience.
Okay, but to be clear: when I talk of (apparent) multiplicity, I don't mean that it is splitting up into separate perspectives which are all "happening" at the same time. I mean it in the sense of you apparently being "over here" while the screen is "over there", even though upon inspection you realise that "you" are actually everywhere and all of it.
And: the only thing that is "happening" is your experience right now. "Time passing" is an aspect of the current experience, and does not exist outside of it. So there is nothing happening "at the same time" as this experience of the pattern being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.
The State of George Washington
There is a shape of an experience of a George Washington who founded the United States.
There is, implicitly, and there is every other type of experience too, just dissolved into the background, ready to be intended into relative prominence, such that it becomes the current state/experience.
This is also a 1st-person perspective experience unfolding in time in "a world".
But it is not "unfolding in time" right now. And the 1st-person perspective isn't "in" a world. It is a state that you could switch to, and if you switched to it, then that experience would become what is "happening" now. At the moment, though, it is just an eternal pattern sat in the background.
That shape of an experience is only one of ALL possible experiences but is still "just" Awareness.
Right. So let's summarise this model so far:
- There is "awareness"
- Dissolve within awareness are all possible patterns, and those are eternal.
- By selecting a particular combination of patterns, awareness becomes a "state".
- That "state" might be conceptualised as corresponding to a certain list of facts - a combination of a particular set of patterns, at different levels of contribution - which define a world and a perspective upon that world, and therefore defines a certain experience.
- One such state/experience might be being-a-world-in-1790-from-the-perspective-of-George-Washington.
- Another such state/experience might be being-a-world-in-2016-from-the-perspective-of-djdu982.
- If a state is not activated, then it is not "happening".
- The "happening" of an experience amounts to, you might say, "scanning one's attention" across the moments defined by that particular state, basically unfolding it moment-by-moment into the senses.
So there could be a "me" state that has a world aggregation pattern that involved a George Washington pattern contribution.
So, if what you mean there is that there exists a state (an aggregate pattern) which corresponds to the experience of being George Washington, then yes that would be correct. In order to (apparently) be George Washington, awareness would "take on the shape of" that state, instead of the current state. From this we see that you-as-awareness has no permanent "me"-ness about it, other than being-aware and being able to adopt any state/experience "as if" it were true.
"George Washington" doesn't contribute anything, though, because he is not a being and doesn't create anything. There there is no "shared" aspect to the different patterns as such - they don't contribute, they just are and can be - but all such patterns are available to adopt as a (logically self-consistent) experience.
Aside - There's a whole tangle we can get into about "other people" and "other perspectives. The convenient placeholder for that is to point out that the world is not a "shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time" and instead is more like a "shared toy box of potential patterns and experiences". The benefit to this isn't that it is fundamentally correct (because awareness is "before" all time and space notions anyway), but that it avoids making the usual errors of thinking - e.g. that things are happening at the same time in parallel, or one after the other in sequence, when both of those descriptions are actually meaningless rather than wrong.
The "Moments" Metaphor
My assumption I guess is that all of these states are active.
To give ourselves a simpler way to conceive of this, we could temporarily move away from the abstraction of "patterns" and take a subset of the idea. Let's consider it as all possible "moments" being present, now - a "moment" being a 3D multi-sensory 1st-person frame of experience - but at different levels of intensity.
So, right now, both the moment of "I am sat here looking at this screen" and the moment of "I am in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee" are present, however the former is turned up to full brightness and the latter is dim. Similarly, "I am George Washington chopping down a cherry tree" is also present, but dim.
Would not all possible pattern combinations have actually been experienced by awareness, meaning activated and happens?
The problem here, is that you are still referring to things based on some sort of external reference time, which doesn't exist. Awareness doesn't have a record of history beyond its current state, as the eternal Now, and all so-called memories of apparent recollections of "past" experiences are themselves actually "moments", now (experiences of "remembering the past").
Imagine a landscape with a particular set of contours. I am a gardener who has no memory capacity. I modify the landscape. Where is the old set of contours? Perhaps I call hills in one region of the landscape "the past" and other hills in another region "now" - but actually the entire landscape is Now, and if it changes without leaving a trace in the region I've labelled "the past", then there is no record of it. Note: Even this description is incorrect, because its construction is based on a notion of an 'outside' time perspective.
Eternity vs Forever
Same question different wording: Would not all possible pattern combinations have actually been experienced by awareness, meaning activated and happens?
We might be tempted to say that, given eternity, all possible experiences must have been experienced. However, this confuses "eternity" with "forever". The latter has an implied time components; eternity has no time component, it is outside of, or "before" time.
Maybe this is where "dissolved" comes into play?
Right. So, referring now to the top of this comment, we have a better way to conceive of things. Rather than talking of the experience of all possible combinations occurring sequentially or in parallel, in time, we instead take on the notion that all possible "moments" (and patterns) are always being experienced, Now. At this moment, which is actually the only moment, you are experience everything, just with a different relative distribution of intensities or "brightnesses". All "moments" are Now, as This Moment, and it is eternal. Every "moment" is the experience of everything.
[Dissolved] I do not fully get this meaning.
The use of the "dissolved" metaphor in general is meant to be an accessible way of conveying that you can be experiencing something, now even though it has not been "unpacked" or "unfolded" into sensory objects. In fact, if you pay attention to your direct experience more, you'll discover that there is this felt-knowing which is like the "global summary" sense of your state, and it is that which is your "knowing" of your current moment, more than the visual and auditory aspects of the experience.
Dissolving & Divisions
Are the "dissolved" patterns like the many many colors on a painter's palette? can be combined in any combination or intensity. All of these colors are available to be experienced in any final "state", but does not become "active", or a state, or experienced, until the colors end up on the canvas?
That's a good metaphor - except that we want to avoid there being an implication of division or process. By this, I mean we don't want to depict the colours being "over there" and then we select them and paint a result "over here".
You'll notice that with metaphors such as the "imagination room", they are at pains to try to remove the separation between the "components", the "scene" and the "experiencer". Hence all that stuff about being "an awareness which 'takes on the shape of' experiences"; the shape-shifter as metaphor removes all sense of separation. However, we always end up having to introduce something of that sort because we need to convey that there is a potential within the shape-shifter, even though it is not his present shape.
Another approach to this is David Bohm's idea of the implicate and explicate orders, as described in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order. He uses the physical example of a column of glycerine. From that Wikipedia entry:
Ink droplet analogy
Bohm also used the term unfoldment to characterise processes in which the explicate order becomes relevant (or "relevated"). Bohm likens unfoldment also to the decoding of a television signal to produce a sensible image on a screen. The signal, screen, and television electronics in this analogy represent the implicate order whilst the image produced represents the explicate order. He also uses an example in which an ink droplet can be introduced into a highly viscous substance (such as glycerine), and the substance rotated very slowly such that there is negligible diffusion of the substance. In this example, the droplet becomes a thread which, in turn, eventually becomes invisible. However, by rotating the substance in the reverse direction, the droplet can essentially reform. When it is invisible, according to Bohm, the order of the ink droplet as a pattern can be said to be implicate within the substance. In another analogy, Bohm asks us to consider a pattern produced by making small cuts in a folded piece of paper and then, literally, unfolding it. Widely separated elements of the pattern are, in actuality, produced by the same original cut in the folded piece of paper. Here the cuts in the folded paper represent the implicate order and the unfolded pattern represents the explicate order.
No analogy is perfect for this - it is inherently impossible to have a metaphor which is complete here, because as soon as we make a division we are "wrong", which basically means as soon as we think about it we are "wrong". So the best approach is to consider lots of different metaphors which are "wrong" is slightly different, non-overlapping ways, and we eventually build up a direct intuition for the situation - like that felt-sense I was talking about - which does not need to be unpacked into mental objects; it is "immediate".
So same question a 3rd way, has awareness painted all the possible paintings?
Hopefully the exploration above has covered that in a way that makes sense: all possible paintings are here, now; it is not meaningful to talk of paintings in history, because awareness is "before" time.
Can there only be one shape or state that awareness has active?
Yes, but that state is infinitely complex of course - and yet totally simple: because it has no inherent division. Which leads us to...
The Simplicity of Experience
Once again, it is important to emphasise that what we are discussing above is a description, a metaphor, a "parallel construction in thought". It is not "how things really are" or "how things really work", because there is no "how things really are" or "how things really work".
Actually, the only thing that is fundamentally true is being-aware. Everything else is relatively true only - that is, we can have experiences "as if" they are true, by intending the formatting of experience or intending outcomes which imply a particular formatting of experience.
So, what we are trying to do in the above is produce a description which is the more flexible coherent model which makes sense - which can be used to describe any experience as a sort of general narrative, and which can be used to formulate intentions without implying a restrictive world-view. This is only one side of our explorations into "the nature of experiencing"; the other, primary one, is to attend to experience as it actually is, and therefore directly realise our situation, rather than just think about it.
From a previous comment:
Experience-Of vs Thinking-About
Awareness doesn't have a location - it is that which takes on the shape of experiences. Everything you are experience right now is it, and it is what you are. The body is an object of experience, awareness is the subject of experience. You don't need a body to experience, however experience requires a context for its content. Awareness is that context, and all experiential content arises within (and as) that context.
You can think about this forever, but it's really something that is directly realise. For example as in the comment above, say, where you close your eyes and try to:
- a) find the "edges" of your current experience,
- b) find where "you" are in your current experience.
and:
- c) investigate what your current is experience is "made from".
Those observations are the facts. Everything else must adhere to those facts.
The only thing that is "real" (unchanging) is "awareness" - otherwise known as being-aware, since it has no inherent structure beyond that property. Everything else is temporary, which is to say relatively real/true only.
You still seem to be reaching for a "realness" which is "behind" experience, but there is no such thing. That is the meaning of phrases such as "what is seen is seen". It's trying to convey that what is seen is what is seen - and there's no more to it than that.
Narratives and the like are just a way to formulate descriptions of what has been observed so far, of what is currently observed as part of the present state, and to formulate intentions. Beyond that, though, there's nothing "insightful" about them at a fundamental level. Fundamentally, there's just being-aware and whatever is currently being-aware-of. If you want to experience something, the only way is to think about it, intend it, in the 1st person, "as if" it were happening, until it becomes intense and stable, so that the "as if" persists. You don't do this - rather you become it, until it is fixed as (relatively) true. This is, in fact, your current situation, in aftermath.
basically keep pretending until it happens
this involves persuading myself
but who am i persuading?
No, not pretending or persuading like that. You keep splitting things in two!
Pause this moment. Now, think of a red car. Really, this is better phrased is "think a red car into existence within your perception, albeit a low-intensity one" - or "think a red car" for short. So, now you have a red car. Did "you" think of a "red car"? Where, exactly, in your experience, is this "you" that did the thinking? It is nowhere/everywhere. It turns out that "you" do not think the red car, in the sense of being a separate thinker. Rather, the red car is within you, you as a subject or context (and not an object).
If you were to keep "thinking a red car" it would become more stable and persistent as an image. Now, instead of "thinking a red car", you do "thinking being inside a red car". That is, you are not just seeing a red car from some outside vantage point, rather you are experiencing a full multi-sensory 1st-person frame of being in a red car. Consider what it would be like to hold that "being inside a red car" thought until it became stable, persistent, intense, brighter than your apparent present surroundings!
That is what is meant by intention until it is fixed. No persuasion, no pretending in the sense of a separate subject and object. It is a becoming-asserting or "thinking the experience something-being-true". (Language forces upon us a subject/object division here; we are forced to get creative in order to indicate that's not what is meant.)
it would require me to do some things to acquire the experience of being in a red car
Do some things - how? You "shift" yourself, there is no "doing", which means one "part" operating on another "part". And even then, language makes it sound like some sort of action, when it is not really. There's a risk, here, that you are being distracted into wrestling with conceptual shadows, both modern and old, which are intended to point to things, rather than be things you spend time manipulating.
i do things like go to the car rental place and rent a red car
Not necessarily. Yes, if you just set it as a fact. But if you truly stayed with the image until it replaced the current one, you would actually be in that situation. Of course, this might take a while, but that would be up to you, whether you'd persist with the experiment or not.
right but i can't do something that doesn't exist
Everything exists already. If you can think it, it exists. There is no other sort of existence. If you can think about or of something (from a 3rd-person perspective, like imagining a car over there, as a normal thought), then you can think it (from a 1st-person perspective, as we were just discussing). There is nothing more to it.
Again: to think of something is to experience it - in the 3rd person. All that remains is to think of it in the 1st person, and then you are "living it" rather than "thinking about it". It is identical in nature: intensifying imagery within awareness. (This applies to more abstract facts and patterns too; it's not just restricted to having an expanded audio-visual-texture thought, although it gets harder to describe beyond that.)
ok well i just want to focus on meeting radha
As in, because it would be a cool experience? Fair enough! :-)
POST: Repetition vs Detachment
I think one of the problems we have with this topic, is a lack of clarity as to what "detachment" means. What are we detaching from? Is it our desire? Well what exactly is a "desire", and what does it meant to be attached to it? Similarly, if we repeat an intention until it takes hold, we are led to ask what is an "intention" precisely, and what does repetition do that helps it to persist? And why would that result in an outcome anyway?
Without having answers to these questions, we end up having all these concerns about maybe undoing our intention inadvertently, perhaps worrying that accidentally thinking about our desire is spoiling our "forgetting" - all basically a type of superstition due to the absence of a definite model to refer to. (I'd say that the LOA stuff particularly suffers from this.)
It does seem a little simple that repetition might be a replacement for intensity...
So, increasing the intensity of a pattern could happen all at once or in stages, that seems fair enough. But where "detachment" comes in, would be not re-intending the old pattern, or intending something which implies the old pattern, or intending something which logically conflicts with the new pattern - such that the relative intensity of the pattern never reaches a threshold beyond which it becomes the dominant "fact". For things which "matter" more to us, or are related to things we experience all the time, I think it can be harder to not do this - because we're often continually re-asserting our current position all the time, and implying the larger state connected with it.
For a mundane example, say you've developed a slightly offset habitual posture, and you compensate for that by constantly, lightly intending against it with an upright tension as you move around. By doing this, two things are happening: firstly, you are preventing that habitual posture releasing and following though, but secondly you are re-intending the entire pattern of experience that is associatively linked to that upright posture - in effect, fixing a large part of your world into that state.
In other words, because the world is a single continuous pattern, holding onto or continually re-asserting one aspect can mean you are preventing the shifting of the state as a whole. Your habitual handling of even your body sensations can have an effect. This is why doing a daily releasing exercise is a good idea, I think: it lets your accumulated patterning unfold, but also it gets you used to the idea of allowing things to happen spontaneously and only occasionally re-directing things via intention.
So your idea of initially experimenting with something that is an "easier" goal sounds like a good move. If it is less bound up with your core moment-to-moment experience, it is much easier to not interfere with the new state while just going about your daily life.
Additional thoughts:
Trying to really intensify a pattern could also trigger a problem in this area. If we have an idea that intensifying something requires "effort", we will tend to bring about the "feeling of doing" when we are intensifying it - but that "feeling of doing" actually has nothing to do with this process! However, that "doing" experiencewill perhaps trigger all sorts of stuff associated with your current state. The intention itself should feel like nothing. An intention has no sensory component of its own, after all - it only has the sensory aspect of the target pattern, since that's all an intention is.
If the target pattern has a component that corresponds to the expanded senses in the current moment, then you will experience that component growing. (For instance, the intention "it is true now that I am getting very relaxed" will obviously produce a sensory experience right now.) If it is about some future event or a more generalised fact, though, then you might experience nothing other than an abstract "knowing that your are intending" - or maybe a shift in the background felt-sense of experience (since of course, the entire world forever is here, now).
So, the intention "it is true now that I will will next week's competition" will perhaps not generate any sensation in the current moment - although it might bringing a shift in the sense of a lightness and anticipation and confidence that wasn't there before, or similar. It is a challenge to not tinker with something since by definition you have no evidence for it in advance of it happening. Maybe simple doubt is at the root of a lot of this, the doubt that surrendering to "spontaneous unfolding" after our intention can lead to our desired outcome?
POST: Thoughts becoming actions
It's how things work anyway, and it applies to everything. I'm going to have a bash at expanding on that (just as an excuse to riff on the topic):
Until now, you have been moving your body by trying to "grip the sensations" while intending the arm to move. This is like commanding yourself to stay still and move at the same time - i.e. asserting you current position at the same time as asserting a new position. Instead, while meditating, you imagined (asserted) just the movement while not asserting you current position to the same extent - therefore allowing experience to shift towards it. If you really ceased asserting your current position more completely, I suggest the movement would have been more immediate - simply bringing the movement to mind would have resulted in a shift towards that position.
The relationship between this and "jumping"?
Well, your body is as much the environment as anything else. There is no difference between the process of changing your body's position and change your world's position. In truth, you do not actually move your arm directly at all! What you do is you "assert the fact" of your arm being in the air, at which moment the facts-of-the-world are immediately updated (perhaps with a time component), after which your experiences arise constantly with that new fact. This is exactly the same thing that happens with updating any other fact.
The essence of this:
- THE FORMULA - Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
- Any "act", mental or physical, means what you have decided that it means, knowingly or unknowingly. This is the "intention", a subtle thought pattern that is a shadow of the desired end-state. (The "act" can be a thought, a physical movement, anything.)
- Your experience unfolds in accordance with the sum of these "intentions". (Meanwhile, the less you are continually re-intending your current state, the more time-efficient the shift to the target state will be.)
So maybe we can categorise things a bit:
- Usual Movements - If you grip your arm mentally (with the implicit intention that this means your arm will move), then the gripping is the act, but unfortunately it also opposes the movement to some extent (as well as generating tension).
- Efficient Movements - If you imagine your arm moving (with the implicit intention that this means that your arm will move), then the imagining is the act. You are going straight for the end-state here, and letting your experience shift freely, so there's no conflict.
- World Movements - If you pour a glass of water (with the implicit intention that this means a fact of the world will change), or imagine a scene vividly (with the implicit intention), either will result in a shift. A result is guaranteed, however its level of contribution to your experience depends on detachment and your intentions so far.
This is where the phrase "The Act is The Fact" comes from, suggesting that all acts are arbitrary and their meanings are flexible:
- RULE 1A - Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
Note also that the assignment of meaning accumulates (that's why you live in an apparently stable world) and can be broadened beyond deliberate acts. You can play with things like "the next time I see a red car, it means-that I will have a great day". And what is an act, other than the experience of an act?
So the more generalised version of this is:
- RULE 1B - Assigning a meaning to an experience gives it causal power.
As a sidenote, I have tried the glasses trick twice, the first time earlier this month as a test, with 'single' and 'girlfriend' as the subject. I chose this mainly because it would be the easiest thing I thought to see a change in, not because I was desperate for a girlfriend. When I did it, I did actually feel a shift, although I haven't seen any overtly massive changes since. The second test, last week, was 'low attention span' and 'complete focus', I didn't feel a shift at the time, but last Tuesday night, I felt a complete shift away from heavily valuing inherently useless acts and suddenly became overtly motivated to improve myself, and since then have felt extremely liberated and with a sense of peace and calm. Maybe I meant 'complete focus' in a different way that I intended?
The "complete focus" one is interesting.
Related perhaps: often we tend to assume that being "focused" towards a goal means "concentrating" - i.e. narrowing our attention. But actually, such a narrowing of your attention just deforms your experience and builds stress, opposing movement and preventing change. It's like the thing of trying to stand up while holding onto being-sat-down. It's better, I think, to consider "focus" as *intentional focus", meaning that you have an intention and you don't interfere with it. There's no effort involved in this. So I'd consider "feeling liberated with a sense of peace and calm" to be very much a symptom of being focused in the intentional sense: wide-open attention, clarity, effortlessness, clear direction.
As to the mirror technique, I'm not a fan particularly. I'd be more inclined to do the equivalent of your meditation-arm-movement - get into a relaxed state and summon imagery which means-that your desired state will be activated into your experience. It's fun to play with all approaches though, and see what works best for you.
So, I'll start off by saying there is no "creative intelligence" other than you, and nothing ever "happens" other than the movement of your attention.
For simplicity let's think of the world as a 3D landscape (a current overall pattern), and your unfolding experience is like your attention traversing that landscape, section by section.
Okay, so how is this landscape formed?
Pattern by pattern. Think of each intention as triggering a new pattern across the whole landscape, such that it is added to the current world, to form a resultant pattern which is novel (note: negative patterns can undo the contribution of positive ones). So we have something like this picture of Moire fringes. With that model in place, let's apply the following interpretation:
- Each pattern corresponds to a fact-of-the-world.
And let's have some facts, which were created implicitly through combinations of previous patterns leading to the current landscape: - (General:) "SP is a good person who finds happiness from friendship. All those friends live in SP's city."
- (General:) "SP is an ambitious person who wants success."
- (General:) "Events tend to unfold such that SP will be happier overall."
- (Event:) "SP's company is diversifying globally and will open an new branch in Alaska in June 2016."
- (Event:) "Another company suited to SP's skills will open in SP's city in October 2016 with great opportunities for experienced talent."
All of these can be "subconscious" in the sense that they have not been experienced as expanded into the senses yet, but they are all true at this moment. But let's say you have previously explicitly thought about your ambition, but not the friendship aspect.
So how does this play out?
If you were completely non-attached and allowed experience to simply flow, then in June 2016 would hear about the Alaskan branch, circumstances would be such that you either didn't go for the promotion or didn't get it, you'd hear about the new company in October 2016, get a job there and be very successful and love life with all your friends.
If instead you hear about the Alaskan branch in 2016 and try to push yourself towards that because you have already though about ambition, you will feel yourself intending in that direction against the momentum of the pattern, you may even encounter lots of "signs" about not doing it, nagging thoughts and feelings, events arising as hurdles, but you ignore it and push through. You spend the rest of your days in an icy landscape, the boss of the branch but all alone.
In no case is there an "intelligence" operating behind the scenes. It's simply a case of a patterned landscape being set up with biases in certain directions, and you later intending against it and experiencing the results of that. It is equally possible to have a "subconscious" which is setup against you and leads you to self-destruction (although most people have a default "survival pattern" I would say).
Just to preamble:
Fundamentally Wrong, Relatively Right
In my limited understanding of your model...
We have to be a little careful here, because (of course) every model we use is a metaphor, not the actual situation. To think about something, we necessarily have to cut it into parts, and then relate those parts in space, because our thinking is basically a "shadow-sensory experience". In this discussion we are talking about the thing that even thoughts are made of, it is "before" division and relation, before "space" and "time". In other words:
- As soon as we talk about this-thing and that-thing interacting, we are already wrong in a fundamental sense, but we can be right in a relative sense.
This is why we tend to end up with a few metaphors, each of which might seem to slightly conflict in terms of how it chops things up, but capture a different slice of meaning, if that makes sense. They are judged on their usefulness, rather than their correctness.
Okay, with that out of the way:
One Thing, Many Patterns, Varying Contributions
you immediately get the thing (and a cascade of its related patterns) but the "landing site" on the landscape may be closer or further away from the spotlight.
That's a really nice way to put it, yes. Inevitably, I'll expand a bit on it...
Another way to think about things is: in the daytime sky, all the stars are there, at their usual brightness, however one star (the sun) dominates them with its intensity.
Either this is the ultimate AnswerToTheLifeTheUniverseAndEverything or some top-secret viral mind-screwing meme you're developing and weaponizing for MI5
Why not both? ;-)
Okay, so this is much harder to describe than to actually play with. The main purpose of the "patterning" model is to break free of the idea of the world being "really like" your sensory experience, in such a way that it makes sense that you can use your imagination to make change, and assign meaning to acts, and have results "as if" there was a world out there that was being updated by them.
But really this is philosophy and metaphysics and you don't need to understand anything in order to use the conclusions, it just means you can answer questions about "why do this and not that?" and don't end up talking hand-waving new-age vagueness.
So, if I can control the dials of this cool Reality Mixing Console, what prevented me ("after" all this "eternity") from pumping up all the pleasurable patterns and turning down all the painful ones?
You've probably noticed already that pleasure is temporary, because experiential content is relative and changes. Pleasure and pain, I suggest, arise from how things are separated, the tension between one state and another when you resist the shifting of your world, not their content as such. The only way you can have eternal bliss is by dissolving all division, and therefore all content. But then, after a while, you probably have a thought and the whole thing kicks off again. (You can, however, feel contentment all the time, but that's a bit different.)
There's also that thing of: if you knew it was "all a dream", then you wouldn't mind so much what suffering happened in your adventures, because it would "all turn out alright in the end".
The classic "simple but not easy", to the extreme...
Well, it's "the thing", this, isn't it?
So, practically speaking, have you had the experience of being an "open aware space" yet? That's the first thing to go for. What we're after is to build the bridge between thinking-about and direct-knowing. After that, it becomes more obvious how things work.
Right now, you are literally experiencing all possible patterns. All that changes is their level of contribution to your experience. The combination is what's giving you the form of this present moment. As some of the patterns fade, their contribution becomes less, and the total pattern apparently shifts into a new form. Like the Moire fringes I linked to above. The fading of one pattern is the equivalent to a pattern moving across another in Moire fringes - see here.
A nice way to imagine this is as a stack of transparent projector slides, each with a different pattern. But rather than a light shining through, each slide has its own inherent glow; it is self-illuminating. You can turn up or down the intensity of the contribution of each pattern to the overall stack. Each slide corresponds to a particular formatting or "fact" and some of them can be quite abstract facts.
For instance, one "fact" might be the pattern called "time". That activation of that pattern will then structure the the total experience as if there was a sequence. Another "fact" might be pattern called "distance". Another, "colour", and so on. This means:
- The "gloop" and your "experience" are actually the same thing - and that "dark zone" is present too, at all times, since it is just our name for the more prominent contributing patterns.
In normal life, we have what you might call a "passing time" pattern. This is a static pattern, but it has the effect of producing the movement and change effect that the video above showed.
Since what we truly are is the stuff all this is made of - the infinite gloop is us - we can also intentionally shift the levels of contribution, and thereby pick out and adjust things we might call "the future" or "the past", and indeed adjust anything that might be called a "fact", either a general principle or a specific event. We can select a particular slide and modify the extent to which that is going to be a fact in our world, in effect swap one fact for another, and so on.
So, I'm not sure how clear that was, but you can see that fundamentally there is no particular structure. And even given the total pattern (distribution of contributions) you are experiencing right now, there are many ways we can slice that up conceptually when we are thinking about it. This is why we can say that the world-pattern is both static and eternal and moving and temporary, and so on.
I perhaps should have written 'intentional complete focus', but I knew what I meant.
That's all that matters. This isn't a message to some external "entity god"; we're not making requests of Father Christmas. The words are just a way to capture the essence of the idea you have in mind, create a form for it temporarily so that you can work with it. There is nothing external to you, "doing" anything. This is a "dumb" process: the moment you perform the act is the moment the update happens - it's just that you encounter what you've done later, like an architect exploring a building they have designed, seeing the finished product for the first time.
In case it's useful, when I first started the "spontaneous movement" thing, in my mind I thought of the initial step as deciding to "cease" or "stop generating", such that I was in what I thought of as my current "rest state". From there, since I was not intending any particular state, I could just create an imaginary cause and have it move my body.
So, I'm not honestly sure if I anything shifted, and by saying/thinking that, it more than likely hasn't, but even the act of typing this out shows evidence to me and makes me more inclined to believe. Which I know is a paradox, but oh well.
Yeah, well, you might as well get used to that! :-)
I actually migrated to this subbreddit through the Oneirosophy one, so I'm well aware of the nature of paradoxes, I just didn't want to get too cocky and say something to pretend like I have any idea :P
Haha, "migrated", I like it! Well, you know roughly where I'm coming from then (although I don't always quite agree with the content there). So don't hold back on "pretending like you have any idea". ;-)
Just a thought: remember, for this particular stuff you don't need to "visually-visualise"; you can just "feel-visualise". This is easy because it's actually what you use to direct your body anyway, even though you might be also gripping and manipulating in other ways. (If you weren't doing this, by which I mean the "feel", you would never be able to change state in terms of body position.) For instance, expanding "the feeling of you" into the room around you, including your body space, is usually pretty fulfilling (excuse pun), and good practice for everything else.
It's quite fun and exciting, isn't it?
Something else to do. For everyday living, it's nice to be open and spacious, but expanding out can imply some level of maintenance and an edge. So, imagine for a moment that there is already a background space which is infinite in all directions and passes through everything in all directions, and that this is the "openness" in which all experiences arise. Any one point is instantly the whole thing, in a similar way to how, if you put a drop of special purple dye into a pool of water, the water would immediately be purple. "Purple" would be everywhere. That's what this unbounded space is: the context, everywhere. To be part of this space, is to instantly become the whole of this space.
Now, just decide to be that background space.
When you say summoning imagery that means the same thing as the two glasses trick, what exactly do you mean? How do I imbue 'visualisations' with any of the same intent? Do I go 'I'm visualising the aftermath of what I wish to happen?' will it so, and then leave it?
Not exactly sure on the question, but... I'm saying that any act - mental or physical - means what you decide that it means, or takes on the power implied by its extended pattern. So when visualising an end state while implicitly deciding that doing so means-that it will happen (the default for most people): the act of visualisation = the content is true. Or pouring water which implicitly means-that the situation is being shifted from one state to another: the act of pouring = the situation is updated.
So visualising something and knowing it to be true is all that is needed, I think I get it.
Yeah, that's the essence of it - your world is literally solidified imagination; to visualise something and imagine-that it has certain properties is to literally create a "soft" object with those properties.
You can always simply assert a fact, which is basically to increase the intensity of the abstract pattern that is that fact. But because that is direct and there's not necessarily a sensory component to that, it's: a) impossible to describe, b) has no technique associated with it. So it's easier to assign properties to intermediate objects or events. (The visualising of an image is, of course, an assertion of its existence, but because we are focused on the content of the image we tend not to worry too much about how it is coming into being. Answer: it just is.)
POST: Jumped once. Haven't been able to jump since.
No matter how hard I try, I can't jump.
Isn't this perhaps the problem? Trying to make it happen?
Jumping involves detaching from your present surroundings and the situational patterns you are holding onto, to let them shift. If you are gripping them and trying to make them change, then you are preventing change. Decide your purpose. Lie down. Give up to gravity completely and absolutely. Let everything dissolve.
A little mind boggling to think about jumping to a dimension without a purpose therefore no true destination.
Yeah. Well, we call it "dimensional jumping" but it's more like you stay where you are and the world within your mind falls into alignment, maybe changing who else it apparently overlaps with. Even if you don't specifically think of wanting something, you do have background intentions that you are holding onto. (If you weren't holding on to them, they'd already have manifested.)
So if you don't have a destination, but let go, it's like the world will just resynchronise with all your current "held" intentions even if you're unaware of them. That's why I say you don't need to "try" and in fact "trying" will stop shifts happening. If you concentrate on something you want with effort, you are still "holding onto" that pattern in thought and not releasing it to sink down and get absorbed into your world.
So Korrin has the right idea:
- Optionally: If there's something specific you want, you can summon the feeling of that thing, deciding it is true, bringing it into mind. That pattern is held within you at that point; as are any other non-released patterns.
- Definitely: To have any changes occur, you have to completely and totally give up, detach from the experience around you and your feeling of the world. This releases patterns from being held in thought, to shifting into experience.
Hopefully that makes sense: it needs to be the opposite of trying. Letting go is what allows your world to shift. (Not just esoterically speaking; it's true of physical skills, solving intellectual problems, all that everyday stuff too. Letting go of an intention is what enables it to turn into an experience.)
we need to NOT have a purpose?
Not quite. And I'm going to emphasise "conscious purpose":
In order to get specific results that you have consciously decided upon, you must release them. Summon them fully, then release them. If you are content simply to have your world realign with your current "backlog" or your current "true will" then you can just do the releasing part. It's similar to magickal approaches like this, where you decide what's going to happen, and then don't interfere. If you lived every moment completely open and allowing, you wouldn't need to do the jumping process (letting go). However, that's pretty rare, so summoning the feeling-of-truth ("this <insert fact here> is true") and then releasing it is the next best thing.
What exactly do you mean by letting it go? You tell yourself something is true, then just stop thinking about it?
The general idea for a particular desire: You generate the feeling of something being a fact, really feel that it is true, and then release holding onto that feeling-thought, so that it takes effect, and go about your business as normal. It's like problem solving, where you think about the problem in detail intending to solve it, then leave it be, and later you find the problem-thought has evolved into the solution-thought. If you keep pondering the problem, you never let it turn into the solution. Doing a "jump" is basically an extreme version, where you are releasing your hold on your entire world, which increases the "available routes for manifestation", and lets the whole thing shift. Practically speaking, the more relaxed you are, the deeper you settle, the more like a wide-open space without obstructions you become, the better.
POST: Questions about Jumping & Jumpers (Serious & Respectful)
A1: When you jump, the other you enters the dimension you were in, because there was something the other you found better in the dimension you were in. My thoughts on escaping death are that your consciousness merges with one of yours from whatever dimension is most similar to the one you are in where you did escape, and if there isn't one similar enough, you will probably just die.
That truly answers my questions in that regard quite well. Thank you!
An alternative is to view it as shifting your attention.
If you imagine a grid containing all possible experiences, all possible moments you could have, the experience you're apparently having now is the one your attention is on. Meanwhile, your apparent life history is the trajectory, the sequence of moments, you follow across the grid. In daily life, just because your attention isn't on something doesn't mean it's not a part of you. As you focus on these words, you're probably unaware of your feet. But now you are aware of your feet. They didn't stop being part of you just because you were distracted.
So if you think of "all the possibilities" as being you, then you are always all the variations of yourself - they amount to your extended "body" - it's just that you are only focusing on one part. Until you realise what's happening and make a change, or the trajectory you're on hits an experience which doesn't have a next-moment. Imagine if the screen went blank right now and these words disappeared. You would suddenly be "thrown out" of the experience of reading my comment, back into your body and the room around you.
Having a near-miss experience is like that: You are in a car crash, there is no escape, there is therefore no naturally continuous "next moment" for you to experience after this - the screen goes blank, and you are thrown out of that experience, that part of you, and your attention has to shift to another part of you. So you experience a discontinuity, as you are shunted to the nearest available moment where the path continues.
That is a very concise and readily understandable explanation. My maze through Wikipedia from the initial Third Man reference ended on Jim B. Tucker and his, as well as his mentors/colleagues', work with children who remember "past lives". I have to say, his explanation, which expands on previous theories using quantum physics, as to how consciousness transfers from one body to another is the by far the best I read to date. That may not be saying much though, considering how little I've read on the topic.
Ah right, interesting. If you haven't already, you might want to sift through the two or three AskReddit creepiest things children have said threads. There are a few past-lives or similar curious things there.
Also, a few people remembering "beginning" at a later age. Which makes sense, perhaps: it is not necessarily true that you-that-is-awareness was always looking through a "human moment".
POST: What is jumping?
A1: Essentially, it is switching places with yourself in a different dimension.
Yea i mean thats pretty much as simple as it gets.
That's a way to imagine it, but I'm not sure that's what it is though, right?
Most people do agree that is what it is. It isn't fully understood yet, so we may find out in the future that this is incorrect but as of now, that's the most accepted theory (that I have found anyway).
The difference is probably just in wording, to be honest, in what we mean by "me".
I tend to think of it more as a shifting of attention, so that I am now looking "through" this experience rather than that experience - which assumes the "me" is that-which-has-experiences, and the rest of it (the body and the environment, which are the things that shift) is what-I-am-experiencing. This view fits better if you accept the idea that our bodies and thoughts happen spontaneously; we don't need to constantly be "looking through" them and managing them.
POST: [Serious] Share your stories with me?
Q: Deleted
Everyone's in the other dimension now...
In which dimension? Should we start keeping track of the dimensions? You could number them, name the changes and then try jumping again... This way you could have proof for yourself, since no one in the new dimension would know any differently, since in theory, they have always been in that dimension.
Tricky to keep track, I suppose, since not everyone who does this will see themselves as "jumping dimensions", so much as altering their personal universe or shifting their personal attention. The identification might fall apart with that, since it isn't actually dimension-dependent reliably.
POST: Is this place for real or are all you guys full of shit?
A1: "...actively trying to perceive things differently..." An interesting and insightful comment. One of the quirks of human perception is that we do not process perception to a fine level of detail; instead we pick up enough points of reference to identify a pattern, then mentally fill in the rest of the pattern. This is often called "selective perception" and accounts for a number of things, such as not being able to proofread your own writing (your brain keeps you seeing what you know is there, because you wrote it, rather than what is there), odd blind spots in perception (as in this image that people read as "Paris in the spring"), and wonderful actual mental editing of contradictory perceptions like the McGurk effect. So perhaps actively trying to perceive things differently is a lot more of an interesting empirical investigation than it would initially seem. Personally, I do believe the effect is real, that under conditions we can control our reality changes, however I do not at this point accept the idea of dimensional jumping for a number of reasons.
Yes on perception: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/2kvdfc/darkroom_vision_chef_hats_dreams/]
Had never heard (or lip read) of McGurk - excellent. What are your number of reasons?
You are just begging to be bored to tears asking me that. Perhaps it would be more useful for me to say the number one reason is that I think there are better explanations for the effect.
A1: You are just begging to be bored to tears asking me that. Perhaps it would be more useful for me to say the number one reason is that I think there are better explanations for the effect. A lot of the posts here I tend to not take as serious evidence when they are easily explained by other mechanisms. For example I think a lot of the stories about things seeming different, things being different than people remember and many other accounts with a single observer do not offer any prima facie evidence for the existence of all these multiple dimensions. But there are many that intrigue me that seem to have no other rational possible explanation, aside from just plain old being made up. However having said that, there is a long tradition in many of the mystical schools, even ones associated with the mainstream religions (Yogic traditions in Hinduism, Sufi in Islam, Hermetic/gnosticism in Christianity and others) that reality is not objective. The idea here is that everything exists as potential, and it is brought into a specific form (reality) by conciousness. There are not infinitely many dimensions in which you exist but rather infinitely many potential dimensions existing in you. Many of these traditions talk about reality being a dream and we are the dreamers, and sometimes when you are aware you are dreaming, you can change the dream. Dimensional jumping might be considered then an editing of reality through intent. Now that is a really intriguing question to me even though I personally love the idea of infinite realities, I think it is more likely that there is one reality with an infinite number of manifestations. I once spoke to someone I knew who had seen someone essentially teleport, one minute they were on the phone miles away to this person, and the next this person literally appeared in front of them. (Not sure if it was as described but that is not the point). When asked "how did you do that?" the alleged teleporter said "You see the reasons why it is impossible, I see the reasons why it is possible. That makes all the difference."
You are just begging to be bored to tears asking me that.
Not at all. This is my main area of investigation - not "jumping", but what you might call the "direct application of metaphor to create plausible routes for experiential change". Very interested in your ideas! My thoughts in response:
Single observers and dimensions
The single observer is always going to be a problem, because although that is what you would expect from the concept (if you jump alone, you'll be the only one to remember the "old ways"), it leaves nobody with evidence. Other stories (several in /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix for instance) where two or more people share the experience, are more persuasive. Assuming again, of course, that they are sincere.
There are not infinitely many dimensions in which you exist but rather infinitely many potential dimensions existing in you.
This is more the model I'm inclined to adopt (an edited-down version of this here). If we consider ourself an "awareness" within which all possible moments are dissolved or enfolded, then "jumping" or any other sort of intentional change is simply a case of unfolding a particular moment. Since there is no solid underlying, then absolutely anything is possible - however...
Your mind becomes "formatted with habits" over time, which funnels and limits subsequent experiences. As I've said elsewhere:
- Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences.
- Thinking is an experience, and so has the same paterning effect.
It is this second part which allows us to create "plausible routes" by which novel change might occur (and also to dissolve restrictive patterns).
[Teleport] You see the reasons why it is impossible, I see the reasons why it is possible. That makes all the difference."
There's a book by Jeffrey Mishlove called The PK Man, where he describes spending time with one Ted Owens.
Ted Owens claimed to be in touch with 'other entities' - but that aside, the main thing was that by interacting with them he could (this is documented in the book but we must make our own minds up of course!) affect the weather, various other circumstances. Mishlove seems to be a fairly balanced reporter on this (he delayed publication so as not to ruin his serious career at the time, he was pretty non-trusting of Owens but got to know him). Anyway, he finishes with some other thoughts, one of which was about the Zulus. They had said that they'd tried to teach Westerners about their ability to directly change the weather, make it rain and so on. The most important thing, they said when asked, is that you have to believe it is possible.
In short, you have to know that there is a plausible route by which the event can occur. Your intentions are always responded to, I think, but given that most of us have fairly restrictive worldviews, the routes and results are fairly limited. (For instance, we often dream of the result rather than obtain in in waking life. At least in the first wave of response.)
...
ok how about this follow the instructions but think of the biggest jump you possibly can like a dimension where your the president and than tell us if ts fake or not
He won't be here to tell us.
The version of him that is no longer President will be though. And he will be convinced.
Jump to a dimension where you are The God Of All Dimensions, and give the heads-up to everyone.
POST: Jumping and Parallel Worlds
I realize that it is our minds that jump around from one dimension to another. Not us, but our minds.
I think of it as our minds (which are just open spaces of awareness) sort of connecting to different viewports, such that the experience of that particular "person" arises within us. (A little bit like this [https://old.reddit.com/r/outside/comments/2kygk4/why_did_the_devs_implement_dreams/clqq0do/].)
Worlds are not spatially located, or in fact spatial at all. I like to think that the entire world(s) and all history are 'dissolved' into the background here, right now. Switching from one situation to another is simply a case of packing this moment away, and unfolding a moment somewhere else on The Grid Of Infinite Possibilities.
Have you read Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body? In it, he speaks of different "Locales". One of which, Locale III I think, has him finding himself in an alternate world, looking through the experience of a particular person. The world is like ours, except it runs more on very clever steam engine innovations, and there are other changes. Technology is fully realised, but different. He revisits this world/person multiple times at different point of his (the target's) life).
Ah, here's an excerpt:
Locale III... proved to be a physical-matter world almost identical to our own. The natural environment is the same. There are trees, houses, cities, people, artifacts, and all the appurtenances of a reasonably civilised society. There are homes, families, businesses, and people work for a living. There are roads on which vehicles travel. There are railroads and trains... However, more careful study showed that it can be neither the present nor the past of our physical-matter world
-- Out of Body Experiences: Journey to Other Worlds, Jim Dekorne
Do you mind - broadly, vaguely speaking - saying what sort of things you are going to try and fix? Have you taken account of the fact that your friends, etc, might also change during this process? Or are you going to go "full parallel", as it were?
Q: You are one of the first individuals I have seen relate this view here, and it is a viewpoint of the nature of reality (or at least a very similar view) that I have come upon independently as well (both through personal experience, logic, and reading). To answer OP, my view is that every time you imagine, you are in essence perceiving an alternate state of events (i.e. a reality). With mine and /u/TriumphantGeorge view of the nature of existence, the idea of a primary timeline is a little illogical. To extrapolate that further, the idea of a timeline is actually worth very little except in the storytelling sense. Every possible moment you experience connects because you perceive them to be related by cause and effect, the real relationship between any given moment at any point in the universe of probable moments is probability. I also dis-prefer to use the word "mind" and prefer to use "consciousness" when I refer to the experiencing entity (i.e. me) because, in essense, I believe that we are but a tendril of a larger collective.
I usually use the term "awareness" to indicate what we are, but it needs a bit of background explaining for context, so I do skip it. ("Consciousness" can be a confusing term, since there is consciousness, consciousness-of and self-consciousness, with different people arguing about different versions, claiming they have "explained" this or that.)
Yes, there is no fundamental timeline, there is only the trajectory that you have gone through (which may or may not be all in one world), in terms of sequence of moments - and the 'personal' memory associated with that. The "world timeline" is merely inferred by a lot of participants in a world (by which I mean, the collection of moments corresponding to viewports within a particular common area) having had a similar experience, and therefore similar personal memories.
The important thing is - all possible moments are available, and there is not necessarily a restriction that says they must be continuous (e.g. in principle, you could teleport or time-jump or world-jump, without an intermediary stage). The question then is - what is it that dictates which moment is next, and our overall trajectories? We do not seem to actively choose moment by moment, so what dictates the path and how can it be modified?
*Q: Indeed, that would be the million dollar question wouldn't it :)?
My current framework supposes that the moment to moment jumps are determined mostly by internalized beliefs, intent, and desire - with the magnitude of effect decreasing in that order. For example, if one did not believe that "long range" jumps were possible, then it would be unlikely for such a jump to happen from any given moment to moment, meaning that the probabilities that determine the likelihood that any given moment follows the present moment are determined primarily by the beliefs one has about how things would likely proceed. This extends beyond beliefs in natural laws, for example, as beliefs about one's personal predilections have probabilistic effects on outcomes. This works even on a practical level as one's beliefs about oneself and the nature of the situation affect one's responses to that situation (therefore affecting outcome). Intent and desires factor in less in determining the probability of a particular moment following another. A good example would be that most people would love to win the lottery, and some even focus their intent to shift to probable worlds in which this is the case. However, given the internalized beliefs that many hold that such an occurrence is unlikely (due to a "rational" measure of the probability that any single ticket would win), the internalized belief wins out on the effect of the probability of jumping to an event where one wins. Furthermore, beliefs such as that are hard to undo as they are buttressed by a myriad of internalized beliefs regarding how the world should "work."
The only reason, members of this sub are able to jump to seemingly incongrous moments is because we are able to shed enough internalized beliefs to allow it. The question I might propose is if there is even a level of agency to all of this, even when we "jump" ...*
Not agency as such. More that we are changed, and the world flows in line with our new understanding/expectations. Working on ourselves, we change the world, because they are the same.
In fact, "world = random raw creative noise + habitual channels". In other words, the structure of mind is a filter that shapes infinity into a stable world.
...the idea that jumping entails some concept of switching places ...
I think it comes from a misunderstanding of what "we" are. People are imagining themselves to be a "person" that physically goes somewhere, and that there are other "thems".
...growing consensus here that jumping operates akin to the show Sliders...
Sliders at the moment, Parallels tomorrow. The problem is that fiction tends to imply a 3rd-person view, and people tend to imagine their own events in the 3rd person. We would be better off reading something like Replay or Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and The Electric Ant for a model, and fostering the sense of 'through-your-own-eyes' that such fiction can bring.
POST: Personal experience, long time ago.
we are unchangeable awareness...
Very nicely put. And we are not in anything (e.g. a body), rather experiences arise within us. The way in which we jump dimensions is that we jump experiences.
And got me thinking...
In an OBE we can end up temporarily 'jumping' to someone other than us, in a different world (see Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body and his description of 'Locale III' - mentioned before but it's a nice illustration); a so-called 'Dimensional Jump' is really a jump to someone else who has a resemblance to our previously-inhabited perspective. Or one could say that really happens is that we disconnect from this dream and connect to (or create?) an alternative. The similarities between the two are based on expectation and habit and "holding on", perhaps?
So - in an OBE situation, we deliberately let go (almost) completely to the 'dream' we are having is free to reform completely. We don't completely jump there forever, though, because we keep a bit of "holding on" to the original world.
Aside: This holding-on is metaphorically represented in tradition by the notion of the 'silver cord', which keeps a connection between this body and displaced body. Really though, it is a visual representation of an idea, and lots of people don't actually experience this. "Cutting the cord means death", it is said. Which is true, in the sense of no longer being attached to this dream, and snapping-to whatever dream experience you've tuned into instead.
POST: I consciously jumped.. and it sucks.
Firstly, it's important to realise that so-called 'jumping' is not causal. As in, jumping doesn't make things happen, so if something is different it isn't your "fault".
You should read an old explanation I've used based on the Infinite Grid Of All Possible Moments. Highlights:
Imagine a vast grid extending in all directions... Imagine that each square in the grid is a particular experience, a particular static moment, as seen through the eyes of a particular person...
[...some details omitted...]
In this model: From a 1st person perspective 'what you are' is a consciousness that is looking through the "viewport" of a certain square on the grid. There is no solidity to the experience, it is a dream-like experience. Everyone is having the experience of looking through a certain "viewport" at a certain time. From a 3rd person perspective, everyone is essentially an "extended person", since they appear as characters the experiences of many moments.
In other words, when you make a 'jump' what you are doing is subjectively 'tuning into' a new grid position. There is no physical jump involved. You do not so much change solid reality as have a discontinuity in your experience. It is possible that only you will remember how things were previously, although at other times you may elect to bring another character through the change with you.
So your sister and baby have many aspects, they are "extended persons". Unfortunately, the path you are on involves experiencing those less pleasant aspects. But it is important to realise they are "experiences for you" and not for them.
I thought I did everything correctly and really concentrated on a BETTER version of my life, although my life was pretty good to begin with.
You have to be careful because it probably doesn't work quite as you think (literally). Now, how exactly did you approach this, both physically and mentally? (I have an idea of where things went astray, but I don't want to speak the magic word in case I influence what you're going to say.)
You can't return to the previous 'universe' because this isn't really about universes, it's about experiential paths, and discontinuities between moments (which is what 'jumping' is about) are limited somewhat by your beliefs. Your habitual inferences about people, worlds, bodies, universes are all without 'solid substrate'.
Theoretically, it is possible to have a discontinuity which appears like time-travel, for instance, but could you ever really persuade yourself that tonight you'll go to bed in 2015, and tomorrow you'll have up in 2013 - Live. Die. Repeat? It's much easier to have the world 'shift' more subtly.
EDIT: As an aside, I thoroughly recommend that everyone read and watch as much fictional virtual reality, time-travel, and other reality-is-not-what-you-think-it-is material as possible, to give you some "mind formatting" which is more open to unusual routes of change.
POST: [THEORY] According to quantum mechanics, we're jumping all the time without even trying.
[POST]
The Many Worlds Interpretation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation] of quantum mechanics posits that for every situation in which there are multiple probable outcomes, every outcome does happen simultaneously, each within their own parallel universe.
For instance, you wake up one morning and open your sock drawer to find you have two pairs of socks -- one white pair, and one black pair.
When you decide which socks you want to put on, you are only deciding which outcome you would like to experience. But there are simultaneous versions of you putting on all the other possible combinations.
You choose to put on white socks. An alternate you puts on black socks. Another alternate decides on no socks. Another alternate decides to mix it up with a white on the left foot and a black on the right food. Another alternate puts a white on the right food and a black on the left foot. Another decides its cold out and wears white socks over top of the black socks. Another decides to put black socks over top of the white socks.
NOW: Every single day every person is confronted with countless situations in which they can have an effect on the outcome. So our universe is splitting into parallel universes far more times than you can ever count.
Within the multiverse, there exists every possible version of you, some better, some worse.
So, if it is possible to jump to an alternate universe, into an alternate version of yourself, you might run into some problems.
Suppose you grew up poor, and you jump into a version of yourself who grew up rich, you would have a serious problem. Your family will have gone on vacations that you don't recall. They would have gotten you gifts that you don't remember. Sources of stress and tension in your lives would be based entirely on other things. In essence, they will not know you and you will not know them. From their perspective, you must be suffering from a stroke or something.
And what happened to the alternate you who's place you've taken over? Did they simply jump over to your dimension? Or do all of your alternate selves all shift position? If it's the latter, you cannot jump universes without seriously screwing over all of your alternate selves.
[END OF POST]
There is no universe in which I choose the white socks. ;-)
A1: Look at the post by /u/triumphantgeorge
There is no entity to switch with. You are just switching perception.
I don't know if I agree. Each alternate you in each parallel universe has their own first-person experience of their own world. Suppose Person A from Universe A does the mirror trick and finds themselves in Universe B. Universe B existed just as long as Universe A existed, and during most of that time, an alternate you known as Person B existed within Universe B. So what happened to Person B when Person A decided to jump over to Universe B? If you're only "switching perception" as you put it, does that mean that Person A's body is lying lifeless while they mentally inhabit Person B's body, meanwhile Person B is not even aware that they're being piloted by Person A? I don't believe that there was no Person B, because if you jumped to a universe where there was no Person B, you'd have no one to switch perspectives with.
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that there are lots of time tracks actively "running" in parallel, and that there are people inside the time tracks, having experiences or piloting bodies. This is not the case: you are not a person in that sense.
The trick to realising this is that from a higher level view: there is no time, and all moments from all perspectives are present simultaneously and in parallel. You are more like an "awareness" that "tunes into" a particular experience, moment, trajectory.
I understand that from an objective standpoint, time is a block and that our linear experience of it is only a trick of perspective. But I fail to see how this negates the existence of parallel versions of people in parallel universes.
It negates it in the sense that there are no physical universes that are "running" to worry about because there is no passage of time or timeline independent of an experiencer. And there aren't any people (in the sense we think of it usually), there are only perspectives and experiences.
The benefit here is that we don't need to worry about bodies not being occupied and falling down, or a body already being occupied when we try to jump. We don't even need to worry about multiple perspectives experiencing a single moment simultaneously, if we start going to that level.
In short, multiverses are another "you can experience it as-if" situation. It's an artificial restriction applied to a setup that has no fundamental restriction. (This isn't to say that it's not a useful concept, one that can't generate ideas for desires, but it isn't "real" in the sense of limitation.)
EDIT: To emphasise: there is no such thing as a spatially-extended universe outwith experience, and all moments of body-world-type experiences are "already" available.
In short, multiverses are another "you can experience it as-if" situation.
That is completely contrary to everything about multiverse theory. All other parallel universes ARE really occurring simultaneously. There is another you having their own subjective experience in another universe that you do not have direct access to. There are many other yous currently experiencing other things in other places, concurrently. The you that is here now is not the only one who is self aware and real.
They are not "occurring", all moments have already occurred in effect, in terms of a static pattern of potential experience. This matters. It also matters what is meant by a "you currently experiencing", because you have to be clear what is meant by a "you". We also have to be clear what is meant by a "universe" and where those reside.
Because fundamentally, it's all non-temporal and non-spatial. I use the phrase "as if" because the mechanics of shifting experience don't require you invoke an actual multiverse-based process, however you can use the model as a map for your intention.. It's a descriptive scheme.
EDIT: Trimmed the rest. Not currently relevant. Replaced with:
It is better to think of you as experiencing all possible moments right now, however only one particular moment is "unpacked" into the senses. You might think of yourself as an "Extended Person" in this picture. Remember, though, that since the overall picture is atemporal it doesn't matter "when" you do this.
Remember that in physics the Many Worlds Theory is really just an interpretative, unfalsifiable dodge to avoid having to deal with a non-determinsitic, probabilistic picture of the universe given to us by the mathematics of quantum mechanics - treating possible paths as "really happening somewhere, physically" rather than as structural patterns describing (say) possible experiences that maybe could be accessed.
POST: Does "jumping" mean swapping souls? My thoughts lately on the idea of jumping. Feedback appreciated.
Your soul is trading realities (and bodies) with another you
I'm going to say... no.
It's more a case of shifting your perspective to another experience. You are simultaneously everywhere (all possible moments), it's just that you are focussed on a particular moment or trajectory across moments. This works because although we think of ourselves as 'inside a body looking out', our actual experience is one of 'being a conscious space' and having thoughts, body sensations and an environment arising within that. A bit like connecting to a particular instance of a video game or shifting your attention across a grid of all moments.
In your terms, it would be like your one 'soul' is actually spread across all possible experiences - all experiences are 'dissolved' within it - but it is 'concentrated' on one particular possibility at a time, bringing it into the senses.
Everyday Example: Focus your attention on the sensations of one hand. Now focus on the other. When you shift your attention from one hand to another - attend to one and not the other - you don't have to "swap souls" with your hands in order to do this. You are always both hands (and indeed, your whole body), it's just that you are only bringing one hand into sensory experience at a time.
Thanks for your response, but how would this explain the story of the guy who jumped to mars? His other self was put into this reality, without any memories from this reality. Meanwhile, he shifted to the mars one reality. That story especially makes it seem like you are switching bodies/realities with another you, and when you do, you carry your memories over but you don't "take in" the memories from the body you've jumped into. Does that make sense? Shit, none of this makes sense.
The guy who "went to Mars" - remember there are no bodies. There are just experiences which contain body sensations. The memories you have are those you accumulate on the path you have taken, across the sequence of moments you have experienced - from your own perspective.
Because the body-feeling is so immersive, it can be better to imagine this as people sitting watching a big TV screen really close up. So if you jump discontinuously, it's the scene on the TV show that changes.
Everyone has a similar setup. People confuse 'what they are' with the history of the TV images - and most people have been experiencing the same body-perspective ("looking through the same eyes") consistently and continuously since birth, except for dreaming. So, people mistakenly come to believe they are a body rather than simply having a VR-like body experience.
Metaphor: You are watching TV via a cable service called Life+, where everything is shown from the 1st person perspective to help you feel like you are a character in the show. Suddenly you realise you can "vote" on what's going to happen next in the script, and not just your own character's actions. Pretty exciting. Then you realise you can actually change the channel completely, switch to any scenario. Incredible!
Interesting. What makes you so sure about this?
Research and experimentation. Do remember that the descriptions are all metaphors to provide a useful way of thinking about something that is actually inconceivable/infinite potential. A framework for conceptualising intentions, you might say.
You can relatively easily experience that you are an "aware space" in which a sensory world arises, rather than a body inside a world, via investigation. (Check out Rupert Spira's Presence Vol I & II for a good take on this, or Douglas Harding and his experiments.) The trick is to directly understand that your experience is constructed from concepts and that those are filters rather than building blocks. This leads you to a view of reality that is "dreamlike but with stable habits".
The next step is to play with making changes. At root, all approaches are about softening your hold on accumulated perceptual habits, so allowing your intentions to become experiences in a more efficient way than usual. 'Dimensional Jumping' is one such way, a model which is pretty flexible. Meanwhile, /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix is stuffed with stories of accidental outcomes, where people 'let go of stability' and their experience shifts from under them.
The overall scheme might be viewed as:
Infinity, divided into moments, filtered through beliefs, expectations, knowledge & intention -> experiences
And the 'method':
Soften or detach from the filters, adopt a worldview, such that you get to a "moment" that contains your intention (desired experience) by the most direct trajectory possible. (The ultimate being a straight jump to that moment.)
EDIT: Just reading another blog and encountered this post [http://buddhaspace.blogspot.com/2015/03/shunryu-suzuki-on-zazen.html], which has a similar flavour.
POST: When you jump dimensions, other versions of you are probably doing the same...
I just realized this, in a multiverse where every possibility is a dimension, if you were to attempt to traverse to another dimension, you wouldn't be the only you to do so. There could be a myriad of other "you"s who also are trying to get to a more positive dimension after figuring out how to dimension jump. Whenever you dimension jump, its not just you switching places with one other dimension, its possibly millions of your dimensional dopplegangars simultaneously taking the same leap and being haphazardly reshuffled.
There is only one "soul" or consciousness, simultaneously being all perspectives, it's just a matter of which one you are paying attention to / unfolding into sensory awareness. It's all part of the Infinite Grid Service Agreement.
POST: Wondering whether it is feasible to travel dimensions to another biological sex
I love the name! :-)
The basic answer: Nobody knows until they've done it. And I sincerely doubt whether anyone who did would talk about it. There's also the whole issue of experiential overlap. In principle you can dream anything though. Every moment is a re-start, every morning a resurrection from nowhere - just with added memories to add to the convincing effect of continuity.
Not quite related, but thinking about this brought something to mind:
Back in the time of New Thought advocate Neville Goddard, being non-white was a serious problem for getting anywhere in life. Although he didn't advocate some form of extreme jumping, he did teach that that application of the imagination could transform a person's situation:
“You can start now from scratch and choose the being you want to be. You aren’t going to change the pigment of your skin but you will find your accent or the pigment of skin or your so-called racial background will not be a hindrance, for if a man is ever hindered it can only be the state of consciousness in which he abides that hinders him. Man is freed or constrained by reason of the state of mind in which he persists.” – Neville Goddard
In other words, shift to an experience where being black, trans, maybe even ginger* just wasn't a problem. Some might say we have already jumped to a world where that is increasingly becoming the case, with rather unlikely speed. Who knows where this trajectory is heading - and that's without doing anything too much in terms of radical intervention.
*I am Scottish-linked so I am allowed to make the ginger joke.
POST: Im confused about the whole idea of DJ.
[POST]
So, I dont completely understand the concept of this. Could you DJ and magically have 100$?
Could you magically jump and have your crush be obsessed with you?
Could you even jump to somehow learn something? (You dont know how to play a guitar, you jump, now your good at playing guitar)
I understand that most or all of those intentions are a little selfish and immature. But I was just using them as examples.
[END OF POST]
These are all valid questions. I have yet to see that dimensional jumping can result in any kind of tangible difference such as having your anchor number change, let alone anything else.
Yes, they are. The problem is... it's not objective. But neither is it subjective. It can never be scientific, because there is no outside frame of reference. Everyone has to play the game for themselves.
Exactly. Perhaps there are infinite versions of your body that you can switch your consciousness to. Perhaps there is only one reality based on shared realities between you and others, in which yours can influence everything within small steps and vice versa. Perhaps neither of these options are true, yet they may be. The point is one is not able to proof without trying it.
I think that... it's all true, whichever way. It seems to be shared and consensus, but then some changes are only remembered by you, and you have power over others, but also they are independent, and so on.
Basically, it's just not conceivable. It's not a case of higher dimensionality, it's a case of infinite dimensions and therefore no dimensions. It feels like we travel a timeline, but there is no time aside from that experience. We can attach to any number of perspectives, which means there are no perspectives.
In the end we must simply say: Whatever we adopt that works, is something that works. Something is "true" if you commit to it and the corresponding experience follows. Tomorrow you might commit to a different outlook, and then that will be true instead.
POST: could i have jumped by accident?
Think of it as you moving from moment to moment. If time is to pass at all, you must shift to a next-moment. So "jumping" is not optional! Which means your trajectory will constantly adjust according to your beliefs, expectations, knowledge and intentions.
It's about doing so knowingly and to great effect due to acceptance of discontinuities.
...
Not necessarily true, as I understood jumping unintentional shifts two realities that are very close to similar to one. Otherwise if you jump intentional you are able to jump to more different realities.
"Plausible deniability" tends to apply. What answer does OP truly want to hear? Etc.
I'm just saying that the idea of conceptionist might not work if it would've been a small jump. As well as it could've been no jump at all and his dad just changed his mind, his phone updated automatically and changed settings, etc. These changes might have been occured over a long time span and now because he read about "DimensionalJumping" his conscious is trying desperate to find changes that took place but he was never aware of.
Oh, agreed. That's what I meant: no difference between jumping and non-; he's maybe just looking for stuff. After all, every moment involves a jump to the next moment, doesn't mean the whole world has to shift for every small development.
POST: [Unknown Post Deleted by User]
*A1: there is no other you.
Lets do a thought experiment. Basic theory is that for every possible choice, there is a "dimension" that reflects the outcome of that choice. Now how do we know that this is the more likely scenario rather than a paradigm in which choices not taken do not exist. Well there are plenty of tales in which others here have been able to jump to the past. This is only possible in a paradigm where time is a consequence of experience ... i.e. it only exists as a result of requiring it as a measure of experiences experienced.
Still that requires some suspension of disbelief from the colloquial view of reality - so just except that for the moment. In this paradigm, it is essentially not-preferable for non-choices to exist, since that would require all choices to be pre-ordained. In which case, Dimensional Jumping would be impossible since the probable reality in which you inhabit is the only one. Now assume that all possible choices exist, is it reasonable to assume that at every possible moment another soul or entity or version of you is created?
Assuming that every choice, no matter how minute creates a new probable reality, it is rather silly to imagine these realities as separate universes, since their quantifiability only extends to a sliver of a moment. At every possible moment, you are making decisions which generate numerous probable moments - at that rate of probable universe generation is it still reasonable to consider them separate universes if the extent of its uniqueness extends to mere microseconds, since at every second it is splitting into an infinite array of probable outcome "universes."
Because of this, some of us propose that the paradigm is essentially this: all possible outcomes exist all at once as points in a field. The experience of time is generated by travelling across this field in a probabilistic manner. Existence is the experience of moving through the probability field. Thus, when you jump, you are essentially just jumping to a less probable moment as opposed to more probable moments. There isn't another you to switch with, you are essentially just switching your perspective to a set of probable moments from which it less probable that you jump from your most recently experienced probable moments.*
Excellent summary.
William Blake describes the "Sculptures of Los's Halls", eternal pre-made states describing human drama in its entirety - dormant possibilities assuming reality when we become them:
All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of
Los's Halls, & every Age renews its powers from these Works,
With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or
Wayward Love, & every sorrow & distress is carved here,
Every Affinity of Parents, Marriages & Friendships are here
In all their various combinations wrought with wondrous Art,
All that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years.
So we might refer to universes in the sense of "fully-defined moments of experience", perhaps, but not in the sense of spatially-extended physical environments. Similarly, no multiple souls, because there is only one mind which takes on the shape of an experience - and that is you.
We shift our attentional focus across the Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments, in order to seem to be "here" or "there", but we are already everywhere really.
POST: Question about DJ-- How much can change?
Undirected 'jumping' is basically a leap into unharnessed change, detaching and allowing things to shift into alignment with your current state, and you'll get pretty much whatever you're feeling at the time, although it'll always be quite continuous. "No disintegrations!" So be more precise about what changes you want.
Maybe check out the the Neville Goddard link I posted the other day for a different take on how to specify things.
POST: A hypothetical question
Let's also say that I like her very much and want her to be nearby without her having to physically move.
So, you just want to wake up tomorrow to discover she's now living in the same city, without experiencing a transition? The fact you are asking the question means you don't think such disruptive 'discontinuities' are possible or really desirable, I'd say.
Do I hold up a picture of my friend and let the metaphysics do the rest?
That is a brilliant phrase and I'm going to steal it. Hope you don't mind. :-) Meanwhile, why not read the Neville Goddard books and see how you get along with those.
Q: So, you just want to wake up tomorrow to discover she's now living in the same city, without experiencing a transition? The fact you are asking the question means you don't think such disruptive 'discontinuities' are possible or really desirable, I'd say.
What do you mean by that? I expect a transition of some sort to happen when I make the "jump", so I know that I switched dimensions or whatever. And what do you mean by "disruptive discontinuities"?
If you woke up tomorrow, to discover your friend lived in your city. And had always lived there. And that you've been supposedly meeting up every week for drinks for the past months. But you don't remember any of that. And your eyes are now a different colour. Would that be good?
Or would you rather your friend called you this weekend and said: "Guess what, I'm moving to <name of your city>!!"
I like the first option alot actually! Only question I have is about the method. Do I just visualize that when I'm in front of the mirror? Do I state my intentions vocally? Or will everything just work itself out?
Just know it. And open to it. And report back. So, not really a hypothetical question then. ;-)
Yea, I guess not hypothetical. :P Thanks for all the help, really appreciate it.
No worries! :-)
But, be careful with things yeah. You're basically reformatting your mind to change what experiences you "allow through the filter". Always take a pause to think about how you will really feel if things happen, with this or any other "esoteric" approaches. Unknowingly, you've spent your whole life gradually accumulating a "reality" and being comfortable with each step along the way, and this stuff just suddenly kicks things out of kilter.
POST: is this really real?
It's not exactly big among the reddit community. It's a subreddit with only 1500 subscribers. As for the mirror ritual seeming childish, I agree 100%. I just read this out of curiosity. I like to think about parallel universes, and so far everything in this subreddit sounds like its written by someone with a very tenuous gasp on the subject.
Yeah, I think it would be a mistake to think of this as parallel universes in some pseudo-many-worlds way. It seems like you have shifted to a different "realm" though.
Anyone who has done any experimentation with perception, magickal ritual, philosophical idealism and the like can see it's more about creating change in the patterns of your mind - with corresponding effects in subsequent daily experience. It is a shift in the subjective content a person encounters, which can be quite dramatic. It certainly isn't scientific.
There actually isn't a "way that it works" other than the simple doing of it, with intention. This is why it doesn't make much sense to hold it to a scientific model. Science is "inside" personal experience. It's like coming up with a science of hypnosis, say. Good luck with that.
The mirror approach must be one of the least controllable ways to force a loosening of the mind from its habits though - not recommended. It's like "three kings" while exposing your formatting completely to whatever your current mood is.
The clue is, I think, to understand that time & space are an illusion, so when you jump somewhere, it's not like you jumping INTO the world that was already there, but you sort of CREATE this world around you. Past doesn't really exist, does it, so the only changes you observe (even if they SEEM to be past changes) are only happening right now, and require no time at all.
I think we can let ourselves have it all ways. Our experience behaves "as if" there is a persistent past and future, and a persistent world beyond our perceptual, sensory space. So long as we recognise this "universe beyond our peripheral vision" exists as a set of revisable facts rather than a real spatially-extended world, then we can keep our heads together while also living a flexible existence.
We might call this creation-by-implication. Wherever we look, a just-in-time spontaneous experience arises in our sensory space that is consistent with the facts we have accepted. We can never see "behind" this. It's almost claustrophobic in that way; suffocating in dream-stuff!
But all that matters anyway is that we can change the facts - by detaching and asserting-allowing new ones - and that this changes the sensory experience. And having some sort of stable worldview (e.g. that there is a past and future, but we can edit it, or that there are facts-of-the-world, but we can shift to a new set) gives us something to work with.
POST: [post deleted by user]
Alternative metaphor: Moments as memories.
In this view, all possible experiences are "pre-made" as if they have already happened. So what we are doing is navigating a Memory Block, and our ongoing is experience is one of recall.
How do you remember something? You usually get hold of a part of the memory, and the rest of it auto-completes into awareness. However, trying to remember doesn't work - you have to "allow" it. And attempting to remember two things at once, or hold onto one memory while requesting another, rarely succeeds either, especially if they are opposites (remembering both red and blue, or good and bad, simultaneously).
The sense of smell is particularly good for triggering memories, as is the emotion or global feel of a situation (which are sensory experiences just like any other, no different to vision or sound, just harder to describe in language). Which suggests that identifying the "feel of something being true" and bringing it to mind is a powerful way to trigger a memory into experience.
When you "jump" what you are doing is letting go of this memory, and recalling a more desirable one. The more of the partial memory you bring into awareness during the process, the more constrained the result will be as it "auto-completes" via association.
What makes the entire set of "possible" experiences?
They are not made, they are effectively already given.
It's easiest just to accept this, because it appears a little chicken and egg, but the reason is one of patterning. If moving to a moment is an act of remembering, and remembering is the activation of associated overlapping patterns, then anything you can conceive of exists but it's just not currently in the senses (although the moment you conceive of it, it is).
Is everything possible?
Potentially, yes. Anything you can conceive of, by definition. It's just a case of entering it.
Practically, your own formatting restricts this. To discontinuously "jump" to another moment, you have to completely let go of this one. If you even maintain an emotional attachment, that maintains the pattern because it is a part of the memory like anything else.
For instance, can you imagine lying down on your bed, entering a lucid dream, creating-by-implication a persistent realm, and just never waking up? Taking on the view that you don't "sleep and then enter while being asleep", rather you detach from one experience and attach to another?
So, it is still possible to jump without completely letting go right?
Right, just as you say - but the patterns you remain attached to can't shift. In approaches like the mirror technique, we are loosening our grip just a little with an intention for change, and if we are in a good mood then the slight realignment bring about a few beneficial changes - "auto-completed" from the good emotion.
To more completely let go means to let go of the world. Even when we go to sleep and dream we don't do that (mainly because we implicitly intend to return to the world next morning, unchanged). The "decision" you've made on what's going to happen is probably the most important factor, next to letting go or "allowing change".
Woah. But then what are we doing right now?
You're probably not doing much of anything. You are "attentionally gripping" the patterns of your experience, and everything's staying pretty much as it always has been, keeping us on a "trajectory" of similar moments.
We can now successfully manipulate all the 4 dimensions...
Better to view it from your own perspective. All that every changes is that you switch to a different experience, like changing path a little to a slightly different dream. The world isn't to be seen as a solid place that gets literally manipulated.
Just had a random thought, if we experience our own death... and move to that experience...then what?
Do you mean, what happens if you die? One way to look at it:
Well, in this view you never really die. Say you have a massive car crash, which means there is no obvious next-moment to experience. Perhaps there's a 'blip' and it kinda somehow didn't happen after all, and your life continues (several /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix stories like that). Perhaps you experience leaving your body and floating about and going to another place. Perhaps you experience just suddenly waking up in bed, confused. Perhaps you lose all memories and experience being born again. Your background idea of what's "meant" to happen might well influence this.
Experience of some sort will continue, because you are not a body in the world - you are "consciousness" having a being-a-body-in-a-world dream.
But that's what you might call kinda Extreme Jumping!
...
RrWell, coming up with useful ways of looking at things (what I call "active metaphors") is my thing at the moment.
My own experiences are nothing too dramatic and not really "jumping" as described here, just very very unlikely, and appropriate. :-) One of the reasons for participating is to encourage a move away from the blind, uncontrolled changes that that approach can bring.
This actually isn't something to just mess around with to "see if it works". Because it will work, in some way, and the less structured your concepts of it the more it will just align things with your mood - which might be unfortunate.
(Most people don't really want a life of non-stop /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix stories, right?)
But its surprising that you, having a plethora of knowledge in the subject, haven't really manipulated things the way you want.
Funnily enough, I suppose the knowledge (formulating the description) follows the experimentation: "Things are going well, what am I doing that's right?" When you get things running well, and "stay clean", you don't need to intervene so much. But you have to know what you were doing before, in order to know how to not-intervene :-)
I'd been using the 'Imagination Room + Infinite Grid' in daily life for a while, along with whatever fun metaphor seemed right for the upcoming day - and any metaphor will do it - but the more "meta" of how it works (memory-like auto-completion of patterns) is fairly recent.
Unless a model takes account of generalised synchronicity, it has no durability.
...that's why you are still here
Only as an appearance in your experience! ;-)
When I get a chance I'll do some proper posting with a ground-up description and examples for here and /r/Oneirosophy. Reddit-wise, everything is scattered across multiple comments and discussions...
someone told me that they were just like me and wanted to jump far, but they ended up in the ER.
Yeah - they didn't realise that "jumping" doesn't mean physical jumping. ;-)
POST: What happens to the other-dimensional you you switch places with?
AND you don't need to get into the details for it to work.
This is a very good point. As a fan of metaphor myself, it's great to have a picture in your mind of a supposed mechanism or structure to back up our efforts. But the truth is:
However you imagine that it works,
That's how it works. - TG
There is no inherent background to reality; whatever you want will unfold in some way if you let it. The basic formulation is that you completely and absolutely let go of the world and yourself and concepts you are holding onto, and then "just decide" what you want. However, most people need some sort of metaphor to hang onto as a "permission belief". In that case, it's about coming up with the most flexible one that you can accept.
Yes, but accepting this is much easier said than done.
Oh, I wasn't disagreeing. I was agreeing with your point that the details don't matter and it's best to just go with it. I was adding that, as we know, there's a good reason why it's okay to ignore the mechanical details. It's all about finding a story that you're happy to go with.
Which is why when people post and say they're uncomfortable with mirrors/candles, or that they're afraid they're going to be thrown into a literal parallel universe, it's good to go "yes, look at it this way instead - now have a try". The important thing is that they get an experience of power.
People in the world find it hard to believe that just thinking about it will make it happen.
Well, they are kinda right about that. "The world is imagination", basically, but thinking about things doesn't do a great deal except create lots of experiences about your desire. This is an area where - if you're trying to specify things rather than just leap - a bit of detail is helpful.
Again its just my opinion that bombarding newbies with too much knowledge won't be beneficial 50% of the time...
It's a dilemma. So, we can respond by saying "don't ask too many questions, it'll be okay". After that, you have to give some sort of answer, which inevitably involves describing the larger perspective, or there's no way to discount the fears.
I guess a more general questions are: Is this subreddit for newbies forever? Should it establish a larger "story" about dimensional jumping, beyond the basic one (which has little explanatory power, so can make people uneasy, since it is basically uncontrolled reformatting)? Should there be a revised FAQ or wiki for proper orientation?
They came here to get away from something.
This might be the issue. If you just want "change, any change" then that's fine. In reality-tweaking endeavours, though, it's almost always better to be going towards something. Lots of the questions here are about wanting a change but wanting to hold onto something at the same time.
The authors of the Multidimensional Magick materials (a variant of this) said that (uncontrolled) "jumping" was a sort of world-suicide, and should be considered in those terms. That's about right.
So even if the method doesn't matter too much ("let go, however you can persuade yourself to"), knowing how to specify a change is probably useful. And I personally think a coherent metaphor is a pretty valuable way to support that.
These are some really good points that need to be worked upon.
Yeah, I'm not sure on the best way forward. As I see it, there are four related subreddits (ignoring /r/Occult, is all over the place):
- /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix where people are reporting unplanned changes they don't understand, discussing interpretations and the nature reality without a specific worldview.
- /r/LawOfAttraction where people are trying to make directed changes but without a real metaphor or view of reality, although there is knowledge scattered across its subscribers.
- /r/Oneirosophy which is exploring subjective reality and control in all respects, but it's a project of "practical philosophy", developing a worldview or metaphysics in addition to techniques, so not for the casual.
- /r/DimensionalJumping where people really just want a method rather without too much philosophy, but less vague that LOA. Results with a defined approach and a no-nonsense plausible idea.
My inclination is to say that this subreddit should keep it to basics. A simplified metaphor, but one with enough detail to make internal sense. A recommended way to formulate your intention. Some recommended ways to "jump".
And btw I didn't mean to say thinking. Bascially imagining it and putting your will to it?Deciding on it,kindof..Damn,we need some shorter term to explain it lol.Can't type it again and again.
I was having a chat with a friend at lunch today, trying to avoid the word "imagining" because its common use suggests either daydream fantasy or 3rd-person thinking. Difficult! Need to settle on some new vocabulary...
What I was getting at is, the way to formulate a specific intention is to directly or implicitly bring about a 1st-person perspective, expanded 3D sensory image. Summoning a shadow experience as if you were in the target "dimension" already. Even just a feeling from that point of view is sufficient (you don't actually have to "see" visuals or whatever). The stronger the emotional feeling you generate while doing this, or the longer you maintain the feeling, the more impact it'll have.
Most people don't notice they are thinking-from the 3rd-person or 1st-person, but that's the difference between failure and success I think. You always get results. But results which mean you see something happen to someone else aren't so much fun!
When you get good, just having the idea of something that you want to happen brings this about. (You "decide" you want to meet a friend, the feeling-image that constitutes the decision, even subtly, is of you experiencing it rather than an idea about it.)
That or, y'know, something like... it. :-)
POST: Jumping back in time...
Reminds me of the film Somewhere in Time, based on the Richard Matheson novel. Christopher Reeve uses "hypnosis" to go back in time to be with the woman he loves:
SPOILERS
Visiting [Professor] Finney, Richard learns that the professor believes that he very briefly time traveled once to 1571 through the power of self-suggestion. To accomplish this feat of self-hypnosis, Finney tells Richard, one must remove from sight all things that are related to the current time and trick the mind into believing that one is in the past. . .
Richard again hypnotizes himself, this time with the tape recorder [playing recorded suggestions] hidden under the bed. He allows his absolute faith in his eventual success to become the trigger for the journey back through time. He drifts off to sleep and awakens on June 27, 1912 to the sound of whinnying horses.
What would time travel be? To the time traveler, it would just be a very discontinuous experience, a jump across the Infinite Grid. One evening experiencing "2015" then suddenly experiencing "2005". How would you account for the presence of different versions other people and the fact that you would be in a different world to the present, one that would unfold separately? Perhaps by considering the notion of extended persons and personal universes. If these things are possible, then you could equally just switch to a moment where your "someone" was with you now, or about to be. But that would have its own drawbacks in terms of shifting your apparent world.
Either way, it's worth bearing in mind that attempting this sort of thing is effectively to let go of this world as it is completely. Would you not rather efficiently summon a new love, one perfectly aligned to who you are today?
All things to think about.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the infinite grid.
The Infinite Grid is really just a way of saying that all possible experiences are always available in the background - everything is already created - it's just that you are "looking at" only one of them, only one "moment" is unfolded into your consciousness at a time. To change your experience is just to shift to another moment.
Another way to think about it is that daily life is like an Imagination Room. Mistakenly, we think that what appears in our senses as all there is - but actually every possible thing is there, dissolved into the background. So in fact, you can "ask" for things that have nothing to do with what you are experiencing right now, that seem incredibly unlikely, and the more you let go, the more easily the "room" switches to those patterns. (That's what this "jumping" thing is all about: asking for an experience, and letting the world shift to it.)
I can't imagine even in .. forever.. that I would not still be in love with the same person.
Well, my own thinking is that other loves do come, which seem different but they are all the same love deep down, because there is only one "love". (Perhaps the first thing you can do is stop imagining that things are one way or the other, because it will place a restriction on what you let yourself experience. I do understand the feeling though.)
Another thing to contemplate is that "love" is actually something that is inside you, but which appears to you in the outside world as a way for you to become one with life, to join with it and recognise it's all just own seamless thing. Embrace life and it embraces you back. But that's all sounding a bit mystical, so I'll stop there! :-)
...
Good questions.
It's like the theory of quantum immortality?
Quantum immortality just says: you will keep having experiences. It doesn't really say much else.
In my description, if you hit a "moment" which has no natural continuous "next-moment", you would experience a discontinuity. That might mean a jump where you suddenly missed that oncoming car after all. Or it might mean you experience "dying and leaving your body".
What happens next, would depend somewhat on your beliefs and expectations. You might even experience losing all your memories and becoming a new person. Or you might just wake up in your bed, ten years earlier.
In other words, the Infinite Grid contains all possible experiences, not just the one's where you are looking out of this body, doing your body-stuff.
I see. In the imagination room I suppose you could also change your own self? Although I guess that would require you to let go of your current reality. . . isn't it extremely difficult to change and imagine something drastically different from your current scenario?
Right. But there is a way around this. If you treat the sensory experience around you as just being a 'mirage' floating in your consciousness, then you realise it has no solidity. It's just the current unfolded moment. And the current moment has no causal power, no influence over what moment you might unfold next - unless you use it as the basis for your selection.
Behind the scenes, the whole of time and space is available! Your intentions are already patterning your future experience, specifying the trajectory of moments that you will encounter. It's just that this takes a bit of faith to believe in, because you can't experience yourself intending - you only experience the results.
...
I asked this question a few months, playing the possibility of time travel since dimension jumping is possible. I think it is...idk though
Did you try it?
Not yet. Think ill give it a go soon.
The difficulty would be: you'd have to let go of all present-world-body experience except your sense of identity and memories. This isn't candles and mirrors. Effectively, it's fully entering a memory-seeded lucid dream or OBE that you then don't come back from.
So you stay in there....forever?
Well, there's no "in" there. Entering is probably the wrong word, because it makes it sound like Russian dolls (that you are in there, but outside of the dream you are still here). Switching to is better. Like changing channels on TV. You let go of one channel totally, and that lets you commit to another channel completely.
It's like shifting from having one "dream about being dmitche on planet Earth" to having another "dream about being dmitche on planet Earth".
I mean, I'm assuming OP wants to go "back" permanently from the wording of the post. If they just want a temporary experience, that's fine.
POST: Not sure if I want or can
As mentioned elsewhere, you don't need to worry about someone replacing you and so on - it doesn't work that way. Think of it just as:
- This is a process by which you deliberately select which experiences you want to have.
- Everyone else can do the same. The "universe" is set up in such a way as to allow everyone to have the experiences they desire simultaneously, even if they might seem to conflict with each other theoretically.
- Just definitely deciding you want all your loved ones to be the same while becoming back in touch with this person, is sufficient.
You might want to take a more controlled approach than the "mirrors & candle" approach though, to minimised side effects.
Thank you for your reply! Hearing that makes me... I don't know. I really need to at least to try this. It would be amazing to be able to change your life like this. What would be a more controlled approach, if I can ask?
I quite like Neville Goddard's description of what to do (see book recommendations in the post here).
The summary is:
- Get very relaxed, let go of all attachments, allow yourself to enter a state of "absolute allowing".
- Summon via your imagination a vivid, 3D experience of what it would be like if your desire was true right now - as if you were experiencing it, through your own eyes, around you right now. Really be there and feel it, feel it until it feels true.
It can be a silly simple scene - for instance, imagining being sat on a chair, all excited ("fuck yeah!") as you put your shoes on to go out and meet that person. So long as the scene implies that the desire has already happened and is true, it's fine. The way to view it is, by doing this you will be changing your world such that "it is true now that this will happen then". Like you've already updated the "time-landscape" of your future, and now you just have to enjoy experiencing it moment by moment until you eventually arrive at that point.
In a super-flexible world, you would imagine it so vividly that the scene would replace the scene that is around you now. You would simply have imagined yourself there directly... In a less flexible world, dimensional jumping gives you a sudden shift which occurs "out of sight". The Neville approach is more restrained, unfolds in time more, but is more controllable as a result.
Make sense?
EDIT: I'll just emphasise that the trick to this is to summon an extended, 3-dimensional experience in the space around you using your imagination, that you can feel out into like you are there. As opposed to thinking about the experience.
Thank you - I'm gonna try this. I'm just afraid that I can't do it since I'm a bit suspicious. (I know it's gonna be hard for me to imagine myself doing something.) But I'm trying my best to believe that this can be done. Many thanks!
Well, belief isn't necessarily that important, what important is not constantly second-guessing and therefore re-updating your patterns. It's a pretty automatic process.
Just do it for enjoyment - and if you get a result, great.
I state what I want and really try to believe it has already happened.
Trying implies a problem. Also, checking on progress isn't a great idea. Really, put all that aside.
Simply accept it as fact that when you imagine something as if it were here now - your "brain" effortlessly works without sophistication to replicate that image in external life. It's just a law, nothing you have to do. It's like you cut a hole that shape in your perceptual filter, which lets experiences shine through which correspond to it.
If you imagine an owl in front of you then subsequently the "owl pattern" will start to appear in your life. If you imagine other nice things, it's inevitable they will too. If you imagine feeling great, then patterns that have good feelings as part of them will be triggered.
This is a mechanical thing. It's like triggering memories by recalling a part of them, and the rest appearing by "auto-complete". (A more complicated description can be found here [The Patterning of Experience], but you don't need it.)
Check out the Goddard books. There are specific examples in there of that sort of thing.
But I would say: Don't think in terms of escaping things. Instead, commit to this idea: That the experience you are having, and the history you remember, don't dictate what happens next. They are just a sign of your current pattern. So ignore them - and instead summon 1st-person immersive imagery of how it will be when you are in the situation you desire!
You don't solve problems by thinking them over and over. That's just reasserting the "problem state". The "solution state" comes from focusing on the desired outcome, then letting it take shape. This is true in everyday life (let a problem go, later your mind says "hey, I've solved that for you, here's the solution); it's not just some esoteric thing. Think of this as goal-setting for experiences.
If you just want a change then the mirror+candle approach that started this off will give you that. Just make sure you get yourself in a good mood first.
POST: Logical question
[POST]
Forgive me if this is n00bish, but here's what I don't get:
A) I tell my friend I'm jumping
B) I successfully jump
C) Does my friend in my new dimension remember me telling them I jumped?
[END OF POST]
I also thought - if all the dimensions are not really parallel lives but probabilities, why bother 'changing dimensions' if you can change something in THIS dimension with the same effort? For example, what is the point of jumping into the dimension where you never had a disease (and mess around with the timeline), when you can (theoretically) eradicate it here?
It's just an enabling metaphor to let you have (near-)instantaneous change. It's probably better to say they are like "parallel dreams" rather than possibilities. I can be easier to conceive of detaching from one situation and attaching to another, than it is to convincingly argue how "dissolving disease" would work.
Sometimes the mystery aspect is what helps things along.
I see it as changing the settings :-) once you change them, you can see how it is reflected around you.
Ha, yes, nice metaphor. :-)
I see it as updating or inserting new facts into the world. With the understanding that the "sharing model" of the world means it's basically mine to play with, and everyone gets a similar influence. Ongoing sensory experience then spontaneously falls into line with the updated facts.
BTW, talking about settings reminded me of the Hawaiian (allegedly) ho'oponopono technique - that would actually fit better on Oneirosophy, as its premise is that reality is internal, so if you want to change anything around you, you need to find a corresponding thing INSIDE you, and change that.
Yes, I've played with it! Essentially, it's about dissolving/overwriting troublesome aspects of yourself with the feeling of love/forgiveness. A book called Busting Loose From The Business Game has a similar approach based on "reclaiming your power" from events as they arise. My own generalised version turned into this Overwriting Yourself post.
I guess it makes sense that we should all be talking about basically the same thing. In effect: digging around in the background for facts we don't like, then deleting them!
I'd go so far as to say everything is inside you - even the room and situation you are experiencing right now - because you have no outside. The sensory experience is just a perceptual mirage floating in awareness - a partial slice of the real world, which is the world of facts dissolved into the background.
There is (or used to be) a similar ideological premise in traditional psychoanalysis
Jung played with "Active Imagination" which basically does this. I think it is very much out of favour now (if it was ever really in favour). These days it's all about semi-mechanical tools such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy - they focus on activity rather than meaning. Which is a major error really.
That is also why I commented that jumping dimensions seems (to me) as merely a functional narrative...
I think you are exactly right: you are dreaming-imagining your experience.
Which means you are 'First Cause' for everything around you. But people find that difficult to get to grips with - "okay, now what do I do with that? how do I make things happen?" - because you cannot experience the making of changes. You are the change. To make a change is to take on a new shape, meaning there's a shifting of self but no "doing". So we invent 'Second Causes' or 'enablers', whether they be technological tools to make the changes on our behalf, or active metaphors such as "dimensional jumping" or whatever.
In all cases, it is we who make the changes directly. When we use a tool or technique, the tool is a result on the same level as the outcome. We cause them both; the whole story of "using this to make that happen" is our creation.
Extra thought: This problematic thinking is everywhere. For instance, people try to fix their posture by training muscles and pushing one bit versus another, etc. But your posture is the arrangement of you. There are no "parts" to posture. The only way to have better posture, better shape, is to re-shape as a whole. To... shift.
Actually, when I think back, I believe that most profound changes in my life happened when I slept. I have a habit of going to sleep when I am stressed, as I somehow hope I will wake up and things will be different. I remember once I was supposed to have a surgery, and I was very scared and upset - I had no idea what to do, so I went to sleep praying that somehow the problem would resolve itself. I spent a couple of days in bed, trying sort of GET OUT of the situation I was in, like trying to break out from the INSIDE. After that, I came back to my normal schedule, but after I had a second health check it turned out the problem was not there anymore, and I did not need a surgery after all. Now, it's not like it magically DISSAPEARED - but there was a clear shift in the severity of the problem, to the point when it didn't require any intervention. It was really neat - not a massive change, but a change enough. Only after I started reading this forum I thought that maybe, somehow, my talents at lucid dreaming are not as useless as I previously thought.
Ah, interesting story. I think sleeping with intent works quite well (and I'd see that movie). Which makes sense in this overall scheme - sleeping and dreaming is an opening of attention, a loosening of your hold on current patterns to let them shift.
One time, I had completely screwed up at work, and took the day off sick when I had the corresponding presentation. I slept/dreamt through that day and "deleted" it. I went into work after the weekend, and the project was never mentioned ever again. Good appraisals, etc.
It is sort of like they know, but they don't at the same time.
Right.
As I like to think of it, it's like you've changed some of the facts-of-the-world. Afterwards, people's natural spontaneous actions and thoughts arise from these updated facts. If you push them, it's like there's still a memory of the old ways - however they aren't seeding the current world. But I'd say the old memory was your old memory.
My thinking is that the fact you can push them on this at all is because you know you made the change, basically. And by probing them, you are getting back your own doubt on the matter. Implicitly, by questioning them you are brining the old fact back into existence.
Meanwhile, if you had made a change but you had no idea you were responsible - e.g. a strong imagining of a change in a daydream - you'd probably experience this as some sort of Mandela Effect type deal, and just be very confused that nobody could remember what you do.
I am not sure - I sometimes think there are those twilight situations, when you stil have one leg in one world - so to speak - and another in a different one, and for a moment both are possible. Or maybe I think of soemthing else entirely, but cannot identify it correctly.
I agree with that.
Hmm. The fact that you would entertain the previous history means you have not fully committed to the new facts. If you did - they wouldn't remember. But then how would you tell? Whatever version you try to investigate, that's what you'll get back!
Yes, maybe that is the way to put this, not being fully commited. Maybe these options sometimes are probable but transient, and if you don't commit yourself to them, they become ghost-options, that almost-happened, but never did. Like they were up for grabs, but you didn't use the opportunity and they went back to the ghost world.
You (as in, everyone) should experiment with the synchronicity thing. You will directly experience that the world reflects your firm opinion - or your indecision.
The personal experience is more like a dream which operates on an "as if" basis. If your worldview is fuzzy about certain things, then the evidence you encounter appears fuzzy or contradictory also. That's why I think we need to definitely decide what's going to happen regardless of current sensory evidence, rather than start with the evidence and try to "work out what to do" or what is possible.
(Also, I think that that type of change does not really require any dramatic jumps as it still fits into the previous narrative)
How to think about that? Well, anything "out of sight" can be changed. The more out of sight, the easier it is.
The first level of "seeing" is the sensory experience that you are having. The second level of "seeing" is the narrative you are holding onto. The third level of "seeing" would be more general facts about your life. Fourth level, increasingly diffuse facts about the larger world. These fictional levels are the order in which you focus on and fix things. Background inconsequential things are shifting all the time, or rather they are "fuzzy" and never fixed anyway. Meanwhile, the sensory experience is pretty locked down ("no disintegrations!", no teleportations).
Any level can be allowed to diffuse into "fuzziness" if you step back from it, but it's not so easy to retract from the senses or the main storyline. It's always easier to have a change if you can avoid an obvious discontinuity - if you "avert your gaze" as it were, from the thing you are changing, or at the very least look only for the intended outcome.
Sleeping while the world shifts is an extremely handy way of disconnecting from one set of facts and awakening to another set. It's one way that we permit discontinuities. Probably it happens all the time, but because we never pause and check "how it was before" we don't notice. (Just like the people who if prompted know that something used to be the other way, but their actions are coming from the new facts so they don't notice.)
I was thinking of an example, but nothing comes to mind ... it would be a situation which is weighing, with different outcomes open, and suddenly everyone goes blind to one of these options, somehow as it is not supported ... I am not sure how to phrase this.
The only example I can think of (which is not perfect, but maybe you will understand what I mean) is when I broke my toe and suddenly everyone got blind to this. I was mentioning it (and whinging), but it was like noone could hear it, or noone remembered it. I was quite upset when I had to remind my parents that I had a broked toe, but it was like it was going over their head. It did heal quickly and with no problems, but I discovered that sometimes when this is happening it is not good to push this, and just let it flow. EDIT: it is like the broken toe didn't belong to the timeline, or something (?). Silly example, I know.
I am not sure if I made myself clear (and I apologise for my English, which is not my first language)
Reminds me a little of this story:
Changing the Past, Cindy - Cooperstown, New York
Several years ago I was walking through the woods and I fell. As I tumbled downhill, I heard awful sounds coming from my knee and ankle. I remember thinking that my knee was shattering. When I stopped rolling, I immediately put my hands up towards my leg to start a healing process, saying over and over in my mind frantically, "back in time, back in time."
It was getting dark, so after five minutes or so, I pulled myself up to the main path so I could be found. If I had stayed where I was maybe my ankle would have healed completely right away. When I got to the top, I started the healing again. Perhaps at that point it was for my sanity. I had just finished my second chemo treatment, and I was determined to stay focused on not taking on anything else. Since then, a guide of mine has helped me see the big picture, and I've learned that it's very interesting what we can and will do to get a merit badge, or should I say Spirit Badge! ~@:)
The paramedics told me that it was probably just a sprain. I know they didn't think that I was in pain, because I was calm and quiet, but on the inside I was screaming with pain... yet focused on reversing what had happened.
In the Emergency Room, I was told that I would probably have to have surgery on my ankle, because of the type of break it appeared to be. A few days later when I went to see the orthopedic doctor, he was looking at the x-rays and turned and looked at me with a puzzled look on his face. He said, "your ankle is broken in three places. It looks as though I had already set it ... they are aligned perfectly." I've often wondered if I had reversed a knee injury and had started on my ankle.
(I've had some experiences which you could, I guess, classify as 'jumping dimensions' - it felt, however, as if I was in a bad dream and desperately tried to divert my attention elsewhere, to the point where the situation changed.
I will give you an example.
I have very long hair, and sometimes I dream it is cut short. I am usually very upset by this, but I know it is a dream, and I concentrate for a while, and suddenly I have my long hair back on again (it's almost as 'log out, and log back in again). If I don't manage to do it in a dream, at some point I actually wake up for real, and my hair is still with me :-)
In 'reality' I had some situations that had the same feel - they were going in the very wrong direction, and some things seemed unavoidable, and suddenly everything 'magically' resolved itself, and sort of ... I don't know ... dissipated, and I felt as if I woke up from a bad dream. I suppose 'changing dimensions' is like this.
Ah, missed this - yes. That's a great example and description.
Found this article: [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2012/03/how-to-switch-dimensions/]
Pavlina. We was always a bit of a dick, but was thought-provoking at least. Actually, I remember him experimenting with subjective reality stuff a long time ago. Think he killed his forums, but there was some interesting stuff there from people who had played with it a little.
IMHO, he had some really inspiring stuff going on before he started his sexual experiments and lost the focus.
Yes, that's where it went wrong, I remember. I think that was where he shifted from being "interesting and provocative" to "defensive and slimy". Shame he deleted the forums. A few good stories in there that would have made for good /r/DimensionalJumping or /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix fodder.
POST: Are you really jumping to different universes...?
You need to view it completely from your own perspective. You are not a person walking about a world; you are a conscious perspective having a 1st-person experience. It's more like you are switching from "looking memories about being in Situation 1" to "looking at memories about being in Situation 2".
There are loads of ways to think about it (recent example), but all rely on you accepting that the "sharing model" of the world isn't simple - i.e. it's not like we are all in a room, choosing the consensus decor together. We are each in our own rooms, with different versions of the same people.