TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 16)

POST: Investigation of the utility of dream manipulation

[POST]

Dreams have long been used as a form of divination, either as glass through which higher powers are seen darkly, or an interface with the subconscious mind for self understanding. What else can dreams be used for? Herein, we will attempted to break the possible applications of dreams into two primary categories:

  1. practice of skills under non extant conditions, and
  2. practices of skills that cannot, or do not, exist. Subdivisions of each are explored and reveal a host potential uses for dream manipulation.
    I do not wish to deny the potential of divinatory dreamwork, but since they have been long explored, I instead wish to strike fresh ground.
    The most obvious feature of dreams is that they are a natural (non-drug induced) nonrational form of cognition. Many studies exist that suggest that dreams are a way for the brain to integrate experiences, and to undergo simulation of various experiences without risk. Interestingly, a study was done in which participants practiced a skiing video game. Those who practiced it shortly before sleep learned at a faster rate, and many reported dreaming about skiing.
    It thus seems that dreams allow us to practice skills, and retain some improvement from this practice. Further, given the existence of lucid dreaming, it is possible to practice under conditions that are not physically possible, or to practice skills that could not physically exist.
    Let's examine these two possibilities separately. (1. practice under non extant conditions, and 2. practices of skills that cannot, or do not, exist)
    The former could be of clear use for practicing under dangerous conditions that could exist, but have not yet occurred. Anecdotally, many people who engage in athletics report that first visualizing a task before attempting it results in better performance. It certainly appears that way for me in regards to difficult tasks of fine motor skills, such as playing a difficult passage on piano, or drawing a long curve of relative complexity, and for gross motor skills, such as vaulting objects, and safely landing from a height.
    A subcategory of this conditional practice involves conditions that one does not expect to participate in, such as special cases of physical rules (modified gravity, or friction), or even extremely unusual topological circumstances, such as higher dimensional locales, in which one can move away from a position without apparently moving in the three directions most familiar to us.
    The utility of this subcategory is not as immediately obvious in “waking life.” It can, however, be vital to effective fiction writing and the creation of video games. Further, if memories do entail the formation of neural connections, and there is transferability between skills, then these “impossibly practiced skills” may provide insights into physical practice that would have been much more difficult to obtain otherwise.
    Now we will continue on to the second of the possibilities, the practice of skills that cannot, or do not, exist.
    The first form of utility in this category that comes to mind is that it may exercise abstract thought. In undergoing experiences that cannot exist, one must create them oneself, and thus creative, and likely critical, thinking will be involved.
    The range of environments that can be imagined is far too large to list, so let's devise some categories: literal, symbolic, neither/both literal and symbolic.
  3. Literal
    Literal environments that are not possible refers to “physical” environments that are not possible. This was touched upon in the practice of skills under conditions that could not exist. The same essentially applies here. Only in dreams can one hunt the Jabberwock.
  4. Symbolic.
    In this category we will find ideas that represent something other than what is sensed. Language, games, mathematics, and allegory, lie here.
    Lived hieroglyphics, while potentially possible with augmented reality, are currently not a reality. The ability to communicate directly through the creation of symbols of meaning or desire with more dimensions than typical speech is possible within dreams. Words can change color. A single person can speak in counterpoint, the precise melodies and species containing relevant information. A person can be surrounded in meaning in a way not currently possible. The environment itself can speak, and change form in linguistic meaning bearing ways based upon what is happening.
    Games that are not possible in real life can occur in dreams. These might include games like Hesse's Glass Bead Game, or could perhaps be even more abstract. Imagine a game in which one must navigate a whirling house party of uncountable rooms by changing the demeanour of each room into something congruent with a sphere of the tree of life, in attempt to create a sequence of rooms akin to the tree,
    It is already common for people to visualize mathematics, so that is not new here. Instead, one can live mathematics. While in mathematics it is possible create rules for a system without regard to its physicality, here the impossible physicality may become manifest.
    Allegory is often employed in the use of dreams for divination, so it does not need any more investigation here. Simply put, forms of symbolism already internalized may be lived out in dreams, and thus one may further develop modes of symbolic thought through ritual in which the effects are much more pronounced.
  5. Neither/Both Literal and Symbolic
    Here there are two categories, 1. environments that are both literal and symbolic, and 2. environments that are neither literal nor symbolic.
  6. Environments that are literal and symbolic abound in literature. A “real” world exists within fiction, but it often also contains a higher order discourse that uses people and places as its fundamental carriers of meaning.
    Environments of this sort would entail an apparently physical locale, in which every physical action incurs a symbolic response. Cutting down a tree both results in that tree being felled In the “physical world” of the dream, as well as attacking whatever symbolic associations that tree held for the dreamer.
    This is often little different from ritual in folk circumstances as evidenced in Frazer's Golden Bough. For example, Frazer writes of a range of traditions in which the last person to reap their crop is said to have “taken the old man,” “become the old man,” or “killed the old man.” This unlucky soul then undergoes various unpleasant treatments for working more slowly than the others. This may include being wrapped up in wreathes of corn and beaten, or simply having to host a party with free alcohol for all comers.
  7. Neither Symbolic nor Literal
    From a rational perspective, this can be interpreted as meaningless. If a sensory impression holds no literal meaning, and it holds no symbolic meaning, where can it hold any meaning?
    To employ a Joycean distortion of language, “information” is “in-formation.” Sensory impressions that are placed into formations have already been placed into a system, and systems, being created by consciousnesses, impose meaning. Of course, many systems can be placed over the same data, but a multiplicity of meaning does not deny meaning.
    Therefore, it would seem that only pure, undifferentiated, sensory input can be meaningless. That is, it is only meaningless if no thought is made about it, if it is not organized in any way, or put in reference (in formation) to something else.
    It could be argued that the mere presence of sensory information is itself information. The fact that a sound is a sound, already means that a system has been placed over it. The same can be said for all of the other senses. For a sensory input to be neither symbolic nor literal, the person sensing must be unaware what sense the input goes with. If the sensing person is aware what sense is employed, then it has already been categorized.
    Further, the fact that something is sensed in the first place is a category! It is a distinction between sensed, and not sensed. No continuum can exist here. If it is partially sensed, then it is still sensed, but one has imposed further information onto it, namely that there is something unsensed as well.
    If one wishes to state that something can be both sensed and not sensed, and not in some partial fashion, but in its entirety, one is still categorizing it, namely into the category of being sensed and not sensed.
    If we assume that something lies in fault with the above, it remains unclear what benefit there is to experience that is neither symbolic nor literal, experience that holds no meaning, not even the concept of meaninglessness. If possible, it may be a way to simulate death, depending on the nature of death, and thus prepare themselves for what is to come, but given that view of death, time is limited, and might not be best spent practicing what they are guaranteed an eternity of.

    It is apparent that dreams may be utilized for many purposes, though some theoretical categories appear to be neither possible nor desirable. With the development of virtual/augmented reality and designer drugs, some of these categories may become accessible in “waking” states.==

[END OF POST]

Interesting post, but I think it might be more suited to /r/LucidDreaming or a subreddit about dream interpretation. This forum is about subjective idealism, as Nefandi mentions, and so is more about the dreamlike nature of waking experience.

Check out our Reading List if you want to find out more, get the perspective.

Whether or not "everything" is "unreal" in the sense that you mean, my points about the uses of unreality apply. It just happens that my points apply to a larger category, if subjective idealism is closer to the mark than materialism.
Details about a speaker do not determine the value of what is said. If Hitler said "exercise is healthy," the fact that Hitler is the speaker makes no difference to the truth value of the statement "exercise is healthy."

Of course, exercising didn't do Hitler much good in the end!

Yeah, everything ends.

He should have stuck to making 'keep fit' videos, made a fortune, retired to an Austrian village in comfort. This may in fact be a way around the "can't kill Hitler" problem in time travel...

Now we just have to figure how to send that message to the future...

...so that the instructions can be followed in the past. Maybe in spring 2015? (Comedy-gold)

...

That's not even the main problem. Nethodsod is not espousing subjective idealism. It's obvious he's a materialist. He doesn't understand that this world is an illusion. He thinks some shit here is real and there are molecules and atoms and shit. And brains with chemicals in them. Basically, from a subjective idealist POV he's completely clueless and his points have no worth at all. He's not showing how everything is unreal or how to get in touch with unreality. He's clinging to convention with every line he writes. I can tell he's scared more than any one of us here.

It is really the main problem. From a lucid dreaming perspective it's all good; materialism vs idealism doesn't really matter. It's just that this subreddit isn't focused on that.

That's only true if you're talking about lucid dreaming as a secular, non-yogic activity, then I agree.

Agreed.

Yes, in retrospect, this post wasn't a great fit for this sub. I was acting under the impression that lucid dreams were expected to be a tool for realizing this unreal nature, and thus figured that an investigation of the uses of dream manipulation would be helpful.

No worries! It's great to know that thoughtful people are interested in contributing.

The idea is here is that your dream and waking life are a continuity - both consist of 'dream images' with no hidden underlying solid substrate - appearing in the common background of your awareness. What they are beyond that is another thing, of course. Certainly, lucid dreams can be great for rehearsal and a host of other brilliant applications, as well as exploring your 'base'.

However, fundamentally the hope is that you might be able to apply your lucid dreaming abilities more readily to waking life (in a "magickal" sense) than is commonly assumed, if you truly accept subjective idealism and operate from it. An additional benefit (for some, the key benefit) is a recognition of your true nature and place in the world, and the nature of that world, as a 'good' in itself.

That's why the reading list is a strange mix of dream yoga, chaos magick, lucid dreaming, personal investigation and philosophy!

You know, I don't really disagree with anything you said. I used to be a very hardcore subjective idealist. However, I have since become agnostic towards the issue. That is, I don't think we can know if anything exists beyond our apprehension (noumena being what is "really real" in philosophical jargon). From that I decided (perhaps not for the best) that it is typically to one's advantage to act as though a physical objective reality exists, even if it does not.
On the other hand, I do practice magick (hermetic informed chaos magick with an emphasis on ritual in dreams, and the creation of egregores/servitores/whatever to personify parts of the mind). And I do think that the observed world (whether or not something lies beyond it) is completely mind. Thus, at least that observed reality, if not "absolute reality," can be manipulated by intent.
What I don't see the value in, is making "waking" life completely like what is seemingly a dream, even if both are hallucinations. Again, that's a result of my "acting as if" principle.

I think 'secret agnosticism' isn't a bad thing either. Thing thing is, 'waking life' does act "as if" there is a background, but it turns out to be flexible: it does adjust to your beliefs and expectations and intentions. Since 'dream world' is the most flexible possible approach, and the most relaxed approach, that is to the benefit. In a way, it's much like magick traditions that all, in the end, teach you to work on yourself and reach 'realisation'. The world does seem to try to respond "as if". There's no such thing as a servitor as such, but the world will respond to you as if there were.

The difference between the waking world and the dream world is really the depth of the establishment of habits. The waking world has been around a lot longer than any dream you're going to have, and has stabilised. It is still potentially semi-unlimited (it is just mind-imagery) though. However, the 'will' or confidence or commitment-to-worldview required to make things happen is much greater. Hence the 'Dream Yoga' style effort (if you've not read Tenzin Rinpoche's book, it's worth your time, and is "available"). I understand your 'objections' though.

Also, something that occurred was, all waking imagery is essentially symbolic too; it represents "meaning". This is something I should have taken from your post.

It is not clear that the Buddhist notion of emptiness is equivalent to "lack of substance."

I've always taken this to be that there is no solid underlying. That the world is an illusion not because it is not a real experience, it is just that the nature of that experience is not what we assume.

One examines the cup of coffee before us, and realises that it has no solidity: it is a floating image, with occasional other sensations when we 'touch' it, but nowhere can we find the 'solid cup of coffee' we imagine. Then we turn our attention to ourselves, and find that we are not solid either: empty space with the occasional sensation floating here and there!

That's my understanding at present anyway.

That's a common one, but it is also applied to other things as well. In Confucianism, the idea of self is "relationally constituted." That is, you are the sum of all your connections to other people (and maybe the state, nature, and "heaven"). This fits in well with the idea of emptiness, and for some Confucian Buddhists, allows for emptiness as no-self to exist without completely leaving behind the material world. Many Buddhists are closer to dualists, thinking that there is something physical in addition to something nonphysical. Buddhism is one of those weird systems that is very open to reinterpretation, having few core beliefs. Given that everything we "understand" is illusion, from this point of view, everything can be reduced to utility, rather than "truth," since all things will be false in some since. This utility is very "Utilitarian" in that most Buddhism involves ways to reduce suffering.

I see. Buddhism seems quite 'scientific' in some of its forms, in the same sense as this. It seems to have a 'practical' aspect that works with its flexibility.

In truth, with idealism there is nothing to say that there isn't an underlying 'X' that 'inspires' our sensory experience, it is just inaccessible and cannot be commented upon. It has to be inferred by the restrictions and limitations we observe. In that sense they cover the same ground.

...

If we assume there is no material world, how does it immediately follow that desire is the only element involved in manipulating hallucinations? Further, it is not desire in general you suppose, but "desire to hold on to the hallucination."
Might there be hallucinations that we do not desire, but seem to arise nonetheless? It is certainly not inconceivable, and thus cannot be assumed an impossibility until demonstrated as such. Then there is the issue of the degree to which unreality is consensual. Do the thoughts of others influence our own thoughts? Do we interact with others at all? Berkely, for example, (a well known subjective idealist) thought that God was all-seeing, and thus kept "unreality" stable. Of course, none of the above matters if you wish to throw out the idea of rationality altogether. However, at that point, anything goes, and there is no-thing to be obtained or lost.

Some good points. "The rope and the snake", for instance?

And, certainly, it doesn't follow that belief/expectation are the only things at work. If this is, say, a 'shared dream' then there's more to it than your personal belief. As I say elsewhere, one difference between waking and most dreaming is the longer-lasting nature of this waking world, and it's potential to have amassed 'habits'.

I say "this" because this is the 'default' world we seem to return to. In fact, it might be better to call this our 'base dream'. I'd say there is no difference to the way waking and dream realities are built and behave, but it might be that dreams build up 'habits' and 'solidity' (really: predictability and self-consistency) over time. And since our base dream is longer lasting with more active dream characters, it has stabilised to a great extend. This is why most magick seems to occur via 'useful coincidences', even if incredibly unlikely. It is rare to directly observe a discontinuity occurring.

Is reality consensual? Berkeley's problem is that he implicitly imagined that there was in a sense a three-dimensional space, but the people in it were only observing certain areas of that space - and that things outwith anyone's observation might 'go blank'. However, there is no such 3-d space. If you examine your own experience, you'll find that there seems to be a "vast unstructured place" where your experience arises. Within that, you experience a 'phenomenal space", a structured space with sensory experience, and other parallel 'ideational spaces' where thoughts are (although sometimes they might seem to be located in the 'phenomenal space' somehow). The alternative view is that the whole world is enfolded into the perspective you are seeing now, and moments unfold then enfold into the background one by one. That way, the whole world is always under observation, or 'within mind', and nobody is 'spatially located'; everyone is everywhere or rather, everywhere is within everyone.

Summary: There are some things that need to be understood by experimentation and contemplation.

The enfolded/unfolded idea is well described in physicist David Bohm's world-view of an explicate (what we see) and implicate (which is enfolded) order.

The hologram analogy applies to a limited extent: if the whole image is contained within each part of the image, then looking at any part of the image at all is to look at the whole - this fulfilling the requirement that the world must exist within consciousness at all times (= be "observed" in the most general sense).

I'm pretty flexible on interpretations; to an extent it comes down to "practicality". However, I am keen on a commonality of viewpoint between dreaming and waking, intention and magick, which I think is achievable.

Also, I don't why thoughts can't have nonspatial dimensions to them that we reinterpret into spatial dimensions.

We do have an ability to think-about. For instance, under hypnosis people can experience "square circles" and so on, because you are not necessarily bound by visual and dimensional restrictions. (You don't need to by hypnotised, you can just do this, but you'll find yourself reluctant to let go to it.)

...

Q1: Here's a direct quote from the sidebar about the stated purpose of this subreddit:
A place for subjective idealists to discuss how to get in touch with the deeper unreality of this world...

Q2: I suppose you are right, that wasn't directly on topic. I was under the impression that dream manipulation in general was a tool toward this end.
If what is dreamt and what is typically called "waking life" are essentially the same, then everything in this post should be equally applicable to the unreality of the dreamt and "waking" worlds.

Except perhaps the 'stability' factor?

POST: This is something I am contemplating currently: Stability.

In other words, intent, I now realize, has a clearly effortless aspect. I would even say that true intent, deepest intent, is always effortless.

Yes, I completely agree with this.

I wonder, is the "replacement grounding" required for a sense of stability possibly the consistent sense of identifying with background awareness, rather than any other aspects of personality or objects or whatever? If everything else is going to be changeable and transitory, all that's going to be left is that background; it'll be the only thing to hold on to.

I haven't tried thinking of making background awareness my home base precisely because it doesn't look like anything, it's like I don't know what it is...

I think its property of "always there-ness' despite having no form is why it's potentially good for grounding / identifying with, whereas intent is content (loosely) and so changes.

In one dream I've had my legs cut off and I didn't even blink... I've had dream environments disappear or drastically change...

But, you did know you were in a literal dream (i.e. lucid dream) at the time. Your ("real") body screams for its existence when it gets in danger; you'd be amazed how much it likes being alive (as we judge it). I have in the past assumed I would get to a stage where i'd not care, but then went beyond it and was surprised how... well... fighty it all is!

I still like intent better. :)

You can have both, because the content is made from / shaped from the background. So it's more a case of focus, I guess. Anyway, it's something to play with.

Actually that's something I am working with right now too...

Well, start with low-speed impacts first, yeah? ;-)

POST: Why is Oneirosophy Good?

[POST]

I'll start by saying all this sounds cool, but I'm curious why it is a good idea.
Why is it good to "feel like [you] are in a lucid dream during waking reality?"
Is there some specific reason people should do this? Is there more to the ideas here that I'm not getting? Is there something that one might gain from this way of approaching the world/reality?

[END OF POST]

The extra part of it is the "magick" part. If you've had lucid dreams, you come to a different understanding of what influence or intention means, and what "you" are, and contemplation of what this all means in waking life leads to some interesting ideas. Bits of this were brought up in other threads, but your notion of yourself becomes everything that you are experiencing or that which experiences and your notion of doing something - anything! - means changing the universe. You are performing magick every time you make a decision. What's more, the more you take on that worldview, the more it appears true. And this is important. When you change your view to see waking life as a dream, it will become more like a dream for you, in all sorts of interesting ways. The expectation is that the further you push this, the more flexible things may become...

But, there's still the issue of intersubjectivity. For which I should start a little thread soon...

I am quite familiar with magick, primarily of the hermetic and chaotic varieties. I've also been lucid dreaming since I was a child. I'm still lucid in cycles (weekly or monthly cycles) without putting any effort into it. It eventually became somewhat boring for me, and now I find non lucid dreams to be more beneficial, since the subconscious wellings are less mediated by intention. So you claim that "you" are what you are experiencing, and that you can control what you experiencing, so you can change yourself? Or do you mean something like Crowley's calling every intentional act an act of magick?
Why is it good for your life to be like a dream? Why should you want things to become "flexible?" Are you imagining something like pure intent manifesting desire?

My interest in lucid dreaming also came and went, although has returned. I stopped fiddling with them in the end, more enjoyed the experience unfolding as an observer more; it became more of a philosophical playground.

Non-duality + chaos magick, perhaps as a summary, but the Crowley quote works for me.

Flexibility in terms of free will for your own behaviour, for lifting boundaries for magickal work (what belief could be more flexible?), but primarily for clearer direct perception of the present moment perhaps.

Note: Of course, this is meant to be an exploratory sub for generating ideas as much as anything else - how far can you push this particular idea and what are the effects if you do? There is to be some fun involved.

What do you mean by non-duality?

In its simplest form, the dissolving of the experience that you are 'here' and stuff is 'there'. It's a perceptual thing, rather than a thought thing. (Many-valued logic does look interesting though. I've heard the sea battle paradox before.)

That's kind of what I was asking you! I'm not sure why direct "perception of the present moment" is desirable.

Maybe it'll just be really cool? ;-) Increased freedom of will would follow from clearer perception, I suggest. But the real point of this sub (which isn't mine actually, it just looks interesting) seems to be a question or two, not an answer: what would it be like...? what would it mean philosophically...?

Ah, you see, I figured oneirosophy would have a goal, even though it moreso appears to be a toolset. Sort of like how gnosis is a state achieved for a reason, though its uses are varied. I hope to some some interesting material come of this board!

Well, the extra question is... what can you do if you make this a dream? If you adopt that belief so completely that you experience it, as in chaos magick.

Well, let's hope so!

Beyond the question of what, are the questions of "why?" and "should I?"

Indeed. All to be explored. Or... not, depending. This is interesting though. What are your concerns about this approach?

Well, the main one is that you might not be able to reverse any undesirable changes you make to yourself.
The higher order problem is of knowing what one should use these techniques for. In many eastern religions, these techniques are used to attain something called "enlightenment," whose nature varies from culture to culture. But essentially, the goal is to be happy, or at least to avoid suffering, and in Buddhism, this is largely accomplished through not feeling attached to things.
Unfortunately, if we think about the character of the person who is merely content, and does not care about anything, does that seem like a "good" person. I certainly don't like being around those people, and don't want to be like that.

It is true that changes would be irreversible, even just because of the memory of the change.

Enlightenment, as I see it, isn't about being happy (although that may come), it's about realising there is no division between you and your environment, that there is no "you" as you conceive of it - rather, you are "the space in which experience arises". (Try Douglas Harding's experiments for a fun taster maybe. [https://www.headless.org/])

This is different to not caring or being content. In fact, it doesn't necessarily reflect on your character at all! There are plenty of grumpy, smoking, drinking enlightened people. Rather, it is simply seeing what you actually are.

This then leads to experiential subjective idealism, and from then to a more direct approach to magick. Is the idea.

POST: How I have changed my core beliefs throughout my lucid dreaming career.

I was excited to have this thought but also angry that I didn't think of it myself and needed some stupid book to remind me. I always feel like that about great ideas, lol. I feel ashamed that I didn't already know them on my own, how dare I not know them?

Of course, if this is a dream, then you created the dream book to tell yourself about the dream nature of your reality. So really, you did think of it Yourself, just not yourself. ;-)

Random quote to end the day, since it seems appropriate to this and the other thread we're running [POST: What is Oneirosophy?]:

==In my first twenty years of lucid dreaming, as I came to seek an ultimate or base reality beyond symbols and appearance, beyond dream- ing and lucid dreaming, something deep within allowed the awareness that enlivens me to experience the "clear light" of pure awareness (as described in chapter 7). After exiting that experience, I knew that each dot of awareness, each speck of aware light, existed equally with all others and equally connected to all others. The awareness of the col- lective could be accessed in the awareness of the tiniest speck.
From that moment, I sensed that behind all appearances an un- paralleled, profound connection exists at a deep, deep level. Beneath each experience lies a connectedness. Behind each life, each object, each action, an awareness exists joined to all other life, objects, and actions. The inner working of all this awareness spills out into a reality formed and experienced and connects all in a massive symphony of individual creativity and fulfilment.
In certain moments, if you allow it, you can sense that the world around you is deeply interconnected: the sound of this bird is connected to a neighbor opening his door, the wind rustling the leaves announces the car appearing around the corner, your brief sudden thought of a friend lies in synchronicity with an action hundreds of miles away. The thought, the wind, the car, the bird, all connect at some deeper level where awareness resides, intersects, creates, and fulfills. Behind all ap- pearances lies the movement of awareness.

  • Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert Waggoner==

...

There's also a tendency for people to "forget" unusual experiences. The just don't get attached to the rest of their memories; they let them go. I actually found it hard to stick at lucid dreaming initially because daily life would quickly 'overwrite' the feeling and disconnect me from it, then I'd 'wake up to it' again.

If you just relax and ignore your dreams, your dream rules can remain the same throughout your human lifespan or they can drift around a bit.

Just as in life. If you never consciously 'intend' or 're-intend' (either in moving forward or resisting a direction) then you and your life environment (the same thing) will just play out automatically. Many people don't realise they can direct themselves; they just experience themselves. Hence all that talk about 'karma' in various writings; really I think this can be viewed as just clearing out 'bad intentions' (or directions) I think.

I think we can be mostly automatic - once we make our occasional intentional adjustments we can let them run - but if you make none at all, you're in trouble. Particularly because external events will, if you don't 'stay awake', adjust your 'character' and implicit direction, and send you off to the wrong place. A main thing in all this seems to be, at a minimum: pay attention and always listen. You don't necessarily need to interfere, but you need to be aware, and do a spot of magickal intention to counter 'drift'.

Nefandi means well. This kind of thing.

There is one warning regarding this practice: it is important to take care of responsibilities and to respect the logic and limitations of conventional life. When you tell yourself that your waking life is a dream, this is true, but if you leap from a building you will still fall, not fly. If you do not go to work, bills will go unpaid. Plunge your hand in a fire and you will be burned. It is important to remain grounded in the realities of the relative world, because as long as there is a "you" and "me," there is a relative world in which we live, other sentient beings who are suffering, and consequences from the decisions we make.
The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Some people can get pretty lost in this stuff, because on the one hand it works (intention via subjective reality worldview does have effects), but on the other hand there are limits and dangers.

On communication, you only need to take a look here on this very sub to see how challenging it is to refer to what you individually assume are straightforward concepts - because different words mean different things to all us different Humpties, just as you say! Especially when you are talking about experiences.

Consequences are important to consider, particularly if there's a risk that other people will be directly affected without their consent, collaterally. Part of the purpose of this subreddit will be, I hope, to explore those issues too. There are practical, philosophical and moral implications here. Subjective idealism is not solipsism. If you are right-handed, do you happily use it to cut your left hand?

Lack of consent is hovering perhaps highest amongst the top of my issues now having pulled the corruption alarm cord. I am very concerned about malevolent corruption of innocence as a result

I think that so long as you don't explicitly target a person with your intentions, you're okay. Why would you pit aspects of yourself against one another anyway?

It is true, however, that there is no filter: if you magickally intend something it will happen in some form or other, regardless of moral aspects and so on. However, how 'the dream' manages and combines the different intentions of everyone into a single movement is of course interesting (if we view it that way). One of the simplest ways is to say that 'everything gets taken into account' from a timeless level perspective, but that's a little out of scope here.

POST: Getting used to defining your own dream, letting go of objective meaning and embracing subjective meaning.

My snap response would be;: Why would something be meaningless, just because it turns out not to be made from atoms? Meaning was always (I suggest) about the relationship between one part of experience with another. That doesn't change. But...

I suppose it can be disconcerting if you find that the fight isn't a real fight - that the odds weren't stacked against you and your triumph is over yourself. But wasn't that always true anyway? And doesn't the bummer of death in the materialist view make things more meaningless?

Although I suppose realising that people, including yourself, are just sensory imagery with nothing them, might take a bit of getting used to...

POST: Dreaming Versus Being Awake

Have you ever had a lucid dream (a dream in which you realise you are dreaming)? Then you are not even a zombie; you are fully aware and can manage the dream accordingly. I'd say that waking and dreaming realities are on the same level. They are not in fact "realities", just parallel sensory experiences. Right now, you are in a room, reading this. Now, think about the room next door...

This room remains vivid but "with" it is now a shadow image of the next room. The only difference between the two is in terms of intensity and stability. If you could make the next-room sensory pattern more intense than the this-room sensory pattern, you would be in the next room...

It's remarkably hard to hold onto as a direct insight, rather than just as a concept - because any attempt to do so, loses it.[1] This is why I've been advocating that "letting go of control of attention" is the vital ingredient. We usually focus on letting go of our thoughts and our bodies, and yet still unwittingly "deform" our experiential space by manipulating "attention". In fact, you shouldn't interfere with your attention at all, as conceived of as a narrowing down to certain objects in space. Rather, you want to use activation of desired images - in other words, intend to make a pattern dominant.

I've been injecting the related ideas elsewhere to see how they take with other people coming from a different place, without the "baggage" of previous metaphysical thought. (So, ahem, please resist the urge to "contaminate" them, so to speak.)

[1] This makes senses of course; you can't hold onto "open attention" by narrowing your attention!

Open attention is just a delusion. All attention is closed in some way. You choose which way you want to close it. "Open" is just another kind of "closed."

Pffft. The essence is: "attention" is completely the wrong way to look at it. There's no such thing as attention, as in a "positive" thing, except as a concept. It's a concept which leads to a poor intention. Indeed, there is no such thing as "open attention" (apart from a concept) because it corresponds to an absence of something. The absence of deforming experience rather than triggering it.

For as long as you try to use attention to interrogate the experience of simultaneity of thought (of the room now, of the next room, of your shopping list) you disturb it.

In my view there is nothing to disturb. All is false, not just some! Therefore, we play as we want to.

Yeah, but that's just tedious and useless, like saying "all is consciousness". The fact is, when people try and use this stuff - to "play as they want to", as you put it - they unwittingly use things like concentration and attention to do so, which actually works against their efforts. Most people don't get how to imagine, that it's "taking on the shape of" thoughts, and "attention" is one of the sneakiest ideas going around. People genuinely don't realise that attention is effectively a locking down of what you are focusing on. They try to relax by using their attention; they try to dissolve and forget things by using their attention. All in the aid of "playing as they want to".

This suggests experience has a correct form that we're fucking up somehow.

It doesn't have a correct form, but each of us might have a desired from. And "attention" is something that can block our transition to the desired state, even as we try to use it to get there.

This isn't a bad thing when it happens, and it's not always locking down. There are different kinds of attention. There is acidic attention, which melts whatever it turns to. There is approving attention, which fortifies whatever it turns to.

Narrowed attention always locks down. The "other kinds" of attention are actually intention. There's a subtle difference between "bringing to the fore" in awareness such that it dominates the moment, with the intention to accomplish something (melting!), and attempting to contract space down to the target. "Attentional focus" (concentration) is not necessarily the same as "attending to something" (having that be the dominant image or pattern). Although very quickly here we're going to have trouble with language, because people's idea of what "concentration" is does vary. Those who "focus" by contracting space to the object, vs those who "focus" by allowing it to fill the space.

For most people agency is part of that desired form. We don't want to be (or feel like) passive TV watchers, guests to our own experiencing.

Agency or "the experience of agency". Because the experience of agency isn't agency; it's just another experience. It's second cause and it's a fake, like when people generate muscle tension prior to moving their body, because "that's them 'doing' the movement".

Consider too that you might deliberately want to make use of this "locking down" feature of attention. So even assuming attention had such a mechanical quality (I don't agree), it would still be useful! Once you achieve a desired state, you'd want to lock it down for some time. So even from your perspective narrowed attention wouldn't be a universally bad kind of attention.

Attention isn't the way to do this - simply declaring state-stability is the way to do this. Maintaining narrow attention is to fight against all change, you start getting pretty tense as your whole experience starts trying to cram itself into the compressed space you've created. Which is not to say it has no use - it's even useful just for a raw experience of "playing with the shape of your space" - but I don't think it's a great way to do those things. Experimenting is the only way to tell though.

To try to avoid a natural movement of attention is unnatural and wrong. Sometimes you want to narrow your attention. Why block it?

This is exactly my point - let it run free! But then you contradict yourself. You shouldn't be narrowing or expanding it yourself, you should instead by intending and there rest of it "just happens".

You've saddled attention with some very unhelpful features by declaring them to be so. And now it is so for you. Sad.

Heheh. Well, I think I've distinguished between the variations: attending as object taking dominance ("summoning an experience into awareness"),and attention as contracting and narrowing space (due to a misunderstanding arising from words such as "concentrate" and "focus").

The difference we're having is...

You don't narrow your attention at all by "doing" it. The apparent focusing of attention is a side-effect when we allow a particular object to dominate our experience. The problem arises when we try to make this happen by inferring a means ("focusing") and using those means to get the result. We feel we have to "do something" to get the result, and so mangle it up and create opposition. Just as we get confused and think that we have to "do" the process of standing up - becomes aware of our sitting position, move muscles into position, etc - when in fact we should simply bring the desired result to mind. There is no process to this, and the attempt to experience a process introduces strain.

Obviously, if that's what people want they can do that - but in the main people are under the misapprehension they need to create the transition, but that is not the case, and attempting to do so actually opposes the transition.

When you just want a result...

Rituals are fine, it's only when the details of those rituals are in opposition to the desired result. Rituals can often let you do something that you maybe can't persuade yourself otherwise. This isn't against "stepping stones" themselves, it's about having opposing intentions - intending one state while at the same time intending another. But if you are going to climb the building floor by floor, I reckon you should intend each floor at a time - allow that to be your complete experience. But life's about more than that...

I definitely agree with rituals and steps as a way to learn. After all, if you always go only for the end result, you might miss other pathways and opportunities!

And, y'know, life's about experiences not just getting everything over with. I totally agree on aesthetics. The ways and the flourishes are part of the fun. Even if we could just teleport everywhere, we might still choose to take a walk in the woods, or enter a running competition, or do some rock climbing. Y'know, cos doing stuff does feel good. The point I've probably been making is: If you want a particular experience, then summon that. There are no intermediates required though, so it's a choice. And - like you said earlier - freedom is all about choice, and part of that is knowing what you don't have to do.

So imo you should be very careful about what you say about attention.

This, actually, is the crux of the matter. What we tend to want from attention is to bring something into mind; how we often do it is by compressing the space down to that something - which turns out to be extra.

If you try to jump from A to D, but your mind is not emotionally and intellectually ready for that, your subconscious will block this attempt.

Good point. Acceptable stepping stones!

Actually, magick's been all about this, right? Because it's hard to conceive of ourselves as the direct cause of all things, we nominate something else - an object, or even a word - as the cause, and invoke that. We create and assign power to a "technology" to do what we want.

Everything is good. All meat is good meat.

It's all just experiencing! Even "bad" experiences will be, from a certain perspective, just fine. Returning a little to what we were talking about before about attention, with reference to the Imagination Room metaphor, I'd say that if we...

  • Assume that what is desired is for a particular pattern to be dominant.
  • If we are beholden to a "spatially-extended world" view, we will be inclined to try to somehow filter out the rest of the world in an effort to isolate that pattern. Since that view implies the world itself is kinda fixed, our only option is to compress our perception so that it includes only that pattern. This is like creating "walls" in the Imagination Room and then moving them to surround a particular pattern. (This is the misunderstanding and the uncomfortable result I'm trying to describe.)
  • If instead we have the "unbounded imagination room" view, then we realise there is no spatially-extended world, there is just the current activated patterns. This leads us to instead trigger the desired experience into the room, rather than assume an experience and try to then filter it down.

The first method involves trying to narrow down an experience (narrow, bounded attention), the second involves no narrowing or bounding, we remain open and have the pattern arise within that openness?

EDIT: On consequences, that's something we should explore. We can't be aware of all consequences in advance (I suggest) and maybe not even aware of what will be necessary for us to experience to get from here to there, so every act has to be one of abandonment?

It's like when you look at a mountain range and you feel how mighty and stable nature is, then you think how fickle and weak you are by comparison.

So why is the loan difficult to recall? Given that our power can never go away, and can never change in nature, the difficulty must arise from confusion. Two possible contributors. These things combined mean we don't realise our everyday power and so we don't even try:

  • The first is: time. It apparently takes time to change the world in ways that are not fully habitualised. It is "easy" to move your legs or move a pencil; it is "hard" to teleport or change the location of a mountain. Because we cannot do something in a short time-frame we tend to think it as not being possible. In fact, we do get results constantly by this method: synchronicity. These seem like weird random coincidences though, because of the second point.
  • The second is: being unaware of the mechanism. That simply holding a pattern in mind for a while will result in the same pattern appearing in the "external" world. And doing so with intention (which is really just a more specific thought, the addition of definition change) even more so.

There's also our conception of the world as filled with heavy objects. A "mountain" is a massive solid mass of earth and rock so how it could possibly be moved by decision alone? But in fact, a "mountain" is more like a couple of dimensionless facts (a shape, a location) and a floating semi-transparent picture. To move a mountain you might have to "hold in mind" its change of location for some time, the first time, so ingrained is the habit of "mountains can't move". Although: the more you have accepted the notion of a transparent, depthless world the easier it should be.

In the second case [the Imagination Room] the world is completely internalized.

Saying "interalized" isn't quite right though, because there is no internal to that model. The room itself has no boundary; it is unbounded consciousness. All possible worlds are "in" it but the room itself (consciousness which is the-real-you) isn't anywhere. It can take on the shape of apparently being you-and-a-separate-world or everything-is-in-mind, but those are both just different experiential views (which one can freely flip between).

EDIT: Additional. If you were completely detached, then simply triggering a thought would overlay-combine that pattern into experience. Even saying a phrase would trigger the associated pattern into experience. This happens with synchronicity quite a bit anyway; but commanding a mountain to move and it moving! The question is: does it just move for you? We need to talk about the "world-sharing model" here.

[On magick and related]

All good points. Even if you know the deal, it's not necessarily easy to allow such a transition. Just look at people's reactions to "glitch-like" experiences. Sometimes people get excited. More often they are frightened. But why be frightened just because a car suddenly vanished, or a person changed appearance? Because it means anything at all could happen. Even being healed from an illness is problematic. If you (say) allowed your life-threatening infection to just vanish overnight, what would be the larger implications of that?

Reality would be broken (in terms of your previous notions of it).

You can make sudden transitions without having to go through a developmental process - after all, all that you're doing is learning to feel safe and let go - but it's effectively world-suicide so it's reasonable to not want to do it. You're not human anyway but you are having a human-in-a-world experience. That ends when you start altering literal landscapes. Or you memory-wipe. Or you account for it by saying it wasn't you that did it.

[The imagination room and internal/external]

I'm still not sure what you are referring to with "internal" there?

In that view, the only thing I can see that could be labeled as internal is those patterns which are not currently "bright and dominant". The whole world-so-far is literally being experienced here, now (felt-sense) so there is no outside, or inside. There's just potentially categorisation. Although what I think you're getting at later - that there is no seeking for confirmation because you have direct access to "what is" anyway; it would be like asking for confirmation of your own thought - I of course agree with.

So if we were to grow disgusted and overly unsettled by the human body, that would hurt our state of mind. So these contemplative tools, contemplating the downsides, are powerful and dangerous and effective for all the same reasons.

And our contemplations, since they lead to a transformation of worldview, are reflected in our experience, including that of the body - which, after all, is made from ideas. Interesting on the eyesight. I think I've shared this story before, but when 3D televisions first became available, lots of people reported interesting experiences. One guy had a girlfriend whose eyesight was terrible. When she was watching the 3D TV with him she became absolutely traumatised - because it presented the world to her in total clarity. She was confronted with it being there in miniature form, the distance inserted directly into her vision. She didn't want to see; she was accidentally-deliberately blurring the world out.

It's that which is within the POV. POV is a specific and partial manner of knowing, experiencing and intending.

Okay, so we're talking about the "everyday person" here rather than someone who has come to understand the revised view - in which although habitual imagery might be "as if" there is a perspective, you are actually the entirety. In other words, the "individuality" is just a thought that is activated presently; you are never actually an individual, just as the TV screen isn't a particular TV channel.

All manners of experiencing have alternatives. No matter how enlightened you become and no matter how you revise your notions of body, personality, etc... it's all optional and you don't have to live like that.

I agree with this but...

So you remain, always, an individual.

I don't with this. In what sense are you an individual, except that you are not experiencing all possible thoughts at equal intensity at the same time? You may call your experience being-an-individual but the experience itself just consists of selected patterns. Implicit here is that you are having an experience whilst in another location there is another experience - but that's surely not the case. Space and time are aspects of an experience; they are not available for there to be a "between experiences" or "separate experiences" beyond this. You and I, for instance, are not experiencing each other at the same time - but equally, neither are we not. It's a case of "the context cannot support that idea".

In the sense that in distinguish yourself by your unique choices. You distance yourself from other options, and thus individuate.

Okay, although that is quite broad. That basically saying: I am "these thoughts" right now rather than "those thoughts". In fact, it's really saying "at the moment, these thoughts are brighter than these other thoughts; I identify myself with the brighter thoughts". There is no distance. And the thoughts correspond to a world rather than to a person.

Conventional reality is an unconscious magickal assertion too, and it's groundless.

For sure, there is no fundamental ground [that is solid]. Like Narada and his Maya experience, it is all dissolved at any moment and revealed to just be sensory fluctuations and not even that. We live in a world - or rather, as a world - of "as if". But what use is freedom, if one is afraid to use it? Is it just the comfort blanket to make us feel better about our lack of courage? Could and should; I could do it any time I wanted, but won't.

It's even more subtle than that, because you don't have to identify with your thoughts.

You should identify with all of your thoughts - but not any one thought, and not their content.

You can have intellectual or emotional distance from something, for example.

But what, exactly, does this mean? It might not be an object which is located in this room, say, but it is a conceptual object that you have located in conceptual space. I suggest that emotional distance is a literal distance in imagination space, in the "parallel space" associated with that metaphor.

However when you attempt something you haven't done in you recent or any memory, you may feel doubts, and fear.

What is this a fear... of? Is all fear the the fear of annihilation, the fear of a transformation of the thought-pattern-concept that we have become identified with?

You can conceive of it that way, if you like. But is that what it really is? Or just a conception you find useful?

There are many ways to conceive of something, but (I suggest) there is no "really is" behind it. There are just different representations pointing at each other. Like George Berkeley's "objects as bundles or collections of ideas" - the "vase" is the superposition of all vase experiences and thoughts, and so on, and there is no "real vase" other than this. "Reality" literally is a collection of interconnected metaphors "about" a fictional thing we call "reality"; the metaphors simply point to one another. A castle in the sky!

Language is part of this too. If you talk in terms of "distance" then you are invoking a spatial metaphor; at the very least you have a "feel" of space between your designated location and an idea representing (and being part of) the emotion.

I don't think so. I think half of the fear is the fear of annihilation, and the other half is the fear of suffering.

Yes. Suffering - isn't that a fear of a change of the world, whereas the other side is a change of oneself? Same thing fundamentally, so the fear comes from the apparent division in both cases?

I think you're describing some portion of suffering. But not all suffering is fear of change per se. For example, our thoughts change moment by moment, but hardly anyone is afraid of their thoughts or mind. People are accustomed to this. In fact, if a thought stuck around and refused to change, that would probably elicit fear.

That's a matter of convention though. If one truly understood that both "the world" and "me" were merely particularly bright thoughts that hung around more than the others, would fear dissipate? Certain traditions would have us believe so, certainly.

Maybe? I think it would depend on what you really wanted to be true. If your understanding runs counter what you desire to be true, it will distress you.

I guess I'm implying that true understanding = acceptance in this case. Otherwise you'd be fighting against the void.

Maybe when understanding is extremely thorough, there is room for little else in the mind, which would be like acceptance.

Right. Acceptance = forgetting, in a sense. It's allowing one thought (experiential pattern) to fully brighten at the expense of all others. Although this is a special "meta" case: it's accepting all thoughts.

Attention cannot be "narrowed" because it suggests it should be wider than it is now.

That absence of narrow attention is... no attention. But singe language dictates I need an opposite for "narrow attention" I called it "open" - note, I didn't call it "wide". Remember, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having one object or detail fill your perception (attending-to, perhaps?), I'm saying that doing so by contracting your space or "concentrating" is problematic. This is not actually easy to talk about; experimentation is the way. Most people I've encouraged to "stop narrowing" seems to like the result; it's like any attending and redirecting is effortless because you are no longer trying to experience the "doing" of it.

Sure, and if you weren't paying attention, how would you know this? :) Eh? Eh? Eeeehhh???

Haha, cheeky fucker! :-) But my paragraph above should help clarify.

[Experience of agency isn't agency] There is no difference between experiential and actual in our view. :)

But in this particular case, there's a point. I could phrase it better by saying: the experiencing of apparently-causing is not itself causal, because it is a resultant. The "feeling of doing" is always a result, a generated experience.

But you'll notice that even when people do this fake, something about this fake is not fake, since they still do move around! So there is truth in the fake. And fake in the true.

No. The "doing" is actually in opposition to the movement. It's like trying to stay still and walk at the same time. As soon as you stop trying to "do" in this way, everything becomes easy. It's tricky initially, because even the "thought of being in a position" triggers that pattern. So if you are sat down and want to stand up, you must avoid "thinking of being sat" or even "thinking of the process of standing" - you must leave all that alone and simply "think of being stood up".

Because any experience whatsoever, even the experience of not having any experience, is a fact of attention.

The point here is that one selects or brings-into-awareness by a "choice" rather than by manipulating the space in which experiences arise - which is a common error that people make (I have found). It's not really a philosophical point. It's a common practical habit borne of misunderstanding.

If you think "contracting space" is problematic, please explain what the problem is, exactly.

It is problematic if you are generating unpleasant results in addition to your desire. It's the equivalent of straining to read the letters on the screen by "concentrating hard", which doesn't help and in fact even works against you.

[the experiencing of apparently-causing is not itself causal, because it is a resultant.] I don't know if this is always true.

It's a matter of recognition. Incorrectly assuming that you need to "do this" in order to "experience that" puts you at a disadvantage. Of course, it also gets used in magical work: declaring that "this" has the property of "making this happen" and then using it accordingly. But being aware of that is important, to know that you are "dreaming" it into utility.

I think you're going overboard. You can't trick yourself like that.

It's not a trick; it's how this works fundamentally. As in the room example, "you can't be in two places at once" (let's put aside talk of actual bilocation). If you bring two opposite states to mind at once, you lock your experience. If you want to stand up efficiently, you must release the thought of sitting down and indeed any other position. By triggering the "being stood up" thought, your experience naturally flows to that. This applies to more than just getting up out of a chair (which, after all, is an imaginary experience like any other)...

Right, but why should these two features bump into each other? You can do both at once!

They shouldn't but our use of language has, I've noticed, let to many people doing something they don't knowingly intend to do. This wouldn't matter so much, except that narrowed attention (reduction of experiential space, although not of awareness itself of course) leads to physical tension, lack of ease and fluidity in thought and creation, and a build-up of "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements" (as written elsewhere).

You're saying "not until you stop focusing your attention will you experience magick." You're saying I have to be inflexible toward how I use my attention.

I definitely never said that (the first sentence). And the other is sort of the opposite of what I'm saying, which is: that narrowing of attention, fixing attention, leads to an inflexibility in experience, because it "locks" the patterns you are presently focused on. Again, like the "triggering being-sat-down" and then trying to "trigger being-stood-up". Magick requires detachment, and this is at the heart of it: allowing patterns to dissolve back into the background (so to speak). Narrowed attention inhibits this.

That's true, but the way to unfuck them is to alert them, which includes alerting their attention to some heretofore ignored facts.

That's exactly what I'm doing. There's no point in messing about though; we might as well say: if you are doing this then this is what's happening. Naturally, people must should against their own experience, and they don't need me to tell them to do so. Otherwise I'd be far more introductory and explanatory, right? (And I know you don't need cushioning!)

EDIT: Although yeah I'm totally aware I'm bashing this stuff out quite "prescriptively" today. :-P

So, I'm describing the essence of it okay though? In all sorts of situations we end up creating an experience which is just extra clutter on the way to what we want, and even opposes it. If "magick" works by bringing a thought into awareness and having it become the brightest thought (if you see what I mean), then introducing intermediate states actually just gets in the way of your desired result.

It's like you can fly to the top floor just by "wishing" it, but instead you end up interfering with that by "wishing" each of the floors between here and there. Which is great if you want the tour, but often we (by which I mean: me, often) don't realise that we can "skip to the end" - provided we don't think about those intermediary steps and thereby bring them into awareness.

Agreed on this. My other response is basically that. The only thing I'd add is that, yes, slowness might be desirable, savouring the experience - but I'm suggesting is that many people (myself in the past, and still now) unwittingly create conflict and opposition in their approach.

You know that I'm just asserting a conclusion so that you can bounce back on it though, yes?

It works with you, because you immediately pick a hole in things and we deconstruct the process, and take it apart in a way that's probably totally different to how it was put together - or rather, how I think it was put together, which often turns out to involve assumptions which I hadn't have spotted, because that's how good discussion plays out.

What manner of trickery is this? :) Please carry on.

I think it might be a compliment! ;-) And just checking we're on the same page too.

To me attention is similar to a cursor on a computer screen. Intention is similar to programming. So intention is what creates content. And attention is then what is moment-to-moment emphasized in that content. They are both functioning together at once. One doesn't replace or obviate another.

So the end result is always: you've selected an experience. An alternative definition to try out: "attention" is bringing into awareness something that has already been experienced in the main senses ("already 'exists'"), "intention" is bringing into awareness something that has only been experienced in the shadow-senses ("only thought of").

Intention changes your felt-sense. Attention navigates around felt-sense.

Elegant. Can I add: "intending is the changing of your felt-sense"

Sure. Why would you even ask for a permission? Of course you wouldn't, because you're a Lord and a mage. Therefore you must be joking now.

It was a rhetorical question. And my answer was, unsurprisingly: "yes you can, and why don't you have some other cool things too".

...

Hmm, interesting thoughts! More random poking...

What I think I was poking at, is the possibility that the subjective experience is merely some epi-phenomenum of some deeper non-conscious process.

But there is never anything other than subjective experience?

We might imagine some deeper process beyond consciousness, but we do that imagining in consciousness. That amounts to making "explanatory fictions" or stories, since we'll never actually experience supporting evidence (I suggest!).

You can test this by simply closing the eyes, or putting fingers in the ears.

Voids are a subjective experience also. But why would we expect closing our eyes to stop persistence? It is not a true void. A true void is absolute complete forgetting. What makes a world seem solid? That the images are vivid with well-defined lines and (key to most) that there is a sense of solid touch. But it actually doesn't matter how focused or fuzzy something is in terms of it being a subjective experience; it's just a subjective experience... of fuzziness. A sharp dream (a dream of sharpness!) is just as much a dream as a fuzzy dream (a dream of fuzziness!).

If my subjective experience is everything, then that would have to include those voids - as the world seems to 'pop back' from them.

But you are still experiencing the world subtly!

It is tempting to say that our experience is sights-sounds-texture, but actually there is a whole complex felt-sense in the background. It is this which persists when we close our eyes and throughout our apparent movements in the world. The "current state of the world" is dissolved into this felt-sense. We are always actually experiencing everything. If it were to be dropped, then the world would completely restart - but you would never know it. And when, in this newly-born world, you went looking for memories, you would find them (on demand). Probably the key to all this is to be clear about what "you" are. If you believe you are a "thing" looking out at a world, then all sorts of problems kick in. If you instead you observe that you are a "conscious open sensory space" in which experiences arise, one of which is being-a-person-in-a-world, then it's easier to see that all experience is subjective, no matter that its qualities.

Short version: A lack of imagery or a lack of sound is not a lack of subjective experience; it is a subjective experience that happens to lack imagery and sound. Even the experience of "open empty space" is itself a subjective experience.

There is the direct experience part: the sights-sounds-texture you mention (I'd like to say sights-sounds-smell-touch - SSST!). Then there is the sensation of Time - an ever circulating loop of about two or three seconds (SSSTT).

I like the "SSSTT" thing! Hmm, so following on from that:

I see "time" as just the fading brightness of the most intense aspect of the ongoing sensory experience. That is, the "ongoing duration". 'The past" is then whatever residual patterns we've hooked onto the conceptual pattern we've got, a timeline say (basically just a retrieval concept we never quite release). I see the felt-sense as the entirety of the world to date (in the largest sense). It's all dissolved in there and it never goes away. Because if it did, the world would restart. There's a little thought experiment I played with a while back which is quite good for this. Turn off all your senses, what's left? You can get pretty much down to unlocated openness, although you still retain a sense of identity behind just consciousness. A feeling. If you switch off all the senses, the only sense left is the felt-sense.

The conclusion: You are always experiencing the entire world, right now, in every moment. Literally, sensorily experiencing it. And if you dropped parts, effectively forgot them completely, they would be gone forever.

My ordering: Open consciousness; sensory patterns within consciousness, evolving in intensity; some labelled "body" and "mind/thought" and "me", others labelled "world". All experience is subjective, to nobody.

The total sum of all your observations (intense-sensory and shadow-sensory), the accumulation of facts which are active, the current state of the pattern you call "the world". Your world right now is the culmination of all the experiences which have arisen in your consciousness space. The superposition of all patterns. For the purposes of this, we might consider each instant of sensory experiencing to be "a fact". All facts will make sense in terms of previous facts (unless there is a deliberate intervention) because the pattern is one whole. The felt-sense, then, is the constant experiencing of that entirety in your consciousness.

EDIT: Imagine that in addition to the SSSTT of this room, you also had a sense of the whole space and its contents all-at-once, like a unique dimensionless number you can "feel" that corresponds to this arrangement and has everything within it. Now have this include things that are out of sight. That, but for the whole world.

SSSTTG, where "G" stands for "global".

To be clear, it's better to say that awareness "takes on the shape of" experience. So what's changed isn't awareness itself, but its content, its shape.

  • Subjective experience is "made from" awareness; awareness is like a non-material material whose only property is being-aware and which takes on the shape of experience.

So the background feeling, all the accumulated experiences or patterns, like the sharks and the suncream and all the other facts and memories, that's the felt-sense. It's the "texture" of "you" in a way: it's the entirety of you-to-date, dissolved-enfolded. The rush of old feelings is a memory-experience, unfolded. The room around you now is a sensation-experience, unfolded. If neither was present, if nothing was unfolded, there would just be that "texture" to the awareness-that-you-are. (If that texture faded, it would just be void.) In the sun-stars-sky analogy: awareness is the daytime sky, the stars are the entirety of what has been experienced (felt-sense or G), the sun is the current experience (SSSTT). Actually the second T is the name for the fade-transition between different stars bring bright => sun.

Experiment: When you "feel out" information within yourself you can see how it works. If you loosely placed your attention centrally in the body and assert something - e.g. "I feel great" - and allow the response to arise, you can see how a state unfolding feels, if you sit with it and let the resulting state information arise (responding with why you don't, probably).

If it's only property is being-aware how can it also have the property of taking on a shape? That's two properties. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...

Heh. Taking on a shape isn't a property, it's a capacity. Since it's not actually a material in the mechanical sense it has no properties at all (apart from being-aware). Even when it takes on the shape of something, it only apparently does so - in the same sense as a TV screen "takes on the shape of" people doing stuff in a world. It never really becomes people-stuff-world but it takes on a shape such that people-stuff-world are experienced.

The answer is: all three.

I'm struggling to put into words that there's something up with your description of awareness.

And this is where the problem lies, as you later observe: language. In order to think about something, you have to split it into parts (concepts) and then arrange them relative to one another in mental space (a conceptual framework). You are doomed to create divisions in order to understand something intellectually! So awareness is:

  • The non-material material whose only property is being-aware, which takes on the shape of experience, and experiences itself relative to itself.

Which very quickly starts to sound like nonsense. We're having to create artificial divisions ("non-material material") in order to put it into language, when of course the next step is to collapse those divisions such that nothing can be said (" ").

In other other words to be aware requires structure of some sort. Another way of putting it is that awareness needs a certain amount of surprise or difference or information. Without that, there is no awareness.

No, there is always awareness - there is always "being". If awareness has no folds in it, there is not experience but there is still awareness.

Awareness is not an actor!

No, because acting implies something which acts and something which is acted upon. Awareness, instead, becomes. When "it is raining" what is the "it"? It's an error of language! It would be more accurate to say "the world becomes raining".

I knew my sloppy language would come back to bite me! :-)

The awareness of 'being' as something that carries on without experience is at best an illusion. . .

It's not awareness of being. Hmm. Okay let's see if we can arrange this better. Let's begin with:

  • There is "what-is", which I have been calling awareness. Other traditions call it "pure awareness". It isn't awareness of anything. It has no inherent division, spatially or temporally; it's that which such things are formed of. In a sense it is all that exists and it does not exist (because: relative to what?). We could think of it like a blanket of material that is aware of any folds within it. Lying flat there is no experience of folds - there is simply "existing", which leaves no trace. We can't say "experience of" existing, so we might say simply "being". Regardless, it is "that such that" if a shape is adopted then the self-experiencing of that shape is the case. Maybe this is what you are meaning by "void"?
  • When this takes on a shape, then that shape experiences itself - it is the experiencing of itself. No matter what happens, it has no actual "parts" or divisions, however it can apparently have parts, as folds are experienced relative to one another. The experience of division and location and change.

The awareness of being, is simply just another part of the crowd of awarenesses.

I'd probably phrase it as: there is no awareness of being but there can be awareness of being something. Now, we get onto the experience of the world itself, which is a matter of that background global felt-sense and the bright sensory aspects and thoughts. If your bright sensory experiences (which "comes together with" space and time) fades away, then you are left with a non-spatial, non-temporal experience of being-a-world or being-a-state. If that fades away completely then there is no world or universe.

Awareness as a thing is simply comprised of many parts.

Or a superposition of patterns? I would shy aware from saying "parts" for the earlier reasons, because awareness isn't "comprised of" anything if it's what those things are formed from. Patterns don't necessarily need division and their superposition just leads to a more complex form, rather than a proliferation of parts. So we retain the experiencing without saying awareness is "comprised of" parts that sum to the experience.

POST: My experience of "Just Decide"

I'm actually just imagining that I'm not using efforts to do things.

How will you be able to tell whether you are "actually" not using effort or you are "just imagining" not using effort, if the experience is identical? :-)

Good post though. Something to ponder: What if one time you allowed your body to rise up and then... never interfered with it ever again? Just allowed it to respond spontaneously with/as the enviromment as it unfolds?

For instance, the "catching exercise" is fun - having decided you are going to catch things, you let your body go and have a friend throw stuff at you, and find you catch it in efficient and unexpected ways. But what if that was always how it was? Your body automatically responding like that without the Decison-Prep? Someone throws something, your body just effortlessly catches it. A guy on a bike skids in front of you unexpectedly, your body sidesteps to avoid collision spontaneously.

That's the eventual outcome: One Decision To Rule Them All!

As you have anticipated, the realisation is that the "the only thing I'm trying to do is hold back these impulses", and that the final decision is to simply allow what is always trying to happen anyway. To get out of the way. That's something to aspire to eventually.

EDIT: This actually has the greatest potential benefit for speed and accuracy tasks, but the extent to which you need to be "the observer" is greatly increased. Think the knife trick in Aliens or more likely: playing sport or threading a needle. Video games are great for practice.

The more I let go the more fear I feel, and the more fear I feel the more faith I need to give myself.

Yes indeed, identifying with the awareness-space is the way forward. And it is an interesting thing, this matter of "faith". In some ways, it end up being that the faith is to not stop and so therefore you avoid having to restart again. Both the "letting happen" and the sense of expanded space can bring with them a sense of vulnerability and exposure, but once committed to it's actually very secure and freeing.

For me, the experience might eventually go away. At least, that's been my experience with many mental "hacks" so far.

Only if you re-trigger the previous experience by thinking about it or returning to it as your starting point. There can be a temptation sometimes to start from the beginning. You discover a way to do something, but you keep bringing to mind the old way in order to recall the new way. This reasserts the old position!

For example, when we stand up from a chair we can do so by summoning the sensory-image of ourselves standing, and just allowing the body to rise. However, if we do so by imaging our initial sitting position first and then the standing position, we effectively reset ourselves. We are intending both positions at once. Anyway, something to watch out for. This is what "releasing" into the desired state is all about. You have to resist the urge to check you are not in the old state, how far you have progressed from the old state, or even that there is an old state.

Feeling writerly this morning after my coffee. So, a little thought experiment (almost literally), based on a metaphor I've used elsewhere:

The Imagination Room Revisited

Something you might find useful as a rule of thumb, is to think of your experience as literally a responsive dream-space: the world around you is just a habitual thought. The room you are in is a strong habit - a imaginary scene that has condensed such that the thought-of-being-in-this-location triggers this thought-room. The bodily experience you have is similarly an accumulation of thoughts or "imaginings". Imagine for a moment that if you sat in a chair and imagined-that there was a vase on the table in front of you, unwaveringly, it would eventually solidify into persistence in front of you. If you didn't go the full distance, what instead would happen is that a vase would appear in your life that would seem to come via events in the world.

However, since there is no persistent spatially-extended world outside your current experience, that is only an apparently true. All that there ever is, is this "imagination space" the contents of which are shifting and changing "as if" you are a body in a world. You never go anywhere, you are never located anywhere.

Adopting this view, what does it mean to stand up?

It means to change the "shape" of the imagination space from "the experience of sitting down" to "the experience of standing up". And since you are the imagination space, what you are doing is shape-shifting yourself. The change is made by shifting this 3D-sensory-thought to that 3D-sensory-thought. So you can see why you shouldn't "look back" and think about where you were - because that means you are shifting back into the previous state, using the exact mechanism of change! And any habitual is more easily "triggered" by partial thinking in this way, so you are most vulnerable to that when trying to shift away from the habitual.

Let the movement of your imagination destroy the place from which you came, and don't be like Lot's wife!

By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
-- Genesis 19 - EDIT: "To regard, to consider, to pay attention to"

(Yeah I am not remotely religious, but some of the parables are obviously tales with reference to this stuff. The rest of that chapter has a few interesting things to say about creation too. If you read them literally, it's a sorry tale of incest! But actually it's probably describing something like creation-from-self-imagination.)

A Personal Addressable Voxel-Space

Another way to envisage this is a voxel space. Basically, imagine a complete and total void with not even space. Now, imagine a 3-dimensional array of cubes going on forever. Each cube can contain a sensory "pixel" (visual, auditory, texture, feeling). The room you are in now is basically a particular sensory pattern existing in that array. If you think a thought, that appears in the same voxel-space, only less intense and less stable. However, it leaves a trace upon the space, a slight deformation, however subtle - which results in a momentum from the current state towards the state described or defined by the thought. If you are completely detached (is in, not "persisting" other patterns) then the transition between states is effortless and clean. Otherwise, what occurs is a mangling between the present state and the thought, and any other thoughts you are holding onto or resisting. So when you "look back" you are literally re-defining the target of the voxel-space to your previous state again. That's why lots of "manifestation" type techniques recommend "letting go of your desire". Not because you need to forget what you are after, but because our tendency is to re-created the "state of desiring" when we think about it.

All good. So one interpretation of the "pillar of salt" fits in quite nicely. Earlier in the story:

Another Jewish legend says that because Lot's wife sinned with salt, she was punished with salt. On the night the two angels visited Lot, he requested of his wife to prepare a feast for them. Not having any salt, Lot's wife asked of her neighbors for salt which so happened to alert them of the presence of their guests, resulting in the mob action that endangered Lot's family.
-- Jewish commentaries on Lot's wife, Wikipedia

So, as with other parables such as The Parable of the Unjust Steward, this is about forgiveness. And forgiveness in the deeper sense of the word: to forget completely. Lot's wife had made an error relating to salt. By looking back she remained bound to that, she became once again her error - in the same way as when you look back at a habit, you are returned to that state.

Yes, it fits nicely. Also, here's a related essay which is worth a look:

For it is magic, this pruning shears of revision. It really is not only the achievement of objectives, but if you do it daily, it will awaken in you the spirit of Jesus, which is continual forgiveness of sin. In this teaching the sinner should always go free; you will never condemn him, for when the spirit is awake in you you will realize in him there is no condemnation, only forgiveness, and forgiveness is not as man of the world thinks when he omits the actual execution of his revenge.
-- The Pruning Shears of Revision, Neville Goddard

(Assuming you haven't already encountered him.) Goddard was a New Thought guy who interpreted the parables of the Bible as offering insight and instruction on how reality actually worked. His language is a bit old-style, but his concept of the "pruning shears" corresponds to recalling and "editing" the past so that it no longer participates in the ongoing moment - i.e. total forgiveness.

It's worth checking out his book The Law and the Promise and other materials. Lots of stuff here and a summary article here. You'll see how the "technique" of it corresponds well to the subjective idealist's concept of a "private view" of the world which is mutable.

POST: A physicalism-breaking experience while high last night

You can certainly bend the visual field with practice; senses and thoughts occur in the same space and the of the same thing. It doesn't necessarily negate physicality in and of itself - after all, the "standard interpretation" of materialism is indeed that the senses produce electrical signals in the brain and that's where "your world" is. In a way, this can be used as proof that perception isn't direct and is in fact brain-based!

Making that explicit does give you the first step on the way to unravelling things philosophically, though. The first chapter of The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds is quite a good read on that. It's definitely true that having direct experiences like this (which point out that you are not actually experiencing a solid 3D world even if you are in one) is far more groundbreaking that just thinking a lot about it. I'll clarify: Direct experiences of the flexibility of their perceptions rather than simply thinking about how they should-or-could be flexible. I'm more referring to bending the visual field in front of us, rather than just OP's behind-the-eyes effects.

Yeah, I think that anything can jog you out of assumption if you are being attentive, because it's attentiveness itself which does the jogging. What really changes your view is a new context: once you've noticed that everything is of-a-piece with an undivided background, the taste of transparency does it. But if you're not even attending...

I don't think playing with visuals behind the eyes is going to be of a lot of use to normal, sober, ordinary people...

Or, if it's done while already knowing what you are looking for and experimenting with. In which case you are not discovering anything, you're already a convert and are exploring it. Personally, I think even a flash of accidentally dropping your hold on attention - brief exposure to unboundedness - can achieve more insight than years of messing around with meditation and so on (valuable for other reasons though they may be). And if you are lucky enough to just put faith in those ideas, even better - because then you can knowingly "take on the shape of" the experience of openness. This is really a case where the more of a thinker you are, the longer you can end up delaying the actual direct knowledge. You are play-doh and haven't realised it; the only way to realise that you can adopt a different shape is to... adopt a different shape.

POST: Awareness and the nth dimension

The mountains in the distance can be no further than my experience of them, and nothing is closer to me than experience. The world has no depth!

But it can definitely take a while to stop "seeing your ideas about experiencing" - e.g. seeing distance as independently real - and sometimes I quite like playing with ideas like "selecting a 3d scene from 5d space" and living from them for a bit. I wouldn't say they are approximations though; surely they are applied patterns, active metaphors which actually shape experiencing if you are operating from them?

However, I think OP was talking about exactly that form of spatial-dimensional thinking. Your response about "only ready to experience them after a walk" seems to misunderstand what I'm saying though?

I am experiencing the mountains instantly, at close quarters, even as they are "smaller and less detailed" than they might be. Walking has nothing to do with how close I am to the mountains. The experiencing of walking may occur between this experience of the mountains and that experience of the mountains, but the experience won't get any closer than it already is. It will simply change in kind. This is just a matter of the nature of experiencing, nothing to do with habits and commitments or abilities. Our interpretation of the experience might change of course, giving it certain apparent qualities, but the world still has no depth (=experiencing has no depth). I'm not sure where you're going with the wall-eating-levitating stuff here? Or was that based on another interpretation of what I was describing?

Ideally I think we should talk about possibilities going from middle to stratosphere.

Just to emphasise though: the "world has no depth" and mountains comment says nothing about what can be done (you have extended it to that though), it is a comment about literally the nature of the experience. A dream about faraway mountains that are a 5-day hike away, still involves dreaming a 5-day hike to get there - however you recognise during it that you are not going anyway, it's just that your experience is evolving. Leveraging the knowledge about the world (beyond the simple relaxation that comes with it) is another step.

On Effortlessness - Effortlessness doesn't mean you can just discontinuously alter everything right now (although potentially you might be able to). It does mean that the changes you do make will not involve effort. Effort is an experience, it is content. If you experience effort, it's an additional thing you've created on top of what you were focused on. Now, spending time - that's something different. I think that's what you mean by "effort". You need to spend time exploring yourself, finding that you have patterns which stand in the way of certain experiences you'd like to have, and so on.

I think you're trying to emphasise: Just because you understand the nature of things, doesn't mean you are suddenly going to have Super-Ultra-Wizard™ experiences. This is true. Having the correct map doesn't automatically let you redraw the landscape. Often the response to being told that "everything is consciousness" is something like "well, why can't I just fly?" - if this is a dream, why can't I just do anything right now? The answer is:

Because it's a dream about being a person in a world made of atoms and gravity.

Everyone is going to have to spend some time changing the formatting of the dream. And in fact, some things may be so ingrained into the foundational pattern of the dream, that you'd have to detach from it and seed another one. The reformatting will itself be effortless (in the sense that you won't be using force to make the changes) but they will still take time (bringing out aspects and refashioning them or more obscure intentions will take take to come via apparent plausible paths).

Actually, that's a good rule to focus on: The spontaneous content of a no-depth world is limited by plausibility from the perspective of the dream character. Anything could happen in the next moment, with no background occurrences leading up to it, however it will always seem plausible-if-unlikely. Only by restructuring the conceptual patterns we have adopted can we allow for increased unlikeliness.

On the first part, certainly - you know my adherence to the felt-sense approach to capturing this.

Effortlessness shouldn't make anyone feel, well, stupid. It's a description of the experience when it happens properly; it's not a chastisement for not being good enough. It's just what we want to shoot for. Because any effort inherently means the retriggering of previous existing patterns - the experience of effort is the experience of reasserting a pattern and then trying to overcome it. So effortlessness is "what doing it right feels like". It will take time to get there, and colloquially we might say that it will "take a lot of work". There are other words we might use: "should not involve using force' and so on, but they all have their baggage.

On the rest - I'm saying that simply recognising it's a dream doesn't mean you can instantly "fly". However, that is the first step to even considering you might make changes. You don't just wait for it (although I think even recognition does soften the habits of reality over time) you can now sift through the patterns or assert new things - it will be "effortless" in the sense that effort you apply will block your progress. It's like asserting being-sat-down while intending to be-stood-up. Opposing directions!

So, "making things plausible" is exactly the approach indeed! :-) That's what all that patterning stuff is about.

Perhaps we need to go into specifics here? Let's stick with the sitting and standing ideas, since the (apparent) body's habits is a good place to experiment.

  • Effortless State Shifting: If I am in the seated position, and I want to stand, I can simply Just Decide or recall into experience the pattern of being-stood-up, and I will translate to that state. However, most people being by re-asserting the being-sat-down state first, and then perhaps assert intermediate stages while holding onto previous states. In this way, the process is experienced as being effortful. If instead one simply asserts the final state, experience moves effortlessly towards it - one they've released a hold on the previous state. Initially, this can take a long time. And since releasing isn't something you "do", the experimenter who tries to work out "how" they did it, can get confused when they try and make it happen again. So this is where spending time explicitly working on held patterns can be good. Because most of us have, over time, got into the habit of continually re-triggering out current state, re-triggering being-a-body-in-'this'-arrangement.
  • Releasing Held Patterns: So, one thing we can do is spend time explicitly releasing-dissolving persistent patterns. That's where Overwriting Yourself and related approaches enter the picture. By lying down on the floor in a fully supported position, and completely letting go of mind, body and attention (letting them roam as they will) we can release ourselves to a fully self-supporting state, and then eventually the "non-pattern" of not actually maintaining a present state at all. This process is not effortful, in the sense that you don't use force and you don't try to push through to a different state (because you will likely begin by reasserting the initial state to do so). Rather, you operate either passively - where you simply allow everything to unfold and settle out in time - investigatively - you go looking for a particular pattern, so arises in awareness, you let it unfold - or active-assertively - in which you assert a state of complete openness, and when the counter-elements to your state arise in awareness, you simply be with them and let them unfold by themselves.

So in both cases (really the same case in different contexts) we spend time to work through our accumulated "facts", but we don't use effort (as in force).

I think you are bringing to it more than I am intending to give from it! Separately from that, of course they are all good points.

I'm not forgetting all the other sense, of course; that's why I often call our experience of the world a "3D-immersive multi-sensory thought". It doesn't matter for this, however: the point is that all experience is intimately close, made as it is from yourself, regardless of the nature of the content. The world's depth has no necessary implication on its ease of change - other than emphasising that everything about the world is, contrary to first impressions, here and now and always. It opens possibilities, but it does not say how exactly they are enjoyed, except that it must be effortless because effort is content and "second-cause" content is not required. It does, however, let you have "right-formatted intention" because your intention is based on the world as it is as an experience, not as you think it to be as a "place". That's not to say it's easy from one's current state to just do anything - of course not! - but the process itself cannot involve effort. Perhaps the main difficulty we all have is ceasing to push and hold on, and with that the fear that goes with completely abandoning everything for a discontinuous change. Even a slight maintaining of a pattern keeps everything in place, right? Hence all that gnosis stuff.

However, we should remember that: Right-experiencing is a value in and of itself. In fact, many if not most traditions don't go beyond this.

I don't think we live in a 3D world. We live in a world with some 3D data in it.

Right. It's the immersive thought that has a spatial component in the experiencing of it. Nothing is actually "located" anywhere except in a relative informational sense, conceptually speaking. This is exactly what I mean by the world not being "spatially-extended". The room next door is not in fact "over there" when you are not having an experience of it.

On depth: The value of it is in the massive expansion of plausibility. Right now, you could open your door and anyone at all could be stood there. There is nothing "happening" outside your experience right now. Nothing at all. The only definite fact is the current sensory "observation", although we have accumulated other contributions too. If one can truly accept that only now is the definite fact, then I feel that this is the most expansive our "plausibility sphere" can be. Again, "effortlessness" is what to shoot for. Yes, in a sense, we do practice and we "do nothing" to make things happen. Hence the Just Decide exercise. The experience should be of things doing it by themselves. Any effort you put in is actually against your goals, because it is a sign you are retriggering the current state and then trying to overcome it.

Of course right-experiencing is a value in and of itself. To literally and directly experience this moment as sensations, perceptions and thoughts floating in consciousness is absolutely important. It shows that the world is... not even subjective. This is both beyond aesthetic (it is the plain reality) and supremely practical (if you are operating from some other basis, you are shackled).

POST: Any tips, tricks or texts on remote viewing?

You should so have let it happen. Well, depending on the target of course.

I'd prefer to avoid the future...

It doesn't necessarily enter determinism as such, right? Only the future as it will be if you don't re-intend it. What you will experience if you don't make changes.

Something to contemplate:

In the old science fiction stories of teleportation, there was the concern that since the original copy of you would be destroyed, and it would be a duplicate that would appear at the destination, you had killed yourself. In this form of teleportation, it is the world that is destroyed and created anew, as you are effectively translating your viewpoint to another position on the 'Infinite Grid'.

Have you ever teleported T-George?

It's (exactly) as if one line of thought starts to fade and another becomes brighter, more immersive, and if you let it fully snap into place, you're there. But this involves the previous scene including your bodily presence fading out and being replaced; your body-experience is part of the environment-experience that changes. This makes sense, since generally you are "viewporting onto" a configuration rather than being a body physically in a place, but -

No, I've not let it follow through either in that way - because it wasn't at all clear that that's all that would shift, right? However the difference is probably one of entering a thought that one comes back from (OBE/LD) vs one you do not; there is a difference, of intent I guess. It may actually be better not to have thought so much about reality. In ignorance, you just have remote viewing and maybe a teleport and are none the wiser. In knowledge, you have to confront the fact that by doing this you are leveraging a different concept of what "the world" even is.

I think experience is self-organising though. There aren't rules, so much as ingrained habits or patterns, which become entangled with one another. Which is why things don't need maintained: experiences arise spontaneously in accordance with the current distribution of activated patterns. What we are doing here, is using the fact that it's possible to intentionally change what patterns are more active. I think the problem isn't so much that you might break habits that you like inadvertently (although this can well happen), it's that the very recognition of the possibility shows you that these habits weren't real in the way you thought they were anyway. Your friends aren't in fact stable consistent separate people with an existence independently of yours; events and people don't even "happen" when you aren't observing them; etc. Your "higher self", then, is just you with a widened POV; there is no-one "doing" anything; widening your POV will certainly give you easier access, the equivalent of extra dimensionality as it were, to go around-through obstacles. But that itself may be an uncomfortable reality breaker for many, who prefer to think in terms of guardian angels and designate some experience accordingly.

The short version is: to use these insights you must effectively commit to the idea that you have a "private copy" of the world.

EDIT: By "you" I don't mean you specially, I mean "we" or "one". Just realised this read like a presentation speech! It's meant as general thoughts I am having.

So yes, it can be said to be self-organizing, I just can't seem to fathom how it possibly organizes.

It's not easy to describe, but I think of it a bit like how layering two patterns over each other combines into a new pattern. Nobody "made" the resulting pattern, it just naturally emerges from the patterns that have been laid down so far. So wherever you look, there's always an experience apparently ready and waiting for you, since that "space" is already occupied by a combination of all the patterns or observations you have accumulated so far (previous events and previous thoughts).

On the one hand, powers are awesome, on the other hand, I know that if I can simply instantly have everything I want then, well oddly enough nothing really changes.

Completely agree - if that's what we would do. But I think what happens is, you start realising that you never really wanted to (say) actually own anything - what you've always wanted is to have certain experiences and not others. So, you don't really want to own a Tesla Roadster, you just want some of the experiences that go with that ("driving a Tesla" not "doing garage maintenance on a Tesla"). You don't really want to be rich, you just want some of the experiences that you think go with it ("not worrying about money", "doing what you want" not "handling investments, avoiding corrupt accountants"). A lot of our desires are about not needing to worry anymore, to feel safe. With this (oneirosophic) understanding of our worlds, that can go away: we can always feel safe (potentially). The most important thing is that by knowing how it works we can avoid accidentally generating experiences that we don't want, and realise that:

All experiences are real-at-what-they-are.

Maybe lucid dreams are a good example of this. In a lucid dream, do we just start summoning various objects and then sit back on our sofa? Do we just go to parties or play golf?

No... just like you say, we go on adventures!

you could practice consciously controlling what you view when you visualize the card or whatever and deciding that is what is out there in the world.

Such a good point. If you think of the facts-of-the-world as the being accumulation of observations so far (and in logical space their implications), then this is about right. When you look at a location in an "undirected" way, it is creation-by-implication - the content of the observation is "filled in" according to whatever patterns are active in that context. If you do so in a "directed" way, which really just means that you are holding a particular pattern in mind when you do the looking, then you are deliberately selecting the content of the observation. Since new observations that are created by implication will always arise in a form coherent with prior observations (the world always "makes sense"), and every new observation re-triggers and entangles prior observations, it's a good idea to take deliberate control of anything important - since revising it later (although possible) is more difficult.

It doesn't matter whether the "observing" is sensory (main experience) or shadow-sensory (thought), they both count as part of the definition of the world, except for the intensity of their contribution.

(Related: All Thoughts Are Facts.)

POST: Are we immune to reductionism just because we like subjective idealism?

I take the view that concepts are always just relative truths?

There's never going to be a description of how things really are, because that already is a description - to describe it would required another description of equal or greater size. We'll never have a TOE as such - because that is basically the definition of a world, and we're surely against such definitions here except as tools? What we can have is a metaphysics where we, say, talk of patterns in the general sense and come up with better ways to lead people direct experiencing.

So reductionism of some sort is inevitable - the difference it that we are not confused into thinking that it corresponds to "the truth". Instead, we might view them as active metaphors: patterns of description which themselves have a shaping power over experience. We are never just explaining something, we are defining it and deforming experience with our concepts - but the subjective idealist is aware of this. They are aware of the impossibility of separating a fact from a description. Meanwhile, all the senses and the felt-sense and spatial-extent and all that, they're the same thing (experiential content) and to focus on any one is to deform experience. It's all-of-a-piece. (Just notice how quickly people knacker their vision by trying to see visuals instead of have perceptions.) But that can't be captured in words, and so the visual sense tends to get used in discussion because it is easiest to describe in language and can be presented in a verbal or literal diagram better than any other, due to the persistence of a visual experience.

I don't think it's an easy way out - it's simply how things are? The nature of experience dictates it. Spatial extent isn't a thickness, it's actually "flat". There are lots of other "depth-type experiences" one can have too, but they are just that again. To be clear though, "the world has no depth" is more about there being nothing "happening" behind what you are experiencing, rather than just the idea that there's no distance between you. It certainly has no spatial extent other than the experiencing of it, but also there is no deeper world in the same way you are experiencing it. It's that old thing of the world not in fact being a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

To reuse a tired analogy:

  • You are watching a TV show. There's a scene of an office. The door opens, and a man walks in. "Elevator was broken, had to walk up the stairs", he announces.

Did he actually walk upstairs? Was there even an elevator beyond that door? In what sense does the man even have a history, in what sense does he "happen", prior to opening the door and you seeing him onscreen? In fact, in what sense are the events after the door opening even "happening"? In what sense is that a man, other than my concept of a man?

So we should definitely look into things deeply, but the way we look into them isn't in the manner of investigating "real world", right?

[The Reframing of "Thickness":] The advantage is that now the thickness is accessible instead of being "out there" beyond reach.

See, I'm not very happy with repurposing the word "thickness" for this. Although there's a natural problem that every word we use will imply a spatial metaphor. What matters is the complexity and entanglement of the patterns; that would perhaps correspond to your use of "thickness". That's why I've turned to phrases such as "patterns" or "accumulated observations" or "dimensionless facts", depending on context, to describe the nature of the world - dissolved into the background awareness. In truth it (the unobserved world) doesn't exist in any way that can be sensorily conceived of; although we can say it is dissolve in the felt-sense perhaps. This means we can jump straight to no longer viewing the world as a "place" in the way we have habitually assumed it to be.

Anyway, as you have indicated, what's important here is that it means all contributing facts are available, here and now. And this means we can "re-observe" things we don't like, and adjust them. Furthermore, we no longer need feel obliged to believe our sensory experiences, or thoughts, since they no longer represent anything; they are simply a reflection, an aspect of, our present extended state.

[A Man Takes The Stairs:] There would be a narrative for what happened while the man was absent. And this narrative isn't something trivial per se.

I think you exactly can adopt the view that there's nothing "behind" your present experience, in the sense of their being an environment that is "happening". You can assert the truth of it until it takes root and you'll find your experience shifts accordingly. And that's a key thing, right? There is no technique. There is no way to do things, or even a possibility of doing things, other than the shifting of state. And the way you change state is... to change state. There's no other way or approach. Questioning things and saying things to involve a state shift to some degree - it's inherent in the experience - and if you kept at it that shift would become stronger and one view would become "brighter" than the others. But it's a long way around?

We're just exchanging different words for the same thing. Some would equate the word "contemplation" with thinking-about, which would be wrong. Some would equate it with maintaining-in-mind, which would also be wrong. But I know what you mean. Your "contemplation" is my asserting of state. And your concerns about contemplating North and South simultaneously corresponds to my example of triggering the state of being-sat-down while asserting being-stood-up.

Again, we still come back to: detaching from one state while bringing another into experience. And since there's no way tell anyone how to recall something, there is no technique, there's not much we can say about it. As our old pal said in The Art of Dreaming:

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

Yes, we may as well stop contemplating physicalism, because you can never "solve" a point of view in order to get to another. We must leave it behind, and adopt a preferable alternative. Only by doing that do we discover if it works - but we have to do so fully, which is not necessarily an entirely comfortable proposition for most/anyone.

How, exactly? That's what's so tricky! Our conversation is an example of that, I suppose. We make a good effort though, I think. :-)

I suggest that all we can do is offer analogies and metaphors, until we come across one that clicks, one that's the nearest to the experience - on a case by case basis. Although we can say what not to do clearly enough. This is an area that requires the experience; just as talking about everything being "consciousness" doesn't really mean much until you've had that experience of openness.

Okay matey. Enjoy your dreaming until next time. But watch out for mountains, please - they sneak up on you. They're much closer than you think! ;-) Cheers for now.

POST: What are some of the implications of personhood having no substance? I'll talk about how I understand this.

Very clear, a good read. I would maybe offer one thought:

In fact, in this very moment, just how many Nefandis live in this very body?

If we were being more precise, might we instead ask:

  • "How many Nefandis (conscious perspectives) are accessing the experience of being that body in those circumstances?"

Because Nefandi isn't "in" a body, it's really that a particular experience has taken shape "within" Nefandi, or rather what-Nefandi-really-is. And that answer would be, any or none - because (to use a poor analogy) the number of viewers watching a TV show is not limited by the show itself, only the number of viewers. An extra answer would be, infinite - because an individual moment of "being a body in the world" exists outside of time. The number of "experiencings" of that moment over all eternity would be uncountable and, essentially, simultaneous. I'm referring to "at time of broadcast" here, to be clear. (The show itself was never made, in a sense it has always existed.)

But then, as the next version of the answer clarifies, since this is outside of time or at least there is no relationship in time - there is no "George watched and then Nefandi watched it" - every program will "eventually have been / has been" seen by everyone. The additional part would be, there aren't any "ones" either because it doesn't make sense to talk of two consciousnesses when they cannot be distinguished between. But that's more something that can't be talked about.

So because we know we can switch, of course we subtly know more than what meets the eye.

Yes. In more practical terms, there is no distinction in type between being able to conceive of something and experiencing it. If you can think of something, then it can become an immersive experience. To know that a TV show exists is to be able (in principle) to be able to seek it out and watch it.

Just because time is endless doesn't necessarily mean you get around to watching everything possible.

Yeah, I always try to tread carefully here. More specifically, I'd say that "every program" that has been conceived of does logically exist (simply be definition). It has therefore in a sense been "seen" (thought of) - but that is not to say it has been "watched" (been adopted as an immersive experience). This is a little hard to talk about because in discussing it we imply an objective view - a space in which "every program" exists. But in truth it is more claustrophobic than that; it's not any program, it's every program that is logically implied by the current state. You can't "see outside" of that - for the attempt to do so creates an "inside" by implication.

Agreed with all. All things are here, now, just in relative states of brightness, different levels of contribution. One's present experience is then the total of all prior "observations" to the extent that they remain active/bright. This understanding is where the hope for deliberately directing one's "reality" comes from - diminish so-called previous observations, introduce new ones, and so on, to "rebalance" reality or simply assert a new pattern. Importantly, it means that the next-moment need not have any logical causal connection with the now-moment - other than that one has conceived of it.

Prior, future, and parallel. :) Not just prior.

Aha, well quite!

So, that's the interesting area: emotional readiness for discontinuous change. I'd equate that "readiness" with a willingness to release a hold on the current experience almost completely?

So, if for convenience we maybe think of "emotional state" as being a collection of bodily sensations, then the only states you will be able to shift to are states which also contain those bodily sensations. No happy states while you are holding onto your sadness, to pick a clumsy example.

Since it seems relevant to the "multiple experiencing" aspect, and it's the closest I've got to writing a description of world-sharing in metaphor:

The Hall of Records

Imagine that you are a conscious being exploring a Hall of Records for this world.

You are connecting to a vast memory bank containing all the possible events, from all the possible perspectives, that might have happened in a world like this. Like navigating through an experiential library. Each "experience" is a 3D sensory moment, from the perspective of being-a-person, in a particular situation.

And there may be any number of customers perusing the records, and any number of customers examining a particular record. So this is not solipsism: Time being meaningless in such a structure, we might say that "eventually" all records will be looked-through, and so there is always consciousness experiencing the other perspectives in a scene.

At the same time, this allows for a complex world-sharing model where influence is permitted, because "influencing events" simply means navigating from one 3D sensory record to another, in alignment with one's intention.

This process of navigation could be called remembering. Practically, this would involve summoning part of a record in consciousness and having it auto-complete by association. This would be called recall. You can observe something like this "patterned unfolding" occurring in your direct conscious experience right now. You are not even the person you are experiencing, you are simply looking at this particular series of event-memories, from this particular perspective. "Reality-shifting" means to decide to recall a memory that is not directly connected to this one.

POST: Subconscious mind is helpful and problematic for the same reason.

On the "effortless" thing:

...the way in which things are "effortless" is more in the sense of alignment of intention, lack of tension cause by asserting contrary states, and the sign of this alignment is effortlessness. Like the alternative term "non-doing", it is easily misunderstood as meaning not participating at all; people think "it happens by itself" is a sign to wait around, because you can't easily describe intending. [1]

Practically speaking, it is meant as a description of using end-state intention and allowing-unfolding, rather than simultaneously intending the end-state while reasserting the state-state or intermediate states. The common examples are intending being-standing-up, while intending the process getting-up-from-sitting (creates conflict). Or trying to solve an intellectual problem by intending it-being-solved while continually revisiting the it-being-a-problem state, and so never letting the pattern make the transition.

Unfortunately, it (effortlessness and non-doing) really doesn't make a lot of sense to someone until they've had the experience, like a lot of the things we discuss here.

[1] Although actually, if you use the patterning description of experience, you can lead people to be able to assert end-states using their imagination in a way that makes sense and can be discussed. You can lead them to non-doing, although in my experience in most cases it has to be done in person, as you kinda feel your way through the explanation.

So do you mean in the sense that you have a "knowingness" that whatever you intend is going to manifest because your subconscious mind and/or universe works towards aligning with your intent, therefore you comfort your anxiety through this knowledge?

Sort of.

Remember: The universe is dead. Only you are alive. All time is now. It is you who scan your attention across the pre-existing moments.

When you intend something, the update is immediate: it is immediately true, incorporated into the pattern of the world. Your attention just hasn't got to that moment yet. So the reason to accept and know that "it is done" is because that's the truth, and so you don't then re-update the world into another state through further meddling due to doubt. Literally, everything that arises in your awareness is a direct interaction with the world, as the world. Passing thoughts indicate the current state of it (they are it). Deliberate intentions-thoughts define the current state of it.

POST: Can abstract dualistic matter exist?

[POST]

I'm reading through the Three Dialogues and got past the bits about the impossibility of abstraction, but I didn't feel like I grokked it, or that abstraction was given due diligence. I also feel like matter is too often dismissed in the book simply because the sensory experience of it is contingent on the mind. Let's pretend that we live in a dualistic universe. Let's pretend it's just you, me, and a single other piece of matter to observe. To really simplify things, the only thing that we can observe is this piece of matter, and we can't observe it from other perspectives... because we're tied to rocks in Plato's cave. This piece of matter works like a function of both its own properties and the properties of the observers. When the piece of matter is observed from my perspective, it outputs a "0" and I experience that "0". When it's observed from your perspective it outputs a "1" and you experience a "1". So our experience of this dualistic object is contingent on our own mind, as well as its own spooky properties. This is analogous to me and a dog looking at a rainbow, and each of us seeing different colors. I know nothing about the structure of this matter, except that it imposes consistent sensory experiences on an observer relative to its own properties and the properties of the observer's mind. f(own_properties, observers_properties) = experience!!!!
Isn't there about as much reason to suppose this matter exists as there is that our sensory experiences are contingent on a greater god-mind?

[END OF POST]

I'd say your story already begs the question; it presumes the existence of something and then creates an image based on that something, in an attempt to prove or disprove it. Some thoughts:

  • In what way do we ever experience matter?
  • How exactly would the boundary between matter and mind be breached? How would they interact with one another?
  • How can something have properties other than those that arise in experience? Where do those properties exist?

Certainly we can conceptualise additional objects and patterns and properties to form an explanatory link between observations, but they belong to mind and arise in experience too, and don't belong to some external thing (except as the concept of "an external thing"). In other words, matter "exists" only as a fictional story to connect sensory experiences. Unwitting reification of abstractions is one of the worst habits we can have.

EDIT: The additional part is that what we call "observations of objects" are themselves collections of ideas and their extended patterns.

A Reformulation

Perhaps you should reformulate your question, which is in fact:

  • "Is it possible for me to have experiences as if there was such a thing as matter?"

The answer is, "yes".

Then you should ask:

  • "Does that mean there exists such a thing as matter, other than my conception of it?"

The answer is, "no".

One of the problems with personal experience is that it has the property of aligning with our current worldview. The fact is, that if you adopt almost any philosophical position, you will start to experience the world as if it were true. Only by personal experimentation can you demonstrate this to yourself. If you genuinely adopted the notion that only mind exists, your thoughts and experiences would quite quickly fall into line with that view. But that makes us ask: what is the "real, essential truth" then?

The Truth(s)

For the sake of discussion, and simplifying by division, we might say there are three types of truth:

  • Direct Truth - The immediate experience you are having right now, without analysis. The only definite fact is the content of your experience at this moment.
  • Conceptual Truth - The is the 'truth' of having a self-consistent conceptual framework which we use to describe the world. This does not necessarily have many contact points with direct truth; it can be a 'castle in the sky'. The more contact points, though, the better.

Since the content of direct experience is changing all the time, and content of conceptual experience is arbitrary, then neither can be the fundamental truth. The absolute truth must be unchanging.

  • Absolute Truth - The only definite truth is that experience is being experienced. In other words, that you exist and "are". Essentially, this is consciousness. It is the only certainty.

So all truths apart from this one will in fact be relative truths. "Matter" is a conceptual truth, a self-consistent framework, but one with minimal touch-points to direct truth because it supposed an external view beyond what is possible to experience directly. There are in fact many ways a world can conceptualised in any number of equally coherent ways. But none of those ways are "out there" in reality, they are "in here" in thought.

The Conceptual Question

Finally, let me suggest a way to tell whether a conceptual framework is approximating direct truth, rather than simply being a connective fiction:

  • If when thinking of your conceptual truth, you see it from an objective, 3rd-person view, the "view from nowhere" - then you are immediately wrong, and all that your are imagining in that view is a complete fiction disconnected from direct reality.

It would be an interesting exercise for you to pause right now, and think about "matter" and how it interacts with personal experience. Probably you have some sort of vague imagery that appears in your mind at that point, perhaps a little illustration or diagram or example. You should write down a description of that imagery.

...

What do you mean "who am I"?

I'm simply presenting the common argument that is used, the logic supporting that position. The basis is that anything that has ever been observed interacting has had a commonality. If instead of "interact" we say "push against one another" then it becomes clearer. Only things which share a common property can push against one another, otherwise: what is pushing against what?

(If there is no commonality, then you have to propose an intermediate processes which contains aspects of both and acts as a bridge between the two - but then you have implied there must be an additional type which underlies that, something which underlies mind, matter and the bridge.)

So we end up eventually with the idea that matter must have a mind-aspect or mind must have a matter-aspect. Since we only ever observe mind, then it would seem that matter must have a mind-aspect. Furthermore, since we could never observe a non-mind-aspect of matter, it exists only in our concepts. Effectively them, observable matter = mind. Hence, there is only mind.

The short version is: Anything you can't directly experience, is something you are inferring, and cannot prove the existence of - you can only demonstrate the usefulness of it as a fictional concept.

The even shorter version: Matter is not impossible, but it is perhaps pointless!

I reckon that if we keep going at it, what we'll discover is that we do agree entirely, it's just that we're cutting up the world differently; our experiences are the same, we're just categorising them into parts in different ways. :-)

To wrap up a couple of stray points and go around one more time for fun:

  • I'd suggest that in order to recognise that two things are affecting one another, a commonality has by definition been established of some sort. Even if that commonality is simply that they are (say) both "patterns in consciousness" in the same way as there is commonality between "folds in a blanket".
  • We can have commonality without cause and effect. In fact, I don't believe cause and effect is a very good model; I think it's better described as an account with partial observations of a larger pattern, etc.

We probably have to define what we mean by "exist" to get any further. It does depend on the level at which we're talking. If I'm saying matter is essentially a concept to us, does that mean matter doesn't exist or cannot exist? That's a reasonable question. (The other was "does it matter?", pun-fully, which speaks to my short version!)

Concepts do "exist" as concepts, as thought-patterns. And one could look upon our ongoing sensory experience as an "immersive thought". And so experiential patterns are themselves "concepts" or "collections of ideas" in Berkeley-speak. So "matter" does exist as a concept-idea and one which is experienced in a way... but only in the same way as "a vase" exists and is experienced, which is only as a concept-idea... and which is associated with certain sensory patterns, which are also concept-ideas. And so on.

We are left with: okay, it turns out that everything exists at least as concept-ideas, so what are concept-ideas made from? And the answer is something like "awareness" or "consciousness" or "experiencing" or... mind.

So again we're back to a commonality, and to mind. But it's a commonality in the sense of different folds, as concept-idea patterns, belonging to the same blanket, as mind.

POST: Oneirosophic music that cultivates the feeling of lucidity.

Nice selection. Music, yes, completely. Oneirosophic Soundtracking™. Coincidentally, I was already listening to Boards of Canada's The Campfire Headphase when I clicked on the link - I find their stuff and Plaid quite good for background mood-setting. Also some Moderat/Apparat remixes:

Seamonkey - Moderat
Tomorrow - Ladytron (Apparat Remix)
A New Error - Moderat
Milk - Moderat

Yeah, I like Moderat, their Bad Kingdom video is one of my favourites in the last few years. Those were quite pleasant. Remind me a bit of classic atmospheric drum 'n' bass like Omni Trio's The Haunted Science album - dreamlike with a persistent beat, good for traveling. Kinda stripped down and without much in the way of effects. EDIT: And liked that last video.

Organic, yes. Really I think there is a sweet spot where drum and bass, atmospheric electronic, and hip hop meet up. Things that are "soundtracky" in particular.

...

The Devin Townsend "drone" albums are good - thanks for the tip! If The Field's Sound of Light EP, which was meant as a soundtrack for Stockholm's Nordic Light Hotel, was less relentlessly intense, it would be like that. And I agree with the Terence Malick and Into Great Silence, particularly. The latter really puts you somewhere else.

POST: Dreams, Subconscious and the Goetia

In subjective idealism, all demons are "you". As is everything else you experience. (Using the word "thing" is perhaps slightly problematic, since it is often taken to imply an "out there" spatially extended place with objects in it, that are "happening and unfolding in time, but we'll let that pass.)

So you can make up anything you want and have it behave however you want, potentially. If you choose to imagine that there are demons and they do such things, then you will have experiences "as if" that is true. You'd have to actually define what you mean by "subconscious" and "greater collective subconscious" to go further than that, within a larger context. Here, I would suggests that "subconscious" is just a word for all logically sensible patterns which are activated to a greater or lesser degree within your perspective. "Conscious" is the brightest pattern at this moment, obscuring the other patterns (think: the sun shining in the daytime sky, obscuring the stars but the stars are still there). "Greater collective subconscious" would mean all patterns in logical space, full stop (think: all possible locations in the sky where a star could be).

[have it behave however you want.] Not if you imagine it has some independence or free will.

I would count that as part of the original "imagining" though. You should be careful and specific, definitely. Certainly, once you've set something in motion, it can (apparently) be operating under its own steam. Although I would view this as the pattern of that thing being overlaid upon subsequent experience. The problem is that this happens "by implication" or association.

For instance, you summon a particular Greek hero for his strength and wit, knowing it's "all you", but forgetting that doing so also triggers all the associated patterns, and you subsequently find your music tutor dead with a lyre embedded in his head.

POST: The Mental Tendency of Preferring Multiplayer

In discussions elsewhere about subjective reality and influencing reality, a concern that comes up again and again is that doing so implies that other people won't be "real", or at least not independent. (The other version is where it's assumed that they are "real" now but that the act of making change will mean they won't be the same people afterwards.)

This "peopleness" issue might well be one of the main problems for accomplishing unusual things, and explain the "urge to forget" that occurs after spontaneous unusual experiences. For instance, witnessing objects vanish and reappear may seem like a small glitch of no consequence - but in the back of your mind you follow through the implications: that the world is not solid, stable, reliable, but instead flexible, randomised and arbitrary. If that can happen to objects, then it implies that perhaps any fact-of-the-world at all could change on a whim, including those relating to people. Maybe this is why it's often only under extreme and desperate circumstances that reality-shifts are experienced.

The world is dead independently of us, only we breathe life into it. Perhaps this is a fear of loneliness? Perhaps that's why we invented a world with imaginary friends in the first place?

Q1: The world is dead independently of us, only we breathe life into it. Perhaps this is a fear of loneliness? Perhaps that's why we invented a world with imaginary friends in the first place?
One of my earliest experiences with anything I'd call oneironautical was meditating in a dark room after having eaten four grams of dried Gymnopilus luteoviridis. The hallmark of the experience was an overwhelming, metaphysical, inescapable sense of loneliness. It was like masks had been pulled off of everyone I'd ever known (or could ever know) and they were all just reflections of my self, devoid of any -genuine- otherness. And that devastated me to such a degree that I decided, "There's a very good reason I decided to be a human. Realizing you're It is not fun. It's way more fun to be a human." And I stopped meditating or doing drugs or contemplated anything important for... months, definitely. Maybe upwards of years. I wasn't ready for that at all. And it didn't just mean that I wasn't open to that realization. It pushed me, repelled me backward, stunted my progress, took me out of the game for a long time. Cultivating your sensibilities, molding your desires and tendencies, and learning how to subtly establish your own, internal sense of validity (i.e. some kind of ultimate Otherness is not necessary for something to be just as valid as you feel it to be right now) is one of the absolute most important aspects of spiritual progress IMO. Maybe the most important.

I think /u/3man had a similar drug-related experience, but it was more of the sort of a character telling you how it is; he felt the potential horror of everyone just being our puppets too. Can't find the link right now. Yes, I think that having a right worldview, and a shifted perspective of what "meaning and purpose" are, is required before being fully exposed to this. For instance, many people's response to the oft-banded theories that "this is a simulation" is that it would make their lives pointless. Similarly, people who accidentally have lucid dreams and just wake themselves up because "it's just a dream". They rarely seem to interrogate the underlying assumption, the assumption that things "being made from atoms" is somehow inherently more meaningful than things being made from information or dream-stuff. Are solids more meaningful than gases? Are rocks more meaningful than oxygen?

If a person hasn't addressed these things, then even straightforward philosophical idealism will be problematic for one's identity.

cosmicprankster420: To me the whole point of oneirosophy and lucidity is to have the freedom to create any kind of experience you want for yourself not to come to some ultimate realization that this is all some kind of solipsistic nightmare that we are trying to forget. You are making the mistake of assuming there is some kind of ultimate reality, but the way I see it is that neither the realm of otherness or the realm of just me ness are ultimately real. To say that one realm Is the real one and one is illusory creates a kind of objectivity because in order for something to be real something has to be unreal and vice versa. I was definitely going under the solipsism trip for awhile but I then realized if everything is subjective and not ultimately real then solipsism isn't real either. I think what our mental tendency actually is, is having a kind of foundational primary worldview in which everything stems from. To me being an oneirosopher is about being a kind of metaphysical nomad moving effortlessly from one type of dream to another via there lucidity and if you are stuck in one type of dream like atheism, Christianity, or the case of solipsism then you have actually lost some of your lucidity. It is realizing that if nothing is real then nothing is unreal either. The idea that everything is lifeless hologram under your control is no more or less valid then a world of otherness and others the former is simply more practical when it comes to controlling things. But if we say that one type of experience is real (being the only thing that exists) and one type of experience is unreal (there are other independent minds out there) then we are actually disempowering ourselves in terms of creating the types of dreams we want because what if we really want to create a dream where other independent minds exist, if everything is just us are we not able to or allowed to create that kind of dream? That's limitation to me paradoxically. I think instead of trying to come to some ultimate realization we need to learn how to switch back and forth at will from these perspectives because both the everything is me perspective versus the there are things independent of me perspective both have their own uses, but we should be very careful about fully commiting ourselves to one dream to the point that we forget we have a choice.

Yeah, the only "ultimate realisation" is surely that there is no fixed truth in terms of content. No content-based realisation is ultimate. I think people sometimes confuse "nothing is real" with saying that experience is hollow, that there's no aliveness. But that's misinterpreting it as " 'nothing' is what is real", that reality is nothing. In fact, if you-as-consciousness is shaped into the experience of being a body in a world with other people, then all of that is alive, is intelligent, formed from your aliveness and intelligence.

So oneirosophy becomes the recognition of the ability of whatever-you-are to take on the "as if" experience of any relative truth.

cosmicprankster420: misinterpreting it as " 'nothing' is what is real".
thread closed

POST: I've learned how to wake up, but I'm too afraid to do it

It doesn't mean loss of identity - it means recognition of identity and context. It's like you've been watching a TV show all your life, confusing yourself with one of the characters - and then one day you relax, your attention opens up, and you discover you're actually a guy on a sofa in a nice apartment holding a TV remote. And you always were that guy.

Now, that initial opening up might be uncomfortable; it'll feel very exposing at first, but that's just like how tight muscles are uncomfortable when you first unclench them. It's just like a lucid dream: you realise you are dreaming, and then your realise that this means the "you" that is dreaming is not the dream-body or perspective, it is the whole "space" in which the dream experience arises. The experience of awakening in a lucid dream is truly freeing and exhilarating. For starters, you understand that your intentions have global effect, not just local body-movement effect. When you decide to go to the grocery store, it isn't that you bodily move there - rather, the whole dream shifts towards the experiential state of "you-being-at-the-store". Meanwhile, it's incorrect to say that the dream "happens" at all. Nothing is "happening" while you are not experiencing it, although we infer it must have from our observations. Reality isn't this other thing that does stuff, like it has a separate intelligence operating independently of you. That's too movie-ish.

Short version: You don't need to worry.

Q1: Hey, George, I've been reading your theory on so many occasions now and I'm grateful that you keep sharing it.
Something is kind of itching me though, and I would like to directly address it.
"Reality isn't this other thing that does stuff, like it has a separate intelligence operating independently of you." - that, and other such ideas, imply that the whole world is "my dream". Okay, maybe we could say that, but then why does this dream follow it's own routes in so many occasions? For example, I would like to have this monetary system off the table, and have all the people on planet Earth to be conscious, generous and kind towards everyone and everything. I would like to have my country run by strong people who really do well for it. I would like to have us able to travel in space right now.
Why are these wishes not true already? Why does it even seem that it could be the exact opposite coming to reality? Is it my fault or is this way of thinking just a kind of mental disorder?
Please, clarify! I bet you know what I'm talking about. :)

Hey! Getting straight to the important stuff, I see! So I suppose we should start with a question: Why do you expect that those wishes should be true already?

Q1: Because in my dreams things change instantly "on demand". Let's say this "physical" world might have a bit of delay in manifesting desires, partly because we have too many of them and have a hard time focusing. Maybe that is one of the reasons things are so messed up - because we don't really know how we want them to be? You have said about the various patterns which "reality" manifests and I agree with that theory, but what if my desire is to remove some of those patterns entirely? Anyway, how long do you expect that it should take to manifest if I intend those wishes right now? The current situation shows that it might take a bit too long, if it ever does happen, and I might not even be alive to see some of the manifestations. What if my intention is to have all of this in a few, three to four years max

Well, this world has been around a lot longer than most of your dreams, and has become pretty stable - although you can create persistent dream realms and you'll find they operate very much like this one. You can indeed have on-demand changes though; any delay is due to "plausibility", related to the form of your intention, and that's something you could work on by examining your ideas of what the world is. (Just because you accept it's a dream, doesn't mean you've dispensed with the idea that it's still a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" of some sort.)

Meanwhile, to remove a pattern completely, you need to remove all "amplitude" from it, but it's generally easier to abandon something and switch to a replacement, just as in a lucid dream you'll tend to open a door to a new scene, rather than morph the current scene. Anyway, as to your "wishes"...

How exactly have you gone about wishing for things so far?

Q1: So far I have put myself in a workplace where, although I spend quite a lot of my time, my work would bring those wishes closer to reality. I'm actually in a position where my influence could greatly expand, thus even further manifestation could occur. However, some things seem to be beyond my control, like what the EU, USA, Russia and such "great powers" decide for our globe. So far I've gone about wishing for their powers to be more and more diminished and their influence over people and reality itself to be lesser and lesser. I've just been intending that my country (somewhere in the Balkans) be too far away from their clenches, thus being able to become an independent, sovereign power. Still, not long ago, NATO put even more military strength around here, which seems to be quite the contrary to what I wished for. Also, the public seems quite powerless to all this, and this is also contrary to what I wished for. Perhaps my "wishing" has been not specific or ritualistic enough? I've read about the dimensional jumping, perhaps I should jump to a dimension where these wishes are closer to reality? Can I just jump to a dimension where they are already true?

The problem with these "wishes" is that they can be outside of your daily experience - and what your life is, is experiences and that's the key to selecting things. You have to identify what the actual end-state experience is that you actually desire. Vague notions of things often aren't helpful and can be contradictory. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For instance, your country becoming a sovereign state may necessitate NATO preventing other movements during the events of the transition phase. There is going to be a transition in time between this-state and the end-state. It also matters how you conceive of the world. If you really think that the EU, USA, Russia are "out there" and that they "happen" unseen, then that can be problematic. Those ideas become part of your intending if you "wish" in terms of those assumptions.

All of this is why manifestation approaches tend to, in some form or other, advocate deciding on the desire and then having faith and forgetting about it, by which they really mean do not define or interfere with the apparent means by which the desire manifests. Meanwhile, the so-called "jumping" approach will give you all the same problems if you don't have the formulations down pat; it's really just an active metaphor to allow yourself to let the world-pattern shift more drastically, it's a decision that it's "okay" if things change discontinuously.

So... make it specific in terms of an end-state and how it would actually be experienced. All manifestation must be about subjective experience, because that's all there is. Maybe pick one single thing and focus on that first?

...

A1: How are you going to wake up?

A2: He'll dream he woke up.

POST: All the Feels (Are Yours; Act Like It!)

Something that can be helpful: viewing bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings as part of the world rather than part of "you".

If what you (as consciousness) are having right now is an experience of being-a-person-in-a-world, then your preferences (which really about to feeling-states) are just part of that world-experience. Just because that part is closer to where you've typically narrowed your attention, doesn't mean that it is more "you" than other parts of the world. This leads us (hopefully) to identifying with the background space which takes on the shape of experience, rather than identifying with the experience itself. (Yes, they are the same thing, but the context is unchanging whilst the content is ever evolving.) It is much easier to detach, modify, release something when we aren't grasping onto it as part of our identity.

My garden is blossoming with purple trees, obviously.

Q: ==It is much easier to detach, modify, release something when we aren't grasping onto it as part of our identity.??
Actually two conditions need to be satisfied:
It's not part of your identity and it's within the scope of volition.
It's a bit of a contradiction, because we consider the so-called "external" world to not by part of our personal identity by convention, but because it's also considered to be outside the scope of volition, it's not easy to modify directly by will.
In other words, while whatever you want to modify shouldn't be what you are, it should be your emanation/imagination/activity, etc.

Yes. In easy imagery, I see it as not "standing on" the particular fold of the "reality blanket" that you are intending to move. But you have to see that the fold is within you and therefore accessible, without it being you and therefore not movable.

We can easily fall into language that has come to imply the opposite of what we mean. For instance, to make ourselves understood we might talk about how "everything is internal" - in order to dispel the idea that there is an "outside". But really we mean there is neither internal nor external, or at least that those are artificial divisions which divide a whole into parts arbitrarily. The use of internal-external then leads to misunderstandings on what subjective idealism would mean, assumptions of solipsism and so on, all based on trying to think of one perspective through the lens of another. And so on. There's a common thing where an idea is accepted partially, in such a way as to be "made safe" and less radical. One example is that Neville Goddard's instructions on revising the past are interpreted psychologically rather than literally, or with new-age swirlings about releasing emotional energy and so on. It's only half the message with the other half replaced by something more comforting, less philosophically disturbing.

Physicalists love your post.

"Materialists just won't believe number 4 on this list!"

POST: Techniques are a double-edged sword.

I guess that if you think of a technique as a straight up pattern-activation - using what's currently prominent a bridge, like triggering one memory via another by association - then it doesn't seem so bad. It's a way to get to an experiential result without having to detach from everything in order to create it discontinuously. While there is no technique to intending itself, getting to a result by intending the starting point of a chain of activation seems valid to me - and can be used in innovative ways.

Yes, totally, particularly if one particular pattern becomes too "bright" and dominant, obscuring others. Since everything is "us", then all technique and cause-effect is fakery. So I tend to think that any move away from a "taking on the shape" approach (no cause-effect, we shift ourselves as ourselves as a whole), by identifying with one part of ourselves and using it to try and operate on another part, tends to intensify division. By using tools, we withdraw ourselves from the target - but being the target is exactly how to make deeper progress.

On the other hand, representational approaches (attaching meaning-patterns to objects and then creating experiences involving the objects) can be fun and easy and does get to the heart of treating all experience as a dream environment, where anything can mean or do anything.

Q: [Deleted]

Good analysis - the problem of Second Cause in a nutshell. The confusion of association (linking of memories) with causation.

Yes, "being the target" isn't easy; even the phrase already implies a division. The only way that seem to work is to "stop generating". In other words, cease maintaining division. Even the direct approach of "becoming" requires that. Detachment and intention all over again.

That's how I interpret the situation.

A better interpretation is: there is no "way" to do this, so there's nothing for me to say.

Whatever I might say, would be a description of a technique. There are no doors or way to make it easier, because it isn't hard or easy. In truth, I wrote everything I had to say about it around 7 months ago and 4 months later. Anything else is really just a reformulation into different language, the creation and application of different metaphors, which might generate fresh ideas for experiential direction, but none of which change the underlying message.

Q: [Deleted]

Sorry, I got distracted by my own typing there: expand on that ignoring or running away from subjectivity? Something I've noticed repeatedly: being all too willing to be distracted from settling into that.

I knew that. I still think there are things to say.

Yeah, I agree that it's about removing obstructions. But how are they removed? By the same non-way approach of intention. There are always things to say, because the total pattern is always changing in terms of distribution, but there's nothing that can be said about intending and "the truth" except saying that it is not doing and not this or that. There are infinite ways to not-say-it though. :-)

Cheeky on the criticising=technique! ;-) Now, I don't say anything can't be done, but by that I mean that I don't believe there is anything that cannot be experienced, so I'm really talking about "the experience of doing". Which would be Second Cause again...

Do you figure your contemplation will change at some point?

Well, the underlying thing of it I don't see changing (which amounts to a not-this), but everything else will definitely right? And subjectivity is a good one: there's that whole thing of realising that for there to be a notion or experience of being subjective in one way, that's not being subjective in another way. If it is discerned at all, then there is somewhat of a division or contrast in experience. So yeah, you're spot on that the style of contemplation will change quite dramatically, because even to look at something is to have it shift by the looking. I think that just knowing this means it's more of an "exploring possible experience adventure" rather than an "uncovering of fundamental truth" though?

I don't care about a fundamental truth. Not anymore. I want a powerful and useful truth. Useful to me and powerful for me.

Right - and this speaks to your other comment too, which I found really evocative of a certain struggle that goes with this territory.

I suspect a lot of us (naturally) get into this looking for some ultimate knowledge, something that can be discovered and seen and used - a "thing". Then eventually, it a cliche, but we find that it was here along along and that, so obvious, it must be everything and everywhere already. As you seem to have, I spent a lot of time wrestling with should about "me" and tried to manipulate it into a certain way, relative to a world, to overcome boundaries and all that.

But then, if I instead view everything as "experiences", and that the experience of being me "comes-with" a world, I realise I don't need to worry about boundaries or separation. I view it that I am having the experience (taking on the shape) of being-a-person-in-a-world, and that "the world" is a state that includes all of this. Spontaneous body and thought experiences arise from and are part of the world, a continuous pattern, and reveal its present state. Intention-imagination is then the act of directly being and modifying the distribution of patterns that constitute that world. There's no room for "me" at all, in one sense; I don't need to worry about it.

No, the world isn't a ground of experience. By "world" remember that I don't mean a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time"; I mean something more like the current state or pattern of your present experience. To leave the world would be to allow those constituent patterns to fade, and others to become brighter and more dominant. Essentially, there is no world other than the experiencing of it (of course), but it's usually to have some way of referring to the present state.

There is no room for anything other than "me." What isn't my choice? I can't find it.

If it's all you or there's no you, it amounts to the same result. No division, no (apparent) existence.

Oh, I'm not claiming any definition is "the ground of experience". There is no "ground" except in the sense that experience is "made from" consciousness-that-is-me or whatever. I'm just suggesting that repartitioning our idea of person-and-world can be helpful. More later.

Q: [Deleted]

Hmm, I was talking structure there, but yes the "fundamental" is will/being/potential and all that stuff - the attributes of a "something" that can become anything. Y'know, God. Yes, I'll sign your bible if you want.

The world is my Bible, Nefandi. I've noticed you reading it on a daily basis, which is great. Not that you have any choice of course. I'm here for all eternity, so do tell you your friends - thank you and good night! ;-)

...

A1: In other words, cease maintaining division.
I very much like this phrasing.
Edit: Jives with my model of experience that I base off of the Hindu trinity. All of experience is creation, maintenance and destruction (actually transformation). I find this to be a nifty way to view things. Creation can be seen as the intending, maintenance as the confidence or knowledge of one's intention as truth, and destruction as detachment or the act of experiencing truth.

Ah, interesting about the trinity. Particularly specifying "maintenance", which is usually hard to incorporate into a model. I've tried to push away from those divisions too by having all possible patterns pre-existing, and varying only in their levels of contribution - their "intensity". This means that creation, maintenance and destruction are just the experience of redistribution, and intending is the act of reshaping that distribution (by activating or "recalling" a particular pattern into prominence). It makes it clear to me that everything is a shifting of experience; nothing is made or destroyed; it's always transformation and transformation is actually mundane. But of course, it's yet another way of chopping up the same thing into different language!

Yes I can see that too, all being transformation. I find chopping it up to make it more digestible.

I think the benefit of the approach of this subreddit is, we can feel free to use whatever "chopping-up" feels appropriate at the time. Freed from concerns about being "right", we can adopt whatever view is the most useful for our purpose. Your trinity description has the definite benefit of being static - you can hold the concept in your mind and refer to it easily without having to "run" it mentally - whereas the shifting-transformations description is dynamic, so a bit slippery for everyday use maybe. (I'll be adding it to my armoury!)

POST: A question about tables

I suppose we would have to start by tackling what we mean by "yourself", "outside" and "tables". Basically, we have to begin by discussing the nature of experiencing itself.

Eventually, we'd get to something like: what "you" are, is subjectivity; there is no outside to subjectivity; all possible forms can be thought of as being "dissolved" within subjectivity like patterns at different relative intensities of contribution; a perception of the table is the table, or rather a direct sensory aspect of it; there is no need for an independent "feed" and in fact this would be nonsensical; our subjectivity "takes on the shape of" states and experiences and is not separate from them. Furthermore, we would have to address the possibility that the world-as-it-is is not necessarily of the same "format" as sensory experience - in other words, it is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Spatial extension and context, and change, are aspects of experiences rather than aspects of the world as such. Only "experiencing" happens; the world does not "happen". And so on. There is no contradiction, I suggest.

The first two parts imply that our purely-subjective sense-inputs are...

In your reading of the first two statements, you have presumed such a thing as "sense inputs". The notion of "inputs" of course implies an external world - but that is begging the question. In your current experience of this moment, can you identify any "sensory inputs"?

The most consistent explanation would be that there is some external "it"... Though how exactly that happens is subjective, yes.

If there were an external "it" - what would it be external to? And could we ever ascertain whether something was being caused by an external "it" versus that something arising purely internally? Do we ever in fact experience anything external, other than as a thought about something being external (a thought which of course arises internally)?

An additional line of questioning would focus on what the "stuff" of the external would be made from. In order to interact with the internal, would it not have to be made of the same "stuff" as the internal?

I suggest that we aren't dealing with "sensory inputs" here; there is no "outside" to experiencing. I also suggest that it's vital that we note the difference between attending to our experience and thinking about our experience. It is very easy to build "castles in the sky" which are self-consistent and so "make sense" when we think of them, but in fact do not correspond to the structure of our ongoing moment as it is experienced. These "parallel constructions in thought" have an inherent problem: they arise within experience and so cannot capture experience. It's like trying to build a sandcastle which accurately models both "the whole beach" and also "sand". If one is not careful, one ends up making a partial duplicate of another sandcastle and calling it "the beach" or "sand", when it is neither (but also, somewhat ironically, both).

I think believing you are everything you experience is nonsensical.

It is not a belief. It is, finally, a direct observation, from which follows a self-consistent description. Whether that description seems nonsensical or not, depends on that platform from which you think about it. For starters, as I indicated in my first response, it matters somewhat what you consider to be "you". The thinking that occurs within one "castle" does not necessarily translate - often cannot be translated to - the thinking which occurs in another. They are, however, self-consistent within their own perspective. In the end, then, the reason to go for "B" is that direct observation does not in fact support "A". Never having observed an external world, and discovering no edges to one's experience, the only possible conclusion is that the world is entirely within experience, which is you, and is entirely made from experience, which is also you. A coherent description can then be built - in fact, many can be built - from that starting point, each with their benefits as relative truth, while only the observable nature of experiencing itself is held as the fundamental truth. [1]

Aside: There's not much point in quoting stretches of philosophical writings. What matters is how you are bringing their insights - or rather, your interpretation of their insights - to bear on the discussion you are having. I can copy-paste you a whole load of Kant if you like, but I don't see how that furthers a discussion?
__
[1] Please note that kicking a stone is no refutation.

Don't be silly.

That's not very helpful. My point was that just quoting doesn't engage the points raised, as they were raised and in the context they were raised. It's not a discussion. My "kicking a stone" comment was fairly obviously a gently playful allusion to that. No spaghetti monsters involved.

Subjective interpretation is indeed undeniable.

Do you not mean to say that subjective experience is undeniable?

What you are interpreting is most simply explained by the external.

I don't think it is. Now, you may have an "instinctual belief" in an external world, but many do not, after attending directly to their experience, and find reason to question it. And I don't agree that an "instinctual belief" in something is, of itself, any reason to refrain from exploring parallel constructions. No justification at all is required to do so, other than curiosity. Beyond that, the benefits of a parallel construction will likely only become apparent after it has been constructed.

"can never be any reason for rejecting one instinctive belief except that it clashes with others"

I would disagree. See above. There is no reason at all to commit to a single view - besides lack of interest or curiosity. In fact, the recognition of an instinctual belief may itself be the motivation for putting it aside and seeking alternatives. You realise it's just a "castle in the sky", suggesting there are other such "castles" to be constructed and explored. You seem to be implying that an alternative construction, based around a purely subjective view, could not allow for "a harmonious, complex system..."? Why do you think that? (Of course, a "purely subjective view" isn't a subjective view at all, since there is no subjective/objective dichotomy. There is just "the context of experience".)

POST: Lucid Dreaming Question Which Pertains To Reality

Basically, the only "correct" or fundamental truth is that "there is an experience that is being experienced" - made up from sensations, perceptions and thoughts (which are really of the same nature: "awareness"). This is the context of experience. Beyond that, all content of experience is relatively true only. There is no "how things really are" behind the scenes; there is no "how things work". In fact, there is no "behind the scenes". What there is, in effect, is experiential patterns within your subjective perspective. And since it is you-as-awareness that "takes on the shape of" these patterns, then by shifting your own shape you shift the formatting of your experience. So that's probably the two main truths, really the only ones and the same one actually:

  • The "nature of experiencing", which corresponds to the true nature of "you" - context;
  • The implications of this for the structuring of your experience, and how it can be re-patterned or reformatted - content.

If we conceive of the latter as amounting to a set of "facts" corresponding to the sum of all intentions so far (and their implications), then we have a better idea of how to think about "lucid dreaming" and "how it operates".

POST: How to start? Or maybe not.

Oneirosophy is less of a concrete path and more a topic of study.

Quite so. And as you point out, the reading list is intended to raise questions - it simply points out possible texts for contemplation across a range of areas - rather than provide answers.

...just an inability to read the sidebar/faq is all.

As more and more people use the Reddit app, the tendency of people not to read the sidebar - or even know that there is such a thing as a sidebar - is becoming a problem for more nuanced subreddits everywhere, I think. It's not necessarily the user's fault; the app is just a bit of a crap design generally. One approach is to make a sticky which contains the text of the sidebar. Provided users don't have their app settings sorting things by "hot", then at least the introduction will be the first post on the front page. Would take two seconds to do that - shall we?

POST: Clarifying a few things. (By cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

Alright so some readers here are still not fully clear on what the idea of Oneirosophy is, and maybe there are a few things i didn't explain. A few people mentioned how they don't understand how it is more than just lucid dreaming or feeling like this is a lucid dream. The importance of this feeling of lucidity is recognizing that this very well may be a dream right now (I believe that, but i'll let you decide for yourself) and that if this is a dream then it can most definitely be changed with magic. In HP lovecrafts short story Celephais there is a part in the story when Kuranes is exploring the dream lands that he comes to a place outside of what he calls infinity inhabited by intelligent glowing colored gases that study the secrets of existence. This is the kind of place Oneirosophy takes you in that realizing the dream like nature of existence you are in fact stepping outside of conventional reality into a place where the talking purple gas clouds live.
The reason it is a practice is because although one can claim to be a subjective idealist on an intellectual level they may still have materialist habits and thought patterns at the unconscious level. By blurring the line between waking and dreaming and achieving lucidity this mindset becomes integrated at a more fundamental level emotionally and experiencially rather than just conceptually. When this is integrated successfully there is a feeling of peace as well as a sense of courage to do things one was normally afraid of doing. And like Nefandi said somewhere its not just about making the dream world seem real but making the real world seem more dream like.

[END OF POST]

This is good. Yes, the point is to recognise that this actually is a dream. And not just to think it or recognise it intellectually, but to feel the truth of this in your moment to moment experience.

And (magickally speaking) what could be more flexible than a dream?

POST: Proposal for terms?

Since part of the point of this subreddit will be (I'm assuming) to mess with concepts, break them and find new ways of saying things as required, it might be better to just let things flow freely.

POST: Dreams - what are they good for?

This is not a sub for philosophy!

Except perhaps for what we might call "practical philosophy", since we'll be using and pushing idealism to its limits, i assume...

POST: Resignation

I feel that this was going to happen eventually; it wasn't something that could have been resolved by discussion, and it wasn't really anyone's fault. How do you agree or compromise on fundamental matters of style, with a subject which demands you speak from your identity? Some styles are mutually exclusive, and it's difficult to host both in a single forum, in terms of moderation or amongst subscribers. So in some ways, although it's obviously somewhat bumpy as transitions go, this is actually probably the most efficient way for it to get sorted. The challenge going forward is that this subreddit and whatever else emerges from these events must clearly set out their stalls in terms of "mode". Although "nice" isn't always necessarily the best way to grow, it is "nice" to have the choice to select the style that works for you in any moment - and maybe that's what will come out of this: an opportunity for people to pursue their chosen way without compromise.

Personally, I'm about the ideas whatever context they might be embedded in, and I'm good with whatever communication style does the job at that time. Not so much on the fence, as playing sport badly in the fields either side of the fence simultaneously...

POST: An Outside Observation

It turns out that the moderators were having a "people-shaped" experience - who knew, eh? Anyway, when two or more directions arise in direct conflict, like with tectonic plates, a shake-up is probably inevitable. And perhaps the use of anger is that is sometimes the most efficient way for a change to happen in strained circumstances.

Non-duality doesn't necessarily correspond to "everyone being nice to each other all the time", even though it's my own preferred approach; non-duality is impersonal. Events arise, this includes apparent interactions between people, sometimes those interactions corresponds to an angry narrative, then that part of the story completes. Regardless of the manner of its occurrence, the right thing has happened overall. And now, we have a subreddit for one flavour of this topic - a looser forum to explore the perspective "life is dreamlike in nature" - and there will be another for more hard-nosed philosophical discussions of subjective idealism. The right thing doing itself, for everyone. I wasn't speaking in support of how things played out really - "my preferences lie elsewhere", you might say - and I do get the point you are trying to make overall (why are people shouting into the mirror?). However, it's kind of done now, and the final result is probably the best outcome (in my personal view of course) that doesn't mainly involve, as of this moment, just wishing that situations and people/aspects were different than they are.

"A thing", indeed. :-)

Thank you kindly.

If something good has come of this, beyond the overdue bifurcation, it's that lots of people have piped up to explicitly say that they care about the subreddit and the topic it explores. This bodes well for the future!

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix

POST: [META] People should look into a few things before they post

[POST]

  • Cognitive Dissonance
  • Baader Meinhof Phenomenon
  • Schizophrenia, psychosis other hallunicatory illnesses
  • Depersonalization
  • Sleep Paralysis
  • Fugu State
  • Absence seizure

Way too many people post things with a whole thought of "Lel I shifted realities" before checking out what it really could be. I'm all for mysteries and shit but some things can easily be explained by things mentioned above. If anyone knows any more just post it below.

[END OF POST]

Good list, although: The point surely would be that if people read a post and think one of those is the explanation, they can then post a comment describing how, exactly it accounts for it. So long as a post is "an everyday-mode experience that OP is confused by and has no explanation for", it's valid. OP can then choose among submitter contributions. A key problem is that glitches (as defined in this subreddit) are usually one-off experiences that can't be repeated - hence not scientifically studied. We are then left with personal opinion - what one deems to be "likely" or "plausible" given their own life experiences to date. In other words, if we can't test a theory, then it stays a theory.

Short version: Certainly take these things on board, but don't be dissuaded from posting your experiences. Simply naming or categorising something is not the same as having explained it; and it certainly ain't science.

And it's okay sometimes to just not know.

What if the answer is something mundane that we don't know?

Exactly. The real answer to most glitch reports is: you'll never know, but pondering it might turn up some interesting lines of thought. The discovery is in the discussion. However, there's a real urge "we" have to choose an option from the available ones, to wrap things up and "be right" or at least resolved, even when none of them are much good as an explanation. Why do we feel so uncomfortable with that? Is it because we don't like acknowledging we know very little of our world? Not in some mystical way; I mean simple things like not understanding basics of visual perception. That uncertainty = instability, vulnerability?

But still I say, when it comes to choosing between crap explanations: "why not none?"

The problem with a lot of this stuff is that we don't have the equivalent of a "theory of gravity" for, say, memory. Fundamentally, we don't know what memory is (the sense in which it exists, where it is stored, how it is experienced). So we can identify similarities with other reported experiences (psychological studies, brain damage studies), but that is comparison and not explanation in a deeper sense. When we make progress along those lines, we'll get our mundane explanations. (Although I'm sure there will be radical leaps in understanding to get to the mundanity.)

Not remembering how many chicken nuggets you ate is not a comment on our understanding of memory. It is a person grasping for a reason to feel important, for a reason to believe they are one of the privileged few to peek behind this "curtain".

That's... a bit of a straw man, isn't it? (EDIT: Ah, that other comment.)

Well, I suppose a desire to experience something of importance is better than having a mission to stay committed to unimportance! But I don't see that's what's happening. Mostly, people aren't very happy at all when something odd happens to them; they find it disturbing.

A desire to feel important is good, but it can't be a delusion ("It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring"). To think these things are sincere occurrences of a rift in space or time is delusional. To think you are important because you noticed them is satisfying and reassuring. We should want, as people, to be satisfied under true and honest circumstances. They might find it disturbing, but they seem pleased enough with it to post it to reddit. This community is fervent enough about believing it that they will downvote me for thinking it's silly and speaking out calmly about it.

I think they are downvoting you because you are responding to my comments as if I was saying something I'm not. In other words, you are replying as if I am promoting one view or the other - when I'm saying that the judgement should be on whether an explanation is well-constructed or not. Entertaining different views is not delusional; dogged commitment to a view in spite of shaky foundations, probably is. I don't think "this community" is a bunch of fervent believers at all. In fact, compared with other subreddits which highlight unusual experiences, it is pretty balanced. Most subscribers don't seem to have an opinion one way or the other; they just find it interesting to read and think about these things.

...

Q2: I say this from an educated in the sciences background. What if what science/modern medicine names as pathology because it is rooted in the belief that physicality is all there is, is actually glimpses into other dimensions and other cultures would call it a talent? I think there is room for that in this sub.

Q3: Yeah no, these pathology can be measured, diagnosed and treated, they have nothing to do with dimensionnal jumping and such.

Hmm. While I don't endorse "parallel dimensions!" as the answer to everything (or indeed anything), nor am I very impressed by the approach to "measuring, diagnosing and treating" many of what we call psychological illnesses. Perhaps it's because I studied physics, but when I look at the actual models being used, I see the very worst examples of "vague ideas someone had once" that become self-fulfilling diagnostics - lots of begging the question, no actual deeper theory that has or can be tested. In short: not science. In other cultures, many of these symptoms would have been viewed quite differently (I don't just mean primitive tribal cultures here) - however, our current society has little time to give, and the priority is on keeping people "productive", or at least reducing the inconvenience they cause. The aim is efficient bypass or overpass, rather than compassion and comprehension leading to solutions.

The experiences are real experiences, but the nature of them (and therefore the appropriate response) seems open to question - which is why it's fun to discuss them on this subreddit!

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A1: YOU have schizophrenia! and YOU have schizophrenia! EVERYONE has schizophrenia!

Schizophrenia! It's the new absence seizure!™
© Glitch Explanations, Inc.

POST: Lots of snide self righteous comments

We discussed this recently in the comments of this post [POST: [META] People should look into a few things before they post]. Mostly it's just an internet conversation thing, mixed in with a misunderstanding of what it means to be level-headed or scientific. It's not that commenters should believe, disbelieve or neither - it's that if you are going to comment, then you should be contributing to the discussion. And the point of joining the discussion here is to explore the topic raised by the post. Skepticism has become a misused word. It does not mean that you remain attached (often emotionally so) to the currently dominant worldview, defending it until you are forced by "extraordinary evidence" to reconsider (this is what the behaviour of many would lead you to think). It means you are a curious and questioning individual:

Skepticism or scepticism (see spelling differences) is generally any questioning attitude towards unempirical knowledge or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere.
-- Skepticism, Wikipedia

A true skeptic would treat observation (direct experience) as primary, and be wary of the reification of any explanation, including the current dominant one. He would be equally suspicious of jumps towards any single-phrase explanations - "brain seizure", "schizophrenia" and "parallel universes" alike. His question would always be: how, exactly does that description account for this report.

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

Note: welcome the ideas, not believe them.

POST: [META] Possible explanation for some doubles/dopplegangers

[POST]

Subject line should start with [THEORY] instead of [META]. Sorry.
For many years, I worked security, usually on the technical side. If your keyless entry card stopped working, I was the one you went to for help. Imagine the following...
"I'm Betty Brown. My card won't let me into [location] anymore."
"Sorry to hear that. Let me look you up in the computer." Clickety. "Hmm. I can't find you. Let me see your card. I can look you up by ID number. Ah, here you are. Wait a minute! This card is for Rebecca Jones!"
"Oh, that's me."
"You just said your name was Betty Brown. Why is your name different on your ID card?"
Rolls eyes. "When I went to nursing school, I went by Rebecca, and I was still married to [first husband] so I had his last name. All my professional certifications are under Rebecca Jones. But my friends here at [this hospital] shortened my name to Becky, then it kinda evolved into Betty, and now I'm married to [second husband] so I'm using his last name, Brown."
"Okay, let's just double check that with HR." Checks out. "Okay, let's just call your department head and see where you need access." Dial, dial. "Yeah, what area does Betty Brown need access to?"
"Who?"
"Betty Brown AKA Rebecca Jones. Registered nurse, works on 4th floor, [physical description]?"
"Oh, you mean Ann Smith. She needs access to [location] and [other location]." Click.
"Why does your department head call you Ann Smith?"
Rolls eyes. "We went to high school together. Back then, I was using my middle name, and my maiden name..."
I had some variation of that conversation about once a month for 20 years. Several times, I'd be talking to coworkers about one security problem or another, and we'd realize that we were talking about the same woman using different names. Or to find that three or four of us had written incident reports about the same woman, all using different names.
On a related note, I was once speaking to a woman when a man walked up.
"Ann, is that you?"
"Sorry, are you talking to me?"
"Yeah. You're Ann, right? We go to [church] together."
"Sorry, you must be mistaken. I'm Betty. I don't go to that church."
"Oh, I thought for sure you were Ann. Sorry for bothering you." Man leaves.
"I'm glad he left. I didn't want to talk to him today."
"What? You knew him after all?"
"Of course. We've been going to the same church for years. I just didn't want to talk to him right now. I'm sure if it's important, he'll tell me Sunday."
"So, you acted like you didn't know him?"
"Well, I didn't want to hurt his feelings."
"Let me get this straight. You pretend to be a different person sometimes just so you don't have to talk to people?"
"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"
In the words of my favorite old boss, "I don't like people anymore..."

[END OF POST]

"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"

It's surprising what some people think is normal, and they've never been called out on. It would make a good AskReddit thread, except of course they are unaware of their own behaviour, so it would be empty.

Q1: The crazy (ha ha) thing is that I worked in hospitals for nearly 20 years, often dealing with patients with mental health issues. 99% of them realize they have mental health issues, freely admit it, and actively seek help. In spite of their issues, they are as a whole very nice people who generally act and sound normal outside of their one or two specific issues. The mental health professionals on the other hand are the weirdest bunch of jackholes I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. You know how you hear that every medical doctor became a doctor because they were very sick as a child or someone close to them died? That goes double for mental health workers. But every one of them I know, no matter how strangely they act or sound, will insist they are perfectly normal. I think I remember that the woman in the second story was a mental health worker. I know she was employed at the hospital in some kind of authority role.

Heh, yeah. I've always been interested in psychology and the mind and so on, and one of the things that comes up is, often the reason people become therapists is because "to explore and heal the client's problems is to explore and heal your own". You never really have access to the client's mind; what you are dealing with is your own fabrication, an "inner client" you are imagining - i.e. an aspect of yourself. It's not the client who projects, it's the therapist, and the client becomes the therapist's way of working through their own issues.

Q1: On the one hand, I kind of think it's a good thing that mental health professionals have a background of mental health issues (either their own or a loved one) as it obviously makes it easier to understand where their patients are coming from. On the other hand, back in school we had a joke that one of our teachers wasn't really a teacher. He was just a really big dumb kid who had never been able to quite pass 4th grade, being held back year after year, until eventually he was an adult and just kind of took over the class. I sometimes see therapists not as highly trained and schooled professionals, but as therapy patients who attended therapy so long that they know all the answers and somehow got put in charge. In the movie What About Bob? Bill Murray's character, a mental patient, corrects a doctor's diagnosis of another patient and suggests a different drug therapy. The doctor agrees and changes the drug he was going to prescribe. I worked at hospitals for nearly 20 years and I can honestly tell you this actually happens.

Ha, I love your teacher example. Your larger point is accurate too. Sometimes professionals are too busy "being professional" in order to be actually good. It's often not their fault; the environment they end up working in does it to them. There is a general trend towards abstracted careerism, a sort of "meta" approach to what you do (see particularly: career politicians). Whenever the job involves a subjective experience and an empathy aspect, this has a particularly dire impact. I have family members who work in health and mental health, and encountering some of the (genuinely nice) people who work in that industry, I am often shocked at how there are very basic things they have given no thought to. There's a trend towards "solutionism" without having an underlying model - a lot of it seems to work on ideas on the level of "gee-whiz" popular science magazine articles, or in response to current marketing. It was always thus, but the increased focus on "being a successful business" rather than "succeeding at your purpose" has made it far worse than ever before. Meaning: politics aplenty!

And what is a career politician, if not a skilled gaslighter who can change his or her view on a whim? A multi-opinioned doppelganger of themselves! (Had to loop it around somehow.)

My crush doesn't exist.......

[POST]

So I there was this girl I worked with that I liked.... I actually created this account 5 months ago and posted on /r/dating_advice looking for help. I had finally gotten the courage to ask her out yesterday. She was supposed to be at work, but I didn't see her... I looked at the day-schedule and didn't see her name on there. When I asked my boss (who knew I liked her) where she was, He asked me who I was talking about. So she no longer exists. I tried to find my other posts, but this reddit account didn't exist, so I had to re-make it. I know she was real. There were so many interactions I can remember. The feelings were real... HELP!

[END OF POST]

Consciousness can easily be described by physical laws we know about.

Actually, really? How exactly? Because you should write that up if you know, and save neuroscientists like Christof Koch resorting to panpsychism and cognitive scientists like Donald Hoffman proposing reverse interface models!

Perhaps you are referring to the hope that somehow, one day, we'll be able to describe how consciousness arises as an "emergent property" of brain chemistry - but the fact is that not only do we lack a theory of consciousness that could lead to this, we do not even know what form such a theory could take. Alternatively, you might be referring to a correlation between brain patterns and reported experience, but that is the problem of content not consciousness - i.e. the soft problem vs the hard problem. Most solutions being proposed currently involve some sort of flipping round of consciousness in the hierarchy of structure - in other words, making it at the very least a more fundamental property, and in some cases the fundamental property. (Note: this doesn't mean "self conscious intelligence", it means "the property of awareness".)

Apologies for the rant, but this is an area which is fundamental to perception and to science generally, and it's always a shame to see something so important dismissed with a couple of ill-informed one-liners, especially ones based on such simplistic metaphors...

Q1: Thank you for that. I know that some level of skepticism is certainly healthy no matter what arena of life we're talking about, but this is one subject area where I find that people tend to have an infuriatingly common kneejerk reaction to any suggestion of intelligent discussion or philosophy. I find it confounding that so many people are so rooted in the presumption that the consciousness is derivative and not originative when all existing scientific evidence seems to suggest the latter.

I think the strange, almost-emotional reaction stems from where they subconsciously (haha) fear this would lead: that if "everything is made from consciousness" then there is no solid substrate behind reality (true) and anything could happen (yeah, well). Nothing would be "real", life would have no meaning, the world would be in chaos!

But if it is true now, then it has always been true, so nothing changes in the knowing of it, except perhaps a greater sense of interconnection. Our understanding of the nature of our experience changes, but the actual content does not. And one has to ask: in what way is a description based on "dead" atoms interacting deterministically particularly meaningful in comparison?

Or perhaps the fear is more fundamental even than that. Perhaps it is that it would force us to recognise that the only thing that ever "happens" is our observations, and absolutely everything beyond this - our "explanations" - are merely connective fictions that have no reality other than our thinking of them. It's unusual for a discussion on this topic to get that far though...

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Q2: She still exists, just not in your perception. From what I've expierienced and read it's not that hard to get a person out of your perception, because there can easily be a coherent story (hit by a bus, heartattack, move to another country). Thing is, in our world view there is no coherent explanation of someone coming back into our perception (except someone just moved to another country), so this one is not an easy case.
edit: mh but now that you expierienced that people can simply vanish, a step in the right direction could be to truly accept that people can simply appear too

Q3: Or he's mentally ill

Or "worse".

Q4: worse being...?

Exactly.

Edit

Pub: 10 Oct 2025 13:45 UTC

Views: 5