TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 15)

POST: David Chalmers' TED talk on "How do you explain consciousness?"

I think the "inner movie" idea is a poor metaphor, even for a general audience like this, since it inevitably implies "content" and a "viewer of content".

The subjective experience is more like being an aware material which "takes on the shape" of experience, and therefore all experiences are you experiencing yourself. It is in this way that "consciousness" is fundamental. Self-consciousness is something else: It is the identification with one part of experience as "you" and the rest as "other", from an expanded perspective containing both. In moments of no content (perhaps in deep meditation and the like), there is simply the experience of being-aware without objects or a "you".

I think the inner movie idea is a good conversation starters for people who haven't really considered the idea of consciousness and that this bad explanation actually opens the door to your better explanation.

There's something in this - stages of explanation, where each new layer begins with revealing the previous one as false - actually. Start with the movie explanation, then say you are the movie screen and the image, and then that they are one and the same.

Depends what concepts and culture the person is familiar with. Problem is, though, that these halfway islands of explanation become the habitual way of describing something, with the next more-fiddly stage neglected.

Q1: One would be better to trust their consciousness as real and true as oppose to any scientific theory which is simply a byproduct of the consciousness.
Is there a reason you single out scientific theories here? It seems like you should reject philosophical theories as well?

Q2: It sounds like a solipsistic notion to me. If I had to guess I would say that his/her position is that only one's own consciousness can be sure to exist. Scientific and philosophical theories as well as everything else cannot be objectively proved to even exist let alone trusted.
The problem with this argument is that it is unfalsifiable. That is supposed to be the mark of a weak argument as Christopher Hitchens would say.

Problem is, perhaps, that something that is completely true might be unfalsifiablem - e.g. Everything is consciousness / everything is my consciousness.

"Everything is made from matter" would be vulnerable to the same thing surely?

Saying "everything is made of matter" can be verified through experiment

I'm not sure it can, though? It's equivalent to saying "everything is made of stuff, the stuff that all experiments detect"?

I follow the argument. What I was getting at is that the statement "everything is [made of] consciousness" basically predicts everything exactly as it is observed, including subjective experience. So -

Perhaps a better judge of it isn't whether it is falsifiable, because "correctness" is built in in a sense, but whether it leads to a more coherent or intuitive framework than the alternative. (e.g. Not needing to fall back on the hope for "emergence", etc.)

Well the claim "everything is made of matter" is not perfect, but you could see if you were say something a little more specific...

It could only be made more specific by assuming a certain subset of matter, I think. Which means you'd be testing the properties of a particular instance of matter, rather than matter itself. The same I think applies to "consciousness", except "consciousness" has the property of being-aware.

How does that statement predict everything as it is observed? what exactly does "everything is made of consciousness" mean?

The quick way to suggest this would be:

  • Consciousness is a "material" whose only property is awareness or being-aware.
  • All things are patterns in and of this "material".
  • Therefore all things are have being.
  • This does not mean they are self-aware, in the sense of being able to reflect upon themselves or think or whatever.

In truth, it's basically materialism but with the property of fundamental being-aware inserted into the lowest level. If that makes sense. You get all the same "objective" observations, but you also get subjective "being", the ability to be *conscious-of, built-in with no need for emergence.

Experiments also detect space, time, energy, and information.

They don't detect those things in depend of matter. But you get my point, don't you? That the "unfalsifiable" has limit potentially when it comes to discerning the truth.

I can clearly feel myself existing within my body, it feels like my skull is a house and my eyes are windows and there is an entity (me) that is in the house.

Which is interesting, because it can't be true. In what sense are "you" housed inside the skull?

In the sense that "I" am not outside of my skull ??? :/

Surely that's not your actual experience though?

So, light may go in your eyes and then travel along your visual cortex where the signals are interpreted and contribute to a "3d world" that you then perceive yourself to be in - but that whole representation is inside your skull. As in, the room around you is all inside your perceptual space - it's all "you". If you try and find the boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' right now, you'll find there's no barrier in perception - you don't feel a wall between the room and you, do you?

You imagine being inside a skull, but that's not your actual experience I'd suggest. (Hopefully that made some sort of sense.)

Top tip: Point to your "real" hand. If you are pointing to one of your hands that you can see, remember that that's inside your skull; it can't be your real hand. If you are pointing to your head, then the same applies: where is your real head? (Answer: If it exists at all, then it is completely outside this perceptual space.)

This is definitely an informative area to explore I reckon...

Ok in that sense, yes my mind is everywhere. but finally I have to logically say...

Thing is, it is a jump, because you never experience that outer world. Indeed, you never really experience a "self" other than a thought of one. You suppose your brain is making all of the external observations (and 3rd-person experiment suggest there is a correlation between brain areas and subjective content) but the fundamental background perceptual space itself cannot easily be accounted for in this way.

It is not clear in what way that 3d experience is inside your skull; when we look inside we do not see a room, for instance.

it's the difference between a movie and the watcher.

What is the "movie" and what is the "watcher" in that metaphor?

I suggest that upon examining your subjective experience, you will not be able to find a "watcher". If you think you do, then examine it further and you will discover you are perceiving it from outside of it - meaning it can't actually be the watcher of course.

... the only thing left will be "you". I like to call this observing entity the soul, at the moment most people are calling it the consciousness.

Right, the unbounded aware openness. I'd say most people are using "consciousness" to mean something a bit different, like the content or a notion of self, rather than this fundamental background. Which is why things get confused I reckon.

I cannot isolate the location of the soul...

Because it is what the experience is made from. Investigate any sensation or thought and you discover it is that too. Hear a sound in the distance, you discover you are both "over here" listening to the sound and you are "over there" beside the sound. It has no location, because it is the unbounded aware space in which experience arises, which is you.

But yes this is an informative area to explore, although I understand that my metaphysical ideas are way out there,

Not at all - they follow naturally from a direct, experiential exploration of this stuff, rather than just thinking-about. If you conceptualise it as a space which takes on the shape of experience, including sensations, perceptions and thoughts, then you don't need to deal with the duality of experience and experiencer.

... my body would be doing all of the typing all by itself without any sort of conscious awareness like a robot.

Well, your body and thoughts and the world around you all seem to arise as spontaneous experiences, "by themselves". If you examine closely the way in which you "direct" these things, you will find you cannot locate the "doing" of them - only the experiencing of them. After all, when your attention becomes absorbed in the words onscreen, your heart doesn't stop beating. Hopefully.

conscious awareness

Perhaps better to say conscious-of or attention-on for this usage, since it is a particular shape of experience adopted by the background awareness.

Right now, isn't seeing just happening all by itself? And when you type, isn't most of that happening by itself? Only if you have over-focused your attention or if you have tensed up do you feel "effortful doing", I'd suggest.

But that's the thing, there cannot be an experience without an experiencer.

Ah, we're only slightly disagreeing. I'm saying that there is only "the experience", by which I mean that you experience something by being it. Your awareness "takes on the shape of" an experience you are having. The apparent separation is a language thing. This actually plays to your "trees in the wood" thing. I'd suggest something extra, which gets around Berkeley's "God is experiencing everything and so keeps it existent" thing. That is, that you are experiencing the whole world right now, it's just that you are only experiencing part of it as a sensory experience. There rest of it is dissolved into the background, as it were.

The facts-of-the-world are here right now. When you walk into those woods are see the fallen tree, you are "unpacking" the tree from the background and into perception.

through meditation I control my emotions and eventually my heart rate.

Right, it is all potentially accessible; you can unpack any part of the background (that which is not within current attention) and make it so, with a bit of practice and (importantly, of otherwise you block the route) belief.

he truth is whenever I think a lot I can feel my brain getting denser like as though I'm flexing a muscle so yes I do feel a little effortful when thinking.

Is this not different?

There is a difference between making thoughts and thoughts arising, in response to an intention. Effortful thinking brings tension, because it involves a suppression and redirection, due to misunderstanding. You feel a pain because you are implicitly tensing up muscles in an attempt to control what arises. Although also, I think you can experience pain wherever there is "stuff that shouldn't be happening".

I then realized that I do in fact "exist" as an entity that was experiencing this depression and that I was running the boat that is my body. Through constant pessimism I had corrupted my boat to the point that it negatively affected the conscious observer (me).

You do exists as an "awareness in which experience arises". And if you screw up the spontaneous flow, block up those patterns, I think you can get into deep depression mode. Basically, you end up creating persistent structures that prevent movement.

An approach to thinking of this:

  • Experiences leave traces which "in-form" subsequent experiences.
  • Thoughts are also experiences, and effortfully generating or allowing thoughts is equivalent to experiences them as events.
  • Hence both bad situation and bad thinking will funnel your future experiences in that direction.
  • It is possible to almost completely halt the natural flow of experience by doing this.
  • The natural state is one of open allowing, with no trace accumulation. This implies that one should let thinking and action arise spontaneously, and direct your experience only indirectly - through intention.

Pessimism is (accidental) active programming of experience. Unfortunately, this means that to improve you have to choose to think and act in a positive manner - completely ignoring the evidence of the moment!

I do agree that there is a difference in our language, of course the experience and the "experiencer" are one and the same, I just meant that there is an entity within which all of these experiences are experienced. It's more of a ying yang, inner-outer world idea based on compatibilism, the soul does not have any solid boundary, the experience can go as far as the thought wants to go (this is where we might talk of auras). But finally all of this is experienced by a single central awareness which you can call as a soul.

Right. Unbounded. It's all 'within the aware perspective' I'd say.

If you try to find where "you" are, you'll discover you seem to be everywhere, and that the world experiences arises within you. I think this flipping around or inverting of our usual way of approaching the world is quite key to having a direct understanding of consciousness.

do you perhaps believe in the immaterial soul ?

Not that's how I would describe it, but the broader idea, yes. We are "whatever is aware" and, not inside a skull, but rather "tuned into" an experience. It also not at all how clear how much of that experience is external to us. Now, there may well be philosophical zombies - not all "people" have consciousnesses looking through them, perhaps - but I certainly am not. :-)

How on earth could you possibly to say that ? are you looking at blackness ? consciousness isn't looking "through you", you ARE consciousness. I'm sorry but I couldn't really comprehend what that meant, how could we be talking if you are not a consciousness ? What I mean is that a philosophical zombie can be artificially programmed to perfectly behave like a human but there is nothing inside the zombie looking back out the way you are looking back out at the screen.

I am consciousness, and the experiences I have appear within me. I am not "inside a body". I am having the experience of being a body. A philosophical zombie could potentially behave exactly as a human, without a consciousness being aware of it, if that makes sense. It's not about programming. To cut to it: Do you believe that the "soul is in control" at all times? Do we finely manipulate our behaviour? Or are we mostly aware of it, with certain adjustments now and again?

The word here my friend is compatibilism, The unified soul can be divided into the conscious awareness and the emotional subconsious (ying,yang), the conscious awareness is completely free to do whatever it may but the subconscious is extremely deterministic. The subconscious consists of these instincts that are in tune with the best approach in the chaotic world, this can be described as the brain activity that occurs before the person becomes consciously aware of it. It would really benefit the free will listen to this subconscious but free will is also the source of critical thinking and reasoning, the free will can freely choose to listen to the subconscious and access the different possibilities the subconscious has to offer or it can ignore it completely. But because it would benefit to listen to the subconscious we can track the subconscious on monitors and predict the outcome of the persons choice before he becomes aware of it. The choices that the free will makes also affect the subconscious which could later determine how future decisions are made. The subconscious can be described as all of the experiences inside and outside of your mind, it is everywhere and limitless, however the conscious free will being the source of this consciousness should technically exist inside of your brain.

Yep, good summary! We can go into further details about the nature of the encompassing awareness, etc, but overall there, is after all, you-and-your-preferences + the world experience. There is no "free-beyond-this" will.

I have created this really crazy theory that shows that there is a subtle conscious force that permeates through the universe and this force is responsible for the creation and sustenance of life. Literally everything is consciousness ! The whole universe is an ocean of this energy and our awareness is like a whirlpool in this ocean.

There is a nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware. Everything is patterns within this "awareness"; individuals are semi-localised areas in which their world appears. However, at a fundamental level, everything is everywhere and always, like the colour "blue" is the whole ocean, because at root there is no time or space division.

I feel like as though my mind is pouring out of my eyes and is enveloping everything around me, but at the same time the world is entering inside me.

Right, well I'd phrase this as that you are the background, so therefore awareness is everywhere (and all experience is made from awareness), and the apparent world arises within it.

chakras

Although I'm familiar with chakras generally, I'm not really up on them being applied specifically. I guess I find it difficult to link their "physical" side with the less structured background idea.

The etheric feild interacts with the soul...

So, in this way, what is the "soul"? Or are we just talking about different 'types of pattern' within, and of, me? Is "energy" really just a movement, a shifting of patterns in consciousness then?

there is not a single part that isn't you really.

What are the implications of that?

This is where things seem even more far fetched for you, I used to be an atheist myself, but atheism never really answered any meaningful questions, it was only a an idea of rebellion and nothing more. I used spirituality aided by my critical reasoning to help me get through my depression and it genuinely worked. Believe or not, but through spirituality I have left my body twice and now have a little command over the movement of the wind by tuning by body and mind with the consciousness of the wind. (yes I said I can move the wind, believe me if you want but I am having a lot of fun with my aerokinesis)

Aerokinesis is a great word. :-)

I am an atheist in terms of an entity god. I am not religious. I am aware that all my experiences arise in a space of open awareness (consciousness) and is shaped from them. The best description is perhaps, that I am God taking on the shape or perspective of being-Triumphant-George. I am still everything, but my bright sensory experience makes me think that I am "here" instead of everywhere. It's as if I have my face pressed up against a window pane or I have VR goggles on. It seems that I am in that world and it is independent of me, and yet if I relax and detach a little from the show on display, I can somehow "feel around" and find levers and switches which influence the scene...

EDIT: You might enjoy reading The PK Man by Jeffrey Mishlove, if you haven't already.

Being an atheist is okay, I used to be one too. But never disregard your own consciousness, it is by far the most valuable thing that could have ever been conjured up by the universe. I used to be a hardcore atheist at the age of 12, because I learned that the earth was made by consolidation of mass through gravity and that could just discredit the existence of a creator. But eventually I realized that atheism was only an idea of rebellion, it never sought to answer the more meaningful questions of life and is content with nothingness.
The multiverse theory that most atheists use to explain the creation of the universe eventually only became nothing but a gigantic assumption and just as far fetched as believing in a creator. I just could never logically accept that all of this order came from random chaos, I mean the shear amount of order that is present in this world really doesn't leave a lot of room for such random chaos to even occur let alone chaos being the main driver of the universe.
Eventually I logically deduced the existence of God to be there, and slowly began establishing a connection between myself and God and tried to become "one with the universe". Eventually all of the answers for the most important questions of the world just became so apparent and crystal clear to me. Questions like why are we here ? why does evil exist ? what is the purpose of creation and of course telekinesis and some other cool tricks.

I have a completely open mind - happy to have my ideas shift around. So probably to say I'm atheist jumps too far; I am a whatever-it-looks-like-to-me! :-)

I'm not sure there is a "purpose" though. If everything is for all eternity, the only purpose that one can imagine is eventual collapse back to infinite potentiality, from where it all begins again.

The purpose exists in being, I mean think about it, if there was no purpose why would there even be an existence in the first place ? If things collapse back into the source then the purpose would exist in being, if there was no purpose there would be no being, there would be nothing to expand into and nothing to collapse into, just a purposeless dot. I later on realized that every element in existence exists with a purpose whether we understand that purpose or not.

I follow you, but I sort of "put that aside" because I have no access to the information. I'm quite happy to have unanswered questions, if the alternative is to have a placeholder answer from logic only.

Since we don't seem to retain memories prior to our lives (and it's not clear what is happening in cases where such things are reported), we are left in a wait-and-see position.

Which isn't to say we can't probe the nature of this environment we're in, the nature of ourselves. It definitely seems less "substantial" than one would assume, and more responsive. Which again makes me wonder about a larger given purpose. I'm inclined to think there can't be a purpose from an eternal viewpoint, except fluctuation itself.

Q: Well on the topic of recalling past life memories, you have to understand that doing that is a skill in itself, it is something to be honed and trained. If you saw a weak man failing at lifting a dumbell, would you say that all human beings can't do that ?
Take life for example, every single element of life exists with purpose. All of life exists with the conscious intent to change the circumstances of it's environment and bring order to it and thus creating it's own purpose of existence. Order can only exist through intent, no matter how much you try to word it order can never independently exist in an environment of chaos.
You might call it a fluctuation, but that's just saying that you don't understand it enough, a fluctuation is change that's it, you could say that all of life is nothing but a fluctuation, but even you know that life is a lot more than that. Try taking the time to understand the forces that govern our universe, take gravity for example, we can see it happening, we have the equations to have an idea of it's power and we are capable of predicting the force. But do we have any idea of why gravity even exists ? why are particles attracted to each other in a constantly expanding universe (order in chaos) ? Take any force of the universe, polar forces, magnetic forces, If you go deep enough it doesn't look like anything else short of magic. I mean Max Plank pretty much discovered God in the Quantum universe, the rules the particles follow in Quantum space are as unpredictable as free will, he had a glimpse of the ether.
Just for that sake of humor I decided to connect these forces to human traits, I found that gravity connected with universal love and electrostatic forces were similar to polar love (love between a man and woman). Gravity holds entire galaxies and the major part of existence together while polar forces holds the atoms together thus keeping reality in check.
Every force suddenly seemed like a conscious act of God, every movement had purpose and reason, the whole universe was conscious, every force all the way up to the neurons in our brains a movement of God. Your very conscious mind is God separating from himself in order the observe existence from a different perspective.
I can explain to you what's happening in recalling past memories, and the ultimate purpose of existence. But all of these explanation are going to be all about the etheric space.

I guess I could have been more precise: We can't know from this present perspective. It's in the nature of being a perspective. Science, of course, doesn't answer "why?" or even "what?" it just answers "in what way". I can't answer purpose and so on. Those answers must be direct rather than thought about?

However, the true nature of things is timeless and spaceless, it seems to me; this is a created experience by me, but not the "me" that I conceptualise (the thought I have about me), rather the larger background me in which experiences arise. All information is accessible potentially from that perspective. The localised perspective is a filtering rather than an identity.

etheric space

How would you define that? As the background conscious aware space which knows no boundaries but within which all things appear?

the ultimate purpose of existence.

Is the ultimate purpose not... just to create and explore?

You may not realise it but you've pretty much answered most of those questions yourself. The etheric space is basically just as you have described, now you say that the perspective that you say is created by you, so does the whole world get created the more you explore it ? At the same time you cannot deny the identity of the perceiver because he is a creative observer. The observer creates and interacts with the world with his own "source" of being, because it all comes down to this, our minds are deeply interwoven with the rest of reality in an extremely intimate way, a machine can only analyse data no matter how complex you design it but a person is intertwined in the experience around as a single identity. You would now have to have two assumptions, say that you are not alive just like the rest of the universe or say that the rest of the universe is alive along with you, physically there is no difference between you and the rest of the universe and it is paradoxical to call yourself dead, so the most logical conclusion is that the whole universe is conscious in a way that we have yet to comprehend. The ultimate purpose of course being that the unified conscious force extended it's consciousness into manifestation to create this world and into us in order to have a more creative subjective experience.

Yes, I pretty much agree with this; this is my view.

I would say that what I am is a consciousness, and that I am in effect exploring the memories of a particular world, from a particular perspective. (This is experienced as creativity, discovery, and creation-by-implication, which are in fact the same thing.)

Since memories are "made from" thinking and thinking is "made from" the consciousness that thinks, there is no physical world as such. And I am not physical. Furthermore, all this means there is nothing special about "content". It's fun-stuff, explore-stuff, and it's all part of you. You're exploring your own mind. But that means you're also exploring every silly notion you might have. Don't take what you think-see too seriously; there is no "background solidity" to it.

Finally, the "content" that suggests I am limited to being-a-person is just that: an imagining. Actually, I am always the entirety of consciousness, it's just that I am experiencing the sensory image of a limited perspective. My intentions are always global, even when my perception is local?

Q: Awesome, I like your thoughts. I can't help but feel that we have been incessantly agreeing with each other, I'd like to know what are your thoughts about God ? For me after realizing that there are no boundaries between my mind and the rest of the world just meant an infinite amount of implications. Before I used to be an atheist, but after my reconnection I pretty believe every single religion that exits (or at least comprehend it to the extent of my critical thinking), I now understand unconditional love with wisdom, the origins of evil, and now I have a bottomless pot of pure joy which I can tap into whenever I please and just "trip out" in any location. Would you believe me if I told you I practice telekinesis ? no I'm not shitting you I can literally move shit with my mind ! As we speak I am making the wind blow through the branches of my neighborhood trees by just tuning my mind to the spirit of the wind and imprinting my spirit upon the wind. All this spirituality jazz is some absolutely sensational stuff which I really think you should have a go at ! And a person like you is in the perfect position to explore these realms because you have come to this conclusion of boundary less consciousness through your own reasoning and critical thinking, now just submit yourself to the beauty that is existence!

I can't help but feel that we have been incessantly agreeing with each other

I think we are! Same view with just different ways of describing it. Same reality, different metaphors kinda thing. Which is nice. :-)

The Big Guy?

I'd like to know what are your thoughts about God?

Hmm, I say:

It's the name we use to describe the undivided experience, that which everything is made of and from and is. What people call "unconditional love" is the direct experiencing of that undividedness - which is a matter of ceasing to narrowly focus your attention on an aspect of content. The water analogy is often used: water and the waves. But I think it is more accurate to say that "God" and "consciousness" is the colour blue. In other words, "blue" is everywhere in water, water is blue, and all waves are blue. The only property "blue" has is... blue. Consciousness and God have the property of being-aware and no other property. All divisions, relations, patterns, forms, shapes, content and experience are 'made from' this being-aware. It is a "non-material material".

Whats On Tele? vs The Dissolved World

Would you believe me if I told you I practice telekinesis?

Of course! Everyone's doing it all the time, unwittingly. We think we "act" but we don't - we experience actions. :-)

-- Allow me to ramble a little...

We confuse the present sensory experience with the world. In fact, I'd suggest that the world is a set of dimensionless facts-of-the-world dissolved into the background of awareness. There is no distance between objects or events. Both space and time are sensory formatting just as colour, sound, texture is. They are part of experience, not of the world as it is.

Sensory experience is like a mirage floating atop the true world, which is the shifting shapes of the sand dunes beneath (within a certain perspective).

And there is only First Cause.

So, when we decide to raise our arm what we really do is "request the experience of arm-raising". At that exact moment, a pattern is triggered, and laid out before us, which we subsequently encounter as our attention passes over it. We call that "doing", but that act of creation already took place. Our "doing" is actually the experiencing of patterns already laid down. When we attribute causes to effects, in actual fact both are effects - results from accumulated patterns created by will, deliberately or implicitly. If you want to lose weight, you might eat less and go running. But the eating less and running are just experiences; they have no causal power. It is the intention that these correspond to a later experience of weight-loss that produces the results (provided there are no contrary patterns).

Realising this, we find that all of our experience is directly caused - by the direct creation of patterns, partial aspects of which later appear in sensory experience. The only power is will, and will operates directly on the patterns. We "imagine that" the world is a certain way, and subsequent sensory experience falls in line with that. The weather unfolds in exactly the same way as the raising of an arm, for the same reasons and due to the same cause. Usually we only identify with "local" experiences (content arising in the body-space area; content arising within an arbitrarily limited timeframe) but all experiences are "our patterns".

You might find The Patterning of Experience worth a read - it's one of my attempts to encapsulate this aspect of things. And this one is relevant to weather. The weather definitely seems to be a thing!

-- Okay, ramble over...

He Sure Can Move!

I can literally move shit with my mind!

So I'm gonna say the better way to say this is: Update the facts-of-the-world, which you then experience. You are changing the "fact of where something is". You never actually move an object (there's no such thing as a spatially-extended object when you're not experiencing it).

I like that way of saying it because it's nice and general. It highlights that you can change "facts" that are the pattern behind your sensory experience right at this moment - or those that are supposedly not apparently here in "space" or in "history" or in "the future". All the world is here, now, and available for change; Your sensory experience arises spontaneously in alignment with it, effortlessly.

...by just tuning my mind to the spirit of the wind and imprinting my spirit upon the wind.

Is the feeling of this for you a bit like detaching then "sensing out" the thing you want to change, sort of "becoming it", and then "shifting the shape of it/you"?

How did you get into trying that, by the way?

Q: I'm enjoying the way you think you are not holding back your questioning mind in the least, and I'm enjoying the people here in r/philosophy because they actually take the time to question the world around, the people at r/atheism piss me off to new levels, they preach their ideas like dogma and refuse to see the world in a different perspective, the worst part is that they have no sense of direction what so ever and sometimes just end up becoming rude and terrible people.
Your thoughts are exploring the spatial world around you and they look like they are about to burst! For me the conclusion of God came from the analysis of chaos. Chaos is nothing but the loss of order, is no different from entropy chaos in it's purest form without a shred of order would be nothing but sand like particles in space, with no direction, no internal forces like gravity or electrostatic forces, just plain dispersion of sand that is the final stage of chaos. To assume that order can ever be created from chaos is an extremely magical assumption because order is only a conscious force, order is an act of consciousness, you can never expect these sand particles to ever make up their mind to kind of fall in love with each other and recreate gravity where all of the particles begin to tightly hold on to each other in the dispersing effect of the void. I mean let's talk about gravity for a second, we have all of the equations that can predict the force of gravity and this equation is made up of variables that rely on a gravitational constant that apparently changes every few years so it's far from accurate, we have flexible 2D representation of gravity showing how it warps space time but this is only a visualization, we don't have a basic explanation of why one iron ball is attracted to another iron ball in space it's like as though all of these particles are in love with each other (unconditional love) and this love is what holds galaxies together, holds the solar system together and the love of Jupiter is what keeps us alive from meteors. There is just way too much order in the universe to say that all of this happened by chance, it's actually very foolish to even assume such a thing as order occurring from chaos. The very fact that the universe exists by default proves the existence of God.
After taking the time to accept these truths and shift my perspective to unity consciousness I began unlocking many hidden powers that fully conscious entities are capable of, telekinesis being one of them. And no my friend I am not practicing telekinesis in a metaphorical sense, I can quite LITERALLY move objects at my command. Here check out these videos
For me I have the most fun with aerokinesis where I make the wind move, With better established connection I can even control the rain and lightening. Again it's about tuning your mind to the substance of your target and impressing your soul upon it, to get a better idea of this would require a good understanding of chakras which I would be happy to tell you about.

I enjoyed your take on chaos! Loosely, I'd say that the structuring of reality is the structuring of experiencing - and this is the structuring of our minds. Which is very much the same idea, with different words, I suppose. This is not a new idea - Immanuel Kant and others long ago said that things like "space" is more like a sense than a reality. And he basically says something like I do: the world is unstructured and dissolved and effectively an "infinite gloop". Which is really to say, it is nothing at all.

We are the order. And behind order: nothing.

Quick note: When I talk of "metaphor" I don't mean that we can't literally make changes. I mean it in the sense of what I call "Active Metaphors" - that the metaphors you adopt to describe experience end up shaping that experience (described a little in my post about The Patterning of Experience elsewhere). In your case, adopting the idea of chaos and love has pre-formatted your world to allow such experiences to occur (in my thinking). So, in terms of influencing the world, your examples are quite direct. By which I mean, you are dealing with objects and the environment that you can see and are present. Have you also experimented much with stuff outside of that, more abstractly?

Like, experimenting with things which aren't restricted spatially and temporally (since space and time are part of the mind's experience, and not part of "a world"). This is where we cross over from being an "Entity God" (a located presence with power) to a "Fundamental God" (that which constitutes the world and creation itself).

Aside - Can't recall if I've mentioned it before, but have you read Jeffrey Mishlove's The PK Man? Anyway, it's quite decent read for those unpersuaded of the possibilities of direct influence. Kirby Surprise's Synchronicity, meanwhile, deals with more metaphor-based approaches (decent interview with him here). If you get very bored, over the last while I've posted a few things at this subreddit [/r/Oneirosophy], in terms of techniques and worldview. Mostly about opening ourselves up, rather than specific targets.

Q:I was just checking out the r/onerosophy subreddit and I'm in love with it, that's it no more beating around the bush with you, I am going to tell you my ultimate theory about existence, I am primarily Hindu but I am going to use Christian metaphors which are very easy to understand. By default it is impossible to assume order can ever come from chaos, so therefore there was a source of "intent" for everything to be, let's call this source as God, the basic crucible of light for all of existence. I'll explain to you several theories regarding God and I hope you can piece them together, let's first start with the 'Lucifer Experiment', imagine God as a ball of light, all of existence and consciousness comes from this single source, God is a force of creation and does not find solace in an empty and mundane existence of just being a boring ball of light, this ball wants to explore and manifest into the void around it, the ball begins to grow tentacles at the ends of which are tiny balls of light, each of these balls are still the same source consciousness of God and God observes the rest of the universe through the awareness of these tiny balls. Let's call this tiny balls angels, they remain constantly tethered to God, but God is still bored because he is still not outreaching himself into all of existence fully, so he decides to separate and divide himself in a very unique way. One of the tiny balls under the will of God decides to separate itself from the central ball of light by disconnecting the tentacle like tether that kept it attached, because of this tiny ball of light who we will now call lucifer was disconnected from divinity, lucifer now after seperation no longer felt the divine bliss of unity and complete awareness, but through this seperation he now has independence and free will, he can make his own decisions without the interference to God. As Lucifer explores the void, he gains the strength to manifest and the knowledge of the existence, but due to natural causality many of the decisions that Lucifer makes is subjected to the destruction of natural consequence and because of this he begins to manifest his own hell, there is nothing he can do about it it just plain causality and this was a part of God's intention to experience the void since God and Lucifer are still one and the same, and thus Lucifer remains meditating in the fires of hell where he is in unity with reality and in unity with divinity, God and Lucifer are constantly helping each other in maintaining balance. Now that this duality is set up, God can begin the creation of a middle earth where he can experience the ultimate form of a subjective reality, In the Garden of Eden when God created Adam and Eve through which his consciousness exists, he wanted to Adam and Eve to live a world of conscious freedom, Adam and Eve only remained in the Garden of Eden as long as they were "tethered to God" but God wanted them to be free so through the spirit of Lucifer he enticed them to eat the apple of knowledge which will give them the ultimate strength and knowledge to face the harshness of the world of causality, but in order to make this experiment pure he had to make sure that Adam and Eve chose to eat the apple under their own free will, so he pretended to not be watching while Adam and Eve disobeyed him to eat the apple. The experiment was a Grand success although not entirely for Adam and Eve, since they were capable of demonstrating free will they had the power to face the harsh and real world and thus they were disconnected from God and the Garden of Eden disappeared thus leaving them to face the world with nothing but their own knowledge, strength from Lucifer and unity and divinity from God.
My life after death theory:
When it comes to life after death I believe in the Hindu theories of reincarnation as they make the most sense, I don't believe in an eternal hell or heaven since one is unnecessarily evil and the other horribly mundane and pointless. I believe that that once you enter the metaphysical space after you die, the space naturally reacts to your thoughts and your mind but only temporarily, just like in a dream if you have good thoughts you will get good dreams, if you have bad thoughts you will get nightmares, in the same sense if you were a good person you will only manifest good things but if you were a hateful person you will only manifest a horrifying and cruel reality which will attack you back because in this place there is literally no boundary between your mind and the rest of space. Only until you are cleansed of your wicked thoughts and you are capable of creating a beautiful reality will the metaphysical space react naturally to your purified mind. Lucifer makes sure that the souls who are experiencing this cleansing do not get destroyed and lost into oblivion, he keeps them all in one place where the evil souls can atone for their sins together in a single hell space. Every single thing in existence has the breath of God present inside it, everything from dogs and cats to trees and rocks, literally everything is conscious in some sense. In life this conscious energy keeps getting recycled through the process of reincarnation, as each soul gets more and more purified with each incarnation they receive more and more energy from God to reincarnate to a higher conscious creature, so if a person lived a good life he gains a lot of conscious energy of love from the people around him and his surroundings that he will end up getting a better afterlife in a family where that level of energy will match and resonate, while a bad person will end up losing energy and thus end up in a much more poorer after reality or even worse might have to be reborn as a creature of a lower intelligence and conscious awareness to relearn what it truly means to be alive. as of now the whole point of our existence is to improve our subjective reality to such an extent that we exist in resonance with the rest of reality to the point that we can consciously re-tether ourselves with God and leave the cycle of birth and rebirth and achieve moksha or liberation and take all of our experiences back to God.

Ah-ha!

More later, but at its root, this seems to be the story of "cause and effect" vs "direct will", of second causes vs First Cause. Of accumulated memories shaping subsequent experiences - and the tale of their realisation and dissolution!

Yup, in all of existence we are the main show, life trying to establish itself against causality and be in resonance with manifesting reality!

...

Consciousness comes first becasue it is the material which takes on the form of experience. (Let's call it "awareness" maybe, since "consciousness" has multiple meanings - really we are talking about three ideas: consciousness, conscious-of, and self-consciousness.)

All other thoughts and content are shaped within that. It is before science, it is before metaphysics, it is before everything. It has no particular properties iteself at all - except the property of being-aware.

Science is the study of "observed regularities in experience", inferring concepts via distinction and reconnecting them with relationships. What those regularities are "made from", it cannot say. That would be like trying to describe water as being "made from" waves. Not a "byproduct", then, but something that appears within it.

Q: It is before science, it is before metaphysics, it is before everything
does this mean anything? It sounds like poetry

In the same way that "matter" is before atoms, and "colour" is before a painting, "consciousness" is before content. Actually, that's not a great comparison. Maybe "eyes are before seeing" and "water is before waves" - you can't describe water as being made from waves.

I don't understand or condone this form of thinking

In what way?

The point being made is that the reason it is difficult to study consciousness with science is that science deals with the observation of regular pattens in experience. Consciousness being what those patterns are made from, cannot be studied by it. Which is not to say that self-consciousness and the experience of being conscious-of something can't be studied; but that is content. The reason for the "form of thinking" above is that at this level you can't really say anything about this, apart from something like "consciousness the fundmental nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware, everything else is patterns in and of this" - or similar.

Q: science is that science deals with the observation of regular pattens in experience. Consciousness being what those patterns are made from, cannot be studied by it.
This doesn't hold up though - the study of the patterns we see in nature brings results. The reason consciousness is beyond the reach of science so far is that we haven't been able to define or measure it. We come at it from our personal experience side of things but have nothing in the physical world to point at and say "lets measure that". So I think we agree that it can't be studied directly at the moment but with slightly different paths to that conclusion.

Yes, the study of patterns we see in nature brings results - "observed regularities" - very successfully. For consciousness, though you hit it right...

The reason consciousness is beyond the reach of science so far is that we haven't been able to define or measure it.

We don't really observe consciousness at all, externally or internally; I'd say because it is not a thing. We only experience being it. (It is that which, in subjective experience, things are made of.)

So, as you say, we can't define it, we can't detect it with the senses - so it can't be studied scientifically. And nor will we ever, I suggest. (We might be able to study the self, and the content of consciousness, but not actual consciousness.)

I'm glad you brought this up, because the objective existence of Self is at the center of the discussion about the nature of consciousness: we're not actually talking about the nature of consciousness, so much as the nature of Self. It's also at the core of a philosophical problem camouflaged as a consciousness problem: free will vs. determinism - is consciousness a movie "we" are watching and choosing (separate from the brain somehow) or is it just a light show brought on by conditioned biological reactions to an environment (the brain itself)? I've spent the last 4 years studying the mind and meditation in Zen monasteries and probably the most frustrating part of this whole inquiry about the nature of consciousness is that when you try to investigate it experientially it is seen as inseparable from reality itself, which is why Zen masters went so far as to deny the very existence of this thing we think of as "mind" or "consciousness" as anything but a mistake of perceptive illusion for reality. There is something else, however, Mind without any preconceptions or illusions; I've only glimpsed it a handful of times, but I feel that no matter how long I was able to see it unfold I wouldn't be able to actually describe its quality or function. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," which is some bullshit frankly haha.

You're right about this, and it's the next step of subtlety for the metaphor. It's a bit more long-winded, but the quick version is that the mind is "structured" with accumulated patterns. At any moment is the current spatially-organised sensory expereince, but also the "format of mind" which are the habitual patterns which experience "snaps-to" or is funneled along. These patterns are "dissolved into" the background.

Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. What you experience as reality is really the "format of your mind" therefore. You can't separate the two. There is no reality "made from objects" beyond your mind; objects are patterns of the mind.

If you release your grip on expeirence, the first thing that relaxes (the first folds in the blanket to release) is the sensory experience, then the sense of space and time, then increasingly the other levels of "formatting" untl you are experiencing just "openness". Since this is not patterend at all, it cannot be described in language (because language requires division and contrast - it is built upon distinction).

That's my best edited version anyway.

Q: There is no reality "made from objects" beyond your mind; objects are patterns of the mind.
You went full idealist. You never go full idealist.

Ha :-) Well, I'm not sure it's quite the full "Idealist Jack" thing...

I have to first apologize as one of my deep conditionings through my training kicked in as I read your comment: there's an intense prejudice towards conceptualizing the mind in formal Zen training, which I'm sure you can understand and appreciate (the ideal Zen student is a genuine mystic, not a philosopher, even studying Buddhist literature was highly discouraged). I am however interested in the source of this iteration on the "levels of formatting" you mentioned. Could you hook me up?

The source as in, practically?

In terms of experience, I think you can experience it through different levels of attention and so on, and by inference. (That background "felt-sense" is what I thinkof as the dissolved meaning, which can be probed.)

In terms of a history of how it comes to be like that within you, I'd say you start off blank - then noise, then clustering, then linked channels, then more complex patterns, then forms - from birth onwards the world starts forming itself in you.

I am an epileptic, who has unfortunately lost consciousness several times due to seizures. I have always just drop to the floor and go straight to black (nothing there) and woke up disoriented a few minutes later with a badass headache and a sore shoulder. The best way to explain consciousness for me is to control your surroundings and see how it effects you. If it isn't the desired effect, you aren't conscious. I am using my dreams as an example. Usually when weird stuff just start appears out of nowhere is when I wake up... I feel dreams are just past experiences mashed together with that days stress/emotions desires. Call me crazy I guess.

The idea of testing the (nature) of consciousness by attempts to control the environment is quite interesting. Not sure I agree with you on dreams just being past experiences - if you have lucid dreams (aware you are dreaming while in the dream), you'll see that it's much more creative and interesting than that, and that there is no way to tell the difference between waking and dreaming except for the fact that you can recall having "been somewhere else" before you were in the dream. Without that memory, you would not be able to tell.

Well my experence will vary from others. I am on 4 seizure medications. Depakote, Lamictal, topamax, gabapentin. More importantly, I am on a decent dose Dilaudid for pain. And have been for a couple of years I have a feeling that influences my dreams a lot as well.

Can you remmeber what your dreams were like before, vs now?

EDIT: Apologies to other readers - thread goes slightly off-topic now, but was interested if any consciousness effects that ran over into dreaming.

I have had my epilepsy since the summer of 2002. It started two weeks after I started working at a grocery store :/
No it feels like they have always been this way for me. And I have only been on my dilaudid for 2 years. Are you a M.D. or Professor, or just curious? I'm willing to answer whatever I am just wondering.

No, just curious! Because the topic is about consciousness, and I think the area of dreams has a lot to say about it. But more than that - because the whole "brain functioning vs subjective experience" area is at the cutting edge of it - people with unusual experiences, like yours, are fascinating.

Yea sure. I understand the whole REM sleep usually starts around 3 hours into your sleep (where the actual dreams are at), but I usually sleep around 10 hours a day... My body needs it. The dream I remember is at the end.
For me its one of 3 situations. 1'st a real external event sets me off like a loud car, and it wakes me up. 2nd. Things start to feel out of control. You are talking to someone at work, but you don't remember what. Someone else joins the conversation that has no reason being there. Say someone from High School or that special someone on Facebook you really like. Then someone else joins as well. You start to feel the anxiety build, and build, until you can't take it anymore. And I wake up feeling like a failure. 3rd one and the most scariest one for me. I am falling into the infinite darkness with my arms folded on my chest. I only fall for a few seconds, but you wake up feeling like you almost died. Not short of breath or anything, just huge amount of adrenaline there...
Edit. Most of mine seem to be based at work. Seriously when I was hallucinating at the hospital from being hopped up on so much seizure meds (they OD'd me) I was dreaming that I was calling people up to check customers out because it was so busy.

The infinite darkness... ego death? Impending annihilation into the backgroudn awareness! Pretty good dreamstuff. There's a book by Robert Waggoner on lucid dreaming that's really good, if you ever feel the urge to explore. Having an "interestingly wired" brain might make for good exploring territory!

Q: [Deleted]

That's great. As said elsehwere, my problem isn't really the metaphor, so much as it gets left at that - you need to next step to avoid a dual perspective and more accurately correspond tp expereince. I'm all for anything which helps folk along a step, really.

I think the idea that "deep meditation" is about experiencing without objects or a "you" is a total misconception: that's called deep sleep.

Actually, I originally had "deep sleep" as the completely objectless, and "deep meditation" as just being a perceptual/space pattern object with no content - but it was getting a bit detailed for a quick comment.

POST: What is consciousness for? — Consciousness is a life-transforming illusion [Keith Frankish]

This sort of theorising seems a bit pointless if we don't actual state what we mean by "consciousness". Several different sorts of things seem to get muddled in together, or mistaken for one another. From a subjective point of view, to begin:

  • Consciousness-Of - A person's awareness of the content of an experience.
  • Self-Consciousness - A person's identification with part of that content as oneself.
  • Consciousness - A person's raw experiential sense of "being" or "presence" or "I-am-ness" which persists independently of content or identification, but which content seems to appear within.

The first we can explore as the correlation between environment, body and brain states, perhaps. The second with brain states and psychology, possibly.

The third is more problematic:

The texture of it may vary with content, but the presence itself seems independent. And it can only exist in the present, since any reports of experiences then are reports of content (or the memory of content) now.

It's a direct fact of experience, and it's probably the only thing we all know for certain. But it is not associated with any particular content, and so it cannot be studied by looking for correlation. It's an "isness" that precedes thought, and so cannot be funnelled through the division into parts and subsequent arrangements in mental space that theorising requires. Perhaps it cannot be captured by a story at all.

POST: The Simulation Argument

The simulation argument is surely just a modern way of describing the notion that the world-as-it-is does not exist in the form that we experience it.

In other words, it is not really a "spatially-extended world, unfolding in time". Space and time are aspects of experiencing rather than aspects of the world; they are more like "base formatting" of the human mind. The room next door is not actually "over there".

The world then becomes more like a collection of "dimensionless facts" dissolved into the background of experience; a superposition of implicit patterns which can be unfolded into sensory form with attention. Which sounds like a mix of Bohm and Zen - the "background" would be consciousness?

--This comment is running on KantianOS v8.3 with the optional auto-dismissive module installed--

POST: "Philosophy is the quest 1) to discover the tacit assumptions that we operate on; 2) to critically examine those assumptions; and 3) to improve upon those assumptions by replacing them with better alternatives."

Q1: Another way of saying my favorite definition--philosophy is essentially metacognition. Thinking about the act of thinking.

Q2: Generally speaking, agreed. My favourite formulation is that "Philosophy is the black-box scientific investigation of human minds."

Q3: Really? I'm not sure how metaphysics could be encompassed in such a definition. Or ethics. Surely the unreliability of the human mind is an obstacle that philosophy strives to deal with, but the mind is not necessarily itself the object of the study.

I suppose he might update it to say something like: the investigation of the content and properties of mind (by the mind). So in that sense, the mind is always the object of study, since all study is the study of appearances within the mind. Typically, we distinguish between two categories of content - "thoughts" and "sensory experiences" - but neither are outside of ourselves (as mind).

Maybe it would have been clearer to say "brains" rather than "minds". (Incidentally, this is where "black box" becomes important - no neuroscience allowed.)

"Brains" is perhaps problematic though, depending on the context? Unless we are just using it in the loose sense of "the place where my thoughts appear", but I think that can be confusing when exploring certain areas.

We never actually experience "brains" ourselves - only sensations, perceptions and thoughts arising in mind (where by "mind" I mean something like "awareness" rather than just "the place where thoughts hang out"). Maybe there is another term with less baggage that can be used for referring to "the context of experience".

* * *

TG Comments: /r/occult/

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

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

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

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

POST: Personal Perception of the Human Condition

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

Some questions:

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

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

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

POST: Are Psychics real?

Real... what?

POST: Best Beginner Book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: How do you think magic works?

Random screed. Magick works...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this accommodate the different intentions of multiple magicians?

Q1: Could you elaborate a bit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: At this point, wtf is the point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep, sounds like depression. So - - -

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

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

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

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

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

He can't be arsed.

POST: Astral Travel clarification please...

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

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

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

Rope Technique

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

Does that make sense?

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

POST: Help a soon-to-be Beginner?

Perhaps you need to realise that Christianity itself is a magickal tradition. Much of the New Thought movement of the early 20th Century was based around an interpretation of the Bible as a reality/magickal manual (e.g. Neville Goddard).

This subreddit [https://old.reddit.com/r/ChristianOccultism/] might be of use.

You can't push through things with willpower, rather you need to embrace them and include them within yourself, let them become part of your momentum. The reason you are so passionate about this is probably exactly because of this need to embrace and overcome your guilt.

Q: [Deleted]

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

On your other question, the meaning of the word "sin" is to "miss the mark" - it's not "evil", it just means to not be at your best. And those passages do not mean quite what you think.

Each essentially says: there are behaviours which get in the way of getting in touch with your true path and nature (that is what "God" is), and because they obscure your deeper intuition (distracting your attention) you will not pick up on the directions and actions you should be following.

There is the notion of "True Will" which is essentially Your Nature and what you should really be doing. The warnings against mediums and manipulations is that they can turn you away from looking within, to your deeper knowledge.

"God" is your inner self, your true self, and the "Son" is that which arises in the world from this. That is why so much of magick is focused on inner exploration and clearing out perception.

There's nothing wrong with doing magick, therefore, but you might find that as time goes on you do more 'inner magick' and find that your life flows better and you don't feel the urge to try to directly influence the world around you. 'Passive magick' where you are open and synchronicities arise to help you along, and what happens to you is what you "really, really want", arising spontaneously from within you.

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

Q: [Deleted]

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

Q: [Deleted]

Yep. So long as you are honest about how you feel before you push through it (faking yourself doesn't work).

When you know what to do, sometimes you've just got to get a hold of yourself and the world, and make it move along! :-)

Q: [Deleted]

"Yeah, but..."

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

There's that way of looking at it, and also the notion that "all of this is you", so by intending harm on an aspect of the world, you're basically directing harm towards yourself.

Magick can be viewed as the skill of generating desired experiences. If that is so, then you should really only work on generating positive experiences for yourself. Blockages, barriers - whether situations or people - should be allowed to fade or dissolve, or be turned into benefits, not be destroyed.

Q: [Deleted]

I wouldn't get too hung up on that. It's the intention behind the ritual that matters most, with filtering by your background beliefs / expectations of how things work. The world happily gives you what you want, good or bad, it doesn't care. You don't need to watch your individual thoughts so much as take care with the "posture" you adopt. That should be expansive and positive. And you should always question why your are trying to summon something.

Note, there are other ways to approach stuff besides formal ritual. See Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman, SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic by Ramsay Dukes, or Oven-Ready Chaos by Phil Hine for example. Every intentional act is an act of magick:

If you drink your cup of coffee while saying "every sip of this coffee means my day will be luckier", then that is magick. Of course, most people drink their cup of coffee while intending... to drink their coffee.

Is there something specific you are trying to achieve?

Q: [Deleted]

No don't worry. Recognise those thoughts and just let them pass, returning to what you are actually focusing on. Just keep coming back to your purpose.

Stray thoughts, like anything, are only a problem if you divert your energy to them and let them carry you away. This is no different to, say, if you are studying and you let the thought of going to watch TV instead carry you away!

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

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

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

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

Have fun.

POST: Anyone else feel like this when first beginning?

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

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

Do a daily practice like this:

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

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

...

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

Perhaps chaos is enfolded into order, or vice versa?

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

My thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Occultism and Depression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Are you studying too much?

My thought: keep purpose in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: the seemingly opposing view points in occultism

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

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

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

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

I scoff and say "nonsense"! ;-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhat, much of this is a matter of taste.

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

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

Thanks for your effort, I appreciate it.

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

There's a good quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a great topic though.

Final quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not something I discuss in pubic.

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

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

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

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

No.

Aw, no fun! ;-)

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

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

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

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

(This of course has implications for free will.)

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

[QUOTE]

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

[END OF QUOTE]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the attraction though, for people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um, so that was a joke actually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take it easy.

POST: Can we get a synchronicity thread going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Solipsism... this thread needs to happen

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

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

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

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

POST: Is this legit?

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

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

Translation from the German wiki:

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

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

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

And here is that particular show described:

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

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

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

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

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

You just use facts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

POST: Is a Creator necessary?

There is "God" and there is God - ?

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

/r/Pantheism much, yessss?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Metaphor of the Blanket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Dream magic question - how to?

Enter his dream directly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

POST: You can't have anything you need.

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: They say practice magick every day

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

Explore the nature of your direct experience.

could you elaborate?

Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

But, do you experience this directly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Thoughts on narcissism? Thoughts on vanity?

I'll have a go with this...

Narcissism

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

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

The narcissist is an idea.

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

Vanity

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

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

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

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

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

I will make that change.

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

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

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

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

But yeah, people should take care of themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imagination Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're coming from a pure subjective idealism position.

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

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

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

Under a physicalist model...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They think past causes the present.

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

On Time and Metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Spirit Possession on LSD.

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

For instance: The Patterning of Experience and related links.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the rationale, anyway

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Pub: 28 Sep 2025 05:53 UTC

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