TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 16)

POST: delivered from the lust of result

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

Well, you've nailed that I think.

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

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

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

Thanks, will do that.

The stuff about creating a mental landscape is my favorite.

Sounds like my kind of thing - great.

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

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

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

Of course, that's just more words really.

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

The distinction for me would be:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Either the world is your personal dream or it isnt.

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

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

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

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

Physics in dreams is never that consistent.

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

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

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

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

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

No probability doesn't just say things are unlikely.

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

Certainly that's true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I say rules are effectively just strong habits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of lie?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, there's something to that, certainly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think autism has much to teach us.

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [deleted by user]

You're a passionate person who feels the world in a way that other people don't. Basically, other people simply don't feel the underlying emotional world situation that you do.

This means that they don't understand the world you describe, and therefore why you are upset. What at first seems like aggression and ignorance, is finally revealed to be empathy and distress, and that where irritation turns into compassion.

Unfortunately, inevitably, people have usually stopped reading what *seems * to them like abuse, before they get to that revealing point.

For sure, there have been horrors, and the planet hasn't shown itself to be a very considerate place (mostly due to ignorance, but a lot due to greed and maliciousness). I've long admitted this to myself, and figure that we can only work our corner (although that can actually have far-reaching effects).

Well, by "corner" I don't mean geographically, I mean in our areas of knowledge, expertise and influence. So if I have ideas, I contribute them; if actions occur, I take them; a helpful word, I give it. There's no point in me fantasising about transforming despotic regimes in Africa, but I can keep an eye on oppressive movements closer to home - and so on.

I need to delete all this stuff now, and stop posting for a while. Sorry. My bad. Again.

No worries. Leave all the time discussion stuff though, yeah? I think that was useful and we were getting somewhere exploring it.

Take it easy.

...

'mentally' yes. 'physically' I don't know.

If you do it "mentally" and don't come back... is that not the same as doing it "physically"?

As if you entered a lucid dream and then never resumed this waking dream.

there is no space in 'mental' unless you will it to, so you can come back.

Hmm. Is there even a space in "physical" though? Surely it's just the same as dreaming: space is part of the experiencing, not necessarily the world.

EDIT: What I'm getting at is that there's no difference between mental and physical time travel, until you experience "coming back". Just like you only know that you were dreaming (rather than being transported to another reality), when you wake up.

...maybe if you imagine hard enough/obe/astral project/whatevs that you can experience alternate realities or "time travel."

Because what would "time travel" be, I suppose, except an "experience that seemed like time travel".

Interesting on your intro. The exercise you describe is one of the first types of things I did too - found some old 1970's psychology book where people (unknowingly) did a variation of Doors of the Mind [https://old.reddit.com/r/threekings/comments/wmupr/recipe_the_doors_of_your_mind/] and explored strange new lands and reported back, bringing knowledge with them. Having experimented a little with metaphors such as [the Imagination Room] and doing lucid dreaming and the like, it's pretty hard to ever say what is possible and not, purely in terms of what we've experienced. If we follow George Berkeley [https://sacred-texts.com/phi/berkeley/three.txt] and the like, then there is no solid substrate underneath our experiences - our worlds are basically a matter of habit...

I do wonder sometimes: Where do the ideas for fiction come from? If our experience is basically "imagined" anyway, then what is the barrier between conceiving of something and experiencing something - is it just a matter of it persisting?

Regarding where ideas for fiction come from, a few summer's back I started experimenting again (post partying stage) with psychedelics but in a more controlled environment. One night during this period I started thinking about how much of my life I've lived emulating characters and lifestyles that my favorite authors had created. It was kind of intense to think about how much of my life was spent following some imagined life of someone that doesn't exist. From there I fell into Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces]
It made me start thinking about how it seems like we may just fall into this archetypal roles, but how we identify with them is beyond me. Which led me to start actually using the idea of the hero's quest to start controlling my life and trying to do things that would make an interesting story. I forget that it's a continuous experiment all the time and fall back down into my animal behaviors, but it's fun when I remember what's actually going on.
The idea of reality being habit is interesting. As in matter existing due to energy taking the path of least resistance then even society being as such because people found or were trained to acquire certain habits. I need to read up on George Berkeley.

Ah, that's interesting, playing roles. We completely do this. A book I read fairly recently - Synchronicity by Kirby Surprise (check out a good interview here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]) - had a fun section about how your life "takes on" the style of the character or storyline you have adopted, in a synchronistic way. You trigger patterns corresponding to that worldview.

I've definitely done this unwittingly before, and more consciously more recently - adopting a "character" appropriate to the task at hand. (I've also played with the Michael Chekhov acting technique for this [https://web.archive.org/web/20131224190736/http://actingtruthfully.jimdo.com/chekhov-technique/], fun.)

Yeah, Three Dialogues is the Berkeley text to read; it's quite approachable. Only caveats: Replace "soul" and "God" with "mind" and "extended mind" when reading the last dialogue, and focus on the point of the creation part rather than the Biblical reference. It basically nails the whole experience-of-reality thing; the only thing it doesn't quite touch is magickal-type influence (but then you realise you are the extended mind, filtered through a localised mind, and it becomes clear).

Without you the world stops eh?

Yeah, the buck stops here! So you better watch your mouth! ;-)

No, the world revolves around nobody. The point would be that "the world" is less like a spatially-extended place in which events happen, and more like a whole stack of dimensionless "facts".

It is the perception of the world (by a "consciousness") which is formatted in terms of time, space and so on. A bit like Immanuel Kant and friends.

Dreams sure feel like spatially-extended environments when you are having them, but they are not. So what makes us think that waking life is spatially-extended any more than a dream is? The fact that other people report the same experience? That just means that "human formatting" involves space and time as basic perceptual structures.

EDIT: Added the word "dimensionless", which I'd missed out and is sorta important here.

[QUOTE]

Transcendental idealism:
Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves.

[END OF QUOTE]

Sure every occurrence can be simplified to a bland statement of fact.

Ha, I missed the key word, and I apologise: dimensionless facts, as in they are not inherently organised in terms of space and time. We might call it "information" but even that is to frame it conceptually in a misleading way.

Time and space proven mathematical and historical realities. They are independent of humanity and will persist even with humanity's extinction.

That's plainly not true. They are experiences that people have, and the theories are also experiences that people have. Our theories describe the formatting and regularities of human minds and experiences, not of external worlds. I don't think any of our ideas predates human existence or will continue afterwards.

These perceptual structures are greater then humanity.

So, you are suggesting that human perceptual structures are greater than humanity, and exist even without humans? That's like saying that human bodies are greater than humanity, and will exist even if there are no humans.

We have a Plato in the house! ;-)

Hey, this is an interesting topic...

Could you elaborate and give an example?

Perhaps it's better to say it this way: That the world as it is "in itself" is not necessarily of the form we experience it. It is our minds that format the-world-as-it-is in our immediate perception - in terms of objects, and in terms of space and time. Beyond our immediate perception, we tend to imagine that the universe is laid out in a way that naively corresponds to our experience of, say, this room. But it is just that: us imagining the universe as something, as a "shadow sensory experience".

So without humans to bear witness unstable molecules decay instantly? Riverbeds are formed and dried? Our universe created and destroyed?

All those things may be true simultaneously, in the same way that if I see a tail and then shift my attention and see a trunk, I don't have to conclude that a tail transformed into a trunk over time. I could take the bold step of suggesting that something - let's call it "an elephant" - existed throughout this experience, as a persistent and complete structure.

Your position is ridiculous and indefensible.

What is ridiculous about it?

It seems more ridiculous to suppose that our mind-formatted experience corresponds to how the universe is in itself. That our concepts (and this is important: we perceive concepts, we do not perceive directly) are fundamental and are the "concepts of the universe".

Time, and the mechanisms the universe known and unknown continue to function with or Without a human to bear witness.

We cannot take the step of supposing that reality is organised in terms of dimensions, objects, and the like. We cannot study this.

We can only study the regularities of the human experience - and even then, we can only make models of those regularities that can be conceptualised and communicated in language. Things like "time" and "mechanisms" are human concepts. The idea that the universe "functions" itself presupposes time! The universe doesn't necessarily function at all; perhaps it simply "is".

Note, I'm not saying we should do away with the scientific method or logical thought. I'm just saying we must be clear about what we are actually studying. We are not uncovering the secrets of the universe, as popular science articles would have you believe. (This was not controversial among early 20th century physicists. Models were not confused with "truth".)

TL;DR: Theories and models are thoughts about human experiencing, and subject to the formatting and the restrictions of human experiencing. They are not thoughts about the universe as it truly is.

EDIT: Fixed some bad mobile-based typing and editing.

POST: Chaos Magic and Forgetting

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

One view:

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

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

POST: Sigil and Law of Attraction Contradiction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really describing any action is describing Magick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TL;DR: Blessing not required.

Q: [Deleted]

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

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

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

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

Q: [Deleted]

I agree with what you say.

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

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

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

Q: [Deleted]

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

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

Gives us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

...the FACT that it will happen?

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: Added more facts. ;-)

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

[QUOTE]

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

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

[END OF QUOTE]

That's really interesting, new on me!

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

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

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

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

Imagining new facts into the world.

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

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

Something like that, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

$5,000.00

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

POST: Origami as offerings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: How do you see entities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: ShowerThought on Visualization

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Your goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"..."

[question] magic is real. is psi real?

I suppose what I meant was, if it was possible, why isnt it more common? And what precisely have you learned to do? Telekinesis is like a blanket term and I'd like to know what you meant by that

Looks a bit like James Hydrick's dollar bill trick [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30o7_iy-O1g&t=18m20s]. Is the commencement of movement synchronised with your breathing?

Not saying that's the explanation or that it's intentional, but you need to be careful to exclude these possibilities in your experiments - both breath motion (very slight gaps under the container) and thermal changes (heat from hands or breath warming one side of the container slightly, resulting in air currents inside). With such a finely balanced object, very small changes could make a difference.

EDIT: This is a more general problem: magick always finds a way to give you the experience you truly ask for. But sometimes it can do it in an underhand way, if we're not careful.

Q: Not saying that's the explanation or that it's intentional, but you need to be careful to exclude these possibilities in your experiments - both breath motion (very slight gaps under the container) and thermal changes (heat from hands or breath warming one side of the container slightly, resulting in air currents inside). With such a finely balanced object, very small changes could make a difference.
Totally get what you're saying. I spent months checking and cross checking. I grew up being asked questions and being shown different ways in which physics works so I'm pretty familiar with countering those things. I did not allow myself to even accept the results until I was confident. This is something you'll have to learn on your own since videos never show what is going on within me. And yes, breathing is one of the many ways that you can synchronize energy flow. Not necessary but can be a very easy thing to fall into when you're first learning.
I should mention that I have spent hours staring at the wheel and have gotten very familiar with recognizing what is driven by the elements and what is driven by me. I can feel the energy move through my body and then pass out of my hands to make the object move. I've also tried blowing on the edges of the glass in all directions to verify there is no air flow happening. I have sat there with my hands directly on the glass and never once had the wheel move until I tried moving it. I've checked for static by rubbing my feet across the carpet, getting the wheel to follow my hand using the static and then discharging the energy by touching the energy saving bulb of the light on the stand only to have the wheel not move from static any longer before I start practicing. Something fun about static is that it can be manipulated.
If you try learning to do this I would recommend being patient and do lots of meditation.
This is a more general problem: magick always finds a way to give you the experience you truly ask for. But sometimes it can do it in an underhand way, if we're not careful.
I agree! Magick can definitely give what you want like that. The static was the original way that it started, then I was controlling air movement, and now it's directly related to my ability to move psi or chi. My only hope of showing this to folk is to inspire them to learn how and to help them to start developing spiritually. Come join us in /r/energy_work if you haven't yet and start discovering out what you can do.

Thanks, that was very informative! Sounds like a pretty thorough experimental approach.

Magick can definitely give what you want like that.

I guess (know) the trick is: specify the route. And you're right about really having to explore yourself. A couple of thoughts:

  • Do you think this is related to, say, the "stretching out of presence" one can do to make contact with other people?
  • Do you think this could be done eventually without a direct connection?
  • Do you think that attempts to demonstrate this sort of thing with other people present, presents a problem? That the fact of an observer can cause difficulties? Perhaps because of the concentration required, perhaps due to "conceptual momentum" (the idea that being in the presence of conflicting beliefs is like a "counter-will").

I have duly subscribed! You might also be interested in checking out /r/Oneirosophy.

what I like to call consciousness, outside of our physical shell and having it interact with other things.

I call it "presence" to distinguish it from the background awareness that also gets called "consciousness" - Peter Ralston calls it "feeling-awareness" which is not a bad compromise actually. I might take issue with "physical shell" and "things" but that's a different thread!

So, implicitly, we all have a direct connection, even if our locations differ - eventually I might be able to render an effect at a greater distance...?

Our brains [I'd say minds] love patterns and it likes to make everything automatic.

It's all about the patterns, so true! Patterns, memory traces, automatic habits. The very stuff of the personal daydream! :-) I'd suggest that improving one's ability to create "out of the ordinary" effects depends precisely on softening these patterns, directly (addressing them specifically to dissolve them) or indirectly (repeated practice to wear them down).

Anyway, lots to explore! Thanks for giving me a new angle on this, something new to play with.

I still believe that everything is consciousness so I'm wondering how this can be accepted into or break my current view.

Everything is still "made of" consciousness - but just as sight, sound, touch are perceived as separate "modes" of consciousness, so "presence" is a mode. You might think of it as extended, subtle touch?

Going to write up another post soon which covers the other stuff, actually.

Quickly though: Try and actually find your body right now. Use your attention or "presence" to feel it out. You'll realise it's basically a big empty space, in a big empty space, with no solid boundary. Some people find the Douglas Harding experiments helpful, and you might like the one I describe here [Outside: The Dreaming Game] - in the middle.

Try 'em and feel free to PM me if they do/don't make sense!

Let me know when you have that post up if you happen to remember. I'd love to see what you write. Cheers mate!

Ah yeah, sounds like you're on it.

Will say though, that the experience you should eventually have is beyond just the body sensation - it should feel like those sensations are floating in empty background space, without there really being a "body" that connects if all together. That's what helps you realise that "you" are actually over there as well as over here - it's the difference between thinking that everything is consciousness, and actually experiencing it to be true. You are the background. (Check out this interview for Rupert Spira trying to get someone to get this.)

Will do. Cheers!

...

When you pick up a rock and throw it, you are not using mental power to do so.

You might ask though - if that's not mental power, what are you using to get your arm to move? What is the name for that and how does it work?

POST: How to start out.

"Meditate for at least 20 minuets every day. If you don't do this you are wasting your time in the long run". I see this pop up every day. thoughts?

Sort of?

  • "Meditation" in its loosest sense, sure. Just lying on the floor for 2 x 10 minutes a day, letting your nervous system relax out and unwind, does the job.
  • "Meditation" is the ongoing sense too: not "forcing" your mind or body as you go about your day, letting things unfold at their natural spontaneous pace.

Basically, if your "aware space" is cluttered up with "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements" then you're going to have a hard time perceiving how things are, where they are going, and find it difficult to tune into and direct things.

If you sort that out then you are inherently less scattered, and will find results naturally easy (easier!) to access. Actual ritual and action detail not necessarily mattering so much, since it becomes more about the decision of meaning (c.f. Alan Chapman, etc).

EDIT: You might find this recent post of mine of interest [Overwriting Yourself], or not.

POST: I'm going to start a business this year, but I know for a fact that a certain crazy person has a grudge against me, and he's really deep into the occult. I'm pretty sure he's tried to curse me before, and worried he might again.

A1: If there is truly someone out there actively working on doing you harm, then you're only validating it by worrying. You're doing most of the hexwork for him already. But, chances are, he's not. Your source of anxiety is opening the business, and you're looking about reasons for your anxiety.
Be a wall. Don't worry. No one can touch your life. Plow on ahead with your plans. If someone truly had a grudge against you, then "the best revenge is a life well lived" So, just go and be successful, ok?
Edit: hey, my first gold, and it wasn't about something fucking stupid. Woo!

This x 10.

Just keep focused on what you're after; don't entertain ideas of others' influence. If you make your future certain in your own mind, no other can interrupt that. (And in the end, they are kinda you anyway: your own anxieties or self-destructive tendencies might manifest as "someone else hexing you".)

POST: Rationality in your practices?

Q:[Deleted]

Nice comment. Although we must add the special sauce of the conundrum: The concepts we adopt affect our experience of the world, of the objects and narrative we encounter. So it's difficult to be truly science-like objective with magick. Doing so can destroy the effect.

No need to make things more complicated than they need to be. Either you have objective evidence (with scientists present to rule out trickery), to support your systems do something, or you don't. Easy Peasy

Do upsetting memories make you feel sad?

No. What does make me sad though is that people who want something real wind up giving up on the search, because virtually everything everywhere is lies, disinformation, roleplay and make believe nonsense. Real practices are actively suppressed in this and other similar communities, in favor of practices that generate only subjective results. It's almost as if paid government shills are actively trying to bury real practices with disinformation, and discredit them. That does make me sad. It also makes me sad that out of a thousand spiritual seekers maybe one or two, understands why objective evidence is important, and why we should demand proof that systems actually do something. The rest think you can brew potions, and chant incantations, and draw sigils, and swing around an athame and it will have any meaningful effect at all. That does make me sad. It also makes me sad that the people who would most benefit from real practices are so burnt out fake spiritual bullshit, and make believe nonsense scams that pass for spirituality, that they wind up becoming raving Atheist skeptics. I can't really blame them, with all the lies, disinformation, scams, hoaxes, etc. It's sad though, no amount of evidence would ever be enough for them.

Well actually I was building on the objective evidence aspect - I can't objectively detect memories nor the feeling of sadness in other people, so they must be excluded from my model of the world - rather than the larger issue of delusion or misleading groups.

We've talked before I think, but my own investigations have led to the conclusion that, simply put, power is in plain sight - for all to see and utilise if so inclined.

You can't know for certain if someone is really sad, or giving a performance of being sad. You can know for certain if someone could demonstrate real abilities objectively to scientists or not. There is the difference friend.

Uh-huh, but magick's most important abilities are psychological... in one sense or another. That was my point - that for those things it's subjective evidence that matters, one proves to oneself. So we can't discount the value of those things, just because they are difficult to prove objectively. In fact, it can be baked in, that problem.

Of course, that's separate from real objective abilities. It just important to be clear there are two strands (at least), and being well versed in one doesn't mean one can be dismissive of the other (in terms of its value to other people). A lot of these subreddits are more for one type than the other.

Wow, I sound so even-handed there. I'm not really, normally! :-)

Let's cut the bullshit friend. Either there is good objective evidence to support your practices do something, or there isn't. I've met plenty of magick users, and all of them are dirt poor, drive 20 year old cars, live in their moms basement, are miserable failures at life, but boy their magick sure is strong. I ask them what has magick done for them, and they go off on all the subjective benefits. From an outsiders perspective the only metric of success they have achieved is keeping themselves spiritually entertained. You either want something REAL, something you can prove is real in the presence of scientists, or you don't.
It's that simple. There is no need to write a doctoral thesis on metaphysics to figure this one out, friend.

But... I love my Mom's basement! So comfortable in the dark, with my 1990's video games! :-)

Hey, as I said, we talked before.
S'all good, each to their own, and whatever they are satisfied with.

POST: What technique (s) do you use to focus your intent?

It's ages since I've done meditation formally. I've found that anything that moves/expands/dissolves localised attention is helpful; anything you 'let go to' that isn't thought-based.

If you are one for habitually being stuck in your head, exercise expands you into your body. If localised to your body, contact with the external environment expands you into that. Painting and drawing encourage you to "reach out" with your feeling-awareness towards the subject. Gradually, that persists, and the "information" stored at those locations (the oft-ignored rest of your body, beyond perhaps) produces insight occasionally.

Interesting that you did it with the lights off - one of the best ways I found to realise that I wasn't restricted to "here" was to ignore vision, and attend to where sounds or body sensations were - it's much easier to directly realise that they occur in a "large space of awareness" with eyes closed than with eyes open. Something to do with the persistence that images have in insisting they are "over there" rather than "in here".

Another sense was being exercised.

Can you try to describe that a bit more?

Reminds me of Luke Skywalker training while while blindfolded with against floating laser beam shooting robot orbs. Same idea. You have to anticipate what is going to happen before it happens. I do think it helped me to develop an almost predictive reflex. At the time I felt like it was magic. Maybe it is?

It sort of is! I recommend it all the time, but this book by Missy Vineyard is great on the subject of 'letting things happen' when catching balls and doing other tasks. Meanwhile, this book by Peter Ralston is good on the idea of feeling-awareness.

It's basically a sixth sense, that - the "feeling out" sense. You can do it deliberately when attending to things (exploring), but also you can get the benefits by letting go (responding).

I like the idea that, at its core, we are deciding to let the environment move us appropriately, rather than holding onto our separateness and trying to control reactions manually. It takes a bit of faith, though - because there's no knowing what your reaction is going to be, you just have to trust that it will be appropriate; it happens faster than information can travel consciously.

(I always wince when watching those get-hit-with-a-stick exercises! Where's the blooper reel for that stuff? Bet it's messy.)

The two books complement each other nicely. Also, I quite like Alan Watts on this "the environment moves you" thing:

[On letting go and living in the present, unprepared,] people immediately say, however, “Now wait a minute. That’s all very well, but I want to be sure that under such-and-such circumstances and in such-and-such eventualities I will be able to deal with it. It’s all very well to live in the present when I am sitting comfortably in a warm room reading this, or meditating, but what am I going to do if all hell breaks loose? What if there’s an earthquake, or if I get sick, or my best friends get sick, or some catastrophe happens? How will I deal with that? Don’t I have to prepare myself to deal with those things?”
“Shouldn’t I get into some sort of psychological training, so that when disasters come I won’t be thrown?”
That, you would ordinarily think, is the way to proceed — but it doesn’t work very well. It is much better to say, “sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof,” and to trust yourself to react appropriately when the catastrophe happens. Whatever happens, you’ll probably have to improvise, and failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself. You have a great endowment of brain, muscle, sensitivity, intelligence — trust it to react to circumstances as they arise.
Zen deals with this. Studying Zen will change the way you react to circumstances as they arise. Wait and see how you deal with whatever circumstances come your way, because the you that will deal with them will not be simply your conscious intelligence or conscious attention. In that moment it will be all of you, and that is beyond the control of the will, because the will is only a fragment having certain limited functions.
I know that this sounds impractical to some of you, or perhaps revolutionary, or perhaps not even possible, but it is simply living in the present. It requires a certain kind of poise: If you make exact plans to deal with the future and things don’t happen at all as you expected, you are apt to become thoroughly disappointed and disoriented. But if your plans are flexible and adaptable, and if you’re here when things happen, you always stay balanced.
As in movement or martial arts, keep your center of gravity between your feet, and don’t cross your feet, because the moment you do you are off balance. Stay always in the center position, and stay always here. Then it doesn’t matter which direction the attack comes from; it doesn’t matter what happens at all.
If you expect something to come in a certain way, you position yourself to get ready for it. If it comes another way, by the time you reposition your energy, it is too late. So stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
-- What is Zen?, Alan Watts

And that's all my book references done for the day! :-)

Right on tack with my own experience! I was very into the Zen concept and the practicing thereof when I was a teenager. Fishing and spending as much time in the woods in silent openness as much as possible was my introduction to it long before I read about it. Actually, I was a little disappointed to find out what I was feeling and knew was already well known and ancient. But that was a typical teenage reaction. I'm not special anymore blah blah blah. Kind of funny now.
The fact you lead right into it gives me joy. I used to read Zen Koans and poetry when I felt off track and off my center and it would clear my mind and settle it for a while. What turmoil we put ourselves through!
Thanks again for the links and reminder. Bringing me back to myself, this whole thread.

Hey, your post reminding me to remind you helped me remind myself! :-)
Of course you are special; it's just that so is everyone else...

...

You should check out the Carlos Castaneda series.

Yes! His quote on intention really made everything clicked for me:

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

Q: Wow, that takes me back. When I read the series back in my younger twenties, I kept a notebook of every good quote I read followed by whatever thoughts they inspired. Wish I had that notebook still! No idea what happened to it.

Same here! That quote is my favourite, because it really gets down to the fact that there's not one thing affecting another: you are 'first cause' and move yourself by yourself with yourself.

...I've had a bit of success re-acquiring notebooks for people lately, as a matter of fact...

Re-acquiring notebooks? What do you mean?

A converstation I was having elsewhere. Could still turn up, you know...

I think I need to get in the mindset to reread without trying to relive or recapture, to start where I'm at, ya know?

Yeah, sometimes a "reset' - or the acceptance of the reset - can be just the thing that's needed.

POST: Some shee folk i met in a lucid dream

TIL, lucid dreams are rare for me, and when I get them I tend to get a bit carried away. The last time I encountered an entity she was super scary but i stood firm and faced her down and broke her, this made me think that this is all i have to do, that because it's a dream i can't be harmed.

Yeah! In a dream, you are the dream and not the "character" you seem to be. So everything you encounter is a bit of you, the larger you. So there's always more to it than just, say, cool imagery and fun stuff to do. It's filled with meaning, to some greater or lesser extent.

Facing up to fears is classic fun.

So would you say that the characters that I encountered are manifestations of my own subconcious and therefor the names they gave me meaningless?

No, not meaningless. It's maybe better to put aside the notion of the subconscious, and instead say that - from the perspective of 'little you' - the 'universe' is talking to you, giving you messages or challenges to help you. The dream may be "all you", but the fact is you do identify with one part of it, one perspective. However, the rest of it all has meaning for you, because it is part of the 'big you'.

(Sorry, that wasn't very clear probably.)

EDIT: Keep in mind that "finyacluck" is just a dream character you are seeing through the eyes of, and 'finyacluck" is at the same level as any other dream character. It represents part of the whole that you are; it just so happens that you are attached to "finyacluck"'s perspective and so you confuse it with being "you".

Thank you for explaining, and apologies for my very basic, newbie questions, the only thing now that's on my mind is if anything I encounter whilst dreaming, given that I didn't try to contact it earlier, has the ability to interrupt my waking, day to day life?

Well, the changes you experience in a dream do overflow into waking life (because you have changed), but you don't need to worry about "beings" following you. If that is a concern, then simply perform some sort of banishing ritual that seems persuasive to you. Simply declaring is sufficient for this, until you feel comfortable.

And don't worry about "newbie" questions; none of this is obvious and it's all still under debate. That's why it's a personal exploration/journey of discovery!

POST: Question on sigil magic. Re: no harm...

Is the "poor guy" as real as you anyway...?

But, if you want to avoid the experience of getting a job because someone else was apparently fired, you just need to be more specific about what you request. Or intend more directly, directly into the 'external' world.

Sigils and servitors tend to operate according to your own established habits - hence, no materialisations etc, plausible unfoldings only. So perhaps experiment with taking control of the situation "personally".

POST: What was the most Epic Fail you ever had from a spell that actually worked?

Q:[Deleted]

Good story. You should have kept going though. First attempt can give you the easy result (you dream of your desire, you see a drawing of what you want, or some other reality-joke played on you). It's saying: "Are you serious? Then commit!"

You were probably half-hearted in your intention.

Not to say you are going to wake up the next day on a mattress stuffed with money. In a beautiful house. With a beautiful wife. But you may ask yourself... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvM6TxUnCDE]

My tendency is to end up seeing films which have scenes depicting what I want, or reading passages in books. I see it as a sign that I was "heard" and to keep pushing...

Q: In total agreement. This is how I (make every effort to, anyway) operate now. If I see something (a photo, an overheard conversation, etc.) that is representative of my own "heart's desire", I have gotten myself to a place where I can rejoice over that.
As in, if I want a trip to Europe - and a co-worker comes in and says she is unexpectedly able to travel to Europe, I rejoice (even if said co-worker may not be my favorite person). If I feel a twinge of envy, I... not so much "quell" it... but transform it, as best I can, into genuine gladness for the other person. I also see it as the Universe (ha - yes, sort of ME -) bringing my own wish a little bit closer to me, and still a little bit closer to me.... If a a bunch of people around you seem to be getting what you want, believe the Universe loves you and hears you and that the THING is being drawn closer to you, instead of that the Universe has played a joke on you and you should quit.
To me, the Monopoly houses & money by the bus stop sound like an amazing "yes!" sign. It's saying, "You're kind of vibrating to your house and your money. Here's some inspiration to help you along!"
ALTHO' "quitting", ie "dropping the seed into the ground" can be quite effective. "Quitting" is what brought the "bf" from my other story BACK after 2 years, so he could break my heart even more effectively by leaving again a year or so later!! (Moral: Discernment is needed. "Know thyself!" Just 'cause you wanted something desperately 2 years earlier doesn't mean you're obligated to say "yes" to it whenever it shows up. :)
"Dropping it" is easier to do with the little things, the "it would be nice but it's not urgent" things, like my chair. (I used Deepak Chopra's meditation to arrange that; I bought a worth-$300-or-more wing chair for $10, carried to my doorstep, no less.)
I also try extremely hard to stay positive and um... silent. For instance, IF I've recently failed to do this ("stay positive", that is) - today or any other day - I would not tell you about it here! :p

Hey, great response. There's also the fact that people don't dedicate themselves enough to this, don't really commit.

If you were told that, to get something you want - a complete change in your reality - you should lie down, let go, and simply strongly intend that for a day. Just assert that it is true already, without compromise. Would you do it? Basically, almost nobody would. This guy [POST: one way to get whatever i want] has the wrong intentions but the right dedication.

I also try extremely hard to stay positive and um... silent.

Yeah, it's a challenge. It helps, though, once you realise you don't need to be "thinking positive thoughts" all the time, so much as only intend positive things. It's about what you put yourself behind. If you remain detached usually, then no stray passing thing will get energised; if you spend your days being hyped up, then your dream will be all over the place.

Crowley said to use magick like this to fix sickness is deplorable.

I'd never heard that. Looking up quotes, the best I could find was:

Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.
-- Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.

So, is it more that it is folly to ignore the message and learn from the sickness? That would make sense. In other words, forcing "feeling better" on top of the underlying cause, which has not been reached into and dissolved.

very good point! I'm not sure where I heard that then.
Also, could a sigil backfire if given a silly time frame, for example "By tomorrow"?

There's no reason it can't happen semi-instantly. For instance, a friend of mine was very sick, 10 minute gaps between "visits", and did the thing: "I wish I had a magic potion to cure me" (or similar). Later, he suddenly knew he had to go and buy a bottle of rum. He watches his timings, gets to the store and back again, downs the rum. Wakes up a few hours later, cured.

I feel that when the phrasings play tricks on us, it's really us being tricky with ourselves. Any slight lack of conviction or confidence on our part, and the wiggle room will be used to make it happen "off-centre".

In the story above, you've got to think that his 'larger self' was having a bit of fun, sending him on a journey outside for a distance was that going to need near-perfect timing, but was doable - just. He rose to the challenge, he gets his reward!

Meanwhile, you can skip phrasing altogether, by simply lying there and directly intending into a "feeling-state" of health. Basically, deleting/overwriting the (now temporary, historical) fact of illness. Become the larger you, and operate from there (outside > in), rather than being the small you, sending out wishes (inside > out).

This is fascinating! Any books on this technique of operating from the larger self?

You really need to feel it out for yourself - become aware of the larger background in which your experiences (thoughts, sensations, etc) arise and stand there as that, rather than as the mind or the body. Expand your presence into the world.

Neville Goddard's "summon the feeling of the wish fulfilled" technique, detailed here [http://www.thepowerofawareness.org/] for instance, is an approach. (Do a daily "update" of the universe each night to realign it with your desired version.) The feeling-awareness exploration of Peter Ralston is also helpful.

Mainly: experiment. If you 'send requests into the universe' then you are implicitly asking for the universe to do something on your behalf, as a separate entity. If you 'become' or 'recognise that you are the universe', then you are operating as first mover. (See Alan Chapman for how implicit assumptions affect work.)

Main final thought: This stuff, even the "direct" stuff, happens indirectly, in that you are operating at the "enfolded" level of experience, which subsequent "unfolded" objects and events will manifest in alignment with. You never really create that Ferrari, rather you update the "enfolded schema" of your world such that ownership of a Ferrari is part of it; subsequent sounds, images, feelings and sensations that arise in awareness will then unfold from that updated schema.

(Sorry, not sure that was very clear.)

EDIT: Remember that you are always your larger self. Sometimes you forget it and pretend to be a smaller self.

EDIT2: Another way to think of this is that each moment appears anew, unfolding based on the "enfolded schema", then disappears - and a new moment appears. The unfolded moment itself is transparent, it has no substance, and can't be altered. However, by updating the "enfolded schema" you have effectively "re-seeded the universe", updating its blueprint or script, so that subsequent moments will arise consistent with that modified architecture.

Q:[Deleted]

Good story.

I'm finding, the less specific you are the more you are vulnerable to your background beliefs of: a) what is possible, b) what you deserve.

If you secretly believe you don't deserve something, you'll set 'tests' for yourself so that you can 'prove' you are worthy. If you think that you must work hard for everything, then stressy-hurdle-jumping will be your world.

If you weren't willing to work for it, I wonder what would have happened.

...

Q: Wanted specifically "a large amount cash" to "appear in my lap." The next morning my friend called me who I haven't seen in 3 years asking if I could watch her relatively large pit bull, Cash.

You were lucky. Circumstances could have forced you into a life working at a strip-club, say, where indeed large amounts of cash would have "appeared in your lap" - when you were with your "special customers".

Tricky stuff, this.

Tricky, yes.
But could the pit bull Cash have been a symbol of the "real cash" to come? I mean, the very next morning, after 3 year absence. Hmmm. The You-niverse on the move.
(That is a funny story. I wonder if Res_hits did wind up pet-sitting and if Cash ever actually got up in his/her lap....)

Like other stories, often the first "comedy" response is a little tester. It's like "hey, I'm listening". So you should keep pushing on. Half-responses are perhaps a sign of half-hearted intention, as I said on another... oh, looks like I'm going there now > > >

Would't it have instead been a stripper being on his/her lap? I mean, if it was a good night for the stripper...

...hmm, so a life going to a strip club, and a girl called "Candy Cash" or similar sitting on their lap?

...

. . . God rewards and guides those who are aware of it's existence; even if people choose to view said God as a simple point of reference. From my own experience- God represents a Guidance System directed towards Goodness. It recognizes ones desires, wants and needs- it gives us those things when we ask for them as long as we are an active part of society- that way he (god or the universe) can work through the people of the world.

What a great way to put it - thanks for that thought-provoking reply. Interested in your "part of society / work through people" idea. Could you expand on that a bit?

If you desire something- you must be willing to go into the world so that it may reach you. You gotta be willing to meet 'God' half way in a sense. Lets say- you are looking for a specific material possession or experience; it doesn't do you any good to lock yourself up in your home indefinitely. Desires are found out there in the community / society- through networks- friendships- relationships- ect. It usually happens through a domino effect of coincidences and before you know it you are in front of what you originally wanted. Watch the Jim Carry film- Yes Man. I am not saying to be unwise about the opportunities that come your way but we naturally tend to not go along with opportunities due to lack of trust and fear of the unknown. Also sometimes life simply gives you what you need instead of what you want. There is always a lesson to be learned- even if you are not able to achieve your goals or you do achieve your goals but then fuck up. Instead of becoming angry- take a moment and retrace all your steps; things should add up if your attention span is broad enough. Thanks. Sincerely. -Al

Nice. Thanks.

...

Q: Well, I told TriumphantGeorge I would leave these forums, for I am "divesting myself of my stories" (which is great; I love it,) but lo! here I am with a story. Altho'... I don't really wish to tell it in first person, so I'll use the "let's call her Jean" tactic, which I've never liked!
Okay - so, let's say we have Abby, Bonnie, and Cara (ABC). (These folks are all in their 40s, at the time.) Abby is deeply in love with her bf, who dumped Bonnie to be with her. Abby is shy and reserved. The bf is striking and has women falling all over him all the time. Bonnie is stridently persistent, and will walk right up and grab bf's arm and drag him off when he is with Abby. (note: bf is a player; he cannot help it) Soooo, Abby detests Bonnie, who is originally from another city (Boston) 500 miles away.
"Just for fun", having no idea what she's doing ('tho she should have, having "manifested" a beautiful chair easily, & other things,) Abby begins to indulge a fantasy in which Bonnie is packed up (safely) in a big box which is all taped up and shipped to Boston. Abby loves this little fantasy, and visualizes it over and over again, enjoying the idea of detestable Bonnie in a big box on a freight train, swept off to Boston. Haha! Harmless Fun!
Well, after a little while Abby's very best friend of 20 years, Cara, who has always been local, tells Abby that her (Cara's) husband has been transferred to... Boston!! A city they've never been to! A city that never crossed Cara or husband's mind! "Detestable" Bonnie is unaffected by fantasy, but Abby's best friend and constant hang out buddy is the one swept 500 miles away.
If the foundation of the idea is negative feeling (this even goes for depressed thoughts, irritability, self-pity, blame - all that) then even unintentional musings can have a surprising "boomerang" effect.
Oh, yeah - Abby and bf break up after a year, of course, but Cara stays in Boston, having the time of her life, for over 10 years.
(I be Abby, obviously. :) I could tell you a dozen of these kinds of stories. This one is the most amusing. I won't tell the sad ones.

Heh, good, glad you broke your decision.

So here's the thing, is the "boomerang effect" a law of the universe, or a law of your-self? Just as thinking you don't deserve something can mean you don't get it, or have to 'prove yourself' when others don't - so can you having the background belief that wishing bad things means you get it back atcha be the true cause of this?

If I did such a thing - and, being ruthless and not believing anything that isn't to my own benefit - would I have got shot of "Bonnie" and kept "Cara"?

POST: I think /r/DimensionalJumping is slowly moving toward occult practice, and they have no idea

I dunno - I reckon some of them are probably aware of the overall context, see it all as part of a larger picture. Or, y'know, whatever. :-)

Q1: Just a question. I want to try this technique, but I'm worried I'll fuck up my wording(or rather what I want). In this, it's important to know that I'm a virgin and someone without a romantic partner of any sort. I guess what I'm looking for might be romance or it might just be the chance to get laid for the first time, but at the end of the day I'm struggling to figure out how I want to word things. For the latter(a focus on romance) I was gonna try "Loveless" and "Romance" but I don't know if it'd work. Any advice on wording and such(since the instructions call for one word)

The reason it's one word is to encourage you to actually summon a "handle" to the situation, rather than simply write out a description, since in the latter case you'll might just get the extended pattern of the phrase, rather than something more specific to your situation (although that can be sufficient).

So what I'd do: take a moment and ponder each situation (the current one and the target one), and pause and "ask" for the word which best captured that, and let it come to you. Sit with it a "feel out" whether it feels right. That's the word to use, since it arises from and is an aspect of that state or pattern.

Q1: Thanks dude.

No worries - hope it's helpful.

POST: Dreams mingling with reality

It's simplest to view these things as synchronicity - by which I simply mean, part of a larger pattern that is "across time", regardless of the "3D moment" you are presently attending to. (I recommend Kirby Surprise's take on this if you are interested).

But generally:

  • The apparent division between waking and dreaming is arbitrary - they are both just experiences you are having, sensory experiences arising in your "mind-space".
  • The "patterning" of your mind-space affects all your experiences, no matter what the apparent context.

How it works:

  • Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences.
  • Thoughts are also experiences - in-form-ation which shapes subsequent experiences.
  • The patterning which results, when obvious, is called "synchronicity".

TL;DR: What you are is an "open aware mind-space in which experiences arise". The formatting of that mind-space affects all your experiences - waking, dreaming or thoughts.

POST: What would you consider this in an occult terms?

[QUOTE FROM 'POST: Are you guys for real? (/r/DimensionalJumping/)']

Yeah this sub seems insane, to be honest. To someone who believes this stuff: why? I am genuinely curious to know what could convince you that people have the ability to move between "dimensions".

[END OF QUOTE]

Q1: Wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of visualization->actualization.
Or just group insanity.

It's basically detachment + intention, by way of a metaphor, surely? Like pretty much everything on this subreddit.

Q1: When I was desperate and tried to brute-force my way into another reality, I did use a similar technique. I just wonder if the metaphor they are using inhibits their progress.

Yeah, I don't think there should be any progress maybe. It's a user-friendly bit of fun for experimenting, but with a path to go a little deeper for the curious. Most people shouldn't go deeper. But - there's the mirror technique listed, plus from the sidebar link there's the Neville Goddard approach and a Patterning approach. I actually attached myself as mod there to tidy it up a bit because it was getting popular but seemed a bit... "not a good idea" as it stood.

EDIT: By "any" progress I mean they shouldn't have anything too powerful.

Q1: Eesh. That sounds like my relationship with /r/howtonotgiveafuck. I became really drained trying to teach people the difference between nihilism and detachment.

Haha, now that sounds frustrating! :-)

Well, it's been kinda interesting the discussions that come up. Some folk just totally get the ideas (the larger ideas behind it) and they're the people who will end up checking out /r/occult and /r/oneirosophy.

I actually think there's a place for a narrowly-defined, one-hit type approach that everyone can do when in a spot, without needing to commit to a full world-view. I quite like the idea that something could evolve into that.

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Psychonaut/

POST: Why are you happy?

Q1: I used to answer "because I'm still alive!"
Now it is "just because".

So, are you saying you are no longer alive...?

Q1: Nope. I'm saying that I was never not alive.

And yet, whole lifetimes rise and fall within you...

POST: What is "it"

What is "is"?

What is what? :O

What what is, is is "is"! :-)

WHAAAT

IIIIISSSSSSS

POST: [deleted by user]

Instead of trying to totally let go or resist, just be indifferent of the outcome, let resistance and letting go balance each-other out.

To me, that's what letting go would be. You don't unclench a fist by doing the opposite - forcibly opening it - you do it by stopping clenching. So letting go isn't something you do; it's a cessation of holding on. Your approach of being indifferent - non-judgemental? non-attached? - sounds like a better way to refer to it. (You can't do being indifferent!)

POST: Is it possible to be enlightened, but retain carnal desires?

Q: from a buddhist perspective? no. this is not what people like to hear, but enlightenment is an incredibly rare and difficult state to attain and takes some serious dedication to grasp, and even then it is far from guaranteed. in order to be fully enlightened you need to completely drop all attachments and desires to transcend suffering. all of these are functions of the ego that must be overcome. however, this does not mean spiritual growth is pointless. as I said, a truly enlightened person is an incredibly rare phenomenon, but working towards it now can set you up for success in your future lifetimes. dont beat yourself up over not becoming enlightened in this lifetime, just stay on the path of mindfulness and grow at your own pace.
here is some more info on steps towards enlightenment:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_enlightenment]

You make a good point, but the word "enlightenment" has become a bit of a vague word in common usage. You can directly realise the nature of your existence (maybe call that "awakening" or "seeing") but that doesn't necessarily you choose to be nonattached to the patterns that arise in experience; you might still choose to remain a "person", albeit one who's "living the dream". People who have genuinely chosen to drop it all, eradicate all accumulated memory traces, and cease accumulating new ones - as you describe - probably are very rare. Having "the answer" is all most people aspire to, I think.

Q: [%red%Deleted&&]

Or a mixture of the two, yes. You can "see how it is", and still choose to live your life while incorporating that. You have a new perspective - you don't have to delete your entire accumulated character. Directly experiencing the lack of boundaries alone will inform your actions from then on, for the better. Change will happen gradually by itself anyway, internal and external (being the same).

POST: [deleted by user]

Q1: Even new age became a fashion.
I noticed this and it is always going to happen. With anything. The vegetarian fad, gluten free fad, meditation fad, etc. These people are annoying because they have no real interest in said action but eventually it will actually serve them. They are essentially tricking themselves into being better healthier human beings. No matter what ideas spread as fads to the majority of the population, but you know these fads will actually stick and hopefully lay way for a better more peaceful society.

Q2: We're all victims of it. Enlightenment is the only fad that isn't a fad

I'm not even sure about that...

Q2: Well it's been talked about in books for thousands of years. Yet we're still trying to achieve it. Most of us. It's the most obvious thing in everything. It's what ties all things together, what everything has in common.

Aw, we'll get over it! ;-)

Well, it's consciousness. I suppose that's quite popular.

POST: Is there a term for what I sometimes do (sorry if this is a basic question) - explanation below.

I simply watch my brain thinking, worrying, and feeling emotions. I watch "it" thinking, worrying, and feeling emotions.

Sounds like you are stepping back from the location where most of your thoughts are - literally in the head area of your experiential space. Ego thoughts tends to be around the head area; more intuitive thoughts lower in the body and more global.

If you expand your "feeling-awareness" out in into the room (open out your focus from narrow to diffuse) or shift the centre where you are "looking out from" (from your head to a more central position or lower) you can get this effect. (e.g. seeing from the core, as one example.)

The visualisation you're using is implicitly causing you to do this, I'd say. Really nice approach!

POST: Since everything is in our mind...

A1: Being at the center no matter where you are is equivalent to saying there is no center.
That's not true. If you are always in the center, then you are never moving at all. The rest of reality is what moves.

AesirAnatman, you are on fire today, shootin' down the daftness. This post is your ideal home! ;-)

if everything is in our respective minds, where are our minds, then?

Every... where?

POST: What do you believe in?

Q: [Deleted]

Not even "best guess" - more like "current best description", maybe? That puts the emphasis on utility rather than truth. You can then apply that to everything you think too, in fact. All is provisional-for-usefulness.

Q: [Deleted]

I agree science is the best approach for examining what I'd generalise as "the observable regularities of experience". In other words, repeatable patterns that involve objects, which can be abstracted in terms of concepts and narrative.

Ultimate truth, though, is that which is the "container" for all such observations and conceptualisations - so I'd suggest that although ultimate truth can be directly experienced, it cannot be described by a model, and so falls outwith science.

Like the inner surface of a sphere, if conscious, could never see its shape or true nature - it would see only the contents of itself - but it might be able to feel-know its shape directly just by being itself. (Yeah, rubbish metaphor. It was that or the "blanket of eyes" one.)

POST: Some of the many mysteries of Duality (seeking good thoughts)

You can't start from ideas about an external universe, and then work your way towards a 'through-creates-your-reality' viewpoint. We must first just admit what you know, what you don't, what you cannot.

But once consciousness comes into play it starts creating difference through the use of forms and ideals. I mean when you look at a bed the first thing you think of is what it is, a bed.

Already it is "too late": The seeing of the "bed" occurs within mind, before you even have a thought. You don't "look at a bed then have a thought" - you just have the experience of "bed" and that experience as all bed-related meanings and feelings as a part of it. Thoughts and perceptions are made of the same stuff; they differ only in their location in your field of awareness. Forgot ideas about the world, about inside and outside. Start with what you have when you wake up.

  • Darkness. A sense of space. Indistinct shapes. Light.
  • Within the space, sounds.
  • Within the space, patterns, images... no, objects.
  • A sense of "location", a meaning-feeling of being "you".
  • A sense of world, perhaps an arbitrary notion of "in here" and "out there", but do you ever experience such a division really? Or do you just think-about it?

It's like a dream-world or a game. What are you really, if you strip away the content of the world? When you invite the world back in, where does it appear?

Perception and meta-thought on it are inked intrinsically on the day-to-day basis but there is a key difference, one is you and the other is happening to you.

I don't see that difference. Which is "you" and which is "happening to you"? Surely both are true of both at once?

...the barrier between things melting but that's not the normal plane we inhabit.

But why not? That sense of separation is just a habit.

Seeing is believing but feel is real too.

Surely. All experience is 'real', and in the end thoughts and perceptions are the same "thing". Thinking about a table is different to perceiving a table, but they are essentially similar except for apparent persistence. However, thinking about consciousness doesn't work that way, because it cannot be conceived of. It is not a "thing".

Thoughts warp perception and the brain is a space of consciousness. But if thinking is key for seeing, what came first. Chicken/egg ect.

Perceptions (objects) are essentially stable thoughts. Neither came first; they are part of the same ongoing process. To be clear, deliberate forced thinking is not needed for seeing. What is required is that there are established patterns in the mind to be activated.

POST: What are some of your "out there", unconventional thoughts about this reality and your own consciousness?

This life is a dream and each of us is a small fraction of the dreamer. Anything is possible. Nothing is forbidden. But what we do to each other, we do to ourselves.

I like this efficient way of saying it. Do you see yourself as the dreamer?

Hahaha my ego wishes! No, I think we are literally one God-soul, lost within itself.

Yeah, "Phwahaha, you are all my obedient puppets now!" :-)

Doesn't that mean you are the dream character and the dreamer and the dream environment? Meaning "duck_amuck" is a character who borrows his power from the dream, as it were, but he's still the dream and the dreamer too - just as /u/duck_amuck borrows his power from Reddit.

Actually, I quite like that idea, and it fits experience a bit:

Characters borrow their power, so they can only "submit requests" for what they want to do to the larger dream, hoping that the dream will then move them as requested. All the while, of course, they are actually the larger dream all along, pretending they have to ask...?

Here's a picture of duck_amuck hanging out with a chickeny pal, pretending to be separate.

Alt Tag

EDIT: Better: They are the larger dream, having confused themselves into thinking they are the character.

Lol to the pic.
But yeah, something like that... Ego is the character. Self is the dreamer. Self has unlimited power, but the character is the one driving the story within its limited scope/means/belief systems.

Self-ego-character, sounds about right. "Big Self, Little Self". Would make a good title for a children's esoteric television show.

Another way is to rebrand this. Self is the universe. Ego is just a bit of that universe. What we call "you" is just the sphere of attention, perimeter of experience we are currently maintaining. We think that we are "ego" when we localise on the region of body-space where selfish thoughts seem to arise (typically, towards the rear of the head); we think we are the universe when we dissolve the perimeter; in-between and we think we make "connections" and have non-local paranormal powers.

Idk what in your post made me think of it, but it's too bad there's not a legit mystery school teaching today... The realization of consciousness and the tools to work with it should be available to everyone.

Yes. There are lots of 'cult-type' efforts and 'self-help' arrangements, but there's nothing legitimate. In school, we don't even teach the history of religions and beliefs/worldviews anymore (as opposed to the content). I am very interested in seeing insights brought into modern, accessible language, together with investigative approaches ('exercises' without any nonsense) a person can use to discover themselves and the world. People like Rupert Spira attempt this to some extent, but somehow it doesn't cover the whole subject (life!) for me.

POST: Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman | Science

A1: I'm working on it, shmeesh, hold your horses.

A2: I'm working on my thesis at the moment, here is an early draft:

Alt Tag

Haha, spectacular.

...

To Dennett’s opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest.

Part of the problem is maybe this idea of "inner experience". To me, all my experience appears in a conscious, aware space. So in a way, all of my experiences are inner - that chair over there, that thought over here. There's no separation. But I can't detect an outer in my experience, so really they aren't inner either. This is the background to all experience. Consciousness isn't a thing, it's a context. (Any thoughts I have about my-"self", George, also appear within that context. Which means those are just concepts and not the "real me".)

"To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named “fictoplasm”

Which is funny. But highlights the problem: those characters appear in my awareness too when I read about them. In other words, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter are made from consciousness. If consciousness is not a "thing", but rather the material from which experience is shaped, then it's either an error or a straw-man argument to dismiss consciousness by categorising it as such.

It’s like asserting that cancer doesn’t exist, then claiming you’ve cured cancer.

It's more like asserting that words and sentences don't exist, using words and sentences.

Well, it certainly doesn't help that our only means of expressing consciousness is mediated by language... a tool of consciousness.

Well, I guess... art? Art and the felt-sense.

But, yeah, as soon as we are using division or objects in our communication, we are already in trouble. How can something point to something that it is made from?

I've actually considered art before, but if you think about it, an artist can never paint anything that fully depicts his entire knowledge/understanding of art

I agree, but I think we can capture "meaning" in art, felt meaning. Sure, not the fundamental truth (because that is what the art is made from, not what it depicts), but it allows us a deeper connection than language.

. . .but as soon as we think about it, we begin to attach all of our comfortable symbols and concepts to the experience we're trying to describe, and we taint it in the process.

Yes, I think that's spot on. Even sitting quietly on our sofa, we can relax into this open feeling, but as soon as we think about it we "ripple the water" as it were. Direct perception and thinking occur in the same space, so to perceive clearly you have to let yourself settle - no forcing, no trying. That's why "there is no technique".

I'd be interested if this was also true for near death experiences...

Lots of them still seem very "content-based". Sometimes people feel peaceful, they often have a sense of a greater connected space, but it seems they are still having an object-based experience. Maybe there's a balance to be had between giving yourself to the experience, and holding back a bit. This might make the difference between dying and not, though...

It's a real shame that the Guardian article is so inaccurate.
I strongly recommend you read Consciousness Explained - it's a killer book and I think you'd have a great time with it.
In particular, Dennett does NOT claim that consciousness doesn't exist. What he's against is the Cartesian theatre model of consciousness, where a "little man" sits in your brain telling you what to do.

I did read it (about 10 years ago) and its "multiple drafts" model. It's a very enjoyable book actually; he's a smart guy with a nice style. As I recall, the problem with Dennett is actually that he's talking about content not consciousness.

It's quite a nice model for describing the formation of the apparent world as experienced in one's first-person "aware space". In fact, it's pretty close to the idea that our experience is an "ongoing dream 'inspired by' the senses". (The nature and location of "the senses" is another matter.)

But because he's determined to infer what consciousness is from that, he ends up clashing; just as he does when he confuses directed introspection with thinking-about, and therefore sees construction rather than observation. (He really implicitly assumes that we can only apprehend the content or patterns, but this is not true.)

In any other area, it would be a good approach: See what is there, then derive the terms from that. In this special area though, "what is there" and the thing being "explained" (consciousness) are the same thing and therefore outside of your examination, because it is that which all examinations are also made from. Which means in some ways that having a theory about consciousness is meaningless. One can only have theories about patterns within consciousness; that which awareness is aware of, as and within itself. In fact, I think this is exactly true. Now, it's been a while since I read him, so maybe I am misrepresenting!

POST: My problem with most reality theories

It is my opinion that existence does not operate in any definable manner at all, we cannot postulate on existence by taking the laws and parameters that we believe govern our subjective experience of reality and assume that the rest of existence is in any way related to those laws and parameters.

The core problem is that experience leaves traces and those traces in-form subsequent experiences. We cannot separate the structure of mind from the apparent structure of experience. Mainly because, to us, they are one and the same thing.

And finally occam's razor, the simplest explanation to me for things existing, is that they don't.

In a sense. "Exist" is difficult - perhaps better to say they don't exist in the sense that our typical world-description would assume. We can't "represent" existence, because either both the existence and the representation occur within the same field of observation, or we use the term existence to represent everything, which is meaningless.

Thanks for the reply, I'm glad you understand the difficulty and inherent problems with trying to communicate something like this.

It's difficult, but I think so long as the people having a conversation understand that it's difficult (i.e. don't get frustrated at each other because it's so obvious to them) then they can feel their way along.

existing/not existing are not singular states even if they are both definable to an extent.

Yes.

So, a shadow 'exists' but it does not exist in the sense of being a separate thing to the object that casts the shadow. It would be tempting to say that the object is 'more real' than the shadow. But actually neither the object nor the shadow 'exist' without the light source which makes them both visible, so it is relative. From the perspective of the light source, the shadow and object are equally real.

Yeah, wishy-washy pretty fast! :-)

For instance if you hypothetically could draw a diagram representation, how do you include your perspective of the representation within the representation...

It gets pretty folded, pretty quickly - infinite regression. Right, we have to declare one "observational level" as the foundation. I think we can do this. It's time for today's made-up metaphor! I think it's something like this:

Today's Metaphor: The Single Sheet of Paper

I have a sheet of paper. It has a line dividing it into two, and on the left side is a picture of a vivid 3D cube drawn in amazing technicolour. The right side is blank. The right side is where I can draw to think, represent. However, my drawing skills aren't that great (I can only do 2D) and my tools limited (only got red and blue crayons). But I draw the best representation that I can: a blue and red square.

Okay, now I think to myself: I've represented the cube, how about I represent my representation? To do this, I don't need another level or whatever. I simply draw another blue and red square on the right side, with a little arrow pointing to the first square I drew.

On the left we have "the external world". On the right we have "my thoughts about the external world" and "my thoughts about my thoughts". No infinite regress. I can have as many "thoughts about thoughts" as I like without going to a deeper level.

Importantly, all of this happens on the same single sheet of paper. My aware space. My mind.

I feel compelled to mention I'm by no means as well read as a lot of people here, and what I write is pure conjecture, so there are bound to be contradictions/inconsistencies floating around

:-)

Being well-read just means you have read more. Being good at reading, being good at thinking-about-thinking is no guarantee of insight. More important to be open and curious. After all, it might be that the world we experience is inherently inconsistent. Then all those neatnik little reader-thinker folk would be screwed, wouldn't they? ;-)

...

It's starting to drive me crazy, that there are NO substantive posts with a feasible, logical, rational structure to them.

Well, lots of people are just trying and struggling to put their experiences into words - and often finding that they don't quite fit. Also, they are sometimes trying to describe something which is before logic and reasoning: That which experiences logic and reasoning (and absurdity and intuition and everything else). They are trying to describe what experiences are "made from", but you can't get outside experience in order to do this, and it's meaningless to talk of logical representations of an experience of void, say.

Although I'd agree that you have to go one way or the other - half-logic is no path at all.

Experience only can come from a background of pure logic and reason underlying the very fabric of reality.

I disagree. Logic and reason aren't the base, the underlying fabric of reality. They are certainly patterns or pathways which experience may flow along - by which I mean both thought and perception - and they might even be some of the most stable pathways, but they only seem to be the foundation because they are common and become entrenched due to repeated activation. They are hard to describe in words, yes, because they are more subtle than words - words are "too late". But they at least do correspond somewhat with the structure of language, and so can be captured to some extent. Which is why they get confused with the basic level of reality - because they can be thought about and more subtle structures can't because they barely correspond to language at all. (This also means they become disproportionately reinforced by communication.)

Logical pathways might be "lowest common denominator" pathways. If every experience we have leaves a memory trace in our minds, which then funnels subsequent experience in a self-reinforcing cycle, then it would seem as if reality was built upon those pathways. They would seem to be external laws.

In fact, though, this would be equivalent to simply thinking about something an awful lot ("red cars"), subsequently noticing those things after being so primed (red cars in the street), thinking about them some more ("gosh, lots of red cars"), in a passive loop. It would seem that reality was built a certain way, when in fact the 'shape of your mind' had been deformed. You could never tell the difference. In fact, there would be no difference...

It could be argued that surely only patterns that were common "out there" could lead to such stable patterns, and so patterns of mind == patterns of external reality, but there would be no way to test this. We can't point to external reality - where is it? In some parallel space beyond this room? Where is the real hand that could do the pointing anyway?

After all, when did we "wake up" and start thinking about this stuff? Who knows what patterns have been accumulated before then! If we are all one, then really there is only one mind anyway, and so there need be no fundamental solid underlying at all. Just, accumulated patterns from a random noise, eventually clustering into meaningless paths, from which our arbitrary world emerged. It seems meaningful, but only because "meaning" arose by the same process.

All you have to experiment with, is the flexibility of your own experience. No maybes. ;-)

[QUOTE]

Clustering illusion
The clustering illusion is the tendency to erroneously consider the inevitable "streaks" or "clusters" arising in small samples from random distributions to be non-random. The illusion is caused by a human tendency to underpredict the amount of variability likely to appear in a small sample of random or pseudorandom data.

[END OF QUOTE]

There aren't 'minds' at all, we are just analogue computers which perform i/o.

I disagree that we are analogue computers. "Minds" is just a word we use to (fictionally) encapsulate a set of experiences when we talk about them.

We think about thinking, but we don't even know what a thought really is. It isn't 'anything' more than a pattern.

It isn't any-thing, that's true. And it is a pattern. But following the input-execute analogy doesn't really lead us anywhere surely. There's no evidence for it in our experience, for starters, it's just a visualisation that some people find attractive.

Although your (implied) notion patterns unfolding spontaneously along "the curve" is a nice description.

There's no evidence for input-execute in our experience? What? Go read a neuroscience book, or hell, even just an informative article, you fucking hippie scum... srsly jesus christ. ew. so glad i don't reject anything that has 'weight' to it. you just write off everything because everything 'is nothing' in your view. Have fun with that crap, m8. I'd like to see the kind of moral code you've built up for yourself with that attitude... Or maybe I don't want to see it, because it's probably abhorrent.

Somebody got out of bed the wrong way? ;-)

Maybe you need to spend a bit more time reading critically and also paying attention to how you actually experience the world. Neuroscience, despite its many advances in other areas, has made very little progress when it comes to understanding how we come to perceive a "world" or the larger area of consciousness. We might be able to track brain activity from eye to brain, but we don't see "processing" of that into a "world". And it's hard to see how it ever could at present. There are currently no theories about how consciousness arises.

The signal-path/processing/construction metaphor just doesn't seem to work any better than the clockwork metaphor or the steam metaphor before it. We can't even locate memories in the brain. There's interesting stuff going on [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/learning-how-little-we-know-about-the-brain.html], but it mainly reveals how little progress we've made. But the way that minimal progress becomes turned into blanket enthusiasm and even public policy [https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/can-brain-science-be-dangerous/?mabReward=RI%3A5] is somewhat dubious.

That there is a link between brain and experience is certain, but the nature of that connection is... hazy to say the least. For all we can tell, we might be the equivalent of The Electric Ant [https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd077-0.html].

Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception is perhaps one of the more hopeful approaches (see here [https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interface.pdf] and more speculatively here [https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf], lecture here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqDP34a-epI] covers the issues). The problem remains that the brain as studied is itself a representation in mind, and we have a terrible habit of literally seeing our metaphors without recognising it. (Hence it being important to bear in mind that the "objects" we divide experience into aren't necessarily "out there". Wherever that is.)

Meanwhile, physicists (the late) David Bohm and Basil Hiley's work on wholeness and the implicate order is an interesting approach - see here [Dead link] for a good interview.

The short version: Current models and metaphors are crap; they don't fit our experiences; we need to explore the nature of perception - and hence the apparent world - more; the future of neuroscience as an explanatory approach is just faith.

My moral code: Is probably much more inclusive and considerate than someone who thinks we live in a world where "there aren't 'minds' at all" and other people are just "analogue computers which perform i/o".

Consciousness can't be described because it isn't a thing.

I would agree with that statement (although perhaps not in the way you meant it).

We think we are conscious, but what convinced you of that?

This is mistaken. It is independent of thinking.

Sure, I can think, "I am conscious" but that's just a thought - but it is a thought within my awareness. By attending to the space around that thought, or the context of my experience more generally, I discover that I directly experience right now that I am aware. Or more correctly in this first-person view, that I am this awareness. I don't think this is something that can be thought about (because thoughts appear within and are made from this; consciousness is not an object). But it is a direct truth.

Why do people emphasize the fact we can perceive consciouslly?

Because it is their fundamental experience and any description of the world which does not account for it (or at least admit to starting from it) is incomplete. The phrasing "we perceive consciously" is problematic perhaps. Perceptions appear to us; we don't "do" perception. We must account for this also. Perception might be "ordinary" in the sense of being familiar and ever-present, but that does not mean it needs no examination. Quite the contrary.

Right now you are sat in front of a screen, reading this text. If you sit back, you can feel the space in the room, become aware of all its contents. Simultaneously, you experience a sense of the place you are "looking out from". Also, any thoughts which are arising, any body sensations. Additionally, you can now think-about those these experiences. Behind all that, there is a sense of "presence".

Now, you can think the words "I am just a computer, this is all programmed". But this really doesn't account for the experience at all. What I'm doing is replacing experience with a thought about it.

(And the more you take the time to examine your experience, the more you'll discover there's lots of other stuff going on. Exploring how actions and thoughts happen, how experiences snap into formations, and how adopting a certain set of ideas actually changes your actual perceptions.)

As for moral code, if we are all computers executing code, then we can never blame ourselves but rather only the situation in which code was executed. Can't be mad at people, ever, with that worldview.

If we are all "computers executing code", then we have no choice whether to blame ourselves, or be made at people, or not - or indeed anything. There is a quick cheat to all this, of course: You can insert "consciousness" as the base level material in the universe and have everything else as "patterns of consciousness".

(Christof Koch's panpsychism [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-universal/] does take a half step there, but not quite because he hold onto a certain notion of consciousness-and-object. Many otherwise interesting formulations [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-theory-of-consciousness/] stumble by confusing the content of consciousness with consciousness itself. Also, confusions between consciousness, self-consciousness, awareness and attention persist.)

What makes you convinced you are 'aware'? Isn't that one of those symbols your mind made up?

You highlight an important point, you get to the essence of this.

-- It is simply directly true that awareness is my experience; it is experience itself. --

It is not symbolic.

This is different to thinking about being aware.

We could maybe say there are two types of truth:

  • Direct Truth. I touch a pillow. The pillow is soft. It is directly true that I am having the experience of softness. Or rather, that softness is my experience. The feeling of "direct sensation". Although I am using words to describe this, I stress that this experience is not itself symbolic.
  • Conceptual Truth. This is the truth of a coherent system of thought. A set of thoughts which fit together. That is conceptual, logical or symbolic truth. The "feeling" of an argument "making sense". Note that a conceptual framework can be entirely self-consistent, have this feeling associated with it, and yet be largely disconnected with perceptual experience, the direct facts of the world.

Both experiences occur within the same "conscious space". Being aware is the direct truth of the background sensation in which other experiences (direct perceptions and thoughts) appear. It is difficult to talk about this though, because not only is it not symbolic (it can't be experienced as Conceptual Truth), it is also not an object (so it is a Direct Truth but without a "thing" I can attach it to, unlike the pillow). Rather, it is the background which takes on the shape of those experiences, the context and the material for experiential objects.

Excuse the struggle for wording there; it's the nature of the topic!

...

EDIT: Somewhat of a long reply. The dangers of typing in a 5-line-high box on a tablet. Added headings to break it up a bit. EDIT2: Just tidied up some bad formatting and phrasing after previewing.

No Mechanism: Awareness & Content

saying that awareness is the 'background' means that anything can be aware without a mechanism of awareness...

Yes. Awareness itself can be taken for granted. There is no mechanism. In fact, logically, it the only way to get things to work. The content and structure of experience is something else though. Our wormy friend isn't having the same sort of experience as us. However, his background and the nature of his experience is the same. Remember, by "awareness" I mean literally just "being aware". This is not about self-reflection or thought associations or whatever.

No Connection: Awareness & Space-Time

it's not connecting to this universal hyperfabric of awareness that permeates through everything...

There is no connection to anything. Do waves have to "connect" to the water? (Excuse me reusing a hackneyed metaphor.)

In a way, there is nothing special about this. We could ask "what is matter made from"? And hit the same problems. You might eventually answer something like "it is patterns formed by the bending of space-time". Well, maybe think of a base material whose only property is that of being-aware. That's all it does. If we "fold" that material into shapes, then we have awareness-experiencing-a-folded-shape. The more complex the shapes...

Well, this is basically the "matter/space-time" story, but with consciousness built in, inserted at the fundamental level. We get all the goodies of science, but no mind-body problem.

I guess doing drugs and thinking 'outside the box' can lead people to that conclusion, but what basis is there?

I think what happens in those experiences is that the habitual structures of mind relax somewhat, and the feeling of 'open awareness' or 'open space' becomes more apparent because it is less clouded. Like those figure/ground illustrations.

Alt Tag

No Built-In Structure: Emergent Stability

I guess my final statement is this: why are things differential if there isn't some sort of inherent logical structure built into reality? what would have caused reality to develop the structure which allows this universal awareness that is everything/everywhere to exist?

As hinted above, we have to take "open unstructured awareness" as the starting point. This starting point is, remember, before divisions of any sort. We might use the metaphor of a blanket which then gets folded into patterns, but of course that implies a spatiality that awareness does not possess: it is not a "thing", it is formless. But things may be formed within it, but at the same time it will always remain unbroken. It has no structure; it is before structure. Therefore it is inherently everything, everywhere, always.

Taking that starting point, we can then allow the universe to come into being quite straightforwardly. Perhaps using a simple model of random fluctuations appearing, which then cluster into patterns, which self-reinforce and form more persistent structures - habits, if you will. Regularities. You could even call them "laws".

And so there comes to be a feedback mechanism: Patterns arise, leaving traces, which funnel future patterns, and so the universe tends towards stability. This applies to the universe at large, but also to our own localised experiences - and in fact those turn out to be identical.

In effect, we only need one type of metaphor to describe everything. We have:

  • A "landscape" of awareness upon which the "rain" of random fluctuations falls.
  • The rain erodes the landscape, leading to channels, which channels future rain.
  • Before you know it, you've got a highly complex, stable world, but still with an inherent creativity and a possibility of change.

No Worries: Thoughts & Intentions

There's an additional component of intention and individual minds - by which I just mean localised areas of awareness - but even that follows the same mechanism: Thoughts would leave traces too, explaining why adopting a viewpoint appears to deform one's direct experience.

This accounts for our tendency to 'see what we believe' - repetitive thinking, or thinking while in a certain type of open mode, literally restructures our mind. (It's reasonable to ask "where is that structure?" - and it is in fact directly accessible, it's just subtle compared with the ongoing foreground experience of sounds & sights & thoughts.)

Intention might therefore be described as a "wilful deformation" of the patterns within awareness.

'localised areas of awareness' - I thought your whole point was that everything is aware... how can it be localized then?

Everything is aware, it is continuous and delocalised. Patterns, however, are not. The "sky" is everywhere, a particular "cloud" is not.

In your analogy: the landscape, the awareness untouched, it has these random fluctuations, but somehow these are separate from the landscape while also being a part of the landscape, eroding the landscape.

It's all made of the same thing. It's just a metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the world. To use words, you have to partition things up unfortunately. But it's quite hard to describe a self-fluctuating, self-memorising, self-experiencing, aware surface that has no sides or edges and is therefore not even a surface initially. ;-)

The landscape HAD topology on it already, and the 'random rain' which carves out those rivers was always going to carve out the same rivers, because of the starting topology.

Really?

In my description, all that I pre-suppose is the property of awareness + the appearance of random fluctuation. Absolutely everything else follows from that, and leads to the stable world, one with physical laws and populated with conscious beings, we find ourselves in today. You are now suggesting we start with a pre-made topology, with everything rolling down it! So, how did this topology come to be? And how did the "snowball" come to be, and arrive at its initial location?

Basically, you are saying that space-time and the laws of physics are fundamental and have always existed, right That just seems a bit... unlikely! ;-)

If you like, I'll let you call the point where the first object appears "the Big Bang" or something like that. Would that make my description more appealing to you? :-)

And yes, I am suggesting a premade topology, because in YOUR example, the rivers wouldn't form without a nook and cranny to actually erode.

You are wrong. Which is why I included that little clustering animation. Since "random" doesn't mean "evenly distributed", paths will form on such a metaphorical "memory surface". No nooks and crannies required.

Rehashing again (because you don't seem to get this point I've been making the whole damn time... like talking to a wall), things 'are', they aren't 'not'. With that in mind, it isn't a leap to say all things that 'are', are, and that's it.

Oh, but it's a massive leap and it's a cheat. It's giving up, basically. We could have done that at any point in the past. Perhaps we could have just said: Hey, here's planet Earth, it just "is". But we didn't. You are suggesting we go: Hey, here are physical laws, they just "are"'. Why? You can push past that. Eventually you get to "is-ness" itself. Even that doesn't need to be accepted, you can go beyond it: "is" and "is not" are not fundamental. In fact you have to go beyond this, because that's the only way to account for consciousness, and any scheme which leaves that out is incomplete. I understand your point about not being able to access beyond the "cone" - that we cannot reach out beyond the rippling-out, beyond the unfurling edge of this "pattern" - but this turns out to not be important when all patterns have the same origin.

The way your own mind works is exactly the same way the whole universe works. And of course it is! How could it be otherwise? All talk of "software" is already "too late". It's a pretty unambitious base level to set ourselves when it comes to deeper explanations. Fun at a high level, sure, and very useful, but it's not "the nature of things". The universe is not made out of code, our of inferred laws, or out of mathematics. When we observe those things, we're really just observing the structure of our own minds...

...it's that those laws of physics and space-time CAN be known... ... the preloaded mechanics of reality boils down to things that 'can' be known...

...which is basically what you say here. When we talk about conceptual schemes (laws and so on) we're not really talking about the universe "out there" at all.

POST: How do I know you exist?

Get out of your head, go outside, experience reality, and you'll see there is so much more to life than just yourself.

Can he get out of his head?
Where is this "outside"?
Maybe all of life is "just" himself.
Not little him who worries about what to have for dinner, but the larger him.

If all these things don't exist for his amusement, what do they exist for?

I feel like there's a whole bunch of people in this thread just fucking with this poor guy at this point. He came here asking a serious question that is obviously causing him a lot of anxiety and instead of replying with the simple answer, 'Chill out. We exist too.' You all decide to fuck with him by saying 'I dunno, I might exist, I might not, nothing is real' etc.

You have a point - I don't think he was taken particularly seriously. Unfortunately intersubjectivity is the trickiest topic when it comes to consciousness and experience. It's not easy to talk straight about.

The quick answer is that everything that you experience it real-at-what-it-is.
You experience others as having presence and intelligence; that is sufficient evidence.
Life is definitely simpler if you just accept that and go out and enjoy it.

Right?
But, if we can't let it go, if someone really wants to explore it...

Just because you have access to your thoughts and not people's thoughts (note, not "other" people) doesn't mean you are on a different level of existence. When you really pay attention you find that, reassuringly, you are not really a "person" you are aware of a person - in the same way you are aware of "other people".

And that is how experience can be centred around your perspective, while avoiding being self-centred (solipsistic).

You can now relax and enjoy your life from the perspective of a background awareness rather than a tensed-up human.

Are you seriously saying WE and the entire universe exist for HIS sole amusement? If true, that has got to be the most egotistical statement I've ever heard.

If he really embraced that point of view then it would be the opposite of egotistical, and it wouldn't be about amusement. If you realised that the whole world was in fact "your extended body and mind", then you'd be very kind to it. To do otherwise, to play with aspects of it non-seriously, would be like taking fire to you own arms. And it wouldn't be an egotistical notion, because such a view would annihilate the ego - there would be no places for a localised, separate sense of self, right?

TL;DR: He can know we exist because he experiences us with a corresponding intelligence. However, the deeper answer involves revisiting what he thinks he is and we are in such a way as to place himself at the centre while changing the understanding of the himself to avoid solipsism.

Solipsism

That's only a problem if we're talking about a personal mind. If he realises that he doesn't exist (as a person) either, then solipsism isn't a hurdle.

POST: Why is it that the things happening inside our brain, are instead experienced as if they are happening outside of our body?

Things don't happen inside your brain. They happen within your awareness. Your perceptions, your thoughts, all happen within your awareness.

The brain and body, meanwhile, is the 3rd-person image of the the activity of localised consciousness. The image is correlated, but not causal, with experience.

I'd be interested to see the research demonstrating this.

You can do the research yourself right now! Examine your own experience, back it up with a bit of reading on metaphysics, neuroscience and consciousness, there you go! ;-)

More seriously...

Donald Hoffman - "He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and his Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Psychology" - gave an accessible talk on his interface theory of perception that you might find interesting though - see here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqDP34a-epI]. It's a bit more accessible than the published papers [http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/%7Eddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf].

John Searle's opaque comments [https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/perception-experience-intentionality-philosophy/] are always interesting, but you might find the links in this post about Darkroom Vision [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams] worth your time.

Q: So two guys, basically. Only one of which has published any research papers. If I ask around about how credible the rest of their field considers them, what am I likely to hear?
There is a saying: "Beware the man of one book". I think for the same reason it's wise to beware the man of one study, or who puts all of his confidence in a single figure because that guy agrees with him and seems sciencey/credible.
The nature of truth is that it's convergent. Loads of people will arrive at it independently regardless of era or geographical distance. Has this happened yet for the idea that consciousness creates reality? Moreover, I have done some simple experiments myself as you suggested and I cannot seem to instantiate objects or alter objects in front of me by thinking about it. How do you account for this?

(Responding to the initial version of your comment.)

What, you're really going to go down the "lots of people" route on the nature of perception and consciousness? Is that how you make your decisions on other subjects?

I offered those links because they are thought-provoking and might encourage further research and reading - and experimentation. This is not an area where you can just go and read about "how it is". (In fact, I don't think there are many such areas.)

As you'll see, it's not clear what constitutes a "scientific experiment" in the field of consciousness, when there isn't actually a theory. We already have a similar problem with finding what matter "is", mind you.

Scientific Theory Side

Theorising on consciousness is the big open area. It's not just that we don't have a theory, it's that we have no idea what possible form a theory could take that will fit in with a materialist perspective - because we can't make the connection between 1st and 3rd person. Neuroscience is great stuff medically, but it keeps writing checks that it can't cash philosophically.

We often end up with "habits" (linking cosmological development to the big bang) or "promises" (it'll come out of brain research eventually, somehow) which just sit there as accepted ideas without having descriptive or predictive power. And even those that do are up for grabs - recent example [https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html]. This is a classic area for this. Most people just won't touch the subject, because it's a no-win in terms of your career. Still less people really care; it's something that'd be better if it went away.

But those who are more established (or retired) do have a go. Christof Koch's aricle here [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-universal/] is worth a read although I think it is wrong; Donald Hoffman's ideas are interesting as mentioned before; this overview article [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness] isn't great but some of the responses were interesting; Susan Greenfield has given some interesting talks but then she also comes out with other nonsense; Aeon magazine is a good resource for starting points, article examples here and here [Deleted]; Bernardo Kastrup's aggressive writing is definitely worth the thought-provokation. You might also find Erwin Schrodinger's lectures, What is Life? interesting - specfically the appendix.

But essentially - unless there's a real flip-around of some sort, we're not going to be getting a consensus anytime soon. Cristof Koch's imaginary dialogue in Scientific American sums it up. Because - in the end, all brain-as-causation theories hit the same problem - at what point does consciousness "magically" emerge from matter, if matter does not already have a consciousness aspect? (Note, I do not mean self- or reflective consciousness. Just the property of awareness.)

In fact, you can keep all the "goodies" of physics and so on if you flip it round and insert a conscious background at the ground level, within which matter/phenomena arise as structured patterns.

Experiential Reality Side

Meanwhile, you can learn a lot just by examining your actual moment-to-moment experience. You are conscious, so why not explore the nature of that consciousness from its own perspective?

Studying brain blood-flow patterns via MRI can't really offer much insight into that. Neither does reading about today's temporary theories, or thinking about experience. You actually have to do the investigation yourself to get the 1st-person insights. And only then will you know what is required of a 3rd-person theory.

There's an abundance of material for this, but Rupert Spira's Presence and Greg Goode's The Direct Path are both well written and accessible. One has to ignore the "happy language" a little, but the actual approach is sound. Or you could try this little thought experiment [Outside: The Dreaming Game] (highlighted).

Other Reading

On the philosophical reading side, James M Corrigan's Introduction to Awareness is hard-going but very thorough. He tries for a ground-up description of the nature of experience. For a general round-up of the attempts to account for consciousness so far, covering both mainstream and less so, Susan Blackmore's Consciousness: An Introduction is an excellent read.

TL;DR: It ain't that simple, you're gonna have to do some work yourself, this is a "special topic" because it's not just about the sights, it's about the seeing. You need both the intellectual and the experiential aspect to make sense of it.

EDIT @ 20 mins: Re-ordered a little, added a couple of paragraphs for clarity, additional links.

(Responding to the extended version of your comment.)

Convergence & The Man of One Book

There is a saying: "Beware the man of one book".

A very wise saying! I'm totally stealing that. Similarly, beware the consensus view if you have not done the legwork yourself - or at least, be aware that you haven't. Take inspiration, I say, but keep it at arm's length.

The nature of truth is that it's convergent. Loads of people will arrive at it independently regardless of era or geographical distance. Has this happened yet for the idea that consciousness creates reality?

I don't think I ever said that "consciousness creates reality"! Reality might be made of consciousness, but that is a different thing. If "matter" was taken as the substrate layer, would we say that "matter creates reality"?

On convergence: Many people have proposed the consciousness-as-substrate view in the past. It's always been there, over the last couple of hundred years, amongst philosophers. It didn't really matter to general physics/biology until relatively recently, when the insurmountable issue of explaining consciousness via matter came to the ore. It doesn't really make much difference for "physics involving stuff", it's still more of a philosophical thing mostly. The early 20th-century physicists (back when it was more "natural philosophy") all had things to say about it, but that kind of got forgotten about. Schrodinger, Planck, Pauli, Bohr - they all had interesting views which differ from the "science=technology development" angle we ended up with by the late 20th, even if they didn't integrate them.

Starting with work of the likes of David Bohm and Wholeness and the Implicate Order, his work with Basil Hiley, and culminating with an increasing number of articles by physicists on the topic in magazines like Scientific American, I think it's gradually become more prominent again. (Interestingly, it's the Bohmian approach to quantum mechanics which forms the basis for that recent article on the big bang I linked to before.)

Creation, Creator, Created

Meanwhile, we have to be very careful with the use of the word "creation" as a verb, a conscious act...

Moreover, I have done some simple experiments myself as you suggested and I cannot seem to instantiate objects or alter objects in front of me by thinking about it. How do you account for this?

...which is not to say it can't be done, eh. Those are definitely experiments everyone should try. What did you do, more specifically?

The idea that we can just sit in a chair and "think things into existence", as commonly understood, can quickly be disproven. Although we can think things into existence over-here (for that is what thoughts are) it doesn't necessarily mean we can think them into existence over-there.

It is true that both thoughts and events "pattern" our minds as to the forms they will experience, though. In other words, we can be said to "create our experience", but the sense in which it is created means we'd be better to say something like "we can change the form of our experience". In the manner of, say, learning to see "trees" rather than brown patches topped off by green blobs. Or even "brown patches topped off by green blobs" rather than... nothingness.

The extent to which this means "creation" rather than "formatting" depends on whether you believe there is a deeper underlying solid reality (without evidence) or that patterns of consciousness that have become stabilised is that solid reality.

Even if you could establish new forms, that doesn't mean you can just fly about or make millions of dollars appear under your bed. The world might have over time established very stable habits, deeply ingrained patterns which act as an effective potential barrier to this - such as the tendency of objects to move towards one another ("gravity"), and persistence in general ("inertia").

However, within the parameters of accumulated structuring, there certainly are things we can do just by "asking" or what we might call thinking-over-there.

For instance, you can have your arm move. How do you do that?

Q: There's a lot of things I want to respond to in here, but I can't think of anything to say on the matter that won't irritate or upset you, and I don't want to do that. I do not foresee any possibility of constructive dialogue between us.

Respond!

You won't irritate or upset me, trust me. I am far less bound to a particular viewpoint than you might imagine - I'm just setting out my stall as a starting point. Be as "straightforward" as suits you, also.

...

Great, now we're up and running ;-)

This is astonishingly stupid. Only a retard would interpret this as evidence that consciousness creates reality.

I was careful to emphasise that I'm not saying that "consciousness creates reality". I'm suggesting that reality at the fundamental level is made from a material whose only property is consciousness. This isn't much different to saying it's made from "matter" - but it has the benefit that consciousness doesn't than have to magically "appear" at some point later. It's in-built. If you had followed any of the literature on consciousness studies over the last couple of decades even, you would be familiar with that approach as one of the possible solutions. If you are an appeal-to-authority kind of guy (which you seem to be) then you'll have to take the time to do some actual reading. If nothing else, read Wholeness and the Implicate Order or Paavo Pylkkanen's take on it.

Your arm moves when you want it to because a direct electrical connection exists between your brain and that limb, which conveys the signal to move.

Really? Is that what you do when you get your arm to move? Right there is missing the point and the problem. Until we can connect the experience you actually have (I bet you've never experienced "direct electrical connections in your brain" ever) and the external observations, then there is a gap that needs to be bridge. These are some of the issues at the core of the consciousness problem.

You seem to not understand there is even something to explain!

"What the @#$% Do We Know" is a textbook example of this, the scientists they interviewed were not told what the movie was really about.

Yeah, that was a terrible film... But the fact you even bring that up reveals something. I mean, nobody who actually is interested in these topics takes that seriously, right? Or even has a debate about it? It's like taking The Matrix as a documentary. So - I gave you a bundle of links to relevant articles by respected figures (is selected relevance "cherry picking"?) that offer the background you lack and are required to understand the problem and the potential solution, and you respond with a reference to that movie? I've referred you to no "new-age woo", as you put it. Or is it that you just automatically equate "consciousness" to a "woo topic" because it doesn't fit neatly into a conceptual framework?

Your problem is that you don't know what you don't know. You are arguing about something you have spent zero time studying.

As Wolfgang Pauli would say: You're not even wrong.

Finally, you seem so very... emotional about all this. Why is that? It's fine if this is an uncomfortable topic for you; simply put it aside in that case.

But don't fool yourself that there's no issue, that everything's solved, that we've got this sussed at the moment, etc. Science just isn't like that, it doesn't find Truth and never aims to. In ten years time, we might well look upon the idea of the Big Bang as a quaint mistake borne from an out-dated perspective [https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html].

POST: Your subconscious is smarter than you might think

I suggest that thoughts are their own things, and that problems solve themselves.

Problems, as described in thought, are created with the intention of being solves, and so their natural tendency is to do so. Create them (formulate the problem), leave them alone, and that thought framework will come back to you in the form of the answer. It seems mystifying to us because we assume that "we" actually do things. It's actually probably more accurate to say that we set targets, and the rest of it happens to use as experiences, as the world walks the path towards those targets.

It's only the tendency we have to not entirely let go to this process which results in a sense of opposition and tension - or effort - and the feeling that we do and try instead of have an experience. Meanwhile - the so-called subconscious isn't really outside consciousness, it's just not expanded as a sensory experience. It's a felt-sense that's always there. Just because it's not explicitly being encountered as "objects and sense modalities" doesn't it isn't there at all, enfolded into the background space.

Q: This is something that I have really had an interesting time dealing with, the concept that most of my decisions and actions are likely comprised of subconscious activity. I struggled with that alot ofter my first psychedelic experience, It was eye opening, almost like what part of reality is "real" when I'm not even consciously acting in it. How much do my eyes see in comparison to how much I truly "see." Its scary to think about. especially if you have poor subconscious patterns or tendencies.

One of my favourite topics of the moment.

Perception isn't something you do, it "appears to you". To what extent do your actions just "appear to you" as well?

...

Thanks for the response.

Requesting valid citations is not an appeal to authority. Somebody's book does not equal peer reviewed research.

This really is a false point. All of those authors have academic papers about their work; their books are based on it. However, you should be well-informed enough to judge what you read on its own merits. It's not beyond anyone to understand the issues here; it does not require advanced mathematics, for instance.

But, here is a good point -

One of the criticisms that has been levied at theories relating to consciousness (and indeed alternate interpretations of quantum theory, the Bohmian approach included) is that it doesn't change the results, or predict different results - it changes the description of the results. For instance, is there an experiment we could do to prove that things are made from "matter"? No, because we measure the properties of something - not what something is, or the nature of our experience of it. We just don't care about this in a physical theory. But that's exactly the gap we need to tackle in this case.

The idea that it is something separate and extricable from the brain rather than generated by it absolutely is woo.

Nobody is suggesting that, least of all me. The challenge is to have consciousness be associated with the brain without having to invoke some magical "emergence". In fact, we want consciousness to be "baked in" to reality before we even get to "brains".

This is why Koch, Hoffman et al. have ended up changing tac to approach it from the other end, as it were.

And what you call studying amounts to fruitcakes reading books by fruitcakes.

Really. So, you're saying that reading the work of physicists and philosophers and other thinkers, and using them as the basis of your own thinking, constitutes "fruitcakes & fruitcakes"?

It seems to me that you are a bit of a cherry-picker yourself - the ideas you like are legitimate, those you don't, aren't.

What troubles me is that this is also what creationists say with respect to evolution. (That things aren't finalised.)

Creationists aren't pointing out that some things aren't explained, they just don't like the current explanation. The problem with consciousness is that it isn't explained with our current approach. I like that Asimov essay too, but I don't see what it adds here. I can't help but think you are reading into what I say, assuming that I am taking a position that you happen to be particularly against. What I'm saying isn't particularly controversial as a possible approach:

  • Consciousness - as experienced personally and as implied by observations externally - isn't currently accounted for in our description of the world.
  • Until we can bridge the gap between my 1st-person experience of being and doing, with the 3rd-person observation of my body and actions, then our description of reality, biology and consciousness is not complete.
  • The faith that consciousness is "emergent" at some point in brains seems unfounded and optimistic. Where is this magical moment? At what level of complexity? Is consciousness then a "thing" that is "made", rather than a property? If it is a property, why isn't it there all along?
  • When I talk of "consciousness" I am not talking about self-conscious thinking. That would depend on the complexity of a structure. I am talking about the simple property of awareness, introducing it at ground level.
  • This does not lead to "consciousness creates reality" in a new-age style. It does however mean that you can move your arm (by which I mean, your whole body can move itself as a single pattern, starting with brain activity). At the moment, we cannot explain how it is possible to move your arm - we can only describe the sequence of observations that constitute arm movement.

What are the problems here?

...

Incidentally if I seem unreasonably harsh...

That's fine. It makes conversation a bit more efficient! ;-)

Wait... pause.

What exactly are we disagreeing about here? You seem to be assuming that I am suggesting that "science is not the way" and, like some sort of creationist, that some magic is responsible for our conscious experience and our world in general. In fact, I hold the opposite: That (neuro)science at the moment involves a sprinkling of magic dust at the last moment to make us conscious.

Problems??

I think neuroscience is, at the moment, super-basic and is talking up its book in the same way that genetics did back in the day (remember the certainty with which it was thought it was a "blueprint" with a gene for each property?) - most fMRI work seems to be a hack-job fishing expedition with "optimistic" statistics and an unsubtle "brain lighting up = this". This is somewhat of a funding-driven situation (I've been in similar situations in another scientific field.)

However, it will get better. I do believe the body and brain is the image of the person and their experience - "from the outside", as it were. Not in a particularly special way, in a similar sense I can tell a person's personality from their macroscopic behaviour. It's just a more detailed, granular view. So that's not the problem. Body-brain events correlate to an inner of events, quite so. To be clearer:

Body-brain events correspond to the CONTENT of my experience

The problem is, how do I link my personal "inner" experience of content to that "outer" observation? How is it that I aware of the content? How am I able to manipulate that content (e.g. create thoughts and move my body)?

Those are the unanswered questions. No matter how detailed our description of the brain, we'll still need to tackle this, the "hard problem". Agreed?

[QUOTE]

Hard problem of consciousness
In the philosophy of mind, the "hard problem" of consciousness is to explain why and how humans (and other organisms) have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioural functions such as watching, listening, speaking (including generating an utterance that appears to refer to personal behaviour or belief), and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioural—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

[END OF QUOTE]

Solutions??

And the suggested solution (this is where you get to slag me off and say it's rubbish, but please say why that is the case):

If we incorporate "awareness" as a fundamental property of things from the start, then we just don't have the problem. Matter would not be reflectively aware but it would have "self-consciousness". Then there are no longer implicitly two separate things (consciousness and the body) with one causing the other or influencing the other. They become the same thing. Complex structures such as the brain-body will inherently experience themselves. I am my body-brain - or at least a subset of it - and I move or think simply by moving myself, as myself. (Any idea about myself being a little controller somewhere is just a thought I have from time to time. Really "I" am the whole thing.)

To change my inner experience of myself is identical to acting and thinking. We've joined together the "inner theatre" and other "outer person"!

So that takes care of that. But we also get some stuff for free:

An outcome of this is we get to move away from a strictly "parts" model of the universe. With a single background "property" that is everywhere, we can have nonlocal effects explained more easily. Our view becomes an integrated, continuous one.

IIT & CR/IT & AI

It would actually be better if there was a word that wasn't "consciousness" with all the baggage it brings with it. Which is where ideas like "integrated information" (Tononi) and the "interface model/conscious realism" (Hoffman) and "active information (Bohm) come in, although they are still build on awareness-as-inherent really. I pick on those authors because they are the most complete formulations that seem hopeful at formally integrating the different parts, even though I don't fully agree with them. I am not cherry-picking - honest! ;-)

(The Tononi papers on IIT are a bit of a slog although it's worth reading the update. Scott Aaronson's blog entry on it is good though. Less sophisticated, this overview, but it adds: "Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Wherever there is integrated information, there is experience.")

...

Just passing this thread again: A recent conversation reminded me that Henry Stapp - worked with Pauli and Heisenberg - is good on this. His book Mindful Universe is worthwhile, but actually the introductory chapters of Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (I recently rediscovered, see here [http://www.martinshaven.com/Resources/StappMMQ.pdf]) pretty much covers it all, although a bit dense.

Stapp's interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers. Each knower's act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe. One person's increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe, and, of course, it changes it for everybody else. Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter, but about our knowledge of such behavior.

Basically, it's a mental universe.

Anyway, that's that. Cheers!

POST: Why do humans need a sense of identity?

If we lose our identities, we lose what our humanity.

If you are something, how is it possible to lose it? I can see how we might lose our misconceptions, what we think we are - but how can you lose your true identity?

Humans are, by nature, empathetic beings.

So (I then think) if we stop interfering with ourselves, our identity, then we might be better able to relax into this more fundamental nature, and greater empathy should result?

Have you ever experienced death? Either in a medical sense, or psychedelic "ego death"?

Only in the letting-go-of-person way. Hence the ideas about a background what-you-are.

POST: What do you guys think about Eckhart Tolle?

Maybe our idea of what "walking the walk" entails is misguided. Non-duality isn't about behaviour, it's about a simple fact:

At the fundamental level, there is no separation or division, there is just the nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware. Everything else exists only as patterns in that awareness.

As a result of this understanding, we might then conclude there are appropriate behaviours - because "we are all one" - but those are extra ideas on top. The fundamental reality itself doesn't care what patterns appear within it.

Realising the non-dual nature might result in feeling connected with all of reality and humanity "as you", but your experience is still patterned as a human experience.

Just as materialists don't necessarily go about actually acting as if they were inert matter with no empathy, non-dualists don't necessarily go about being messiah-like. They are not an example to us all, "they" are just another temporary pattern in awareness.

This interpretation seems to abandon the need for any ethics.

From the fundamental viewpoint, there is no such thing. But then, from the fundamental viewpoint, there isn't anything. There is the property of connectedness of all people at the fundamental level, so we would expect an increased natural compassion for others in someone with more "insight". But with this would come a recognition that there are divisions at the human level, and that they are resolved by constant rebalancing.

If everyone identified completely with the whole (the 'ethics of the continuum'), there would be no distinctions, and therefore no wars (nothing and nobody to fight) and so on. Also in effect, no people! But for as long as there are distinctions, then there is division and opposition...

And the environment - together with our human need for food and water - will create distinction and therefore opposition, even if we do not. Ethics, then, are the human "customs, habits" associated with a particular distinction (group), a particular worldview, geared towards the persistence of that distinction (group).

With this logic, it seems as if Hitler could have the same presence of mind as Tolle. Interesting indeed.

Hitler is just as much a part of "the one" as Tolle, and neither is evil from their own perspective. In fact, one extreme can only be discerned relative to the other; they are part of the ongoing rebalancing process, a destabilised object oscillation to a rest position.

I would hope Tolle feels a more general compassion than Hitler did though, that his worldview encompasses more people. However, if Tolle found himself in a cage fight, would he resort to violence?

Speaking of Tolle in a cage fight, that reminds me of the old Ghandi anecdote, which was something like: Asshole with Sword: I could kill you without blinking an eye! Ghandi: You could kill me without me blinking an eye.

Love the Ghandi quote! The more interesting cage fight would be Tolle vs Ghandi!

I think this brings up the question of "attachment" . . . only the relinquishing of attachment gets you to the real shit.

Well, this is true. You release your hold on narrowed attention, let it open out and deepen to encompass everything. You become the entire world, universe, the real deal... at which point patterns fade, you become only the continuum, and you will think it is absolutely perfect as it is.

What you've learned is that to have an experience, requires a division. If you have a division, you have opposition. If you have opposition, you have conflict.

The recognition of this means you no longer feel you have to fight the conflict, not that it disappears. It becomes sort of "transparent" and you can see through it. You realise that it's okay to go swimming even if the water has ripples in it, because otherwise there would be no water in which to swim.

This is where "acceptance" comes in, I guess.

I wonder if it's possible to be both attached and detached at the same time? I know some meditative dudes claim to maintain "split consciousness," where they are simultaneously, say, carrying on a conversation with you and repeating a mantra in order to ground themselves.

Well, I'm not a fan of that "mantra" stuff, but I certainly think you can have multiple patterns arising in your awareness at once that don't necessarily form a continuous space. You do it all the time, in fact, by looking around you while a thought appears. The thought seems somehow to be parallel-simulataneous - occurring at the same time but no in the same "perceptual space". Normally we flip perspectives - you can do it right now: Just decide to "become" the space in the room, including the volume of space your body occupies. Now "become" your body again. And so on. From there, you can experience everything as just being "made from the background awareness".

How does this then relate to our enlightened folk and their action in the world? Well, I'm not quite sure about this. If you ponder it, there is the fundamental situation (the nonmaterial material) and there is the arbitrary patterns within it. Anything at all that is not the fundamental is pattern-based, and therefore specific to the forms/habits underlying our experience. So-called "wisdom" is then relative. It's just a case of which granularity, which level of subtly, you are speaking from in terms of the patterning.

And yeah, if you identify completely with the whole, then I agree you don't exist at all.

Right. The most subtle patterns will be simple properties, then concepts, such as "relative division" and "spatial extent" and then "perimeter". These will be felt-known. Much later, there might be concepts of "image" and "sound" and "texture". We haven't even got to "object" yet...

It is all very well to say that the true reality is "love" - by which people mean the unbounded openness of being-aware - but while you are a human you have certain baseline structures in your experience that dissolving will mean, if not death, then a ceasing of this-world in perception. Recognition is good, but its primary result is probably the reduction of fear? And maybe increased possibilities...

Extra topic: Does "acceptance" mean literally accepting things as they are, even if this knowledge implies a new-found flexibility to reality which suggests we could affect it in direct ways?

...

Q: I tried reading his book "A New Earth". It started out amazing, so many of the things he was describing resonated with me. But then he got to the chapter about materialism, and the whole thing fell apart.
He lost all credibility at that point, because on one hand he's talking about spirituality and consciousness and things that any human could relate to. Next he's talking about something extremely culture-centric like materialism, which applies a lot to America but not so much to some other countries (I was reading it while being in a third world asian country).
It felt like he knew exactly the audience he was trying to sell the book to (namely western countries, especially the USA), so he put some chapters to appeal to that demographics specifically. It felt fundamentally dishonest, and turned me off the rest of the book, and him as a person.

What does he say about materialism what turned you off? Bringing up the subject itself isn't a problem. I would assume that to bring anyone to a new understanding you have to connect with their current worldview, and then form a bridge.

Of course, if your reading requirement is that "things resonate with you" then that could be quite restrictive...

POST: I spend a lot of time reading through my own profiles, trying to figure out who I am. In reality, I should be creating who I want to be right now.

There's definitely a difference between examining the world as it is, trying to read the signs and trails to find out what's going on and what can be done, and asserting the changes you want to create a world.

One assumes the world is remade and structured and you must understand the maze to make your way through it; the other says that the world is responsive and the maze adjusts to provide you with a path if you take "the bold step".

POST: Demystifying enlightenment

Try stop thinking of yourself as a human but, instead, think of yourself as a vantage point.

That's good. I think of it as a "perspective" but the actual experience is more like being an open space, with "perspective-based content" appearing within it.

Like doing the "turn off your senses" exercise.

Rather simply go an sit somewhere and do nothing...

Yes, I've found this best. Or just lie down on the ground, head supported, and give up completely to gravity/God/experience or whatever. At most, you can "decide" to switch to the background perspective before you do so. Then you don't even "let go", you just no longer hold-on.

Really, what you are doing is not-interfering - specifically, not-interfering with your attention, which will then release, open out, and dissolve by itself.

POST: Any older(maybe even wiser) Psychonauts here?

A great point. My favourite! Two types of truth:

  • Conceptual/Pattern Truth - Something feels true because the conceptual framework it is a part of is self-supporting. This is the feeling of 'coherence and elegance'. However, it can be a castle in the sky; it need have no relationship whatsoever to other parts of reality to generate that feeling. These tend to be thoughts-about other experiences or patterns-about. A strategy developed on a nice map doesn't necessarily translate to a result in the field. However, it might be art.
  • Direct Truth - The hardness of a table, the sense of being-aware, direct visual observation of an action and a result. Truths that are simply experiences, rather than thoughts-about experiences.

Obviously, the two are tangled somewhat, but it pays to be wary of enthusing about 'elegance' other than for its own sake.

POST: Not feeling the love

Do you feel "fighty against the world" generally? Lots of people do. Residual tension from past events, conflicting thoughts and concepts, etc. They will release eventually; you can do a daily "letting go" exercise to let them go a bit more efficiently (or full-blown meditation).

Importantly though, don't go seeking for how you "should" feel. Feel whatever you do, then do what needs done (see David K Reynolds' Constructive Living for the chat on that).

Remember, they are not "your" thoughts; they are just... thoughts.

POST: Thoughts and plans of "suicide".

Well, haven't you got it sussed eh? Or... not.

Probably missing the point, more like. Who said the purpose was 'happiness' and wilful control of your state? How come you think that the world and society is imperfect? If you think this is the case, your work is not done, despite all your "selflessness and compassion". You can't have it both ways.

There is no escape.

And you're not done yet.

You'll be back here in no time, I think. ;-)

Q: If I do end up coming back, I'd actually like to come back as a forest :)
A larger, higher, older form of consciousness. And yes forests do have a consciousness if you really think about it. Each tree communicates with one another through the release of chemicals and the help of fungi in the roots. Just like how each neuron in our brain communicates via neurotransmitters. The collective action of each organism firing off creates a larger collective consciousness.

Right - I love that image of the forest, as a "slow being". Just me and the Ents, hangin' out for the ages, having (very) long conversations.

Q: I'd actually be just as content coming back :) if it's in a different body with a different life, I'd still be content with that and am willing to accept it as a new learning experience!
I'd also be just as content staying in the afterlife, where ever it may be.
I actually took this online test "How old is your soul" and it said mines was millions of years old. And I know these tests can't truly measure such things, but I feel it to be very true. I feel it with all my heart. And I do believe with all my heart that the purpose is happiness and knowledge. We continue to reincarnate into this world so that our soul will build up it's library of experiences and learn all the lessons there are to learn. I feel like I've learned all I need to learn from this reality throughout all of my lifetimes and am ready to leave for good.
When I spoke of willful control of my emotions. It's sorta like how regular folks will let their environment and people around them affect their emotions. They are happy when they play video games, they are sad when someone breaks up with them. Their emotions are influenced by the outside factors. For me, my emotions come from the soul. I can be wronged by others and still feel happy because the happiness comes from within, from the soul, as opposed to from the environment.
"How come you think that the world and society is imperfect? If you think this is the case, your work is not done, despite all your "selflessness and compassion". You can't have it both ways."
Well, for one, I don't need to have it both ways, nor am I desiring to have it any which way. I don't know where you got that idea from to be honest. Why I think society is imperfect I've already explained within my initial post. Most of society is blinded and confused by the materialistic nature of our reality. They fill themselves with unnecessary worries from day to day when they don't need to. They let events and things in their environment affect them, stressing themselves out. They blindly follow religion and government without even giving it a second thought. Without ever questioning "why".
I explained this to one of my "unawoken" friends and he told me "Well there are laws and if you break the laws, there are gonna be consequences." See, his mind is still stuck in that limited paradigm, thinking that he MUST do what society and government tells him to do, how to live, how to act, what drugs are legal/illegal, what he should and shouldn't do, etc. He's still stuck in the thinking that government IS LAW and religion IS LAW and you MUST follow them if you want to be a good person and be successful. He still thinks that success in life means finishing college, getting a well paying job, and owning a big house and a fancy car. He thinks that materialistic things will bring happiness. And he's partially right, materialistic things DO bring happiness, but it isn't true happiness.
True happiness is everlasting no matter what. Materialistic happiness disappears once you take away the things that make you happy.

Yeah, I'm not sure about the 'old soul' thing... but:

You're a bit clearer in this response. It's true that happiness can't come from external things, except as a brief clearing of preoccupation which allows the natural stillness to be experienced. Nothing wrong with "external fun", of course - it's just that it should be enjoyed rather than relied upon. People blindly follow because they don't realise their own power, and that we can assert our worldview rather than go looking for hints and the guide of authority. Of course, this assertion only makes sense once you've understood what you 'are'. In other words, people asking "why?" often isn't sufficient - the answers they get result in the same mistakes. I do think more people are more aware than ever before though. Not that it's any of our concern one way or the other - which is why I brought it up that you mentioned this. It's no reason to leave, in and of itself - because it basically is yourself.

Anyway... True, everlasting happiness from within - and a nice car. Now, that's living and being. ;-)

POST: You wanna know the way out?

[POST]

New Agers

[END OF POST]

A1: If taken seriously, this comic is idiotic. It says accept your prison, you're a rat in a maze, so just be a rat and don't try to look for an out. That's defeatism. Give up trying, give up looking. On the other hand, this comic could be very clever because after all it paints the beings who indulge in defeatism as rats, so it may be a funny and clever dig at those who preach acceptance when something more radical would have been more appropriate. If the comic is meant to be sarcastic, it's a great one.

*A2: I love this because it represents to me the major fallacies of the new-agey crowd:

  1. thinking that people want to know the way out when they are already sedated with food and entertainment
  2. thinking that "Acceptance" is the 'way out' - if the TV mouse simply 'accepted' his position, he would still be stuck in the maze... Acceptance is not the full solution and IMO really only helps if you are awake enough to then realize that you can change the current reality <3*

Right. Acceptance lets you detach from the current patterns of experience. Only by detaching from them can you transform them. Acceptance allows intention to unfold - but rabid acceptance, where you hold onto the experience you are accepting, misses the point. That's... fatalism.

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Pub: 28 Sep 2025 05:55 UTC

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