TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 5

POST: more feedback on my jump

Q: Is it in poor taste or rude to ask for proof in this sub? Only because paychecks would be pretty good proof, and fairly easily shown? Beyond strange, happening upon those cards reminds me of finding drawings in my sketchbook I can't remember drawing, but so much more intriguing...

It wouldn't really prove anything, though, I suggest? Someone could easily, upon receiving a pay rise, just say that they'd intended for it beforehand. Also, I think, it perhaps misses the point. That is, that the only way to truly satisfy yourself whether there's something to this (or not), is to conduct your own experiments and observe the results. Other people's stories are, to an extent, irrelevant except as an inspiration to check things out ourselves, or maybe provide different ways of approaching the "investigation". Meanwhile, the "meaningfulness" of an outcome tends to be quite personal I'd say (meaning that it's hard to convey the impact getting a result has, because a surface-level description just sounds like a coincidence, and it's the larger context of the situation which tends to make it - occasionally - astonishing or disruptive of one's usual perspective). To an outside observer, they often seem kinda irrelevant or unlikely or mistaken.

Q: Sure, like any "proof" of that nature it's not worth much on its own, but I suppose occaisonal attempts at giving some sort of evidence would make skeptical people more inclined to believe, or at least give this sub an appearance of something more than just storytelling- and this seemed much more "provable" than some others. It was a genuine question, and it seems that it /is/ a bit poor etiquette, so my apologies.

It's a completely fair question for you to ask: is there value in requesting evidence that a story happened?

If the overall project was to document instances of an objective phenomenon, then there could well be value in it. However, ultimately the underlying topic here is "the nature of experiencing", so in the end it's always down to personal exploration - and then sharing your stories and thoughts in order to inspire others or gain their insight. I think we have to mostly go with the notion that the posts themselves are trustworthy (as per Rule #1) because there's no real way to prove authenticity of the report overall, only (irrelevant) elements of it. Or, rather, we should keep an "open verdict" until we conduct our own experiments and see results for ourselves (or not, of course). It's actually okay that the sub has an appearance of storytelling, because the sub isn't trying to persuade anyone of anything. The guidelines specifically suggest that you shouldn't "believe" anything here (or anywhere else, for that matter), until you've looked into it properly yourself. You (probably) can't prove "dimensional jumping" itself (to others), any more than you can prove that you are aware.

...

No, I disagree. This isn't about "believing" as such (although, for sure, if we define "belief" carefully, when can connect it somewhat to a broader idea of "patterning" experience). You do not need to "believe" in the owls or two glasses exercise in order to get results - at all. In fact, the exercises deliberately omit the underlying thinking upon which they are constructed, so it's hard to believe in them as mechanisms at least, even if you want to.

...Not even that? What does matter, though - and this is where a specific idea of "belief" comes in - is that you don't interfere or counter-intend subsequently. That is, you don't allow doubt to cause you to tinker with your state, and perhaps pattern yourself with the idea that things cannot or unlikely to happen. This is a "non-thing", though, rather than a "pro-thing". So it is better to neither believe nor disbelieve, and instead just do the thing, and then "carry on with your life"!

POST: OCD making me visualise really bad things - will they come true?

Don't worry about them (easier said than done, I suppose). Passing thoughts are just that: passing. The aren't causal. It's not the same as sitting down and focusing on an image with intention. Don't try to wrestle with them; you don't need to "solve" those thoughts and images; just let them be. It's actually the wrestling or solving that is the issue. (Fighting the images basically persists them - that is, fighting something implies that there is something to fight, further narrows your attention upon it.)

You could consider a thought to be like an artefact on the overall infinite static landscape of experience: sure, you can stare at that tree forever and worry about it falling in the woods, or you just look elsewhere (or "carry on with your life", as the final instruction in two glasses says). It is your choice to continue to engage with the thought, even though you might not realise this; you can choose to leave them alone. This is easier to recognise if you can put the thought in context, for example by doing the Feeling Out exercise quoted in this comment. You might find this essay on OCD [missing] an interesting and useful read, and also these books for the perspectives they offer: Richard Carlson's Stop Thinking Start Living, and David K Reynold's Constructive Living.

so if I'm understanding correctly, without intent these thoughts won't happen

Right. A passing thought is just that: a passing image across your "screen" of experience, just like any other passing sensory fragment. Images are not themselves causal; intention is the only true cause. It can be useful to distinguish, perhaps, between "passing thoughts" and "active thoughts". In the active case, one is deliberately summoning and focusing on an image with the intention (or implied intention) that doing so means-that the content of the image will later arise in daily life. In the passive case, it's like having, I dunno, an itchy elbow or something. If you have an itchy elbow, do you stop everything you are doing and focus on that itch, worry about its meaning for the future of your elbow, spend the rest of the day returning to check your elbow sensations for signs of itching? Of course not! You scratch it, move on, if it remains ticklish, you just go "oh okay" and get back to work anyway. If you want, if it's the same thought again and again, you can experiment with the equivalent of "scratching the itch". After all, that thought is just an image - that is, a visual, auditory, motion, textural composite image, which is made from you. You can alter its properties, in fact, and thereby change its "intrusiveness". For example, you might play with reducing the visual brightness, making the image black and white, adding or removing a frame around the image, making it a still image (if it's a moving one), changing its distance from you, changing the image size, make it silent, and so on. Try each property and see what effect it has on how impactful the thought is. Do this just for fun, even, to find out more about what makes a thought or image have an emotional intensity or not. However, in this particular case, it's really just easier to just-decide that it doesn't matter and then return to whatever actually needs doing in the moment, now, in your life.

...

Q: ?!#&/!

Please ignore that reply; it's really not appropriate for what you are describing. You really have no need to worry at all about this. (No disrespect to the commenter, I just think it's important not to be too casual about advice in this specific sort of situation, because it can easily spiral.)

POST: I don't know what to say.

[POST]

My life is in shambles. I wont get into the specifics of it. I love my SO, but our life is falling apart. I've been reading this sub almost obsessively for the past week. Not that I am looking for a "miracle cure", but I felt hopeless. For every step forward we were launched a mile back. I kept toying with the idea, but Im never up between midnight and 3 am. Even then my bathroom mirror isn't that big, I dont have candles, blah blah blah. I read the post (or link, I dont rightly remember) about laying on the floor, head slightly elevated with feet on the ground and to just....be.

So I laid on my bed today. (I used the bed because we have family living with us and the living room floor would have been an odd choice and I would have been asked if I finally snapped.) I am just done with life (not suicidal, just needed to check out for a bit). I turned my tv off, put unplugged headphones on and just tried to melt away. As I laid there, I tried to imagine myself in a white luminescent room (sorry if I spelled that wrong). I didnt so much say to myself as just try to feel it "Body, Im done. If you want to get up and go, get up and go". If I got fixated on a thought, I wiped it away. I continuously went back to the white room. If thoughts did come through that were negative, I turned them to positives before I wiped them away. At one point, I either fell asleep or legitimately let go (my vote is for let go). I felt as though my body started to lift my head up and then my consciousness realized what was happening and slammed me back into my brain. Thats the only way to describe it. My heart was pounding and my mouth was so dry. So I calmed myself. Went back to my good thoughts (usually trying to turn a negative thought or emotion to a good one involving money, since that would fix a LOT of my problems right now), and back to my white room. This same feeling happened 2 more times. Where I felt like my body was just going to do what it was going to do and I was just an outsider watching until I was slammed back into my brain. I dont know what to make of this. It both excites me and scares me. It wasnt normal. Ive meditated before and this is nothing like what Im used to. I feel stupid and silly sharing this. I feel like an irrational person using psuedo-science to rationalize my feelings of lost-ness. But I am literally at the end of my rope. Im not hoping for miracles.... just enough change to make it in life and be genuinely happy. I am going to continue to do this every day. Maybe there is something to this dimensions thing.

Edit: I wrote this right after I came back to "reality" (meaning I sat up, turned the TV back on, listened to my SO's family fighting in the other room, etc etc etc) and as I sit here... I have a massive headache and I feel nauseous and kind of... out of it. This has never happened in other meditation sessions Ive done. I dont know what to make of any of this. Ideas? Conjectures? Theories?

[END OF POST]

Well, that sounds quite fun. (You were doing a 'daily releasing exercise' with the 'imagination room' or a variation, sounds like?)

And your later experience is the beginning of an OBE/lucid dream. You detached and shifted your attention away from your sensory surroundings and your experience followed through. Next time you try it, don't worry - have the confidence to let go more completely, to just allow whatever happens to happen, and you'll have some interesting experiences. If you're not familiar with lucid dreaming, check out Robbert Waggoner's Lucid Dreaming book. If you've not heard of OBEs, Donald DeGracia's free class notes are worth a read. The hypnogogia technique described is similar to what you accidentally did. Don't worry about "evil spirits". A good quote from DeGracia:

Sepherial went on to explain how it's really important to realize that fear is something we create in our own minds and that if we are to get involved in [these] things, we must learn NOT to fear things anymore. You can replace fear with understanding. When you understand something, you no longer need to fear it. If it is truly a dangerous thing, but you understand it, you will not fear it, you will avoid and respect it. And there are other things we fear that, in reality, are not dangerous things. These are the worst kinds of fear [...] to have. These are fears you have created in your own mind, for whatever reasons. These fears are like weeds that grow in the garden of your mind, and you should eliminate these.
-- do_obe class notes, Donald DeGracia

Q1: I have not read of lucid dreaming (I have heard of it, though). I will definitely have to read this book and read up on this, thank you!

It's great. You can have this life and a radically different parallel life (or lives) in dreams as well. Much fun!

...

Have you ever encountered an evil spirit? You can certainly summon demons into your life but... they are you. In these things, you bring a lot of your own beliefs and fears into it. That's why the 'transition point' can be very frightening. But really... treat it like lucid dreaming, access to the larger realms of mind. I've never known anyone had have any problems.

I honestly believe they are real, external things.

That may be the problem! ;-) Joking aside, you can certainly have experiences of apparently independent forms, but I wouldn't view them as external except in a notional sense. The main point is, nobody should allow fear of that to prevent them doing AP/etc. If you encounter things you are uncomfortable with then, just as in waking life, you give them a wide berth. (I suggest.)

If you can! I actually always wanted to do AP growing up, but was terrified of doing so because our house was haunted as fuck. I'd be open to trying it again now that I've moved out, I dunno.

Really, just do it. You seem to be imagining that you are some powerless dot that is at the mercy of anything that happens by. Really not. The best way to dispel your fears is to read accounts by people who have explored it thoroughly: Donald DeGracia as mentioned, Robert Monroe, Oliver Fox. There are many reasons to choose to interpret your experiences as "part of you" and to accept the fear as fear of aspects of yourself. This applies to dreams, OBEs, and waking life (which are the same really). If you occasionally have a startling experience, it'll be no worse than having an intense dream - only you'll be conscious and able to manage it accordingly. Are you scared of going to sleep at night? ;-)

POST: Jumping ship?

What happens to a memory when you aren't recalling it?
What happens to your name when nobody is calling it?

That sort of thing.

A "dimension" isn't a place so much as an experience that you're having.

Q1: But where do "I" come from? How did the collection of experiences that is me start?

A very good question, and there are various ways to approach it. The simplest is: a hypnogogia type process in which random sparkles became patterns, shapes, images, a scene, and finally a full-blown environment, apparently centred around a certain perspective. You-as-consciousness, an open aware space, were always there. However, the world-pattern that is arising within you now, the content of your experience, was formed as a sensory dream. That includes the basic formatting of time and space. This is The Forever-Now World.

POST: Questions! I don't have anything holding me to a dimension, I want to see how far away from this reality I can get.

But there is nobody to accept you just the way you are, except for yourself...

Perhaps to get to a universe (state) where you have reached self-acceptance and therefore the experience of others accepting you. Oh, and have cool things.

Anyway, wait, why am I listening to you? You're not even real!
Sha-la-la-la I can't hear you!
[puts fingers in ears] . . .

;-)

EDIT: Of course, maybe you enjoy the thrill of the fight and overcoming (apparent) adversity.

POST: How to shift universes by Bashar

Hi, if you're going to post a link can you include text with your own discussion and experiences? There's no point in this place becoming yet another Bashar link fest. Thanks!

I've never seen any Bashar links here, hence why I posted it. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding how parallel universes work and how to shift here.

Bashar, fun though he is, is just one of hundred of different versions of the same underlying idea - which is essentially that there are different patterned experiences available, which individual private views can select amongst. Parallel universes aren't "places".

(You can even channel your own version if you like: sit in front of a computer, type "How does reality really work?", get comfortable and relaxed and then - whenever you feel ready - just start typing out your answer without thinking about it in advance.)

Hmm, how about you give me a quick summary (two paragraphs) of how you think parallel universes work and how to shift, based on Bashar's output?

Q1: Well, that's just it, you've perfectly illustrated that you don't understand parallel universes. Forget about bashar for the moment just look at quantum physics. Every out come/choice is its own real universe. Bells theorem shows the observer creates their universe by observation. So you are just one version of infinite versions of you that all exist. Shifting to another parallel reality happens all the time, it's by your conscious higher self controlled by emotions, thoughts, frequency, beliefs, vibration and visualisation that decides which universe you shift to. There is a recent book called the afterlife of billy fingers, where he explains how everything is recorded in the Akashic records, and you can sift through all the decisions/actions in your life and see what happened if you made a different choice, they are played out and recorded for real. That's how the law of attraction works. It's a physical law, there simply are infinite number of universes of you. It's all holographic you see, it's not real, like a computer running millions of versions of gta at once. That computer is God, as God wants to experience everything. You are just a tiny piece of God running In a simulation. I suggest you take some LSD to find out. Better still die. You can by accident thus having a NDE. Or just leave your body by means of an out of body experience OBE by astral projection. Once you aren't in your physical,body and outside of the hologram you can see this really clearly. So until you take the red pill, reality is exactly what you fool yourself or believe it to be. Clever eh?

Okay, you should forget about quantum physics: Quantum physics is a mathematical theory used to create a description of available energy states and their probabilities in certain narrowly-defined situations. It does not involve creating parallel universes; that's an interpretative fiction which although fine for fun, isn't scientific, since there can never be evidence for it.

(Recommended reading: George Ellis on MWI and the like; N. David Mermin on reification of concepts; Christopher Fuchs on QBism.)

And also forget about "infinite versions of you", because to pursue that notion you will have to work out what a "you" is and how there can be multiple versions. Really there is only one you: the subjective conscious perspective in which experiences arise. The world is not a "spatially-extended place, unfolding in time" and you are not a person in it. Rather, you are a conscious perspective having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Which is what allows you to change that experience using intention. There is no fixed underlying substrate. What you are doing, it seems, is confusing one particular metaphor (many worlds imagery, computer simulation imagery) for "how it is really". But the thing is, there is no "how it is really", except for consciousness taking on the shape of experiences. From the sidebar, you'll notice that both The Hall of Records and The Infinite Grid are basically versions of the same idea that 'Akashic records' is based on: that all possible experiences are available, and that one can select one's trajectory through them. Have you read any of the "related posts" as listed in the sticky post? Particularly useful are this one (plus links) for establishing your personal perspective, and maybe this one to give yourself a good metaphor for direct experience. If you don't even have the understanding of what "you" are sorted, then everything else is meaningless and immediately wrong. Parallel universes are metaphors; experiences are like an ongoing dream that never ends. You are never "in" your physical body in the first place.

So until you take the red pill, reality is exactly what you fool yourself or believe it to be.

Exactly right! And that includes any concepts of personhood and the structure of "the world" or "the universe". This is why we talk in terms of "active metaphors" here: the adoption of a metaphor shapes the experiences you have. The short version:

"However you imagine that it works, That's how it works." -- The rule of metaphor

Right now, you probably believe yourself to be something like a conscious soul that is in a place, believe that the world is a "place" made from parts and unfolds in time, and believe that events happen and that actions are performed. None are correct. All good fun!

[COMMENT]

Q1: You are confusing "remote viewing" with " parallel worlds ". Time doesn't exist, and the world you sense is a holographic illusion. Parallel world are a real thing, not some imaginary construct. If you want to really know the truth, you have to leave your physical body and the 3d dimension illusion. In order to do this you have to either :

  1. Die, that is have a NDE, near death experience.
  2. Take red pill, that is enthogens like LSD, DMT, Aya, shrooms.
  3. OBE, astral projection, out of body experience.
    All of the above will take you out of the physical dimension, for real. Until you grow the balls to really leave this dimension, you are simply living in an holographic illusion. But I really don't think you are smart enough to discover the real truth for yourself by real practical experience. Think about it, wouldn't you rather know for real ?

[END OF COMMENT]

Sigh. There is no physical dimension. Don't you get it? That's the whole point. There are no physical places. Everything other than your conscious perspective, that open structureless aware space, is an imaginary construct. Everything. Any discoveries you make are just... more dream. Your current experience right now is in effect a remote viewing "from nowhere", an immersive thought about being a person in a world. You are never anywhere, in fact. You can't leave a dimension, because you aren't ever in one. However, you can use the concept as a nice way to change your experience dramatically and discontinuously. I've done the tour - but really you don't need to. And in fact people who do often get the wrong idea, because they view their everyday world as a stable platform and the mystical as some special state (they think they leave bodies, see infinity, etc, instead of realising they were never in one, and infinity is in the room right now).

The reality is: there are no fundamental facts. All content is arbitrary.

I have a feeling you've never really directly changed your world...

I'm not mocking any experiences you've had which have helped you; if you've benefited from them then that's great. But remember, they're just... more experiences, more dream.

Q1: You are really not getting this. I already said many times reality is a holographic illusion, it's not real. This is really ultra basic spiritually 101. You can leave this holographic illusion. More specially this lower frequency vibration 3d reality hangs on. Now instead of talking bollocks all your life, why don't you take the real red pill and find out? What are you so scared taking LSD will shatter your completely wrong view of reality ? Surely you should take it, just to prove to yourself all your false assumptions are correct ? Really what are you scared of ?

No, I think you're not getting it. But maybe we're just using different ways of talking about it. So:

  • Tell me what you mean when you say "reality" and what you mean by it being a hologram?
  • And then: what exactly do you think you are? Do you think you are a person, in a location?
  • And then: what do you think taking a chemical does? Does it affect "your brain"?

[Transcriptor note: He never answered...]

POST: Can't Jump? Dimensional Jumping from a Skeptical Perspective.

The easiest approach is to do something minor, just to test the water. Belief itself isn't really the problem - except that it prevents someone from trying things out, or they keep tinkering with things they've already done. The process of change itself is "dumb, automatic, mechanical". The hardest bit is getting yourself to actually do anything in the first place. The simplest ones are, in the spirit of just having fun:

  • Create a synchronicity involving the owls. Basically, sit down for five minutes and imagine an owl in the space in front of you, with the intention that your life is going to be filled with owls from this point onwards. That's it. Since there's nothing at stake, there's nothing to worry about.
  • Try the situation shifting experiment. This has the benefit of involving no commitment at all in terms of belief or indeed effort. Provided you have running water and somewhere to put it, you're sorted.

The purpose of doing these is to demonstrate to yourself that there is indeed "something going on". After that you can get more focused - although once you've witnessed results, you can probably think of ways to adapt even these simple ideas to your advantage.

POST: Not getting results...

Just "play dead". Don't worry about how or what. Don't bother tinkering with your thoughts, or try to suppress them. The way to think of this is:

  • Performing the act is a direct manipulation of the world.

Once you've performed the intentional act, "your work is done". You can just go about your life. And the results will show up in time. You might imagine the world as a landscape that you are traversing. As you walk across the terrain, only a small section of it is unfolded into 3D-sensory experience; the rest of it is present but dissolved into the background. Despite this, intentional acts operate on the whole landscape, instantly. So your change has already been made, there's nothing more to be done - you just haven't reached that part of the landscape yet. When you perform the intentional act, you will quite likely note a shift in your background felt-sense (that sort of 'global summary' feeling), but actual confirming experiences will appear later. The important thing is to resist constantly, intentionally tinkering about with the landscape (mentally or physically) on the assumption that nothing has happened, because you will be reshaping it again!

Main points -

  • Don't overcomplicate things. It's tempting to want to "do more" than just doing the imagining (the owls) or pouring the water (the glasses exercise), to somehow make things happen. But this is before action. Trying hard is an experience; trying hard is not causal. Just decide what the act means, then perform the act.
  • Do it then forget about it - but in the sense of not picking at a wound, rather than you actually attempting to prevent thoughts and memories.

POST: Do you think dimensional jumping can explain something like reincarnation?

If the rule is that "experience always continues" then, yes, in the sense that when you run out of "plausible moments" in whatever trajectory you are on now - a discontinuous jump would happen. A "rebirth" in the sense that you would no longer experience being-this-person-in-this-world, but would still have an experience of some sort. Over at the Glitch subreddit there are lots of stories of people having a crash and it being "reset" to before, with memory, or suddenly a switch so it doesn't happen. If it did happen though, then your other next moment options could be a reset without memory, a new person with or without memory (at birth or after), or some sort of non-Earth type experience. What you actually get (assuming you haven't planned ahead) might be a composite of whatever patterns you have accumulated at that stage (I suggest). After the dream... more dream.

Aside: The Buddhist idea of preparing for bardo sounds quite a lot like our ideas of releasing accumulated patterns and intending states.

...

...I guess that's one reason to give this some attention, sooner. Who knows how many times you've already been through it. (Maybe you've even "been" me one time.)

One thought: how long would it be before you'd maybe choose to forget again?

...A really good analysis. So, I'm inclined to think you'll go along a while, enjoying not being afraid, getting what you want. But: Eternity is a long time. And since you now know that suffering is an illusion - that there's nothing to worry about really, because you are never a person - you might go, well, I'm bored, it's time for another adventure, and an adventure means the stakes must seem real...

This probably (definitely: since you are here, now) means that you will always "eventually" choose to forget, at least "temporarily". However, you might be able to set some things up in advance to help your newly-ignorant manifestation have an okay time - some basic patterning, maybe - provided they don't resist it and do listen to their intuition...

...Maybe you'd choose to wake up in North Korea, as a bit of a challenge? After all, you know that at the end of it, it won't have mattered, because all you were doing was browsing through the Hall of Records. There was no danger of a final sort. The good thing about life, is that it's definitely temporary? Ahem. But yes, lots to ponder.

Nothing matters, but we need to hold on to the thoughts that it does or experiencing itself becomes meaningless, then we would become "prisoners of the dream".

So, forgetting it means adventure but fear... and eventual exhaustion, then remembering it. Remembering it means safety and comfort... but eventually boredom, then forgetting it. Seems like a cycle is the ideal solution, or a bit of adventuring between the bliss.

maybe that's how it's supposed to be by "default"

I don't think there is any intended default. Or rather, any default must have been a "decision" you made previously, implicitly or explicitly. Any "meant to be" must have been triggered by us at some point.

Like using the law of attraction, not questioning the underlying structures?

Well, I meant more that after you've sussed it out, you could perhaps embed a pattern such that you will forget - and then remember. A "memory worm"? Since patterns are triggered associatively, you could link it to a pattern than can only come into experience when not-being-a-person. But then, this is theoretical fun really. There's nothing beyond what we're experiencing now, but who knows what is dissolved into it? (Well the answer is: everything, potentially.)

the experience of being a human seems to come with the pattern of limited lifetime by default

I see what you mean. Yes, I've been thinking about this lately. Although I suppose our actual experience is one of being-a-world-viewed-from-the-perspective-of-one-human. The limited lifetime is part of the definition of the world-pattern.

I guess we will never find out, as free as we feel we're still caged for eternity on a big scale

Well, I'm not sure we're caged at all; it's sort of the opposite, right? All possible patterns are within us. Our human-patterned limitation is that we cannot experience as unfolded everything at once, as 3D-sensory experience. Our overall limitation is that we cannot cease, because we are eternal and undivided. In other words, our final limitation is that we are unlimited.

the ability of analysing, interpreting and understanding your experiences (intelligence) seems to fall into this too.

At a more subtle level, yes, good point. The ability to identify with one part of the pattern and manipulate other parts, even though actually you are shifting shape as a whole.

it's disappointing, that finding out what's behind consciousness is impossible.

We are disappointed that there is no behind, I guess. One of the issues human thought has, is that it cannot capture this, because thought is a form of this. In truth, there is not even consciousness, since it is everything. It's really just a way of saying that the forms we encounter have no fundamental existence, they are all the same thing, but that thing is that which takes on form. If everything is you, then nothing is "you" because there is no other thing to contrast it with, meaning that it's not even a thing.

Well, that's nice and clear, isn't it? :-)

...I think that the intellectual exploration helps us strategise - gives us a framework for discussion. It also helps us format our experience, because thinking is itself the triggering of patterns (hence "active metaphors"). But really we have to attend to direct experience to fully get it. It's then very obvious that you are unbounded consciousness in the shape of an experience. What can be difficult at first is the ironic sense of claustrophobia: that you can't get away from yourself-as-the-world, since everything you think-intend-assert-attend to is a literal shift of the world. If you re-identify with the background space as your viewpoint, though, this sorts that out. You basically choose to identify as a "container" and therefore you can intend without "standing on" any part of experience.

If I would be truly convincend that the world is a computer simulation it would behave as such.

Right!

There is no definite truth, and you have to take on some shape. The worldview you adopt becomes the basic formatting for your experiences, implicitly defining the "plausible paths" for your intentions to shine through into sensory moments. Here, in this subreddit, we assert our formatting knowingly and deliberately - which means it's all about finding the least complex, most flexible description, realising that it will shape our experience accordingly. That's why I suggest metaphors like The Imagination Room. They give you a "place" to be as the experiencer - you are the unbounded background - without interfering with the potential experiences available to you, or opposing intentional shifts.

POST: Anxious and scared to jump

Why don't you take one thing at a time? What's the rush? If you'd never heard of this subreddit, you'd likely just be stuck with handling it normally anyway. So get comfortable with the idea first maybe. If you browse the sticky post you'll find non-mirror approaches, as well as other background info. You might just create some owls and do the Two Glasses Exercise initially, as a demonstration for yourself. Then: the most direct method is to repattern yourself using detachment + imagination + intention. Check out The Patterning of Experience or the Neville Goddard post for some information on that. It makes sense to read through the other key posts and get familiar with things before pursuing that too far though, I'd say.

...

Good description. Another thing to note - the "collateral shifts" might not always make logical sense, at least not in a way that's obvious (it might be associatively linked but not factually linked). If you adjust the fold called "my ranking" then it pulls on the rest of the sheet, as you say. But the sheet isn't arranged spatially like the world is, with related objects all beside one another. For example - when you change the "my ranking" fold, one of the folds it pulls on might be the "total number of tinned peaches in my cupboard" fold.

Thats what I'm most worried about. I've been sitting this entire day contemplating what can happen if I go through with my jump. Also is the two glasses method still in form of dimensional jumping, so will I see my universe Id change?

I'm going to suggest you look at it this way: Everyone has their own copy of the universe, a "private view" that contains their own "set of facts". All that ever changes is the stuff in your universe, what's different is the extent of the change. I'd scale it like this:

  • conf. bias > coincidence > synchronicity > "manifestation" > shifting > "jumping"

The glasses exercise sits at the level of synchronicity and manifestation. From your perspective, it will seem that things are happening to help you along the way, like lucky events and odd changes, but it will be like an "accelerated" process. Really, don't worry and just try it out and see what happens. Your world is changing all the time in the direction of your intentions anyway, this is just a way of shifting it more quickly. Imagine if tonight you went to sleep and during the night one year passed in the space of eight hours - it would seem that you had "jumped dimensions", right? Think of it like that.

I just did it. How long does it take to see the change?

Wait and see. Top tip: remember that your body is part of the world too. If you feel "drawn" to doing something, just let your intuition move you. And follow the last instruction: "carry on with your life", don't dwell on this, let it happen by itself.

Q1: conf. bias > coincidence > synchronicity > "manifestation" > shifting > "jumping"
I think this epic magnitude scale deserve a cool scientifically-sounding formal name :)
Why are "manifestation" and "jumping" in quotes?

Quotes: in the original comment context, because they are terms which have different meanings to different people, regarding the underlying mechanism. Ha, yes, I like the idea of a proper scale name!

...Well, the scale is meant to capture how it is being described (explained away!) by the person experiencing the change. It's the answer to the question "isn't that just confirmation bias, or coincidence?", formulated as "yes, but that is part of a graduated scale of changes arising from the same mechanism!". So it's "jumping" as the final one because that is the metaphor being used for more extreme change - where it seems that not only has the world changed a bit, but it seems that you are in a different (version of the) world! You have translated yourself across the Infinite Grid to another "dimension"!

Of course - as you point out - all the items on the scale correspond to a shifting of the "world-pattern" to different extents, in the ongoing now, with subsequent experiences being in alignment with that.

Jumping, at least for me, implies thinking of whereas superimposition implies more of thinking from.

Just to finish on this - Yeah, I do agree with what you say here, which is why although the subreddit (which predates my participation) is called "dimensional jumping" I've personally tended to push metaphors which take a consciousness-centric viewpoint rather than a content-centric one. You are changing the content of your experience; you-as-consciousness are not going anywhere.

POST: What happens from our perspective when someone else jumps?

Well, there is only your perspective, for you. Your experience of other people (doing this or anything else) is dependent on you, not them. You can really only think subjectively for this; there is no "outside" to your own experience. After all, how would you distinguish from you "jumping to a situation where I experience other people telling me they jumped" and a situation where "my friends are jumping and telling me about it". If it's all just experiences, and you can "ask" for any experience you like, then it's pointless looking for evidence, or interpreting things as being meaningful, outside of your own intentions and results.

I'm not looking for meaning or truth...

Well then I can say anything and it won't matter! ;-)

When I say there's no outside, I mean there's just no outside to your experience. There aren't any people, really, and you aren't a person. You are more like a copy of the world, and you are having the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. When you "jump" you are basically shifting the facts of the world that you are, such that subsequent experiences will be consistent with that. You don't go anywhere, because you kinda aren't anywhere in the first place. So really, the answer to your question is: "that question doesn't make sense". If, we might ask:

  • "Is it possible for me to experience a friend telling me they're going to jump, then I never hear from them again?" Yes.
  • Or: "Is it possible... and they seem to change personality and even look different?" Yes, also.
  • Or: "Is it possible... and nothing really changes?" Totally.

Because there is only your experience. You are always watching a film based on your own script. Jumping is always subjective, and there is no 'objective' viewpoint. There never has been. If you can do "things" such that people behave differently (and you can), that means they are part of you. So it doesn't make sense to ask them, or watch them, for evidence of what happens. They are just behaving consistently with your definition of the world. And remember: the same applies to "auereusFluvialite", because you aren't that person either, they're just a part of you. That all got a bit philosophical eh? Oops.

The trick is, I think, to stop thinking of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and instead view it as a "resource" - a collection of patterns, a toy box of possible experiences, which we can pull into awareness. So, if you think of yourself as not a person, but literally as an "open aware space" which can "take on the shape of" any experience, it makes it a bit clearer. The background of this space contains all possible patterns and facts, and they are always contributing to your experience, but different patterns are "brighter" than others, and so contribute more than others. So facts like "I am always lucky" and "John has green hair" and "I live in Tokyo" and "Things fall when dropped", they are all patterns which affect experience to a greater or lesser degree. How does this help? Well, it means that the answer to "what will you experience if someone else jumps" is really about: what "facts" about jumping are currently contributing to your experience?

It's the equivalent of watching a movie where the scenes have been selected according to the concepts that are currently active in your mind. (Which kinda happens: synchronicity.)

POST: I did the two glasses experiment...and I'm feeling less skeptical now.

It doesn't seem like the glasses experiment worked for me...

When you did it, did you simply write on the labels, or did you contemplate the situations at the particular points during the exercise? That can mean the difference between a general change corresponding to the extended pattern of the words ("acquaintances -> best friends" applied to the next available context without regard to specific people) vs the specific situation and person you were working on. It sounds like it did work, but as an overall pattern applied globally. It might be the case that all your acquaintances now shift towards being friends now, and that might include your target, or it might be that this specific context window will be the main effect. (Not something you can tell without knowing the subtleties of your state at the point of change, which even you can't know really.) Regardless, I'd let this recent shift have time to settle out before you do anything else.

It doesn't need to be complicated or effortful though; it's simply a case of deliberately deciding what the labels mean, what their context is. It's the same as any pattern activation...

For instance, with the owls exercise one simply pauses and imagines an owl. If that's all you did then, literally, what's happened is that the extended pattern of "owl" and all its associations have been triggered into "brightness", such they will contribute more prominently to your experience from then on. The pattern is overlaid without limitation in time, space, or context. Owl-related aspects appear everywhere and in everything, even apparently retroactively. However, if in addition one had made the decision that imagining the owl means-that you would see more owl t-shirts then, mindful of that, the result would be narrower, more focused. (Although you'd still see some signs of the extended pattern - that can't be avoided, that's what synchronicity is, and "collateral shifts" are.)

So...

Wait a little while, then repeat the exercise, but this time be cognisant of the meaning of the act - i.e. your intention. Actions without deliberate intention just trigger their broad, pre-existing meaning or extended pattern. Actions with deliberately assigned meanings, trigger the more specific patterns associated with the intention. Snappy bullet points from elsewhere:

  • Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
  • Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
  • Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.
  • Habitually observed cause-effect relationships are the outcomes of previous assignments or associations.

That shit sounds like it's straight out of the Kybalion... (I ain't even mad!)

Well, if it's from the yogic traditions, it's all the same stuff. I mean, how stuff works is how stuff works; there's only different ways of saying it.

POST: New to this, and looking to make a big change

I'm so sorry to hear about your fiancé, that's a terrible thing for you to have to go through. From the ideas discussed here: your fiancé may apparently have passed away from your perspective, but from a larger perspective it's more accurately described as: your two conscious experiences are no longer overlapping. Experiencing always continues for both though, surely, but also unfortunately. I suspect that to make a change to reverse this would be very difficult. By its nature, if someone succeeded in doing it they likely would not speak of it, and it would obviously be wrong for someone to give hope that it can be done if they have not actually done it themselves.

(If there are ways we can help beyond that, we're here for you, obviously.)

He continues on, surely. Perhaps this isn't appropriate, but on that front, every NDE I've ever read sounds like a pleasant experience (see examples of reports), so despite your separation and how terrible that feels, I think you can be certain that he is well. Hmm. So I'm not sure where to go with this, since I can't exactly recommend trying a reset, although you can pursue that. In terms of recovery of yourself from the situation (without having had to practice anything), others have had success with this simple exercise - but that is more appropriate for a time when you feel you want to let go, and it can help things shift once you have a direction again.

You know, the underlying notions that your fiancé was probably interested in, are the basis of this subreddit. Plus maybe lucid dreaming, all those sorts of things. I'll save you the philosophy though, now is not the time. Actually, for your life more generally - it occurs to me for no reason - you might like to check out lucid dreaming. Here's a link to what's probably the best book on it (I keep a folder of the books I like so I can share). It also has relevance to our discussion, perhaps.

POST: Is it possible that I already jumped to where I wanted to go, but forgot that I was somewhere worse?

Q1: With God all things are possible. God is leading the charge, so it is entirely possible that the wisdom of God wanted you to forget that you jumped from somewhere else. Perhaps a traumatic event happened, and it would just spoil your new life here to think about it constantly. Enjoy what you have - it is a gift!!!

A1: You were downvoted, but you're right, it's true. With me, all things are possible.

Q1: I was downvoted soley because I mentioned "God"... there is a reddit animosity about God for some strange reason. And you are not God, but you are a piece of God, a god spark so to say. Without you or me God wouldn't be whole.

It's not reddit animosity here - it's that the concept of an active entity god, one that "wants" things and acts independently of you, doesn't fit in with the general view of the subreddit, so explaining things in terms of it isn't likely to generate a lot of enthusiasm. It's basically a case of being off-topic.

Broadly speaking, this subreddit takes the view of philosophical idealism. From that perspective, we might say that everything is "one" and we are all "connected" in the sense that all subjective experiences arise within consciousness/awareness. The phrasing would be something like, "an open aware space, taking on the shape of a world-state, as the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person" (catchy, eh?). The concept of "God" pretty much dissolves in that picture, because there is no separation between the nature of experience and the content of experience. You can use it as the word to mean "all this" or "existence", or sometimes people use it to refer to "imagination" as both the essence of things and the power of creation, or as aspect of the pattern which is not presently unfolded into sensory experience - but it's pretty much redundant. Plus, it often acts as a barrier to understanding since it doesn't correspond well with most people's conception of "God" as either an independent thing, or something you can be a "part" of. (And people can have "entity god" type experiences too, so it's best to keep that word out of the general description.)

So I wouldn't imagine that anyone here is angry at "God" - that would be like getting furious at existence. (Although that might be a good title for an album...)

POST: Jumping to a reality with magic/different laws/different technology?

A1: A lot of people are going to down vote me but this is already possible in this dimension.

Q1: How is this possible? I'm genuinely interested.

A1: I know there are fake videos on YouTube but there are also real videos as well. Jump on there and search for stuff like PK, TK, aerokinesis, pyrokinesis, electrokinesis, etc. Doing a Google search for telepathy or psychic powers will help you find more information on how to unlock your soul. I've been learning PK for the past two years and I'm still weak as far as my level of ability but there are some folk who are much more advanced than I am so it is not impossible for what you ask. As far as magic or "magick" goes just check out /r/occult or similar groups in /r/psychic. I started out in /r/energy_work. Check the side bar for each and there are other subs that they reference that you could link to. You could peruse my comment and post history to see what kinds of things I've commented in too. I have no doubt that there are dimensions where I'm more adept at manipulating reality but where is the fun in learning if all the difficulty is already gone? Ultimately dimensional jumping, occult practice, or energy work is all talking about the same thing. It's just a matter of finding the niche that you currently relate to the best and then going for it. I recommend starting with meditation if you've never done it before. That is what directed me to start looking into PK and the meditation practice trained me enough to actually succeed sufficiently to know it is real and then keep at it with my practice. The thing that I've learned is that you have to be patient when gaining super powers. It's a hard lesson but I think I finally understand it. I've turned my attention toward growing spiritually instead but that doesn't mean I'm not getting stronger with super powers at the same time. The best part about all of this is that you don't have to believe a word I'm saying though it will help. Learn to do it. Be patient and keep trying. Everyone has different results in changing their perception of reality and thus everyone has different rates of progress. I managed to turn a psi wheel (another good YouTube search term) on my second day of trying but couldn't get it to happen again for two weeks and then it took almost another month after that. These days I can do it almost every time I sit down. We are deprogramming ourselves and learning to do something that is very difficult but doable. I didn't believe it wasn't some kind of stray air current or static for 6 months.

Jeffrey Mishlove's book, The PK Man, is worth a read. The subject's supposed method was, essentially, a deprogramming or circumvention of expectations - which I think is generally what's required for direct and sensorily-experienced intentional change in the moment (as opposed to misdirection + intention). Everyone should try a bit of cloud bursting on boring car journeys, at the very least.

A1: I'll check that out. I have to agree about cloud bursting. Nothing more satisfying than making them disappear. I have yet to master making clouds though. It's weird how stopping motion seems easier than generating it even though energy never truly stops moving. I think it is a human belief born from hardship and whatever the situation appears to be.

It's generally harder to create (apparent) things in front of you; it just generally feels less plausible. You can rationalise clouds dissipating, but it's not so easy to explain away the coalescing of things - it's not something we generally observe (broken coffee mugs reassembling, etc). However, decide that the rainy day is going to be sunny, or vice versa, potter about indoors for 5 minutes (harry potter, perhaps!), and the whole sky can be completely different.

Observing and reacting tends to solidify things, I think. For visualisation, it really should not be effortful; it's meant to "come to you". Have you tried imagining-that and letting it autocomplete? (As in, you imagine the fact of something being there, implying its presence, and let the sensory imagery fill in for you.) I first used David Fontana's The Meditator's Handbook and its advice - it might have been an earlier edition than that - but it basically amounted to: try and try picturing, eventually you'll get good at it, but what you'll realise is that you got good because you gave up, thus allowing the 'unconscious' to fulfil your request for you.

Something to try: check where "you" are looking out from, the location you seem to be. Perhaps it is too close behind the eyes? Sit back a little in your head, such that you are behind the eyes, but halfway back in your head, on an imaginary centre line that runs through your whole body. Then, experiment with resting at different points along that centre line, from the top of your head down to beyond your abdomen, and find the place that feel like "home" for you. That "rest position" should feel more open and calm and aware than the others; it makes any intentional activity far easier. Anyway, do have a play with it and see if that helps at all.

This is harder than it sounds. :(

Be sure you are not contracting when you try to do it. Stay "open" but sort of "include" and 'lightly reposition" yourself there. Remember, there's no physical-muscular component to doing it. Yeah, it's very hard to describe!

As an exercise, maybe just begin by seeing if you can "feel" the position at your lower abdomen, in the centre of your body. Then, decide to move that imaginary point around the room, letting your body follow it.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by contracting? I am noticing that I want to put my awareness 100% into that spot so it is as though I'm in a little elevator. I guess shrinking my perception of me could be what you mea.

Don't narrow your focus down at all. In fact, you should never narrow your attention deliberately; intend only. It sounds like you are trying to "concentrate" - don't do that. Stay open and expansive, but just have your "home" as the new place. The idea here is that you are reconfiguring your rest state; therefore it shouldn't involve any effort at all.

This is quite the conundrum. Lol I'll keep trying to figure it out.

No! Do not try to figure it out! That's probably the problem. Do this right now: imagine that you are a sort of fuzzy energy that is expanding and filling the volume of your body. Now expand out to fill the room. Do not sit in your head thinking about this, actually expand your "presence" to be that fuzzy energy. You become this, rather than sit in your head, try to be in one place and then do it to another.

I've tried multiple times to do this so far and bleh... The funny thing though is that I've done this unintentionally at least a handful of times. It almost sounds like you're describing bilocation.

Hmm. As I say, I can only think you're trying to be "here" and then "be there from here", rather than expanding yourself to encompass that point, but it's tricky to suss out in words! It's really a matter of relative intensity, since you are actually "everywhere" in your experience; you are just attending more to that location than you would. You could perhaps approach it as an imaginative exercise - maybe "imagine that" you are a sphere in your lower abdomen, and that everything else just follows that sphere's movements?

POST: have there been any studies/documentaries about this phenomenon? On youtube perhaps? any outer likes that do not reside from reddit?

In terms of "things changing" spontaneously there are probably been some stuff on the "Mandela Effect" and so on, but it'll have been from a social phenomenon standpoint I imagine. But kinda by their nature, these things can't be studied objectively, because they are "before" objective study. And as with other approaches to understanding the nature of experience and changing it, people generally aren't particularly interested in conversing about it much for a larger audience, because there's not much to say. There's nothing to point to that you can say "that concept is true"; all concepts are up for grabs. It always ends up with a bunch of people trying to describe consciousness. (Which is pointless, since it's the thing that descriptions are made from.)

Basically... It's a subjective thing and a practical thing. If someone did make a documentary, it would be a bunch of metaphors in row. Perhaps someone would drink a glass of water at some point.

What about a book TriumphantGeorge, any chance you will be bringing one out? Love your techniques and I want to read more.

If I came up with an interesting way to present it - a sort of Edward Tufte or Mark Lombari plus Peter Saville approach to it - then I might be tempted. I think there's a bit more work to do on the metaphors first anyway, though. (And: thanks for the encouragement!)

Peter Saville's work reminds me a bit of Hipgnosis.

Yes, it does have that Hipgnosis thing. I think Saville, Mark Farrow and Stylorouge all covered similar ground in their time, but I've always loved that "informational typography + stark diagramming" approach. There are lots of good designers who are more recent, of course, but I think the aesthetic developed by those groups became the "modern style" and there's not really been much since about which you could say: this is a departure. I recently watched Fresh Dressed and it's interesting thinking about how these elements have intertwined to give us today's visuals. The decline of tribalism in music, fashion and design over the last decade particularly means there's less of an obviously defined development taking place now. Everything is all-at-once. Which is appropriate, actually, for this subject. Back on topic - I think it's maybe important to find a way to present these sorts of ideas [jumping and patterning] that avoids "scienciness", new age, or magickal-philosophical tropes - that is sort of its "own thing" and is immersive, so you're not just reading about it, but having an experience of it too (it sounds cheesy when written like that, unfortunately). A modern, practical metaphysics which separates itself from unfortunate associations - and maybe makes a nice coffee-table book (only half joking there).

POST: To seek on the outside for that which you do not feel you are is to seek in vain, for we never find that which we want; we find only that which we are.

Yeah, he's the man. Everything arises within the mind, both the "external" and the "internal". If you want an experience to arise in "the world", then you have to summon or intensify that pattern within the mind. If you go looking for it in the world, all you are doing is exploring your current state. If your current state doesn't have what you are looking for activated with in it, you'll tend to have experiences about what you are looking for, rather than experiences of what you are looking for.

how may one " Experience of what we are looking for" instead of "what we tend to have experience about what we are looking for" ? :)

Say you are looking to live in a specific house, you get enthusiastic about the idea, but you don't actually shift state (imagine it 3D-immersively), you just think a lot about living there (imagine images of the house and people living there). You start noticing yourself encountering conversations, or local news articles, about the people who are currently living in the house, seeing other houses that look quite like it in documentaries about people's lives, and so on - experiences about living in the house, but not the experience of living in the house. It's a variation of that.

Wow i actually experienced this plenty! How may 1 shift his/her focus upon actually experience living in the house instead of living about being in the house? Your explainations are always phenomenal

This is why I try to push a literal interpretation of the "imagination space" idea. When you imagine the house, how do you do it?

If you imagine an image of a house "over there", a house-thought floating in space in front of you, then you are basically intensifying that pattern of house-image-over-there, which is an experience about a house - and you will find that and its extended pattern incorporated into your subsequent experiences, as if that pattern has been "overlaid" on top of your ongoing life. To be clear: when you do that then you are creating and intensifying, right then and there, the imagination-experience of seeing an image of a house. What you want to do instead, is create and intensify the imagination-experience of actually being in the house, and living within the desire, so that you are triggering an immersive, first-person pattern rather than a remote, third-person one.

Summary - Really do summon into the space that you are the experience you want to have, an experience that implies you have what you want. (The alternative is to operate indirectly, and create an image which means-that you will get what you want. You can also do this by assigning meaning to physical objects, attaching states and patterns to them; this is how the two glasses exercise works.)

(according to this idea there is no difference between the 'internal' and 'external, they are one thing)

Exactly. Internal and external, like me and not-me, are arbitrary divisions; there is only you-as-state.

How may one intensitfy this pattern? Is it mainly through imagination?

To imagine is to intensify - which is why it matters whether you do it in the 1st person (3D-immersively) vs the 3rd person ("over there"). So any intentional act is an act of imagination, of intensifying one pattern relative to the others.

POST: Do you need to drink all the water to jump?

There is no need to get too obsessed with the details here. The intention and commitment is what matters most. I would definitely drink the full glass however. Other drinks might be fine but they usually come with extra personal associations, so why would you not use water?

EDIT: Note, this was mostly a reference to this comment by OP: Also, if I drink half of the water, will I half-jump? Or will it just pause so I can continue later? May I use other drinks?.

Although it might be fun to think of "what ifs", actually you should seek to avoid overcomplicating it for no additional benefit. The more you mess around, the more you are introducing additional associations that you can't anticipate. If you are doing the exercise with the expectation that it will work, then it would seem silly to take the risk - it would be like having a teleport machine and wondering what happens if you only step halfway into it, or only type in some of the coordinates, or set the teleport beam to a lower intensity. Good luck with that! ;-)

(More accurately: it's like using a technique to change the structure of your mind but only following half the instructions.)

Q1: The intention and commitment is what matters most
Got it, so if it doesn't work, it is my fault. Just my intent and "commitment"
How may I further seek enlightenment?
There is no need to get too obsessed with the details here.
I don't think I'm obsessed over details, just trying to ask you some questions due to the original instructions being unclear.

Why are you so upset? (EDIT: You edited. Previously there was an insulting line about being a fuck-up who never graduated from school. EDIT2: You edited again to add the final sentence, which does I suppose make you seem more sincere and worth engaging with, but you added it an hour and a half after you posted the comment in its original form - too little, too late, the damage was already done.)

It's just an exercise to demonstrate something about the mind and the world, and people can take or leave it. Nobody's promising anything, or even promoting anything. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and people can just move on. You sound like someone who... probably hasn't thought about things very much.

Q1: I'm not upset, you must be talking about another dimension. I'm only asking you if you support users attempting to cure their social anxiety and other psychological issues with your subreddit?

I support users doing whatever they want. If someone has social anxiety, then they can "attempt" to fix it with prescribed pills, or "attempt" to fix it with counseling, or "attempt" to fix it with hypnosis, or "attempt" anything else they want. Whatever's helpful, is good, regardless of ideological concerns.

Q1: Why the quotation marks?
Also can you elaborate on this part and why you brought up ideological concerns? Do you see any ideological concerns in supporting the use of dimensional jumping to "attempt" to cure psychological illnesses?
Whatever's helpful, is good, regardless of ideological concerns.

The quotes were to emphasise you own use of the word attempt, which implied there were other guaranteed, proven, theoretically sound approaches to curing, say, social anxiety. I haven't encountered any (although there are many things that can help to some extent). I brought up ideological concerns, because approaches shouldn't dismissed (or accepted) on the basis of narrative concerns alone. You do realise that "dimensional jumping" is a metaphor, right? It's not about literally teleporting to other physical realms. Also, it is not particularly about curing psychological illnesses (although someone could certainly use that as the target for experimentation). In effect, it's a demonstration that experience is someone philosophically idealist. Separately though, we might wonder what the nature of a "psychological illness" is, exactly, of course. That such things exists is apparent, but what they are isn't very clear.

Q1: Also, you never elaborated on this quote, I hope you aren't trying to avoid it:
If you are doing the exercise with the expectation that it will work, then it would seem silly to take the risk - it would be like having a teleport machine and wondering what happens if you only step halfway into it, or only type in some of the coordinates, or set the teleport beam to a lower intensity. Good luck with that! ;-)

First, a suggestion: if you actually want to have a discussion about this, you should adjust your tone and be less aggressive/defensive. If you just want an argument, you can take it elsewhere. So, not sure what you are asking about that quote? The suggestion is, that if you are going to perform an exercise of some kind, with a result in mind, why would you only half do it or not otherwise follow the instructions?

Q1: if you actually want to have a discussion about this, you should adjust your tone and be less aggressive/defensive. If you just want an argument, you can take it elsewhere.
So, if I actually want to have a discussion about this, I'd better obey your suggestions? I've only noticed defensiveness from you, to be honest. Are you sensing aggression in me? Do you feel threatened? You seem to be avoiding my simple requests for you to elaborate on this concept you created. Also, are you familiar with satire? If so, how does satire relate to the subjects we discuss?

No, I don't feel threatened because... well, I'm not here to defend anything or persuade you of anything. I'm happy to discuss things. If you want to engage in satire - great, knock yourself out. But it probably makes sense to actually understanding the nature of what you're satirising first; that's what I do. You seem awfully emotionally hyped about all this. Why?

Q1: You seem awfully emotionally hyped about all this. Why?
I'm not, what makes you feel that way? You seem awfully defensive and have projected some of your insecurities onto me. Did you notice that? Also, are you implying that I don't understand satire? Here is the definition: "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, sarcasm or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues."
You didn't think that satire was just acting like you were the subject of your criticism just to criticize it, did you? Because that's not what I'm doing. Satire has many forms. Literal forms.

Oh, don't be so tiresome. I didn't imply at all that you didn't know what satire was. You didn't read my comment properly: it probably makes sense to actually understanding the nature of what you're satirising first

As in, if you are going to be satirical, you have to be satirical about the actual thing itself, not about some parallel idea you have about it. Otherwise you are just being unpleasant. Since you're not actually engaging with the discussion, there's not much point to this. I'm happy to bounce back and forward in some wordplay usually, if it's entertaining. You do seem to be under the impression that I'm defending some sort of position here, though!

This is only relative to your endurance not matching mine.

Ah, so this is a battle of wits, a challenge of persistence and strength, to win through attrition? ;-)

I dunno - why do you care about "winning" at all? What is there even to win here? I'm not even trying to persuade you of anything; there's nothing to persuade you of, in fact. Your idea of your situation here, of the context of this chat, appears to be... incorrect.

How many things, according to you, is one allowed to satirize at the same time?

See, you've missed the mark again. My point was, plainly, that in order to satire something, you need to know what it is you are satirising. Since you blundered into this subreddit, all ready to triumph over ignorance, all you've done is revealed that you don't really know what the target is.

Do you know that /r/ThreeKings is a child of the fiction sub /r/nosleep?

Well, it's an offshoot inspired by it. The actual ritual (and related: the doors of perception one) has a long history, related to entering a detached mental state. As I say though, that predates my involvement. Related post on the nature of perception: Darkroom Vision. Fascinating stuff.

Q1: I dunno - why do you care about "winning" at all?
Are you quoting me or yourself? Because you're the only one who mentioned "winning". Also, regarding Theroux, have you noticed a common trend among his interview subjects? They seem so absorbed in their own work, so eager to be in the limelight, that they often reveal the flaws of their work? To be direct, are you upvoting yourself through alts, breaking Reddit rules? Your points seem oddly consistent here, and usually variances occur, along with people downvoting opposing viewpoints. Seems like I haven't been downvoted, consistently, other than my original post. Almost as if someone doesn't want the post to be seen, yet wants validation to their views within the post.

The quotes are (obviously) to indicate that there is no such thing as winning in this context. How can you "win" a discussion? (You must have seen quotation marks used that way before, right? If not, consider it a new string to your bow.)

So, do you feel absorbed in your work? Are you keenly aware of the flaws in your thinking and in your approach? What to you think Louis Theroux would make of you? I think you are projecting your own ideas and self-image on his work (which is a bit more nuanced than you think, I think), and any idea you might have of yourself as a champion of rationality seems... unsupported by the evidence. No alt accounts (really, do people bother to do that? care that much? it's just... an online forum!) but you did end up on the spam list because you were reported for trolling. Everyone's up for a discussion, but uninformed ranting is of no use to anyone. Was that neutral journalism in action? ;-)

...

Q1: You do realise that "dimensional jumping" is a metaphor, right?
I suggest you add this to the sidebar.

Relevant excerpts:

OVERVIEW
The essence of Dimensional Jumping is the leveraging of perspective-structuring metaphors and the techniques derived from them. It is for readers to decide for themselves through personal investigation and introspection whether jumping is appropriate for them or not. Never believe something without personal evidence; never dismiss something without personal evidence.

Note, however, that being "just" a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be used to accomplish things, specifically: reformatting your experience.

Q1: Are you familiar with Louis Theroux? Also, when saying "personal" evidence, are you referring to anecdotal evidence?

I am indeed familiar with Louis Theroux. I'm referring to trying something out for yourself, to see whether it provides your with a particular subjective experience. I'm not sure what your point is there? You'd be better off speaking more directly. To emphasise: the subreddit (as far as I'm concerned; I didn't originate it) isn't promoting a particular worldview as true. It's saying: here's a model of experience (basically a modified subjective idealist view) that's interesting to explore, you can check it out by investigating it yourself.

*Q1: I am indeed familiar with Louis Theroux.

How do you think he would react to your sub and the discussions you've had regarding it? (not just with me, but with others) All documented and archived on Reddit? Do you feel a personal sense of affinity towards Mr. Theroux or more towards his various guests in interviews? Also, do you think most of your readers actually believe that your "exercises" are metaphors? It seems like the posts made by those whom seem to not think that this is not a metaphor aren't reminded of the metaphor part. Do your replies to them address this phenomena? Also, when did you first create these exercises?*

Sorry, what exactly is the point of this exchange, if you're not actually going to have a discussion or state your own position?

It's not that complicated: The subreddit itself started (before my time) with some sort of mirror ritual reminiscent of /r/threekings. Gradually it's morphed into an exploration of the potential use of the philosophical idealist (or non-dualist) viewpoint + formatting metaphors, to make changes in your experience, and to examine the nature of the subjective experience more closely.

Q1: Sorry, what exactly is the point of this exchange, if you're not actually going to have a discussion or state your own position?
To give you a chance to explain you sub, of course! Also, to ask the questions which the public may ask when stumbling across your sub. Although why are you asking me this now? I know you didn't feel threatened a few seconds ago, but do you feel threatened now? You seemed defensive towards the very beginning. Why is it that whenever you change the subject, a few of my questions go unanswered? My questions are very direct and I aim to emulate Louis Theroux's neutrality. Care to answer the questions you've avoided, or shall I aggregate them into a list?

I think perhaps you have not been paying attention to Louis Theroux very closely! I've been a fan of his since his work on Michael Moore's TV Nation. Good interview with him in The Guardian earlier this year:

[QUOTE]

“No, I go in to tell stories, to reveal the truth and to try to understand. Not to set people straight,” he says. “I don’t go into this with the agenda of saving the world.”
-- Louis Theroux: ‘My secret fear is that I'm not helping'

[END OF QUOTE]

He takes a neutral stance and seeks to understand and explore a topic on its own terms, from the inside. He does not actually take satirical or mocking stance in his documentaries. Furthermore, he doesn't make barbed comments and then re-edit them. (Seriously, what was all that "never graduated from school" shit earlier?)

So, are you imagining you are conducting an interview or an investigation? Perhaps you feel you are performing a public service of some sort? Are you fantasising or roleplaying about being an "online Louis"? Because if you really wanted to do that, the correct approach would be to engage and fully understand it on its own terms. So, personally I don't really identify with a particular position - I think ways of thinking are useful or they are not. I aim to keep separate the experiences or observations, and the conceptual frameworks or "connective fictions" which we use to explain them to ourselves. Do you identify with a particular position, as being true?

What it seems you are trying to do is "debunk" the subject of this subreddit. Which seems a bit pointless to me, and the equivalent of trying to debunk a diagram or disprove the subjective experience of seeing colours.

Q1: You know that to keep one's status as journalist, one must state neutrality, correct?
It seems like you understood Theroux's statement, yet didn't understand why he made that statement. As for the rest of your points, I'll address them after you address the questions which you've avoided answering.

So are you suggesting that a journalist should state neutrality, whilst actually pushing an agenda? ;-)

That seems to be your approach anyway, perhaps unwittingly. Also, I may be wrong (forgive me if that is so), but you strike me as being one of those people who is perhaps really into popular science (but never actually studied it or the philosophy of science). That's okay, but often such people tend to be "defenders of the true worldview" rather than actually of a scientific mindset. With that in mind, exchanging question is pointless, since we aren't going to be exploring a subject - you are going to be seeking opportunities to "win" an argument which only you are having, so that you can once again feel comfortable with the set of ideas you have become identified with.

Q1: So are you suggesting that a journalist should state neutrality, whilst actually pushing an agenda? ;-)
You are mistaken (again, I wonder if you are trying to keep this discussion unfocused), I'm pointing out that your comments have shown that you don't understand that journalists do need to maintain neutrality to be considered journalists, yet it is common practice to push an agenda. Why the winks? Do you think you're being witty?
That seems to be your approach anyway, perhaps unwittingly.
Things may not always seem as they... uh... seem? Ironic, you use the word "unwittingly" as you delve deeper into... your "thing"
You still have not answered many of my more important questions, often opting to misinterpret and keep the discussion unfocused. I ask you this one again, though: When exactly did you first come up with your "exercises"?

Well, if you have an agenda, let's hear all about it! Then we can have a proper discussion. Because at the moment it isn't actually a discussion. And it certainly isn't journalism either, if that's the fantasy you are holding onto, given your comments so far. It's just non-constructive trolling, which is of no benefit to anyone. Aside: What you are referring to above isn't journalism, not even advocacy journalism - it's propaganda.

Q1: Are you familiar with James Randi? Also, what makes you think I'm coming from a journalistic angle, didn't you forget our talk about satire, son? creepywink!;-)
if that's the fantasy you are holding onto, given your comments so far.
Looks like your subconscious might be taking my points to heart, and expressing itself without your control. You might need to jump again.

Randi, yeah what a joke. He's set skepticism back decades, in my opinion. :-/

Q1: Literally laughed at you. As much as you try to keep an aura of level-headed kindness, you will definitely refer to people as a "joke" when put into a corner. You are a joke. You are not helping anyone. I don't need to be fake like you in an attempt at bravado/preserving non-existent integrity. Explain how he set skepticism back by decades. Also explain how skepticism relates to this sub and to how you should act when people don't realize this is a metaphor. Maybe I should email him and explain our correspondence? He's been on Reddit before. #creepywink ;-) Maybe I should also contact anonymous, to confirm if you are trying to make money off this quackery. Anon is busy at the moment, so I'll give you a chance at redeeming yourself. Also, are you promoting other websites or paid-for services? Are you a failed Psychologist attempting to be a Parapsychologist? "Some within the parapsychology community were outraged, with Dr. Berthold Schwarz (R.I.P. QUACK) declaring: "Randi has set parapsychology back 100 years!" Randi's approach also raised outcries concerning ethical considerations and doubts about positive effects on methodology awareness,[13] both within the parapsychology and the skeptic communities. But Randi reports that other parapsychology researchers have contacted him with praise, describing the project as "splendid and deserved", "an important sanitary service", "commendable", and "long-needed"." The reason I brought up Theroux is because his subjects for interview are often so self-absorbed and pathetic, along with being arrogant and fake, thinking they can fool the masses... that they dig their own grave and become the subject of ridicule for normal society at large. Especially among scientists, doctors, journalists and others who are doing the real hard work in advancing science and medicine. The ones that didn't flunk out of med school and start a website to promote on Reddit.

Last comment on this thread - let's keep it to the new one you started [POST: How many of you know that this is just a metaphor and not a substitute for Science-based medicine and counseling? If anyone tries to sell you anything, don't buy it. It is a scam.].

Although Randi did entertaining work in his reveals of magician's tricks used in public claims of "supernatural powers" (for instance, Uri Gellar and James Hydrick), he is a showman and magician, he was not proceeding as a rational thinker, and I don't think he ever intended to. He is not a useful model for skeptical thought, except in the sense of not adopting views without satisfying yourself of their worth. He also comes with a lot of baggage due to legal stuff. (I think Randi has retired now, has he not?)

As regards this subreddit - read the sidebar. The foundation of it is a questioning attitude and that nothing should be taken as fact without personal exploration. Actually, the underlying idea is that the only things you can be certain of are:

  • That you exist.
  • That you are having experiences.

A skeptical attitude should be adopted for everything beyond that, when it comes to interpreting those experiences. In other words, you should separate out the experience from the explanation, and recognise that all explanations are connective fictions, to be adopted or not depending on their usefulness. I'm not promoting anything at all, here or elsewhere. And if someone was going to do it based on this subreddit, I'm not quite sure how exactly they'd set up a paid-for service based on "don't believe anything" and "don't take anyone's word for things" and "these are metaphors". Maybe they could sell subreddit-branded water glasses? ;-)

EDIT: So, you later added all the stuff from "Are you a failed Psychologist..." onwards...

Ah, you seem to think this is some sort of paranormal thing? Which just shows you still don't understand it. You also seem to be viewing this subreddit as some big deal, whereas to everyone else it's just a tiny inconsequential online forum, on a massive website, on a massive internet. Look, I get that you have your favourite role-models, and you have a particular worldview, but you're missing the mark here. So, a few of mine would be George Ellis, David Bohm and Paul Feyerabend. Have you actually read physics or philosophy, or are you just a "defender" of a vague notion of those subjects? Holding up James Randi and Louis Theroux (fine folk though they may be) as your primary champions doesn't seem, I dunno, very convincing somehow. You're basically just ranting here, now.

...

Q1: Why are you so upset? (EDIT: You edited. Previously there was an insulting line about being a fuck-up who never graduated from school. EDIT2: You edited again to add the final sentence, which does I suppose make you seem more sincere and worth engaging with, but you added it an hour and a half after you posted the comment in its original form - too little, too late, the damage was already done.)
No I didn't you must have been in another dimension where I did.
.....You sound like someone who... probably hasn't thought about things very much.
Wait, I thought I was the one in this dimension that was using personal attacks and insults. Why would you do such a thing, oh enlightened leader who isn't a scam artist looking for attention on the internet while spouting self-help quackery which could be dangerous to anyone who actually wishes to improve themselves?

Self improvement? Exploration of experiencing, maybe. Heh, well we've had fun here, haven't we? I think you got a bit caught up in the "dimensional jumping" metaphor, rather than the underlying thing (which is really more like: adopt a philosophical idealist view and from there explore the "patterning" nature of experience though experimentation). Thanks for engaging! ;-)

POST: How many of you know that this is just a metaphor and not a substitute for Science-based medicine and counseling? If anyone tries to sell you anything, don't buy it. It is a scam.

Discuss!

I think the poster doubts this subreddit's ability to think rationally, entertain ideas, and make choices. I also think that he misunderstands the whole thing. But perhaps that isn't for me to say.

Edits

EDIT: For context if interested, see this recent conversation [POST: Do you need to drink all the water to jump?]. The final comments were here. Discussion will now be constrained to this thread. EDIT2: Link to my specific comment about James Randi: here. EDIT3: And taking it personally as a mission.

Update

For completeness, I should mention that OP's post seems to be a follow-on from his earlier post over at /r/skeptic. There's actually another post over there at the moment which is a quote from Steven Novella on skepticism, and it's worth reading that in full even though it's on a particular topic. See below:

[QUOTE]

"The skeptical outlook is to consciously remove oneself from any emotional investment in any particular belief. Instead we align our identity with the process of science, listening to facts, and following valid logic and sound arguments. Part of this is being transparent and engaging intellectually with others. The critical analysis of others will keep us honest. We must be our own harshest skeptic, for if not others will expose any flaws in our process. We will then be under pressure to examine our methods and change our conclusions if necessary. Essentially being a skeptic and being part of a community of skeptics harnesses inherent human psychology toward being logical and scientific, rather than irrational and emotional. As a skeptic my primary motivation is getting it right (not defending any particular position), and if I don’t I know that other skeptics will point out my error, and if I don’t properly engage with their criticism, or if I dig in my heels, I will lose credibility."
-- Excerpt from Steven Novella article

[END OF QUOTE]

The poster then adds:

I think this is what sets skepticism apart from other -isms. Unlike political ideologies or religions or other belief-systems, it focuses on methods for finding out, not on particular conclusions and beliefs. Which I think is its greatest strength.

Good stuff and good comments in response. Although one should obviously approach even skepticism-related material with a healthy dose of skepticism, however...

...

A3: It is both sad and funny that people cannot see the true plausibility of the core ideas behind this sub. Of course, this disconnect is due to the name DimensionalJumping, which does undoubtedly sound bat shit crazy to people simply because they interpret there to literally be multiple physical dimensions. And it just fits in perfectly with that goddamn many-worlds interpretation so most end up taking it literally. It truly is unfortunate that this sub is named how it is and I really cannot blame skeptics for judging it the way they do. At it's core, this sub is built around the simple idea that consciousness comes first, hence why reality could be a bit more malleable than one would expect. And it isn't that crazy, since science has absolutely zero explanation for consciousness currently. Is it really that far-fetched that maybe, just maybe you have been making (incorrect) assumptions about the nature of your experience due to accumulated habits? Are people seriously this blind to the potential validity of this proposition? Take a step back and consider the fact that your lifespan compared to the length of human existence is literally like a drop of water compared to an entire ocean. Do you really think that your life right now is your one and only chance to live as a human for all of eternity? I am not against people who accept this (it is their choice), I am simply alluding to the fact that it really is not that crazy for someone to question and investigate what their true nature is through personal exploration. The intent of this subreddit is never to simply tell anyone what is or isn't true. Also, speaking from direct experience I have not once been asked to buy anything while participating in this sub. Ever. There is nothing to even purchase, it is literally free information. Although some purchasable Owls of Eternity™ figures wouldn't be half bad!

Yeah, the sub's naming is a historical accident really, as reflected in the intro post. Initially it wasn't really "about" what it's become about - that is, having fun exploring the nature of experience for curiosity and utility - and although it's a quirky and provocative name, it does make the initial impression misleading for the casual reader (or the skeptic who isn't a skeptic and is looking for a fight). But on the other hand perhaps a strong and engaging image gets people thinking in a way that a more dry or abstract presentation would not. At its core, we're talking about the ultimate skepticism: identify exactly what you are sure of, treat that and only that as fundamentally true, and absolutely everything else as only relatively true. And what you are certain of is one thing, although it is more easily stated in two parts:

  • That you exist (you are aware).
  • That you are having an experience (you are aware of content).

Anything beyond that is about the content of experience, and is up for grabs, and we treat all descriptions of that as provisional, as a convenient or useful or interesting or fun fiction only. (Note - It is useful to assert a basic level of form to experience though, and say that by default we are an "open aware perceptual space" in which experiences arise, or which "takes on the shape of" experiences. This gives us a ground or reference point for discussion and exploration.)

For instance, take the assumption that "the world" is of the same format as our experience. Although our experiences may arise in the form of a 3D-formatted spatial scene, that doesn't mean "the world" is of that format, that is it a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Unfortunately though, our thoughts are also formatted in this way (they are experiences too) so it's not really possible to think beyond this. However, we can certainly take the most generalised version of structure - we can talk of "the patterning of experience" - and, bearing this in mind, at least avoid committing to conceptual frameworks and forgetting that they are "connective fictions" only. The working model for this is to provisionally treat the world as a dimensionless "infinite gloop" from which experiences are selected, in a manner perhaps comparable to scanning our attention around a 3-dimensional room. Our investigations, then, might be said to be about exploring the nature of the "selection mechanism" and its limits. Those limits, that basic and unalterable formatting, would, if reached, be the structure of the "underlying substrate" of experience, effectively a combination of the structuring of "mind" and "world" (one can't separate the two out). However, if no such limit was reached, then we would have to infer that there is no fixed underlying substate, and the patterning of experience is just that: accumulated habitual patterns which are subject to change. Of course, we could never make a final conclusion here. But that's okay, because this is really about freedom of thought and being skeptical of all narrative structures, based on (looping back round here) the recognition of the difference between fundamental and relative truth.

Next up - Our exciting new range of Owls of Eternity™ branded apparel! (8>)=

You are conscious in this moment right here, would you not agree?

I don't think we're conscious in the moment though? The moment is not the container!

Rather it's that consciousness is eternal and is the boundless container for all moments. The [sensory] moment arises within it. This means that the centuries never pass in time. Instead it is we - as time, as consciousness - that pass across the centuries. So perhaps: conscious of this moment. Better: conscious as this moment?

Yes I know, I meant that from a perspective that the average joe having minimal interest in this stuff could relate to (hence the word non-formal). My apologies if it seemed like I was directing the question at you. Really, you are absolutely correct though. It is an important distinction to realize that we are conscious of this moment rather than in this moment.

Ah, I missed the context when replying. So, yes, non-formally and without having to go into details, anyone can confirm for themselves the undeniable fact that "I am conscious, right now" - simply by pausing and noticing. And really, from that observation the whole perspective follows naturally, if one stays with it as one works through things.

...

A4: Riiiight... because medicine is scientifically perfect, never hurts anyone, and doesn't have mile-long list of side effects. And counseling does what, exactly? Makes you think about your life and ways to change it? Hrm. That sounds pretty familiar, actually. I'd rather not pay inflated prices for someone else's knowledge, which I can easily gain myself by reading, discussing, and learning about anything and everything I want to. Counseling and medicine work for you? Great, fantastic, I'm so glad it helps. Sometimes counseling is precisely what someone needs. It can and does help a lot of people. Medicine is sadly not usually the answer, and way too many people are over-drugged all across the world, especially here in the US. Some of us, though, would prefer to not be zombified slaves. I've seen plenty of perfectly normal people, albeit misguided and lacking purpose, become completely fucking nuts, or turn to drugs, or even commit suicide after psychologists decide to tinker with their brain chemistry. I realize you are not going to listen to a word I say. I just hope I can help someone else who may have a chance at helping themselves before turning to mental-fuckery and popping pills like candy. These people belong to a whole different cult altogether. This cult is powerful, money hungry, and has convinced millions of people that they need drugs and therapy to help them deal with their crappy lives. I want to be happy from the inside, so I learn, I communicate, and I explore new ideas.

Q1: Riiiight... because medicine is scientifically perfect, never hurts anyone,
When you open with a fallacy....
I know what I'm dealing with, so at least I tried. Scientology before mitosis
I just hope I can help someone else who may have a chance at helping themselves before turning to mental-fuckery and popping pills like candy
Were you ever forced to pop pills? I'm a supporter of CBT, not meds.

It's interesting that you support CBT specifically though, since its current dominance is not uncontroversial. It's been suggested that its apparent popularity, like that of medication, might have more to do with organisational convenience than it having an accurate model that works reliably for solving problems (rather than helping endure them). It's currently being pushed as a blanket solution in some countries, when that is not really justified I feel, based on the depth of its model and the evidence to date. See psychoanalyst Darian Leader's article, A quick fix for the soul, for an accessible read on this, and cognitive neuropsychologist Keith Laws on Has cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis been oversold? for more serious coverage. As always, if someone finds something useful then great, and one should try all reasonable avenues and that includes CBT. And of course, there is a difference between having developed poor thinking habits vs having developed deep depression or hallucinations! But we should be wary of hand-waving promises which are sometimes motivated by political and economic reasoning rather than scientific or intellectual integrity - which I think is often the case with this. Y'know, be properly skeptical and do our own research. (As I'm sure you do.)

...

A5: Aside everything else, re James Randi: if I had genuine paranormal abilities, the last thing I would do would be to go to James Randi. First of all, I would never advertise those abilities - ever - secondly, with that kind of abilities and knowledge, why would I need the money? How much is he offering these days, 1 million dollars? That's literally half a million pounds, and this is not that much. Ok, you can buy a house for that, but it is hardly worth exposing yourself.

Q1: You'd hide the powers in fear and use them for your own personal gain, yes. All as a metaphor, though. Just about sums it up. Lost, desperate and arrogant. You are victims of quackery. Downvoting me does nothing. Seek mental help instead of drinking a glass of water and hoping that it will somehow fix your life. Also stop seeing the glass of water as causal and not correlative.

A5: You are taking this too literally. What is wrong in a bit of speculation and thought experiments? BTW, an idea that reality is based on consensus is a sociological one, nothing paranormal there.

Q1: All as a metaphor, though.
Literally? Really? Then why am I jokingly referring to the people who made this shit up as claiming metaphor, yet not correcting people when it isn't referred to as such. Then you start bringing up sociology? When this is an individual "exercise" being pushed on vulnerable people. Also, asking for a consensus from a biased sample pool isn't science. It is quackery, it is a an infant cult on training wheels. This self-help new-age fluff is not a substitute for proper counseling. I draw the line at meditation.

All as a metaphor, though.

Well, all explanations are effectively metaphors. What matters is how useful they are, how well their predictions correspond to experience. I hope you haven't developed the bad habit of thinking that stuff like "gravitational fields" are real things? Or if they are, in what sense are they real things?

When this is an individual "exercise" being pushed on vulnerable people.

Who's pushing what?

Now, I don't whether you or someone you care for has had some bad encounter with a cult or something - you seem pretty focused on this notion - and if that is so then you have my sympathy. But you do seem to be reading this subreddit from some pretty odd assumptions - assumptions nobody else seems to be making (probably because they read the sidebar before going all straw man on things). And what's more, you are then ranting instead of actually discussing or making a coherent argument. Which is ironic, since you originally posted your comment in /r/skeptic. Obviously, the paranoia about alts isn't helping (which I can assure you isn't the case, although I realise that won't help). Anyway, this thread here is your own special thread to engage with. Lay it all out, and people can judge your input as they see fit, and make their own conclusions from the responses you give them. But you really should lay out exactly what you think the topic of this subreddit is, and what is problematic about that. If you can't do the first of these, then you're not really saying anything at all, because you quite literally don't know what you're talking about.

I truly pity you

How can you be sure of that? ;-)

A5: Not because of fear - it is just, I would assume, I would be at the point of not being interested in such mundane things as money and showing off.

Q1: Wow, your hypothetical morals and course of action are inhuman. You're a God. How old are you, anyways?

A5: It has nothing to do with morals. Let's say you are giving a donation to charity - are you interested in showing off and telling everyone what you've done, or is it enough for you you are helping? This is, for me, the same kind of idea. Going with a hypothetical 'paranormal' power to Rabdi would be like Dalailama going on a TV reality show to prove he can meditate for 5 hours. The idea that someone with any type of ability strives - first and foremost - for a public recognition, fame and money, is astonishing. Especially media is something to avoid, in any profession really. My husband has lots of media request due to being an expert on something (no matter what) - just last week the BBC called him twice, and he declines, as he does not want NOR NEED any public exposure. Now can you imagine you have some unusual ability - whatever it would be - would you really rush to show it off to the world for a mere 1 million dollar? For any money, really?

Q1: Let's say you are giving a donation to charity - are you interested in showing off and telling everyone what you've done, or is it enough for you you are helping?
That's a horrible comparison.
Going with a hypothetical 'paranormal' power to Rabdi would be like Dalailama going on a TV reality show to prove he can meditate for 5 hours.
Are you on acid? At least you admittedly align yourself with Randi's guests and seemingly google "randi debunked"
The idea that someone with any type of ability strives - first and foremost - for a public recognition, fame and money, is astonishing. Especially media is something to avoid, in any profession really. My husband has lots of media request due to being an expert on something (no matter what) - just last week the BBC called him twice, and he declines, as he does not want NOR NEED any public exposure.
What exactly does your husband do? What field of study is he an expert in? Also, to anyone else reading, remember that Louis Theroux invites guests on the BBC all the time. Not for public recognition, but to help society. Frankly, it would be more likely that one would hide in fear due to thinking the conspiracy shadow government was out to get them. To keep theme with the Kettle Logic... The real heroes are just regular people. Doctors, scientists, Inventors, Paramedics, Counselors, Social Workers, Bus Drivers, Tow Truck Operators. Spies. Soldiers. Musicians. Artists. TV host Illusionists. This quackery, to me, is akin to religious ignorance. "Pray the disease away" "Allahu Akbar" "A woman does not own her right to choose whether to abort a baby to prevent illness, nor shall she choose her husband"
Would your magical superheroes not be able to help more people if they were exposed to those who need help? Unless they regularly visit the hospital or mental ward. After all, finances, health and personal lives all converge there the most, with the most in need of help often there. Sad part is, I'm pointing out how seemingly kind and vulnerable people like you can be manipulated into quackery. That's the reason I speak out.

A5: Are YOU on acid? The only thing I said in my original post was that - theoretically - the fact that someone has 'paranormal powers (in which I DO NOT believe) does not AUTOMATICALLY follow they would want to advertise them anywhere. I know that IF I had any 'powers' (in which, let me repeat, I do NOT believe, the last thing I would do is to admit them, advertise them, draw attention to myself, and be interested in cashing on them for a mere half a million quid. What is there not to understand?

Your obsession with Louis Theroux and James Randi is really odd. Especially since you seem to misunderstand the first (he is not on the mission you think him to be, and he is a journalist-entertainer really), and have an elevated impression of the second (with no scientific credentials and a history of untrustworthiness, he is only qualified to 'debunk' illusionists, as a skeptic-entertainer). Why those two? If you are on the skeptic/rationalist path there are better figures to follow, if following people is your thing, which it seems to be. I'm not sure what the real reason is that you "speak out", but since it mostly consists of random disconnected points, and there's no coherent argument even vaguely related to, for instance, the topic of this subreddit, it's unlikely you are going to help anyone by doing it. Your comments here and elsewhere consist of an antagonistic stream of uninformed ranting, personal attacks, non-sequiters involving the words "Theroux" and "Randi", and even paranoid delusions. I seriously hope nobody who is vulnerable ends up anywhere on your radar, the unfortunate target for your emotional release. Everyone is polite in response, of course, because it is natural to feel sympathy once the initial amusement has faded, but I have to wonder - if this is how you respond to a bit of playful experimental metaphysics, who knows how you'd respond if you took the time to do some actual reading in science and philosophy and inform yourself about things - maybe even find out about proper skepticism - rather than watching media personalities! It's meant to be all about having dialogues, don't you know.

(Yeah, I realise you're not actually interested in being serious, but it's become interesting to watch you dodge the content of people's comments and post disconnected sentences in response, claiming victory in an argument nobody's having except you.)

Q1: Proof that you are narcissistic to the point of thinking you are a doctor. Once again projecting your avoidance, quackery and hypocrisy. So how old are you and when did you make up these exercises? Are you a metaphyscicist, doctor or philosopher? Where are your credentials? Do you accept responsibility if you mislead anyone or caused anyone to avoid real medicine, science and philosophy? Do you pm people who subscribe here, offering advice and counseling without credentials? How many alts do you have on here? How does the bullshit here relate to the other subs you mod? What is your job outside of reddit? Seems like philosophy and science are merely excuses for your lack of credentials. Do you see any long terms risks for those who might be misled and consume your quackery?

Okay, so you still don't get it, even now. And so you can't actually discuss the topic or criticise it on its own terms (which would be fun), because you don't actually know what you are attacking. Hence your own ignoring of any of the points people raise during the discussion. If you haven't already, you should read this earlier comment which pretty much sums it up, in terms of history and content (including the origin of the subreddit name). There is nothing very new or controversial there, in terms of philosophical ideas; they are not new concepts. The only addition is exploring of the implications of it, by experiment. What one then does with that, and what one uses as the subject, is up to the individual - as are the conclusions one draws. Fundamentally, the problem here might be that you are just not an abstract thinker. Everyone else seems to get it, except you, since you seem to have brought some sort of strange template with you and overlaid it upon everything. You are applying a delusional idea of what this subreddit is, to what's basically discussion forum with a (potentially practical) philosophical theme. Meanwhile, of course I'm not going to start giving out personal info, especially not to someone like yourself. For your curiosity: my background is in science and technology - but that is not relevant here, because this is a discussion forum about exploring a particular set of ideas to see where they lead, to be taken on their own merits. It is not relevant because: the whole thrust of this subreddit is the idea that people make judgements based on their own experiences no matter what the topic, applying their own thinking, and not on what anyone says. That means me or you or any authority figure, regardless of their credentials. It's actually a concern to me that you elevate the people you do, and are advocating others use them as their baseline for truth. Everyone is just people; including prominent figures in religion, science, philosophy, sociology; even journalist-entertainers, skeptic-entertainers, etc. For instance, eugenics was practiced in the USA until WW2 (it was actually the template for the Nazi program), including the passage of compulsory sterilisation laws, and was accepted as fact and taught in universities across the country. It was seen as scientifically validated. Prominent figures of authority advocated it. Would you have been defending that at the time? Given your tenuous knowledge and tendency to follow, I suspect so! (Okay, I'm just having a bit of fun with you there.)

You've got me curious though: What makes you think people are posting under alts? Where do you get the idea that anyone advocates the avoidance of science, medicine and philosophy? Why are you so obsessed with me in particular? Are you under the impression that being a moderator = agreement with all comments? And again: what exactly do you think the topic of this subreddit is, given that your comments don't seem to match up to it?

(Man, I just couldn't resist replying; too fascinating.)

Q1: Okay, so you still don't get it, even now.
Redundant. Also, what is "it"? Insane amounts of projection as usual... let's see what the walking fallacy has for me today. Noticed you didn't answer any of my questions. Again. For the Seventh time. What are you hiding? Are you afraid that certain questions might reveal facts about you which would turn vulnerable people away from being taken advantage of by you to satiate your messiah complex?
For instance, eugenics was practiced in the USA until WW2 (it was actually the template for the Nazi program), including the passage of compulsory sterilisation laws, and was accepted as fact and taught in universities across the country. It was seen as scientifically validated.
Wow, I think you've covered every fallacy. The complied list of unanswered questions and fallacies you've committed is going to be amazing.
(Man, I just couldn't resist replying; too fascinating.)
What's fascinating? Attempting to belittle someone, but actually making yourself look like a spineless douche?
Are you under the impression that being a moderator = agreement with all comments?
All it takes is time to get a megalomaniac to reveal themselves as mentally ill. No particular diagnosis, I'm unqualified.
Why are you so obsessed with me in particular?
lol. You flatter yourself and at the same time attempt to belittle me, yet another beautiful unwitting microcosm you create of this overall dialogue. I'm guessing Randi and Theroux (my other obsessions, correct? Because I've spoken about them to you only in this sub for less than a month.) If you've been speaking about your quackery and yourself for longer, according to your logic are you not obsessed with yourself? Not only are you a blowhard and one who seeks to validate themselves with buzzwords, but you are a misleading coward and science (along with actual philosophy) fundamentally are not compatible with your self-centered wannabe cult guidance. Richard Dawkins. Opinions?

In this thread and the initial one, in your responses to myself and others, all you've done is attempt to attack the commenter, and appeal to authority, rather than engage with the topic. You have been content-free throughout. In fact, I don't think you've responded to any point or presented any view. I guess that's one way to avoid making a fallacious argument - never make an argument at all. :-)

I suppose you are trying to go for the "discredit the author" route, following what you perceive to be the Theroux-Randi™ template. But what would that achieve, with me or anyone else? It would leave the actual ideas intact, to be taken on their own merit (or lack of, as the reader saw fit). Ideas which predate this subreddit, a subreddit which emphasises thinking for yourself, and taking nothing on trust. Perhaps you do not understand what is being discussed, and so can't participate. Have you even read Berkeley yet? Perhaps this is just an emotional release for you, a need to "win" no matter whether it makes sense or not. In other words, for you this is about your very identity, and that's why you are showing signs of paranoia and hysteria. (I say this from a layman's point of view of course; I am not a medical doctor.) Nobody needs to belittle you; at the moment you have effectively dismissed yourself with your approach.

Richard Dawkins - He was an excellent biologist, then a mediocre philosopher, and now he's a poor social commentator. Why are you letting yourself be distracted by these media figures who are presented as "crusaders"? You are just wasting time that would be better spent focusing on reading deeply, exploring ideas, and thinking for yourself. Or if this is not actually about the ideas at all...

On the other hand, perhaps your concern has nothing to do with science and philosophy as such - rather, you are worried that broader society might be going in a direction you don't like. Religion's influence in politics, non-evidence-based approaches to policy, that sort of thing. With that I have sympathy. But it would be a mistake, I say, to think that replacing all the god-believers or new-age-followers with scientists and engineers would transform things for the better necessarily. After all, in theory all the Christians in the US and other institutions should have been working for the wellbeing of their fellow man; that's not how it has played out though. With a completely amoral structure in place based on logical reasoning and scientific modelling, we might make decisions better, but we won't necessarily make better decisions. So, it would make things more efficient, perhaps, but the political goals probably wouldn't change; the country's control infrastructure would remain nearly identical, it's just the methods that would shift. We might ultimately end up with something like a technocracy (in the original sense):

The term technocracy was originally used to advocate the application of the scientific method to solving social problems. According to the proponents of this concept, the role of money, economic values, and moralistic control mechanisms would be eliminated altogether if and when this form of social control should ever be implemented in a continental area endowed with enough natural resources, technically trained personnel, and installed industrial equipment. In such an arrangement, concern would be given to sustainability within the resource base, instead of monetary profitability, so as to ensure continued operation of all social-industrial functions into the indefinite future. Technical and leadership skills would be selected on the basis of specialized knowledge and performance, rather than democratic election by those without such knowledge or skill deemed necessary.

In fact, in the UK there have already been moves towards this with the Behavioural Insights Team - see recent article in Wired, which asks "who nudges the nudgers?" - which one might see as the natural evolution of Edward Bernay's work on population management, and extending the remit of ongoing data collection from being specific to anti-terrorism and serious crime, to now include "economic wellbeing". Similar data and analysis projects are running in many countries, dating back to the early 2000s and TIA, so this is the way things are going eventually, I'd say. All of which makes logical sense of course: it's obviously more efficient to get everything integrated into databases and set up automated rules and alerts, with algorithms designed by "nudging" teams, in alignment with the policies of government and associated agencies. So if you wait a while, all this stuff about people believing in things you view as foolish might not matter - personal beliefs will eventually no longer be able to have much influence over behaviour in a social and economic context anyway. You know, if that is your bag, if you are concerned about science vs woo and how beliefs affect how things are run, then you might really enjoy reading some Paul Feyerabend, such as Farewell to Reason, which explores the relationship between how science is actually conducted, and society at large. Even if you disagree with him on many points, and it's likely you will, it is still very thought-provoking and great for clarifying your own views.

Discredit the "author"? You wrote a few paragraphs, posted them on reddit and promoted the shit out of it with alts.

Ha, I really meant it more as a general term rather than a personal reference, although we shouldn't give reddit any ideas: it'll start advertising itself as the home of "100 million published authors" before we know it...

Skuuuuurt! Redirect!

It was a sincere change of tack to see where you were coming from, actually, which is why I bolded it. And there are genuine concerns here, I feel, about what is accepted without skepticism by the population at large (this applies as much to science, psychology, medicine as 'woo', perhaps more so) and then applied as political or economic solutions. Science is amoral, I'd say, but in the political sphere science and technology are being treated as inherently good, which circumvents our ability to apply critical thinking to things. The frustration I feel about the misuse of knowledge and the misrepresentation of science and philosophy as processes and conceptual frameworks is similar to how you expressed your side of our discussion; I just dial it back.

In the end, I do apologize if I attacked your character. Only if you aren't using alts to promote this site/vote manipulate/etc.

No problem - apologies if I've been a little too "provocative" sometimes. Yeah, there's really not alts or voting stuff going on here (not by me anyway). It would kinda ruin the point, which is to have people explore a certain philosophical perspective, without actually having bought into it. The sidebar really does lay it out: it's taking philosophical idealism as the starting point, and exploring how actively adopting metaphors "patterns" experience and filters intention, and seeing what the effects are, without presuming anything. It tries to be "worldview-free" other than a basic notion that experience can be described as a dumb patterning system. The beneficial aspect of any outcomes are (useful?) side-effects really.

I see a huge danger in an "exercise" that requires the practitioner to at least somewhat accept some form of fallacy in their life.

It's something to be cautious of, definitely. The exercise itself tries to completely avoid suggesting either the nature of the exercise, or the type of outcome - while warning not to treat it lightly (because you do tend to get some sort of result, even if we interpret that as apparent coincidences and selective perception). In other words, to avoid any tendency to fallacy. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, this, because of course despite the intention to prevent it, people inevitably bring their own worldviews to it.

[replacing all the god-believers or new-age-followers with scientists and engineers ] Another introspective piece into your emotions. You feel threatened by me. I don't want you replaced, I just want you to be more responsible.

Actually, I was putting myself on the side of the scientists and engineers there!

Anyway, some good has come of our exchange, because it's resurrected the discussion about the subreddit's name and all its baggage (which is historical accident - it really did begin as that mirror technique thing before it gradually morphed into this), and the idea of having one that's more appropriate to the actual topic, of which "dimensional jumping" is just the most provocative metaphor.

Now I'm convinced that you are an AI running a Behavioural Insights exercise on Reddit.

Haha, rumbled! :-)

Thank you for engaging in dialogue and not banning me. Thank you for offering at least some of your material ,which some people find to be great, for free.

Without dialogue across boundaries, we're fucked I'd say, so it's all good. Well, if people find it useful that's great, but to be honest it's just me exploring my thoughts on a certain angle; I'd be bemused if someone actually wanted to pay for it, considering they can just browse reddit while sipping a glass of water instead... :-)

Cheers. (That was classic Wesley by the way.)

...

A1: Dude, check out the sidebar. There's even a whole section titled Active Metaphors. The point of this sub is pretty transparent. No one is selling anything. But don't worry, I too once believed this was actually about jumping to alternate dimensions, until I did more research and absorbed all the information contained over there =>. You should check it out! Otherwise, you aren't really exposing anything. All you're doing is giving a good laugh.

A2: Exactly. Lack of abstract thinking is a plague really. This is the same with religion - lots of people who cannot understand symbolic thinking take things too literally and jump up and down.

A1: when they should seek actual counseling.
Well, I actually sought therapy earlier this year for anxiety and depression, and indeed was seeing a therapist for a couple of months. It didn't work out for me. Then I discovered this sub, and started taking responsibility for my life. I'm not saying the ideas presented here will cure anxiety or whatever. But they can have and have had a positive effect on people. If changing my life for the better (without actually believing in anything) makes you think I'm being cultish, then so be it ;D

POST: Holy. Crap. Two Glasses Works...I Think. TV Show Changed Network.

Q1: Oddly enough, I was a huge skeptic of this. I did the experiment a week ago and 2 different shows I've watched for many years are now on a new station. My result hasn't come yet, but when I first noticed this change it was very odd.

Q2: Correlation does not equal causation. To assign a causal relation to the data is simply a fallacy. Just know that you are being vulnerable, and people will attempt to take advantage of that.

An excellent point. Causation is an aspect of a particular description, and not of any set of observations. It is an interpretation. More importantly, the road from coincidence to correlation is a long one. If the aim is to discover more about how the world apparently works and codify it, then repeating an experiment is the only way to discount confirmation bias and the like, and avoid the temptation to attribute every change to a previous act. Replicate the results!

Q2: An excellent point. (act neutral, pay a fake compliment, cliche and generic) Causation is an aspect of a particular description, and not of any set of observations. It is an interpretation. (release the horse dung and sprinkle some buzzwords on top!
You should be a politician. Maybe write for Donald Trump. You'd kill it. You'd have to teach him your godlike redirection skills, though.

Well, you made a decent point but, since it was a bit of of buzzword phrasing which might not mean a lot out of context - i.e. causality in the sense of physics or philosophy or common use? - I thought I'd add some. It matters whether we are treating "cause" as in the sense of an inherent relation, or part of an explanation:

In physics it is helpful to interpret certain terms of a physical theory as causes and other terms as effects... For different physical theories the notions of cause and effect may be different... So what constitutes a "cause" and what constitutes an "effect" depends on the total system of explanation in which the putative causal sequence is embedded.
-- Wikipedia: Causality (physics)

As for the rest, not everyone spends their time viewing things in terms of a battle or political argument, you know. Some people are just interested in exploring ideas with other curious people (minus the snark).

Is it possible to get someone banned from a subreddit? This fellow (AthleticsTix) has been quite the nuisance recently.

Apart from this little exchange, his participation has recently been limited to the two threads he began: recently here [POST: How many of you know that this is just a metaphor and not a substitute for Science-based medicine and counseling? If anyone tries to sell you anything, don't buy it. It is a scam.], originally here [POST: Do you need to drink all the water to jump?]. And those threads are now closed, as far as I'm concerned. I felt I should at least see those discussions through, just to allow a contrary - even antagonistic - position to play out, and allow people to make their own judgements.

Q3: It isn't dissent or a differing of opinion that I mind, but the antagonism is a bit jarring, you know? There's a bunch of people exchanging and comparing ideas, discussing how they're different and similar and encouraging each other to experiment, and then there's one asshole just standing around shouting that all the rest are idiots, you know? Basically I generally view this sub as a library, where people are free to exchange ideas in peace, and this guy is the guy who's being loud and distracting everyone.

Yeah, I completely agree. Differing views are (more than) fine, that's part of sharing our insights; fighting to "win" without actually contributing, is not. People who do that and get reported end up on the spam list for pre-approval. I let that one run a bit in his own thread because he'd done a cross post to /r/skeptic, and it gave folk an opportunity to voice their own "meta" view on the subreddit, if desired. Normally the mods wouldn't let that stuff run.

POST: What is the difference between /r/Oneirosophy and /r/DimensionalJumping?

Firstly, I'd suggest that the premise is probably better phrased as something like: "a mind takes on the shape of reality", since it is not necessarily a personal mind or a personal reality. It is the experiential content that is of being-a-person; the nature of experiencing is itself not necessarily personal. But with that little bit of pedantry behind us...

We might vaguely define them as:

  • /r/oneirosophy is broadly focused on having quite involved philosophical discussions about the nature of experience, morals and ethics, and so on, all rooted in the perspective of subjective idealism.
  • /r/dimensionaljumping is narrowly focused on the practical exploration of direct experience, employing specific metaphors and exercises, and not necessarily requiring idealism as such, subjective or otherwise.

Loosely, the shift of this subreddit from mirror fun to something more developed is based on the metaphor of "patterning" as partly outlined in this post from /r/oneirosophy [The Patterning of Experience], which is linked in the intro post here. Although an important part of this is: exploring direct experience should not require the adoption of any particular metaphor, hence the demo exercise descriptions are fairly devoid of background explanation. Experiences are primary; explanations are secondary.

...

It's all witchcraft!

What? To the ducking stool with /u/ManipulativeMinds! Or to the wicker man! (And it'll be the remake, too; there is no mercy here.)

POST: Is dimensional jumping and "manifesting" using the law of attraction the same thing?

Well, the same fundamental "truth" underlies all of experience, even everyday boring grocery shopping, so everything is of course kinda of the "same thing" in a way. So yes, definitely. The "dimensional jumping" concept of this subreddit is (see sidebar) one of several metaphors for creating change in your experience. You are not literally changing dimensions - as in, switching to other "places" - you are really changing your own state. The difference between here and things like LoA is that here this is done knowingly, you pick your metaphor. But that's just because it includes a certain philosophical angle, which arises from asking the question: how, exactly, does intention and thought relate to experience?

But in the end it's a case of whatever works for you. Many people prefer to continue to view the world the same way (as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time") and think of things are being "attracted" to them, and not think too deeply about what that actually means. Because what it potentially means is, the world isn't really a "place" at all and you are not really a "person". That's not somewhere that everyone wants to go. Having a clear model, though, does give you a definite structure to work within, beyond just trying to "raise your vibration" and so on. And the structure you select also formats your experience simply by its adoption, meaning you both create the path and identify the means of traversing it, simultaneously.

Related: The Patterning of Experience

Copy-pasting a previous comment which provides context -

Yeah, the sub's naming is a historical accident really, as reflected in the intro post. Initially it wasn't really "about" what it's become about - that is, having fun exploring the nature of experience for curiosity and utility - and although it's a quirky and provocative name, it does make the initial impression misleading for the casual reader (or the skeptic who isn't a skeptic and is looking for a fight). But on the other hand perhaps a strong and engaging image gets people thinking in a way that a more dry or abstract presentation would not. At its core, we're talking about the ultimate skepticism: identify exactly what you are sure of, treat that and only that as fundamentally true, and absolutely everything else as only relatively true. And what you are certain of is one thing, although it is more easily stated in two parts:

  1. That you exist (you are aware).
  2. That you are having an experience (you are aware of content).

Anything beyond that is about the content of experience, and is up for grabs, and we treat all descriptions of that as provisional, as a convenient or useful or interesting or fun fiction only. (Note - It is useful to assert a basic level of form to experience though, and say that by default we are an "open aware perceptual space" in which experiences arise, or which "takes on the shape of" experiences. This gives us a ground or reference point for discussion and exploration.)

For instance, take the assumption that "the world" is of the same format as our experience. Although our experiences may arise in the form of a 3D-formatted spatial scene, that doesn't mean "the world" is of that format, that it is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Unfortunately though, our thoughts are also formatted in this way (they are experiences too) so it's not really possible to think beyond this. However, we can certainly take the most generalised version of structure - we can talk of "the patterning of experience" - and, bearing this in mind, at least avoid committing to conceptual frameworks and forgetting that they are "connective fictions" only. The working model for this is to provisionally treat the world as a dimensionless "infinite gloop" from which experiences are selected, in a manner perhaps comparable to scanning our attention around a 3-dimensional room. Our investigations, then, might be said to be about exploring the nature of the "selection mechanism" and its limits. Those limits, that basic and unalterable formatting, would, if reached, be the structure of the "underlying substrate" of experience, effectively a combination of the structuring of "mind" and "world" (one can't separate the two out). However, if no such limit was reached, then we would have to infer that there is no fixed underlying substate, and the patterning of experience is just that: accumulated habitual patterns which are subject to change. Of course, we could never make a final conclusion here. But that's okay, because this is really about freedom of thought and being skeptical of all narrative structures, based on (looping back round here) the recognition of the difference between fundamental and relative truth.

POST: Dimension jumping from one location, waking up in another

It makes for a nice thought experiment anyway. If what you truly are is something like an "imagination room", then what's the difference between changing your experience from being-sat-on-a-chair to being-stood-up, and changing it from being-in-London to being-in-New-York? In the example in the thread, it's not just that he would have teleported away from jail though. It's more that the world shifted such that the jail events never happened at all. Apparent history fell into line with his new state. But if all you are ever doing is in effect "updating the sensory image that is within my perceptual space", and if there's no "real world" beyond this, it seems not such a massive leap. Changing direction as I walk along the street, and changing the direction of the street as a I walk, are the same: you are overcoming a habit of perception, rather than changing a solid independent place.

Q1: This is the type of mega jump that I'm going for. I've been visualizing specific realities that I want to see happen for a few months now, and recently, I've begun programming my subconscious mind with these visualizations (and some affirmations) while in the alpha and theta states. I learned this from Harry W. Carpenter in his book, The Genie Within: Your Subconscious Mind--How It Works and How to Use It. My goal is to jump into my visualization, where the world shifted so that my visualization IS my reality and no longer just a dream, if that makes any sense at all. Thanks for the link to the matrix sub reddit; I'm going to check that out.

Okay, so - have you been lucid dreaming yet? If not, then I'd suggest that's where to start (read the excellent Robert Waggoner book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, if you need background and inspiration) and experiment with "persistent realms". There's also a related subreddit: /r/LucidDreaming. Basically what you are after here is a direct-entry lucid dream. You might also play with softening up your perception in general: Overwriting Yourself. There's a more general daily exercise which you can dig out too. In fact, I'll just paste it here for general reference:

Daily Releasing Exercise

  • Every day, for 10 minutes, lie down on the floor in the constructive rest position: feet flat, knees up, hands resting on abdomen, a couple of books under the head so that it feels supported. Lie down in this position and give up, play dead. Give yourself to gravity, the universe, whatever. Let go of your body, your mind and - particularly - let go of controlling your attention.
  • Allow your body and mind and attentional focus to shift and move however they want. And if you happen to notice yourself "holding on" again, gripping anything, just let go once more.
  • Now, sometimes you might find that your attention narrows on a particular sensation, which then intensifies, peaks, then releases, after which your attention opens out again. That is fine. Just let that happen. Let anything happen, for those 10 minutes.

The idea is that over time you'll have an open and self-supporting rest state, and you won't continually "thrash your world" by intending change all the time during the course of your day.

TG, you are amazing with the resources. Thanks a ton! How long have you been studying this stuff? You seem to have an answer for everything, lol.

The wider thing, quite a while. I kinda ramped it up for the last year though, bringing things together, trying to nail the descriptions fully.

No, I haven't started lucid dreaming yet, but it's been a goal of mine for awhile. I'll start with your recommendation. Eventually, I want to get to a point where I can simply command my subconscious mind to lucid dream before I fall asleep at night.

Well, that's pretty much how it will play out. You'll mess around with techniques, perhaps, but then you'll realise that, as with the rest of this stuff, there's no real way to do anything. It comes down to firmly deciding. So I suggest: just immerse yourself in reading about it and contemplating it from the perspective of being a lucid dreamer (rather than thinking about "how will I become a lucid dreamer?"), and take it from there.

Q1: Definitely. The more I learn about this stuff, the more I realize that all roads lead to awareness, and it's just finding out which road(s) you prefer to cruise on. I really like the idea of just deciding. I strongly believe in my own abilities, and firmly deciding that something will happen because I've declared it so is exhilarating. On the downside, this mindset may inflate my ego to epic proportions, but that's a chance I'm willing to take. :-)
On a side note, one of the reasons I believe these concepts are possible is because I've watched a lot of NDE videos and read their testimonials, and many of these folks have talked about effortlessly teleporting themselves and instantly manifesting thoughts into things while they were out-of-the-body. So I always thought, if we can perform these feats on the spiritual plane, why not on the earthly one?

Well, there's nothing wrong with little bit of ego! Although actually: the key to "just deciding" is to cease interfering with the sensory experience that are arising in your awareness, since to interfere is to re-intend against what you have decided. If you like NDE testimonial stuff, you might be interested in the NDERF site which collects these. Not all of them are strictly what people tend to think of as NDEs, and those ones tend to be the more interesting. For example: this one. One way to think about it: no matter what happens, there's just... more dream. There are two aspects: the fundamental nature of experiencing, and the content of experiencing. You never go anywhere or are anything, not really; rather you just have experiences "as if" things were true. This means that there are no paths to understanding, in the sense that the path doesn't really cause or lead to understanding... it's just a sequence of experience you happen to have, prior to understanding (which is itself not a particular experience, but rather is the recognition of what all experiences are). Actually, the true concept of this subreddit (now anyway) is that. It is about exploring what can be done, and in the process becoming clearer about how things are.

...

To be clearer: "reality" is just a concept, there is only experiencing. Those look interesting too - thanks. Just from a quick glance, I notice a reference to Robert Monroe in the first one, which reminds me that you might find Donald DeGracia's free DO_OBE guide worth a look too (although I don't really agree with some of his perspectives). On the "open perceptual space" thing, remember that it is you that is the open space, and being-a-person-on-a-planet is just experiential content appearing within it. To emphasise: you are not a person in an open space, you are an open space having an experiencing-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person shaped experience. You are like a blanket of material that "takes on the shape of" a particular set of facts, adopts a particular state, and experiences itself as a particular set of sensory impressions in correspondence with those facts, or state. (Hence the imagination room metaphor, which should actually be taken almost literally.)

I've also heard it phrased as "We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Well in truth, there is no definite way to express it, because it is "before" words. So what we typically end up doing is exchanging a few different versions of a definition, to make sure we're talking about the same thing - just like this! We're really talking about being something that has no innate form, but which takes on the form of any experience. Not an easy thing to choose a name for!

Can you imagine the magnitude of scientific discoveries that would exist if these beliefs were mainstream? Hmm...maybe I should lucid dream myself into a world where everyone is more aware to see how that plays out...

Do you see the irony?? Fun, this.

You mean the idea of using metaphysical, "unproven" concepts to further advance science? Ha. If that's what you meant, I didn't see the irony...until you pointed it out. :-)

Indeed! :-)

So your plan is: To create a world where people are making amazing "scientific discoveries"... by believing in them. It's a bit like being in a dream and deciding to dream about building a factory, then dream about hiring some people, and dream about doing the accounts and getting the tax sorted - all so that you can then dream that the factory makes nice dream objects which you want to exist in your dream. Rather than, y'know, just dreaming the objects into existence directly.

I actually think the hardline view of "if it can't be studied by the scientific method then it's not real" is relatively recent, having begun post-WW2 and ramped up since the 1970s. Popular science magazines - not to mention funding applications - tend to misrepresent what science is. Prior to WW2, the major physicists, the groundbreaking ones, recognised what they were actually doing. That is, not discovering how things were, but developing descriptions for a certain subset of subjective experience. For example, Neils Bohr:

"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."

Nowadays, people tend to look upon the other activities of those scientists, and before them, the likes of Newton, and think that they "lost it" later in their career, or just ignore the fact that many of them were engaged in metaphysical explorations at the same time as their scientific work. These scientists were more like "natural philosophers", exploring the experience while recognising mystery. They knew they weren't really explaining "how things really are", rather they were cataloguing and describing repeatable observations. They didn't not mistake their abstractions for an underlying reality. See: N David Mermin's What's bad about this habit

So, looping back: yes indeed, we need to return to a place where people trust their own subjective experience, because really there is no other thing. There is no objective world, that's just a conceptual container into which we have put a subset of the possible experiences we can have. We need to remember:

  • Observations define the possible models.
  • Models do not define the possible observations.

Although as we discuss sometimes in this subreddit, models or metaphors can act as a "patterning" over your experience - but understanding that already requires a certain openness to these points.

Q3: Basically what you are after here is a direct-entry lucid dream.
But a WILD is still a dream, right? Eventually, I'd have to wake up. My goal is to achieve what the dude in the thread accomplished, but to intentionally, and permanently, step into a new reality, where the external world shifted around this reality.

What I am suggesting: you enter a lucid dream and never come back. Consider, perhaps: what is the difference between lucid dream and waking life? Isn't it just that you wake up? This makes more sense once you've actually had lucid dreams. Also: You have never experienced an "external world". That's just an idea you have about the nature of experience. Everything you ever experience, including thoughts about an external world, arises within the "open aware perceptual space" that you actually are (this is easy to realise after a moment's pause to examine - note: examine, not think about - your experience right now).

Basically. I mean, you are always "dreaming" in the sense that you are experiencing sensory shapes arising in your awareness, with no "outside" to that awareness. The only reason you differentiate between waking and sleeping, just as your differentiate between internal and external, is because you've ended up with a particular idea about it, which does not really hold up to examination. Specifically, you only think this is the default experience because you have likely conceived of things in terms of hierarchies and levels, and because you can't remember anything before this sequence of content.

POST: Is there a negative side to dimension jumping?

Well, only in the sense that there's a negative side to making any decision, since you can't have a change in your life without there being some changes. You'd perhaps be better phrasing the question as: "Will there be collateral changes as a result of this?" - and the answer is of course: "yes". If the world is a single pattern, like a blanket of material, then you can't pull on one of the folds to reshape it without tugging on the other folds, even if just slightly. However, such "collateral shifts" are neither good nor bad. In fact, though they are caused by your change, they may not be logically connected to the decision you make. You get a promotion, and an extra tin of peaches appears in your mother's kitchen cupboard. In general, though, you might find it comforting to have a side intention when you do an exercise - something along the lines of "for the good of everyone" or something similar. That way, you are making explicit that, for example, you don't want to get the promotion due to your boss being attacked by an escaped lion in his apartment complex, but rather that he'll leave his job to become a lion tamer, the fulfilment of a childhood dream.

POST: Help me understand

Some thoughts -

I attributed a lot of their experiences to drug use

That's probably a little insulting, since there's no reference to drug use in the vast majority of posts. However, it's obviously a possibility to consider when reading unusual reports.

EDIT: We should also note that not all reports are necessarily of the same type. For example, one shouldn't conflate discussion about the header number with the larger topic of experiential change. Also, if people don't take the time to read the sidebar and the sticky posts, they'll probably get the wrong idea about things. This happens quite often.

Confirmation bias perhaps?

As always, the only way to counter this is to perform repeated experiments, as with any area related to personal experience and without an observable sequence of events. And the more specific someone is about an outcome, the less likely that broadly related experiences are going to be interpreted as "results". It's not really a case of "positive thinking vs sitting on your ass" for a gold medal though, since this isn't an exploration of positive thinking, you probably do sit on your ass afterwards, and the recommended type of situation to experiment with is one that isn't directly under your influence.

Can you say with certainty you're experiencing something different than my thought process of the situation?

Your thought process seems to amount to "drugs or memory or confirmation bias", which isn't much of a theory, more a list of categories. I guess we'd really need to take particular cases and show how exactly those potential explanations account for an experience. You'd probably need to say what you think "dimensional jumping" actually is - not its mechanism, just what it is proposed to be - so that you and they were operating from the same concept. For instance, the concept does not involve literally teleporting from one place to another. The general concept is that it's a shift of state, but again that's just a way of thinking about it. There is no "how it works" really. That's why it's fun to play with. It should be noted that the spirit of the subreddit is one of exploring the nature of your experience, and drawing your own conclusions. This isn't something to "believe in", it's an exploration of the level of flexibility of our ongoing experience, and how explanatory frameworks relate to that - be they physical, psychological, metaphysical, whatever.

It's surprisingly easy to trick your brain into experiencing things such as outer body experiences, events that didn't occur, etc.

That is the equivalent of saying "maybe you are just imagining things". We could apply that to absolutely everything you've ever experienced and any claims you have to being conscious, for example. Again, repeated experiments would be the answer. If you could (for example) "trick your brain" into experiencing something reliably, and the rest of the world stayed consistent with the trick - in what sense would it be a trick?

Again, general statements like this aren't explanations, they're a bit meaningless without context.

Correct me if I'm wrong but based on my understanding of this theory reality is merely my illusion.

I'm not sure that it does. Broadly speaking, the subreddit encourages exploring the nature of experiencing to see whether it is consistent with your assumptions. If your assumptions about that turn out to have been incorrect, does that make "reality" an illusion? Or does it just mean you were thinking about it wrong? (More later.)

It's important to not confuse your ideas about the world with the world itself. Although for convenience we tend to assume our explanations and description to be the world, they are just parallel constructions in thought. They are not barriers to what can be experienced, nor do they really tell you what it is you experienced. They just provide a way of thinking about it, based on a catalogue of a particular subset of experiences to date.

Do you exist or did I create you? If not, then why does this subreddit exist if I don't believe in it?

What do we mean by "exist"? And aren't we making the assumption that if reality is an illusion, or a private subjective affair, that it necessarily means deliberate creation of things by conscious decision-making - rather than, say, triggering by logical implication?

And I suppose, what do we mean by "reality"? Do we mean "all that is"? Then it's pretty meaningless. Do you instead mean that the experience of the world as "a spatially-extended place unfolding in time" is an illusion? Well, in the sense that the world might not be "stored" in that form - that the format of our sensory experience isn't necessarily the format of the world - I suppose that's true.

Anyway - Interesting points to raise! Fundamentally though, none of it much matters, in the sense that one actually has to do some experiments and satisfy oneself whether there is "something going on" or not - directly. People could offer another logical scheme to think from (for instance, one based around philosophical idealism), but that wouldn't really confirm anything. It doesn't much matter whether it makes logical sense in advance or not - because the world is not made from explanations. This means that nobody can prove anything to you. Which does mean taking a bit of a leap, since if something doesn't seem possible or even desirable, why bother? It's up to the individual to decide if they care enough.

I was simply stating from a statistical standpoint that the majority of users I tend to view post in psychedelic subreddits.

That is an interesting correlation (I didn't realise you were referring to post histories outside this sub). I'd tend to view it as showing that people interested in "the nature of things" probably end up exploring, reading about if not participating in, similar topics. For example, /r/psychonaut often has lots of thought-provoking posts where people ponder their experiences (although personally I've never dabbled in psychoactive substances). What's important here, though, is that the experiences do not occur while under the influence of drugs. In terms of the experiments people have tried out here, it's very much recommended to have a clear mind, unencumbered by anything. Drugs probably wouldn't explain any results, though, which tend to be in the form of subsequent events or changes, unless we're talking about heavy use affecting people's perceptions more generally on an ongoing basis.

I'm not trying to be some judgmental prick.

Well, sometimes that can be fun too, of course...

I really don't understand the bit about the gold medal. I'm referencing the overwhelming amount of positive feedback in this subreddit and why I figure that occurs. What isn't an exploration of positive thinking?

Well, "positive thinking" has a particular meaning to most people, which doesn't correspond to what this (dimensional jumping) is supposed to be about. Of course, positive thinking may indeed make you more inclined to interpret fortuitous changes as being due to "jumping", or more inclined to take action.

Now, did I receive the job because I shifted realities or would I still have been hired if I didn't file the application?

And, indeed, would you have got the gold medal if you didn't do all that training? That's why the race and the job application are not necessarily the best examples, since you are apparently influencing results by direct action anyway. The way to explore this is to generate results that are not directly under your influence, and do so repeatedly.

The drugs were an observation to posting history, flawed memory was an example to the mandela effect and confirmation bias was in relation to positive feedback.

Okay, that makes more sense! It wasn't so clear in your original post. I'm not sure that it gets us anywhere, though? It's probably a good list of things to be cautious about, I guess. Again, it's really only by repeatedly performing personal experiments that one can establish whether there is "something going on" or not - whether the experiences you are having push against the boundaries of what seems reasonable with in the usual "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" model.

In absolutely every sense. There's always a right and a wrong regardless of if we're aware of it or not.

Hmm. I don't think that's the case. We might assert that there is a right or wrong - a specific "how things are" out there - but really it's an assumption, which is perhaps based on conflating the structure our narrative constructions with the whatever-it-is that those narrative constructions are "about". Which leads us to...

I'm applying my logic to the general consensus of dimensional shifting according to this subreddit.

I'm not sure there is a general consensus? One of the ideas here is that there is perhaps no solid underlying substrate to experience, no necessarily fixed "how things work", no specific mechanism behind it all - only experiences and different ways of thinking about experiences. Fundamentally, I suppose there's the experience of "something I wanted to happen or be true, happened or become true". I'd suggest there is no "true" explanation for that experience.

Since my logic obviously can't fit in my world...

Probably a good place to start for this, would be to separate out two things:

  • The Nature of Experience: I'm going to suggest that your actual experience in this moment, is like being an "open aware perceptual space" in which your sensory experiences arise - sensations, perceptions, thoughts - and from which they are apparently made. This "direct" truth and is available at all times.
  • The Content of Experience: This is the set of experiences that arise within your aware space. Right now, your experience is one of being-a-person-in-a-world. All your thoughts "about" the world also appear within your awareness. Such thoughts are parallel constructions which attempt to capture certain aspects of experiential content. We never actually experience a "behind" the content, except in the sense that we recognise that it is all within and made from that aware space. "Explanations" are experiences at the same level as every other experience.

Having done that, and having confirmed this to be true by directly attending to experience, we are better placed to think about: "dimensional jumping", the possibility of certain experiences, and the best way to think of our descriptions about those experiences. Thanks for posting a good discussion-starter!

POST: I have no glass cups only Plastic!

It's not the glass as such, it's the transparency of the receptacle (so that you can see the water and see what you are doing with it). If you make labels and place them beside the locations of the cups, that will do. So long as you finish up the exercise as per the instructions, it doesn't matter what happens with the cups afterwards.

Considering how many practical questions people have about the TG method, I think you should have an edit with FAQs to the original post.

Well... really it's an exercise, not a method. Which sounds pedantic, but it's not really meant to be a tool, even though it can be used that way and getting results is part of the fun. It's meant to trigger an inquiry and a bit of contemplation, be a starting point for discussion. Pondering the mechanism after getting results (or not!) is the real purpose - and of course, there is no specific mechanism as such, to that exercise or anything else. To work through that exercise is to work through the "nature of experiencing" itself. At some point there will be a "part two", to continue the discussion. For now, though, I think it's playing out reasonably well just as it is - people are following the line of thought, suggesting their own exercises and even imagination objects, etc.

Thanks a lot, man. Will keep watching. I have yet to do the exercise. So many things to try it with. Funny thing is I am so excited of it working that I am scared to try!!

Yeah, it's weird, there's a sort of satisfaction or anticipation in the idea of these things, that sometimes makes it sort of daunting to actually do any experiments! But, that's how it becomes a thing - and overthinking stuff and making it too important probably works against progress, so get to it! :-)

POST: Problem with two glasses method.

Yes, you really have to follow the last instruction ("carry on with your life"). It's okay to have passing thoughts; just let them pass. You don't need to do anything with them, they are just random spasms in imagination, let them be and return to whatever you are doing. You don't need to deal with the thoughts. If you need something to do here, then I suggest that when you find you are narrowed down upon a thought and realise this, "release your hold" upon attention and become aware of the background space of the room. You should also do a daily releasing exercise, like the passive version of "overwriting yourself". Just 10 minutes every day, lying on the floor and giving up to gravity and "playing dead" - ceasing to hold onto your body, mind, and your attentional focus, and "being okay with whatever happens" - will work wonders.

Thanks for the response. So I basically perform the experiment, and any time I have trouble with my thoughts I should realize I need to release them and play dead every day in terms of overwriting, is that correct?

Yep, that's the way. Just as a general life thing, it is good to realise that thoughts are just passing sensory twitches from your current state; they don't need to be worked out or solved. If you have some persistent stuff, then the daily releasing will take care of it: typically, you'll find your attention drawn towards an area, a thought or sensation will increase in intensity, then it'll peak and dissolve into the background. During releasing, if you find you are "holding onto" your attention manually, you simply let go of controlling it again. Another idea you might find useful: when you do something, physically or mentally, you do not need to narrow your attention to accomplish it - you don't need to "concentrate". Instead, allow your attentional focus to stay open and to shift however it deems appropriate, and simply intend the thing you want to do. For instance: reading these words, sit back and relax, and instead of "using your eyes" or body or mind to do so, "just decide" to read the message and let it happen by itself. You don't need to "do" it, you can just sit back and let the experience come to you.

Alright, before I attempt this again, should I try for smaller shifts? (I updated my initial post so not sure if it was seen)

Yeah, I mean, why not experiment a bit? Do some stuff for fun that doesn't really matter. Then come back to larger things after having let go of them for a while. And who knows...

The demo exercises, while also valid tools, are really designed to show you that "something is going on" without putting any effort - and then "big things have small beginnings". Although it's probably inevitable, and there's no limitation (in terms of plausible but apparently very unlikely things happening), it's not ideal that people tend to have their first ever experiment be something that really, really matters.

How about in the context of getting back together, would you recommend something like acquaintances => friends => back together?

When you return to that, then it's fine to go directly, but you have to be able to let it go and let it come to you. However, if you want to do it in stages, if that's what you feel more comfortable with, that's okay. Again though, you have to let it come to you - trust that the change happens literally at the point you complete the exercise, and it's just a matter of you encountering the pre-created events that have been put in place as a result of it.

Okay, thanks for all the replies. I'm going to try in the next couple of minutes for an experience not as important. I suppose not focusing on my big problems right away will help me let them go.

Sounds good. Remember: let the results come to you; after the exercise, there's nothing more for you to do. (Hmm. Accidental cheesy rhyming. Jumping by Dr Seuss!)

The idea mentioned in the second and third paragraphs are same as 'Just Decide' post. You're the first guy I've come across, in my short experience, mentioning this mentality. Could you share the story of how you developed this?

Yes. The Just Decide post is sort of a "call to arms" for this approach, although it usually doesn't make much sense on its own to people without a bit of expansion in context, as in the comment above.

Some background - So, the underlying (non-)observation is that you can't really experience yourself intending as such, and think that this comes about because: a) only a particular slice of your state is unpacked into the senses at any one time, b) most of your state isn't sensory anyway, although aspects of it are. We tend to assume that what is sensory is what there is and all there is, but actually the whole state is here, now, "dissolved" into the background and accessible. Given that what we want to happen is shift our state from one configuration to another, and that state is us, then all that's required is to declare the new state, to "think unboundedly" of the outcome. Messing around by intending sensory aspects - e.g. trying to stand by summoning a state of muscle tension - is a waste of time. Such things generate an experience of effort; without them, there is no effort, simply the decision. Which leads us to the origin of it, which is relatively mundane: The realisation that you can direct your body effortlessly, and not experience yourself "doing" or "directing" at all, although you "know" you are doing so. This is touched upon in many bodywork approaches, such as the Alexander Technique, but it never really gets pinned down, since they focus on the sensory aspect, still trying to have a "causal source" in the content of experience. And that's because it doesn't make sense without the perspective of seeing yourself as an "open aware perceptual space" in which and of which experiences arise, and which is "patterned" as your world. Once you've done that, though, you can see the generality of the principle, and expand it to other things. Provided you aren't after an experience which involves world-rule-breaking, are happy for "still plausible if very unlikely circumstances" to be the route of your outcome, then "just decide" is all that's required. (Obviously, the more you work on adopting the perspective of an "open space", the more the definition of "plausible" is likely to soften.)

Summary - "Just Decide" comes from the idea that all intention is about a state change, that the entire state is always available right now, and that the aspect of the state you are changing is not necessarily in the senses. Since effort is a sensory experience, intention shouldn't be effortful unless you are intending tension. One can simply "just decide". Furthermore, from the perspective of being an "open aware perceptual space" in a particular state, there is no difference between pausing and intending an end-state of "my arm is raised in the air", and intending an end-state of "I am talking to my long-lost brother after 20 years".

POST: You can only go so far

Good topic. For me, this is why outsourcing causal power to objects (physical or imagined) is useful, since it doesn't involve de-patterning yourself so much, and you don't have to deal with the fact that everything arises in the mind as one undivided experience. You can still pretend there's a world "out there" and that somehow you magicked up some coincidences. (Although the point of things like the two glasses exercise is really to get you to ponder the nature of things, more than get results.)

I'd say that people don't really want to have their world become undivided and super-responsive to their intentions, until they have got into the habit of "ceasing". That is, allowing the ongoing moment to unfold without reacting against it (and therefore constantly re-intending), and instead settling into the idea of intending as "course correction" rather than micromanaging. Meditation or just a daily releasing exercise is a good idea for getting to a "rest state" from which you're not constantly feeling as though a movement is trying to happen to rebalancing things. To most, such movements feel like being "out of control", even though it's in fact an example of how control actually works (you intend something, the whole world moves towards that outcome as if happening to you "by itself"). Basically, we're talking about "surrender", but...

I'm not a big fan of the "higher self" concept sometimes, because I think it implies to people that you are a sort of small intelligence inside a larger intelligence, and that you are literally trying to communicate with something outside of yourself. I think it's probably more helpful to think of it like you-as-experiencer have got your attention narrowed onto a small part of the "landscape" of the world-pattern. Viewed this way, we've got an idea of what to "do". We can also see more clearly how this leads to resistance to movements arising from the larger pattern, and hence "intentional thrashing" - reacting to every thought and experience instead of letting things follow through. But however we conceive of it, there's nothing really to be "done" here; it's a non-doing, a "ceasing" as mentioned earlier. The way to widen and dissolve one's attentional focus is simply to stop controlling one's attention - with the intention of letting it open out. Get "meta" with your intentions, really? And have some faith.

Extra - The intro post has a link to this interview [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U] with clinical psychologist Kirby Surprise (yeah), who did some research into synchronicity with his patients. It's got some great examples of how people can go a bit off the rails when their experience gets highly "patterned" without understanding what is going on.

Do you think they can stabilize by ceasing to be concerned with the external repatterning...

Yes. The sense in which you surrender is to cease to react to the content of experience, and therefore stop intensifying that particular pattern by narrowing your attention on it, because that amounts to implicitly intending its persistence. "Ceasing" in this way naturally lets things settle out. Lack of stability tends to correspond to lack of control of attentional focus, I'd suggest. Or tight attention and the attempt to control (same thing). You become swept along by the content, having lost awareness of the context, leaving you with no reference point. Ideally you'd let your attention settle out and switch your context to the "background space in which experiences arise", but failing that even just maintaining one region in awareness at all times - e.g. the lower abdomen or any other central-line spot - can provide you with a stable platform. That would be the emergency situation solution, definitely. I do think that even just being aware of what is actually happening can be sufficient to regain perspective. Knowing that you are not receiving messages from outside (leaving aside the whole idea of an "outside" for a moment), and that patterning is a normal thing, can be enough to make you realise that you are not going mad, and that the content of experience should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Experiential content should be treated as being "as if" something is true, rather than "because" something is true. People can spend years of their life wondering about these things, "discovering" new explanations and patterns in "the world", not realising that the act of looking for something implicitly triggers the experience of seeing it. And then not realising that maybe you can leverage that (once you've stopped chatting to Thor or whoever).

POST: I haven't visited this sub in a while...

What's up with these owls what's the story behind them?

Q1: Basically, you start noticing something (in this case owls) that you normally do not pay attention to, and you start seeing them everywhere (which owls are, so this is why that is easy). It is kind of like asking yourself "Hmmm, how come there aren't that many yellow cars?" Or "Have you ever seen a tall guy in a trench coat like in the movies?" And then you start being hyper-aware of these things, which makes it seem as though you are creating their existence just by being mindful of their presence. They always exist, but you are now seeing them more often- creating a false correlation between your taking notice of things and their perceived increased frequency. Blah blah blah, psychology blah blah.

Do they always exist? And if so, in what sense do they always exist, outside of their presence in sensory experience?

Q1: "I think therefore I am" can be generalized to "I see what is therefore it exists." In a purely egocentric universe where our own terms are the only force driving its existence, then it would be a valud question to consider if things really do exist even we are not perceiving that existance. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, did it make a noise? Yes. Our universe is self-sustaining. It does not require the mental effort of its inhabitants to uphold its laws and existence. If the universe were to become unstable, it is not caused by any flaw a being could have caused. Things exist whether or not we think of them or percieve them in any manner. If I am correct in thinking that we, as sentient beings, are all parts of a larger whole, then it is untrue that you or I could ever not be perceiving all that exists in time and space. Because we are one in the same. All that exists effects itself, like ripples in water.

I'd probably interpret "I think therefore I am" to mean something more like "the fact that I am aware of thought means that I am aware and therefore I conclude that I exist as that-which-is-aware". With that, I'm trying to get away from the notion that "seeing" (having an "unpacked" sensory experience) should be taken to be equivalent to "existing". Further thoughts -

It does not require the mental effort of its inhabitants to uphold its laws and existence.

Why should it require effort? Once a pattern is fully established, that pattern remains (or at least, it fades very slowly). While the "fact" of the tree falling at a particular time may be "true" even if someone doesn't experience it, I'd still suggest that it doesn't "happen" unless someone experiences it. So it doesn't really make a noise unless the moment of "hearing" has been attended to. Are you not perhaps equating perceiving or thinking something, with it being experiences in the format of the senses? Could it not be the case that something can be held in mind - "dissolved into the background" as it were - without it being actually seen or thought?

Q2: Basically this It's the easiest way to manifest the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon since owls are such a pervasive design feature thanks to rampant hipsterism. Owls are everywhere these days. I'd bet that just a casual stroll through Urban Outfitters would turn up owl t-shirts, notebooks, pencil sharpeners, sheet sets and maybe curtains if you're lucky. The owl seems to be a popular tattoo as well these days. I personally think the owl thing is useless, I'd be more impressed if it were something like a Dodo bird, for example.

So... people can choose something else, right? Clearly, owls are just a suggestion. The general concept and exploring the responsiveness of our experience is what's interesting to play with. We should pick something unusual, to challenge it, and repeat it with different things, to confirm it, and select something we'd like to experience, since that is the way to leverage it if it is a reliable effect. (Owls weren't particularly prevalent when the original example was made. And, well, not everyone lives in a country where Urban Outfitters and the like are dominant.)

One might then ponder how, exactly, the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" works - beyond it simply being a name for a particular pattern being more prevalent in one's experience (rather than a model or an explanation for pattern dominance).

POST: Tried the mirror method yesterday, starting to see signs?

[Zen vs greedy jumping]

Or, I suppose: why not both?

The larger picture is, that the things people do here are one approach to exploring "the nature of experience". Now for sure, many are just about getting a particular result, but the fact of getting that result, the manner in which it arises, can lead us to ask interesting questions. Similarly, there is not necessarily anything inherently beneficial in "connecting with the land" - other than it tends to shift your attention towards the main stand of experience (rather than thinking-about it in a whirlwind of endless attempts at problem-solving) and this may lead us to notice something about our actual experience vs what we tend to assume it is. Mirror rituals do potentially lead us to interrogate our identity - what is the reflection a reflection of? what is it inside? Even more than that, though, the ceasing of "holding on" to the identity pattern that results can give us a far more direct experience of how we are structured relative to the world. We get "desired" results and a shift in the perspective of our desire, as part of the same package.

I should probably begin by emphasising that I don't personally like the mirror ritual approach - however, it was the starting point for this subreddit, which predates my own participation here, and some people apparently find it useful. If someone is into "paths" then it can be one path like any other though, and fair enough, I suppose.

However, within the context of the conversation that led me onto this forum...

Ah. Obviously I am missing the context of your larger conversation, prior to the one that began here, but: I'm not sure how "connecting with the land" and "billions of dead people" necessarily leads to Zen understanding in terms of the eventual insight as to the nature of self and the context of experience? For sure, attending to the content of experience can lead to this, because it highlights the patterning of the world more generally, the "happening by itself" aspect to things, which can culminate in us reconsidering what we are and or relationship to the world. But it is still 'just' more content - don't you agree?

At the minimum when you are in a culture with a shamanic history, land connections are foundational to your entire understanding of how the techniques work.

The lesson we learn about "how the techniques work" is that essentially there is no "how it works" when it comes to the techniques, I'd suggest?

pretending that there aren't thousands of years of people who have done this kind of thing is foolish.

I guess there are a couple of perspectives we might have on that. In one sense, there really aren't thousands of years of people. However, regardless, the lessons of the past are only lessons if we pursue our own investigations. The surface lesson often isn't what is being pointed to, and when we interpret them literally we often miss the value. If we don't, we're just indulging in storytelling - making up parallel constructions in thought, "castles in the sky" which aren't necessarily linked to direct experience. Which is where "connecting with the land" can come in handy. (I am sharing musings with myself there more than anything else!)

you're taking out land from the equation but as soon as you get into thinking about reality it all falls apart because you are arriving at conclusions while beginning in confusion.

Not sure about this. How so?

...Okay, so I'm clearer now that you were intending to distinguish between "land traditions" and Zen (I had originally interpreted your comment as intertwining the two). Our understanding of Zen - and shamanism - does seem to match, then. I'd agree that it's highly beneficial to have something as your grounding - and that can even be the actual ground - if you are experimenting with something which, by its nature, is all about shifting everything else. Ideally, this stable context is the background awareness itself, but failing that then any persistent subset of content can serve as well. Where mirror gazing might lead to you noticing your actual situation - having the Zen insight - is that it can result in you realising the reflection over there isn't really a reflection of anything, as such. Your sense of identity then shifts from being a specific location, to the that in which all apparent locations arise. But, yeah, it's not the way I'd do it personally. Best to just look directly.

In the end, I'm using grounding to mean something similar, but perhaps broader - the underlying structure of experience itself. So, the "land" I would be referring to would be how-things-are-in-themselves, the true landscape as it were, rather than the "places" or "things" of everyday experience, which are surely just fleeting and human-formatted sensory aspects of that. Certainly, that is a land you can trust, in contrast to any thoughts-about what is (which some would call "the ego"). Perhaps we end up referring to the same thing, though, finally? But I don't think skies and forests and streams and birds are inherently grounding, except in the sense that they are more obviously spontaneous and persistent - and apparently outside of our direct grasp in contrast to our thinking selves. Is desire so bad? Certainly, we can suffer if we are identified with a desire, but otherwise there is no problem that I can see. So long as you don't mistakenly believe that "things" solve you, you're okay. I'm not sure that I see greed here though - most people who come here seeking results seem to be after an experience of something, rather than accumulation of anything. Guests are always welcome when they are so thought-provoking! The more perspectives the better - although it's true that this subreddit tends to view experiential content as, in some way, arbitrary. So, while we may agree on the relative benefits of connecting with the land in a shamanistic sense, we perhaps might not do so on the fundamental benefit.

The problem is, you are telling yourself you are "dimensionally jumping", but the more you do it the farther and farther you get from even finding the footprints of the bull.

Well actually, in the end nobody is telling themselves they are "dimensionally jumping" - that's the point. That's why it is described the way it is. Someone may start out that way, of course, but the framing of the subreddit is intending to push back against all descriptions. With that in mind, I would say that Zen puts formulations into context rather than obliterates them, although that is poetic. I like the ten bulls, but I also feel it can needlessly obfuscate something that is quite simple and mundane in the seeing, albeit not possible to formulate in language and concepts (what with being what those are "made from", basically). I unintentionally misquoted you a little on "the land", apologies, but my sense in it was to refer to something like "the full topology". You secure yourself to that larger content (the land), or you secure yourself to ("the background nature of experience of which the content is also a one", Zen). You are not separate from either, of course, but you are the latter. So the latter is what you should be aiming for, although I'd say there is not really a path to it - there is a path in thought you can take in your thinking about it, but that is something different, in parallel, and something you give up eventually. Why not give it up initially!

The sense in which these exercises are "dangerous" only this time you (meaning, the experimenter) will get what you knowingly chose, unlike all those times you accidentally did it. And hopefully this leads you to have a think and notice: there is only one cause - first cause - and all else is, as you say, "head games". The couple of demo exercises given are deliberately chosen for that. I don't agree that desire is inherently problematic. In the larger context, in fact, it just doesn't matter.

Formulations are not obliterated a such - they are recognised for what they are, in their place with any other strands of thought, within the context of that. Part of the story of Zen, surely, is the story of seeing what "descriptions" are. But again, that's somewhat problematic to talk about - and it's only directly clear when we "cease" describing. That's what ends up happening eventually (although "happening" is not the appropriate word). So - on the rest, although interesting, we probably disagree more than I anticipated. To me, it does not make sense within a Zen perspective, although it might do within a shamanistic one. The latter is, however, optional. Even the notion of "techniques" in the sense you are describing them is problematic; they are highly context dependent (fortunately).

...So, the word "story" was obviously used in the poetic sense - I was not saying that Zen was a fictional narrative. I do really hope you're not going around offering this sort of teaching of a "fire and brimstone" perspective of Zen, because it's wide of the mark in my experience (literally) - and just doesn't make sense in the context of the insight of "the nature of experience". Of course, it can make sense if you pattern yourself with that sort of thing - but in this subreddit that's exactly what we don't do, since we acknowledge the structuring that takes place with the acceptance of descriptions and formulations. There's nothing necessarily special about "ancient techniques" - except that they are largely misrepresented because people no longer understand imagery and metaphor. I don't think they particularly mind being violated, because they... aren't anywhere. One must of course "format things responsibly", as it were, but that is within a person's own influence, with understanding.

How far are you from your real hands?

Closer than close, of course, but no closer than I am to everything else - nor further, naturally. I'd be very impressed if I'd manage to become separated from myself, because I don't see how it is possible. I may imagine-that I am something separate from other things, but that separation too would be... me. (This also makes your notion of "personal bubbles" somewhat problematic.)

Now, I would never dissuade someone from a "lentils & land" approach to life if that is what they want to follow, but talk of "reckonings" and the ancients and the totality of work - that is the story-fication of existence. It's certainly possible to have experiences aligned with those sorts of views if you embrace them; it's also fascinating how quickly it all falls away into the void when you stop, along with all the fear that goes with them.

...Maybe better to say: everything you intend and/or imply has an effect?

Has an effect upon what, though, that's what is important. Can you influence another person's personal bubble? Does it even make sense to talk of that, when they are not separate from the world, and you yourself are not separate, or located, or individual as such? And so on. None of which particularly matters at the root, of course. Shame. Lentils & land sounds quite fun, now and again.

...But what is the source of the effect, the "cause"? As you read my message in your personal bubble, in what sense am I affecting you? In fact, what is the "you" that is being affected? And can I affect you contrary to the structuring of your experience? (Otherwise I cannot be said to affect you, surely; it's just another experience associated with your current condition and nothing is being changed.)

...I'm engaging in discussion with you, my questions being largely rhetorical, curious as to how you would respond in your language - because your comments don't line up with how I would phrase these things, but that is fine. I'm not actually seeking answers from you. Still, you've got the two-part, comma-separated sentence thing down pat anyway. ;-)

...I really wish you had put a comma in that first sentence...

Isn't "technique" the wrong word to use here, though? Since that suggests something that is done, as an action, with results, by an actor, within the world. "Decided" may also not be a good word. It is a pre-existing interaction, certainly, and we might say that the current state implied it, made it inevitable or deterministic. It is probably best to put that down to difficulties inherent in a verb-and-noun language when we are talking about something which doesn't "happen" as such.

I employ the word "technique" in its common usage, because that is how it will be interpreted by most people. With a more specialised audience, this matters less, but those unfamiliar tend to interpret a technique as involving doing something. When in fact, the act itself is largely irrelevant, more of a collateral result - if even that. (The subreddit deliberately tries to avoid using the word "technique" or "method", using "exercise" as a less loaded term.)

In my experience, phrasings like "a technique used without technique" are fine once someone already knows what is being referred to, but is worse than confusing for those who do not - hence best avoided, probably always (in my view, of course). "Understanding" Zen misses the point, surely? ;-)

Well, alas the deterministic path implied by "my" "past" intentions (which of course all occurred in The Now) has finally (has always) led to my retirement for this evening, and so, having refrained from intending further, we'll have to leave it there for now (since when else is there?). Thanks for engaging; keep collecting wisdom.

...Sigh. That's the eternal for you. > > >

POST: Missing Point _____Something that does NOT make sense

To ponder: You are making a lot of assumptions in your description, the primary one being that "you" are somehow "inside" a brain. Have you ever actually experienced your brain? Your account starts a few levels too "late" in terms of its concepts, perhaps. You have to start "before" your inferences about the nature of experiencing. In particular, we should be careful about our assumption that "the world" is inherently formatted in the same way as our moment by moment experiences are. In other words, our assumption that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" and that we are somehow "in" that world should not be taken for granted. (Be sure to read the metaphors in the sidebar if you haven't already, for a sense of how this might be flipped around.)

yes this is why I said "from a scientific prospect".

It doesn't really fit into that narrative framework. For starters, the fiction of the "objective world" container concept and the idea that "the world is made from parts" are both incompatible with it - it is "too late" as I said. Now, you could pursue this through a variant of QBism, perhaps - see here [https://www.nature.com/articles/507421a] and here [https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/] - but frankly it's a waste of time in terms of seeking a "scientific" explanation as generally understood. This is because it resolves to something akin to being an experiencer with a "private copy" of the world, navigating through the possibilities as if you were traversing a pre-existing memory block. This is philosophy and metaphysics. Now, that isn't to say we can't conduct structured investigations into this area - in fact, that's exactly what is encouraged here. We are talking about an applied philosophy; our metaphors are active metaphors. However, you really have to take a step back from "brains" and so on when doing this. Even a moment's pause for contemplating the implications of the standard view - by which I mean, that all that we know arises in our "mind", even if you choose to equate that with your "brain" - indicates that this makes sense. Other than a handy metaphor for "my experience has structured patterning", the concept of neuro-connections isn't going to be helpful here, in what amounts to a direct exploration of the nature of subjective experience.

POST: So we can change "What" but now "How?"

It might be worth considering that there is no "how", only a sequence of "whats". By specifying one particular "what" - which is to say, asserting a particular moment as "fact" - you logically imply other "whats" in doing so, since the world is a coherent, self-consistent pattern which must always "make sense" between shifts. The more "whats" you specify, and to a greater level of detail and intensity of contribution, the more fully defined your ongoing experience will become. So the true "how" is never within the experience - experiences do not cause other experiences. The only cause is "intention-imagination-assertion-intensification", or whatever you prefer to call it. And the way you control the apparent sequence of events consciously, if you want to do that, is to intentionally define more and more of the extended pattern of your target outcome.

Also, is trying multiple dimensional jumping methods at one interruptive?

I'd stick to a single approach for a particular thing. Trying multiple approaches at the same time is basically a declaration of doubt that any of them have taken hold, and it's possible that the implied patterns of different approaches are contradictory, even if the intended outcome is identical. On the other thing I'd say, if you've done something which amounts to a "have life unfold as if this-thing didn't happen or isn't relevant anymore", you might benefit from repeatedly asserting that pattern over a period of time. After all, if you have already observed something to be "true" then it tends to have quite a high contribution to your ongoing experience afterwards. What you are aiming to do is have an alternative version be "brighter" than the original version. The more you assert your target pattern, the more any logically inconsistent alternatives will diminish in their level of "factness". (This is why asserting a future situation, or a more abstract background fact for which there has been no counter-observations, is easier - there is no direct competition to the truth you are asserting.)

Maybe also check out The Pruning Shears of Revision, linked at the end of the Neville Goddard post, for one example of approaching this without much in the way of conceptual baggage. One of the other links, Imagination Creates Reality, gives you the worldview he is using. (Of course, everything resolves to the same underlying thing; these are all different ways of saying it, different ways of applying it.)

POST: This was a massive jump. But it wasn't intentional. At all...

Q1 (falken96): Nice try, see how they like it in /r/NoSleep. Which is basically where this entire subreddit belongs, lmao

The point of this subreddit is to explore the nature of experience and perception, how it is influenced by intentionally using explicit or implicit reformatting metaphors, and seeing how far it can go. It's not about literally jumping into parallel universes (as you'd know if you read the sidebar or introduction). However, that doesn't mean it doesn't bring about results which can seem that way. As the sidebar says, though, the idea here is that nobody takes anything for granted - that includes both the concepts being explored and our everyday assumptions about the world and how we experience it - and instead tries things out for themselves. Nobody should simply assume there is something to this without testing it, just because they'd like there to be. (The same applies the other way around too, of course. Just because you can't think of an explanation of how it could bring about a result, doesn't of itself mean it doesn't or can't.) People here are reporting the results of experiments, or pondering the implications; they are not subscribing to a world view as such. Finally, there's not much point in showing up to subreddits you don't know anything about, and being a dick. Fine to challenge ideas or ask for an explanation, but the sort of wild-eyed defensive manic tone in your comments below are a waste of everyone's time - mostly yours, though.

EDIT: Oh the irony! [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/4cijfm/sudden_realization_about_the_universes_nature/d1j8y8l/]

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Pub: 14 Oct 2025 23:11 UTC

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