weirdway

My preoccupation at the moment lies in trying to better understand the nature of the othered aspect of myself, the part which crafts the world/my experiences. The questions I'm working on at the moment are: is it self aware as I am self aware? Does it contemplate me as I contemplate it? Am I mysterious to it as it is mysterious to me - or does it "know" me? Is it emotional or indifferent? What is the nature of our current connection? Does it function as a series of algorithms might or is it more nuanced? If I managed to merge with it tomorrow - to what extent would "I" still be "me"? What would I care about if that occurred?

I'm not sure how much headway I'm making with these questions to be honest. Thinking about them, though, has made me realised that I have made assumptions about my othered self, and that these assumptions affect my capacity to manifest things.

One area where I have experienced occasional success lies in willing traffic to improve. When I examined my success in this area I realised two things that my success was always accompanied by:

• a deep conviction that bad traffic was valueless

• a sense that traffic, no traffic, the world wasn't going to be ground-shakingly altered

So why was this important, why would these factors need to be satisfied in order for me to will things different?

And then it hit me - it's because I lack trust in myself and my capacity to make a "good," impressive world. I have accorded my othered self a privileged position, whereby I consider it a better crafter of worlds than myself. Basically, in my mind, I'm the kid drawing stick figures and it's Van Gogh.

And the artist idea isn't just a metaphor - I am quite literally fairly meh at drawing or any other artistic venture and I struggle to visualise in detail. Things I imagine have a fuzziness to them. Meanwhile, my othered self produces this world with its dizzying degree of detail, blades of grass, swirling dust motes, light and shadow, etc.

And since, visually and artistically, I can't compete with that othered part of me - I guess I extrapolated from that that I can't compete with it in any area. If it was better than me at the visual stuff, wouldn't it be better than I at crafting every aspect of my experience? If I interfered - would it be like splattering a big red paint mark across The Starry Night?

Well, looking at it logically, I can see the potential flaws in my assumptions. Being good at one thing is never a guarantee that you'll be good at another. And whatever unconscious awe I've been regarding my subconscious with, there clearly are situations where I have decided that it's wrong - traffic being one of them. God I hate traffic.

So I suppose what I've taken from this is that as an awareness I'm currently saddled with an inferiority complex which hamstrings me when I try to change my experience. My success is usually accompanied by extreme irritation - something has to look really, really pointless and stupid in order for me to be able to magically alter it. And I have to feel like I'm not changing things too much, lest I'm making a big, clumsy mess. So perhaps achieving greater success, with less requisite-angst, lies in more critically querying the pedestal I've placed my othered self on.

Why do lucid dreams at the height of their development seem so amazing? One big reason for this is that lucid dreams give many experienced lucid dreamers a preview of what it's like to be God. As you learn to bend reality in your dream, and as you get better and better at not only playing a role in your dream, but also at being an indisputable and tyrannical conductor of the entire dream, you approach Godliness.

The power of lucidity is not a democracy. It is absolute tyranny. This is why when I want to have sex in my dreams, when I am lucid, there is no discussion or debate about it. The first girl I see is hot, and that's no accident, and I take her hand, and she wants to fuck me as much as I want to fuck her. Why does this happen? Why is it so flawless? That's because I understand the meaning of true tyranny and in my dreams I allow myself to feel this in a way I don't yet allow myself to feel during waking.

True tyranny is divine. When it is exercised, the subjects don't feel oppressed. They feel like they want to do whatever it is you want to do. It feels voluntary through and through. There is no resistance. It is instant and flawless. There is no adjustment or fine-tuning. Things turn out to be magically always right the first time, seemingly beyond any reason.

The way to learn to feel this way in your dreams is to disregard all facts. Whatever dream situation appears to your mind, a typical, conventional attitude would be to take the apparent situation as fact, as evidence of something. This is why most dreamers who are accustomed to relating to their senses as avenues of evidence, they also fall prey to their dream environments and become victims of the circumstances in their own dreams. Then the dream monster as presented by the 5 senses is evidence of a real monster that really wants to get you. And then if people resist your advances or ideas, that's taken as evidence that your point of view is not absolute, and that you must contend with something besides yourself "out there." To overcome this victim trap, upon lucidity you have to instantly disregard everything you witness. You have to realize that nothing in the sphere of the 5 senses is a fact. You're witnessing only a one possibility out of an infinity of possibilities. To a lucid dreamer all configurations of sense bases are no longer factual or evidential. They're just accidental and they're subject to volition and to imagination. What is becomes subjugated by what could be.

This frame of mind is radically anti-conservative. A conservative frame of mind is to always preserve appearances and to always resist "what could be." That's why conservatives always look to history for inspiration. To a conservative mindset "what is" is also "how it always was" and also "how it always will be."

To take the lucid advantage to a waking consciousness you have to do something very much similar during waking. Stop relying on facts. Stop relying on evidence. Claim your divinity. Don't ask for permission. Just do it. Don't be reasonable about it. There is no one and nothing you would need to reason with. Reasoning is still a subtle act of asking for a permission. When we reason, we want the faculty of reason to agree before we engage in something. From the POV of a deity, the faculty of reason will become your slave. Your reason will be there to explain in ways that others will find impossible to argue with, why what you want to do is reasonable, when in truth you just do what you want to do, and that's that. Reason then becomes like a corrupt lawyer who is tirelessly working to keep your wishes safe and you entertained, and if you are resolute, then even an army of 100 million philosophers working together will not prove anything wrong.

When you try maintain an attitude and a frame of mind of a deity during waking, it may so happen that it will be overwhelming. That's because we have so much stuff in our past, and the past is not just "past." The past is present in our mind right now, and it is held there deliberately by intent, because it was valuable at least at one time, and if nothing else, it gives us a sense of continuity of identity, continuity to which we tend to cling. Who wants to become a being with no history? Not even personal history?

So when you move powerfully against convention, what happens is you might feel pain in your body. That's because your body is a shadow of your past. The correct attitude at this point is to regard such pain as helpful. This pain is not a "message from the universe to stop." It's the same thing as when you feel pain from lifting weights. When you lift weights, and you're not accustomed to it, your body will ache. That isn't a message that you're doing something wrong. It's only a signal that what you're doing is not something you are accustomed to.

Further, regard any possibility of injury on this path as wonderful. Convention can't grab hold of your mind or intent. They can strike out at your body and nothing else. Then tell your body, "If you, my arm, allow yourself to be taken by the others, you were never my ally to begin with. You are a traitor. You may go. You are a weakness. Losing you is nothing more than losing weakness. Losing you is nothing more than losing a disease. If others should take you, go, go, go." Accept only those parts of your being which are committed to your cause. And be ready and willing to let go of any parts that are not. Jesus was talking about this when he said something like "if your eye sins, rip it out." Basically, your ordinary bodies are traitorous to your deepest wishes if your wishes involve transcendence and divinity of any kind. Do not be fooled. Do not grieve.

There is nothing in the entire universe that keeps it going outside of your own constant and unremitting commitment. Once your commitment to the universe authentically and genuinely comes to an end, the universe will dissolve like an illusion that it always and ever was.

When a relatively normal person returns to a world of solidity after experiencing something amazing, what happens? Why the return? Is there something that forces such a return? Think about it. If you resolve to never return, what could possibly force you? It would have to be your own idea and your own commitment to the externality of the universe. It would have to be your own love and desire for the universe. It would have to be you.

People don't realize this, but they energize and power every little piece of garbage in their lives by their own love and life juice. Reawakening the memory that you really are God is all about restoring that love and life juice back to yourself. It's a universal reset. It's you, as God, saying, "Enough is enough, I will not play this game anymore. If the Universe wants to do it, it will need to find its own strength and energy to do it. I am out." And what do you know? Once you're out, you'll discover universe was empty and hollow and it has nothing in it that was powering it from the outside of your being.

When you maintain a deific attitude for even one month, you'll realize how much bullshit you used to believe that isn't really true. Conventional thinking will begin to stick out so vividly and obviously. Things you would take for granted will gradually begin to sound absurd. It's a period of great discovery.

There is much more that can be said about this. I could write a book about being a diety. But this is just a reddit post.

There are two polar complementary dimensions of experience: tolerance and expressiveness. When one's tolerance has been perfected there is no urgency to modify any experience to be something else, no matter what that experience may feel like. When one's expressiveness has been perfected, one regains the knowledge and the courage necessary to exercise intent along its full range of ultimate possibility, thus being able to manifest any experience that could be experienced even in principle. This second perfection we know as magick.

If you cultivate tolerance without expressiveness you'll be like a patient victim, able to endure but passive and lacking creativity. And if you cultivate expressiveness without tolerance, you'll be like a perpetually frightened maestro for whom magick is not a leisurely pleasure but a dire necessity at every turn in life.

May you all be twice perfect.

There is this popular conception that floats around, and I think it's often an incredibly damaging one. The idea is that whatever you are like on the inside somehow spreads out and infects the outside or it somehow gets mirrored in the external world.

So for example, if you're generous, that somehow infects other people with generosity and forces them to be generous to you back. Or if you're constantly fair when dealing with the others it in some way obliges others to be fair when dealing with you.

I don't think this is true in most cases. Why not? Because we generally emanate beings through the veil of othering. We generally will want those beings to appear truly unique and independent and therefore quite intentionally and on a very profoundly deep level we would not want those beings to be mere mirrors of our own conventional being. So we get a situation where not everyone is going to be generous even if you are. Not everyone is going to be fair even if you are.

The only way to make sure that people appear in some specific configuration, and mirroring is a very specific configuration, is to intend it directly from a very deep place in your being, without any hidden counter-desires messing things up (so this state of mind has to be very internally coherent). If you intend people to be mirrors and not to be free agents, then and only then will people begin being mirrors. I claim most people will not enjoy this style of emanation. Generally people want surprises, diversity and some degree of discord to make for a believable appearance of unique individuals as opposed to clones. Who wants to live in a sea of clones who copy every one of your "good" habits? On the other hand, we also wouldn't want to live in an environment where we're constantly brutalized no matter what.

This idea that what appears externally is a copy of what appears internally is potentially dangerous. In most cases it is a gross simplification, it's a distorted caricature of a greater truth. If people don't understand how gnarly and profound their own intentionality is and begin expecting a simplistic system of clones and mirrors when on some subconscious level they vehemently don't want to live among clones and mirrors, there is going to be a lot of unhappiness.

What's going to happen is, you'll be nice and you'll expect reciprocation. Any time someone fails to reciprocate you'll either get angry like "damn I was nice, now it's your turn, what the fuck?" Or you'll get depressed like "woa, I was nice and why isn't it working? Why isn't my niceness being cloned how I expect it to be? Why isn't everyone just a copy of my personality here? Damn it... nothing works.... it's all screwed." Or you'll begin to get very demanding and pushy with yourself like this "OK so I was nice but that wasn't cloned as I expected. So it means I must have been a dick on some subtle level. Damn, I suck. Why can't I be really nice??!!! If I am really nice, for sure that's going to become cloned all over the world. For sure. I need to try harder. I am not doing well enough. If I were, it would be visible externally." Etc.

So there are all these myriad of ways to get wrapped up and to hurt yourself and others because you misunderstand something very secret and deep inside yourself: you generally do NOT want to live in a sea of clones and do NOT want to live in a world of mere mirrors. You intend a complex world and you get a complex world. You're a Buddha but not everyone around you is a Buddha. You're nice but not everyone around you is nice. Etc. It's a complex world because generally in most cases that's what you'd want: a complex, gnarly, strange, twisted, surprising, living breathing world where you can get lost, where you don't know everything in advance, etc.

I say "generally" because for a trained and very wise practitioner it will indeed be possible to emanate a sea of clones and mirrors and anything else! You could emanate some truly bizarre and common-logic-defying worlds. You could emanate a deliberately simple and deliberately symmetrical world. You could emanate a world with 3 body types and 2 personality types. So the possibilities are there, but you have to check yourself: is this where your heart is at? Do you expect a gnarly complex unpredictable world? Do you expect beings to look and smell and walk and talk like they have free will? Don't fool yourself no matter what it is. Whatever your deepest intent is, you have to meet that intent face to face if you want to achieve mastery of emanation.

A typical person who hangs around here is not interested in a world of clones and doesn't have the intentionality or the wisdom to pull something like that off. No you cannot just pretend everyone is a Buddha and force everyone to become a Buddha that way. That's not going to work assuming on a much deeper and more hidden level you want to encounter genuinely unique and surprising beings who seem to have their own quirks and interests in mind, sometimes even conflicting interests to your own.

Generally when we want to get lost in a world, we want that world to seem complex and not too predictable. If everything was just a mirror image of your conventional human personality it would be a small and boring world and we wouldn't even find it believable or worth getting lost in. There might be some exceptions to this, but I think in most cases what I say holds. I know for sure I don't want people to just be clones of me. That doesn't mean I don't want people to reciprocate. That's not the point. I want to feel like reciprocation is an option and not a given. If I feel it's not automatic, that creates the illusion of free will in the othered space, which generally speaking is very desirable.

Plus, if I am only doing something nice because I expect it to bounce back on me, I am not really being nice, am I? I am being self-serving. And if I want to be self-serving, I have more honest and more direct ways of serving my interests as an aspirant. I don't have to get other people involved in my self-serving trickiness by demanding that the other people invariably bounce everything back to me like helpless clones.

The world is a reflection of one's fullest and deepest commitment but one's fullest commitment is generally very complex. If you don't respect that complexity you're going to get snagged. I described how one can get snagged above, but there are many ways to get snagged besides the ones I described. Only people who properly understand the true and full depth of their own intentionality are free from being snagged by their own tacit secret commitments.

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I thought about death in the context of convention, but that didn't seem too relevant to this subreddit. I also thought about death in the context of freedom, which seemed totally relevant. Here's my mostly unedited thoughts. I welcome other thoughts and criticisms of my ideas.

What is it that dies? The body dies. What is it for a body to die? It is a change in state, from motion to non-motion, from sentient utility to uselessness. The conditions that are necessary to keep the body alive and able to move are no longer fulfilled.

Death is something that happens to bodies. A mind is not a body. Minds cognize bodies. Minds experience bodies. A body dying is an experience and cognition that a mind can have.

People worry that their mind is tied to their body, and that when their body dies, their mind will also die. Specifically, this is rooted today in a belief in the brain being the origin of the mind.

This belief arises largely from the fact that, in the conventional world, affecting a brain is related to changes in that person's mind. So, for example, brain damage is associated with changes in mental state. Similarly, chemical drugs that are believed to interact with the brain are associated with changes in mental state.

There are two reasons why this does not mean that the brain is the origin of the mind.

First, the eye is related to changes in a person's mind. If one or both eyes experience any sort of change of state or damage, then there will be an associated change in that person's mental state. Their visual experience and beliefs will be different. Similarly for the ears, the skin, the tongue, the nose. None of these are the origin of a person's mind although altering them can affect a person's way of cognizing.

They are all sense organs. They are objects which are believed to affect cognition, and thus they do. The brain is the same. It is another organ which is believed to affect cognition, and thus it does.

Secondly, in a dream it is possible for there to be a relationship between a dream brain and dream cognition. A person can have dreams where certain dream drugs affect their perception, for example. Thus, the ability of drugs to affect one's state of mind in the dream is rooted in one's state of mind. So it can also be during waking.

So, when the brain is thoroughly damaged and the body dies, what happens?

Despite the demonstrations above, one response might be, 'when the body dies, the mind stops manifesting and experiencing altogether. The mind will stop existing.' However, upon further consideration, this idea is nonsensical. The mind doesn't start existing or stop existing. The mind is the infinite capacity of possible experiences and manifestations. Experiencing nothing is one possible state of mind. Even when the perspective of nothingness is what is experienced and made manifest, there is always the potential for experiencing another perspective (a perspective of something).

So, a person might then say that when the brain and body die, a person's mind forever experiences nothingness. Since the mind believes that a brain and body in a physical world are necessary for perception of things, the absence of a functioning brain and body would result in the manifestation of nothingness.

There is a problem with this way of thinking.

An individual dreams every night and the dreamer can know that in this particular dreamworld their dream cognition depends upon the survival of their dream brain and body. And the dreamer will either create a new dream or wake up if their dream brain or body are destroyed. Similarly, when living and waking we believe that our living cognition depends upon the survival of our living brain and body. Thus, we cannot conclude that simply believing, in the context of the living, waking world, that our brains and bodies are necessary for living, waking cognition means that this living, waking brain and body are necessary for non-living, non-waking cognition. After all, there's no way to discern the difference between a dreaming experience and a waking experience using evidence – the only difference is in what you believe about experience. Similarly between living experience and dead experience.

So, we have no reason to conclude that our minds will manifest nothingness after our bodies die. At this point, we are left wondering what we might experience when we die. It is unclear. This is where we can start looking at intent and commitments.

What a mind believes and experiences is intentional. A mind's reality is a mind's will manifesting. So, having a given set of interests is intentional. Having a certain sort of personality is intentional. Having a specific job and living in a specific country is intentional. Having a human body and living among humans according to their norms is intentional. Living on Earth in this universe is intentional. The laws of physics in the universe are intentional.

Most humans are laser-focused on their ordinary human lives with their ordinary human concerns. They believe their experience definitely takes the form of waking and dreaming cycles (with specifics varying from individual to individual), and don't think about the broader nature of these things at all and are instead concerned with controlling events taking place within these states of mind.

As such, they habitually think about controlling the details and never look at the bigger picture. They don't pay attention to and have forgotten about the bigger picture. It may even feel totally outside of their control (even though it isn't). These people are deeply committed to the general intentional structures that make up a world like this that allow them to interact with the specific details of this world they like. Because of this, most people's dreams reflect these intentions as well.

We might consider an individual who is so focused on being successful in their career that they never think about the optionality of their career. Their career is voluntary and intentional and they are always free to disengage. Their identity is so caught up in living a lifestyle to impress their peers, sucking up to the boss, learning the things necessary to succeed in their industry, that they basically never think outside of this commitment.

Let's imagine that this person then loses their job. This person is now confronted with their freedom more directly. Here they are, unemployed, free to find a new career or remain unemployed and learn to live a whole new lifestyle. Assuming that this person maintains the same motivations that got them and kept them in the old career, and assuming that this person never considered or prepared for unemployment or other careers, it is probable that being unemployed is terrifying and embarrassing. This person will want to get a new career as soon as possible to continue pursuing their visions of wealth and success.

Depending on this person's skill and know-how regarding finding a new place of employment, they may end up in a terrible line of work like fast food (if they don't know what they're doing and are really scared and their last career was just luck), something moderate like low-level office work (if they at least remember or can discover the basics of job-finding and be patient), or maybe with skill and some nepotism they will end up in the same industry with another good career.

If we imagine that the living world is intentional in the same way as a career, only more abstract, then we can draw certain parallels. The more attached and focused a person is to the specifics of the living, material world of convention (with little thought of its unreality and intentionality and consideration of options), the more we can expect that person to in some way desperately seek to re-enter a living, waking, material world of convention – that is, to re-manifest a life in a world.

When a person dies, their entire perception is ripped out of its ordinary and conventional material context. Suddenly, such a person finds themselves confronted with the world of the dead – not a place where ghosts reside necessarily, but a world where manifestation and experience are wholly free of ordinary constraints. This is very similar to an individual losing their job and becoming unemployed. Yes, you can live this way and don't need to return to your old lifestyle, but it is probable that the individual had a reason to live within the constraints of the old lifestyle – something they were seeking, and thus a motivation to return to the life of working or a motivation to return to the life of living, waking, material convention.

It would make sense to conclude that individuals who enter this state (death) thoughtlessly and accidentally after being wholly focused on the living, waking world will be so panicked and confused that they may not make the best decision or use the most skill in selecting/manifesting a new life. Similarly, individuals who are more aware and have prepared and practiced are more likely to be able to deal with the situation and make a skillful and controlled decision. This is not a discrete situation, but is rather a continuum.

I find it hard to say much more specifically about the intermediate state between lives, the state of being dead.

What do you think?

Imagine you go to bed tonight, and each night after, and enter into the same, continuous, cohesive, coherent dream world. It remains as apparently constant, unchanging, and "objective" as our own waking world does. In other words, you're living in two consistent worlds which you alternate experiencing (as opposed to one consistent world + lots of less consistent, less predictable worlds).

In this dream world, you're aware that you're dreaming, and that when you go to bed in the dream world, you'll wake up in the "real" world. The other folks in the dream world, though, are exactly like the folks in the waking world. In fact, the so-called-"dream world" and the so-called-"waking world" are just about identical. You experience both as a fleshy being living on a planet, eating, sleeping, communicating, laboring, playing, etc. You're Bob the Human on Earth half the time and you're Flob the Fluman on Flearth the other half of the time. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that you didn't start dreaming about Flearth until now, you'd probably not know which one was "real"!

Question: What kind of lifestyle do you adopt on Flearth, where you know you're dreaming? Do you watch Flearth TV shows, go to a mundane Flearth job, pay your Flearth bills, fill up Flearth trash cans, buy Flearth products in Flearth Flal-Marts, eat Flearth animals, etc.? Do you spend your time on Flearth doing about 90% the same thing as everyone else on Flearth? Or, maybe, do you try to solve world hunger, end wars, spread peace, etc.? Or, maybe, do you become a genocidal warlord? Prime minister? Sports star? Ascetic? Billionaire?

I pose this hypothetical because I want to know to what degree you put your money where your mouth is. If you really do experience the Earth, with all its capitalism, warfare, environmental destruction, overpopulation, etc. as a dream world, how does that influence the way you interact with it? Are you more, or less, compelled to help other people/civilization and society as a whole? What does that do to your ambitions and aspirations? Because there certainly does seem to be -something of a contradiction (and that may be a strong word) in living a totally mundane and ordinary life, nearly entirely identical to that of any conventional physicalist, if you're awake to the fact that it's all a dream. (There are some metaphysical arguments against this which are perfectly valid, but I've got that gut feeling and I'm standing by it.)

We talk a lot about contemplating, metaphysics, and dealing with very specific situations on this sub, but very little about the things that we likely spend the vast majority of our human lives doing. How does subjective idealism influence your life choices? What obligations do you feel toward being a human, other humans, human society, etc.? Do you have animosity toward mainstream culture or do you enjoy it? Are you all logging out of Reddit and turning on reality TV, or are you sitting in fallout shelters in the dark all night?

It's not unlike that famous story from David Foster Wallace where the two fish are swimming along and an older, wiser swims by and says, "Hey boys, how's the water?" And after a while, one of the two younger fish turns to the other and asks, "What the hell' 'water'?" As oneirosophers, in theory, you're aware that THIS IS WATER. So, I'm literally asking you, "How is it?"

At the end of the day, this is your playground, right? I mean, this is basically here for you to play in (with the implications of play/fun not being limited to sheer pleasure). It's game-like in nature. Are you treating it that way? If not, why not? Are you having fun? Does this life feel playful? Is there any gap between what you "feel like you should be doing" and what you are doing, day in and day out? Are you happy with this current life experience?

Talk more casually about SI here without having to make a formal post.

I've been thinking a lot about Buddhism lately, because my early practice in this life was heavily characterized by Buddhism, and Buddhism is what's responsible for my interest in unraveling reality which eventually led me toward subjective idealism a few years ago. I'd be surprised if I was the only one on this sub for whom that was the case.

When I first encountered Buddhism, I encountered it with a very different understanding than I have now and many of the ideas were (as I think they generally are) very easily misunderstood. Buddhism deals with some very basic and fundamental concepts which are just bound to be understood incorrectly by someone operating in the wrong paradigm. I wrongly interpreted things that I encountered in Buddhism, I believe, because my understanding was poor and one with poor understanding misinterprets everything axiomatically.

So I've been interested in re-approaching some early Buddhism, some Pali canon fundamental type stuff, to see if investigating it at this point in my practice I'll find it much more useful than I did when I last contemplated it.

I spent some time with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path today and wrote an interpretation of it "in my own words", for myself, as a practice of better understanding (I find things more accessible when I convey them than when they're conveyed to me). It is not explicitly canon and not directly in-line with Buddhism in a few places (the two most glaring ones I've pointed out with footnotes) but it, I think, carries on the spirit of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path into subjective idealist terms.

You are currently, consciously aware that you are undergoing certain experiences. That these experiences, also called phenomena, are presently occurring within your consciousness is one of the only things you can be certain of.

Amongst the phenomena that are arising within your conscious experience, one of them is called "suffering". Even when it is not apparent, as it may not be in this moment, suffering exists latently at a very high level, as an easily realized potential, just below the surface, which permeates your current type of experience. The potentiality of suffering arising is generally high at any given moment.

This phenomena of suffering does not arise independently within your conscious experience, of course. Many other phenomena arise, and suffering is but one among them. However, like each of them, suffering arises within the context of, in relation to, and causally interconnected with other phenomena. Suffering is but one segment of a vast web of experiences that you're currently undergoing.

The good news is that the causality which provokes suffering to arise within your conscious experience can be circumvented and the conscious experience can be transformed into one in which there is no suffering. The method to cultivating such a suffering-free experience is done by utilizing your will to change your conscious experience, your capacity to interact with reality intentionally.

You must be wise. You must have the right view, perspective, or understanding about the nature of reality. One cannot begin the path with a conventional understanding of the nature of reality. One can only begin the path to the release of suffering if one has first understood that reality is not as it appears, and does not exist as a physical and objective realm.^1 One must recognize the path before one can walk the path.

You must also have the right intention and the right aspiration to achieve this goal. According to one's right view or perspective, one must aspire to proceed in such a way that is progressive. One must walk toward the end of the path if one wishes to arrive at the end of the path. You must aspire in the direction of removing limitations, sufferings, and ignorance from yourself and from other beings. This intention must be a persistent feature of one's experience and reflecting often on the intention is important if one is to avoid straying from the path toward the release of suffering.

Proceeding with right intention, you must act in accordance with it. A path cannot be traveled if one will not walk it. One must act in such a way that moves along the path to the release of suffering. How does one do this? When you utilize your capacity to speak, to convey thought, do so rightly. When you utilize your capacity to act with the body, act only rightly. When you occupy the body in daily affairs, occupy it toward right ends. What is it to speak, to act, or to occupy the body only rightly? It is when speech, action, or occupation are done when the behavior is internally ethical and done with awareness. One who acts in such a way acts virtuously. One who acts in ways which are not internally ethical and not done with awareness does not act rightly. To act in such a way is synonymous with walking the path toward the release of suffering.^2

You must also have the right resolve, the right determination, the right will to pursue this goal. The process toward the release of suffering is not easy, simple, or brief for most people. Rather than a gradient of increased happiness, the path is dynamic and subjective, and the obstacles one faces can be extraordinarily difficult. Only with a great amount of effort can such a task be accomplished. One must be constantly vigilant about discarding wrong understanding, acquiring right understanding, and behaving ethically. Only one who proceeds by making such an effort can be rid of suffering.

You must also be sharp. You must be keenly aware of your current experience, without falling into assumptions, misunderstandings, or convention. You must be sincerely present to the actual conscious experience, the phenomena which presently exist. You must not slip into inattentiveness or forgetfulness lest you stray from acting in accordance with the path toward the release from suffering. Only one who remains ardently on the path, with a correct understanding of the nature of reality, with a correct intention toward that reality, who acts ethically, and who has the right determination can expect to progress on the path toward the cessation of suffering.

If one has done all of these things, one need only to concentrate rightly. One who, having done these things, concentrates rightly, achieving Samadhi and one-pointedness, has no barriers between themselves and ultimate understanding. They are truly virtuous and may become free of the experience of suffering.

^1. This is an intensification of traditional Buddhist rhetoric. Buddhism, being more welcoming than not to all levels of spiritual development, doesn't set the bar so high here and doesn't require one to drop physicalism to adopt Buddhist practices. For our purposes on this sub, I think physicalism being thrown out is fundamental to right view.

^2. 'Ethical conduct' has different implications depending on the way one interprets it. Being kind, talking kindly, and working at a job where you don't manufacture guns or slaughter livestock is the conventional interpretation, emphasis on "conventional". For this sub, consider the ethical obligation to the furthering of one's practice to be the ultimate obligation, with conventional morality and ethics being of secondary (but non-zero) importance. Being friendly rather than unfriendly is of benefit to you and other beings and removes the seeds of would-be hindrances and latent mental stress -- but of more glaring importance is that you remain devoted to your highest ideals, which have little to do with the dreaming world.

Thanks to mindseal for some well-advised clarifications on differences between my interpretation and Buddhist canon.

So I have an actual post on this subject which I'll put up after this, but I thought I should maybe introduce myself first. This is just a little background on what brought me to subjective idealism/some of the phenomena I've experienced. I've been a lurker on this and other similar subs for a while now, but haven't really posted before.

As far back as I can remember I've had an inner conviction that the world was not as set in stone as it appeared to be. My earliest memories of contemplating this sort of thing come from around age 3-4. My first lucid dream occurred at around that time. In it, I was at the pre-school I attended. The setting and people were a true-to-life reproduction and everything was extremely realistic.

For no particular reason I suddenly became lucid. I turned to one of my teachers and told her that this was all just a dream and therefore nothing was real. She said "Oh, really?" in that condescending way adults do - you know, the “I'm not really listening but I have to respond kindly to child nonsense" tone. And suddenly I felt expansive, universe-sized. I had an unchildlike feeling of being the adult and she the child. Adults have power and knowledge that children lack - I had knowledge she was incapable of grasping (it was a dream) and power she couldn't access (in a dream you can do what you like - she was bound to behave conventionally because she mistook the dream for reality). I also had this difficult to articulate sensation of being a spectator-beyond-the-illusion, of being a larger being with a depth of seriousness that doesn't "belong" to a kid under five.

For various reasons I find this lucid dream more interesting than any I've had as an adult. For one thing, as an actual child in the waking world, that condescending talking-to-kids voice worked on me - which is to say, I didn't notice it. Before and after the dream, I can remember telling adults about imaginary friends and babbling to them about kid stuff. Recollecting those occasions now I recognise that I was responded to in the "talking to small children" voice - but at the time it was invisible to me. For the duration of the dream only, I accessed some state of greater knowledge/awareness where I recognised the voice, knew its purpose and mentally repudiated it.

More than this, though, the dream was valuable because of the larger-than-who-I-am sensation it produced in me, which I can access now by recalling the dream.

Anyway, growing up, conventionality grabbed me for a long time. I learned pretty quickly not to mention the niggling sensation I had that the world isn't as it seems. You do that once or twice and realise that that way mental institutions lie. I tried to explore spirituality through conventionally accepted paths, but I was disturbed by the nihilism of Buddhism, frankly disgusted by the illogic of Christianity and irritated by the inflexibility of both. I also felt they were seriously lacking in a sense of fun.

A couple of years ago I had an experience which, for me, confirmed that the world is stranger than we acknowledge and helped kick me back into a search for answers. I find this story slightly embarrassing because I like to think that if you're going to have an act of magic surprised out of you, it should be because you suddenly find the overwhelming poverty in the world so intolerable that you rediscover your divinity. Or you see a great injustice about to occur, a murderer about to walk free, and you unearth your inner superhero.

Well, I lost a gift voucher. To be fair to me, it was a straw that breaks the camel's back scenario. On the back of a two week period of depression stemming from a hatred of the solid inflexibility of the world, of being tired of despair and injustice that I couldn't fix and of the world being devoid of mystery and just persistently awful, I was briefly happy to realise there was something I wanted to buy and I had a gift voucher which would allow me do it. Moreover, I'm dreadful with gift vouchers. I lose them, I let them expire, but THIS one I had been careful with. So I reached for the spot where I'd carefully put it – and it wasn’t there.

I can't tell you what a sustained rage this threw me into. I knew it was a stupid thing to get that angry about but I didn't care. For three solid days I pretty much decided that I was throwing myself into auto-pilot for the rest of my life and refusing to engage with the world beyond going through the motions for the sake of family and friends. I was done. At the back of it all, I knew it wasn't just the gift voucher - it was that even when you play by the rules of this stupid world, you still lose. The rules were all too consistent until they weren't and I was D. O. N. E.

Day three of this, I’m standing in my room and I give the universe one last chance to be decent. I ask for a sign, a hint, a vision of where the accursed thing is – and a coin appears in midair out of the corner of my eye and falls to the ground. I had this sensation which I don’t know how to describe – everything felt weird or thin. I pick up the coin – and it’s a special edition coin commemorating the wedding of Kate/Prince William. I’m thinking – that didn’t just happen. And I hear, but don’t see this time, another coin fall behind me. I turn around and this one is a regular coin but it’s fallen queen-side up (I’m in Australia, all our coins have the queen on one side). I happen to like cryptic crosswords, and out of nowhere the idea enters my head that this is a cryptic clue.

I stare at the coin and “William” keeps running through my head. I look at the queen coin and “royal majesty” runs through my head, which is particularly nonsensical because I’m aware she’s styled as “her royal highness” not “royal majesty.” “Royal Majesty Williams” runs through my head.

Suddenly it hits me. There’s a huge bag I’d filled with junk a few days ago, ready to be thrown out, and it’s an R.M.Williams (iconic Aussie brand) bag. Feeling surreal, I walk to the bag, tip it upside down - and there it is. The card I’d torn my house apart looking for.

Anyway, the card reverted to its proper state of being not very important – I think I ended up spending it on something for my sister. I stopped being (that) angry and started seeking truth again. I wasn’t very successful – I kept thinking that I needed a mentor or teacher or some pointer. I had no idea where to turn. At the back of my mind I probably knew I wouldn’t tolerate a mentor since I resent authority figures, but I knew I needed help – and then I stumbled on this corner of the internet. After years of fruitless internet searching, it seemed to come at just the right time and a great deal of it resonated with me.

Actually - I can’t tell you what a relief it was to find you guys. You’ve made leaps and connections that I can’t flatter myself I’d have reached on my own. I remember that when I first read /u/mindseal’s warning about how pursuing this path makes you (by the standards of the world) insane, I discounted it. I see now that you were right. That said, I would not alter my decision to explore that rabbit hole for anything. This brand of insanity may be uncomfortable in some respects but it’s also non-optional for me, now.

This post is much longer than I intended. I’ve had other experiences but I’ll leave them for now. I’ll sum up with my own aspirations – as I said, I always felt the world wasn’t what it seemed. I was sure there were other worlds and I want to be able to access them at will.

This forum is primarily dedicated to higher quality posts and discussions. Those are welcome from everyone but will be filtered by the moderators. In order to foster more discussion, we have decided to start a weekly stickied discussion thread for the subreddit. This discussion thread is a place for people to post things that are more casual regarding subjective idealism, and things that are more exploratory. Here is a place for individuals to propose ideas and ask questions and figure out subjective idealism.

Talk more casually about SI here without having to make a formal post.

I was thinking, "If the physical world is an illusion, how can I come to access the world beyond illusion? Senses are all no-go's. What else do I have to work with?" And I thought, oddly enough, of senselessness.

So I closed my eyes very, very slowly. I watched as my vision, which seemed to take up the entire potential visible field, began to develop definite 'edges' The top and bottom of my visual field started to disappear into the lightlessness of closed eyes. And soon what remained of my vision was just a tiny, trembling flicker surrounded almost entirely by lightlessness until my eyes finally closed entirely. And I'd do this again and again, very slowly opening them back up, and very slowly re-closing them.

I started imagining an image of myself with two tiny, round TV screens floating in front of my eyeballs like the lenses of eyeglasses. And each of them was showing me a very slightly different perspective on the world in the same way that 3D glasses do to present a 3D movie.

And the interesting part really began when, as I slowly closed my eyes, I would imagine the screens compressing horizontally until they dissolved away, and as I slowly opened my eyes, the screens would emerge again and slowly expand. And I held this visual in my mind very strongly and probably spent no less than 15 minutes imagining that, as I felt my physical eyes close, the 3D screens were dissolving. I recommend you do this and pay special note to what you begin to 'see' when your eyes are closed.

The sensation settled in that as I closed my eyes, I was effectively opening my actual visual field to the "genuine" world -- and naturally when I felt like I was opening my eyes, I was actually covering up the real universe with a virtual screen.

What are the implications of this exercise?

Well, it implies that the emptiness you see when you close your eyes is kind of "more real" than what you see when your eyes are open. This means that total sensory deprivation, including thoughts, would be the effective extinguishing of the physical world -- and also, therefore, might share similarities with the state of mind of an enlightened being. This may be intuitive, but what's (I think) profound to imagine is that what's left, the dark, scentless, tasteless, sensationless, thoughtless world you'd experience in total sensory deprivation, is precisely the state you return to in deep sleep, certain states of meditation, or death. When you close your eyes, you're looking at the "Real World" beyond illusion. The only illusion would be to imagine that you're seeing the backs of eyelids.

I found this to be very powerful to experiment with.

Another very interesting thing that can be done with this practice is to, while sitting in a dim-to-dark environment, perceiving all of the dark spots in your field of vision (shadows, black objects, etc.) as 'holes' in the screen. The nature of the visual field suddenly becomes very thin, 2D, and almost transparent.

I want to make perfectly clear that this is an exercise intended to stretch and bend the mind, chip away at conventional understandings, and make you as flexible as possible. The darkness or blindness of closed-eyes is no more 'real' or 'genuine' or 'enlightened' then the light and visuals of opened-eyes. You are not actually perceiving anything more valid when your eyes are closed. But framing it this way is a very powerful thing to play with precisely because we so often DO think of our opened-eyes perceptions as being 'real'. This is not, in and of itself, a method of insight, but rather an exercise in flexibility. An important distinction.

So a little bit of context for this, I've found the idea of mind as a three-fold capacity very useful for a lot of things. This is focused on the aspect of mind "experience." So to dabble a little in experience, I would like to define "dimension" as an element of experience.

Now that that is out of the way. The elements of experience or dimensions are defined by the other two aspects of mind, will/intention and knowledge. A single experience can have infinite possible dimensions, and by knowing the ones you would like to include in an experience you can knowingly will them into your experience.

An example: I recently went to a music festival where I planned to consume a variety of psychedelic substances. So my intention was to have a psychedelic dimension to my experience. (Goal achieved lol.) What I didn't realize is that my dimension of music festival sort of mixed with my dimension of psychedelia and it turned out that everyone I met was also having a psychedelic experience.

This wasn't a bad thing. I've never been lost in the woods with a bunch of other people all out of their minds on psychedelics but it was enjoyable. Anyways the second night of camping was interesting. It started to downpour right after it got dark, and we were mostly in the woods, so dark was really dark. Once the rain started visual-acuity was reduced to a matter of feet and it was my first time ever being at this location. A friend I was walking with when the rain started, has anxiety and started to get worried we were lost and would never get back to certainty (our campsite.)

So the way this ties in is that I just felt the need to wander. With the framework of dimensions being elements of experience, The dimensions I was participating in were: dark, wet, raining, music, group, and walking. All the people (more dimensions) that we passed were new dimensions coming and going. Even the scenery was a dimension that was coming and going. My friend was really freaked out because he was so uncertain of if we would ever make it back to something familiar and everyone he asked for directions had no idea where we were or where they were going. People would literally just point and say go that way. Ha, without reference to anything after a few steps, "That way" almost became a joke to me.

I decided that we would find our campsite after I had had my fill of wandering and wanted to find a towel to dry off with. We eventually found a campsite marked 237. That's my number and the same friend I was with used to take it for granted. He believed I was just looking for the number like people do when they get a new car and everyone else seems to have that car. Except we had been wandering through uncertainty for over an hour in the rain, and just found 237. My friend almost fell down crying when he saw it.

TL;DR - Let go of expectations sometimes and just wander. Your will and knowledge will guide you if you're lost. But wandering is a fun and interesting way to pass time.

PS - get lost in the woods sometime. It's healthy!

This forum is primarily dedicated to higher quality posts and discussions. Those are welcome from everyone but will be filtered by the moderators. In order to foster more discussion, we have decided to start a weekly stickied discussion thread for the subreddit. This discussion thread is a place for people to post things that are more casual regarding subjective idealism, and things that are more exploratory. Here is a place for individuals to propose ideas and ask questions and figure out subjective idealism.

I was walking around in a park and decided to apply a transformation to my experience when I kept hearing an annoying siren that just wouldn't shut up.

As soon as I decided that, the siren started to get quieter, with some subtle ups and downs in volume, but trending downward in volume. But this wasn't happening fast enough for my liking. So I was then focusing this way and that, and I was adjusting my mentality like this and like that to make it go faster. And then it struck me.

It struck me that the reason I was doing that is because on some level I was still assuming that magick is something objective, and then it was my job to find the one right way to do it. I had to match my activity to something I imagined to be objectively the most effective way of performing a transformation.

Then I realized the idiocy of that belief and I found it funny how I still continued to believe it on some level even though I know better. I'm not even sure I've learned my lesson. It's entirely possible the next time some transformation doesn't work fast enough, I'll be trying to "tune" it, lol. I hope not. At minimum I shouldn't tune anything with the idea that I'm matching what I am doing to some external unbending and eternal standard.

A place for more casual conversation about subjective idealism and its implications.

Your innermost heart is brilliant beyond brilliance and steady beyond steady. It is calm. It is perfectly poised. It is all-capable. It is invincible. It is a repository of all possible virtue and all possible health. You can consider this proposition in a lively manner, without any dead rote, but really considering it sincerely as if hearing it for the first time each time you consider it.

As you do so, you can hold your two hands together and put them comfortably in front of you. It's essential to deliberately focus on the softest and mildest feelings. Something subtle can be very powerful. A whisper of a feeling can overwhelm something that roars when you feed it with your attention and love. So as you hold your two hands together, feel the softness and kindness of your left hand seep into your right, and the softness and kindness of your right hand seep into your left. There is no need to make it a strong feeling. The key for this type of exercise is subtlety. It can be a subtle but very distinct and noticeable feeling. It may start to feel warm and comfortable, and soft kindness will glow in your hands.

When soft kindness glows in your hands, you can allow it to gradually expand by feeling the very same thing you feel in your hands all over your body. When this happens remember your true innermost heart. Consider how invincible, calm, steady your innermost heart is. It is like the starry sky at night. There is no agitation in it at all, and it is your innermost core.

When developing an ability to assert arbitrary propositions as knowledge it's necessary to have at least extraordinary courage, if not fearlessness. It is well known that one way to develop courage is by deliberately subjecting oneself to difficult experiences. Asceticism is a practice in that vein, but challenges don't have to be in the form of body denial or conventional personality denial as in the typical ascentic practices. Anything that puts one outside the comfort zone is a challenge.

For a thoroughgoing subjective idealist such challenges can at times be really outlandish, unreasonable and mad in order to be effective, because a more "usual" sort of challenge is just not necessarily going to be felt as a meaingful or interesting challenge. Plus, in order for a challenge to be effective at liberating one from rigid conventional habits it has to be intimately conceived. If one seeks freedom one must only undertake challenges of one's own design and refuse all other challenges as meaningless. That way one can take conscious responsibility for the challenge as well as understand the ins and outs of why this or that area of personal sensitivity must be faced head on in some case that's particular to one's subjective state. That way a challenge will fit neatly into one's own unique manner of development and it will correspond to one's personality in a way that's authentic.

Plus, I don't hear about many spiritually liberated people who are good at hitting the boss' deadlines. So rising to other people's challenges is something I consider a total waste of one's time and I don't recommend it. If ever the word gets around, you might have a line of trolls coming your way with all kinds of challenges for you. Plus, rising to other people's challenges is generally done with the desire to satisfy those people's expectations rather than one's own. But it is yourself that you have to convince of your capability and no one else.

Consider how this or that challenge would fit into your plan to liberate yourself from convention.

But there is a problem with challenges. The problem is that challenges don't prove anything, even to yourself. After all, if you rise to the occasion once, maybe it was a fluke right? So maybe you have to do it twice. But then again, two times might have been a fluke, so three times is better. But wait, those three times don't count because you were young and strong. Now that you're older you have to do it again to see if you can still do it when older. And so on. In other words, if one wants to doubt oneself, the possibility for a doubting narrative is always there!

That's why challenging oneself can easily become a trap of perpetual insecurity where one constantly feels the need to overcome this, that, and the other, to repeatedly prove to oneself one's own greatness. One might even come up with a slogan for this hapless attitude, "I'm only as good as my last challenge!" Maybe it will sound familiar.

Someone wise in the way of subjective idealism will recognize this trap.

The goal then is not to prove anything. The goal is to learn how to rest in the knowledge of capability, no matter what. It is that state of knowing that's the goal. Because ultimately such knowing cannot be justified by anything, it is essentially madness. So trying to attain such a state through a means that's entirely reasonable is not likely to work.

What I find works best is to rise to this or that challenge on occasion, but to do so sparingly, and to know that one's state of confidence and capability cannot be earned or proven. It cannot be proven to others, and it cannot be proven even to oneself. Rather, the knowing of capability is simply assumed without anyone's approval or permission. Once assumed one then commits to living in line with that knowing. And that's all there is to it.

Of course one major reason why such a tactic can work is precisely because of subjective idealism. So if you understand what makes subjective idealism true, you're not going to be entirely unreasonable in your madness. Then you might only appear unreasonable from the POV of convention.

A practical exploration, in terms of having the experiences we want:

“When I know what I want in this world, when I am thinking of it, it is always beyond me. When I know what I want, I enter into that state and think from it.” - Neville Goddard

I often find myself in the former, with the experience I desire out of my reach. Quite frustrating.

One night, I was somehow accidentally able to think from it with ease. It was surprisingly simple to do, like something hidden in plain sight all along. It was less of a lateral move - just imagining or visualizing over top of this moment, as I usually do. It was more like my awareness moved up in time, I was less so 'here', and everything was being drawn towards it. A great sense of ease. I'd like to practice this.

Perhaps some of you are familiar with this or have some insights on the subject?

edit: I suppose 'thinking from' could be seen under the umbrella of detachment, letting go.

This should be a short explanation. More of an experiment for anyone to try:

Consider from the point of view of context that you have a secret. You're able to share this secret with whoever you wish but there's no necessity in doing so. This secret is that whatever environment you find yourself in can instantly and effortlessly have the framework of a gameshow applied to it. Given that this points towards the abstract idea of a gameshow and not any particular instance you have a few things to decide.

First, are you a contestant, a judge, the host, or part of the audience? After choosing your locale, orient yourself to whatever form of gameshow you would enjoy to be a part of. If you can't decide, let the content guide you.

As an example, when going out to eat at a restaurant: maybe your secret gameshow turns out to be something like "Americas Top Chef." All of the sudden you find yourself as one of the judges on the show. You get seated in a premiere location and waited on professionally. Your contestants are now premiere chefs fighting each other with all of their creativity in order to win the big prize. Your food comes out.

Suddenly you shift your secret to be an Instagram influencer with thousands of viewers who love to watch you eat. It may take a little more care so that you don't make a mess out of yourself, but every bite tastes like the best thing you've ever eaten. Thousands of people remotely watch on the edge of their seats as you take every bite, relishing it with you. You finish eating completely satisfied, not only by the food but also by the fact that you've put on quite the performance for your viewers.

Another shift and you're exiting the stage as a contestant or performer. You give a deep bow or courtesy and everyone around you claps and cheers at that stunning show they got to witness.

Exit stage left.~

On the face of it subjective idealism appears to have frighteningly little content. To briefly summarize it, what does subjective idealism propose?

Firstly, all that can be known and experienced is a product of one's own mind.

Secondly, one's own mind cannot be understood in terms of one or any set of its products.

Thirdly, all the specifics of knowledge and experience are volitional or subjective. (Volitional and subjective are synonyms here. They mean the same thing.)

And that's about it.

So isn't this rather thin? This philosophy tells us nothing about the color of the sky, or whether or not there even is such a thing as the sky. It tells us nothing about the shape and the size of any body. It tells us nothing about whether or not music exists and which sort of music is best. It tells us nothing about space and time even! It tells us nothing about the number of sentient beings: is there just one or are there many? Although it does suggest there is at least one sentient being: the reader. It tells us nothing about how best to relate to experience, including when we experience ourselves to be in the presence of what we believe to be other sentient beings.

Even from the POV of aesthetics, subjective idealism is so abstract, that to find beauty in it requires a very particular sense of beauty tending toward maximum parsimony and simplicity. So there is a possibility of someone studying it for its aesthetic beauty, but I want contend it won't be that for most people who might want to study it.

So what might the utility be?

Hypothetically a subjective idealist can hold any sort of axiomatic commitment(s). A subjective idealist can even hold a commitment to the axioms of physicalism. If so, what is the difference then between a subjective idealist holding a commitment to physicalism and a bona fide physicalist? The difference is that a bona fide physicalist doesn't feel that the postulates of physicalism are a choice. A physicalist will feel as though the truth of physicalism somehow impresses itself upon the mind whether one likes it or not. So in other words, in the language of subjective idealism, a physicalist is someone who has othered or disowned one's own commitment to physicalism and is no longer consciously aware of it.

And these sorts of othered commitments can be the strongest ones. These are the commitments that are tacit, unspoken, default, instintinctual. They're unspoken because they're so "obvious" that they don't need to be mentioned. They're so widely and pervasively assumed in the subjective sphere of one's own mind that one needn't discuss or think about them. And there is a lot of power in this. Allowing one's own commitment to become tacit and implicit to the greatest possible degree makes the experiential consequences of that commitment very stable and densely apparent.

And now we can understand why someone might want to study subjective idealism.

Simply put contemplating subjective idealism returns a sense of personal conscious choice to one's deepest core commitments. And this in turn opens up the possibility of making a change at the most profound level of one's relationship to one's sphere of experience.

This suggests a strong theme of discontentment at the deepest level of one's phenomenal reality. Why would anyone even think about changing one's fundamental axioms about phenomenal reality if the person considered them even remotely workable?

And it also suggests that one is considering alternative commitments. So if not physicalism, what then? I suggest that subjective idealism itself is too thin, too abstract, and so I don't think it can replace physicalism by itself. Becoming consciously aware of one's commitment to physicalism weakens that commitment, but if we're not going to contemplate any alternatives, there is no point in weakening one's perception of physicalism.

Another thing to consider is, do we want to jump to just one long-term alternative? Or do we want to develop a more complex system of relating to one's experience through the lens of more than one commitment in parallel?

And if more than one, then how many? Two? Three? More?

There are so many possibilities here that I cannot even imagine them all. I just intuitively feel that the choice here is mindblowingly wide open. My own ready imagination is restricted by prior expectations. What I might be able to imagine tomorrow might be different from what I can imagine today. What one can imagine in principle is different from what can readily imagine right now.

One choice that's obvious to me personally is going for subjective idealism plus a dual combination of physicalism and solipsism. So one way to exercise this is to relate to one's experience as a physicalist during most typical activity, but to relate to one's experience as a solipsist during a magickal ritual. There are many possibilities, and this is only one, just as an example. Another possibility is to relate to one's experience as a physicalist when comfortable, but in times of crisis relate to one's experience as a solipsist. An obligatory car metaphor is that you use cruise control when the driving is safe, but take manual control of the car when it's potentially dangerous. So this presupposes being able to shift one's manner of relating when necessary, and this implies that one has to be aware that even such fundamental and axiomatic commitments as physicalism are voluntary, and this is exactly what studying subjective idealism can accomplish.

Other slightly less obvious possibilities can include: living with the ability to switch on demand between animism and solipsism. Jumping to full-time animism, where subjective idealism is only a realtively brief transitional period necessary to accomplish the jump. One can even live with the ability to switch between physicalism, animism and solipsism. Or one can live with the ability to switch between animism and physicalism under the framework of subjective idealism.

So it seems to me that if one wants to be able to switch rapidly between two or more sets of fundamental axioms regarding how to relate to one's experience, then subjective idealism is helpful on a long term basis.

And if one wants to just switch from physicalism to animism, then subjective idealism can be helpful as a transitioning phase, after which one can become a bona fide animist.

Another possible reason to study subjective idealism is to gain the ability to update significant details in your otherwise favorite system of core belief. So with the aid of subjective idealism one could shift one's commitment from physicalism A to physicalism B. As an example, maybe in physicalism A faster than light travel is impossible, and in physicalism B it is possible.

There is another powerful reason to never become bona fide anything other than a subjective idealist. And that is, you may realize that no set of axioms about how to best relate to your subjective experience is going to be desirable forever. Since you anticipate the need to switch at some point when you grow tired of a certain way of life, you may want to keep yourself ready for such change by having never allowed yourself to get to the point where some core metaphysical commitments have become instinctive and unconscious. That way if you realize you may want to live 30 human lifetimes as an animist, you could do that, and then on your 30th lifetime you could switch to say physicalism without any particulalry arduous spiritual effort, provided you kept yourself a subjective idealist with a commitment to animism and never became a bona fide animist.

I want to make a small post mostly to just spill some thoughts I've had recently and to perhaps stir a little discussion. To provide a little something to ponder on in quiet moments for the next few days and to maybe open people up to some new ideas.

What is the prevalence of individuals capable of exceptional, non-conventional actions? I mean individuals who are capable of experiencing, intending, and knowing things that are beyond the scope of convention? Is the answer that there are many? Just a few? None at all? Is the number of such individuals dependent upon the extent to which you are presently capable of accessing your own capacities? Are any of the great or famous characters of history such individuals?

Or are you and you alone the only such person who could presently have such a capacity? Is your current conception of reality compatible with others expressing such non-conventional capacities at all? If not, what would have to be different about how you conceive of the world? How might you go about changing your conception of the potential of reality?

I know that most of us, even in weird communities like this, still routinely experience the world around us as stale and unmagical. Even if it is idealistic and not physicalist in nature, that doesn't instantly make it appear to us as full of magic. Why not? If currently-unconventional and magical actions were so ubiquitous that they were every bit as common and conventional as currently-conventional actions, would they still be magical in any way? Is there any fundamental difference between that which is currently perceived as unconventional and magical and that which is currently perceived as ubiquitous and conventional? Or is it arbitrary?

Can you conceive of currently-unconventional things being completely conventional? Can you conceive of currently-conventional things being completely unconventional? Can you actively experience either of them as such? Can you make a chair unconventional and magical? Can you make a dragon conventional?

Have you ever seen anyone perform, or performed yourself, an action (be that knowing, intending, or experiencing) which is utterly non-conventional? Was the non-conventional action perceived as something internal (e.g. a bizarre dream) or something external (e.g. something featured on /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix)? Do the divisions of "inner" and "outer" experiences seem to have different definitions for what seems unconventional?

Where is the line that divides the inner and outer and why is it where it is? Can it be moved to facilitate unconventional actions?

Just some thoughts to grease those rusty gears. I welcome all discussion on any of the dozens of questions I posed.

I've grown particularly interested in developing the psychic senses (the "remote" senses) as a middle-term/long-term spiritual goal recently. Not in the sense of communicating with spirits directly or symbolically via those clair-senses, but in the sense of generally attaining experiences and knowledge from the illusory world in ways not seemingly tied to the illusory physicalist/body-centric mentality.

Now, you might say 'why would you want to develop this if ultimately there is no world out there and it's all an illusion?' Well, even if it's an illusion, you're somewhat going to be playing as if it is not, as long as you are maintaining any sense of "senses"/"experiences" of the world that do not consciously feel like explicit actions/intentions on your part - i.e. if you want any form of othering.

So, with othering there will be a feeling of some experiences/knowledge/information coming from 'somewhere else' (even if you think of it as your own subconscious). The catch is that in a physicalist mindset, we limit the sorts of incoming information to strictly physically tied modes (senses tied to material sense organs that only give information/experience when in a certain spatial relationship to other material objects - and then all more abstract knowledge of the world must be derived from that materially rooted information). So, I think a materially tied conception of consciousness is a major aspect of rebirth (i.e. body dies -> mind dies/has major forgetfulness). Thus, I think one of the keys to moving toward liberation from rebirth/attaining immortality/self-deification is at least loosening up if not eliminating the fixation of physical senses from material body-organs (so at minimum having "remote senses" as an options if not always active) as well as loosening our ability to learn abstract knowledge about the world only by conclusions from sensory/experiential data (so, it should be possible to gain abstract information about the world without drawing conclusions from experience a la psychometry or claircognizance or whatever.

Of course, these alternative senses are all as adjustable as the ordinary senses. So you might remote-vision that there is a couch in the other room. If you are practiced well enough, you can make that couch dissolve, just like you could make the couch you seemingly see with you eyes dissolve before you. That leads me to an important point. Your ordinary senses are forms of psychic senses. You are just shaping them exclusively in ways that we would consider bodily/physical/sense-organ-oriented. A lot of this is related to some ideas in my post ‘The Construction of the Senses’.

So, in conclusion, I'm going to be exploring how to start taking the baby steps to develop these sorts of abilities in my future, just like I am doing with magick/manifestation/attraction/whatever you want to call it.

I feel like there's probably some parallels between the two. With magick, a big part of it is first learning any degree of conscious focus/concentration/will even in ordinary life. Then you can apply it to things you believe are possible/probable and the idea is to progressive increase the difficulty/unlikelihood of the transformations you attempt. So, with remote senses, how to start and develop the requisite skills and powers? It's something I'm going to be thinking about and commenting about as time goes on. I think that healing is one good beginners skill with magick. And I think that psychic-body awareness is a good correspondent psychic sense skill to develop for beginners. I realize now that in many ways I’ve already developed this skill as I’ve practiced healing, I just didn’t know it or have a conception consciously of what I was doing or what it meant in the bigger picture. But there are many many fun and interesting ways to practice. (I wonder what is the closest psychic-sense correspondent, if there is one, to the form of abstract magick that is probability/spell-casting style magick? Hmm)

I'm quite interested in hearing your thoughts on this, folks.

Imagine your body has become coated in a semi-transparent film. It coats your skin and covers your eyes and ears. It has a very subtle opaque, smoky quality, and it distorts, fuzzes, the perception of anything beyond it. You can make out the objects around you – there’s your cell phone, your water bottle, your shoes, your lamp – and you feel yourself to be seeing them all quite clearly. You can pick them up, examine them, touch them, taste them, analyze and describe them. You have learned to entirely ignore the opaqueness.

In fact, you don’t even need to ignore it. You’ve learned to adjust your eyes to simply focus on the film itself instead, rather than attempting to perceive the objects beyond. So while you may feel yourself to be looking directly at an object, you are actually looking directly at the object’s reflection in the opaque film and confusing that for the direct object itself. As a result, you spend your time dwelling in a reflection of reality rather than in direct contact with it. You are like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory, watching only shadows on the wall, thinking them to be objects in-and-of themselves.

What is the film made of? How did it get there? Can it be removed?

The film is not a physical object. It is a mode of consciousness. To remove it, you must adopt an alternative mode of consciousness. Modes of consciousness are notoriously difficult to explain with words. Like the finger pointing to the Moon, thinking, pondering, and conceptualizing within one mode of consciousness is rarely a productive means of exiting that mode of consciousness and entering another. This would be like explaining the color blue to someone using only words and shades of red.

Let’s try anyway.

First, understand that the mode of consciousness you are attempting to adopt is no different from “being here and now” or “attaining mindfulness” or “waking up”. It is also no different from “opening the third eye”, which in an apt metaphor, focuses the mind directly on the experiences rather than allowing it to be lost in the duality and illusion of the everyday mode of consciousness. The trick is not actually achieving this state – it is recognizing the state we are currently in. Attaining the meditative and enlightened mode of consciousness happens quite intuitively and naturally and does not need to be forced. Being able to see the everyday mode of consciousness, and not simply ‘tuning into’ it and thereby confusing it with the direct perception of reality, is far trickier and quite necessary.

So, naturally, the next thing you must do is accept, acknowledge, feel, and digest the fact that all of your perceptions are indirect, fuzzy, opaque, distorted, illusory. Conceptualize your perceptual field – especially your field of vision and your field of thoughts – with that opaque film. Come to persuade your intuition – which may resist quite strongly – that though you always think of your current mode of consciousness as a direct channel to reality, it is not. Allow your eyes to unfocus, and consciously conceptualize the world around you as a 2D surface, as lacking substance or depth, as being a mere reflection. Dwell in this state for some time. It is not our instinct to see the illusion for what it is and it takes time and reflection and contemplation for our minds to adjust on a deep and visceral level.

Then, re-focus your eyes and proceed to stare directly and intensely on a single point or object while focusing sharply and pointedly on your own breathing, re-focusing every moment. Each instant, replicate your action of the previous second: focus on where you feel the breath in your body right in that instant, and focus on looking straight at the point or object. Don’t allow instinct to take over. Don’t allow yourself to go on auto-pilot. Keep re-upping your attention. If distinct thoughts arise in your mind, if self-reflection begins, if you start to conceptualize your breathing or the point, your perception has tuned itself to the film again. You can repeat the practice and try again. The practice is successful when the point or object is seen directly – when all perceptions become direct perceptions (when the distance between self and object vanishes), and when thoughts, internal dialogue, and self-reflection fade away.

Hallmarks of this direct perceiving, tuning ‘past’ the illusion, include: a sense of awe or wonder at the 3D-ness and vividness of the perception, a sense of playfulness or spontaneity, a sense of being aware and attentive to all thoughts or perceptions, of clarity, a sense that perceptions are malleable, flexible, impermanent, or intangible, and the sense that one is having a dream or dream-like experience. Perhaps the strongest test of one’s own mode of consciousness is the perception of other beings. If other people are felt to be purely external, made of something other than what you are made of, originating from a different source than you originate from, or if solipsism feels potentially valid, you are not perceiving directly. If others feel internal, or if the internal-external dichotomy feels invalid, or if others are felt as originating from a similar source to yourself, or of ‘self’ is a concept which doesn’t apply to any particular human point-of-view, including your own, you may be seeing directly, perceiving attentively, awake to your direct experiences.

No magic, no alteration of reality, no occult practices, are feasible without first attaining this mode of consciousness. From the everyday mode of consciousness, such acts are performed on the wall of the Cave – they miss their targets entirely and the performers will not understand why, or become convinced that magic is impossible.

This is a basic teaching. It is a beginner’s teaching. If you can’t master this, don’t bother going anywhere else. You can read about the truth and speak about the truth and contemplate the truth, but none of these indicate your own perception of it, your own attentiveness to it, your own awareness of it. And the talk and reading will all be vanity without that direct perception.

It is sometimes said that we want to prolong the pleasant situations and to avoid the unpleasant. It's very tempting to mentally swat at the unpleasant situations or experiences as they arise. I don't hold any extreme views in this regard, but I do think some caution here is a good idea.

The problem that can happen is that once you swat at the bad thing and let's say you get rid of it, you're still left believing that the thing you just swatted at is something that can sometimes happen, and maybe even should, which isn't always a good thing.

So for example, this body of mine had zits for a while, and it seemed like the more I was popping them, the more they appeared. It was as though my body was saying, "You seem to enjoy popping those things, so here are some more then." I've had much fewer problems once I started thinking that I have healthy skin, no matter what it looks like, and minimized any popping. Now I hardly have any zits at all.

Let's say there is situation I do not want. It's tempting to only focus on removing it. But it's at least as important to focus on a situation that I do want, a kind of good situation which simply leaves no room for the situation I don't want.

The reason for this is that the othered side of mind can be really arbitrary. Once I had a dream where as far as I could see, up to infinity, I saw these hideous locusts everywhere. This is a clue. The mind has no limit in terms of imagining obstacles. I really realized something in that dream. Normally my instinct would be to swat at the locust. This is fine if there is only one or two. OK, but I am studious and stubborn, so I can swat even 10 thousand. But what if it's endless? What if it's a self-sustaining process? Doh. Then obviously I have to think differently.

In a way the subconscious mind is sometimes trolling me. If I am dealing with an opponent who is not playing fair, I cannot win in a fair contest. So an infinity of locusts is not a fair and sporting opponent. Competing with them using some sports-like notions makes no sense. The only workable option is to be unfair myself, such as, denying them reality in a summary way, mentally. And, imagining green hills with some trees is more important than imagining how to get rid of locusts, especially if there is an infinite number of them. If it's just one, I think it's OK to imagine how to get rid of it, but if I sense it's going to become a recurring pattern, I have to take a different approach to manifestation than to swat at the bad experience or scenario.

That's also why when healing, it's very important to sense health right inside the sick area, as much as possible, in addition to whatever visualization one might use to clean the bad condition out. So if you visualize the bad stuff as a black smoke and you see it leaving the body, that's OK, but just as important, I think, is to focus on the good right in the middle of the "bad." It can be challenging to sense pain-free goodness and health right inside something that hurts and looks swollen, but this is highly effective in my experience.

Some challenges are enjoyable. But it's also possible to face an unwinnable challenge, and if that's the case, there is no need to play fair. And winnable challenges can sometimes become unwinnable if we swat at them too recklessly and/or with too little wisdom. So I'm not against mental negations, but I do see a case where negations can sometimes escalate into something that's hard to manage by the ever more copious negations.