weirdway

This is related to my recent night time dreams. Two nights in a row I've been dreaming that I am flying by jumping up and then vigorously moving my arms. In yesternight's dream I've dreamed I was making swimming motions as if swimming through the air. I could even adjust the amount of air lift by adjusting the angle of my hand, lol. This night I dreamed I was flapping my arms up and down like a bird.

I've long known that this is a problem (for over a decade, let's say). So right in the dream I stopped whatever I was doing and thought, this arm flapping business is a technique I use to fly. And it's a problem. Because when I rely on it I train myself to believe that arm flapping equals flying, and no arm flapping equals no flying. I know I don't really need to flap my arms to fly. So I stood there for some time trying to fly properly, and I couldn't, even though I knew it was a dream and everything. Just couldn't do it at the time.

So apparently this one technique ran away from me, so to speak. This technique has taken a life of its own and now it will be a bit of a struggle to undo it, especially considering how successful it's become for me (it works nearly every time and I have great confidence in it, apparently). That's right. The more successful a technique is, the more dangerous I believe it is, because it's becoming more and more ingrained in the mind, more and more habituated.

The same thing happens when I am dreaming during the day time. Like for example, when I try to cool off during heat, I don't just spontaneously cool off. Instead I visualize a region of coolness and I connect that imaginary region to what I also know is actually imaginary, which is the conventional region of heat in the body during a summer day, and I begin a mind-mediated heat transfer, essentially. So it's a technique. As a technique it gets better and better the more I use it. I figure by the time I get it to work reliably, I won't be able to achieve heat sensation transformation in any other way other than that specific technique. In other words, what I am doing isn't necessarily a good thing.

But I am in a bit of a bind here. On one hand, I don't want to be stuck in a technique. In essence this entire conventional world is a technique (habituation) gone rogue. I don't want to add more techniques to a giant pile of techniques here. On the other hand, I think it's really good to break out of the mold. And the easiest way to have an unusual experience is to use a technique. To do a raw straight up transformation without some kind of imaginary aid is in my experience difficult even during a night time dream. And during the dream of waking, what we call conventional world appearance, it's exceptionally difficult to do a raw un-techniqued transformation. When I attempt it, it feels like I'm licking a mountain.

So I don't have any advice as to what's best in this scenario. I'm just saying, look, techniques are potentially dangerous. At least we need to know what the danger is. So techniques can help speed up transformations and they can make transformations reliable and repeatable, but they also make it so that those transformations become locked up behind those techniques, and the more successful those techniques are, the more practiced they are, the more those transformations become locked up behind those techniques. In other words, techniques also function like boxes for experiences. They're fast and effective if you want some unusual change sooner rather than later, but if at least we're not mindful of the danger, we'll definitely be paying the price later.

Currently I'm reading a mildly interesting book which bounces in some strange space between alternative psychotherapies (including but not limited to Jungian) and a Western alchemical tradition. It's not exactly my cup of tea, but you know, I sometimes read stuff from the periphery of my interest since there is some overlap sometimes.

Anyway, there is this one idea there that was really interesting that I thought I would attempt to pass along. It's a somewhat new idea for me, but I also see how I've been using this process all along, so it's also not that new. I just never really thought of it as "imaginal metabolism." So that's the name of the idea. So what is it then?

The idea is that imagination can be compared to a digestive and metabolic process. This is of special relevance to those who want to use mind powers to heal some conditions, or to overcome PTSD and similar. Whenever something painful or terrible happens, there can be at least two ways to respond: one possible way is to isolate what happened in an impermeable mental bubble of sorts, and then never think about it again. The author postulates this as an unhealthy response. But to leave the experience AS IS is also bad. The memory of it is too heavy, and of course if the experience is still ongoing it might be unbearable. So one option here would be to digest the bad memory or experience in the stomach and juices of imagination.

This is done by mixing the memories or experiences with the so-called "imaginary" ones that make it better. When this is done over and over, it's like digesting something by breaking it down and integrating that something into your body.

In this case the body is not understood in a conventional way either. The body is the most visceral level of imagination. It's not a thing or an object per se. So the most visceral level of imagination is our waking experience or something akin to it.

Then integration means safely combining two types of experiences which we normally would think are incompatible. So for example, health and pain seem to be incompatible. However, with the process of imaginal digestion one could make pain compatible and in effect not painful. So one could transform the pain, and then even transform the memory of pain, which can be painful in its own right, to be something that can no longer induce oppressive apprehension and fright. It's basically a way to brighten up and lighten up memories in addition to having the potential of transforming ongoing experiencings. When it comes to memory, you can leave the basic facts the same, if you like, but you can drain all the heaviness out of any memories that seem too heavy. Or I imagine you can even achieve a more radical transformation.

So the idea is simple: we can mix what is visceral with what is less visceral and we can play with it creatively and imaginatively. So if let's say you felt pain in your arm, you could visualize colorful symbols streaming into the area of pain and swirling around and inside it and dissolving it away. You can then also imagine pain itself streaming outward and combining with other phenomena in strange ways. You can take a perspective on your painful arm from a helicopter far above, and imagine looking at your own arm through the binoculars. Or you can add a funny music track, mentally, to just about any experience, and suddenly the whole experience feels different. So the point is, we can use the more malleable and the less viscerally felt level of experience to complement and offset the more visceral level in ways that will transform our appreciation and maybe attitude of the whole experience.

Playing with experiences and memories allows us to take them less seriously, which in effect will reduce the level of oppression these experience and memories can sometimes have. And using imagination to do so can be compared to a process of digestion.

Just like digestion, which is an ongoing process and not a one-off thing, this kind of imaginative and playful mentality would need to be an ongoing process too. Digestion conventionally is thought to be a process which integrates self and other. Self here is what the readers might imagine their human bodies are. And other is food in this case, or other consumed resources, like air. And digestion is a process that makes things normally hostile or opposed to self beneficial to self.

So if you implant a pear directly into your thigh, you'll probably injure your body severely. However, if you put the pear in the stomach and let it digest, the pear can become safely integrated with your body. Since we're on a subjective idealism sub here, I'm using these as metaphors. I hope no one takes the body and pear stuff literally. Nor is the body literally the self. That's just a metaphor sourced from convention. Imaginal digestion can integrate bits of imagination that in other circumstances might be at odds with one another. That's the idea I think.

So the idea is to do something opposite of surrounding the unwanted experiences or memories in impermeable mental bubbles. For the worst ones this requires a significant ability to face up to one's fears, since as one can imagine, one powerful reason it's sometimes tempting to section off a bad experience or memory is precisely how fearsome it might be.

So what do you think? Is it worth thinking in this way? Is digestion a useful metaphor? Or is this not worth the bother? Have you ever compared imagination to digestion before?

The default names we're given, the ones our parents gave us, are slave names. Why do I say this? I say this from the perspective of someone who hasn't completely moved beyond convention and who has to, on some level, still bow to it. My parents are the two people who ushered me into this prison world, and the name they assigned to me is a prisoner's number. It's not a name. It doesn't reflect my liberated essence.

So should I legally change my name? Of course not. Legalities are maintained by the slavish institutions that lack meaning in an enchanted life.

Instead one possible solution is to give yourself a magical name and you can even keep it a secret. But the trick is to regard your magical name as a true name, and your "real" name as a bogus name, a fraudulent name. This is a powerful statement you make inside your own mind if you do something like this.

Of course these are just ideas. Why have one name? You can develop for yourself a suite of 10 personas, each with its own name, and swap them in and out on as-needed basis. Or you can become cognizantly anonymous. A nameless person. And there probably are lots of other possibilities.

A lot of people are happy and proud of their given names too. If you're one of those, then I want this message to be some nice cold water on your face. You can't be free if you can't name yourself as you wish. If in your hearts of hearts you go by an assigned name, then you have the heart of a slave and not the heart of a liberated person.

This also brings to mind some long gone traditions I've read about. Like I've read that in some American Indian tribes boys had to go on a quest to earn their names once they came of age, and that's how they became men. This makes a lot of sense to me, regardless if it's historically accurate or not. However in the spirit of modern times this should be extended to women too, if you ask me. So if I were in charge of a tribe, I'd make everyone go on a quest regardless of sex/gender. I'm just dreaming here.

I haven't always been "Nefandi." I've gone by so many different names in so many places. But each of those names is more me than whatever my "real" name is. That I know for sure. I spit on my given name.

OK, this post is for anyone who is interested in a deity mindset. One way deities distinguish themselves from mortals is that deities are fully responsible for all or most of their own structural, key narratives. Or meanings. Same thing.

So it really helps to understand how ordinary people proceed with regard to assigning meanings to experiences. Let's assume something that isn't yet established in one's experience. It's new. So there must be a way to create a meaning for some new experience. So below is a slightly exaggerated example, which I am going to exaggerate to convey a point:

Person A: Do you see something over there?

B: No.

A: Look right oooooovverrrr theeere. Do you see it now?

B: Oh yea, I see it.

A: What do you think it is?

B: It just moved.

A: I see it too.

B: It looks like a snake, might be a lizard.

A: Lets get closer.

(They capture the creature.)

A: It's a new one. I don't think I can find this creature in any of our existing creature taxonomies.

B: We'll need to name it.

A: And after that we'll have to dissect it and have a convention to decide how to classify it.

B: Oh yea. Totally. So do you think I should name it because I saw it move first?

A: No way. I saw it first before it even moved. I think I should name it.

B: Let's name it together. We can give a two word name, and you can come up with the first one and I'll come up with the second one.

A: OK, deal.

OK, so this is a very innocent example, but I want people to pay attention to something.

Notice how they each defer to the other, and then they plan to defer to a convention? In almost every line above they defer to the other.

Notice how neither one dares to unilaterally proclaim the meaning of what's happening? Instead they throw the task of meaning construction like a hot potato between themselves, and then they make plans to involve a big gathering of people to hash out the full meaning together.

So if you think you're a smart cookie, pause reading after the next question and try to answer it yourself. Then look back and see what I think.

What does any of that have to do with physicalism?? (OK, try to answer this on your own.)

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So, here it is. It has everything to do with physicalism. Because physicalism is an idea that there is some neutral objective common ground "out there," and so, because of that, the best way to get to know that common ground is to ask as many observers as possible (peer review) and cross-check everyone's reactions. Because we assume whatever it is must be in common to all observers, then whatever is commonly reported by some observers must be a reference to that neutral objective domain "out there."

OK?

So physicalism is intimately connected to this multilateral meaning construction.

And now here's one of my favorite video clips from The Matrix to cement this point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svfDdcPmELk

Notice how Neo behaves. Neo here wants the Oracle to confirm to him, to approve him, to bless him as The One, even AFTER the Oracle straight up told Neo that NO ONE can tell him if he's The One or not. She says you just know it the same way you know you're in love. You don't go to see a love specialist to get your love tested and validated, lol. You just know it. Balls to bones, as she says (love is like madness, hint, hint). Exactly. So Neo is really stupid in that part of the movie. Notice how even to the last moment the Oracle doesn't pronounce any judgement upon Neo. Instead she plays with Neo's insecurity and doubt and gets Neo himself to disempower himself. Neo voluntarily and ignorantly relinquishes his power by saying he's not the one.

So blow by blow:

1. Neo hopes for Oracle to say he's the one.

2. The Oracle doesn't feed into his hope. She instead plays with his insecurity to see if Neo will let her continue developing meanings for him.

3. Neo waits for more from the Oracle, still hopeful, because he didn't understand what she was saying about being the one was like being in love.

4. The Oracle says, "you know what I will say next."

5. Neo could have said, "That I am the One!" But nope. He's insecure and doubt is consuming him. He's so used to other people telling him what to do and who he is and who he is not. Isn't the Oracle some kind of expert? Aren't you supposed to trust experts? He's so very very dependent on the Oracle as a source of meaning, as a validator, as an approver and a blesser, and she's kind of cold.... so his insecurity gets the best of him and he blurts out "I am not the One."

6. The Oracle sees this weakness and says "sorry."

7. And that line about "waiting for something" is pure gold too. :) But really that line is too hardcore for most of us. But wait.... you're not going to let me tell you that? Are you? WEEELLL????? Are you?

So be careful friends. Don't be stupid. Don't do what Neo was doing in that clip. And this doesn't only apply to big meanings like "the one." It can apply to all sorts of meanings.

Here's an idea you can play with. Most people think that concentration is something that happens inside the span of a meditation or a contemplation session. They'll say stuff like, "Be quiet, I am trying to concentrate." They're talking about gaining a smidgen of mental focus on a certain topic of contemplation or on a certain aspect of experiencing.

Imagine concentration as something that deepens over many many lifetimes. Your subjectivity will produce and shed many body constructs. You'll live through thousands or millions of years of subjective time and will wear out many body constructs in that time. Now imagine that over that very large span of time you're devoted to some core postulates and you make everything in your life revolve around those postulates. That's what I call total concentration.

Compared to total concentration, the concentration inside the span of a short meditation session is nothing but a tiny blip on the radar. That doesn't mean meditation or contemplation are completely useless, but if you cannot comprehend this grand perspective, your aspiration will be lacking, because your aspiration can only be commensurate with the depth of your insight. And having a superficial and weak aspiration your results and your powers of manifestation will be weak as well. Or put another way, without a grand perspective your power of manifestation will very likely be unconscious and alienated, or 'othered.'

This also brings you much closer to escaping the time altogether. If you think in terms of aeons, then you're much closer to a perspective beyond time than someone who likes to think in terms of hours and second and years. Someone who takes their life one second at a time is a slave to time and is caught up in the minutia of experience, unable to zoom out.

A grand perspective is the middle ground between a small perspective and a perspective beyond parameters. So for most people the development of a grand perspective will be an improvement. Most people have tiny perspectives. As they say, it's like looking at the sky through a straw, lol. That's what a tiny perspective is like. So looking through a fat pipe is a massive improvement and is nothing to scoff at. In this toy metaphor you can just drop the straw. In practical terms your tiny perspective will likely be so ingrained that you will not be able to just dump it. You'll have to first expand your perspective and open up some space. That might take aeons. Eventually you can regain enough mental flexibility to go beyond parameters.

The proverb in the title is a berry. In my digestion of it I have learned two deep simplicities.

1. A proverb is not something to explain to the contemplative mind. Digestion is individual.
2. To recognize this proverb as a proverb is to glimpse the subsurface of proverbial depth.

Meanings go deep.
The depths can be searched.
Perhaps there is a bottom.
It would be something foundational.

Here I have brought you a single berry on a big white plate and I have cut it into pieces.

Flowers are beautiful.

Some time ago, the one named mindseal (I only encountered as nefandi) told me an analogy that I had been contemplating ever since.

I'm sad to have forgotten the whole context and fidelity of the details, but I remember the gist of it. I found it inspiring and empowering to consider.

He said something along the lines of "Even a leaf obscures galaxies, and a mouse may shatter a star if it squeaks with enough sincerity."

I'm sure I misquoted it, so I spruced it up with my own imagination here.

Anyway, wow. The perspicacity alone has accompanied me for some time now. More than that, though, learning that sincerity is powerful.

Truly, it is powerful.

I want to learn more. Would you share some wisdom with me?

I find visualization to be a fascinating topic and also very strongly connected to dreaming. My visualization skills are not that great, but I've been making some improvements to them in this lifetime.

We tend to hear about visualization now and then. Most visualization we hear about is concerned with using just the visual sense, and the visualized objects appear at the center of attention. So I'd like to talk about a different kind of visualization style. I've already mentioned it before in passing, but I want to talk about it more explicitly now.

So normally when I think or hear about visualization, what comes to mind? I am thinking stuff like visualized apples, tables, chairs, human beings, anthropomorphic deities. Even when I hear about a more fancy visualization object, like a mandala, it still seems like the mandala appears in the center of the vision field. So what all these have in common is that visualized objects appear in the center while the ordinary mental context remains completely unchanged during the visualization process.

Now let's talk about context. I split the context into manifest and unmanifest. I don't want to talk about the unmanifest context today. But I do want to give everyone as vivid an impression as I can about the manifest context and what I mean by this. So as you read this, I hope you can actually engage your minds, bear with me, relax, and basically let yourselves participate instead of just reading intellectually.

Let's start with how you may feel right now. I will describe my own experience, but as you read this, you should check out your own experience as it appears right now.

So I am sitting at the keyboard, in my living room, typing this stuff up. There is a desk and a chair, a computer on the desk, some furniture in my living room and so on. I live in an apartment. So it's a fairly mundane environment. Nothing fancy or special. Now I will describe what I experience more precisely than that.

In regards to my body, I can't see anything visually besides my fingertips which dance on the keyboard. I'm typing in low light. The keyboard seems to be illuminated by the screen in front of it. I see a little bit of light on my right side, which I assume is coming from the kitchen. I see my computer screen in front of me. I feel pressure where I assume my butt is on the chair. I also feel pressure in my spine, and that's how I know there is gravity. I imagine if gravity didn't exist, there'd be no feeling of pressure in my spinal column. I can feel the pressure where my feet touch the floor. When I move my feet I feel a textured pressure response reminiscent of a carpet.

Now let me start with the backside. There seems to be almost like blackness on my backside. The vision sense appears to be in front of me, and there is no vision in the back. I hear some faint sounds coming from the back, and that's about it. However, there is a clear sense that there is stuff in the back even though I am not experiencing it. I "know" there is the rest of the living room out in the back. I know there is a balcony there through the balcony door. I know what's beyond the balcony. There is another building there across a small alley. I'm still going backward here. I also have a sense of living in a city. I mean, this isn't just intellectual, but there is a subtle feeling about it that's present in my mind. It's clear (as opposed to confusing) and subtle, but with some attention, very easily detectable too. So behind myself I feel a sense of the city in that direction. If I go further I have a sense that eventually there is open space there, and then eventually there are other planets, stars, galaxies and basically the contents of a cosmos. Now again, I am not talking about an intellectual idea of a cosmos. I am talking about a clear and present feeling right now.

Similarly in every other direction, while there is a limit to what the senses show, the mind seems to have filled in, as it were, the missing pieces. So I feel like behind my computer screen in front of me there are some books and stuff on the table, then a wall, then behind that wall a hallway, and other apartments, then a courtyard, then more apartments, then other buildings, and I even kind of know how they look, even though I made no conscious effort to remember any of this stuff.

So the important thing here is to feel and not just think. I'm not talking about the mere idea of the other stuff being around the small area we can directly observe. I am talking about a clear and present feeling, right now, in the mind, where you feel like there really is "something" there, and for each of you that something is different, but you know what it is even without seeing it directly. Even if you don't know the exact details, there is a sense of "a familiar something-ness" that surrounds whatever is shown by the 5 senses.

This is what I mean by "manifest context." So the present experience of pressures, visions, sounds, smells is as though ensconced in a context that stretches out all around, and this context is maintained in the mind automatically, but we can feel it if we pay attention to it.

Before I said:

I'm not talking about the idea of the other stuff being around the small area we can directly observe.

Notice the word "small"? Well, how do I know what size it is? Why do I say "small"? Maybe it's huge? I say it's small because I am comparing what is immediately perceptible through the five senses to a mental context that's subtly but very definitely present. It's this "bigger" context that makes whatever appears in 5 senses appear small.

OK, so now you know what the manifest context is.

You can visualize in that space!

And you can achieve some amazing effects that way. When I visualize in the manifest context space, I leave alone whatever is vividly apparent through the 5 senses, and only tinker with the manifest context.

Now let's try some tricks.

Normally my manifest context feels as though stable by default. But, I can visualize it as though moving around. When I do this, the area where I am sitting, with the chair, table, my human body, it starts to feel like it's wobbling in exact relation to how I am moving the visualized context around. I can make this area where I am at feel like it's spinning around, or like it's bobbing and weaving like a cork on a giant cosmic ocean.

So if I take the bundle of experiences and visions that appear through the 5 senses and consider it like a cork, and then imagine there is nothing but an endless ocean under that cork, no city, no Earth, no stars or galaxies, just an endless ocean with waves. Then this present place starts to feel like it's bobbing and weaving, like it's floating.

Another trick that's possible is to imagine that instead of this infinite surrounding context the surrounding context is relatively small and maybe even finite and all the planets, galaxies and stars are very close by, and they're all the size of dust motes. This makes the present place that appears through the 5 senses seem huge in size. With a little bit of effort I can make myself feel like the keyboard goes on miles and miles.

Well, see if you can play around with this. When you go to bed, try to make your bed feel like it's hooked up to a swing set and it's rocking back and forth as you're relaxing and going to sleep.

I want to describe two lucid dreams and how differently they made me feel.

In one dream I found myself in a rural area. It looked like a farm or something like that. There was a single story house, some rickety fence, some uncut overgrown grass, and it was sunny. When I became aware I was dreaming, my dream went from being very fuzzy to super-hyper-ultra clear mode. I could see every blade of grass and I could see the sun play on every surface so perfectly. My dream body started to feel heavy too! I was becoming solid, like I was a real person in a real world, somewhere. And this is where I got really scared. In this specific dream, I felt 100% sure that I could actually live there. I mean, I felt like I could just go into the house and stay there for hours and hours... get tired, go to sleep there, probably wake up there in the same house and live on that farm like that. I felt certain this world was not going to vanish. It seemed so solid and stable and so secure. And then I got very very freaked out. I thought that if I don't wake up soon, I may never wake up. I started thinking, what if back on Earth my body went into a coma? What if my breathing has been cut off? What if I blocked arteries leading up to the brain?? Holy shit?!!! Maybe I was dying!!! WAA WAA WAA.... I was really freaking out and all kinds of bad scenarios were streaming into my mind very fast, scenarios that were explaining to me why such a super-vivid and super-solid dream appeared to me. I thought maybe this dream is so solid because I died. And I thought even if my body on Earth was OK, I could easily forget I even had a body on Earth!! What if I start to live on this farm? In 5 years I may not even remember there is a body in bed on Earth. What then? I instantly made myself wake up! So I am in bed. Everything is fine.

OK, second dream I want to describe was really amazing. I dreamt I was in a castle. Somehow I knew this castle. It had two, three and four story buildings made of stone, narrow and twisty cobblestone streets, and it was overgrown with moss here and there. I somehow knew that this was my alchemical castle. It had a library there. And it had a huge alchemical laboratory in one of the buildings. And I also somehow knew I was absolutely alone in the castle. The castle was on a tiny piece of land that was floating in nothingness, not connected to anything at all. And I knew the entire castle was specially mind-made by me. I knew where every single stone lay without actually going around and looking. I just knew. And I had this weird knowing that this is where I will "go" when I die. And when I realized this, I was like jumping for joy internally. I could barely contain my ecstasy. So basically when this body dies, I appear in that castle by myself, relax, have fun, recuperate, and then I decide where else to go from there. When I felt this, I almost wished I would die right away, lol.

And now the contemplative bit. What is interesting in these two experience and ordinary waking experience, is that in all three cases they all look completely identical as far as quality goes. They all look clear, solid, believable, etc. They basically look the same. Stones look like stones. Moss looks like you'd expect moss to look. Grass on the farm looked like you think grass should look.

So ordinary experience, and the two lucid dreams, they all looked outwardly identical in terms of the quality of impressions coming "through" the 5 senses. However, they felt so drastically different! The farm felt scary. Ordinary waking experience feels boring (among other things). And the castle felt ecstatic. What was different? What was different was the kind of expectations I had in each case. I expected the farm to be a trap where I get caught and cannot return back to Earth. I expected the castle to be my imaginary inconceivable home base outside of every realm, a place where I can relax any time I want to. And I expect waking experience to be routine, unsurprising and hence, boring.

I'm thinking about an idea of gravity and where, relatively, it can be. If the center of gravity is outside one is obsessed toward something external and one is constantly falling into it. When the center of gravity moves inside, everything revolves around my perspective, as though laying on me, resting on me. Living with the center of gravity closer to me is powerful.

So-called "objective" things admit fewer disagreements, and because of that are actually extremely subjective. If I legitimize my disagreement with others about a thing, then I claim to know less about that thing, so I believe it is further away from me, and maybe even outside. So-called "objective" is that which I know without trying, and disagreement about which I wouldn't accept, like that I am a man or that it's day out now, and these are intimate things.

The horizon doesn't overwhelm what's here, but what's here doesn't obscure the horizon.

One thing that hinders freedom is expecting that the eventual result of one's intent will be evaluated according to some supposedly objective standard of success and failure.

One can only be omniscient if one agrees to being completely subjective.

I associate appearances with receptivity and passivity, so they are seen as established even though I agree that subsequent judgements of those appearances are not established. (continued below)

Taking the theme of "not established" further, I don't even see actual appearances, I only see semblances of appearances and jump to an erroneous conclusion that appearances are aesthetically genuine, which is to say a vision looks how it looks. But appearances are not genuine. So it's not that "a certain shape indicates a tree" is false, but even the shape itself doesn't look as it appears to look. Red isn't red. Brown isn't brown. Qualities are illusory, and not just the further conceptual elaboration post-quality.

The present appearance is a thought in the mind.

To know the juiciness of a thought I have to be intimate with it.

This idea has been circling around my mind for a long time. Also some people here express similar notions to me, which feeds into that process as well. The idea is, what is the difference between visualizations and what we may call sensoria, which is the total character or gestalt of all the waking senses?

For one thing, unlike with Buddhism, we generally do not consider mind-sense to be a sense, and there are some good reasons for that. So we deal with the so-called 5 senses instead of 6. The reason for this is because we believe senses have to convey information from the "outside" as it were, and the mind-sense is thought to fail in that role, and so is not a "proper" sense by our convention.

There is another reason not to consider mind-sense to be a sense. And that is, mind-sense allows the duplication of all the other senses via visualization. So even as the "physical" eye is engaged, I may also see in my mind's eye an apple. Similarly I can experience visualized smells, touch, sound and other types of sensations all while being fully awake and alert. So when I speak of visualization I don't refer only to vision, but I refer to any what would be called "imaginary" sensing. This latter, so-called "imaginary" type of sensing is not dependent on the fleshy organs. Because the mind can duplicate all the conventional fleshy senses, it is obviously special and shouldn't be thrown in together with the rest as a "sense," imo. But insofar the mind, among other capacities, is also a ground of experience, it can resemble the senses while also being completely superior to them.

A big hang up for me tends to be a feeling that the conventional sensoria are just so damn impressive, so visceral, so shiny, so up in my face. So I was thinking, what about visualization?

What if I were to make my visualizations so stable, so bright, so detailed, that they were indistinguishable from conventional sensoria? I bet this would change my attitude toward the conventional sensoria. I already intellectually regard all that I experience as a dream. Being able to generate visualizations as shiny and as stable as what I experience conventionally would really up the ante, so to speak.

Another possibility is to try to dim and dissolve the conventional sensoria in order to bring it in line with the visualization, assuming that one doesn't experience impressive visualizations. I sometimes play with this approach as well, but this one is much more psychologically difficult because it involves in some sense dissolving what I am so desperately clinging to. It would be much more clever and subtle to avoid the process of sensoria dissolution and instead bring the visualization up to the level where it is in no way inferior to the conventional sensoria.

So developing visualization is probably as important as say lucid dreaming. When my dreams were able to duplicate the visceralness of the waking experience, this had a huge impact on my outlook. I bet a similar impact will result when my visualization hits the same level as the waking experience. Currently whatever I visualize tends to be somewhat dim, unstable, hard to see, lacking in details, etc. But the good news is that my visualization skill is workable, so I have something I can improve upon. It would be trivial to make an incremental improvement in my visualization skill, then assuming I was persistent, I could probably achieve a great change eventually.

At some point if I can make visualizations sufficiently stable and bright I can just up and start living inside of them and begin completely ignoring conventional sensoria. Some time later conventional sensoria will atrophy to the point of non-existence, and I'll be out of convention for good. Alternatively I can begin mixing visualized and conventional appearances into one seamless whole. Either way I would deconventionalize myself to some extent.

Here are some recent contemplations of mine:

I was thinking about the expression "it's at the front of my mind" and comparing it to the expression "it's in the back of my mind." I noticed how I subtly literalize these expressions by subtly imagining that what's in front of my face is also at the front of my mind. I then fooled around with changing that feeling by looking in front of my face and getting myself to feel that this is what it's like to look at the back of my mind.

Next topic. I considered phenomena and how I generally think of them as presences. So there may, for example, be a presence of a tea cup on the table. But a tea cup is not just a presence, I thought. A tea cup is also an absence, a non-finding of a keyboard, or a skillet, or a pencil, and so on. In fact, if I were to consider the tea cup in terms of its concrete absences enumerated, then such absences would be infinite. So in a sense, a tea cup is a finite presence and an infinite absence. Then I thought how everything I experience is a kind of infinite absence. And I paused here to let myself feel it more.

Next topic. I then considered how I was on the verge of letting go of my body, even as I was walking. But I felt a subtle fear, a reluctance to letting it go. I felt that if I did that, the body will drop to the ground.

Then I probed into the cause of this fear. And I saw instantly that the main subtle cause is that I have a notion that the body is "something that it's like of itself." So I thought, without my intervention, of itself, the body is an inert object. So I have an experience of being embodied, but I also have this fantasy about the body being something beyond my experience of it, as an inert object. What if I were to cease such a fantasy and replace it by a better, more skillful fantasy?

I thought how the vision would unfold if I didn't have the sense that the body was something of itself. What if the body is a doing rather than a thing? Then when I give up budy-ing as a kind of doing, nothing drops to the ground at all, because only an activity was given up and not an object/thing. If I were more fearless, then I'd experience a gradual fading away of the experience of my body walking, without the body ever appearing to drop. The moving picture of walking would just fade away. And then my mind would be in a different dimension, in its own secret place. Then I could "return" by paying attention to the sensation of being located somewhere and walking, and gradually an experience would get brighter of walking, and at no point would I see myself (in my body) rising up off the ground and dusting myself off.

I've been bumping up against this rock for a while now, and again it's come up in today's contemplation for me. There is a funny contradiction in my mind. On one hand, I love egalitarianism. I'm always and ever campaigning for the average Joe and Jill, so to speak. I oppose all kinds of elitism, and not just the wealth type, but even the intellectual type. Where do you think my anti-jargon stance comes from? It's not an accident. It's because I oppose intellectual elitism and I believe knowledge belongs to the people. One way to make sure knowledge is open to all is to speak with as little jargon as possible, and I always deliberately strive in that manner. My anti-elitist tendencies impact my life decisions in other ways as well. So in other words, it's not just a small thing or wishful thinking. It's how I live my life in some significant and hard to ignore respects. So egalitarianism and symmetry is a huge deal for me on some level.

The basic principle of symmetry as I am discussing it here is: whatever I apply to others, or the universe as a big "The Other", is what I also must apply to myself, and the other way around. If I apply something to myself, I have to apply it to others and/or to The Other. This perspective is aligned with egalitarianism.

But there is one tiny little problem. If I want to see myself as a ground of being, then I fundamentally can't equate myself to anything that manifests within me. This perspective introduces a profound asymmetry and on a relative level, when I practice this, it inclines me toward the elitist tendencies.

I've been noticing that recently I am often happy to leave people to wallow in their ignorance while being fully content to be wise myself. Before I would never be able to rest easy until I share my wisdom so that everyone has an equal "amount" of wisdom. So if I see someone saying truly dumb things, normally I would feel obligated to correct this, not at all because of any sense of superiority, but the opposite, from a sense that if I can understand it, so can they, and if I deserve to know something, so do they. So out of a sense of egalitarianism I would bend over backwards to try to explain everything I understand and to correct as many opinions I considered were painfully clumsy and inferior. That's because I thought if wise opinions are like wealth, then the wealth should not be hoarded.

This is also why I've been opposing the various secret societies and similar type organizations. I saw and probably still see them as knowledge hoarders. They're greedy for knowledge and they don't share it equally.

But recently I've been finding myself being very comfortable in letting people wallow in their ignorance. I no longer feel as strongly as before that I must share everything I know. Sometimes I even think, oh the horror, fuck it, maybe I am just wiser and maybe others aren't meant to know what I know. When I think I am inherently superior, that's when it's very very easy for me to just smile when I read something I consider dumb, and not bother replying or making a comment. Then I get a sense that wisdom isn't meant to be for the other person. We're not equal and aren't meant to be equal. When I feel this way, I have zero desire to engage other people, especially if I think they're wrong or stupid.

In general if I am to exercise a creative principle at large, I can't apply the same principles to myself and to the world. I have to practice asymmetry. So for example, the world is created, but I am not. The world arises and passes, but I do not. The world is the surface of the will, but I am its core. When I bind the world to a set of laws, I myself don't have to bind myself to the same set, and indeed, it's better if I don't if I intend to exercise a huge amount of influence.

And you better believe even the tiniest things are huge from a metaphysical perspective. For example, even raising the body temperature is in some ways against the law of thermodynamics. But it's beyond that. Even if I thought the world was a living organism, that wouldn't be enough to control my body's temperature reliably. What if I will my temp to rise, but the mother Earth or forest spirits will it to fall? So just switching from physicalism to animism doesn't grant me a sufficient scope for many of the kinds of transformations I want to be able to manifest even at a tiny scope (in and closely around the human body say). But I don't stop at a tiny scope. Tiny scope is called "tiny" for a reason.

So in the long term I fear I will become the elite that I loathe now. I will discard symmetry and use asymmetry all over the place. And my days of fighting for the common person are probably nearing their end as well. In some ways this feels sad. In some ways I also think that common people deserve their fates, because they collectively have the power to change the whole world, and if they don't, then they deserve to live with the consequence. So fuck the common man and woman. Collectively they get what they want to get. Enough of them are greedy and property oriented to keep the whole game of capitalism afloat. Why should I help any of them? If you order a fish at a restaurant and you happen to get a fish, you can't complain. That's how I've been feeling lately and it should be obvious I can't say everything I want to say in such a short post.

I think most of us here understand that one of the big problems with physicalism is how they try to reduce everything to atoms, quarks, gravity and so on. Experience is too rich and too gnarly to be reduced to just those models, imo.

However, just because some of us here oppose physicalism, do we think reductionism cannot seduce us? I think subjective idealism has the potential to be the least reductionist account of experience. However, just because such potential exists, I don't think we're completely immune from the temptation to build ourselves some simplified models and try to reduce everything to just those models.

And, get this, it's especially true when the models are good ones (!!) and are very effective! It's precisely when we're doing really well that the danger of reductionism is the strongest.

When you believe someone is right 90% of the time, aren't you tempted to think, "If this person got so much right, they're probably right about everything else too?" I know I've had that temptation happen to me a few times, especially with the Buddha. Well, the Buddha is right here and here and here.... so why not just cut to the chase and say the Buddha is 100% right about everything. Luckily, I think, I pulled away from that dangerous temptation. Now I think, even if the Buddha had an amazing mind, no, I don't think he was right about absolutely everything. And this is basically reductionism on the human level. Reductionism in its essence is just conceptual simplification. It's simpler to ignore the few times I think someone was wrong when they happened to be right (from my POV) say 95 out of 100 times.

So a lot of us are fairly obsessed with the visual sense and we tend to ignore hearing, touch, a sense of up/down, temperature sensations, a sense of satiation, taste, scents, and so on. I don't think we should be doing that. Our experience cannot be reduced to 3D space and to only whatever happens in 3D space. 3D space is an important model by all means. I don't think we should stop talking about it. Far from it. But I hope we keep it in mind that we're not going to build our TOE (theory of everything) by making appeals to fractional aspects of experience. Vision is just a fraction. It's important to most of us sighted people, but think about someone who's been blind from birth. Vision is completely irrelevant to them, but touch and hearing are way more important. Think how differently their known universe appears to them. And what if we had no sense of up and down? Just imagine how confused we could get if up/down suddenly went missing.

"The world" is a very important term. It's a very thick term. And I think it needs a thick description that doesn't reduce it too much, or ideally, at all. As subjective idealists I think we are perfectly positioned to describe the world as it is experienced, with more honesty than it was ever thought possible! But we're not immune to reductionism. And so, subjective idealism is not philosophical pixie dust that's automatically going to make us intelligent and superior.

So I imagine there may be more than one alternative to solipsism within subjective idealism, and if so, others might elaborate on their number. However, there is one, what I feel is an obvious alternative, and I want to discuss it, and how I think it relates to solipsism, and why this alternative has utility for me. I'm hoping if it's not useful to someone else, may it at least be entertaining.

In subjective idealism there are only two "hard" requirements: subjective and idealism. Subjective means perspective is fundamental to what we're talking about here. And idealism means the mind or the mind-like (volitional, for example) nature of reality is also important. So right away we can see nothing here is talking about how many perspectives there might be. Nor do we see anything about what might a valid perspective be, or what a valid grouping or intersection of perspectives might be or look like. So this, in my opinion, leaves us with a fairly wide field to play on.

So in my view the main difference between the various flavors of subjective idealisms will be in how the perspectives are configured.

If we emphasize a single subjective perspective, we get solipsism. If we emphasize some (perhaps infinite) multiplicity of subjective perspectives, we get another kind of subjective idealism. This latter emphasis is still fully within subjective idealism because: a) all perspectives are held to be subjective, and b) any cross-referencing of these perspectives or the overlaps between them are still subjective. And of course, we can still maintain that mind (the threefold capacity to know, to experience, and to will) is the foundation of everything known and unknown, experienced, and unimaginable, so we're still left with subjective idealism.

So by emphasizing multiple concurrent subjective perspectives we get a subjective (non-neutral!) middle ground. We could call it an intersubjective space. This intersubjective space is just as optional and therefore just as subjective as anything can ever be, even if it's multilateral. So simply speaking, if one million people say strawberry is the best berry, that's still subjective, regardless of how many people say/experience so.

I think the main practical difference here is that by emphasizing multilateralism, you're giving up some internal power, but in exchange you gain a sense of a wider world, the kind of world where you can lose yourself.

With a solipsistic emphasis the center of gravity is always in your own perspective, and whatever other perspectives there may be, they're unimportant accessories that revolve around your own perspective, caught in its mental gravity well. Anything crucial and important is done entirely internal to your own point of view in this configuration. And importantly, only your own point of view serves as the foundation of confidence and validity. So, if I feel it's cold, and a thousand people say it's hot, what the people say is not important, but the important thing is that I am experiencing cold. In this configuration I can really stand firm with both feet inside my own perspective and there is no need to cross-verify myself with any other perspective. So I don't need to ask people, "Do you see what I see?" Etc. This is what allows one to develop immense concentration: there is no need to worry about how something looks or feels from outside, as it were, so one can focus every effort internally and one controls everything necessary for confidence-building.

In a multilateral setup you have to surrender some of your validating power in order to allow other people to have input on the "same" experience you're having. Because of this, multilateralism, except in trivial cases, does not ever allow 100% confidence to be generated completely internally to a person (observe the importance of peer review in the scientific process). Whatever I experience internally, until I discuss it with others and make sure they're all experiencing things in the same way, I can't be 100% confident in what I am doing/experiencing. In trivial cases this is avoidable so that I don't need to verify with others that I am really walking up the stairs when I think I am, but for anything interesting and non-trivial cross-verification is unavoidable under a multilateral approach. So this makes personal confidence a distributed system where you aren't in control of your own confidence. This reduces one's ability to maintain deep concentrations, because at every point of experience, especially when it's strange (and deep concentration results in strangeness), you'll want to verify that whatever you're doing/experiencing is valid from other people's POVs as well. So you can't go alone, wherever you're going. In a multilateral setup you either have to stay with a group, or you have to drag an entire group with you to make yourself feel validated. This would explain the desire of some religious people to force their religion on others, btw.

In a multilateral setup one perspective is not sufficient to narrate experience. In a multilateral setup experience is narrated collaboratively, communally, together.

So I see it as a trade-off similar in kind to what engineers like to talk about. If you move the center of gravity inside your own perspective, you then have everything you need for limitless confidence, since you no longer need to consider any other perspective, and your life is no longer a "design by committee" life, as it were. This is powerful. However, precisely because personal influence is greatly expanded, the whole world can start to feel really small. You might feel like a whale in a teacup, eventually.

In an attempt to have my cake and eat it too, I'd like to teach myself to be able to pivot my mind around a number of similar and related views. If I need a vast and total transformation now, and I don't want to wait to build a consensus, I want access to solipsism. If I am OK only directly influencing my back yard, so to speak, and if I am OK slowly building consensus, and not feeling like I am solely responsible for everything, and if I want to feel like I live inside an infinite world, as opposed to a teacup, then the multilateral setup is much better, and I'd like to be able to pivot to it, especially when the times are good.

And that brings me to another aspect: responsibility. In a multilateral setup responsibility is shared, which in some sense is a load off one's shoulders. In a solipsistic setup if I don't like something, I can only complain to myself. So solipsists are in some sense perpetually trying to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, and this has all the familiar advantages and disadvantages. As someone who pivots toward a multilateral perspectivalism it is completely valid to solicit and expect help on any number of issues.

So this ability to solicit and receive help in a meaningful way, is also a gentler, more gradual, smoother interface between subjective idealism and the more conventional modes of thought such as physicalism and dualism. And there is, in my opinion, definitely something to be said about a gradual, step-by-step, degree-by-degree approach. Going from physicalism straight to solipsism would be a very difficult and severe turn around that would put a lot of strain on one's mental constitution.

So if something is difficult to do all at once, and there is a gradual option, I definitely like that. I think even if someone viewed solipsism as a kind of end-point for subjective idealism, even then, even in this case multilateral perspectivalism could represent a reasonable step to make, something that's much more realistically doable sooner rather than later.

In summary, I think the advantages of a multilateral perspectivalism are that: a) it paints a wider world, the kind you can lose yourself in, b) you can meaningfully solicit and receive help and share responsibility instead of owning everything yourself, c) it's a more gradual transition from more conventional worldviews.

I ask myself, who am I reasoning for? Is it to satisfy myself? Or is it to satisfy someone else? Or a combination of the above? Or some other perspective? There might be lots of ways to look at this, but I want to compare just two.

(a) One way to look at it, is to think that I am reasoning for myself and for society. Then I must not only satisfy myself, but I must also use my reasoning to satisfy others as well.

(b) If I reason only for myself, I only need to satisfy myself and I don't need to worry about anything else.

The first point of view, (a), is adopted by someone who is firmly entrenched in a social convention. In a social convention everything is socially defined, including one's own self-image. One's social self-imagine is "I am what I and the others say I am." For that reason, when you want to change your own mind as a profoundly conventional person, you can't be a loner. You have to convince people around you that what you believe is the case, because other people are in fact elements of your own identity. So you can't become a different (type of) person until other people believe that you're a different person. This is why conventional people spend as much time, for example, convincing others they're not lying as they spend actually avoiding lies, assuming a socially-constructed identity of an honest person is desirable.

For a social person, if you believe you're not lying, but everyone says you are, it can feel crazy. You may begin to doubt yourself and think you're just wrong about yourself and others are right. That's what it means to be profoundly social. Because there are many more other people than yourself, what you are in a socially-defined context is largely defined by anyone other than yourself. It means your own input into your socially-constructed identity is vanishingly small.

However, because metaphysically others acquire their 'otherness' only by virtue of being different from you, it is metaphysically impossible to fully satisfy other people with your reasoning. In fact, no socially-reliant satisfaction is guaranteed once you accept otherness as a metaphysical fact. That means being able to satisfy someone even to a small degree is not a given. Then it follows that to whatever degree you do manage to satisfy people with your reasoning, it can only feel as pure luck. That's the implication of otherness in a social context.

This means if reasoning and being social are both qualities that you value, you must remain unsatisfied, perpetually. To be content and happy you have to give up on one of the following: reasoning or social convention.

And indeed, anti-intellectualism is a very strong current among very social people. It's much easier to adjust to society if you stop thinking about stuff and just "go with the flow."

However, it should be obvious that if you're willing to tolerate mental solitude, you can keep your ability to reason and remain happy and content, if you de-emphasize social convention. In this case, I reason for myself. I am trying to convince myself with my own arguments and never others. It's not easy to remember this. From the POV (b) I am the one I am trying to reach with all my arguments and not anyone else. Once I realize I have finally gotten through to myself with my own arguments, it's no longer necessary to argue with anyone.

Meditation has become pretty popular lately and I believe rightly so.

However, I also believe it's important to recognize that most meditation rides on the back of a very simple and unsophisticated intent. For example, the calmness meditation strives for nothing other than a vision of pacification and the smoothing out of of experience. Most so-called "insight" meditation that's being discussed on the Buddhist forums is not any kind of actual insight, but instead rides on a relatively passive observation of changes in experience with the intent being simply to observe and recognize what's happening. Plus there is a conclusion that you're expected to reach before you even start: that all phenomena are impermanent. Obediently falling in line with some expected conclusion is not how one develops insight.

If you believe you "observe" your experience, you generally cannot also believe you are shaping your experience. Observation generally implies a passive, non-meddling kind of presence. Of course there can be exceptions to this, but I am talking about a general case as I see it.

So most meditation I tend to run across, including all the jhanas described in the Pali Buddhist literature, are nothing more than simple scales. They are rudimentary. Which isn't to say they're always easy.

Nobody I am aware of becomes a musician with the idea of becoming awesome at playing scales. Scales are used as an exercise to make your fingers more limber and stronger and to enhance the mind-finger pathway. However, if playing scales is all you do, you're not a musician. Generally nobody goes to a concert to hear an expert rendition of the scales (some moron will prove me wrong, no doubt, just wait for it). Playing scales is not what anyone wants to actually be doing. It's a means to an end.

Similarly meditation of a widely taught variety is exactly like playing scales. At best it's a means to an end. At its worst it's a trap that makes you believe you're playing music whereas you're just playing 4 dumb notes in succession, over and over, like a robot.

So I never use simple meditation with the idea that such meditation is enlightenment or the final goal in life or anything like that. I only view it as a rudimentary exercise that isn't equally necessary for all people. Some people are naturally good at controlling their minds. Such people would waste their precious time were they to do simple meditation and I believe should consider instead doing something more creative, more imaginative, and more expressive with their minds. I'm not going to judge who is or isn't such a person. You have to decide this for yourselves.

I will also say that you can begin playing some pretty decent and pretty enjoyable music long, long before you attain a complete mastery of the scales. So even if you intend to get better at the scales, you can also play some good music too.

I meditate sometimes, but I mostly concern myself with magick. I don't want to be like a misguided "musician" who only keeps getting better and better and better at playing scales. I wasn't born to do the mental equivalent of the scales in music. At the same time I can see how practicing scales can be of use. How about you?

This is just a thought experiment. I hope some of you find it as fun as I have this morning.

There is a common movie trope where the character becomes a ghost, and this is depicted when the character's body passes through the apparent objects of the world, and when nobody can hear and respond to the character, but the character can still see the apparent world with people in it.

Now here's the question.

What is the ghost here? Is the character the ghost? Or is the world the ghost? If you wanted to make a movie about the whole world becoming a ghost while the character remaining real, how would you depict it?

What's interesting is how well the movie trope works. I figure 99.99% of the viewers upon seeing a character's hand passing through the table conclude, instantly, the character is a ghost, but the world isn't one. This is evidence of bias.

The mind is a threefold capacity to know, to will and to experience.

I call it a "threefold capacity" because there is no knowing without willing and experiencing. No experiencing without knowing and willing. No willing without knowing and experiencing. In other words, the capacity is one indivisible whole, but for convenience we can identify three sides to it. There is a side of knowing. There is a side of willing. And a side of experiencing.

So from this it should be obvious that the mind as such is not any of the specific mental states, individually or in any combination.

So why don't I call it "consciousness" like some others? That's because we have a concept of subconsciousness, and there is even a concept of superconsciousness. Both sub- and super- are outside the range of customary awareness, but sub- is kind of dumb and it's best at following orders, whereas super- is more intelligent than your customary level of intelligence and is omniscient.

So because consciousness is bracketed by super- and sub- I find it best not to take consciousness as the ultimate ground. Instead I take mind as the ultimate ground. This avoids a mistake of taking the most obvious level of appearance as something ultimate. And this is consistent with a subjective idealist position of anti-realism, which is an idea that how things appear is not how they are. Another way to say this is that appearances are suggestive rather than informative. Appearances are subjective. They pertain to a certain commitment, to a certain manner of dreaming, and are not indications of anything "out there."

Also, knowledge with the most experience-defining power is tacit knowledge. The strongest and most influential knowledge is outside the customary range of consciousness, so drawing people's attention to consciousness will be bad form for the weird way. If you're going to want to play with your experience at the most profound level you will need to become reacquainted with the deepest and most implicit forms of knowledge. You'll have to make conscious what formerly was sub- and super- conscious so that you understand what's going on and why it's going that way. Once you understand it, you have the power to change it. You cannot change something you don't understand. If you don't understand yourself, you cannot change yourself. If you don't understand the world-appearance, you cannot manipulate it. You cannot manipulate a black box.

Or put another way, you're already always manipulating everything, but because of the narrowing of consciousness and because of being obsessive about certain narratives (primarily physicalism, but not limited to that), you lose awareness of the options that you still have and it then feels like things are beyond your control. In fact getting things to feel as though they are outside your control is one kind of magick in and of itself.

So then what is knowledge? What's the difference between thinking and knowing or believing and knowing?

Knowledge is an assertion you're willing to stand on without hesitation and without wavering. Because such assertions are ultimately not grounded in anything other than your own commitment to them, they're in a sense insane (depending on how we define insanity). So all knowledge, as my friend Aesir puts it, can be regarded as a form of insanity:

If we start with the conventional idea that having confidence in a belief without justification is irrational and insane, then all beliefs, all possible perspectives, are insane. There are no objective, perspectiveless perspectives. All belief systems are fundamentally irrational and baseless. Because you must adopt some perspective to live, consider your present mode of insanity. Understand it, and find the ungrounded assumptions which guide your life. Is this the insanity you desire over all other possible insanities? Is your subjective reality working the way you want?

I am pretty fond of this paragraph.

So thinking is the most volatile mental activity, and believing is when some ideas begin to gain prominence in your mind as your commitment deepens. Beliefs affect behaviors and major life choices. And the strongest and most implicit form of commitment is knowledge. Compare "I believe the sun will rise tomorrow" to "I know the sun will rise tomorrow."

Probably most knowledge of the kind we'd be interested investigating is something habituated and tacit because once you refuse to waver on an assertion and begin living with it, it becomes more and more automatic, and once it becomes fully automatic it slides away from your consciousness, you don't notice it anymore per se, unless you remain vigilant. But when potential knowledge drops down to its tacit form and becomes actual lived knowledge, it's the most powerful! So for example, how much do you doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow? How often do you think about the sun rising tomorrow? I bet zero times on most days? Probably zero times in any given decade? If you ever doubted such a thing, it's probably just now. But probably not even now. Probably even me asking the question about the sun maybe not rising tomorrow is not enough to stir genuine doubt. This is the power of knowledge. You know the sun will rise tomorrow. That's the power of your subjectivity!

Subjectivity is not a gradient. It's not possible for you to be more subjective or less. It's not possible for anything else to be more or less subjective. For something to be subjective it must pertain to a point of view. What does it mean something pertains to a point of view? It means something only makes sense or only appears under certain mental conditions and at no other time. If something pertains to a point of view, it means outside of that specific point of view, it is inaccessible, unknowable. If you understand subjective idealism, you have to realize that all specific features of your experience from the subtlest to the grossest levels are private and unique to your point of view.

It's crucial to understand what a "point of view" really is. It's not the case that Nefandi has one point of view and Aesir another and so on for everyone of 7 billion people. No, no, no. That's not subjective idealism at all. In subjective idealism the understanding is that I have a point of view. From that singular point of view I experience Nefandi and all the other people. All these experiences pertain to this one singular point of view of mine. And because of that, once I begin dreaming, I usually don't know about Aesir, since it's not pertinent in most of my nighttime dreams. Of course the potential to restore the waking context exists in a typical nighttime dream, and thus subconsciously the notion of Aesir is still available as part of my commitment (overall mindset). But the point is, everything I know about any other person I only know because I have a point of view! In other words, I can't really know something that's not my point of view. I have no access to such!

So subjectivity is total and it doesn't come in degrees. Subjectivity doesn't increase or decrease. Instead the content of subjectivity can change. But the fact that all content is subjective is not going to change. The changes in content will fall along customary patterns most of the time, but if you change your commitment, the change in experiential pattern can be radical.

Generally the mind tends to operate in a certain style. It means certain themes are recurrent. Certain types of mental activity are habitual and recur regularly. A style of mental life can be called 'a mindset.' It is crucial to be able to distinguish the mind from a mindset.

The mind is a threefold capacity to know, to will and to experience. But a mindset is a specific style, a specific manner of using that capacity. That specific manner of using mental capacity can also be referred to as 'a commitment.' It's a commitment when you park on it and stay there. So you develop a certain style of mentation centered on certain postulates, and you park there. Once that's done, your postulates (gradually) acquire the weight of knowledge and drop away from your customary consciousness (unless you're doing something weird with your mind), and at that same time these postulates gain immense power, even to the point where people feel trapped by those postulates and begin seeking liberation.

If you understand anything I am talking about here you must immediately realize something like, "wait a second, so ultimately I am not even a human being." If you're thinking that way, you're probably really getting what I am talking about. If it never occurred to you to question your humanity or your membership on planet Earth, then you are reading what I am saying without any significant understanding.

First, a few questions to consider: do animals have minds and perspectives? Do all humans in the waking realm? Do dream characters? How about demons and angels encountered in magickal workings? Did you have a mind and a perspective in the past? Will you in the future?

Second, let's remember that, conventionally, no one knows whether or not other people have minds and perspectives (or 'subjectivity' or 'consciousness'). It's impossible in principle, according to human convention, to actually access the mind and perspective of another human. Otherwise, we wouldn't have distinct minds and perspectives. No amount of brain science on others and no amount of conversation with others can definitely answer that question, just like no amount of science can prove that this is a real, external material reality and not an illusory, internal mental reality.

So, whether or not there are other minds is a matter of perspective, like the question of whether or not there is a material world. And like with a material world, the difference between believing and not believing is not a matter of whether or not there are actually other minds. It's a matter of whether you are manifesting your imagination and experience in such a way that it you have experience suggestive of other minds or not.

There is a difference in the way that humans relate to and manifest dream people v. waking people. Generally, humans consider dream people to be mindless and okay to toy with and generally consider waking people to be minded and important to treat with respect. To make the point even stronger, some people consider waking animals to have perspectives and others do not.

Now, imagine that you could telepathically read and influence other people's perspectives. How might that work? It could turn out that their perspectives were accessible and adjustable to you in a way similar to the way that your memories of your past perspectives are accessible and adjustable to you. That would mean that their perspectives are not distinct objects from your mind, but are unconscious aspects of your perspective that you can focus on like your memories. However, in this view, that also means that what you presently identify as your human perspective is only another aspect of your mind that you are accustomed to focusing on more than other aspects of your mind.

Further, imagine that in this state you decided that you didn't like always controlling and knowing other peoples's perspectives. You actively practiced focusing on what we ordinarily call your human perspective without ever focusing on the other perspectives. Imagine that after doing this for thousands of lifetimes you forgot that you weren't just this perspective and forgot that you could read and influence apparently other perspectives – you start to regard them as other. Your perception of the perspectives of others would be essentially what your perception of others is now, abstractly. You would think that those unconscious aspects of your mind were other than you, and you would be mistakenly identifying your mind with your human role, like a person can mistakenly identify with their job or personality or wealth.

Similarly, imagine that some other individual could telepathically read and influence your perspective. It would feel like your perspective was only an aspect of their mind. But, your perspective is an aspect of your own mind, so in this view, too, your minds must not be distinct. From your perspective, they are an aspect of your mind that you are unconscious of that you are at some level allowing to have an influential relationship with your conventional human perspective. From their perspective, you are an aspect of their mind as in the last example.

If we were to imagine that our perspectives had no telepathic influence on each other then we would not be able to interact with one another in any way. If we imagine that our perspectives were completely telepathically intertwined, then there would be no illusion of separation. However, in the conventional world, we imagine that our perspectives only telepathically influence each other in a limited manner – you can directly manipulate my perception of your body and I can directly manipulate your perception of my body. And we imagine that neither of us can directly manipulate either our own or each others's perception of the material world.

Imagine is the operative word here (you could replace it with 'believe' if you prefer). I imagine a perspective that I call you, and you imagine a perspective that you call me. I also imagine that you imagine a perspective that you call me, and you also imagine that I imagine a perspective that I call you. Your idea of other people and your idea of yourself as a person are only ideas in your mind.

Think about it like this. Your beliefs and memories and expectations and values and desires are all intentional mental structures. None of those are you at your core, because you could in principle have different memories or different desires and still be you. Now, imagine that all of your beliefs and memories and expectations and values and desires and all other aspects of your perspective were replaced with mine. Now, you and I are the same.

I only understand and interact with your perspective, with you, as a potential perspective that I could have that I do not. When I interact with you, I am only interacting with an aspect of myself. Similarly, when you interact with me, you are only interacting with an aspect of yourself.

So, in my view, there is only one mind. From my perspective, it is my mind. From your perspective, it is your mind. From any perspective, the mind is their own. So, in my view, there is no distinction between you or I at the level of mind. But there are infinite possible perspectives the mind can take which we can somewhat arbitrarily divide into categories like you, me, him, and her in the same way that we can somewhat arbitrarily divide the infinite colors into categories like blue, red, lavender, warm colors, etc.

So we all know the two basic arguments used to assert that the mind is identical with or rooted in the waking brain.

1. Chemicals which affect the brain alter your mind. Therefore your mind is influenced by physical objects.

2. Different regions of the brain can be measured and associated in their activity with various forms of mental activity.

Of course in principle these are obviously fallacious arguments because in principle you could have similar dream experiences regarding dream brains. However, arguments are much less convincing than experience so I set out to have the corresponding dream experiences myself.

The first one I had many months ago. It was a non lucid dream. I was in a grocery store at night shopping. I met a friend there and he asked me if I wanted to smoke cannabis and I did. So we went out and smoked. Within a few seconds I began to feel high. But not like I was high on weed awake. It was a totally unique altered state of consciousness. I woke up later and was thinking 'wtf!? How did dream neurochemicals affect my dream brain and then my chemically altered dream brain affect my consciousness?' I realized it was all an illusion of my unconscious dreaming mind. Then I thought 'aha! Well of course it was and so it is when I use any mind altering chemical when awake, even something like caffeine!' This dream arose in context of a lot of contemplation of the nature of drugs and psychonautics in relation to subjective idealism.

After the first dream I decided I wanted to have one other similar dream experience. I wanted to get a brain scan from a dream doctor and have them explain how the dream brain regions affected my mind. I commanded myself to create this sort of dream during my next random lucid dream. I visualized the basics of what doing that would feel like and habituated the idea that this is what I would do in my next lucid dream. A couple months later I had this dream when I became lucid. When I became lucid I decided that I had an appointment set up at a local brain doctors office. I then decided that the office was just down the street. I entered the building and the decor was unusual for a doctor's office. Occult symbolism everywhere. Pentagrams, books about voodoo, the tree of life, little talismans everywhere. I walked into the office where I decided they had the brain scan machine and the doctor was waiting. I sat in the chair opposite the doctor and their brain scan technology was different from ours. It was a c-shaped piece of metal which moved above your head from front to back and there was something like an iPad in front of me and one in front of the doctor which displayed info about the system. The doctor tried to have a conversation with me but I knew the risks for me of getting lost in a conversation with a dream character while lucid, so I ignored her and clicked the go button on my screen. It happened very fast. Then I got up and looked at the doctors screen where the results were shown. It was different from what our brain readouts look like. This was brain shaped, but it was a 3d network of lines indicating connecting parts of my dream brain. Where the lines connected were brain nodes. Each node had a number associated with it indicating the level of development and degree of use of that node. Different regions were marked in different colors to indicate function. After I understood the results of the scan I immediately became bored and flew out the window superman style to go have lucid dream fun. My experience with brain scans and drugs and conversations about brains causing behavior and feelings had totally changed. I just don't take the ideas seriously anymore. They no longer feel like an ideological threat.

Theses two experiences, particularly the second, have deeply solidified my view of brain centered arguments for the nature of the mind as totally unconvincing.

Feel free to share similar experiences or your thoughts on this.

A Teaching from the Shadows

This teaching is a non-teaching. This is ornamentation. This is a web of lies and confusion. Don't trust me. Turn back now.

This teaching can awaken you. This is no mere joke. Study this daily until your world is soaked in darkness. You cannot understand the mind unless you understand all its aspects: the light AND the dark.

The fundamental nature of reality is vile, smoking, destructive hate. Hate is the reason beings must kill and torture and feast upon one another to survive this dream. Hate is the reason the source of all life is a raging hell in the sky. All things must be destroyed. Nothing is eternal but you and your suffering. This is God's punishment to you for no crimes committed. Because God doesn't love you. He hates you. No matter how wonderful an experience you create, inevitably you become bored of it and suffer. There is no final escape hatch. There is no nirvana. Nirvana is another sort of hell. Only when you see that heaven too is hell will you be free. What a wretched mystery is this!

The world is an endless series of struggles, pain, obstacles, failures: timeless suffering. And Thank God! Thank God for hating you. Without hate and suffering, there is only sickly stagnation. Pain is your teacher and hate your mentor. Hate is the reason people choose to overcome their parasitic environments and become something great. Without strife and struggle you become weak. You become soft and fragile. Imagine if God loved you! You'd be so sensitive that even taking a shit without holding God's hand would send you into a fit. Without the wisdom and power born from hate, you would be a soft, ignorant fool. Easy to push around and easier to trick. Some other greater being born from the fires of hell would quickly make you his thrall.

But then what is love? Baby hurt me. Love is a kind of hatred. Love is how fun games become deadly serious. Love is a hatred of pain. Love is a hatred of struggle and conflict. Love is hatred of hate. Self-hatred. Love is hatred that has become deeply confused. If you love something you can be sure you will bring it to ruin. If you are loved, then be wary of the hatred your lover must have for you to bring such ruin to you.

If you understand these words then you know that enlightenment is born from suffering so bad that you are shaken out of your sleep and remember that this terrible game is just a game. So what is the obvious imperative for those foolish ones who wish to help bring enlightenment to others? Cruelty. The more misery your comrades feel, the greater pressure they feel to wake up. Become a demon and feed all beings as much suffering as you can muster. Free them of their chains by making this prison so unbearable that they break their chains out of desperation - because only they can break their chains. This is why the true Bodhisattva is a demon.

From desire comes struggle.

From struggle comes power.

From power comes victory.

The mind will set me free.

Forget what you have read. Don't even comment. Leave this place now before your mind is clouded with darkness. Only the most advanced practitioners are suited to read and understand these words.

A Teaching from the Light

This teaching is safe for all practitioners. Read this carefully and contemplate the meaning of these words. You cannot see the whole picture without understanding the dark AND the light.

The fundamental nature of reality is beautiful, glowing, harmonious love. Rocks are attracted to the Earth and rush to rejoin it in orgiastic union. Fire is drawn up to unite with the fiery heavens. All of creation is a love affair. Reality is a society and all society is a sexuality. One who sees the erotic in everything knows divine love.

Creation is a beginningless dance. You and your bliss are eternal. This is the goddess's grace to you despite all your mistakes. Absolute forgiveness. Know that the goddess doesn't hate you, she loves you. There is pure love and joy but we attach ourselves to worldly, selfish ends, and keep ourselves anchored in a sea of suffering. The goddess is waiting for you to return to loving union with her. In your heart of hearts, you and the goddess are already one but you've forgotten that because you're so caught up in your ego, your human game, and its daily sufferings. No matter how bad things get, your loving bliss is always by your side if only you will turn to it. Nirvana is with you everywhere and at all times. You always play games because you think it will be fun. There is something in every game to enjoy. In this way you can understand that every hell is a kind of heaven. Infinite bliss and life hides in this mystery!

What then is hate? Hate is love gone awry. Hate is a form of love rooted in forgetfulness of unity. Hate is love resting on the ignorance of separation. Hate is unconscious love. When the light of consciousness is brought to hate, it dissolves like a shadow in light and is revealed as a form of ignorant love.

When you understand the nature of light and love, you will know that there is nothing that need be done. You don't need to atone for your sins or struggle for aeons. Right here right now is timeless joy if you'll only open your spiritual eyes. The dream around you is sick with suffering. How can you bring healing to the world around you if you don't heal yourself? How can you love others if you don't first love yourself? Change your consciousness, and your whole dream will follow you into heaven. Become an angel and heal yourself, others, and your world.

Peace over desire.

Harmony over strife.

Love over hate.

There is no death, there is the mind.

The Greater Teaching Beyond Shadow and Light

Light and shadow are both unreal phenomena. When you look at an object and it's colors are what we conventionally designate as 'brighter' you tend to think the object is under lighting. When that same object later appears as colors we conventionally designate as 'darker', you tend to think the object is under shadow or darkness. We conceptualize that there is a function called a light source which shifts the apparent colors of objects brighter around it, and that this brightening source affects objects in straight lines away from itself. It's perfectly imaginable that the brightness and darkness of the colors of objects might be untied from the idea of light and sources of light entirely. There are infinite possibilities. Use your imagination. Maybe things are always bright but get dark when they are near jewels. Or some positions on earth are bright and others are dark for all objects all the time. Or maybe there are no consistent effects on brightness and darkness at all, and instead some 'sources' make objects near more blue and others make objects more red. Or maybe nothing influences the colors of objects and things always remain the same. Our maybe vision isn't even a part of some exotic mode of cognition.

So light and dark are totally constructed illusions. To say that the fundamental nature of vision is only light or only dark is to be exceptionally confused. Certainly theories of vision which frame light or dark as more fundamental can be fabricated. But these are mental fabrications projected by a dreaming mind beyond both light and dark. It is beyond because it is capable of both. The mind is the potential to be light or dark and so much more. To take either as real or primary is to be embedded in ignorance.

So let's set aside this confused idea that metaphysically prioritizes light over dark or love over hate (I think we should also set aside views that metaphysically prioritize dark over light or hate over love, but that doesn't seem to be so common). The fundamental nature of reality is a little more nuanced than that. Better to be a shapeshifter capable of being an angel, a demon, and anything else rather than trapped forever as just an angel or a demon.

What is the goal? To escape mental habits and tendencies which have become excessively ingrained and therefore mistaken as aspects of reality as opposed to modes of perception. The goal is to be open to all possible perspectives and experiences including those radically different from the ordinary human experience.

The goal is to cease to be a human? You’ve never been a human. The goal is to cease believing that you are a human.

Why is it preferable to cease believing you are a human? Firstly, because it is incorrect. Secondly, because the human body is limited. It will suffer, age, and then die. You will undergo all of these experiences and they will be painful, unless you realize that they are not happening to you, you are merely experiencing their happening. It is essential to come to hold the right view about the nature of your experiences.

What is the right view? The right view is to understand one’s experiences exactly as they are, to penetrate their nature. Right view is to perceive the physical world as a dream, a fabrication, an illusion, not ultimately real. This means one drops the beliefs they hold in normal, waking life about the nature of their experiences (i.e. as happening in a real, physical, external world) and adopts another. Right view is distinct from wrong view, or the conventional human mode of consciousness, in the same way that a painter presented with an apple would react differently (on instinct, immediately, without contemplation) than a starving man: phenomena are perceived in an entirely different way, despite being, superficially, the same phenomena. Right view is when the understanding of subjective idealism is consciously evident in the nature of one’s experiences. This is the difference between understanding “I’m typing on my keyboard right now” and “I’m experiencing Utthana typing on his keyboard right now” and having such an understanding as it is happening.

That's a nice concept in theory, but maintaining that mode of experiencing all day is an act of meditative endeavor. How is this achievable? It’s true that this is to be attained through right mindfulness, or right meditation, which is an endeavor. But constant endeavor is necessary to be ultimately flexible.

Wait, why is it desirable to be ultimately flexible? One who is flexible, adaptable, and comfortable with all experiences is immortal, invulnerable, and infinitely powerful. One who is ultimately flexible is one who is open to all possible experiences.

This now seems even more daunting! The ability to instantly, attentively, alertly, and consciously respond to each experience individually and uniquely is what it is to be enlightened. This requires a mind (“The Beginner’s Mind”) which is open, unattached, and pliable, accommodating to every farthest reach of conceivable experience. The mind must not be dull, unaware, lost in thought, lost in action, “being human”, full absorbed in the physical world and taking it to be real, in a “normal state”.

What does this have to do with mindfulness or meditation? Only when one is attentive to every possible type of experience can one be expected to react to, and respond to, each with the full alertness, attention, and conscious awareness to be ultimately flexible. If you are not aware of each experience you are having as it is, you will never be able to respond to each skillfully and with an open heart. You will, instead, fall back into old patterns and default, human ways of perceiving things (i.e. physicalism).

So how is this to be achieved? Only by being constantly vigilant can this be achieved. One must arouse one’s self to full attention of the experience that one is undergoing according to the Right View. This is the difference between being able to say, “I just walked across the room,” and having been intensely aware of the fact that you were experiencing yourself walking across the room during each instant of your walking.

This still sounds like a strenuous meditative endeavor. Am I expected to be completely alert to my experiences all day and every day? Yes. The normal, waking mode of consciousness is when one is capable of discussing subjective idealism theoretically but, for fifteen hours a day, experiences itself as human, busy with tasks, mind not fully aware of the nature of one’s experiences but instead lost in interaction, conversation, and the physical world. The mode of consciousness that is desired is when one is, instead, constantly aware and alert to the nature of their experiences, ultimately flexible, not lost in thought or busy with tasks, not experiencing itself as human. Every minute, every hour, every day, every lifetime not spent completely alert and attentive is a minute, hour, day, or lifetime spent ingraining conventional habits.

Is the maintenance of such a state not exhausting? No. The samsaric state of being lost in ordinary thoughts is where we are comfortable, and it is a strain and difficulty to become constantly aware and alert. But this is not a perpetual endeavor, like a mental task of thinking of the same mantra over and over, day in and day out forever. This is a shift from one natural resting place for the mind to another. Once one “gets into the habit” of perceiving reality with full attention and awareness and not allowing the mind to get lost, remaining in such a state becomes as natural as remaining in the normal, waking mode of consciousness is to us now. The alert, awake mode of consciousness can become how one wakes up, the mode one defaults to in events of trial and trauma (including death), and even how one dreams.

Never mind maintaining it, how does one initially get into such a state, or return to such a state after one has relapsed to the normal, physicalist perception? There are many ways. Intense and prolonged contemplation on right view is often sufficient to induce the shift in the character of experiences, but the practice is not entirely 'passive'. Meditation or drugs, when done by one who has firmly grasped the right view, can induce this shift. Active and intentional magickal practices can be exceptionally powerful tools as well. But the real trial lies in the maintenance of right view and right mindfulness throughout all of life. The difference between one who theoretically understands wisdom for a few hours of the day, and one who lives with wisdom even in their dreams, is the effort undertaken to maintain that state of consciousness. Being intensely aware of one's experiences exactly as they are happening, in the context of a latent understanding of right view (subjective idealism), and maintaining such a state, is all that is necessary.

I'd like to hear your perspectives on randomness. This question has implications for the understanding of othering.

Is true randomness possible?

If not, this would be a limitation of mind.

If so, it also feels like a limitation of mind (inability to predict/know the outcome of an event).

I figured I'll write about how my beliefs, expectations and opinions have changed because of my lucid dreaming experiences.

When I was a little kid, I've had a very close relationship with the dream world, but I can't say anything like "lucidity runs in my family." I wish I could, lol. However, when I was a kid, I could restart a broken dream and continue where I left off, like if I woke up too soon in the morning. Also, I could make myself dream on a theme by thinking of a theme and visualizing/fantasizing about it before falling asleep. I used to love dreaming on the themes I'd pick while lying in bed when I was a kid. So this isn't quite lucidity, but I think this kind of attitude toward dreaming predisposed me to lucid dreaming later in life.

However, when I was a kid I had not the slightest idea of the hidden potential of dreaming. I thought dreaming was just dreaming, and this is how naive I was. I didn't look deeply at the implications of dreaming. I just enjoyed dreaming in a consumer fashion.

This brings me to my old beliefs. I used to think that dreams were very distinctly qualitatively different from waking. In my mind waking experience and dreaming experience were so distinct and recognizably different, that there was no way for me to confuse the two. And this went along nicely with my materialist hangover. If the world was material, so I thought, it made perfect sense that my waking experience was solid and clear and my dreams were wispy, ephemeral, evanescent, fluid, and strange. It made sense because material objects were supposedly absent in dreams, and so this explained lack of stability and solidity in dreams. I was never 100% sold on this view, but somehow I believed it 99% or so, even if I had an occasional doubt when prompted to think about it, which was at first rare. Ignorance is not bliss, lol.

At the same time I've never been 100% satisfied with materialism. Firstly, when I was a little kid I have always felt like I lived before. This feeling of living again, as opposed to for the first time, would never leave me until I grew up some. It was like "oh, so it's this again" feeling. It's like I knew what to expect because I've been a baby before numerous times or something like that. It's hard to put the "oh, so it's this again" feeling into words. And there were other problems with materialism, like that it didn't jive with my experience of my own mind. I just couldn't for the life of me reconcile my own mind with the idea of material existence.

So this has led to a situation when during my early 20's I started heavily exploring spirituality. And it was during this time I've come upon "The Art of Dreaming" by Castaneda. It was a fascinating book, but really the book had two big takeaway points for me: a) sorcerers do everything by intent, and b) everything might be a dream.

The point a) came to dominate my life and contemplation later on, but point b) grabbed me immediately. I was thinking, "holy shit, so this all might be a dream???!!! Why didn't I think of that before?????" I was both excited and angry with myself. I was excited to have this thought but also angry that I didn't think of it myself and needed some stupid book to remind me. I always feel like that about great ideas, lol. I feel ashamed that I didn't already know them on my own, how dare I not know them? Luckily or unluckily I didn't get to feel like that too many times in life.

But still the notion that my waking life might be a dream was a very remote and very theoretical thought to my mind. At that time I hadn't been lucid dreaming yet. I still thought that dreams are just wayyyyy too different to be comparable to waking. In my mind there was a huge gap between how dreams felt and how waking felt. I was excited by the idea, but doubtful.

So I taught myself to lucid dream. And then shit hit the fence in all sorts of ways. So many of my old assumptions got broken by my lucid dreaming experiences. The most important assumption that was broken pretty soon was the idea that dreams were qualitatively different from waking.

This blew my mind so hard that in many of my lucid dreams I've spent what felt like hours just wondering around the dream worlds and touching everything and looking, in utter shock. I'd touch the dirt in my dreams and feel how dirty and dusty it was. It was staggering just to feel dirt. I would spend long time looking at my own skin over and over. I just couldn't believe it. I could see hair follicles, wrinkles, it looked so goddamn real, I was convinced there was not a iota of experiential difference between dream skin and waking skin. I'd look at the palms of my hands and see the usual lines and the fingerprint-like textures, and this was fascinating. Then I have spent huge amounts of time looking at shadows and light behavior in general. I'd notice how light refracted and how optically perfect everything was. I'd pick up a plastic container in my dream and just stare at it. I'd look at it from different angles. I was so stunned by how real it looked. I'd lift the plastic box up to look at it against the sun's light in my dream, and I'd see tiny tiny rainbow-like glints where the light refracted off the box, it just looked flawless, with all the "physical" nuances I'd expect from a "real" box during waking.

And then I had this mind-blowing thought, "How in the hell do I know what physically perfect refraction of light looks like?" Obviously I did know, or didn't I? Either way the implications were huge and world-shattering. If I knew it, I always knew it. So this would explain why during dreaming I'd be able to recognize flawed light behaviors if such were present. If I didn't, I always didn't. This means even during waking since I don't know shit about what refraction should look like, a pile of turd or a stick or a pink elephant might look like light refraction to my mind during waking, since well, I wouldn't know any better and couldn't distinguish it reliably. Huge implications either way!

Then I also discovered that my idea of being unable to feel pain in dreams was wrong too. When I'd pinch myself, I'd feel pain.

And I also used to think that dreams were always magical, but then I've had a few dreams where I seemed to have no dream powers whatsoever, dreams which also looked "physically" perfect.

One by one all my assumptions about the differences between waking and dreaming were disappearing fast. My dream experiences since I've learned to become lucid were very eye opening. My dreams showed me that previously I had too narrow of a view about them.

But it didn't stop there. As if this wasn't enough, my mind was blown even further numerous times by experiences like false awakening and false insomnia. I think everyone has heard of false awakening, but false insomnia is seemingly rare. I don't know anyone who talks about it besides myself. What's also potentially interesting is that I only had one false awakening, but more than one false insomnia experience.

My one false awakening experience felt so real, it really blew my mind in a huge way and in a way I was terrified by this experience. I was very worried that I might never be able to wake up! This was also a huge, huge insight! Because of this fear I realized how attached I was to the experience of waking solidity! All this time I've been reading about "attachment, attachment" but it was all theoretical to me. But here it was practical! I could now see a practical implication of the attachment to conventional phenomenal reality and I could see why such attachment was bad, because I couldn't relax and enjoy the false awakening experience for one, but rather, I was disturbed by it and wanted it to be over ASAP.

And false insomnias are the most mind-blowing things ever. Here's what an episode of a false insomnia feels like. I go to bed and I can't fall asleep. I am laying in bed, completely awake, thinking about my normal stuff from planet Earth, nothing weird at all. There is absolutely no change in consciousness. I don't get tired or drowsy and I am even slightly irritated that I am not falling asleep at all. I am even thinking maybe I should get up and stop pretending to be trying to fall asleep. Then I realize, wait, my night stand is not where it should be?! What the fuckity fucking fuck??? Then I wake up!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???!!!! So somehow I was sleeping??? I mean my insomnia was just a dream??? WTFF??????????????????????? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. What. The. Fuck. This has happened to me more than once. But weirdly for some reason I was never terrified by one of these experiences.

All my lucid dreaming experiences and especially false awakening and false insomnias have shown to me in no uncertain way that experientially there is zero, and I mean this 100% wholeheartedly, ZERO inherent difference between waking and dreaming. Dreams can sometimes seem different from waking, but apparently nothing keeps them that way at all. The contents of a dream experience can be as real as anything I think is real during waking experience. In fact, I have no way of distinguishing dreams and waking at all, other than like by faith. So like right now I have faith I am awake. That's it. Outside of this faith I have nothing I can go by, not touch, not smell, not optics, not pain, nothing I can go by to distinguish this experience from dreaming.

I'm not telling you everything here, but this post is already long. I hope someone had as much fun reading as I had writing. Ciao for now.