weirdway

OK, so I am watching a video of a person that once in a while I like to watch. And what I gradually realized is that this notion of "a video" is quite illusory. So my idea of a video is that it's something recorded in the past. Since it's from the past, it's not alive. It has to be dead. Except as I am watching it, for some reason I feel like this video is too alive. Conceptually I "know" it's dead but it feels like it's not dead at all. It's a subtle feeling that develops as I watch the video.

Then at one point my attention drifts off and I start looking at some other thumbnails on the right side, and the video says something like, "What? Is it boring now?" The video was talking to me in real time.

Then later on, in the last part or maybe one before last, he started talking about this life (the video was about rebirth) and he started immediately jumping to age 13 or so. And I was mentally saying to the video, "No, I want to hear what happened when you were 4." And, he stops, and says (paraphrased), "OK, so you want to know how I was when I was a kid?" And then he tells me how it was when he was a kid.

Yes, so I can apparently sometimes talk to videos and the videos talk to me in a way that the videos are not conceptually supposed to. This was very interesting and just a tiny bit creepy. But of course I understand what's going on. You see, when I watch the video, I'm not watching anything from the past. My subconscious mind is projecting the video in real time, right now, and makes it look like it's coming from the past. That's why it can talk to me and I can talk to it. It's a nice illusion. Is it not?

This completes my post. I realize some of you will not be happy unless I post a link to the video. So here it is. It's the first one out of 6. Who knows. Maybe this video will also talk to you. I don't know.

Sometimes my mind is stirred up and some relatively persistent fear emerges. It's relatively weak at first, but intuitively I sense that the fear already has some authenticity and it demands more attention and if I give in I'll end up dwelling on it, it will grow, and possibly manifest as one or another unwelcome appearance or pattern that might be harder to get rid of later when it's no longer just a feeling (or a feeling+idea).

So I realized that trying to deny or to straightforwardly banish or to push out the feeling is sometimes not effective for me. I can quickly banish or dissolve most fears when they occur, but once in a while I do come across a rather stubborn one (or even a particularly "convincing" one).

And then I found a little handy device. I realized that if the feeling is too well rooted to just summarily dump it, what I can do instead is domesticate it.

I visualize a box and then I open this box and put my worried feeling (or feeling+idea) into this box and lock it. Then I lovingly and carefully store the box on a mental shelf. So, the idea is, I'm not getting rid of the bad feeling, and I am also not pretending that I don't have it. Instead I frame it in a way that makes it contained and makes it unable to grow. It becomes more like a pet or a scientific sample instead of a wild beast.

And these boxes don't need to be permanent. The idea is to tame the feeling to level off the brunt of its strength and to channel its "energy" into something tame. Once the feeling is properly channeled and tamed, it's OK to forget it, or to deliberately dissolve the box with the feeling in it. So the idea is not to keep these boxes forever, no, but to tame feelings (or feeling+idea bundles) that are too wild and too powerful to just eliminate on the spot as they occur.

It's too early for me to tell if this affects manifestation very significantly, but one thing I can vouch for is that it gives a huge peace of mind and a sense of control over feelings I'd normally struggle with when attempting to outright negate/banish/dissolve head on. By using a redirect-the-flow attitude I can frame and tame the charged feeling instead, which is easier. If any of you studied any tai chi concepts, it's the same as: by using a small force one can lead a larger one. Direct opposition is avoided in this method.

I have a bad habit of logging into this account every twelve months or so, usually when I'm at a low ebb and need to get re-energised, writing a long post which tries and fails to encapsulate everything I've thought, discovered or struggled with since my last post, and then neglecting to respond to any replies.

(I'm sorry. I do read and highly value the replies, I promise.)

I'm sorry to have seen valuable members drift away, and to have watched this sub, and r/oneirosophy, become so quiet - but I fully recognise I am part of the problem. I notice that u/AesirAnatman posted a little while back about returning to r/oneirosophy, or starting a new sub/blog. I think that would be great and Aesir, if you get that up and running, please let me know, I'd be keen to contribute. I think we inadvertently made this sub a little too rigid and it stifled conversation - something more casual might be better? (Casual but not low-effort, if you get me. Gods save us from a sub where every second post is a newcomer asking "Just found this sub, is this real/what is this all about?" But equally, maybe every post doesn't need to be an essay of publishable quality. I'd be keen just to read a paragraph about the walk in the park you took where you experienced a cool moment of synchronicity, etc, if you don't have anything "big" to say.)

I gather we're a fairly rule-averse group of people, so I don't think there's much use in trying to lay down the law about how often people need to post, but I think it might be valuable if those of us who are still flogging this horse made a loose commitment, whether here, at r/oneirosophy, or somewhere new entirely, to try to post and interact once or twice a week. There are posts in both of these subs which have been life changing for me, and while I know we've said a lot, repetition has its value, and I still don't think we've said all there is to say anyway.

If we had, we wouldn't still fucking be in this capitalist hellhole world, would we?

So, in summary, I'm in if you lot are in.

And to throw in some commentary on the work while I'm at it, I've been thinking a lot about humility, arrogance and the trap of needing to feel worthy.

Back when I was in my early twenties I entered a pretty severe depressive slump because it suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded by people who were, from my perspective, more deserving of my dreams and aspirations than I was. What right had I to be fit when there were people who rose earlier, trained harder, ate healthier? What right had I to happiness when there were people who were more generous and proactive?

In my head, before I had the right to have whatever I wanted, it was necessary that I should work as hard as the hardest working person who also wanted what I wanted, or suffer as badly as the suffering-est person who also wanted what I wanted.

And the resultant depression was no doubt from the impossibility of achieving this, even if I threw everything I had at it.

For one thing, the world is, as we know, extremely uneven when it comes to giving people "what they deserve."

Let's say you want to be thin and fit. All other things being equal then yes, the person who works out and watches what they eat is likely to be thinner and fitter than the person who does not.

But the person who is "earning" the desirable physique could find themselves the victim of some catastrophe outside of their control - an earthquake, say - which could instantaneously, permanently and negatively alter their bodies, irrespective of how much work they've put in or how much they have "earned" a body that fits their desires.

Then, too, there are all the other factors outside your control which eliminate the possibility of a level playing field; genetics, socio-economic position, geographical location, etc, etc, etc.

So, while there is a degree to which you can kind of, maybe, almost, sort of earn what you want in this world, worthiness carries far less weight than a multitude of other factors in determining what you get/what you experience.

It's why child rapists can be elected president or spend their lives drifting around the world in private jets, while genuinely wonderful, decent people live in poverty and agony.

Maybe there is even a degree to which we enjoy this paradigm, though I am personally well-tired of a system which so consistently rewards awfulness. But I also struggle to picture a world in which everyone gets only and exactly what they deserve - that might be tiresome in a different way.

So. We've determined the world is unfair. We've determined that even if you do all the conventional things that are theoretically necessary to "earn" what you desire, you're still not guaranteed to get it.

Of course, magic is the province of those who wish to change the world. Maybe our insistence (I say our, because I suspect others struggle with this too) that we meet some intangible, poorly-defined standard before we are "allowed" to have what we desire - in our cases, power beyond that of conventional humans - is a response to the injustice of the world.

Are we possibly inflicting a standard upon ourselves that doesn't exist in the world because we resent the lack of such a standard in the world?

And can anyone hope for success under such a mental construct?

If you have mental commitments to the paradigm of an unfair world, and you also have a commitment to the notion that you will be able to transcend the unfair world once you've finally met your internal criteria, which of those two clashing mental constructs is going to win? What’s to stop the unfair world/reality from saying “bruh – I’m unfair, remember? No.” when you approach it with your hard-won worthiness/magical powers voucher in hand.

You're trying to beat an unfair system by first pandering to it and then expecting it to behave completely at odds with its internal logic just this one time. It's a paradox that won't work - or will only work if you’re very, very lucky.

Clearly another approach is demanded.

Worthiness is inherent. It is inherent, or it is non-existent, depending on how you want to frame it. And that, for me, mentally addled as I am by this ridiculous existence, is a dill of a pickle to get my head around.

The "you must work x hard to be y worthy to earn the right to z results" is a toxic, conventional human mindset which yields limited results in the conventional world and even fewer results in the magical world. You need to start re-conceptualising things in your head and train yourself to realise you are outside and above this construct.

How?

• 1: don't confuse morality and worthiness.

I'm not saying be a dick. I'd actively encourage you not to be a dick, in fact, but that's because I believe that kindness and compassion have inherent value. But it is possible to be an absolute raging fuckcunt and to achieve the kind of magical control we're pursuing. If you're going to be committed to kindness and justice, be committed to these things for their own sake, or for the sake of the good things that come along with them (i.e. a more pleasant existence) rather than because you think that being kind will allow you to manifest a winning lottery ticket. Trying to perform magic by acting like the human idea of a saint is like trying to fill your car up with apple juice instead of fuel. Apple juice is great, but it won't make your car go. Compassion is great, but it isn't a magic wand.

• 2: Cultivate arrogance.

I'm stealing/paraphrasing from an old nefandi post here, but basically you need to set yourself up as ultimate and everything else up as penultimate.

This isn't easy. It isn't easy to be arrogant when you stumble getting onto an escalator and everyone laughs. It isn’t easy to be arrogant when you need to go to a job you hate five days a week just to survive.

It's hard work to remind yourself that you are not what you experience and to distance yourself, and your idea of yourself, from the things that happen to you and even from your own actions. It’s hard but it’s what you must do.

A little mental trick I'm employing at the moment - if your idea of worthiness is still snagged on how hard you work and how much you suffer, you can feed the amount of work and suffering you're experiencing in your quest for arrogance back into your worthiness, making you even more arrogant.

This isn't entirely skilful in that you're still feeding that notion that worthiness is a pre-requisite of magic, but sometimes it's easier to chip away at bad habits slowly than to try to toss them out in one go.

So that’s where I’m at. If you have any better tricks to get around that whole “prove yourself to yourself” circle that gets you nowhere, I’d be glad to hear them.

This is a technique/mindset I've been playing with recently in an effort to reduce the degree of othering in my experience.

I realised that I have a tendency to mentally claim ownership of anything that occurs in my life that I subjectively view as good or desirable. So if I'm driving to an appointment, I get there and there's lots of parking available - that's because I've been consciously intending punctuality. On the other hand, if I hit roadworks and arrive to find a packed carpark - in my mind, that's because I've been consciously intending punctuality but have failed for some reason.

So now, in an effort to narrow the gap between what I'm consciously intending and subconsciously intending, I'm getting into the habit of taking credit for everything. The wind blows - I think "I did that." I arrive to a full carpark and end up being late, I think "Not sure why I did that, but I did that."

Sometimes, particularly when the thing I'm taking credit for is subjectively negative, I take credit and then try to backtrack to figure out why I might have done such a thing. Sometimes I arrive at an answer, sometimes I don't. Either way, I remind myself that it was me who did it, even if it was stupid.

As far as claiming ownership of the things that are neither here nor there - the wind blowing, the colour of the car that's driving beside me, the appearance of the girl who sold me milk - I've found that getting into the habit of automatically, effortlessly claiming ownership for these things is a very effective means of getting into an altered, dreamlike state. A few times, I've experienced the sensation that I am truly catching the moment/feeling of when "subconscious/other me" decided to make the wind blow. A couple of times now I've been able to "see" the way that something would pan out, like the path a leaf would take as it drifted to the ground.

1. Other-perspectives are possible states of experience, will, and knowledge that we can imagine fully adopting but do not.

2. The presence of embedded other-perspectives within our personal sensory world (as opposed to other-perspectives we imagine seperately) entails a translation system that we use to relate the imagined subjective states of the other-perspective to sensory transformations.

3. These sensory transformations which connect to our construction of other-perspectives might be summarily called language.

4. Language takes many forms of expression. Verbal language, body language, and the mere sensory appearance of a body with sense organs considered sentient.

5. A body is the limited range of expressive power over which a perspective expresses its contextual will. Sense organs are material representations of the limited range of experiential power which a perspective uses to manifest its sensory world.

6. In the same way that we may use verbal expressions of bodies and emotional expressions of bodies to construct aspects of other-perspective's subjectivity, we may use the appearance and orientation of their sense organs in relation to other, environmental, aspects of our sensory world to construct experiences for other-perspectives.

7. The presence of an active other-perspective translation system in your mind begins with your will. The choice to limit your construction of an other-perspective to sensory appearances (as opposed to magical transformation of their perspective in some way according to your unconventional desire and power) is also volitional. This is called leaving other-perspectives free.

8. In order for multiple free perspectives to cooperate and stay together there must be a collective desire to coordinate fundamental commitments - a desire for agreement and compromise.

9. It is possible to change your fundamental commitments and beliefs against a group as an act of rejection of the compromise. It is also possible for your group with agreed on commitments and beliefs to separate from another group with different commitments and beliefs in a form of absolute disagreement. It is also possible for an individual to break away from your group's commitments and beliefs. It is also possible for all three of these modes to occur in reverse in the form of agreement.

10. Whatever the variation, whenever others diverge from your deep beliefs and commitments, they will gradually appear to become more and more wrong and insane as reality fits your view more and more, unless they change to agree with you - at which point they appear to become "correct".

11. The ways of manifesting experience and of building expectations and beliefs, and the ways of communicating them, are very fundamental negotiated agreements in a social convention. These may take the form of: materialism, animism, theism, solipsism, and the varieties of magical conventions.

12. In materialism, only experiences derived from material relationships of objects are valid, hence your sensory information is only valid and useful for constructing beliefs if it corresponds to an appropriate relationship between a material sense organ and a material object. In our case those sense organs are the 5 commonly known human sense organs. This particularly requires for your senses to appear as differentiated qualities from one another with clear differentiation in order for clear comprehension and communication of your material sense experiences to others. Thus, e.g., no seeing a 2 dimensional field of scents representing objects' surfaces if the agreement is to see colors. Similarly, only expressions in the form of material transformations are acceptable, hence the role of the body in action and the role of verbal language in communication. These imply the rejection of other, non-material, forms of action and experience and belief and communication.

13. In theism, other forms of experiences and beliefs and actions and communications may be accepted under certain conditions: special revelation, prayer, miracles, visions, and divination are all examples of possible modes of valid experience, knowledge, and will. Similarly, animism and other magical conventions may include other modes of experiencing, knowing, and willing that are considered valid such as remote viewing, telepathy, magick, channeling, or telekinesis.

14. Interestingly, most of the not-fully-material models presented make room for classifications of beings which relate to our sensory world in largely or wholly non-material ways - with modes of experiencing, knowing, and willing fully or largely untethered from material objects. Relating to these sorts of beings would be quite different from relating to the sorts of beings we relate to with the conventional materialist paradigm (animals and humans).

15. Hallucinations within materialism are experiences which do not correctly correspond to the relationship observed by others between your sense organs and the apparent environment. Interestingly, this also makes some room for detecting non-materialist experiences (hallucinations) in your perspective by yourself: you can observe your own sense organs and environment with one sense and compare that to another sense to see if it properly materially corresponds.

16. In general, hallucinations are experiences that do not validly correspond to the core principles of a view. Delusions are beliefs that do not validly correspond. Insanity and irrationality (from the POV of a given convention) are applied to any mode of experience, knowledge and will construction that differs from that conventional view and therein results in invalid subjective states.

17. If you want to be loved and trusted and supported by a materialist or mostly materialist community and culture (as most humans in any cultural context do), if you want to be a member of their group and share in their reality, you'll put an equivalent amount of focus on improving and expressing your material modes of experience and knowledge and will. If you are afraid of being rejected and ostracized by your community, of being considered irrational, insane, or dangerous, then you will probably spend most of your time ridding yourself of any experiences that aren't related to sense organs and brains, knowledge that isn't derived therefrom, and intentions that aren't related to bodily expressions and brains. This can similarly be understood in parallel with theistic cultures, animistic cultures, or any others.

18. If you can remove some fear of social rejection, or if you live in a flexible and tolerant culture, or if you have some social peers that want to negotiate and change the fundamental structure of reality with you, then you can spare some time, energy, and focus (either as an individual or a group negotiating a new convention) for exploring other possible fundamental commitments and modes of experience, knowledge, and will. You can look at rearranging your commitments and thus changing your reality until your surrounding culture either goes insane and destroys itself, disappears entirely, or comes to face your new, ever more apparent truth.

What is the imagination? The imagination is your power to create and explore perspectives. There are the more conscious, surface levels of your imagination, such as those where you can close your eyes and manifest whatever you would like immediately. There are the middling levels of your imagination, such as those where you manifest aspects of your human life (such as job, home, relationships, interests, etc.) that you can change, but perhaps not so immediately or easily as your sandbox imagination. And there are the more subconscious, deep levels of your imagination, such as those where you manifest the vast world you experience as stable and continuous, and everyone and everything in it: those that seem entrenched and quite formidable to someone just gaining an understanding of Subjective Idealism.

The deeper some tendency to manifest is buried in your imagination, in your mind, the more it operates on its own and seems to be out of your conscious control: the more it is subconscious and othered. The more a tendency to manifest has been unearthed, the more conscious it becomes: the more it is selfed. A conventional person is someone who has buried their tendencies to imagine this reality so deeply that they have forgotten their own subconscious responsibility for those tendencies. Now they call those tendencies other. External. Matter.

Most of you interested in Subjective Idealism here in this space are coming out of a long and dark materialist, objectivist, externalist stupor. I know I certainly am. Almost the entirety of your intent is probably buried in the deepest dungeons of your imagination – caged due to aeons of self-forgetfulness. It’s probable that your project is similar to mine. Dig up most of that intent, examine it, refashion it, bury some of it deep but not nearly as deep as before, keep other aspects of it much closer to the surface, much more readily accessible to the conscious part of the mind.

So, assuming you’ve got some idea of what you want to adjust and what you want to leave alone, how do you unearth and bury parts of your imagination, your will? Well, isn’t it obvious? You use your imagination, your will! Your waking reality is your imagination, habituated at the deepest levels. Practiced for countless lifetimes. You need to start practicing, to start imagining, to start willing, whatever new perspective, whatever new intent, you’d like to manifest.

There’s an important caveat to this. Your sense of self is likely rather small. It would be rather difficult to suddenly honestly and truly exercise a sense of self on the scale of a god with divine powers and all after humaning for so many lifetimes. For most people, it’s probably better to take a gradual approach to expanding your sense of self. If you can’t manage to calm yourself when you get angry, or eat your vegetables for health when you don’t like the taste as much (I don’t mean to imply that you ought to do these things, only that you ought to be able to do these things), then you’ll likely not learn magical healing or wisdom, let alone something like telekinesis. Start where you are. If you begin by learning to do things that are slightly difficult, you will eventually be able to easily do what once seemed quite difficult or improbable, and one day you will be able to accomplish the impossible.

The more you adopt the Subjective Idealist mindset, and the more confidence you develop in yourself, the more you will find yourself considering turning to magic to accomplish things in your life instead of the conventional paths of negotiating with others and manipulating matter with your body. What is magic, according to Subjective Idealism? It’s the alteration of your will, your imagination, often understood as acts that we would conventionally consider impossible. But really even opening and closing your hand is an act of magic. As is the daily maintenance of the waking world.

The ability to magically change something is easier when that something is closer to consciousness and more difficult when it is more subconscious. So, to get good at a given form of magic I suggest two things: (a) pay attention to your mind and learn your tendencies in the domain that you are wanting to master and (b) start practicing. Imagine that something in the domain you want to learn that you wish to accomplish is realized. Yes, in your sandbox imagination, but as soon as possible try to put that imagination, that belief, right onto the waking world as well. See what it feels like. Find out what sorts of ideas you have in your mind that resist it, that fight back, that reject it and dismiss it. These are all your buried, subconscious habits of mind within your imagination. Don’t be hasty. Examine the resistance. Be certain you are willing to give up the limiting belief before you abandon it – consider its advantages, not just its disadvantages. There’s a reason you originally established this tendency. Then, if you’ve decided, abandon it. And if it ever rises again, each time crush it and imagine your new vision, your new magic. It will always take hold eventually if you have the commitment to stick it out. Always.

If you do this, you will gradually unearth the depths of your imagination and your magical power will grow in the newly tilled soil of your mind.

First off, for purposes of grokking this, I request you take the perspective, even if only for a moment, that everything in your human dream is 180 degrees off, a little like a reflection in a mirror. Allow for that possibility while you read the following.

When you appear to have been born into humanness, you died to your True Nature, to Truth. You were birthed into this human dream but it was actually a death from the perspective of Truth.

When you appear to die in the human dream, what is really happening is you are being born back into your True nature, Truth. When you are born you die and when you die you are born.

Imagine a night dream... the characters appear within a dream, they are birthed. Later that dream ends and the characters disappear (die). Where did they go? Nowhere, because there never existed. Yes, they appeared to have a variety of experiences within that night dream which might indicate they were 'real' characters.. seeing, hearing, feeling various experiences, but they were not 'real'. From their dream perspective they felt real, but upon awakening the dreaming human realizes they were just illusory.

In a lucid dream, which you have probably experienced, you wake up to your true nature as that of the human character having the night dream. You awaken inside the dream to the reality that the character in the night dream is the creation of a human. Said human is outside the dream. Where does the night dream character go? Nowhere, because he/she wasn't 'real' to start with. You might say he/she died and was absorbed back in the dreaming human. As above, so below.

Contemplate this, you are already dead. You couldn't be deader and some day you will die to this human dream and will become alive to your True Nature. Truth is the dreamer and, in your human format you are a dreamed character.

You might ask why your human character seems so real and believable. Your night dreams appear real while they are happening. If your dream of humanness did not appear real, with the validation of the senses and human drama, you would not stick around for the entertainment.

Could all this human dream be solely for entertainment? You can make up any reason you want for this human dream, I find entertainment works for me.

/u/mindseal and I recently began discussing intention and manifestation and the "mechanism" behind it. We've moved our conversation to this thread so that others can hopefully share their thoughts and experiences.

So I was relaxing while leaning back in my chair, a significant distance away from the monitor, and I saw something that should have been "physically" impossible.

I have nearsightedness and I now wear a deliberately weak prescription glasses so that I can practice my eyesight (I'm am a bit lazy about it though, so I end up not really practicing all that much, but that's the logic behind my deliberately weaker than needed prescription here).

So what I saw was very clear text on a background of fuzzy text, which is extremely strange. I mean, the text should either be fuzzy or clear but not both at once, which makes zero "physical" sense. However I saw very clear text as though overlaid on top of the fuzzy gray stuff that would have been produced by the nearsighted perception of that same text.

From the POV of subjective idealism what I saw isn't surprising, because what I am looking into isn't some external object, but a state of my own inner expectation/will. Since when I am looking out I am not literally looking outside myself, but I am merely examining the state of my world-building will, then of course this can be rendered in pretty much arbitrary ways and what I see doesn't need to abide physical limitations.

All in all this is a relatively minor phenomenon, but it's kind of curious, so I decided to make a note of it here.

Hey all.

I've been away from reddit for a while. I've been busy being pretty immersed in my experiences. I was having a lot of social interactions and I find that nothing else has quite the magnetic pull that they do, especially intense and emotional ones, and I got pretty well sucked into them. So I spent the last few months thinking primarily about my job (which underwent big changes), my hobbies (which are quite illuminating and exciting to me but can also be truly superficial), my relationships (which also were shaken up recently), politics (one human being has 150 billion dollars and I don't have healthcare - that's probably not okay), etc. I experienced a lot of anxiety and found a lot of subtle and passive hindrances that I'd been blind to during these last few months. But I also learned a lot about what makes me happy, calm, mindful, and mindless. I've undoubtedly spent a lot of time with truly meaningless and mindless things and have spent virtually no time actively practicing wisdom. This is not my first experience with a period like this and I have no good reason to believe it will be my last.

Recently, obviously, being here writing this, I've begun to return to a place of contemplation and meditation and, looking back on the last few months, I have a lot to learn and investigate and unpack. It's like I was acting out a film, and now I've taken the role of film critic, except my goal is less about analyzing the content of film and more about deducing the nature of film and video from the footage available.

First on that list of things to analyze is a lingering anxiety about how easily I slipped into a state of very minimal contemplation and meditation and of worldly absorption. I didn't so much as decide to spend a long while lost in convention as I did simply not resist sliding quickly into it. I find that prolonged periods of introspection and practice exhaust me in one way, and immersive 'humaning' exhausts me in a different way, and the last decade has been my bouncing between them for periods of anywhere from a few months to a few years at a time.

Does anyone else experience this? Am I a puny spiritual weakling who cannot resist the temptation to become a mindless drone for more than a year at a time? Do these experiences happen on a different time scale for you? Have you developed techniques to deal with this? Do you consider spending some time mindless (as in, the antonym of mindful or aware) important or even vital to understanding reality? Or is it a sign or failure instead, and a waste of time or even detrimental? Or is it all about the way you spend such time?

And really I'd just be happy to get an update from everyone on what the water's like for them right now. Just dump some thoughts on me, especially u/nefandi, u/triumphantgeorge, and u/aesiranatman, but everyone else too.

Edit: I apologize if any of my wording here is careless. I trust most of you to be clever enough not to be mistaken by it. I'm a bit like a sleepy cat just woken up in the morning. I'll need a moment to regain my sharpness.

With apologies to u/utthana, whose title I've stolen. I thought about replying to your post but that felt like hijacking, and a bit redundant three months down the track. In retrospect this may be more hijacky.

The world is quicksand but, contrary to all that I was led to believe about quicksand by cartoons, I think that struggling might actually be the way out.

I have also spent the last few months distracted and swamped by life and the world, to the exclusion of contemplation. For a long time my daily practice was at nil. Awareness was always there in the background in the form of dissatisfaction, but it just didn't seem like I had the mental space or energy to do anything with it other than acknowledge it. Even my dreams have become a dull penance.

If I had to describe existence recently I'd call it sawdust.

I've done a bit of re-prioritisation in the last week to be able to immerse myself, for a while at least, in practice, and attempt to figure out what the hey has been going on this year. I need to get some safeguards in place so I don't end up so mentally swamped again. It's a catch-22. Living in reasonable comfort in this world requires attention to a lot of stuff I'd like to ignore (money, money... money). It'd be nice to just make it go away but apparently I'm not skilled enough to do that yet.

So that's the challenge. Find a way to exist that isn't untenable but which also allows space - the bulk of the space - for mental progress. Perhaps in some manner I'm cultivating strife because I have some ass-backwards commitment to the idea that this is the only thing that will drive me. Intellectually, I know that pain isn't the best motivator but it seems to be a condition of my progress that it only happens when I'm so severely dissatisfied with the status quo that I force through changes in reality, temper-tantrum style. But too much strife just = stagnation and despair. Hopefully this truth will sink into and take root in my mind sometime soon.

So some techniques I'm currently employing:

Less wishy-washiness: If you want to do magic, do magic. Don't beat around the bush, generate some intentions, set parameters, make things happen, judge your results! I think that fear of failure can be so constraining that this one area of your life where you should be wildly imaginative, flamboyant and fearless can become a sinkhole of restrictions, excuses and apologies. The challenge here is walking the tightrope of not sinking into despair or giving up when you fail. There's a valuable, fleeting moment between action and failure when your mind tells you just why you failed. The problem is that there's a huge amount of data to unpack in that millisecond/frisson of disquiet.

Floating brain: I'm almost embarrassed to include this one, but I've found that it's effective at tackling the sensation that you're located in a brain, experiencing the world from behind a set of eyeballs, especially when you don't have much mental energy for genuine deconstruction of the world. Take your brain, make it transparent, float it in front of you. This helps me to remember that the brain is a construct of the mind, like the world, not the centre/originating point of my consciousness. It also gives me a sense of omnipresence.

Judicious use of fiction: Computer games, books; becoming invested in them and increasing their "realness," particularly that of the characters, doesn't so much decrease the reality of my day to day existence as widen its possibilities. That's clumsily expressed - I can try to elaborate if anyone's interested.

So anyway. Long story short, do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light, etc.

I battle with tiredness quite a lot.

I've been asking myself where the fatigue is coming from recently, in an effort to alleviate it.

The main factor I've identified involves the permanent tension that exists between the "you" who you feel you are and the "you" you manifest.

There's nothing startling or supernatural in this of course - feeling pressure to act a certain way in defiance of your true feelings is pretty universal. I think that once you start to veer away from physicalism, though, there's a greater disparity between "internal" you and "external" you.

At any rate, having identified this as a big mental energy suck, I'm now trying to behave in a way that feels more consistent with my internal vision of myself/the world.

In this respect, the tiredness has almost become a pointer - whatever I'm confronted with, there's a course of action, or a way of thinking, or a way of being that I feel I can "rest with" internally. That's the best that I can describe it. I'd describe the opposite feeling as a mixture of debilitation and demotivation. Considering the difficulties associated with knowing one's own mind and desires, it's a useful tool to have.

Having decided on whatever path or action I can "rest with", the next step is obviously following through, and this brings its own, different tensions. I think worrying about your public persona is one of the hardest physicalist hang-ups to shake, and, as a subjective idealist, some of the courses of action that feel "restful" to me look crazy to an average person. So there's that to battle, but I'd still say that the fatigue that comes with fighting the stress of worrying whether you look like a crazy person is preferable to the deep internal exhaustion that comes from trying to smother your ideal self.

The other reason it's exhausting is because it runs you up against the apparent physical world. Sometimes the restful path is "look different," "stop being cold," etc. But it's not a bad thing, I think, for these thoughts to become reflexive, and to replace the current reflex, which goes something like:

• dissatisfying experience
• "What a pity change is impossible."
• "Wait, maybe it isn't impossible!"

Hello friends. I hope you're all well and making progress in your chosen paths, wherever you happen to be wandering.

It sure did get deathly quiet around here - I feel like everyone sank into solitary contemplation at around the same time. But a pandemic is as good an excuse as any to touch base and see how everyone's going. I don't have anything groundbreaking to share so I thought I'd do a quick where I'm at post. I'd love to hear where you're at as well.

For my own part - I finally acknowledged to myself that the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge and power is the abiding and sole focus of my life, and has been, really, from as early as I can remember. I relieved myself of a lot of unnecessary guilt in coming to terms with this. It's not that I don't care about other things, or other people - but I perceive them differently now, as fitting within the framework of my pursuit, not in competition with it. They're sub-headings, not a whole different essay.

To this end, I made a lot of changes, rearranging things so that contemplation and practice were at the centre of my life. What did this achieve?

Well. Lol. Things never move as fast as I want them to.

I'm always engaged in "kicking the walls of reality," so to speak. I feel like this is less skilful practice and more frustration-driven destruction - but seeing the occasional crack appear in the plaster of our physical experience is satisfying! Even if it doesn't happen nearly enough. Some strange things happened. I saw what I can only describe as a "cloaked" spider walking across the ceiling of my house one day, only to have it disappear when I got up and examined it closely. A bunch of standard "haunted house" stuff started happening around me - being held down in bed while wide awake, doors opening of their own volition, yadda yadda.

None of it was frightening nor, I think, particularly meaningful (well... the spider DOES make me stop and think from time to time). Basically if you randomly kick walls you're going to randomly cause destruction and that's probably all there is to say about that - but I mention it because it's mildly interesting.

Contemplation-wise, the nature of self, personality and identity continues to hold my attention. I had a lucid dream recently - one of those gift from the gods types, where I hadn't even been trying to LD but wham! There I was, with a high degree of lucidity.

In this dream I was fully aware of this life, of the body in the bed dreaming the encounter. What made this LD novel for me though was the sense that I was emotionally attached to and detached from that dreamer's life at one and the same time. I wasn't quite occupying the position of omniscience and omnipotence that I aim for, but I was in a "higher" state than in waking life because I had more choices. The emotional attachments and things I find important in this life felt real and vital but they did not feel urgent. There are other dreams - infinite other dreams - with attachments and concerns of their own and there is time (or no time) for all of them. It was nice to experience, if only for a brief moment, something that we theorise about a lot here. It's a good state, I now know, to inhabit. Worth striving for.

Worthiness continues to plague me. This is an unhealthy recurrent pattern for me. u/mindseal has a great post somewhere here about the trap of feeling as if you have to gain confidence through overcoming challenges. Right now I'm stuck between knowing this is true and knowing this is true. If anyone has tips or tricks they've used to tackle this particular hurdle, feel free to send 'em my way!

Other than that - over to you guys. I hope your travels have brought you something you think worth sharing!

This is really a simple one I've been playing with lately. Mostly it's obvious if you've been around here long. But all reality and all potential realities are imaginary aspects of your mind. Imaginary here means something like intentional and inside your mind.

Sometimes we talk about experiences feeling non-volitional - the sensory manifestations we associate with 'the external world'. That feeling of not being under control is fundamentally confused though. It's as if one were playing a game of Solitaire. In the game, there are certain rules that constrain your behavior to very specific actions. When you get to the bottom of the deck you shuffle the cards left and go through them again. OR. If a queen is moved onto a king in another stack, you must move all the cards that were on top of the queen with it. These are what we might call environmental rules. They are actions you must take under certain conditions in order to properly play the game of Solitaire. In contrast to these are what we might call bodily rules - the parts of the game over which you exercise free choice within the limits of the game to try to achieve your goal. You may either move an appropriate card from the bottom stacks or deck card to the suits stacks or you may flip another deck card or you may move cards on one bottom stack to another bottom stack. The analogy works best if you imagine that you've deeply habituated the rules of the game such that you pay very little attention to what you are doing with the 'environmental rules' and focus very much on the 'bodily rules' and the choices of action you limit yourself to in the game.

Using the same language we use about our sensory world we could say that the habituated environmental rules seem out of our power. But that's not quite right because they are quite within your power. "But," you might say, "I really want to get that buried card there into the proper suit stack so I might win the game. If I really had the power I could just move it there, but I can't." Of course you can though. You don't really HAVE to follow the rules of Solitaire when you interact with the cards, you know? You CAN just put it there if you want to cheat. Or you could scrap the whole thing and play a totally different game. And deep down of course you know this.

The thing is you're not sure. You kinda like this Solitaire game at some level even if you're frustrated with it too. You'd have to be quite sure you didn't want to try to salvage this game from this vantage point before cheating, and you'd have to be quite sure you were sick of Solitaire overall before switching to another game.

So what is it about humaning, even with all of its obstacles and frustrations, that you like so much? What keeps you doing it instead of anything else lifetime after lifetime? What have you considered doing instead? Are you just looking for a quick hack to have a better vantage point while humaning or do you want to play a different game altogether? Do you know?

I know these are questions I've been asking myself a lot lately.