I've grown particularly interested in developing the psychic senses (the "remote" senses) as a middle-term/long-term spiritual goal recently. Not in the sense of communicating with spirits directly or symbolically via those clair-senses, but in the sense of generally attaining experiences and knowledge from the illusory world in ways not seemingly tied to the illusory physicalist/body-centric mentality.
Now, you might say 'why would you want to develop this if ultimately there is no world out there and it's all an illusion?' Well, even if it's an illusion, you're somewhat going to be playing as if it is not, as long as you are maintaining any sense of "senses"/"experiences" of the world that do not consciously feel like explicit actions/intentions on your part - i.e. if you want any form of othering.
So, with othering there will be a feeling of some experiences/knowledge/information coming from 'somewhere else' (even if you think of it as your own subconscious). The catch is that in a physicalist mindset, we limit the sorts of incoming information to strictly physically tied modes (senses tied to material sense organs that only give information/experience when in a certain spatial relationship to other material objects - and then all more abstract knowledge of the world must be derived from that materially rooted information). So, I think a materially tied conception of consciousness is a major aspect of rebirth (i.e. body dies -> mind dies/has major forgetfulness). Thus, I think one of the keys to moving toward liberation from rebirth/attaining immortality/self-deification is at least loosening up if not eliminating the fixation of physical senses from material body-organs (so at minimum having "remote senses" as an options if not always active) as well as loosening our ability to learn abstract knowledge about the world only by conclusions from sensory/experiential data (so, it should be possible to gain abstract information about the world without drawing conclusions from experience a la psychometry or claircognizance or whatever.
Of course, these alternative senses are all as adjustable as the ordinary senses. So you might remote-vision that there is a couch in the other room. If you are practiced well enough, you can make that couch dissolve, just like you could make the couch you seemingly see with you eyes dissolve before you. That leads me to an important point. Your ordinary senses are forms of psychic senses. You are just shaping them exclusively in ways that we would consider bodily/physical/sense-organ-oriented. A lot of this is related to some ideas in my post ‘The Construction of the Senses’.
So, in conclusion, I'm going to be exploring how to start taking the baby steps to develop these sorts of abilities in my future, just like I am doing with magick/manifestation/attraction/whatever you want to call it.
I feel like there's probably some parallels between the two. With magick, a big part of it is first learning any degree of conscious focus/concentration/will even in ordinary life. Then you can apply it to things you believe are possible/probable and the idea is to progressive increase the difficulty/unlikelihood of the transformations you attempt. So, with remote senses, how to start and develop the requisite skills and powers? It's something I'm going to be thinking about and commenting about as time goes on. I think that healing is one good beginners skill with magick. And I think that psychic-body awareness is a good correspondent psychic sense skill to develop for beginners. I realize now that in many ways I’ve already developed this skill as I’ve practiced healing, I just didn’t know it or have a conception consciously of what I was doing or what it meant in the bigger picture. But there are many many fun and interesting ways to practice. (I wonder what is the closest psychic-sense correspondent, if there is one, to the form of abstract magick that is probability/spell-casting style magick? Hmm)
I'm quite interested in hearing your thoughts on this, folks.
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I agree totally. Thing is, the specific transformation you're discussing, which is creation of additional senses, is not an area I consider my strong point. I have some tangential understanding of it mostly based on principles, principles which I of course trust very much due to all kinds of other stuff I've been playing with and thinking about, but that's about it. So, I'm looking forward to whatever you come up with. I think you speak the same language as me, so if you do figure out a way to build these senses I think you'll have a way of explaining it that I could understand too. :) Which would be really cool to read about and to try to understand more about.
My perspective is like this: I've read about such abilities existing in very superficial, almost casual-cursory accounts of them, but here's what I haven't seen: I haven't seen a detailed account of such an experience. I haven't seen a detailed account of a training regimen where one goes from not having such a sense to having it. I have never met anyone who can use psychometry (which is holding a small physical object in your hands and being able to tell from touch the stories and maybe experiences associated with that object).
And besides, I have met people with psychic abilities but I have learned one thing: almost all such people are terrible at explaining their own abilities. By terrible I mean near useless. Which tells me they are either hostile, which I don't believe. Or it tells me they themselves are not sufficiently aware of how their own minds allow certain things. So their abilities were not developed in a conscious manner, and that's why they cannot explain them.
So having someone with a psychic ability and the ability to explain the principles and experiences in it in detail as well as being able to explain a detailed and gradual training regimen (or two) that lead(s) to such or similar ability -- that's rarer than hen's teeth and rabbit horns. And I've heard claims of such people but when I examine the stuff such people say in public I know they don't know anything because they don't have the right "tells" that someone who would know would give off. I am excellent at picking up "tells" like that precisely because I have some ability myself so I know how to spot another one like me.
So from my perspective we're pretty much in virgin territory here with only self-reliance to rely on. Self-reliance is the thing anyway. Even if everyone knew all about it, self-reliance would still be supreme as a matter of principle anyway. Screw short-term convenience. So I am in favor of sharing some information, assuming you're inclined to share something, but at the end of the day we have to rely on ourselves I think.
So as near as I can tell you are pretty much on your own with all this stuff.
The closest I have come to this kind of sense that you're talking about is that I can use the kinesthetic area inside my body, specifically near the heart region around my chest area, to tell what's going on. But this sense is extremely general and extremely abstract, and plus, I often override it magickally and cast spells against it. In other words, I never allow this sense to imprint me, as much as possible anyway. Of course I sometimes still get imprinted anyway, so I just do the best I can. So what I mean here is that let's say I'll get an intuition which I feel inside my chest about something bad happening, and this feeling sticks around persistently. That's imprinting as I mean it. At that point instead of taking this feeling as gospel I cast against it and turn everything around. Thus I dispel the danger. :) So the bad thing that I somewhat precognize is not something that comes to pass.
And for me most of the time such precognitions, like I said, are abstract. Very abstract. Only very very very rarely will I get a pretty precise impression about something specific, and there is no way I can duplicate that at will. I'll just spontaneously know without question that something is going to happen a specific way and it does. I cannot turn this on and off at will but I can sort of attract these happenings in a general sense, like I can set myself up in a way that will increase such occurrences from say once a year to once a month or something, and vice versa I can turn these down and make them more rare, but it's not precise control.
So in general I do not play around with that stuff too much and any ability that develops in that area for me is kind of a byproduct of the other stuff I do and not something I take care to cultivate. Which probably explains why it's so abstract and poorly controlled. It's all rare and spontaneous stuff for the most part, at least when it comes to detailed precognitions.
I don't know? Maybe? I don't think any two subjective idealists are the same. Just because someone practices using solipsistic commitments it doesn't tell us anything about how they've internally structured their own mind. There is probably a subset of both uniliateralists and multilateralists that do not take on waking stress. It's all theoretical for me. I don't see any principle that mandates such stress. I just know for sure I get stressed out if I am waking for too long. I don't know if I can blame some unbending principle for this. I think it's probably more to do with the specifics of how I am involved in my mental habits and commitments and expectations.
I think both dreaming and waking lack something. Waking is stressful, but dreaming in my experience is not as consistent for epic stories. I think there is something better altogether. :) Something that isn't like dreaming or waking, but has the best qualities of both? And that better mental modality could maybe support personal stories that span thousands of years instead of 120 years max (or so). The only thing I really want to suggest is that there is, I believe, some kind of untapped potential here in ourselves. I am 99.999% certain we can do better.
In my ideal world sleeping and dreaming is 100% voluntary. I like the ability to dream a disjointed dream or two. What I don't like is being "kicked" into it, if you know what I mean.
Oh, no no...... That's not at all what I want to say. You're reading way too much into my words. On the contrary. I think everything you said is very interesting and worthy, and I have relatively little personal experience with it, and I am looking forward to your discoveries in this or other areas, assuming of course you're willing to talk about those (and if not, I honor that too).
What happened was this. After reading your post I got into a contemplative mood and I somewhat went on a tangent. The problem is that although I know it's somewhat tangential but I thought it was worth saying because it's not so easy to verbalize some of the things I said there, so instead of throwing it away, I just posted it as is. That's all.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-19 13:04:54 (dokit1p)