My preoccupation at the moment lies in trying to better understand the nature of the othered aspect of myself, the part which crafts the world/my experiences. The questions I'm working on at the moment are: is it self aware as I am self aware? Does it contemplate me as I contemplate it? Am I mysterious to it as it is mysterious to me - or does it "know" me? Is it emotional or indifferent? What is the nature of our current connection? Does it function as a series of algorithms might or is it more nuanced? If I managed to merge with it tomorrow - to what extent would "I" still be "me"? What would I care about if that occurred?
I'm not sure how much headway I'm making with these questions to be honest. Thinking about them, though, has made me realised that I have made assumptions about my othered self, and that these assumptions affect my capacity to manifest things.
One area where I have experienced occasional success lies in willing traffic to improve. When I examined my success in this area I realised two things that my success was always accompanied by:
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a deep conviction that bad traffic was valueless
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a sense that traffic, no traffic, the world wasn't going to be ground-shakingly altered
So why was this important, why would these factors need to be satisfied in order for me to will things different?
And then it hit me - it's because I lack trust in myself and my capacity to make a "good," impressive world. I have accorded my othered self a privileged position, whereby I consider it a better crafter of worlds than myself. Basically, in my mind, I'm the kid drawing stick figures and it's Van Gogh.
And the artist idea isn't just a metaphor - I am quite literally fairly meh at drawing or any other artistic venture and I struggle to visualise in detail. Things I imagine have a fuzziness to them. Meanwhile, my othered self produces this world with its dizzying degree of detail, blades of grass, swirling dust motes, light and shadow, etc.
And since, visually and artistically, I can't compete with that othered part of me - I guess I extrapolated from that that I can't compete with it in any area. If it was better than me at the visual stuff, wouldn't it be better than I at crafting every aspect of my experience? If I interfered - would it be like splattering a big red paint mark across The Starry Night?
Well, looking at it logically, I can see the potential flaws in my assumptions. Being good at one thing is never a guarantee that you'll be good at another. And whatever unconscious awe I've been regarding my subconscious with, there clearly are situations where I have decided that it's wrong - traffic being one of them. God I hate traffic.
So I suppose what I've taken from this is that as an awareness I'm currently saddled with an inferiority complex which hamstrings me when I try to change my experience. My success is usually accompanied by extreme irritation - something has to look really, really pointless and stupid in order for me to be able to magically alter it. And I have to feel like I'm not changing things too much, lest I'm making a big, clumsy mess. So perhaps achieving greater success, with less requisite-angst, lies in more critically querying the pedestal I've placed my othered self on.
Great questions. I'll tell you what I think about it all.
Same here.
One thing to understand about othering, is that it's something you're doing by intending it. Because that's the case, how exactly it happens entirely depends on your intent. So othering is flexible, and you can relate to it in many different ways. And there is more than one productive way to relate to the othered/disowned region of your own intent and mind. So it's not even necessarily about finding the correct one, as much as finding something you can work with and when it becomes too limiting, you can upgrade at that time.
But one thing to understand, is that the mind isn't actually a substance, even though it's real and it exists and one should have total confidence in one's own mind for all sorts of reasons. That means whatever of it is disowned is also insubstantial. But it does appear to us as all sorts of things, including as substance. So for example, my desk feels pretty convincingly solid right now. Thanks othering. You can even verify this when lucid. Check out how solid the objects can be in a lucid dream. Even though you could go through a wall, if you really wanted to, the default behavior of walls in a lucid dream, in my experience, is solidity.
Othering is responsible for mainly 2 things (which are related):
Automatism. It's when the environment seems to be alive without requiring your explicit input for each change. So say the "wind blows" but you don't have to consciously wiggle each leaf on each tree to make it look like the wind blows.
Independent volitions of other beings. This is when you see other beings appear to you and they can act in ways that surprise you. They may even get into an argument with you. This seeming independence of volition of the other people is something 'othering' can maintain.
And precisely because of these desirable qualities, othered stuff, which is basically the whole world, can easily go bad. That's because the whole point of othering is to become less explicitly responsible for the various transformations, or to even feel 100% not responsible, and not just less. Because that's the intent, that same intent is also what makes the world diverge from how you'd ideally like it to be.
But othering is not a 0 or 1 binary proposition. We can have a closer and a more distant relation to the world. So how strongly something is disowned is a gradient I would say. It's not binary. So the waking world is generally heavily othered, thus we have (usually) next to no control over it short of moving the body around according to the "laws" of "physics." (which are just mental habits at the end of the day) But a lucid dream, which is also a product of one's mind as much as the waking appearance, is much more malleable, and so I say it is othered much less so than the waking appearance.
Since the othered region ultimately is a result of your own blessing, how it is depends on what you want it to be like, or how you want to relate to it, and so forth. There is no static "this is how it is, and all else is false" demand. Instead the way you relate to the othered region and what you expect from it will determine how it turns out. Do you want other people to be able to appear as though they've read your mind? You can have that experience and then it will seem like the othered region knows your mind. Or you can make your mind private. You can make yourself invisible and incomprehensible to the othered region. You can do all that by just relating to it in this or that way. However, if you take a specific way of relating and make it a habit, it will be harder to change that willy nilly later on.
The structure and complexity is arbitrary. Whatever manner of relating you can conceive of, you can put it into practice, and the concomitant results will follow.
You cannot merge with it any more than you could merge with your own thoughts. You're thinking your thoughts and your thoughts are neither the same thing as you, nor are they foreign to you. Whatever boundary you perceive between yourself and whatever has been divorced is only a result of your commitment. It is not a substantial boundary, and so the separation is a kind of illusion to begin with. If the separation is illusory, whatever experience of merger you could produce, it too would be an illusion. If you start with some illusion and modify it, you get an illusion. You're dreaming of separation and then you're dreaming of oneness. They're both just different ways of dreaming.
This is beautifully put. Can I say you were Van Gogh just now?
Yes, exactly right. Plus, you're actually digging into the core of your intentionality, and explaining it for our benefit, which is the finest work I myself can hope any one of our peers doing here.
Now, going slightly back to what you said:
What I have found very liberating, is putting a solipsism lens on. Normally I think my experience has to satisfy something objective, something that isn't just me. So I imagine my experience has to satisfy, for example, the laws of physics, which stand outside me. And my experience must satisfy other observers, which I imagine are crawling all over the place "out there." Because of this, I cannot have total leeway over my own experience, because in a sense my own experience isn't just for me! It's for the world!
So to get magick to work much more quickly and powerfully I think that, actually, my experience only and ever needs to satisfy me. When I get into this frame of mind, and I get rid of the idea of "the world" or the idea that there is some sort of "out there" or even the idea that other observers are something more than visions inside my own perspective, then things really get moving. Then I return all of permission back to myself. Of course then the biggest challenge is the fear "what if someone else really is still out there and instead of seeing what I see, they'll see me going insane?" So I still worry about how things will look like from an external perspective. That's a major stumbling block, but of course I also know what's going on and how to fix it, so there is no problem.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-16 21:00:13 (d8u5t2m)
FYI (and here I'm talking not really to mindseal, because he knows this, but to those who might not): the above statement applies to nearly anything and is reflective of a deeply useful approach to virtually any spiritual work.
I don't know about you, but it's not just beings that othering makes unpredictable to me - it's lots of things. Things I categorize as non-beings can still be very unpredictable and I'm extremely comfortable with that.
Not that, in my opinion, we should have any particular disdain for othering. It's extremely useful. I can imagine a thousand scenarios in which the absence of othering is a total drag. Othering is, to parallel other features of my reality, something I implemented because it's an extremely useful tool for making things how I'd like them to be, and it's gotten out of hand. And it's a lot easier to implement it than the de-implement it.
This is very important.
That's really multiple challenges. There's the doubt about solipsism being true, and there's the fear of being perceived as insane. And those are different, and their difference is important if you want to address them. I address the former by contemplating things like whether the nature of reality (e.g. the truth of solipsism) is persistent or flexible. If you decide to use solipsism as a temporary tool, is solipsism temporarily "true"? Is it easier to make something temporarily "true" than permanently "true", and if so, can you use this to make your doubts about the world temporarily vanish? I address the latter by contemplating being-othering, my ability to manipulate other people's perceptions of me, contemplating the merits of sanity, etc. In other words, I think that's a complex challenge that's best attacked from multiple angles with multiple approaches.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-19 18:28:42 (d8ygrmf)
Of course I agree that othering is useful. My point is that othering is a double-edged sword. There is a price to pay. And the price is that things can go rogue. The very quality that sets a section of one's mind loose to do its own thing automatically and quasi-independently is the same quality that (if not careful) can allow these apparent worlds to become arbitrarily subjectively bad.
I agree fully. Except I don't know if I would be talking about truth per se. I think what's true is that the mind is a threefold capacity (to know, to will and to experience). After that we can have all sorts of modalities, which are different ways of using one's mental capacity. Solipsism is one such modality. So this is like sitting down and walking are modalities of bodily behavior. We probably wouldn't say walking is true and sitting down is false. I imagine we would realize that when we walk our ability to sit down isn't destroyed, and when we sit, our ability to get up and walk isn't destroyed.
Similarly, solipsism in my way of thinking is a very useful and very powerful frame of mind. It's a specific way of relating to one's experience. One can use as little or as much of that way as one desires, at least in principle. In practice there might be all kinds of fears and misunderstandings that would prevent one from effectively using solipsism. Also I claim that if one were to confuse oneself with one's body (or even one's current personality), one would be unable to use a solipsistic frame of mind effectively.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-19 21:59:01 (d8ykgd7)
Thank you, these are fantastic, comprehensive responses. I don't want to give a rushed response, and I haven't had a chance to write up a proper one yet. But I'll just say now that I've been practicing this:
since you posted with really rewarding results. Solipsism is probably where a lot of my hang-ups are rooted (sorry for the mixed metaphors... it's late here) and I've shied away from it in the past. Probing that sore spot has been illuminating and daunting at the same time.
Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-10-26 00:23:11 (d96yzon)