weirdway

Beyond familiarity with the common trajectory and a willing to influence the outcomes I don't know exactly what particular expirience will follow.

However, My reasoning is that no particular event should be judged as good or bad in itself, but there are skillful ways and unskillful ways to participate in any expirience.

For example, between losing an arm or winning a lottery, I prefer to win the lottery and not to lose an arm. However if I lose an arm I will not regard it as a detriment at all, all else remaining the same this event can be interpreted as an opportunity to cultivate mental virtues, also I can learn about how such apparent loss affect my mind and contemplate the possible reasons for such effect, etc...

On the other hand even if I win the lottery, if I fall in negligence and stray from my mental training, there will be no true benefit for myself from acquiring such wealth.

That being said, my purpose while playing with my dream is threefold:

• To enjoy whatever activity I choose to do.
• To learn with every expirience
• To achieve my relative goals within the dream.

Originally commented by u/Alshimur on 2017-11-14 21:25:30 (dpsrx9x)

I think mostly the same way, except if someone or something crosses one of my red lines, I will take a decisive measure. I want to be kind but not squishy.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-25 12:24:39 (dngv276)

Well, I'm not exactly a subscriber to solipsism (first time hearing the term). I'm still a bit new to all this so was just trying bounce some ideas around and see what other views there are.

But if we understand the idea that reality is consciousness/awareness taking the form of experiences, then we really can't stray too far off from the truth. That being, the only fundamental truth is awareness itself. Everything else under the umbrella of possibility is true/false in a relative sense. So, things like what we are talking about now, come down to choice. Whether or not it's one we remember or a long forgotten one of the past, it still is a choice. Re-reading what you wrote at the end there, I'm seeing that we're ultimately saying the same thing :)

Also in regards to Rupert Spira, I'm wondering if you've ever heard of Greg Goode as well. His books 'Standing as Awareness' and 'The Direct Path' got me started on all this, and that's what connected me to Rupert Spira. I even see he's listed in the 'friends' tab of the website you linked, so if you're looking for a good read, check him out

Originally commented by u/WrongStar on 2017-09-26 21:28:01 (dniz6do)

That's one perspective you could take. However the thing about subjective idealism is one has the choice to choose what they want to experience. I'm currently dabbling in solipsism but I see it as a tool, a means to an end or even just an experiment out of pure curiosity. Once I reach my final state, I'll probably drop it.

Solipsism isn't your only option. If you wanted to, you could choose to experience other "minds" just like yourself, with their own agency and will, completely independent of yourself.

I emphatically agree with all this.

The whole point of subjective idealism is to broaden the awareness of the various possible intents one could engage in. It's to open up the horizon, or to point out a sky beyond the sky. If someone walks away thinking "solipsism is the only way" then I am afraid they completely missed the boat. Subjective idealism allows for solipsism and in some specific ways solipsism is powerful, but if it becomes restricted to only solipsism that in my view is no longer the real subjective idealism anymore. Subjective idealism is a more general understanding that intents produce experiential results. That's it. If one intends to relate to experience as purely private, there is a concomitant experiential range for that, and one can cultivate insights and skills inside that range. But just as easily a person can intend that there are minds, spaces or even things outside themselves and that they're independent, and in accordance with that intent, there is also a corresponding experiential range. It is possible to cultivate insights and skills inside those ranges.

The only common denominator for subjective idealism is that you cannot claim that you're irrelevant in the manner your experience happens. So if a subjective idealist intends to experience an independent space of some sort, and they're saying it's only independent because they intend that it is and will relate to it in that way, then they're a true subjective idealist still. So as long as one acknowledges that experience is profoundly volitional in an intimate sense, one is a subjective idealist already. From there the field is wide open as to how specifically curate one's own willing/knowing/experiencing.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-25 12:19:02 (dnguu6r)

The spirit of SI seems to be a rebellion against the rules of the game as they are setup to be played at this level of reality.

Not at all a rebellion. At least not inherently. I'm sure some people become interested due to a great degree of unhappiness with their experience as it currently is. But fundamentally, it is simply a realization that these apparent rules governing experience are actually the expression of one's will and that they can be altered if one so chooses.

Furthermore SI fails to acknowledge the subordinate, dependent and/or connected position which we do in fact occupy both in relation to our Higher Selves, to the Creator, to our fellow souls, and to the larger unfolding dynamics of the universe itself.

It is possible to maintain a perspective involving the things you mention, and to make them appear to become a reality, from the perspective of SI. It's really a question from the SI POV of whether you'd like to maintain such a perspective or not, and then how to train yourself in that perspective while maintaining the meta-perspective of SI so that you can always have the conscious knowledge of your ability to change your perspective again in the future if/when you decide you'd like to experience something different.

I think that we maintain massive huge parts of our own minds in deeply habitual unconsciousness and a big part of that is connected to hypothetical external minds/objects. As far as we do this, it is important to respect our own minds and to work with the apparent world as it appears so as to not drive ourselves unnecessarily into the experience of misery. Misery is misery, illusion or not. So, it makes sense to me to work with/around the world and others that you consider/feel/experience as real as long as you consider/feel/experience things in this way.

I think SI isn't really a philosophy for the public in this realm. I publicly maintain a few close connections with friends and my girlfriend. I can talk about it to a few people irl but mostly it's not something they are interested in and I don't expect that of them. I think as a public, conventional human, it is still important to be compassionate and maintain a moderate amount of worldly intelligence to help make the world a good place for yourself and others. I think if one abandons life as a conventional human then it makes sense to no longer be concerned with those things, but as far as one isn't a hermit, these things are important from a human POV. It's just that from the POV of SI they are not metaphysically important or relevant to your own self-realization. The two are orthogonal to one another.

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-11-06 06:10:58 (dpe06ik)

Arguably, there are already many technologies that we should want to remove from our experience. Simpletons have access to guns and nuclear weapons.

Those don't bother me at all.

So, even in a world full of mind-reading technology, we should, in theory, be able to prevent our minds from being read, while everyone else is getting the contents of their minds exposed by the mind-reading device.

The distinction you're missing is that short of a nerf gun and a water pistol there is no ostensibly friendly way to get shot from a gun. With mind reading the situation can be different as the act of having your mind read can be advertised as ostensibly a service, and perhaps many idiots will volunteer for that. That's the problem.

I will not bother to show you "proof" that the technology needed to do this is already in its embryonic stage. But I wouldn't say it has no utility. Dream recording will be the first step. Eventually, there'll be devices that give people maximum lucidity in their dreams, and eventually, as these devices connect different minds together, there will be shared dreaming.

All this is perfect nonsense as far as I am concerned. I've already experienced shared dreaming and sharing a dream is a matter of will rather than tech. It's always like that. If you believe that you don't want it but the tech comes over and takes over anyway, you have a run-away unconscious volition that you're not getting a handle on. This is similar to having a nightmare, which is also volitional. In other words, just because all experience is volitional it doesn't mean you won't ever project some fears for yourself to experience and fuck yourself up with. The only way to really avoid such episodes is to cultivate wisdom and practice using your will consciously all the time, and keep practicing bringing any unconscious tendencies you may have under the light of your own conscious awareness so that you can understand yourself and your process of visioning better.

The only downside is that technology disempowers them by having them think they cannot do such things without technology.

That's a major downside indeed. There are other downsides. Technology of this kind (as opposed to magick tech) is also a product of collective activity and it tends to be related to exploitation because you have to get it through trade and when you trade you know subconsciously the other parties in any trade are economically hostile to you. This can sometimes be controlled through a public policy focused on sharing and on suppressing the super-rich, but it's not a given that it just lands like that without effort or will on your part. So you'd have to always fight politically or secretly through magick against the worst excesses of physicalistic tech. That's a time that could be better spent on something else.

Are you asserting that the mind is fully under your control? I guess this brings up the mind vs awareness issue. If fundamentally, what you are, is Awareness, then the mind is something that can potentially be out of your control.

Why are you on this sub if you aren't even going to read? I'm not here to argue with you. I don't find your beliefs interesting and worth arguing against. It's all dumb and tedious. I expressly pointed out that I will abstain from any polemics here. Our discussion is very close to a polemic right now. I'm just not interested. I'm also not interested in personally dispelling your doubts for you. Although on some level I want to be amenable to all, I don't want to nanny anyone and I am not in the business of individually helping and/or nurturing anyone.

If you want to know what I believe, read the other content on this sub. If you want me to clarify something that I previously said, fine. If you want to argue with me, then please feel free to go elsewhere because I don't convert and don't proselytize and do not engage in polemics. If you don't agree then you don't agree and I am fine with it and don't want to spend time on it. I don't have the slightest bit of sentimental attachment to anyone here on this sub, not even to my "favorite" people. I'm here to serve a grand cause and not people. Those who share in that cause can benefit. That's all.

Certainly empowering! This is something I am working on. The reason I am thinking of all these things is because I want to firmly ground myself in the subjective idealist worldview.

You don't seem to be going about it in a correct way. You need to contemplate more and when you have doubts, then bring your doubt under the light of analytic contemplation and investigate it the way Nagarjuna investigates conventional conceptions in his Mulamadhyamakakarika. Blow through your own doubts with contemplation by your own effort. Extreme logic can dissolve or undermine any offensive conception, and it's just a question of will. The more you rely on having me dispel your doubts for you the dumber you'll be.

If I encounter some guy in the future that brings up the possibility of mind reading, conscious machines that are super intelligent, etc, I want to be able to not be shaken by these ideas.

I'm not shaken by them. :) Basically what you want is possible. That's all I want to say right now. First try to understand the basic definition of subjective idealism. It sounds to me like you're confused about awareness vs mind. In subjective idealism as I have presented it here such confusion does not exist in the slightest. Plus, you need to have your own contemplation. Not just a little bit, but hours daily for decades. After 10 years there is minor progress. After 20 years there is a second wave of minor progress. That's roughly the speed at which it developed for me. It might sound "slow" but if you compare this to the way physicalist understanding grows in society, their evolution rate is even slower than that. Scientists take hundreds of years to reach a new insight instead of new one every 10 years. Basically conventional science is much slower because in addition to contemplation which they have to do just like me, they also have to do peer review work and confirmation experiments, which I don't need to do, because I rely on first principles and never take experience as evidential.

The method I use for developing my own mind is in principle much more agile than the method of science. Of course I could take this process with higher potential and just be really lazy about it and make it even worse than science, hahaha. I don't do that. But I could. So just because the uppermost potential of subjective idealist style of contemplation is much higher than anything explicitly collaborative it doesn't mean it must always be like that in practice. In practice the way it works depends on the individual. For some people the progress may be very slow. But there is no shortcut when it comes to learning self-reliance. Especially other-reliance is not a shortcut toward self-reliance! I hope that's obvious.

It makes me uncomfortable and undermines my power just thinking about it. So even if it may not seem like it, I am seeking power by asking these questions and thinking of these possibilities. By openly discussing such things, It helps dissolve my fear of them.

You don't get it. In the short term if I gently take your hand and start explaining it will help but you'll cultivate an idea that wiser parental sort of figures are always "out there" and they're powerfully shaping your well-being for you. This very premise right there is the source of the technological menace that you fear. In other words, technology is other-power whereas what you want is self-power. But the more you lean on someone like me for easy explanations and avoid your own effort (decades and lifetimes) in contemplation, the more your method resembles the situation of other-power, while your goal is ostensibly self-power. So your method becomes at odds with your goal. Then no matter how well I or anyone else explain anything, that fundamental other-reliance will not be undermined inside your mindstream, and you'll never stand confidently on your own two, and other-power technology will remain an essential reliance to you then and the very thing you fear will come to pass.

What I am saying is: do not be an engineer of the very thing you don't want. Be careful.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-11 11:21:17 (do71qzk)

This makes me think you may be thinking about something different than what I’m proposing. I’m not thinking of the ‘energy’ as a mediating substance to act on to create magical events. Instead, I’m thinking of it as a ‘spiritual power source’ for ordinary beings to seek out, to allow them to do belief-shifting, intent-centered magic. The only function of this would be to (a) allow other beings magical powers while (b) preventing them from being able to arbitrarily alter your world in dramatic ways without limit when your back is turned. If there’s a different way to accomplish this without using the psychic-energy-source concept, then I’d gladly prefer it.

I don't know how that would work. You might need to be the first one to develop something like that if you're interested in such things. To me it sounds strange and contradictory. I don't understand how one's ability to intend can be rationed by some external force/rule/etc. I mean if I believed that it was rationed, I guess I would experience that, but why would I believe such a thing? Maybe you can convince or create beings who believe such things for your own amusement or learning.

I think in some sense there is already a limitation to intent, and that is one's own prior intent in the form of prior habits and commitment. This limitation, however, does not square what one wants to do against what the others want to do. It only squares one's old world-habit against one's freshly intended world-habit.

So the question is, how do you make sure these sprouting gods either (a) always use their magic the way you want or (b) die (“disappear from your reality”) if they diverge too far? What constitutes too far? How would you know? How is that line drawn? How does this work?

It's easy for me. Do I have to spell it out? :) Can't you just think of it like in like 5 seconds? It's actually pretty simple.

Tell me, how do you draw the lines between trees and grass, the earth and the sky, and how do you determine how many and where to put the dream characters when you dream? Do you need to have a complex master plan every time you go to bed?

Well, the limit is that they use magic in a way you like or they die/disappear from your reality from your POV, right?

They don't necessarily die.

Think about the meaning of the word "die." It refers to an evolution of an identity that stops. However, if every possible version of an identity exists, what is "die"? Even if some evolutionary lines have stopped, there are versions that didn't stop. Every possibility exists in potential. So a would-be contending God exists in the form of having subdued me or having bent me to their will. There is another version of that God which exists in a condition of being bent to my will. And so on. There are infinities of these versions. I choose what I experience. If I believe I have to kill someone or something, I must believe that the identity lineage is something unique and solid. But if I don't believe in that, then killing either makes no sense at all, or it becomes a purely ornamental illusory word, like what happens in movies when characters "die". When a movie character dies, the most important consequence is that they're simply not mentioned again as something more than a memory.

It's like killing a thought. If you stop thinking it, it's a dead thought. But of course you conceivably could start thinking it again as well. So it's not dead. In truth nothing really lives or dies. To say something is alive or that it dies is purely a matter of convention.

All control is self-control. If I believe something is truly external or is produced by something that isn't me, then I cannot control it. But if I believe it's either myself or my product, I do with it what I do with say my thoughts or my arms. Then the only limit to this is former habits and commitments which may be to the contrary in some way.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-21 21:04:56 (dnawzku)