syncretik

So I have an actual post on this subject which I'll put up after this, but I thought I should maybe introduce myself first. This is just a little background on what brought me to subjective idealism/some of the phenomena I've experienced. I've been a lurker on this and other similar subs for a while now, but haven't really posted before.

As far back as I can remember I've had an inner conviction that the world was not as set in stone as it appeared to be. My earliest memories of contemplating this sort of thing come from around age 3-4. My first lucid dream occurred at around that time. In it, I was at the pre-school I attended. The setting and people were a true-to-life reproduction and everything was extremely realistic.

For no particular reason I suddenly became lucid. I turned to one of my teachers and told her that this was all just a dream and therefore nothing was real. She said "Oh, really?" in that condescending way adults do - you know, the “I'm not really listening but I have to respond kindly to child nonsense" tone. And suddenly I felt expansive, universe-sized. I had an unchildlike feeling of being the adult and she the child. Adults have power and knowledge that children lack - I had knowledge she was incapable of grasping (it was a dream) and power she couldn't access (in a dream you can do what you like - she was bound to behave conventionally because she mistook the dream for reality). I also had this difficult to articulate sensation of being a spectator-beyond-the-illusion, of being a larger being with a depth of seriousness that doesn't "belong" to a kid under five.

For various reasons I find this lucid dream more interesting than any I've had as an adult. For one thing, as an actual child in the waking world, that condescending talking-to-kids voice worked on me - which is to say, I didn't notice it. Before and after the dream, I can remember telling adults about imaginary friends and babbling to them about kid stuff. Recollecting those occasions now I recognise that I was responded to in the "talking to small children" voice - but at the time it was invisible to me. For the duration of the dream only, I accessed some state of greater knowledge/awareness where I recognised the voice, knew its purpose and mentally repudiated it.

More than this, though, the dream was valuable because of the larger-than-who-I-am sensation it produced in me, which I can access now by recalling the dream.

Anyway, growing up, conventionality grabbed me for a long time. I learned pretty quickly not to mention the niggling sensation I had that the world isn't as it seems. You do that once or twice and realise that that way mental institutions lie. I tried to explore spirituality through conventionally accepted paths, but I was disturbed by the nihilism of Buddhism, frankly disgusted by the illogic of Christianity and irritated by the inflexibility of both. I also felt they were seriously lacking in a sense of fun.

A couple of years ago I had an experience which, for me, confirmed that the world is stranger than we acknowledge and helped kick me back into a search for answers. I find this story slightly embarrassing because I like to think that if you're going to have an act of magic surprised out of you, it should be because you suddenly find the overwhelming poverty in the world so intolerable that you rediscover your divinity. Or you see a great injustice about to occur, a murderer about to walk free, and you unearth your inner superhero.

Well, I lost a gift voucher. To be fair to me, it was a straw that breaks the camel's back scenario. On the back of a two week period of depression stemming from a hatred of the solid inflexibility of the world, of being tired of despair and injustice that I couldn't fix and of the world being devoid of mystery and just persistently awful, I was briefly happy to realise there was something I wanted to buy and I had a gift voucher which would allow me do it. Moreover, I'm dreadful with gift vouchers. I lose them, I let them expire, but THIS one I had been careful with. So I reached for the spot where I'd carefully put it – and it wasn’t there.

I can't tell you what a sustained rage this threw me into. I knew it was a stupid thing to get that angry about but I didn't care. For three solid days I pretty much decided that I was throwing myself into auto-pilot for the rest of my life and refusing to engage with the world beyond going through the motions for the sake of family and friends. I was done. At the back of it all, I knew it wasn't just the gift voucher - it was that even when you play by the rules of this stupid world, you still lose. The rules were all too consistent until they weren't and I was D. O. N. E.

Day three of this, I’m standing in my room and I give the universe one last chance to be decent. I ask for a sign, a hint, a vision of where the accursed thing is – and a coin appears in midair out of the corner of my eye and falls to the ground. I had this sensation which I don’t know how to describe – everything felt weird or thin. I pick up the coin – and it’s a special edition coin commemorating the wedding of Kate/Prince William. I’m thinking – that didn’t just happen. And I hear, but don’t see this time, another coin fall behind me. I turn around and this one is a regular coin but it’s fallen queen-side up (I’m in Australia, all our coins have the queen on one side). I happen to like cryptic crosswords, and out of nowhere the idea enters my head that this is a cryptic clue.

I stare at the coin and “William” keeps running through my head. I look at the queen coin and “royal majesty” runs through my head, which is particularly nonsensical because I’m aware she’s styled as “her royal highness” not “royal majesty.” “Royal Majesty Williams” runs through my head.

Suddenly it hits me. There’s a huge bag I’d filled with junk a few days ago, ready to be thrown out, and it’s an R.M.Williams (iconic Aussie brand) bag. Feeling surreal, I walk to the bag, tip it upside down - and there it is. The card I’d torn my house apart looking for.

Anyway, the card reverted to its proper state of being not very important – I think I ended up spending it on something for my sister. I stopped being (that) angry and started seeking truth again. I wasn’t very successful – I kept thinking that I needed a mentor or teacher or some pointer. I had no idea where to turn. At the back of my mind I probably knew I wouldn’t tolerate a mentor since I resent authority figures, but I knew I needed help – and then I stumbled on this corner of the internet. After years of fruitless internet searching, it seemed to come at just the right time and a great deal of it resonated with me.

Actually - I can’t tell you what a relief it was to find you guys. You’ve made leaps and connections that I can’t flatter myself I’d have reached on my own. I remember that when I first read /u/mindseal’s warning about how pursuing this path makes you (by the standards of the world) insane, I discounted it. I see now that you were right. That said, I would not alter my decision to explore that rabbit hole for anything. This brand of insanity may be uncomfortable in some respects but it’s also non-optional for me, now.

This post is much longer than I intended. I’ve had other experiences but I’ll leave them for now. I’ll sum up with my own aspirations – as I said, I always felt the world wasn’t what it seemed. I was sure there were other worlds and I want to be able to access them at will.

This forum is primarily dedicated to higher quality posts and discussions. Those are welcome from everyone but will be filtered by the moderators. In order to foster more discussion, we have decided to start a weekly stickied discussion thread for the subreddit. This discussion thread is a place for people to post things that are more casual regarding subjective idealism, and things that are more exploratory. Here is a place for individuals to propose ideas and ask questions and figure out subjective idealism.

Talk more casually about SI here without having to make a formal post.

I was thinking, "If the physical world is an illusion, how can I come to access the world beyond illusion? Senses are all no-go's. What else do I have to work with?" And I thought, oddly enough, of senselessness.

So I closed my eyes very, very slowly. I watched as my vision, which seemed to take up the entire potential visible field, began to develop definite 'edges' The top and bottom of my visual field started to disappear into the lightlessness of closed eyes. And soon what remained of my vision was just a tiny, trembling flicker surrounded almost entirely by lightlessness until my eyes finally closed entirely. And I'd do this again and again, very slowly opening them back up, and very slowly re-closing them.

I started imagining an image of myself with two tiny, round TV screens floating in front of my eyeballs like the lenses of eyeglasses. And each of them was showing me a very slightly different perspective on the world in the same way that 3D glasses do to present a 3D movie.

And the interesting part really began when, as I slowly closed my eyes, I would imagine the screens compressing horizontally until they dissolved away, and as I slowly opened my eyes, the screens would emerge again and slowly expand. And I held this visual in my mind very strongly and probably spent no less than 15 minutes imagining that, as I felt my physical eyes close, the 3D screens were dissolving. I recommend you do this and pay special note to what you begin to 'see' when your eyes are closed.

The sensation settled in that as I closed my eyes, I was effectively opening my actual visual field to the "genuine" world -- and naturally when I felt like I was opening my eyes, I was actually covering up the real universe with a virtual screen.

What are the implications of this exercise?

Well, it implies that the emptiness you see when you close your eyes is kind of "more real" than what you see when your eyes are open. This means that total sensory deprivation, including thoughts, would be the effective extinguishing of the physical world -- and also, therefore, might share similarities with the state of mind of an enlightened being. This may be intuitive, but what's (I think) profound to imagine is that what's left, the dark, scentless, tasteless, sensationless, thoughtless world you'd experience in total sensory deprivation, is precisely the state you return to in deep sleep, certain states of meditation, or death. When you close your eyes, you're looking at the "Real World" beyond illusion. The only illusion would be to imagine that you're seeing the backs of eyelids.

I found this to be very powerful to experiment with.

Another very interesting thing that can be done with this practice is to, while sitting in a dim-to-dark environment, perceiving all of the dark spots in your field of vision (shadows, black objects, etc.) as 'holes' in the screen. The nature of the visual field suddenly becomes very thin, 2D, and almost transparent.

I want to make perfectly clear that this is an exercise intended to stretch and bend the mind, chip away at conventional understandings, and make you as flexible as possible. The darkness or blindness of closed-eyes is no more 'real' or 'genuine' or 'enlightened' then the light and visuals of opened-eyes. You are not actually perceiving anything more valid when your eyes are closed. But framing it this way is a very powerful thing to play with precisely because we so often DO think of our opened-eyes perceptions as being 'real'. This is not, in and of itself, a method of insight, but rather an exercise in flexibility. An important distinction.

So a little bit of context for this, I've found the idea of mind as a three-fold capacity very useful for a lot of things. This is focused on the aspect of mind "experience." So to dabble a little in experience, I would like to define "dimension" as an element of experience.

Now that that is out of the way. The elements of experience or dimensions are defined by the other two aspects of mind, will/intention and knowledge. A single experience can have infinite possible dimensions, and by knowing the ones you would like to include in an experience you can knowingly will them into your experience.

An example: I recently went to a music festival where I planned to consume a variety of psychedelic substances. So my intention was to have a psychedelic dimension to my experience. (Goal achieved lol.) What I didn't realize is that my dimension of music festival sort of mixed with my dimension of psychedelia and it turned out that everyone I met was also having a psychedelic experience.

This wasn't a bad thing. I've never been lost in the woods with a bunch of other people all out of their minds on psychedelics but it was enjoyable. Anyways the second night of camping was interesting. It started to downpour right after it got dark, and we were mostly in the woods, so dark was really dark. Once the rain started visual-acuity was reduced to a matter of feet and it was my first time ever being at this location. A friend I was walking with when the rain started, has anxiety and started to get worried we were lost and would never get back to certainty (our campsite.)

So the way this ties in is that I just felt the need to wander. With the framework of dimensions being elements of experience, The dimensions I was participating in were: dark, wet, raining, music, group, and walking. All the people (more dimensions) that we passed were new dimensions coming and going. Even the scenery was a dimension that was coming and going. My friend was really freaked out because he was so uncertain of if we would ever make it back to something familiar and everyone he asked for directions had no idea where we were or where they were going. People would literally just point and say go that way. Ha, without reference to anything after a few steps, "That way" almost became a joke to me.

I decided that we would find our campsite after I had had my fill of wandering and wanted to find a towel to dry off with. We eventually found a campsite marked 237. That's my number and the same friend I was with used to take it for granted. He believed I was just looking for the number like people do when they get a new car and everyone else seems to have that car. Except we had been wandering through uncertainty for over an hour in the rain, and just found 237. My friend almost fell down crying when he saw it.

TL;DR - Let go of expectations sometimes and just wander. Your will and knowledge will guide you if you're lost. But wandering is a fun and interesting way to pass time.

PS - get lost in the woods sometime. It's healthy!

This forum is primarily dedicated to higher quality posts and discussions. Those are welcome from everyone but will be filtered by the moderators. In order to foster more discussion, we have decided to start a weekly stickied discussion thread for the subreddit. This discussion thread is a place for people to post things that are more casual regarding subjective idealism, and things that are more exploratory. Here is a place for individuals to propose ideas and ask questions and figure out subjective idealism.

I was walking around in a park and decided to apply a transformation to my experience when I kept hearing an annoying siren that just wouldn't shut up.

As soon as I decided that, the siren started to get quieter, with some subtle ups and downs in volume, but trending downward in volume. But this wasn't happening fast enough for my liking. So I was then focusing this way and that, and I was adjusting my mentality like this and like that to make it go faster. And then it struck me.

It struck me that the reason I was doing that is because on some level I was still assuming that magick is something objective, and then it was my job to find the one right way to do it. I had to match my activity to something I imagined to be objectively the most effective way of performing a transformation.

Then I realized the idiocy of that belief and I found it funny how I still continued to believe it on some level even though I know better. I'm not even sure I've learned my lesson. It's entirely possible the next time some transformation doesn't work fast enough, I'll be trying to "tune" it, lol. I hope not. At minimum I shouldn't tune anything with the idea that I'm matching what I am doing to some external unbending and eternal standard.

A place for more casual conversation about subjective idealism and its implications.

Your innermost heart is brilliant beyond brilliance and steady beyond steady. It is calm. It is perfectly poised. It is all-capable. It is invincible. It is a repository of all possible virtue and all possible health. You can consider this proposition in a lively manner, without any dead rote, but really considering it sincerely as if hearing it for the first time each time you consider it.

As you do so, you can hold your two hands together and put them comfortably in front of you. It's essential to deliberately focus on the softest and mildest feelings. Something subtle can be very powerful. A whisper of a feeling can overwhelm something that roars when you feed it with your attention and love. So as you hold your two hands together, feel the softness and kindness of your left hand seep into your right, and the softness and kindness of your right hand seep into your left. There is no need to make it a strong feeling. The key for this type of exercise is subtlety. It can be a subtle but very distinct and noticeable feeling. It may start to feel warm and comfortable, and soft kindness will glow in your hands.

When soft kindness glows in your hands, you can allow it to gradually expand by feeling the very same thing you feel in your hands all over your body. When this happens remember your true innermost heart. Consider how invincible, calm, steady your innermost heart is. It is like the starry sky at night. There is no agitation in it at all, and it is your innermost core.

When developing an ability to assert arbitrary propositions as knowledge it's necessary to have at least extraordinary courage, if not fearlessness. It is well known that one way to develop courage is by deliberately subjecting oneself to difficult experiences. Asceticism is a practice in that vein, but challenges don't have to be in the form of body denial or conventional personality denial as in the typical ascentic practices. Anything that puts one outside the comfort zone is a challenge.

For a thoroughgoing subjective idealist such challenges can at times be really outlandish, unreasonable and mad in order to be effective, because a more "usual" sort of challenge is just not necessarily going to be felt as a meaingful or interesting challenge. Plus, in order for a challenge to be effective at liberating one from rigid conventional habits it has to be intimately conceived. If one seeks freedom one must only undertake challenges of one's own design and refuse all other challenges as meaningless. That way one can take conscious responsibility for the challenge as well as understand the ins and outs of why this or that area of personal sensitivity must be faced head on in some case that's particular to one's subjective state. That way a challenge will fit neatly into one's own unique manner of development and it will correspond to one's personality in a way that's authentic.

Plus, I don't hear about many spiritually liberated people who are good at hitting the boss' deadlines. So rising to other people's challenges is something I consider a total waste of one's time and I don't recommend it. If ever the word gets around, you might have a line of trolls coming your way with all kinds of challenges for you. Plus, rising to other people's challenges is generally done with the desire to satisfy those people's expectations rather than one's own. But it is yourself that you have to convince of your capability and no one else.

Consider how this or that challenge would fit into your plan to liberate yourself from convention.

But there is a problem with challenges. The problem is that challenges don't prove anything, even to yourself. After all, if you rise to the occasion once, maybe it was a fluke right? So maybe you have to do it twice. But then again, two times might have been a fluke, so three times is better. But wait, those three times don't count because you were young and strong. Now that you're older you have to do it again to see if you can still do it when older. And so on. In other words, if one wants to doubt oneself, the possibility for a doubting narrative is always there!

That's why challenging oneself can easily become a trap of perpetual insecurity where one constantly feels the need to overcome this, that, and the other, to repeatedly prove to oneself one's own greatness. One might even come up with a slogan for this hapless attitude, "I'm only as good as my last challenge!" Maybe it will sound familiar.

Someone wise in the way of subjective idealism will recognize this trap.

The goal then is not to prove anything. The goal is to learn how to rest in the knowledge of capability, no matter what. It is that state of knowing that's the goal. Because ultimately such knowing cannot be justified by anything, it is essentially madness. So trying to attain such a state through a means that's entirely reasonable is not likely to work.

What I find works best is to rise to this or that challenge on occasion, but to do so sparingly, and to know that one's state of confidence and capability cannot be earned or proven. It cannot be proven to others, and it cannot be proven even to oneself. Rather, the knowing of capability is simply assumed without anyone's approval or permission. Once assumed one then commits to living in line with that knowing. And that's all there is to it.

Of course one major reason why such a tactic can work is precisely because of subjective idealism. So if you understand what makes subjective idealism true, you're not going to be entirely unreasonable in your madness. Then you might only appear unreasonable from the POV of convention.

A practical exploration, in terms of having the experiences we want:

“When I know what I want in this world, when I am thinking of it, it is always beyond me. When I know what I want, I enter into that state and think from it.” - Neville Goddard

I often find myself in the former, with the experience I desire out of my reach. Quite frustrating.

One night, I was somehow accidentally able to think from it with ease. It was surprisingly simple to do, like something hidden in plain sight all along. It was less of a lateral move - just imagining or visualizing over top of this moment, as I usually do. It was more like my awareness moved up in time, I was less so 'here', and everything was being drawn towards it. A great sense of ease. I'd like to practice this.

Perhaps some of you are familiar with this or have some insights on the subject?

edit: I suppose 'thinking from' could be seen under the umbrella of detachment, letting go.

This should be a short explanation. More of an experiment for anyone to try:

Consider from the point of view of context that you have a secret. You're able to share this secret with whoever you wish but there's no necessity in doing so. This secret is that whatever environment you find yourself in can instantly and effortlessly have the framework of a gameshow applied to it. Given that this points towards the abstract idea of a gameshow and not any particular instance you have a few things to decide.

First, are you a contestant, a judge, the host, or part of the audience? After choosing your locale, orient yourself to whatever form of gameshow you would enjoy to be a part of. If you can't decide, let the content guide you.

As an example, when going out to eat at a restaurant: maybe your secret gameshow turns out to be something like "Americas Top Chef." All of the sudden you find yourself as one of the judges on the show. You get seated in a premiere location and waited on professionally. Your contestants are now premiere chefs fighting each other with all of their creativity in order to win the big prize. Your food comes out.

Suddenly you shift your secret to be an Instagram influencer with thousands of viewers who love to watch you eat. It may take a little more care so that you don't make a mess out of yourself, but every bite tastes like the best thing you've ever eaten. Thousands of people remotely watch on the edge of their seats as you take every bite, relishing it with you. You finish eating completely satisfied, not only by the food but also by the fact that you've put on quite the performance for your viewers.

Another shift and you're exiting the stage as a contestant or performer. You give a deep bow or courtesy and everyone around you claps and cheers at that stunning show they got to witness.

Exit stage left.~