syncretik

On the face of it subjective idealism appears to have frighteningly little content. To briefly summarize it, what does subjective idealism propose?

Firstly, all that can be known and experienced is a product of one's own mind.

Secondly, one's own mind cannot be understood in terms of one or any set of its products.

Thirdly, all the specifics of knowledge and experience are volitional or subjective. (Volitional and subjective are synonyms here. They mean the same thing.)

And that's about it.

So isn't this rather thin? This philosophy tells us nothing about the color of the sky, or whether or not there even is such a thing as the sky. It tells us nothing about the shape and the size of any body. It tells us nothing about whether or not music exists and which sort of music is best. It tells us nothing about space and time even! It tells us nothing about the number of sentient beings: is there just one or are there many? Although it does suggest there is at least one sentient being: the reader. It tells us nothing about how best to relate to experience, including when we experience ourselves to be in the presence of what we believe to be other sentient beings.

Even from the POV of aesthetics, subjective idealism is so abstract, that to find beauty in it requires a very particular sense of beauty tending toward maximum parsimony and simplicity. So there is a possibility of someone studying it for its aesthetic beauty, but I want contend it won't be that for most people who might want to study it.

So what might the utility be?

Hypothetically a subjective idealist can hold any sort of axiomatic commitment(s). A subjective idealist can even hold a commitment to the axioms of physicalism. If so, what is the difference then between a subjective idealist holding a commitment to physicalism and a bona fide physicalist? The difference is that a bona fide physicalist doesn't feel that the postulates of physicalism are a choice. A physicalist will feel as though the truth of physicalism somehow impresses itself upon the mind whether one likes it or not. So in other words, in the language of subjective idealism, a physicalist is someone who has othered or disowned one's own commitment to physicalism and is no longer consciously aware of it.

And these sorts of othered commitments can be the strongest ones. These are the commitments that are tacit, unspoken, default, instintinctual. They're unspoken because they're so "obvious" that they don't need to be mentioned. They're so widely and pervasively assumed in the subjective sphere of one's own mind that one needn't discuss or think about them. And there is a lot of power in this. Allowing one's own commitment to become tacit and implicit to the greatest possible degree makes the experiential consequences of that commitment very stable and densely apparent.

And now we can understand why someone might want to study subjective idealism.

Simply put contemplating subjective idealism returns a sense of personal conscious choice to one's deepest core commitments. And this in turn opens up the possibility of making a change at the most profound level of one's relationship to one's sphere of experience.

This suggests a strong theme of discontentment at the deepest level of one's phenomenal reality. Why would anyone even think about changing one's fundamental axioms about phenomenal reality if the person considered them even remotely workable?

And it also suggests that one is considering alternative commitments. So if not physicalism, what then? I suggest that subjective idealism itself is too thin, too abstract, and so I don't think it can replace physicalism by itself. Becoming consciously aware of one's commitment to physicalism weakens that commitment, but if we're not going to contemplate any alternatives, there is no point in weakening one's perception of physicalism.

Another thing to consider is, do we want to jump to just one long-term alternative? Or do we want to develop a more complex system of relating to one's experience through the lens of more than one commitment in parallel?

And if more than one, then how many? Two? Three? More?

There are so many possibilities here that I cannot even imagine them all. I just intuitively feel that the choice here is mindblowingly wide open. My own ready imagination is restricted by prior expectations. What I might be able to imagine tomorrow might be different from what I can imagine today. What one can imagine in principle is different from what can readily imagine right now.

One choice that's obvious to me personally is going for subjective idealism plus a dual combination of physicalism and solipsism. So one way to exercise this is to relate to one's experience as a physicalist during most typical activity, but to relate to one's experience as a solipsist during a magickal ritual. There are many possibilities, and this is only one, just as an example. Another possibility is to relate to one's experience as a physicalist when comfortable, but in times of crisis relate to one's experience as a solipsist. An obligatory car metaphor is that you use cruise control when the driving is safe, but take manual control of the car when it's potentially dangerous. So this presupposes being able to shift one's manner of relating when necessary, and this implies that one has to be aware that even such fundamental and axiomatic commitments as physicalism are voluntary, and this is exactly what studying subjective idealism can accomplish.

Other slightly less obvious possibilities can include: living with the ability to switch on demand between animism and solipsism. Jumping to full-time animism, where subjective idealism is only a realtively brief transitional period necessary to accomplish the jump. One can even live with the ability to switch between physicalism, animism and solipsism. Or one can live with the ability to switch between animism and physicalism under the framework of subjective idealism.

So it seems to me that if one wants to be able to switch rapidly between two or more sets of fundamental axioms regarding how to relate to one's experience, then subjective idealism is helpful on a long term basis.

And if one wants to just switch from physicalism to animism, then subjective idealism can be helpful as a transitioning phase, after which one can become a bona fide animist.

Another possible reason to study subjective idealism is to gain the ability to update significant details in your otherwise favorite system of core belief. So with the aid of subjective idealism one could shift one's commitment from physicalism A to physicalism B. As an example, maybe in physicalism A faster than light travel is impossible, and in physicalism B it is possible.

There is another powerful reason to never become bona fide anything other than a subjective idealist. And that is, you may realize that no set of axioms about how to best relate to your subjective experience is going to be desirable forever. Since you anticipate the need to switch at some point when you grow tired of a certain way of life, you may want to keep yourself ready for such change by having never allowed yourself to get to the point where some core metaphysical commitments have become instinctive and unconscious. That way if you realize you may want to live 30 human lifetimes as an animist, you could do that, and then on your 30th lifetime you could switch to say physicalism without any particulalry arduous spiritual effort, provided you kept yourself a subjective idealist with a commitment to animism and never became a bona fide animist.

I want to make a small post mostly to just spill some thoughts I've had recently and to perhaps stir a little discussion. To provide a little something to ponder on in quiet moments for the next few days and to maybe open people up to some new ideas.

What is the prevalence of individuals capable of exceptional, non-conventional actions? I mean individuals who are capable of experiencing, intending, and knowing things that are beyond the scope of convention? Is the answer that there are many? Just a few? None at all? Is the number of such individuals dependent upon the extent to which you are presently capable of accessing your own capacities? Are any of the great or famous characters of history such individuals?

Or are you and you alone the only such person who could presently have such a capacity? Is your current conception of reality compatible with others expressing such non-conventional capacities at all? If not, what would have to be different about how you conceive of the world? How might you go about changing your conception of the potential of reality?

I know that most of us, even in weird communities like this, still routinely experience the world around us as stale and unmagical. Even if it is idealistic and not physicalist in nature, that doesn't instantly make it appear to us as full of magic. Why not? If currently-unconventional and magical actions were so ubiquitous that they were every bit as common and conventional as currently-conventional actions, would they still be magical in any way? Is there any fundamental difference between that which is currently perceived as unconventional and magical and that which is currently perceived as ubiquitous and conventional? Or is it arbitrary?

Can you conceive of currently-unconventional things being completely conventional? Can you conceive of currently-conventional things being completely unconventional? Can you actively experience either of them as such? Can you make a chair unconventional and magical? Can you make a dragon conventional?

Have you ever seen anyone perform, or performed yourself, an action (be that knowing, intending, or experiencing) which is utterly non-conventional? Was the non-conventional action perceived as something internal (e.g. a bizarre dream) or something external (e.g. something featured on /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix)? Do the divisions of "inner" and "outer" experiences seem to have different definitions for what seems unconventional?

Where is the line that divides the inner and outer and why is it where it is? Can it be moved to facilitate unconventional actions?

Just some thoughts to grease those rusty gears. I welcome all discussion on any of the dozens of questions I posed.

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.

Imagine your body has become coated in a semi-transparent film. It coats your skin and covers your eyes and ears. It has a very subtle opaque, smoky quality, and it distorts, fuzzes, the perception of anything beyond it. You can make out the objects around you – there’s your cell phone, your water bottle, your shoes, your lamp – and you feel yourself to be seeing them all quite clearly. You can pick them up, examine them, touch them, taste them, analyze and describe them. You have learned to entirely ignore the opaqueness.

In fact, you don’t even need to ignore it. You’ve learned to adjust your eyes to simply focus on the film itself instead, rather than attempting to perceive the objects beyond. So while you may feel yourself to be looking directly at an object, you are actually looking directly at the object’s reflection in the opaque film and confusing that for the direct object itself. As a result, you spend your time dwelling in a reflection of reality rather than in direct contact with it. You are like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory, watching only shadows on the wall, thinking them to be objects in-and-of themselves.

What is the film made of? How did it get there? Can it be removed?

The film is not a physical object. It is a mode of consciousness. To remove it, you must adopt an alternative mode of consciousness. Modes of consciousness are notoriously difficult to explain with words. Like the finger pointing to the Moon, thinking, pondering, and conceptualizing within one mode of consciousness is rarely a productive means of exiting that mode of consciousness and entering another. This would be like explaining the color blue to someone using only words and shades of red.

Let’s try anyway.

First, understand that the mode of consciousness you are attempting to adopt is no different from “being here and now” or “attaining mindfulness” or “waking up”. It is also no different from “opening the third eye”, which in an apt metaphor, focuses the mind directly on the experiences rather than allowing it to be lost in the duality and illusion of the everyday mode of consciousness. The trick is not actually achieving this state – it is recognizing the state we are currently in. Attaining the meditative and enlightened mode of consciousness happens quite intuitively and naturally and does not need to be forced. Being able to see the everyday mode of consciousness, and not simply ‘tuning into’ it and thereby confusing it with the direct perception of reality, is far trickier and quite necessary.

So, naturally, the next thing you must do is accept, acknowledge, feel, and digest the fact that all of your perceptions are indirect, fuzzy, opaque, distorted, illusory. Conceptualize your perceptual field – especially your field of vision and your field of thoughts – with that opaque film. Come to persuade your intuition – which may resist quite strongly – that though you always think of your current mode of consciousness as a direct channel to reality, it is not. Allow your eyes to unfocus, and consciously conceptualize the world around you as a 2D surface, as lacking substance or depth, as being a mere reflection. Dwell in this state for some time. It is not our instinct to see the illusion for what it is and it takes time and reflection and contemplation for our minds to adjust on a deep and visceral level.

Then, re-focus your eyes and proceed to stare directly and intensely on a single point or object while focusing sharply and pointedly on your own breathing, re-focusing every moment. Each instant, replicate your action of the previous second: focus on where you feel the breath in your body right in that instant, and focus on looking straight at the point or object. Don’t allow instinct to take over. Don’t allow yourself to go on auto-pilot. Keep re-upping your attention. If distinct thoughts arise in your mind, if self-reflection begins, if you start to conceptualize your breathing or the point, your perception has tuned itself to the film again. You can repeat the practice and try again. The practice is successful when the point or object is seen directly – when all perceptions become direct perceptions (when the distance between self and object vanishes), and when thoughts, internal dialogue, and self-reflection fade away.

Hallmarks of this direct perceiving, tuning ‘past’ the illusion, include: a sense of awe or wonder at the 3D-ness and vividness of the perception, a sense of playfulness or spontaneity, a sense of being aware and attentive to all thoughts or perceptions, of clarity, a sense that perceptions are malleable, flexible, impermanent, or intangible, and the sense that one is having a dream or dream-like experience. Perhaps the strongest test of one’s own mode of consciousness is the perception of other beings. If other people are felt to be purely external, made of something other than what you are made of, originating from a different source than you originate from, or if solipsism feels potentially valid, you are not perceiving directly. If others feel internal, or if the internal-external dichotomy feels invalid, or if others are felt as originating from a similar source to yourself, or of ‘self’ is a concept which doesn’t apply to any particular human point-of-view, including your own, you may be seeing directly, perceiving attentively, awake to your direct experiences.

No magic, no alteration of reality, no occult practices, are feasible without first attaining this mode of consciousness. From the everyday mode of consciousness, such acts are performed on the wall of the Cave – they miss their targets entirely and the performers will not understand why, or become convinced that magic is impossible.

This is a basic teaching. It is a beginner’s teaching. If you can’t master this, don’t bother going anywhere else. You can read about the truth and speak about the truth and contemplate the truth, but none of these indicate your own perception of it, your own attentiveness to it, your own awareness of it. And the talk and reading will all be vanity without that direct perception.

It is sometimes said that we want to prolong the pleasant situations and to avoid the unpleasant. It's very tempting to mentally swat at the unpleasant situations or experiences as they arise. I don't hold any extreme views in this regard, but I do think some caution here is a good idea.

The problem that can happen is that once you swat at the bad thing and let's say you get rid of it, you're still left believing that the thing you just swatted at is something that can sometimes happen, and maybe even should, which isn't always a good thing.

So for example, this body of mine had zits for a while, and it seemed like the more I was popping them, the more they appeared. It was as though my body was saying, "You seem to enjoy popping those things, so here are some more then." I've had much fewer problems once I started thinking that I have healthy skin, no matter what it looks like, and minimized any popping. Now I hardly have any zits at all.

Let's say there is situation I do not want. It's tempting to only focus on removing it. But it's at least as important to focus on a situation that I do want, a kind of good situation which simply leaves no room for the situation I don't want.

The reason for this is that the othered side of mind can be really arbitrary. Once I had a dream where as far as I could see, up to infinity, I saw these hideous locusts everywhere. This is a clue. The mind has no limit in terms of imagining obstacles. I really realized something in that dream. Normally my instinct would be to swat at the locust. This is fine if there is only one or two. OK, but I am studious and stubborn, so I can swat even 10 thousand. But what if it's endless? What if it's a self-sustaining process? Doh. Then obviously I have to think differently.

In a way the subconscious mind is sometimes trolling me. If I am dealing with an opponent who is not playing fair, I cannot win in a fair contest. So an infinity of locusts is not a fair and sporting opponent. Competing with them using some sports-like notions makes no sense. The only workable option is to be unfair myself, such as, denying them reality in a summary way, mentally. And, imagining green hills with some trees is more important than imagining how to get rid of locusts, especially if there is an infinite number of them. If it's just one, I think it's OK to imagine how to get rid of it, but if I sense it's going to become a recurring pattern, I have to take a different approach to manifestation than to swat at the bad experience or scenario.

That's also why when healing, it's very important to sense health right inside the sick area, as much as possible, in addition to whatever visualization one might use to clean the bad condition out. So if you visualize the bad stuff as a black smoke and you see it leaving the body, that's OK, but just as important, I think, is to focus on the good right in the middle of the "bad." It can be challenging to sense pain-free goodness and health right inside something that hurts and looks swollen, but this is highly effective in my experience.

Some challenges are enjoyable. But it's also possible to face an unwinnable challenge, and if that's the case, there is no need to play fair. And winnable challenges can sometimes become unwinnable if we swat at them too recklessly and/or with too little wisdom. So I'm not against mental negations, but I do see a case where negations can sometimes escalate into something that's hard to manage by the ever more copious negations.

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.