syncretik

In my dealings with my own fear and reticence I have found one really cool trick that is subtle, but appears to gradually help over time with constant repeated application.

The time to perform this trick is when you are feeling ordinary. You probably do not want to do this if you're in the middle of a strange experience.

Basically the trick is to consider whatever the thing I fear as already a done deal. So, if I fear death, as I walk around contemplating, I consider that maybe I am already dead and this is what afterlife feels like? And if I fear insanity, I contemplate the possibility that maybe my real body is strapped into a gurney in a looney asylum, I am heavily medicated, and this experience of walking along the street is just a hallucination I am experiencing.

I might fear losing the world. Then I consider what if the world has already been lost? What if I already can't recover anything? After all, each moment is at least somewhat new, right? The old world is passing away every moment.

This is also why I sometimes visualized myself as a disabled person, missing limbs or faculties, a sick person, even a partially decomposing corpse that's discarded on the side of the road. In all this I think: what is so bad about it? And then I think, what about mind? Can mind be restrained or chained up by any of these scenarios?

Well, the last paragraph may be a little grisly for some, but I think most people can enjoy the contemplations I mentioned at the beginning.

The idea is to consider that the worst thing that you may fear has already happened, or is already the case and has always been the case, and then to investigate one's experience and possibilities from that context.

So my tooth was hurting again yesterday and I was using concentration and visualization to handle pain again. I noticed a few things. I noticed that I don't have to do anything directly at the site of pain to affect it (although that is one avenue of intervention). I noticed that simply relaxing at the ground of being can instantly attenuate pain at least in the short term. This is different from me relaxing as a human being, it's not an ordinary kind of relaxation, so don't get confused here. Since I realize I am not actually a human being deep down, I have the ability to do things, including to relax, as a non-human something or other, and this has different effects. Relaxing as a human just relaxes my body and nothing else happens. Relaxing as that which is beyond human not only relaxes the body, it also weakens structure and brightens up manifested appearances. Such relaxation changes how the human body feels and it also changes how the world feels. I feel like if I keep it up, the body and the world will dissolve, and from there, if I had a commitment of that sort, I could possibly dream myself into a new type of realm.

What's interesting is that pain seems to kick up a notch my ability to concentrate. I guess I still consider pain an emergency. So while I was taking a shower, I was doing the healing water visualization where I consider the shower water to be extraordinary as it runs over me. I was running it pretty hot, and then I started to focus on the idea that "all phenomena are peace." And what's interesting, when my mind fell into a concentrated state pretty easily and quickly thanks to my toothache, the water's heat sensation disappeared. At one point it disappeared so thoroughly that I started having doubts about the entire experience! I thought, maybe this water was cold in the first place? Maybe I didn't do anything at all. But when I stopped contemplating the peaceful nature of all phenomena, the heat sensation came back.

This kind of experience happened to me a number of times, usually when I play with the temperature sensations outside. When I get really successful it feels like I am actually not doing anything and it's the street temp that changes and not anything say in my human body. So for example, if I am practicing cooling off in the summer heat, at first it may feel like the street is oppressively hot and there is a region of coolness that I am working on in my human body. As I concentrate on allowing the visualized coolness to flow into the manifest experience, sometimes it feels like the whole street is cool, and what used to look like hot summer sun begins to look like a bright but cold winter sun. In this state it's very easy to think that I didn't do anything again.

This happens because I wrongly associate intent with effort and struggle, still. Of course the truest and deepest intent is effortless. So when one succeeds in the best possible way it may deceptively feel like it's always been that way, whatever you were trying to manifest. It definitely works that way for me.

This also brings up the ambiguous nature of experience. If I had a doubter in me, there'd be plenty of meat to chew. I could just easily disown all the effortless phenomena and consider that maybe the water in the shower, or the street just changed temperature for reasons beyond my intent. To really entertain such doubts seriously I would need to keep clinging to the idea that intent is always and only effort, however.

Back to pain. I notice that pain is a complex multi-factor phenomenon. It seems like lots of things affect it. Destroying the visualized image of humanity in myself alleviated pain, as well as imagining that I was the only being in existence, as well as relaxing at the mysterious base of experience beyond the human identity. It seems a huge component of pain is actually social. Pain hurts a lot more when I want to belong to a group. When I consider myself solitary, I get a lot more leeway in how to interpret the sensations and I also get more leeway to play with the sensations. In retrospect this isn't surprising because the function of convention is to stabilize meanings. But just when I want to change an experience, that stability works against my interests. For most humans this is an acceptable trade off because they'd probably run to a doctor and use that experience of pain to feel love and attention from a doctor. For me such trade off is not a very good one, and seems less good by the day.

So if one were really really successful at a feat of magick, it may feel like nothing at all has been done thanks to effortlessness. In that state it would be trivial to forget the magical nature of phenomena and the relevance of intent. One can get caught in one's own perfectly created dream, and the dream can begin to run away into random directions if one disowns it too much. I need to be careful not to be a victim of my own success.

This is related to my recent night time dreams. Two nights in a row I've been dreaming that I am flying by jumping up and then vigorously moving my arms. In yesternight's dream I've dreamed I was making swimming motions as if swimming through the air. I could even adjust the amount of air lift by adjusting the angle of my hand, lol. This night I dreamed I was flapping my arms up and down like a bird.

I've long known that this is a problem (for over a decade, let's say). So right in the dream I stopped whatever I was doing and thought, this arm flapping business is a technique I use to fly. And it's a problem. Because when I rely on it I train myself to believe that arm flapping equals flying, and no arm flapping equals no flying. I know I don't really need to flap my arms to fly. So I stood there for some time trying to fly properly, and I couldn't, even though I knew it was a dream and everything. Just couldn't do it at the time.

So apparently this one technique ran away from me, so to speak. This technique has taken a life of its own and now it will be a bit of a struggle to undo it, especially considering how successful it's become for me (it works nearly every time and I have great confidence in it, apparently). That's right. The more successful a technique is, the more dangerous I believe it is, because it's becoming more and more ingrained in the mind, more and more habituated.

The same thing happens when I am dreaming during the day time. Like for example, when I try to cool off during heat, I don't just spontaneously cool off. Instead I visualize a region of coolness and I connect that imaginary region to what I also know is actually imaginary, which is the conventional region of heat in the body during a summer day, and I begin a mind-mediated heat transfer, essentially. So it's a technique. As a technique it gets better and better the more I use it. I figure by the time I get it to work reliably, I won't be able to achieve heat sensation transformation in any other way other than that specific technique. In other words, what I am doing isn't necessarily a good thing.

But I am in a bit of a bind here. On one hand, I don't want to be stuck in a technique. In essence this entire conventional world is a technique (habituation) gone rogue. I don't want to add more techniques to a giant pile of techniques here. On the other hand, I think it's really good to break out of the mold. And the easiest way to have an unusual experience is to use a technique. To do a raw straight up transformation without some kind of imaginary aid is in my experience difficult even during a night time dream. And during the dream of waking, what we call conventional world appearance, it's exceptionally difficult to do a raw un-techniqued transformation. When I attempt it, it feels like I'm licking a mountain.

So I don't have any advice as to what's best in this scenario. I'm just saying, look, techniques are potentially dangerous. At least we need to know what the danger is. So techniques can help speed up transformations and they can make transformations reliable and repeatable, but they also make it so that those transformations become locked up behind those techniques, and the more successful those techniques are, the more practiced they are, the more those transformations become locked up behind those techniques. In other words, techniques also function like boxes for experiences. They're fast and effective if you want some unusual change sooner rather than later, but if at least we're not mindful of the danger, we'll definitely be paying the price later.

Currently I'm reading a mildly interesting book which bounces in some strange space between alternative psychotherapies (including but not limited to Jungian) and a Western alchemical tradition. It's not exactly my cup of tea, but you know, I sometimes read stuff from the periphery of my interest since there is some overlap sometimes.

Anyway, there is this one idea there that was really interesting that I thought I would attempt to pass along. It's a somewhat new idea for me, but I also see how I've been using this process all along, so it's also not that new. I just never really thought of it as "imaginal metabolism." So that's the name of the idea. So what is it then?

The idea is that imagination can be compared to a digestive and metabolic process. This is of special relevance to those who want to use mind powers to heal some conditions, or to overcome PTSD and similar. Whenever something painful or terrible happens, there can be at least two ways to respond: one possible way is to isolate what happened in an impermeable mental bubble of sorts, and then never think about it again. The author postulates this as an unhealthy response. But to leave the experience AS IS is also bad. The memory of it is too heavy, and of course if the experience is still ongoing it might be unbearable. So one option here would be to digest the bad memory or experience in the stomach and juices of imagination.

This is done by mixing the memories or experiences with the so-called "imaginary" ones that make it better. When this is done over and over, it's like digesting something by breaking it down and integrating that something into your body.

In this case the body is not understood in a conventional way either. The body is the most visceral level of imagination. It's not a thing or an object per se. So the most visceral level of imagination is our waking experience or something akin to it.

Then integration means safely combining two types of experiences which we normally would think are incompatible. So for example, health and pain seem to be incompatible. However, with the process of imaginal digestion one could make pain compatible and in effect not painful. So one could transform the pain, and then even transform the memory of pain, which can be painful in its own right, to be something that can no longer induce oppressive apprehension and fright. It's basically a way to brighten up and lighten up memories in addition to having the potential of transforming ongoing experiencings. When it comes to memory, you can leave the basic facts the same, if you like, but you can drain all the heaviness out of any memories that seem too heavy. Or I imagine you can even achieve a more radical transformation.

So the idea is simple: we can mix what is visceral with what is less visceral and we can play with it creatively and imaginatively. So if let's say you felt pain in your arm, you could visualize colorful symbols streaming into the area of pain and swirling around and inside it and dissolving it away. You can then also imagine pain itself streaming outward and combining with other phenomena in strange ways. You can take a perspective on your painful arm from a helicopter far above, and imagine looking at your own arm through the binoculars. Or you can add a funny music track, mentally, to just about any experience, and suddenly the whole experience feels different. So the point is, we can use the more malleable and the less viscerally felt level of experience to complement and offset the more visceral level in ways that will transform our appreciation and maybe attitude of the whole experience.

Playing with experiences and memories allows us to take them less seriously, which in effect will reduce the level of oppression these experience and memories can sometimes have. And using imagination to do so can be compared to a process of digestion.

Just like digestion, which is an ongoing process and not a one-off thing, this kind of imaginative and playful mentality would need to be an ongoing process too. Digestion conventionally is thought to be a process which integrates self and other. Self here is what the readers might imagine their human bodies are. And other is food in this case, or other consumed resources, like air. And digestion is a process that makes things normally hostile or opposed to self beneficial to self.

So if you implant a pear directly into your thigh, you'll probably injure your body severely. However, if you put the pear in the stomach and let it digest, the pear can become safely integrated with your body. Since we're on a subjective idealism sub here, I'm using these as metaphors. I hope no one takes the body and pear stuff literally. Nor is the body literally the self. That's just a metaphor sourced from convention. Imaginal digestion can integrate bits of imagination that in other circumstances might be at odds with one another. That's the idea I think.

So the idea is to do something opposite of surrounding the unwanted experiences or memories in impermeable mental bubbles. For the worst ones this requires a significant ability to face up to one's fears, since as one can imagine, one powerful reason it's sometimes tempting to section off a bad experience or memory is precisely how fearsome it might be.

So what do you think? Is it worth thinking in this way? Is digestion a useful metaphor? Or is this not worth the bother? Have you ever compared imagination to digestion before?

The default names we're given, the ones our parents gave us, are slave names. Why do I say this? I say this from the perspective of someone who hasn't completely moved beyond convention and who has to, on some level, still bow to it. My parents are the two people who ushered me into this prison world, and the name they assigned to me is a prisoner's number. It's not a name. It doesn't reflect my liberated essence.

So should I legally change my name? Of course not. Legalities are maintained by the slavish institutions that lack meaning in an enchanted life.

Instead one possible solution is to give yourself a magical name and you can even keep it a secret. But the trick is to regard your magical name as a true name, and your "real" name as a bogus name, a fraudulent name. This is a powerful statement you make inside your own mind if you do something like this.

Of course these are just ideas. Why have one name? You can develop for yourself a suite of 10 personas, each with its own name, and swap them in and out on as-needed basis. Or you can become cognizantly anonymous. A nameless person. And there probably are lots of other possibilities.

A lot of people are happy and proud of their given names too. If you're one of those, then I want this message to be some nice cold water on your face. You can't be free if you can't name yourself as you wish. If in your hearts of hearts you go by an assigned name, then you have the heart of a slave and not the heart of a liberated person.

This also brings to mind some long gone traditions I've read about. Like I've read that in some American Indian tribes boys had to go on a quest to earn their names once they came of age, and that's how they became men. This makes a lot of sense to me, regardless if it's historically accurate or not. However in the spirit of modern times this should be extended to women too, if you ask me. So if I were in charge of a tribe, I'd make everyone go on a quest regardless of sex/gender. I'm just dreaming here.

I haven't always been "Nefandi." I've gone by so many different names in so many places. But each of those names is more me than whatever my "real" name is. That I know for sure. I spit on my given name.

OK, this post is for anyone who is interested in a deity mindset. One way deities distinguish themselves from mortals is that deities are fully responsible for all or most of their own structural, key narratives. Or meanings. Same thing.

So it really helps to understand how ordinary people proceed with regard to assigning meanings to experiences. Let's assume something that isn't yet established in one's experience. It's new. So there must be a way to create a meaning for some new experience. So below is a slightly exaggerated example, which I am going to exaggerate to convey a point:

Person A: Do you see something over there?

B: No.

A: Look right oooooovverrrr theeere. Do you see it now?

B: Oh yea, I see it.

A: What do you think it is?

B: It just moved.

A: I see it too.

B: It looks like a snake, might be a lizard.

A: Lets get closer.

(They capture the creature.)

A: It's a new one. I don't think I can find this creature in any of our existing creature taxonomies.

B: We'll need to name it.

A: And after that we'll have to dissect it and have a convention to decide how to classify it.

B: Oh yea. Totally. So do you think I should name it because I saw it move first?

A: No way. I saw it first before it even moved. I think I should name it.

B: Let's name it together. We can give a two word name, and you can come up with the first one and I'll come up with the second one.

A: OK, deal.

OK, so this is a very innocent example, but I want people to pay attention to something.

Notice how they each defer to the other, and then they plan to defer to a convention? In almost every line above they defer to the other.

Notice how neither one dares to unilaterally proclaim the meaning of what's happening? Instead they throw the task of meaning construction like a hot potato between themselves, and then they make plans to involve a big gathering of people to hash out the full meaning together.

So if you think you're a smart cookie, pause reading after the next question and try to answer it yourself. Then look back and see what I think.

What does any of that have to do with physicalism?? (OK, try to answer this on your own.)

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So, here it is. It has everything to do with physicalism. Because physicalism is an idea that there is some neutral objective common ground "out there," and so, because of that, the best way to get to know that common ground is to ask as many observers as possible (peer review) and cross-check everyone's reactions. Because we assume whatever it is must be in common to all observers, then whatever is commonly reported by some observers must be a reference to that neutral objective domain "out there."

OK?

So physicalism is intimately connected to this multilateral meaning construction.

And now here's one of my favorite video clips from The Matrix to cement this point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svfDdcPmELk

Notice how Neo behaves. Neo here wants the Oracle to confirm to him, to approve him, to bless him as The One, even AFTER the Oracle straight up told Neo that NO ONE can tell him if he's The One or not. She says you just know it the same way you know you're in love. You don't go to see a love specialist to get your love tested and validated, lol. You just know it. Balls to bones, as she says (love is like madness, hint, hint). Exactly. So Neo is really stupid in that part of the movie. Notice how even to the last moment the Oracle doesn't pronounce any judgement upon Neo. Instead she plays with Neo's insecurity and doubt and gets Neo himself to disempower himself. Neo voluntarily and ignorantly relinquishes his power by saying he's not the one.

So blow by blow:

1. Neo hopes for Oracle to say he's the one.

2. The Oracle doesn't feed into his hope. She instead plays with his insecurity to see if Neo will let her continue developing meanings for him.

3. Neo waits for more from the Oracle, still hopeful, because he didn't understand what she was saying about being the one was like being in love.

4. The Oracle says, "you know what I will say next."

5. Neo could have said, "That I am the One!" But nope. He's insecure and doubt is consuming him. He's so used to other people telling him what to do and who he is and who he is not. Isn't the Oracle some kind of expert? Aren't you supposed to trust experts? He's so very very dependent on the Oracle as a source of meaning, as a validator, as an approver and a blesser, and she's kind of cold.... so his insecurity gets the best of him and he blurts out "I am not the One."

6. The Oracle sees this weakness and says "sorry."

7. And that line about "waiting for something" is pure gold too. :) But really that line is too hardcore for most of us. But wait.... you're not going to let me tell you that? Are you? WEEELLL????? Are you?

So be careful friends. Don't be stupid. Don't do what Neo was doing in that clip. And this doesn't only apply to big meanings like "the one." It can apply to all sorts of meanings.

Here's an idea you can play with. Most people think that concentration is something that happens inside the span of a meditation or a contemplation session. They'll say stuff like, "Be quiet, I am trying to concentrate." They're talking about gaining a smidgen of mental focus on a certain topic of contemplation or on a certain aspect of experiencing.

Imagine concentration as something that deepens over many many lifetimes. Your subjectivity will produce and shed many body constructs. You'll live through thousands or millions of years of subjective time and will wear out many body constructs in that time. Now imagine that over that very large span of time you're devoted to some core postulates and you make everything in your life revolve around those postulates. That's what I call total concentration.

Compared to total concentration, the concentration inside the span of a short meditation session is nothing but a tiny blip on the radar. That doesn't mean meditation or contemplation are completely useless, but if you cannot comprehend this grand perspective, your aspiration will be lacking, because your aspiration can only be commensurate with the depth of your insight. And having a superficial and weak aspiration your results and your powers of manifestation will be weak as well. Or put another way, without a grand perspective your power of manifestation will very likely be unconscious and alienated, or 'othered.'

This also brings you much closer to escaping the time altogether. If you think in terms of aeons, then you're much closer to a perspective beyond time than someone who likes to think in terms of hours and second and years. Someone who takes their life one second at a time is a slave to time and is caught up in the minutia of experience, unable to zoom out.

A grand perspective is the middle ground between a small perspective and a perspective beyond parameters. So for most people the development of a grand perspective will be an improvement. Most people have tiny perspectives. As they say, it's like looking at the sky through a straw, lol. That's what a tiny perspective is like. So looking through a fat pipe is a massive improvement and is nothing to scoff at. In this toy metaphor you can just drop the straw. In practical terms your tiny perspective will likely be so ingrained that you will not be able to just dump it. You'll have to first expand your perspective and open up some space. That might take aeons. Eventually you can regain enough mental flexibility to go beyond parameters.

The proverb in the title is a berry. In my digestion of it I have learned two deep simplicities.

1. A proverb is not something to explain to the contemplative mind. Digestion is individual.
2. To recognize this proverb as a proverb is to glimpse the subsurface of proverbial depth.

Meanings go deep.
The depths can be searched.
Perhaps there is a bottom.
It would be something foundational.

Here I have brought you a single berry on a big white plate and I have cut it into pieces.

Flowers are beautiful.

Some time ago, the one named mindseal (I only encountered as nefandi) told me an analogy that I had been contemplating ever since.

I'm sad to have forgotten the whole context and fidelity of the details, but I remember the gist of it. I found it inspiring and empowering to consider.

He said something along the lines of "Even a leaf obscures galaxies, and a mouse may shatter a star if it squeaks with enough sincerity."

I'm sure I misquoted it, so I spruced it up with my own imagination here.

Anyway, wow. The perspicacity alone has accompanied me for some time now. More than that, though, learning that sincerity is powerful.

Truly, it is powerful.

I want to learn more. Would you share some wisdom with me?

I find visualization to be a fascinating topic and also very strongly connected to dreaming. My visualization skills are not that great, but I've been making some improvements to them in this lifetime.

We tend to hear about visualization now and then. Most visualization we hear about is concerned with using just the visual sense, and the visualized objects appear at the center of attention. So I'd like to talk about a different kind of visualization style. I've already mentioned it before in passing, but I want to talk about it more explicitly now.

So normally when I think or hear about visualization, what comes to mind? I am thinking stuff like visualized apples, tables, chairs, human beings, anthropomorphic deities. Even when I hear about a more fancy visualization object, like a mandala, it still seems like the mandala appears in the center of the vision field. So what all these have in common is that visualized objects appear in the center while the ordinary mental context remains completely unchanged during the visualization process.

Now let's talk about context. I split the context into manifest and unmanifest. I don't want to talk about the unmanifest context today. But I do want to give everyone as vivid an impression as I can about the manifest context and what I mean by this. So as you read this, I hope you can actually engage your minds, bear with me, relax, and basically let yourselves participate instead of just reading intellectually.

Let's start with how you may feel right now. I will describe my own experience, but as you read this, you should check out your own experience as it appears right now.

So I am sitting at the keyboard, in my living room, typing this stuff up. There is a desk and a chair, a computer on the desk, some furniture in my living room and so on. I live in an apartment. So it's a fairly mundane environment. Nothing fancy or special. Now I will describe what I experience more precisely than that.

In regards to my body, I can't see anything visually besides my fingertips which dance on the keyboard. I'm typing in low light. The keyboard seems to be illuminated by the screen in front of it. I see a little bit of light on my right side, which I assume is coming from the kitchen. I see my computer screen in front of me. I feel pressure where I assume my butt is on the chair. I also feel pressure in my spine, and that's how I know there is gravity. I imagine if gravity didn't exist, there'd be no feeling of pressure in my spinal column. I can feel the pressure where my feet touch the floor. When I move my feet I feel a textured pressure response reminiscent of a carpet.

Now let me start with the backside. There seems to be almost like blackness on my backside. The vision sense appears to be in front of me, and there is no vision in the back. I hear some faint sounds coming from the back, and that's about it. However, there is a clear sense that there is stuff in the back even though I am not experiencing it. I "know" there is the rest of the living room out in the back. I know there is a balcony there through the balcony door. I know what's beyond the balcony. There is another building there across a small alley. I'm still going backward here. I also have a sense of living in a city. I mean, this isn't just intellectual, but there is a subtle feeling about it that's present in my mind. It's clear (as opposed to confusing) and subtle, but with some attention, very easily detectable too. So behind myself I feel a sense of the city in that direction. If I go further I have a sense that eventually there is open space there, and then eventually there are other planets, stars, galaxies and basically the contents of a cosmos. Now again, I am not talking about an intellectual idea of a cosmos. I am talking about a clear and present feeling right now.

Similarly in every other direction, while there is a limit to what the senses show, the mind seems to have filled in, as it were, the missing pieces. So I feel like behind my computer screen in front of me there are some books and stuff on the table, then a wall, then behind that wall a hallway, and other apartments, then a courtyard, then more apartments, then other buildings, and I even kind of know how they look, even though I made no conscious effort to remember any of this stuff.

So the important thing here is to feel and not just think. I'm not talking about the mere idea of the other stuff being around the small area we can directly observe. I am talking about a clear and present feeling, right now, in the mind, where you feel like there really is "something" there, and for each of you that something is different, but you know what it is even without seeing it directly. Even if you don't know the exact details, there is a sense of "a familiar something-ness" that surrounds whatever is shown by the 5 senses.

This is what I mean by "manifest context." So the present experience of pressures, visions, sounds, smells is as though ensconced in a context that stretches out all around, and this context is maintained in the mind automatically, but we can feel it if we pay attention to it.

Before I said:

I'm not talking about the idea of the other stuff being around the small area we can directly observe.

Notice the word "small"? Well, how do I know what size it is? Why do I say "small"? Maybe it's huge? I say it's small because I am comparing what is immediately perceptible through the five senses to a mental context that's subtly but very definitely present. It's this "bigger" context that makes whatever appears in 5 senses appear small.

OK, so now you know what the manifest context is.

You can visualize in that space!

And you can achieve some amazing effects that way. When I visualize in the manifest context space, I leave alone whatever is vividly apparent through the 5 senses, and only tinker with the manifest context.

Now let's try some tricks.

Normally my manifest context feels as though stable by default. But, I can visualize it as though moving around. When I do this, the area where I am sitting, with the chair, table, my human body, it starts to feel like it's wobbling in exact relation to how I am moving the visualized context around. I can make this area where I am at feel like it's spinning around, or like it's bobbing and weaving like a cork on a giant cosmic ocean.

So if I take the bundle of experiences and visions that appear through the 5 senses and consider it like a cork, and then imagine there is nothing but an endless ocean under that cork, no city, no Earth, no stars or galaxies, just an endless ocean with waves. Then this present place starts to feel like it's bobbing and weaving, like it's floating.

Another trick that's possible is to imagine that instead of this infinite surrounding context the surrounding context is relatively small and maybe even finite and all the planets, galaxies and stars are very close by, and they're all the size of dust motes. This makes the present place that appears through the 5 senses seem huge in size. With a little bit of effort I can make myself feel like the keyboard goes on miles and miles.

Well, see if you can play around with this. When you go to bed, try to make your bed feel like it's hooked up to a swing set and it's rocking back and forth as you're relaxing and going to sleep.

I want to describe two lucid dreams and how differently they made me feel.

In one dream I found myself in a rural area. It looked like a farm or something like that. There was a single story house, some rickety fence, some uncut overgrown grass, and it was sunny. When I became aware I was dreaming, my dream went from being very fuzzy to super-hyper-ultra clear mode. I could see every blade of grass and I could see the sun play on every surface so perfectly. My dream body started to feel heavy too! I was becoming solid, like I was a real person in a real world, somewhere. And this is where I got really scared. In this specific dream, I felt 100% sure that I could actually live there. I mean, I felt like I could just go into the house and stay there for hours and hours... get tired, go to sleep there, probably wake up there in the same house and live on that farm like that. I felt certain this world was not going to vanish. It seemed so solid and stable and so secure. And then I got very very freaked out. I thought that if I don't wake up soon, I may never wake up. I started thinking, what if back on Earth my body went into a coma? What if my breathing has been cut off? What if I blocked arteries leading up to the brain?? Holy shit?!!! Maybe I was dying!!! WAA WAA WAA.... I was really freaking out and all kinds of bad scenarios were streaming into my mind very fast, scenarios that were explaining to me why such a super-vivid and super-solid dream appeared to me. I thought maybe this dream is so solid because I died. And I thought even if my body on Earth was OK, I could easily forget I even had a body on Earth!! What if I start to live on this farm? In 5 years I may not even remember there is a body in bed on Earth. What then? I instantly made myself wake up! So I am in bed. Everything is fine.

OK, second dream I want to describe was really amazing. I dreamt I was in a castle. Somehow I knew this castle. It had two, three and four story buildings made of stone, narrow and twisty cobblestone streets, and it was overgrown with moss here and there. I somehow knew that this was my alchemical castle. It had a library there. And it had a huge alchemical laboratory in one of the buildings. And I also somehow knew I was absolutely alone in the castle. The castle was on a tiny piece of land that was floating in nothingness, not connected to anything at all. And I knew the entire castle was specially mind-made by me. I knew where every single stone lay without actually going around and looking. I just knew. And I had this weird knowing that this is where I will "go" when I die. And when I realized this, I was like jumping for joy internally. I could barely contain my ecstasy. So basically when this body dies, I appear in that castle by myself, relax, have fun, recuperate, and then I decide where else to go from there. When I felt this, I almost wished I would die right away, lol.

And now the contemplative bit. What is interesting in these two experience and ordinary waking experience, is that in all three cases they all look completely identical as far as quality goes. They all look clear, solid, believable, etc. They basically look the same. Stones look like stones. Moss looks like you'd expect moss to look. Grass on the farm looked like you think grass should look.

So ordinary experience, and the two lucid dreams, they all looked outwardly identical in terms of the quality of impressions coming "through" the 5 senses. However, they felt so drastically different! The farm felt scary. Ordinary waking experience feels boring (among other things). And the castle felt ecstatic. What was different? What was different was the kind of expectations I had in each case. I expected the farm to be a trap where I get caught and cannot return back to Earth. I expected the castle to be my imaginary inconceivable home base outside of every realm, a place where I can relax any time I want to. And I expect waking experience to be routine, unsurprising and hence, boring.

I'm thinking about an idea of gravity and where, relatively, it can be. If the center of gravity is outside one is obsessed toward something external and one is constantly falling into it. When the center of gravity moves inside, everything revolves around my perspective, as though laying on me, resting on me. Living with the center of gravity closer to me is powerful.

So-called "objective" things admit fewer disagreements, and because of that are actually extremely subjective. If I legitimize my disagreement with others about a thing, then I claim to know less about that thing, so I believe it is further away from me, and maybe even outside. So-called "objective" is that which I know without trying, and disagreement about which I wouldn't accept, like that I am a man or that it's day out now, and these are intimate things.

The horizon doesn't overwhelm what's here, but what's here doesn't obscure the horizon.

One thing that hinders freedom is expecting that the eventual result of one's intent will be evaluated according to some supposedly objective standard of success and failure.

One can only be omniscient if one agrees to being completely subjective.

I associate appearances with receptivity and passivity, so they are seen as established even though I agree that subsequent judgements of those appearances are not established. (continued below)

Taking the theme of "not established" further, I don't even see actual appearances, I only see semblances of appearances and jump to an erroneous conclusion that appearances are aesthetically genuine, which is to say a vision looks how it looks. But appearances are not genuine. So it's not that "a certain shape indicates a tree" is false, but even the shape itself doesn't look as it appears to look. Red isn't red. Brown isn't brown. Qualities are illusory, and not just the further conceptual elaboration post-quality.

The present appearance is a thought in the mind.

To know the juiciness of a thought I have to be intimate with it.