syncretik

What is the goal? To escape mental habits and tendencies which have become excessively ingrained and therefore mistaken as aspects of reality as opposed to modes of perception. The goal is to be open to all possible perspectives and experiences including those radically different from the ordinary human experience.

The goal is to cease to be a human? You’ve never been a human. The goal is to cease believing that you are a human.

Why is it preferable to cease believing you are a human? Firstly, because it is incorrect. Secondly, because the human body is limited. It will suffer, age, and then die. You will undergo all of these experiences and they will be painful, unless you realize that they are not happening to you, you are merely experiencing their happening. It is essential to come to hold the right view about the nature of your experiences.

What is the right view? The right view is to understand one’s experiences exactly as they are, to penetrate their nature. Right view is to perceive the physical world as a dream, a fabrication, an illusion, not ultimately real. This means one drops the beliefs they hold in normal, waking life about the nature of their experiences (i.e. as happening in a real, physical, external world) and adopts another. Right view is distinct from wrong view, or the conventional human mode of consciousness, in the same way that a painter presented with an apple would react differently (on instinct, immediately, without contemplation) than a starving man: phenomena are perceived in an entirely different way, despite being, superficially, the same phenomena. Right view is when the understanding of subjective idealism is consciously evident in the nature of one’s experiences. This is the difference between understanding “I’m typing on my keyboard right now” and “I’m experiencing Utthana typing on his keyboard right now” and having such an understanding as it is happening.

That's a nice concept in theory, but maintaining that mode of experiencing all day is an act of meditative endeavor. How is this achievable? It’s true that this is to be attained through right mindfulness, or right meditation, which is an endeavor. But constant endeavor is necessary to be ultimately flexible.

Wait, why is it desirable to be ultimately flexible? One who is flexible, adaptable, and comfortable with all experiences is immortal, invulnerable, and infinitely powerful. One who is ultimately flexible is one who is open to all possible experiences.

This now seems even more daunting! The ability to instantly, attentively, alertly, and consciously respond to each experience individually and uniquely is what it is to be enlightened. This requires a mind (“The Beginner’s Mind”) which is open, unattached, and pliable, accommodating to every farthest reach of conceivable experience. The mind must not be dull, unaware, lost in thought, lost in action, “being human”, full absorbed in the physical world and taking it to be real, in a “normal state”.

What does this have to do with mindfulness or meditation? Only when one is attentive to every possible type of experience can one be expected to react to, and respond to, each with the full alertness, attention, and conscious awareness to be ultimately flexible. If you are not aware of each experience you are having as it is, you will never be able to respond to each skillfully and with an open heart. You will, instead, fall back into old patterns and default, human ways of perceiving things (i.e. physicalism).

So how is this to be achieved? Only by being constantly vigilant can this be achieved. One must arouse one’s self to full attention of the experience that one is undergoing according to the Right View. This is the difference between being able to say, “I just walked across the room,” and having been intensely aware of the fact that you were experiencing yourself walking across the room during each instant of your walking.

This still sounds like a strenuous meditative endeavor. Am I expected to be completely alert to my experiences all day and every day? Yes. The normal, waking mode of consciousness is when one is capable of discussing subjective idealism theoretically but, for fifteen hours a day, experiences itself as human, busy with tasks, mind not fully aware of the nature of one’s experiences but instead lost in interaction, conversation, and the physical world. The mode of consciousness that is desired is when one is, instead, constantly aware and alert to the nature of their experiences, ultimately flexible, not lost in thought or busy with tasks, not experiencing itself as human. Every minute, every hour, every day, every lifetime not spent completely alert and attentive is a minute, hour, day, or lifetime spent ingraining conventional habits.

Is the maintenance of such a state not exhausting? No. The samsaric state of being lost in ordinary thoughts is where we are comfortable, and it is a strain and difficulty to become constantly aware and alert. But this is not a perpetual endeavor, like a mental task of thinking of the same mantra over and over, day in and day out forever. This is a shift from one natural resting place for the mind to another. Once one “gets into the habit” of perceiving reality with full attention and awareness and not allowing the mind to get lost, remaining in such a state becomes as natural as remaining in the normal, waking mode of consciousness is to us now. The alert, awake mode of consciousness can become how one wakes up, the mode one defaults to in events of trial and trauma (including death), and even how one dreams.

Never mind maintaining it, how does one initially get into such a state, or return to such a state after one has relapsed to the normal, physicalist perception? There are many ways. Intense and prolonged contemplation on right view is often sufficient to induce the shift in the character of experiences, but the practice is not entirely 'passive'. Meditation or drugs, when done by one who has firmly grasped the right view, can induce this shift. Active and intentional magickal practices can be exceptionally powerful tools as well. But the real trial lies in the maintenance of right view and right mindfulness throughout all of life. The difference between one who theoretically understands wisdom for a few hours of the day, and one who lives with wisdom even in their dreams, is the effort undertaken to maintain that state of consciousness. Being intensely aware of one's experiences exactly as they are happening, in the context of a latent understanding of right view (subjective idealism), and maintaining such a state, is all that is necessary.

I'd like to hear your perspectives on randomness. This question has implications for the understanding of othering.

Is true randomness possible?

If not, this would be a limitation of mind.

If so, it also feels like a limitation of mind (inability to predict/know the outcome of an event).

I figured I'll write about how my beliefs, expectations and opinions have changed because of my lucid dreaming experiences.

When I was a little kid, I've had a very close relationship with the dream world, but I can't say anything like "lucidity runs in my family." I wish I could, lol. However, when I was a kid, I could restart a broken dream and continue where I left off, like if I woke up too soon in the morning. Also, I could make myself dream on a theme by thinking of a theme and visualizing/fantasizing about it before falling asleep. I used to love dreaming on the themes I'd pick while lying in bed when I was a kid. So this isn't quite lucidity, but I think this kind of attitude toward dreaming predisposed me to lucid dreaming later in life.

However, when I was a kid I had not the slightest idea of the hidden potential of dreaming. I thought dreaming was just dreaming, and this is how naive I was. I didn't look deeply at the implications of dreaming. I just enjoyed dreaming in a consumer fashion.

This brings me to my old beliefs. I used to think that dreams were very distinctly qualitatively different from waking. In my mind waking experience and dreaming experience were so distinct and recognizably different, that there was no way for me to confuse the two. And this went along nicely with my materialist hangover. If the world was material, so I thought, it made perfect sense that my waking experience was solid and clear and my dreams were wispy, ephemeral, evanescent, fluid, and strange. It made sense because material objects were supposedly absent in dreams, and so this explained lack of stability and solidity in dreams. I was never 100% sold on this view, but somehow I believed it 99% or so, even if I had an occasional doubt when prompted to think about it, which was at first rare. Ignorance is not bliss, lol.

At the same time I've never been 100% satisfied with materialism. Firstly, when I was a little kid I have always felt like I lived before. This feeling of living again, as opposed to for the first time, would never leave me until I grew up some. It was like "oh, so it's this again" feeling. It's like I knew what to expect because I've been a baby before numerous times or something like that. It's hard to put the "oh, so it's this again" feeling into words. And there were other problems with materialism, like that it didn't jive with my experience of my own mind. I just couldn't for the life of me reconcile my own mind with the idea of material existence.

So this has led to a situation when during my early 20's I started heavily exploring spirituality. And it was during this time I've come upon "The Art of Dreaming" by Castaneda. It was a fascinating book, but really the book had two big takeaway points for me: a) sorcerers do everything by intent, and b) everything might be a dream.

The point a) came to dominate my life and contemplation later on, but point b) grabbed me immediately. I was thinking, "holy shit, so this all might be a dream???!!! Why didn't I think of that before?????" I was both excited and angry with myself. I was excited to have this thought but also angry that I didn't think of it myself and needed some stupid book to remind me. I always feel like that about great ideas, lol. I feel ashamed that I didn't already know them on my own, how dare I not know them? Luckily or unluckily I didn't get to feel like that too many times in life.

But still the notion that my waking life might be a dream was a very remote and very theoretical thought to my mind. At that time I hadn't been lucid dreaming yet. I still thought that dreams are just wayyyyy too different to be comparable to waking. In my mind there was a huge gap between how dreams felt and how waking felt. I was excited by the idea, but doubtful.

So I taught myself to lucid dream. And then shit hit the fence in all sorts of ways. So many of my old assumptions got broken by my lucid dreaming experiences. The most important assumption that was broken pretty soon was the idea that dreams were qualitatively different from waking.

This blew my mind so hard that in many of my lucid dreams I've spent what felt like hours just wondering around the dream worlds and touching everything and looking, in utter shock. I'd touch the dirt in my dreams and feel how dirty and dusty it was. It was staggering just to feel dirt. I would spend long time looking at my own skin over and over. I just couldn't believe it. I could see hair follicles, wrinkles, it looked so goddamn real, I was convinced there was not a iota of experiential difference between dream skin and waking skin. I'd look at the palms of my hands and see the usual lines and the fingerprint-like textures, and this was fascinating. Then I have spent huge amounts of time looking at shadows and light behavior in general. I'd notice how light refracted and how optically perfect everything was. I'd pick up a plastic container in my dream and just stare at it. I'd look at it from different angles. I was so stunned by how real it looked. I'd lift the plastic box up to look at it against the sun's light in my dream, and I'd see tiny tiny rainbow-like glints where the light refracted off the box, it just looked flawless, with all the "physical" nuances I'd expect from a "real" box during waking.

And then I had this mind-blowing thought, "How in the hell do I know what physically perfect refraction of light looks like?" Obviously I did know, or didn't I? Either way the implications were huge and world-shattering. If I knew it, I always knew it. So this would explain why during dreaming I'd be able to recognize flawed light behaviors if such were present. If I didn't, I always didn't. This means even during waking since I don't know shit about what refraction should look like, a pile of turd or a stick or a pink elephant might look like light refraction to my mind during waking, since well, I wouldn't know any better and couldn't distinguish it reliably. Huge implications either way!

Then I also discovered that my idea of being unable to feel pain in dreams was wrong too. When I'd pinch myself, I'd feel pain.

And I also used to think that dreams were always magical, but then I've had a few dreams where I seemed to have no dream powers whatsoever, dreams which also looked "physically" perfect.

One by one all my assumptions about the differences between waking and dreaming were disappearing fast. My dream experiences since I've learned to become lucid were very eye opening. My dreams showed me that previously I had too narrow of a view about them.

But it didn't stop there. As if this wasn't enough, my mind was blown even further numerous times by experiences like false awakening and false insomnia. I think everyone has heard of false awakening, but false insomnia is seemingly rare. I don't know anyone who talks about it besides myself. What's also potentially interesting is that I only had one false awakening, but more than one false insomnia experience.

My one false awakening experience felt so real, it really blew my mind in a huge way and in a way I was terrified by this experience. I was very worried that I might never be able to wake up! This was also a huge, huge insight! Because of this fear I realized how attached I was to the experience of waking solidity! All this time I've been reading about "attachment, attachment" but it was all theoretical to me. But here it was practical! I could now see a practical implication of the attachment to conventional phenomenal reality and I could see why such attachment was bad, because I couldn't relax and enjoy the false awakening experience for one, but rather, I was disturbed by it and wanted it to be over ASAP.

And false insomnias are the most mind-blowing things ever. Here's what an episode of a false insomnia feels like. I go to bed and I can't fall asleep. I am laying in bed, completely awake, thinking about my normal stuff from planet Earth, nothing weird at all. There is absolutely no change in consciousness. I don't get tired or drowsy and I am even slightly irritated that I am not falling asleep at all. I am even thinking maybe I should get up and stop pretending to be trying to fall asleep. Then I realize, wait, my night stand is not where it should be?! What the fuckity fucking fuck??? Then I wake up!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???!!!! So somehow I was sleeping??? I mean my insomnia was just a dream??? WTFF??????????????????????? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. What. The. Fuck. This has happened to me more than once. But weirdly for some reason I was never terrified by one of these experiences.

All my lucid dreaming experiences and especially false awakening and false insomnias have shown to me in no uncertain way that experientially there is zero, and I mean this 100% wholeheartedly, ZERO inherent difference between waking and dreaming. Dreams can sometimes seem different from waking, but apparently nothing keeps them that way at all. The contents of a dream experience can be as real as anything I think is real during waking experience. In fact, I have no way of distinguishing dreams and waking at all, other than like by faith. So like right now I have faith I am awake. That's it. Outside of this faith I have nothing I can go by, not touch, not smell, not optics, not pain, nothing I can go by to distinguish this experience from dreaming.

I'm not telling you everything here, but this post is already long. I hope someone had as much fun reading as I had writing. Ciao for now.

Even upon a superficial examination, it should be obvious that seriously (without pretense) maintaining a mindset of a dreamer during waking is basically insanity. For this reason I believe contemplating insanity becomes essential on this path.

Even some people I consider very spiritually advanced are to a large degree conventional beings, including myself. If I weren't a conventional being to a large degree, I wouldn't be here on Earth, writing these silly posts. I'd have better things to do in much better, more flexible, more interesting realms, with oodles more personal power at my ready disposal. I probably wouldn't be challenged by pain at all, and going without food for 1 year would be a joke for me. Physics wouldn't be a law, but more like a recommended guideline that I would ignore at my leisure any time it suited my fancy.

Convention can be thought of in two ways. In one way, convention is an established and widely shared agreement. This is the interpersonal or intersubjective definition. In another way, convention is that which is customary, it is that which has been done before many times over. This is the subjective angle.

So for example, we all agree to use the English language to communicate. That's an intersubjective example of convention. We all agree that we live on Earth. That's another example of the same.

But. Supposing I routinely dreamed in a disembodied form, that would be my personal dreaming convention. This wouldn't necessarily be agreed upon or shared, but it could still be a very stable pattern for me. Or to give another example, maintaining the view of oneirosophy during waking, when stabilized, would become a personal convention, but not necessarily a shared convention.

I think personal convention is a deeper, more fundamental convention in which the intersubjective convention takes root. Before you begin taking the views of others seriously, you first have to preemptively believe that the others truly exist. The other people can't force you to take them seriously no matter what they do or say. It's completely up to you.

So any time we deviate from convention, it feels like we are going insane. And this can be challenging. Because insanity is a deviation from convention, understanding what convention is in the first place, how it manifests in the space of your own mind, and what your role is in maintaining convention, all such knowledge and intimate familiarity is very helpful.

Generally I think a break with convention which feels like insanity can happen due to one or more of the four causes:

1. You started making different assumptions about reality.

2. You are abnormally less concerned than is customary.

3. You are abnormally more concerned than is customary.

1-3 are voluntarily inducible insanity types.

There is also 4:

4. Your experiences often do not match your expectations/assumptions about reality.

Unlike with #1, where your assumptions change, and then your experience changes to match your assumptions, with #4 it might seem like your experience has gone bonkers for no apparent reason (but usually there is a subconscious reason!).

So for example, most people assume that life is not a dream. So if you decide your waking consciousness is just a different kind of dream, the more seriously you take this attitude, the more committed you are to this attitude, and the more you allow this idea to affect your thoughts, expectations and behaviors, the more insane you may feel, at least initially. Eventually this could become customary, and the feeling of insanity would begin to wear off.

An example of #2 is not being concerned about bodily survival. This can feel insane, even if peaceful, somewhat paradoxically.

An example of #3 is being so concerned about the danger of bacteria, that you wash your hands 10 times every time you visit the bathroom, and you visit the bathroom to wash your hands 20 times during any day. Another example of #3 is thinking that your person is so socially important, that everyone is watching your every move. This is generated by a concern for oneself. You can also think you're the most important being in the universe, but if you don't worry about yourself, then you may not even care if everyone is watching you or not, or even, you might derive pleasure from the thought of being watched. That's because there is no threat perception in the second case.

Normally all healthy human beings have some threat perception. That's why they do wash their hands, but only once. That's why people do lock their doors, but only once. If you lock your door 10 times to make sure it's really locked, and/or if you also have 5 separate locks on the same door, then you have an elevated sense of threat. But if you never lock any door, never wash your hands, etc., that may indicate an abnormally low sense of threat.

Concerns are like hot coals. And then thoughts which concerns generate can be compared to smoke rising from the coals. You know how people talk about slowing down or even stopping their thoughts? Here's one secret. The reason most of them can't succeed is because you can't get rid of the smoke while the coal is burning. If you have concerns, then associated thought activity will manifest in the mind. As each concern dissolves for whatever reason, its associated thought activity also dissolves. And to have no thoughts easily and reliably you literally need to have no concerns about anything. You need to be certifiably insane. And which meditation teacher openly teaches about insanity? None that I know of. Not in a million years. Insanity is not exactly marketable. That's why most meditation teachings that focus on thought reduction are fraudulent. I've known many ignorant meditators who wasted decades on trying to slow down or stop their thoughts. One of these morons was actually a "Zen master" with inka from Japan. Please don't fall into this trap.

People who achieve extraordinary results have extraordinary psychology that goes along with it. Normal people get normal results. Sane people get sane results. This I think is true at least in general.

However, insanity of the type #3 is something I consider undesirable. So even though I think insanity should be embraced voluntarily, I also think it's wise to be picky about what it is you are embracing specifically. Getting uncontrollable nervous ticks caused by paranoia, thinking that the aliens or the government are watching your every breath and thought when you're using a toilet, that's no fun at all!

Once when I was starting experimenting with alternative ways of being, I learned to externalize my thoughts. First I learned to pronounce my own thoughts in different voices. So I could say my thoughts in Bugs Bunny voice, or in my friend's voice and so on. Eventually I got into a habit of always using voices that didn't sound like mine to pronounce my thoughts. And then eventually I started perceiving these voices as though external. And from there it started to get out of control. There was a time when I could have like 5 or more voices chattering in my mind simultaneously, all saying some kind of garbage that I didn't want to hear. At first I thought that maybe I am hearing the thoughts of other people. I started thinking that maybe I am telepathic. Then I realized, wait, even if this was telepathy, I don't want to live like that. I like peace and quiet in my mind. So I promptly dissolved all the voices and I returned to only using my own voice in my own mind. I was probably able to stop this habit quickly and easily because I didn't let it gain too much steam. From my perspective this is a perfect example of an insanity that is not so good. It definitely wasn't for me.

And there was another time when a huge portion of my concern for bodily survival dropped out (there were inner causes leading up to it, so please don't think this happened for no reason at all). Along with it all thoughts related to career and job security dropped out. And this was a huge amount of thought! Suddenly I felt so much open space in my mind and so much peace, but I was also scared because I felt insane. I thought my state of mind wasn't rational, because surely I should be concerned for my bodily survival chances a bit more. Surely I should give my career some thought, and so on. I definitely felt very abnormal precisely because I was "too" peaceful. So it's funny how threatened one can be by peace, if one is not used to it. But this I decided was a good kind of insanity that I decided to adopt for the long haul.

So be careful with insanity. All insanity is potentially dangerous, but some is pleasant and/or liberating, while other makes life even worse than average.

One of the main characteristics of well-practiced dream lucidity is utmost fearlessness. So living life in a state as close as possible to fearlessness allows us to approach the state of lucid waking. This is why I think any topic that deals with fear, and specifically, how to learn to curtail it, is important.

To this end I have found that an often ignored and overlooked method is a confession.

Admitting one's fears and insecurities to friends and to strangers has the effect of lessening the impact and weight of these fears and insecurities. The more we keep our fears secret, the more power they seem to have. Trying to keep a facade of strength is not true strength. Being able to admit vulnerability is itself a small act of fearlessness.

Confessions the way I speak of them are not formal. They're spontaneous and they can happen in almost any context where there is a listener. You can confess to someone who is anticipated to be friendly or hostile. Confessing to a potentially disagreeable person is a stronger effect than confessing to a friend. Confessing in public is stronger in its effect than in private.

Of course before you can confess something to someone else, you first have to admit it to yourself.

A good confession in my experience should make one at least slightly uncomfortable. It should push the comfort zone at least a little, ideally.

Over time, consistently repeated acts of turning oneself inside out have an effect. Less fear. And also one feels hollower inside. It's like you have nothing inside, because nothing is private. It's a good feeling. It's a feeling opposite of carrying a lot of stored up baggage in one's own mind and heart.

It was hard for me to appreciate the psychological values that materialism offered to me back when I was almost completely in materialism's thrall. Eventually I grew to see materialism as a nasty ball and a chain on my mind, and so I enthusiastically set about to rid myself of it, not just intellectually, but to eliminate all the mental habits that are part of the materialistic package deal.

In the process of being youthfully enthusiastic I was exceptionally fearless. Part of the reason for my fearless attitude was my complete ignorance. I wasn't afraid to go into deep states of concentration or alternate realities because I had no idea what it was like. It's like someone who sees the flame and thinks it's pretty and wants to touch it, without knowing what the full experience is like, and without fully understanding the implications of what I was about to do.

So my extremely exploratory and extremely open attitude very quickly led to a series of very extreme experiences (sober, no drugs). And then I realized that I was getting overwhelmed. At some point I actually had to give up certain kinds of concentrations because I couldn't accept the experiences that would follow them. Many of my experiences are instant intent manifestations. I just lay down, intend to expand, and bang, it's done. There is no laying around and cajoling. So literally the only thing that restrains my mind right now is fear. There is no mechanical restraint on my mind. If I wasn't afraid, I could fly up into air right now, instantly, without preparation or gradual concentration and none of that cajoling stuff.

So what is it that's making me so afraid?

That's the topic of this post: stability! I need some kind of stability.

For a very long time my materialistic assumptions and mental habits provided a rock of stability that made everything in my life ordered, clear, understandable, predictable, reliably repeatable. This quality of experience was the source of me feeling psychologically stable. This quality of experience made it feel like I had solid ground under my feet. I open the door out of my apartment and a very boring, predictable, expected corridor meets my eyes. I never realized how much I depended on that feeling for comfort until I lost it. I sit on a chair and I know my butt is not going to fall right through. I know that 20 bucks in my pocket will remain 20 bucks unless I remove it from the pocket. This almost boring predictability had a kind of reassuring and comforting quality to me that I was taking for granted.

And yet materialism had very serious problems in my eyes too. So I came upon a very important conflict in my own being. On one hand, the rigid patterns of experience felt suffocating, like a straight jacket. I wanted out. But on the other hand, that very same rigidity was the source of intellectual and emotional stability! I was leaning on that rigidity and solidity for support and for comfort. It also grounded my sense of identity. Even if my identity is a piece of shit, but at least I knew who I was because my human body appeared to exist in a stable materialistic context, and this was comforting.

Then I realized that if I ever wanted to make total experiential freedom my mainstay, I had two choices. Either I needed a new source of stability. Something else had to become my rock. I could no longer lean on materialism and its associated experiential qualities for support. Or. I had to learn how to give up the need for stability altogether.

Currently giving up the need for stability seems like a very far fetched goal. I try to be as honest as I can be with myself. I must move forward, but even if my limitations are temporary, I need to be honest about my limitations. So I don't think it would be honest to shoot for a complete giving up of the need for stability. So I decided I needed to find a new source of stability.

I've been contemplating intent or volition for what feels like a very long time, almost as long as I've been involved in spiritual life in general. I guess the solution to my problem was here all along. It is my own will! My own ongoing, beginningless, endless, timeless intent! This is what I must take as my rock. That's what I must learn to lean on for support. This is something I can trust and rely on no matter the circumstance. My own intent will never leave me.

I've been gradually realizing that one big mistake I've been making is associating my will with a struggling effort, with some kind of overcoming of resistance idea. But relaxing is just as deliberate as tensing. Forgetting is just as deliberate as remembering. In other words, intent, I now realize, has a clearly effortless aspect. I would even say that true intent, deepest intent, is always effortless. In my innermost being there is no resistance that must be overcome through effort.

I can even say that the effortless appearance of the external world of solidity is the ground-level effortlessness of my own will, effortlessness which I have been disowning! In other words, everything about the world of solidity that I found comforting was produced by my own will anyway, even from the beginning.

So learning about the hidden qualities of my will, effortlessness, smoothness, ongoingness, timelessness, no beginning, no end, no limits, has enabled me to relax more and more into my own will and to trust it as my new (and also old) rock. Maybe I could say, actually, it's the original rock.

The greatest possible gift is the gift of everything. When you remind someone that deep down that person is a God, you're giving the gift of everything to that being.

It doesn't even matter if that's yours to give. What matters is that you agree should someone be able to receive such a gift, you're more than OK with the person receiving it, and, you'll do everything you can to help. That intent in and of itself constitutes the entirety of the gift. It's the ultimate generosity so complete that there is no remainder.

People who help other people become Gods are known as Gods of Gods. They are rare indeed. For every 100 people willing to become Gods there is only 1 willing to help others become Gods. Why so? Because most beings are in the grips of a deluded thought that they're competing with something or someone for power. Because they think there is a fierce competition for power, they refuse to teach other people ways of power. In this way they demonstrate no small amount of both ignorance and cowardliness.

Indeed, there is no competition. The more you give away, the more you keep. Give it all away and you keep it all to yourself. Why so? Because the act of giving is only an illusion and if you agree to give it all away, you're saying to illusion, "I am calling your bluff! You, the mundane appearance, make it seem if I give everything away, I'll be left with nothing. I call your bluff now!" It takes immense courage to teach someone something that conceivably they could attempt to use against you or your ideal vision. You really have to go whole hog on this whole illusion thing not to fear anything of the sort.

Some people get uncomfortable when we discuss the topic of power. Why do you think they are uncomfortable? I will tell you. They're uncomfortable because they think if you gain power, it will be at their expense! In other words, if someone here gains power, then someone with less power will suffer for it. So, a zero sum game of power.

Of course preventing others from seeking power in order to retain more control over your own life is what? It's power-seeking just the same. Who are we foolin'? Right? Nobody is fooled. We all understand.

People with the biggest egos get upset when someone next to them has a big ego. Why so? Because if Bob's ego is so huge, there will be less of a spotlight for my own little but cute ego which needs some love. Would a selfless person mind someone else who had a huge ego? Of course not. What would be the point of minding if you have no personal needs or desires? Why would you comment on someone's ego or power if you had no similar needs yourself?

Unlike in the (illusory) material world, where by convention things often are a zero sum game, in the mental world things are not a zero sum game. In the mental world it's possible for 10,000 all-controlling Gods to meet and chat with each other, and not to step on each others' toes. If you don't think it's possible, I challenge you to consider that yes, it is possible, and unless you understand why and how it is possible, you have no business seeking more personal power.

So I understand very well the fears and insecurities around this topic. For some people just the theme of "all is mind" is a cause for intestinal hatred. Why so? Because it's a short distance from that to solipsism, and solipsism makes people afraid. And yet, solipsism is a very powerful and useful view to master.

Subjective idealism is not restricted to solipsism and indeed I act as though I respect (not to be confused with politeness) everyone, even though I know people are just dream emanations. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting and powerful experiences are only possible within a unified point of view, and this unified POV is basically solipsism, which is what many of you fear. It's fine if you don't want to benefit from unifying your POV. It's fine to hold it off. But don't knock it because one day when you get tired of convention, you may want to leave convention using the escape hatch of solipsism, and what will you do then, if you've built up layers and layers of fear and hatred around that idea? You'll be in trouble. You have to use the hatch, but it's overgrown with thorns. You don't want to be in that position, do ya? So you don't have to like solipsism, but be mindful not to bash it, for one day you may need to use it yourself.

All experience is perspectival. Which is to say, whatever the present experience is like, there are other alternatives that could have been experienced but aren't now. That's what "perspective" means. It means no matter what the experience is, it's never reflective of every possibility. It's also precisely because of this we don't rely on evidence. Evidence lies.

This implies choice, selection. It implies volition. So subjectivity implies volition.

And vice versa. If we start with volition, we'll end up with subjectivity.

Because of that, whoever is reading this, know that you can't ever die. Your conventional body could die and if or when it dies, it disappears as a vision in front of you or in front of others. It dies because someone is there to see it die. You were never born. All you can do is transform your perspective. But your perspective isn't created or destroyed except maybe from another perspective! But those other perspectives are just that: subjective perspectives! Not the truth. Not anything objective. Not gospel. Not data. Not dogma. Not "how it is." Even 100 billion such perspectives seemingly working together do not and cannot depart from subjectivity. If 100 people like strawberry ice cream, it doesn't make it less of a preference than if only 1 person liked it.

So if you understand this properly, you'll realize your own perspective should be the most important perspective for you. Your own perspective is the perspective by which you live or die, by which you rise or fall, and by which you feel pain or pleasure, and by which you experience wisdom or foolishness. Let me repeat: your own perspective. Your own. Not mine. Not hers. Not his. Not its. Just yours!

So a conventional image has a problem in that it's a story of limitation. For example, you're a man or a woman, but you can't switch or be both according to convention. (A hermaphrodite is neither man nor woman because to be both man and a woman means to satisfy the conventional demands of both men and women, and hermaphrodites cannot satisfy either such demand.) Nor can you be a neuter. According to convention you can only be in one place and not in two places at once. And of course there are more limitations that I don't have the time to enumerate. So that's the limitation a specific kind of self-image imposes, the kind that appears to be common wherever I look (I probably have something to do with it, yea?).

So don't bash your ego. Don't bash your image. Don't deny yourself or try to destroy yourself. Whatever you do, you'll always be something or someone experiencing something. Always. You don't have to be human. You don't need to have a body seemingly made of flesh (which is to say, you don't have to revolve around a tactile/kinesthetic structure in your experience). You'll never succeed in ridding yourself of yourself in any kind of metaphysical sense.

Listen, whatever you actually are, you can never change it. And whatever it is you aren't, you can never become it. So if you are anything, you can't get rid of it. And if you aren't something already, you can't become it. Think about it long and hard.

So when you perform magickal transformations, including when you transform your image or persona, please understand. There is something that transforms. And something that doesn't transform. If you have no idea what it is in you that doesn't transform you'll never achieve greatness. And if you think you'll someday be ego-less, you're just wasting yours and other people's time with that dead-end idea. You'll always experience something and not something else. Even if you experience everything, then you're not experiencing a small fragment, so even "everything" would be a choice, and a limited one.

What's never limited is your potential. Your potential is not limited now. Hasn't ever been. And never will be limited. But whatever fragment of that infinite potential you will want to emphasize, stabilize, make bright, familiar, and reliable, it will always only and ever be a fragment. And that's OK.

So you'll always have some self-image. You'll never get rid of it. The best you can do is stop being unconsciously inflexible about the specifics of what and who you appear to be to yourself and to others. Stop bashing yourself because some Zen moron called "Zen master with an inka" told you to. Stop seeking mindless annihilation, because you won't find it. But if you think you can find it, fine, do it. Go ahead.

Normally we might have an intuition that personality has thickness and substance. For example, if some spiritual entity were to possess my body, I would ordinarily think that I should become displaced. Why? Because personalities are thought to collide and contend with one another, similarly to how billiard balls do. Similarly to how two billiard balls cannot occupy the same space, we often imagine that similar properties apply to personality. So in this way of thinking, only I can be myself, and only I can occupy this human body, and so on. Also from this way of thinking I have only one past, and I will have one continuation in the form of one other personality occurring in the dream after this big dream ends (rebirth after the death of the body).

However, consider for a moment the implication of everything being just mind. It means no phenomenon, including personality, has any kind of substance or thickness, and so nothing needs to contend with anything else for one.

So imagine this scenario. I am standing here. And opposite of me TriumphantGeorge is standing. Now TriumphantGeorge mentally possesses my body, and what happens? From my POV I may go on just fine. From TG's POV he may also go on just fine as me. There is no collision. There is no displacement happening.

In fact, in this very moment, just how many Nefandis live in this very body? Conventional answer is one. However, potentially countless Nefandis live here right now. As well countless beings live here who have possessed this body. Since none of this has any thickness, we can fit here just fine, and there is no contention at all.

Another implication is the possibility of having multiple concurrent pasts.

So if me and TG become the same being in the next rebirth, that being's past will involve parallel pasts of me and TG. Since my present past can also involve parallel pasts, it's possible that the past can be infinitely parallel even though it seems to lead to a single unified present moment.

Going forward the same thing can happen. What was one being here, like say Nefandi is one being now, becomes 100 beings in 100 different rebirths. Each of those 100 beings remembers his, hers, or its past as this Nefandi right here, while they are quite distinct and quite separate in the future.

So there is not necessarily a "preservation of energy" happening because there is no substance. So one personality can become many. Many can become one. Such transformations would be impossible, and would make no sense, in the view of substance. But because in the mind nothing can have substance in the ultimate sense, some extremely weird happenings are possible.

So when you hear 10 New Agers all claim to have Cleopatra as one of their past lives, maybe this time you won't laugh at it. You'll know, actually, this is entirely possible and is consistent with the view of personality not being anything substantial.

That said, there is a huge difference between personality and you. There is always one and only one you. It's important not to become confused here. You aren't the same thing as a personality. You're a capacity to experience, to know, and to will. Any specific personality is just a peculiar way to exercise that capacity. And because the capacity is limitless, it can conceive of and exercise some exceptionally peculiar personalities, such as a personality with 5 concurrent and parallel past lives, for example, or being a brother in a family of siblings, all of whom without exception are a rebirth of a single being, which is to say, all of them remember the exact same events as their past.

Because past and future are merely narratives, they can be anything whatsoever. Narratives have no thickness and they're not obliged to follow any laws. There is no law of conservation of narrative in the mind. The mind can commit to such a restriction for a time, but it wouldn't be a law.

Also, here's a freebie. What does it mean to be reborn? It means to believe your experience. If you take your experience now at face value, it means you've been born or reborn.

However, if you believe nothing that you experience right now, and take nothing concrete at face value, then you've transcended the cycle of birth and death.

So being taken in by the visions the mind is having is literally birth and death cycle. If you're not taken in by those visions, you're literally free right now. So if you're not taken in by this post right now, you're beyond birth and death, right this moment. Then you can know yourself as the ever-dreaming mind, the mind that has no beginning or end or other parameters, the mind as a capacity.

Alright, that's enough fun for now.

While talking with /u/AesirAnatman I realized something I think is interesting, so I'm going to put it here. I often talk about mind as a threefold capacity to know, to experience and to will.

I always see all three as inseparable, such that there is no volition without knowledge and experience, no experience without volition and knowledge and so on.

Then it occurred to me that a magickal way of operation uses knowledge as input into volition, and produces experience as output.

Whereas a status quo or conventional way of operation uses experience as input into volition and produces knowledge as output.

This is just a small idea that I will throw out there. This is for any of you who have aspirations to perform harder and more blatant types of magick and who also like my ideas.

Firstly, you have to realize that as far as it concerns the malleability of shapes and structures everything is your will and is united in your will. Even the so called 'othered' aspects of mind are your will in terms of their malleability. But that's not enough.

Secondly, you have to develop appreciation for how weighty the conventional patterns can be. If you want to mess around with those at will, you have to know the mental level of these conventional patterns. To know it means to appreciate it.

So how can you learn to appreciate it? There isn't really one way. One way is to just bang your head against the seeming wall of the phenomenal reality until cracks appear. That's one way you can learn to appreciate what you're dealing with. Another way, and I like this one in particular, is to ask yourself "backwards" questions.

So what do I mean by "backwards" questions? I'll describe a typical scenario how this contemplation works.

Say I want to move a cup on my table with my will, and it doesn't move. After it doesn't move, I ask myself "Wait, what if I wanted to manifest a reality where I couldn't casually move things around with my will? How would I do that?" That's the backwards question. This backwards question is very important, but don't take my word for it.