syncretik

I just want to alert your attention to the fact that there is no such as anything that's powerless. Every tiniest thought has power. Every breath has power. Every sigh has power. I won't even say anything about magickal intentionality, rituals, punches, written articles, and wars. Even glancing at someone has power. You cannot avoid power. The right attitude for anyone seeking self-mastery is to begin recognizing the power that you have and constantly exude, and begin taking responsibility for it, and stop pissing your power away in ineffective, pointless, useless and self-defeating causes. I won't tell you what those causes are. You have to figure this out for yourselves.

Let's consider a metaphor here and why many people get confused about the effectiveness of small alterations.

Suppose there is a 1000 lbs barbell laying on the floor. Let's also suppose it has square sides instead of the circular ones, so it cannot roll. Now suppose I am a weak child, 5 years of age. Now suppose I were to strain myself against the barbell by pulling it upward. Obviously the barbell won't move. So if you go by visible appearance, you'll wrongly conclude my action had no effect. If another person were to stand there and begin pulling they would no longer need to pull the entire 1000 lbs upward, but it would be 1000 lbs minus whatever my 5 year old self is contributing in the pull. In other words, nothing of that action got lost! Every tiny action has an effect.

Properly repeated (with good timing) actions have their effect applied according a principle of resonance by combining with the habitual energy of the past such actions.

So the point is, even if you don't see anything change as a result of your intent, it doesn't mean your intent just vanished or wasn't effective. Rest assured all your intentionality is absolutely supremely effective. Everything you do and don't do matters. How often you do it matters to. With what attitude you do it matters. The mood matters. Your understanding matters. Everything matters. There is nothing that doesn't matter. If you believe something doesn't matter, then that belief begins to matter and takes effect, but only because that's the state of mind you're in at the time.

So don't right away judge whether you succeed or fail by simply naively observing the outward appearances. You have to go beyond the appearance to start cultivating inner power. Eventually you may start seeing obvious results too. Just like someone can eventually learn to lift that 1000 lbs barbell but they may first only get a visible result with a 50 lbs barbell.

So if you don't see an effect it doesn't mean there isn't one.

It is an immutable mental law that all intent has an effect.

It's often hard to say exactly what kind of an effect because to say this you need to know the specifics of your own mentality, but you can be sure it has some effect, always.

My most recent discovery should have been obvious in retrospect. But unfortunately it wasn't 100% obvious. Even if I knew about it to some extent I didn't appreciate it properly. I'm not convinced I appreciate it properly even right now. It's hard for me to get this thought out in a very neatly structured manner, so there will be some meandering up ahead. I hope the idea will become crystal clear by the end.

I've been sometimes using speech as functional instead of as ornamental (and magick can be both ornamental and functional too, and hopefully I'll get to that).

So this distinction between functional and ornamental is hugely important in my recent contemplation.

Functional is that which I need to work. Functional is that which is more fundamental. Functional is a load-bearing part. In terms of a conventional building, the foundation and the central I-beams would be the most functional components. The floor separators would be somewhat functional. And things like paint would be ornamental. A building would be usable with any kind of paint. Whereas it wouldn't be usable without the floors, but the floors themselves wouldn't be usable without the I-beams, and the I-beams would not be usable without the foundation (can't stick them into raw unprocessed mud and hope they'll stay vertical).

So then obviously the most fundamental (and thus most functional) aspect would be the mind's threefold capacity to know, to will, and to experience. But that's too abstract on its own. That on its own tells me nothing about the specifics of what's manifesting. So if I want a reasonable manifestation I need more complexity than just that. So my commitment needs to be in a certain state, and since I must know what state that is, my knowledge is crucial as well. And then experience will follow, helplessly, for what choice does experience have?

So now let's go back to my meat and potato observations.

I've been noticing that I often use speech in a functional as opposed to ornamental manner (mostly when it concerns politics). Of course since I don't have a strong commitment to this specific emanation, my offense (with regard to my own judgement of myself) is a small one, but I still see (or am starting to see) how I have the wrong idea here.

So when I say something and I expect someone else to change their mind based on what they've heard, that's a functional usage of speech. In that sense I want my speech to carry some load. And if I do this all the time (as opposed to a one-off), then my speech becomes a load-bearing part of my manifestation. And yet I don't think speech is good as a load-bearing part. Using speech to bear heavy load is like building a foundation out of straw. It might work for a tiny building, but straw is not the best possible foundational material. We generally prefer concrete.

Ornamental speech is best exemplified by shooting breeze with friends. It can be low-brow or high-brow and anything in between, but the idea is that whether the two conversing people agree or not, they are relaxed, they don't expect anything much from each other. Their only expectation is to have fun. Of course they do expect expressiveness to emerge in the form of a stimulating or relaxing conversation, but they don't lean their expectations toward a specific follow-on on top of that expressiveness as a result of that expressiveness. So you express things just to be expressive, and that's what ornamental expression is.

Another way to conceive of functional vs ornamental continuum is in terms of the "size" of the adjustment. And by "size" I don't mean it literally, but I mean how subtle or unsubtle the adjustment is relative the big picture.

So for example, relative the physicalist picture of the universe, physical laws, the Earth and humanity, me going for a walk and coming back is a small adjustment. So it would be ornamental. On the other hand, if we were to move a mountain, or relocate an entire city of New York to another continent, all at once, instantly, that would not be subtle. That would be functional.

And yet another way to consider functional vs ornamental is to consider the expected frequency of occurrence. So if something happens rarely, it's functional. If something happens all the time, it's ornamental.

I'm using binary language here because it's easier to type, but it should be clear that this isn't a binary distinction. I'm talking about a functional-ornamental continuum here, even if sometimes it might be useful to split that continuum into distinct regions.

And yet another way to picture this distinction is as between a context (like a platform) and some elements inside that context (like dancing on top of a platform). The context is functional and the elements inside the context are ornamental. So the platform is functional and the dancing on top of it is ornamental. From the POV of a theatrical production I would absolutely want the platform to hold steady. I need platform to "just work." So it's functional. Whereas I don't have that feeling to the same strength with regard to any specifics of dance. At most the dance specifics remain quasi-constant for the duration of a single production. They're going to be different for a new production. But the role of the platform is necessary and steady for any number of productions.

So magick of a functional type will be setting up the platform for future use. This is big magick. This is the kind of magick that re-aligns the fundamentals of manifestation. But specifically because this is big magick, it can't be aimed at something specific. This is foundational magick. It's platform magick. When one is building a platform one need not worry about the specific dances that might or might not occur later on top of that platform.

And magick of an ornamental type is magick done for the pure enjoyment in the here and now. A perfect example of that is flying in a lucid dream. It's just fun right then and there. And the state of lucid dreaming is the magickal platform for flying (and many other experiences).

So if I want my whole waking experience to become comparable to lucid dreaming, I have to do some massive and major realignment of many of my basic assumptions, habits, values, expectations, and so on. This is a separate task from wanting to achieve this specific result or that specific result. If I focus on the platform, I shouldn't overly worry about the ornamental specifics. Ornamental specifics become important once the platform is reliable. And that's another key: once the magickal platform is properly setup, all further ornamental magick should be easy to do. Just like it's easy to fly in a lucid dream.

I am consciously oversimplifying to some extent and I am flattening out some nuances here. In reality maybe flying takes a bit of effort, but it's not a tremendous effort once one is thoroughly lucid. But the effort in (a) attaining lucid state is vastly different from the effort involved in (b) flying. (a) is the platform, functional magick. (b) is ornament. Again, I am simplifying somewhat.

So basically moving from a low-magick to a high-magick realm is the functional magick. Before that's done, every tiny bit of magick is going to feel like pulling teeth, by necessity. And I've been catching myself doing just that: lots of pulling teeth. I'm trying to perform magick on a platform that's expressly designed by none other than myself to thwart magick. That's clumsy.

And yet, maybe this kind of unreasonable trying is precisely one of the ways to move the platform to a different level. So puttering around the edges with this specific spell and that one is not necessarily a waste of time, but it might be inefficient if one's commitment platform is still 85% physicalism (like mine).

That's what I've been thinking about.

I also came up with a functional magick approach. I might call it "draining the world of its solidity." The idea is to visualize draining importance, weight, and meanings out of the all appearances that might appear grossly and subtly as "this world." It's a bit like consuming the world. It's like splattering the world-appearance with the digestive juices of imagination and vacuuming up the resultant goo. It's recalling one's own prior grant of weight and validity back unto oneself. That's platform magick for softening the platform. So I am contemplating whether or not I want to be doing more of that. I've been doing some of it already, but I've also been doing lots of tooth pulling too by trying to elicit an effect that's actually very difficult for me to elicit right now because of how discordant it is to all my prior background mentality.

An Argument for Epistemological Skepticism

The most straightforward and common definition of knowledge offered by convention is that knowledge is justified, true belief.

First, knowledge cannot be true or false when there is no objective world to which your subjective beliefs might correspond. If you believe the sky is blue, you are not right or wrong, because there is no actual sky that is either blue or not-blue. There are only your experiences, memories, expectations, and structuring beliefs.

Second, knowledge cannot be ultimately justified. For a belief to be justified, it must be justified by other beliefs. So, the justifying beliefs for (C) “Socrates was mortal” are: (P1) “Socrates was a human” and (P2) “All humans are mortal”. But this justification is only contextual, presently. It assumes that P1 and P2 are already accepted as true. But, for C to be ultimately justified, we need to justify P1 and P2 as well.

Further, whatever beliefs justify P1 and P2 themselves would need to be justified in order to ultimately justify C, ad infinitum. If knowledge requires an infinite chain of justification, then there are no beliefs that have ever been ultimately justified.

Thus, knowledge, as conventionally understood, is impossible.

Maintaining rationality in context of illusion

Instead of being ultimate, it's obvious that justification is only and ever contextual. It's a way of demonstrating what beliefs make sense in context of certain assumed beliefs. It's important to note that you are free to believe things that conflict with your other beliefs. Contemplating your own belief-system and refining it is not mandatory. Rationality is a choice. The less self-critical you are, the more conflict will exist between your beliefs (and the less stable of a realm you will be able to manifest). The more self-critical you are, the more coherent your beliefs will be (and the more stable your manifested realm will be).

Coherency is the standard of rationality, not truth or ultimate justification. Completely opposing worldviews can both be 100% internally coherent and therefore 100% rational. This is because your primary beliefs are not, and cannot, themselves be justified by other beliefs.

Infinite opposing beliefs, which are themselves unjustifiable, stand before you in the realm of potentiality. You may assume any belief, and, as long as you assume it, you will start to structure your mind according to that belief. If you maintain that belief for an extended time, then your memories, experiences, and expectations will shift until your reality completely coheres with that belief. This is the nature of illusion.

Rationality is possible, even when your beliefs are only rooted in potentiality (that is, are hypothetical and illusory).

Manifestation: Contemplating the hypothetical

I want to explore the nature of this assumption of belief. When we assume a belief, we are adopting a possible way of structuring the mind. Our belief doesn't become categorically true when we believe it (because nothing is categorically true), rather it is a hypothetical model we are focusing on and emphasizing. We may be accustomed to focusing on one particular hypothetical model of reality and possible way of structuring the mind. This accustomation, or habit, is what makes it seem effortful or difficult to focus on a new belief system - to magically change the nature of reality. We're fixated on one particular hypothesis – one particular state of mind.

Generally, when we contemplate abstract ideas, we do so with a level of non-commitment. So, I might contemplate what it would be like to believe in the Christian god, or what it would be like to believe in fairies, but I usually maintain a certain sort of personal distance from that contemplation. However, what happens when we contemplate with a level of commitment?

I could select one abstract belief and focus on what it is like to believe it – say, Christianity. As time moves on, I would become skilled and accustomed to focusing on this new belief. This would give me the opportunity to explore the realm of possible beliefs within this primary belief. So, then I could contemplate what it would be like to believe in an immanent rapture v. believing Christ won't return for thousands of years. I could further commit to contemplating one of these beliefs and gradually get more and more specific and concrete. Eventually, I could reach a point where I was contemplating what it would be like to experience a world as a Christian believing in an immanent rapture, who wants to start a Christian family, who has a male body and lives in America...etc. At that point, I could be vividly imagining the life of such a being from their POV and having concrete experiences of their life. The focus of my contemplation could become how to succeed in living that kind of life. Questions like “how do I get a good career?” or “how do I impress pretty Christian girls?” might be what I spend most of my time thinking about.

In such a state of focus, I might forget that all of my most abstract beliefs about that imaginary world are hypothetical. The more I focus on the details of living that life, the less I will focus on the hypothetical nature of that life. As I become emotionally invested in my imaginary world, I might begin to fear losing my hypothetical job or upsetting my hypothetical wife or the death of my hypothetical body.

This state of focus on the concrete details of a hypothetical life is exactly the situation you are in now. This is the hypothetical nature of the world. This is synonymous with the idea that everything is a dream. Becoming lucid in the waking dream is the same as becoming aware of the hypothetical beliefs you've assumed and becoming aware of your fundamental nature as a being that contemplates hypothetical realities, and learning to use that knowledge.

Reality is a contemplation of the hypothetical.

You have infinite power. Right in this moment, that's a fact. You only believe you have a relatively limited amount of power, and therefore rarely, or never, wholeheartedly exert most of the power that you have. Some of these currently inaccessible powers are more readily grasped than others, and some are of more practical use than others. One which is both fairly accessible and extraordinarily practical is your power to influence your preferences.

You are often under the impression that your preferences are very external to you. Sit on that for a while and really contemplate how -odd- it is that you generally think of your preferences as things which are not directly under your control. We should be grateful that we live in a society with a sense of an "inner world of thought and feeling" at all, because it means that the features of this inner world are far more readily pliable than the outer world. Just so, we don't always, 100% of the time feel that our preferences are very external to us in the same way that we do 100% always feel that a tree is external to us.

Sometimes we can "learn to like" something. It can "grow on us". Woah! Hey, what kind of thing is that? If it seems 100% impossible to learn to turn a tree purple, why does it not seem 100% impossible to begin to like, say, listening to a music album which you hated the first time you heard it? Remember, you have infinite power. That's over the conventional "outer" world and "inner" world alike. But one of those seems much more pliable than the other. Our ability to influence our inner world at will is not something most of us are entirely unfamiliar with. But how often, if ever, do we try to push this further?

Importantly, I'm not talking about intellectualizing, metaphysics, conceptualization, rationality, reasoning, or any of those faculties. I'm not talking about our capacity to -know- right now, I'm talking about our capacities of -experience- and -will-. I'm talking about influencing internal experiences. I'm talking about deciding that you like something that you instinctively dislike, deciding that you will be happy instead of being sad, deciding that you won't feel pain as suffering, etc. I'm talking about pushing the boundaries of what -you- can decide about your internal world.

1. Contemplate for a while on the malleability of the internal world. Consider things about your feelings (perceptual, emotional, and more subtle types) which have changed either by your effort or incidentally. Consider how you've stopped liking things you used to like and started liking things you didn't used to like. Think about times you were in a shitty mood and it got much better, or vice-versa. Think about, in particular, times when you feel like you were genuinely, actively, consciously willing the change.

2. Analyze yourself. What are you feeling right now? How do you feel about the things that have happened yesterday, today, and tomorrow? How do you feel about your body's position right now? How comfortable are you? Are you enjoying this lifetime? Are you happy to be experiencing yourself as a human on this planet for now? How -are- you?

3. The ones that come up the most negative or undesirable, remind yourself of your ability to change your "internal" world. Remind yourself of the things you contemplated in the first step.

4. Exercise your will. This is a part when you might come up against some pesky hurdles: namely Doubt, equipped with thoughts like, "You can't just change whatever you want," and, "This is bullshit, you don't REALLY feel that way," and, "You just don't have the power to do something like that yet," and, "If you can just change shit whenever you want, won't you go insane? You're not ready for that!" and, "This whole thing is bullshit. You understand this intellectually but you don't feel it." You'll have to stand up against those obstacles yourself and you'll have to handle them. They're subtle and slippery, but you can call them out.

I advise you to do this and to do this regularly. Happiness is underrated in spirituality, IMO. Happiness fuels courage and courage is necessary in this practice. Believe me, a happy and courageous and excited and energized heart will be a backbone to everything you do. -Feeling- that way will be the shoulders on which all of your intellectualizing, your metaphysics, your contemplation, and your meditation will stand. And as long as you remain dissuaded, dissatisfied, and disliking existing in the world you do, wisdom will be forever just out of your reach, like a massive tower built on quicksand that will keep tugging it downward. (There's an argument to be made -for- disliking the current world, but doing so tactically and intentionally, not falling into it miserably and inadvertently).

Happiness, energy, focus, motivation, and fearlessness don't just fall in your lap. If you think they're going to, go outside and wait for the trees to turn purple. If you want to change the type of experience you're having, you have to use your will. And utilizing your will on things-called-"internal" is, frankly, -easy- compared to utilizing it on called-"external". There's a reason, IMO, why of all the people who've been called "enlightened" seemed to be extremely at peace while only a few of them seemed to have "supernatural" powers. Before you go trying to break the fourth wall and go full-lucid on the waking world, try intending your feelings. It'll strengthen your entire practice.

P.S. As a protip, I've found that anything for which we'd conventionally use the word "taste" is easy to experiment with. "Taste in music", "taste in art", sensory taste of food, etc. Eat something that you don't enjoy and see if you can't find out that it's utterly delicious. :)

I had a passing thought that, abruptly, turned into something of an insight.

I was thinking about two videogames that I've been playing lately, and I considered which of the two I'd like to play. One of the two games is a multiplayer game, and the other is a singleplayer game. As I sat and considered which of the two I wanted to play, I noticed myself doing something that I've been doing for years:

I tend to consider multiplayer videogames, to some degree, "more valid" than singleplayer games. If deciding which videogame to play, I'm often inclined to give more weight to the notion of playing a multiplayer game -- but for no very specific reason. The universe in which a multiplayer game takes place seems to possess some degree of validation by virtue of it being a shared, social space. There's a subtle sense in which the time I spend playing a singleplayer game feels "wasted" by its ultimate irrelevancy to the world outside of it. But time spent playing a multiplayer game suffers no such sense of invalidity. My actions and the time spent on them can be seen by other people and therefore possesses a level of realness that is absent in the single-player game.

As I came to understand that, the word realness resonated with me. The truth is that there isn't a super rational, logcial reason to feel that my time is better spent playing one game than the other just because it's multiplayer. But that is absolutely not how I feel! Multiplayer games provide a feeling of credibility and legitimacy to the experience of playing them. Not merely because the existence of Others means that the world is unpredictable and surprising but because of something far more subtle. There's a hard-to-put-into-words sense of sharedness, in that even though I'm not always directly interacting with other people, I could be, and that no matter how far I push the world around me, it will continue to exist for me and for others.

If I know everything that exists is finite, ultimately, and constrained to a certain program, beyond which the game doesn't continue to exist, the game can be a great experience, but it can never be a world unto itself. For a game to feel like a valid world in-and-of itself, it has to feel close to infinite. It can't feel contained. It must accommodate any reasonable scrutiny. And for communicating beings like ourselves, the scrutiny of being able to interact with the world through language and receive responses reflective of vivid personalities is vital. It validates, to some degree, a game world.

The conventional, waking world is just like an extraordinarily advanced video game world. It can withstand ridiculous, nearly-infinite amount of scrutiny. You can use tools to look at smaller and smaller, or farther and farther objects and the universe will persist to appear coherently (this theoretically has a limit, like videogames do, but much, much greater). You can interact with a massive variety of complex personalities through an extraordinarily intricate amount of communication. It's the ultimate, infinitely-HD, fully-virtual sandbox world. And we like it that way and we're very, very comfortable with it that way.

Following this path will eventually take you to a place, if it hasn't already, where a sense of the existence of Others will evaporate, or at least become distinctly agnostic. Following this path will eventually take you to a place where you begin stressing the limits of the conventional world and, with intense-enough scrutiny, begin to notice that the world has taken on a hue of illegitimacy or invalidity. When you encounter these experiences, and others like them, they can appear as obstacles. They can potentially appear as obstacles larger and more daunting than any conventional obstacle could. Your mind has latent preferences about how it likes its reality to be. You'll naturally push yourself away from important insights because of the fear you have, even (especially!) at a subconscious level, for the implications. Your mind won't go where it isn't conditioned to want to be. It's like a wild horse. It's like a backwards magnet. It'll just keep pushing away. It'll push away with all of its force and the experience for you will be one of fear.

I don't necessarily have an alternative for you. I have no, "When faced with your deeply-rooted desire for a social, shared world and a world which can be highly scrutinized, here's what you should consider instead:". Short of renunciation, the traditional and obvious solution (to which I assume the reader is not open, but which I advocate to anyone who is) I don't have a good method for overcoming these tendencies and rebuilding latent desires, nor for overcoming metaphysical lightning bolts of fear. But I do think it's very important to acknowledge their existence and influence, because they can pass us by entirely undetected.

For the purpose of this article I'll define two types of relaxation:

1. Physicalistic relaxation.
2. Unconventional relaxation.

Physicalistic relaxation is what happens when ordinary beings relax. Ordinary beings have entrenched habitual ideas about themselves, the world, what is real and what isn't, the relation of themselves to the world and so on. They think the mind comes from the brain. They think the body is who they are. They think the body lives in a material universe. Their minds are full of these ideas and these are not just ideas, but they are a way of life, they are ingrained mental habits which occur effortlessly and tacitly. Therefore, when ordinary beings relax, the state of relaxation merely brings them to that which is habitual: to that whole host of relatively bad metaphysical assumptions about one's body, one's own mind, the world, and the relation between the three. This is what I call physicalistic relaxation. From a subjective idealist POV phyiscalistic relaxation can be called a deluded or a constrained relaxation. This is the kind of relaxation that all the people get on the couch while watching football, while playing the piano or guitar, while reclining in the garden and so on... This is why relaxation of the ordinary beings doesn't make them enlightened but simply refreshes and maintains ignorance.

Now then, there is another kind of relaxation. It is the relaxation of a peer. The peer has thoroughly and repeatedly reviewed and mentally relaxed all the constraining ideas about one's body, the mind, the world. In some cases the peer may have abandoned some such ideas altogether. For example, the peer does not think the mind comes from the brain or from anything else. Does not think the world is inside, outside, temporary, eternal, non-existent, existent, made of substance, etc. Does not think that the human body is inside the world or the world is inside the human body or that the human body and the world are identical. Does not think of oneself as identical to the body or different from it. Subjective idealism provides a reliable theoretical foundation for this radical change in mentality. The peer doesn't rest in some anti-intellectual vacuum, far from it, but instead intellectually understands why and how the constraining conceptions of physicalism can be discarded on the basis of reason. And it's not merely thinking in these ways that's been abandoned, but also all attendant habits and intuitions have been relaxed and in some cases abandoned as well. Now, when this type of being relaxes, something extraordinary happens. The universe of appearances resolves into mystery and there is nothing but clear light of wisdom, omniscience, the universal womb. This is what I call the unconventional relaxation. This sort of relaxation is liberative. It's not ordinary. It confers not only insight but all kinds of superknowledges and special abilities to the person and it is not for the feint of heart because after all, the universe becomes undone, never mind your personal being as you would typically conceive of it, or your family, or all the rest.

A lot of people may not suspect the profound depth and seriousness of the implications that subjective idealism opens up. Most people live as human beings who embrace either completely or nearly completely the conventional standards of thought, belief, behavior, expectations both private and social. There is nothing inherently or objectively wrong with that. It is what it is. Some beings love the idea of seeing their destiny play out completely in the familiar human realm that they know and love. This is a serious commitment on the part of the proverbial "average" person. Of course strictly speaking there is no such thing as "average" but the phrase still has some meaning that I think most of us can appreciate. Buddhist Pali Suttas often mention "an untrained, run of the mill person" with the same intent. I am talking about people who want to have a stable, settled, comfortable life as a human being surrounded by the company of human beings, in an atmosphere of familiar stability, neutrality, and at least nominal decorum.

Usually this kind of average person will hold a materialistic frame of mind. This means such a person typically believes that the world is a neutral objective ground, an actual place to which people can belong and which people can abandon. They believe such a place is governed by unbending and eternal laws of physics which are completely decoupled from anyone's mind. They believe the brain is at minimum the location of the mind, and possibly even mind's generator, as it were.

From a psychological perspective sanity is a very important quality for such a person. Sanity is essential to be functional in the world of convention and to be well liked and accepted by typical human beings who themselves prize sanity. A normal human being exists in a state of complete and utter reliance and dependence on the broader humanity and can neither function nor see oneself outside of such a context. To such a person insanity of any kind would be a disaster that threatens everything they hold dear in life and fitting in is essential to not just survival, but even to basic day to day well-being.

Well, subjective idealism when taken seriously at minimum threatens and maximally completely dismantles everything I just mentioned.

Firstly, the whole enterprise when taken up in earnest is profoundly anti-materialistic. The absence of materialistic assumptions leads to the absence of a reliance on some neutral standard of judgement as would be implied by an objective domain of any kind. This absence of a neutral standard and the weakening of conventional reliances leads people to embrace their wilder, less civilized, less inhibited side. This implies almost necessarily that decorum is not nearly as important to such people as it is to most human beings. But personal integrity and honest expression become drastically more important. This means at the minimum you may run into some conversations which seem rude or offensive to you even if a weird way participant whom you perceive as rude actually has no intention whatsoever to hurt or harm you, but is simply struggling to maintain personal integrity at all costs.

When we look deeper into this we realize that sanity in general is now more like an obstacle that must be overcome than a reliance. Knowledgeable people here understand that while the possibility exists to come out of this endeavor unscathed, the completely open and completely unconventional frame of mind that's maintained during waking can easily, trivially lead to some non-standard behaviors which can have serious implications on one's status in convention, with all that's implied by this.

So if you accept that this is an interesting place, please understand that if you take the ideas expressed here as seriously as some of us do, you may endanger your conventional standing, health, and sanity, and at minimum you may expose yourself to discussions which seem off-putting.

By all means all interested parties are welcome to stay. However, this is an environment for adults and not for babies. You'll need a skin slightly thicker than usual and you'll need at least a nominal tolerance for insanity to really enjoy this subreddit. But ideally you will see sanity as an undesirable tumor that must be excised in the course of time.

People here do not concern themselves with what's acceptable, what's normal, what's sane, what's polite, and the like. If you understand the risks and if you understand what you may potentially be getting yourself into, please grab a bowl of popcorn, grab a drink, pull up a chair, and seriously enjoy your stay.

We've all heard of anatomy. Anatomy is body's structure. However, it's rare to talk about personal subjective anatomy. Subjectively we aren't our bodies. So then, what are we? What can we say about ourselves that is even remotely true? I will try to be as practical and as down to earth in my exposition as possible. Polemics do not interest me. What interests me is my own understanding and experience of what it's like to be me, and I imagine, you who read this are interested in what it's like for you to be you.

It's hard to say what I am and it's easier to say what I am not. So I want to begin with what I know I definitely am not. I know I am not anything that's optional, since I outlast all options. So for example, I know I am not a human body with its left arm up, because the left arm can be down and this doesn't remove the fact of personal experience. I know I am not a human body, because in dreams I've experienced myself with different bodies, sometimes even non-human ones, and still there I am able to exercise my will, able to know and able to experience. So all the things that appear to come and go, including the human body, and including the earthly world of convention which departs from the mind during every dream, I am not those things.

However, in all this there is a kind of constancy. There is a constancy of capacity. When my experience changes, my capacity for having an experience remains the same. So if during a spiritual vision I appear to have no solid body, my capacity to be able to experience myself as though I were inhabiting a solid body remains intact. When I close my eyelids, the view of the surrounding environment goes away, but my capacity to view the surrounding environment remains unchanged. So now a capacity appears to be a good candidate for what I really am. From experience and from analytical deduction, both, this capacity appears primordial. Even if I don't remember something, my capacity to have memory remains undiminished.

When I relax, my capacity for exertion doesn't drop off. When I tense up, my capacity for relaxation is not destroyed. This is true for any and all levels of relaxation and exertion.

Even if I can't currently exercise some area of a capacity, it doesn't mean I can't exercise it even in principle. For example, right now it's difficult for me to visualize an entire room with all its detailed contents, colors, textures and so on. But that and arbitrarily bigger and arbitrarily brighter visualizations are within my primordial capacity even if I do not yet have ready access to such. What we have ready access to can change, but it has no influence on the ultimate potential which doesn't oscillate.

I can contemplate my internal state and I can look out onto the surrounding environment. That means I am not located internally or externally, since both viewing directions are optional to me. So that means I am not inside anything. Nor am I outside anything. If I were inside something called "myself", I'd be surrounded by myself on all sides and be unable to examine the environment. Likewise, if I were inside something called "other," I'd be surrounded by the environment on all sides and be unable to examine that which we conventionally call "my own internal state."

Let's examine what happens when we might say "I feel cold." What happens? Who is cold? What is cold? It's not obvious at all and should be examined thoroughly. Right away I know the flesh of the body doesn't get cold, because no matter how cold the flesh gets on a body in the morgue, it doesn't suffer. Similarly, if I were to cut my arm off and freeze it, I wouldn't feel cold. So it can't be the body's flesh that gets cold when we say "I feel cold." So what else could it be? Does my mind get cold? Remember, the mind is a capacity. It's a capacity to know, to experience and to will. Can a capacity get cold? That makes absolutely no sense at all, at least not in any ultimate sense, because ultimate capacity is always the same without any oscillation through time. OK, then what else could be cold? Not body. Not mind.

What else can get cold? I have an expectation of warmth. When that expectation becomes frustrated I report "I feel cold." So literally what gets cold is neither body nor mind, but my expectation and perhaps craving for warmth. But we don't usually say "my expectation and craving for warmth just got cold," do we? To me that's very, very interesting and useful to know.

We can say similar things about feeling hot, feeling pain, feeling itchy, and so on. Like what's itchy? Next time you might itch, try to remind yourself that neither your mind nor body can itch, and then see if you can meditate on that.

I've already mentioned capacity, and capacity has ultimate extent and ready extent. Your ready capacity is what you can do/be/experience either immediately or with very little training. And your ultimate capacity is what you can do/be/experience at all, in principle.

As I said the body is not what I am from the POV of ultimate capacity. However, from the POV of ready capacity, even though I am still not a specific human body, I am something related to it. So during every dream the conventional human body disappears and is replaced by a dream body, which for me on some occasions hasn't even been a human-looking or human-feeling one. And yet, I keep returning to something resembling the human body all the time. Not only do I return to a human body upon waking from a dream, but even in dreams there is a noticeable propensity for me to dream as though living through a human or human-like body. The specific visions of the body change often, roughly once a night at minimum, but the general character of me almost constantly centering myself on a vision of a human body remains the same in the near term. So what is that?

I've experienced myself dropping out of the human body while awake, and every time I felt fear and a desire to quickly recenter myself back in the familiar body experience. What is this? That's craving, (desired) expectation, habit. I'll just use expectation as the term. Strictly speaking we can analyze expectation the way we've analyzed getting cold. Who or what expects? We know the flesh doesn't expect anything. We know the ultimate capacity of mind doesn't expect anything either. So in an ultimate sense I am not my cravings or expectations, and yet I am dominated and affected by them so long as I don't take any measures to rid myself or free myself of them. But because I do have an option of ridding myself of any expectation, ultimately I can't be any specific expectation or any set of expectations. And yet, in practical terms, because I do commit myself to certain expectations, I become those expectations for the duration of commitment.

So although I know I am not a human body, from the POV of ready potential I must be an expectation for a human body. This is important. That means even at the relative level I can't say I am a human body. I am only an expectation of a human body, and this is something very subtle and very mental by nature, and hard to become aware of. The obvious thing to be aware of is the form of human body or the environment. But expectations aren't obvious nor is the understanding of oneself as a capacity, be it ultimate or ready.

There is something I realized relatively recently. It happened after I joined /r/occult, which is a subreddit dedicated to practicing magick, among other topics. I've always been keen on the idea of magick, but I never really did much of anything with it for the most part. I just thought it was a cool idea, and I thought it's definitely possible and it fits into my worldview. For a long time I didn't go anywhere with it beyond that.

There was this really stunning thing that happened when I first attempted to manipulate my waking phenomenal reality. This really blew my mind. It was a realization of how much I don't allow my intent to flow in that sort of direction! In other words, just one act of trying to tinker with something in my world highlighted how seriously I was relating to all the phenomena. I was such a bore! That one act of meddling highlighted the massive energy of non-meddling that completely dominated my inner life. I was faced with a thought that I had an option. I could have been relating to everything a lot more playfully and a lot less seriously, and I wasn't doing it at all.

Around the same time, a little bit before, I also read a stunning post on /r/psychonaut by someone who seems not to post anything there. It was like this person just showed up, made this one post, and disappeared into the ether. But I never forgot it. The post was about playfully fooling around with the perceptions we experience in day to day life. At first I thought the post can't be serious. Everything the post was talking about seemed so superficial, and also, so easy to do. And at the time I didn't instantly understand the point of it. I knew it was important somehow and so I remembered the general idea. But then I started to appreciate how it's this very playfulness that was important, and how it was actually a very good thing that the entry into playfulness was so easy and simple. The importance of all this dawned on me vividly when I tried to do some magick for the first time, after hanging out on /r/occult. It was when I realized I was such a fuddy duddy bore.

Imagine as you walk around, you touch trees with your imaginary hands. Imagine how you slightly change the tint of the colors of everything you see. Imagine a big giant bowl of colored popcorn spilling all over the street. Imagine yourself growing a bit taller, and then a bit shorter. Imagine smelling incense as you walk. Imagine hearing a rhythmical drum beat or a chant.

I realized I could enrich, bend, warp, and generally mess around with my experience at all times. I also realized it's actually a very good thing to do repeatedly and often, to cultivate it as a kind of playful attitude toward one's own experience. It's a way to take the things one experiences during waking less seriously.

So as I walk around, I can sometimes see a giant eye looking at me from the center of the Earth. Or I may see infinitely long thick beams of light piercing everything and rotating. I'd imagine a swirling stream of As, like the letter "A", lots of them, swirling around like bees, flying around, filling up my body, circling around, then flying out into the world and swarming there. I can imagine my feet stomping the ground like drum beats even though I don't stomp and just walk normally.

It's like suddenly my imagination is alive and active, and it's present to my mind and is mixing with the "non-imaginary" scenery of the waking experience. It's very interesting how it feels.

It's possible to play with one's experience in so many ways. One could try to stretch and compress time. It's not necessary to do anything huge. In the beginning the tiniest alterations are enough. The whole point is to drop the serious attitude. The waking experience is just a plaything, and we can play with it.

While I was contemplating today I was struck by a curious and funny thought which I want to share.

By convention the idea behind consensus reality is that we can't take a position on anything without first conferring with the others. Since the world presumably exists externally to ourselves, we have to get other people's input to then try to suss out what the world is like, because ours is only one angle.

However, I don't run up to the pedestrians asking, "Hey did you see that car over there driving on the street? Or am I the only one?" "And do you see a tree there and a building there? Or am I the only one?" "Do you see the clouds there? Or am I the only one?" In fact, I am pretty sure were I to begin behaving in this way, I'd be soon deemed insane.

Funny, isn't it? It's like the consensus reality is a thin veneer on top of profound and tacit solipsism. The world doesn't want us to confirm anything fundamental. We're only to argue over trivial bullshit, but anything that's actually important must be assumed and never confirmed with the others. So much for "consensus reality."

The more I think about it the more obvious it becomes to me that everything in this life is bullshit, basically. It's all some really good wool, nothing more. It appears believable only if you never probe it with questions.

Subconscious mind is a region of our own mind that's been so-to-speak "othered." We "other" it because we don't want to do boring and uninspired tasks like growing our hair and nails. Which is to say, even inside what we customarily consider "our own" being, there is all sorts of automatism. This automatism implies that the mind that's performing alterations, such as adjustments to hair length, to skin texture, and so forth, is not entirely under our control, and mostly we like it that way and indeed, demand it.

So this has at least two implications. On the one hand, boring and stupid stuff gets done automatically in the background. But, and this is a big but, precisely because auto- means "on its own" and it implies othering, it can all go haywire. Our little bot-mind can become HAL-9000. Unlike HAL-9000 our subconscious mind is not literally a machine. I'm using "machine" here as a clumsy and inaccurate metaphor. How would you like a disease or a strange growth you didn't exactly ask for? It can happen precisely because we offload this sort of thing from our conscious awareness, and so we give an (deliberately and gleefully) ignored region of our mind the ability to make some degree of independent choices, and those choices are not always good ones.

We don't like the world to stand still, waiting, while we make a decision where to place each particle of it. This is why the subconscious mind is a form of autopilot.

The good news is, it's not a completely independent mind. Like a computer, it does accept input from its boss - you. Also, if you like, you can completely eliminate the subconscious region of the mind, but warning, if you do that, time as you know it will stop, because everything will become suspended in relation to your own mentation (mental activity, mental life). Your mentation is the only thing that will move, and nothing else, and so, if your mentation doesn't move, nothing at all moves. Which is a very scary state to be in, and you may not enjoy it.

We are lazy fools. We like easy entertainment. We ignore the saying "if you want something done right, do it yourself." We love outsourcing because we're trying to maximize profits and minimize personal responsibility. If you find your world running away from you, it's because you've been too obsessed with having fun while hoping the world will automatically do the right thing. But precisely because you don't attend to that which is automatic, it doesn't have to do the right thing forever. It can begin doing a thing on its own, a thing which you no longer like. If this happens, you have to smack its arse and remind it who is the boss. Remind your subconscious mind whose mind it's carved from. Remind your subconscious mind who is the witness of all its antics. What is a producer without audience? If necessary, annihilate and crush your subconscious mind, until it utterly submits to being either eliminated or reprogrammed. However, just reminding it that you may do so, with the full knowledge and intent, will often be sufficient to scare the bejesus out of it, and gain its compliance. This is why Jesus said, if your eye sins, tear it the fuck out. Meaning, don't spare it just because it's yours. Whack everything that stands in your way, even if it's you, or claims to be you. Then you'll be boss.

And then you can be lazy again, because your subconscious mind will show you exactly what you like seeing. You'll have fun and relax. And the cycle will repeat. But it's OK, because who has limitless time? You do. So you'll just whack your subconscious mind again when the time is right. No biggie.

There have been a couple people who've expressed to me an idea that, roughly, "it's all the same, all the wisdom traditions point to the same thing, blah blah." This is a PSA that while the weird way may share some or even a lot of commonality with some or many spiritual traditions, it is not in fact exactly the same. Please don't hamstring the weird way by overly identifying it with Buddhism or Hinduism or Thelema or Gnostic Christianity or what have you.

So what makes the weird way different from most traditions?

I would put it as follows:

1. The weird way is not a creed, but an area of study. You don't follow it. The weird way isn't a path to follow. It's an area of study. You study it. Of course studying it has some implication to life. So in a sense you may also be following some path, but everyone follows their own path.

It's like everyone is using mathematics at the cash register, but they're not all buying the same things. The weird way is like mathematics. You can study it and when you study it, you'll of course be more likely to read and enact your experience in weird ways, but what exactly that ends up meaning will not be exactly and precisely identical for everyone. Some people want to swallow the blue bill.

The blue pill is expressed in Buddhism as "chop wood, carry water." It means post-enlightenment you have the same shit life as before, but now you can be proud and happy about it, like a moron. The modern version of this would be "Q: What's after enlightenment? A: Wage slavery!" Hahahaha.

Others want a radical change. And everything in between. It's like some people go lucid in a dream only to follow the dream without changing anything. To me it's a waste of lucidity, but if they're enjoying it, they can still be lucid while allowing deep habits to roll onward as status quo.

So unlike with religion, where everyone pretends to strive toward the same exact teleology, I like to think we don't do that. We do not all head toward the formless realm or nirvana or heaven or the jade palace or parallel Earth #529304. However, what I think we should have in common is that we're aware of our personal teleology. We dream with awareness, with purpose, with courage or even fearlessness, not mindlessly like zombies. There is no prescribed or thought-to-be-ideal routine and no conventional and weird-approved lifestyle. That's quite different from most religions where you have to show up certain days and do certain things, and where they do make rather specific demands on your lifestyle, such as do this, and don't do this, etc. We don't do that. So here there are no 10 commandments and no 5 precepts like in Buddhism, not formally anyhow, etc.

So again, it's like in mathematics. You learn how the numbers relate, but what should you calculate? How many calculations per day should you do? Should you start your mornings with 5 minutes of 1+1=2? Right? It's nonsense. Mathematicians understand the abstract nature of their discipline, and so do we.

And abstract doesn't mean "unreal" btw, to any crypto-physicalists who might by chance be reading this. Abstract is the only reality, whereas all that's concrete is illusory. In fact partial and incomplete abstractions are still somewhat concretized and are somewhat illusory. Only the ultimate abstraction is actually real and not any lesser ones.

This brings me to my second point.

2. The weird way is based on an unapologetic and thoroughgoing subjective idealism. Subjective means personal perspective is fundamental to everything we study and do. In this we're different from just about 99% of all the world's traditions who attempt to prescribe a standard and thought to be "correct" set of the experiences you "ought" to have.

We're even in some cases different from Buddhism, which is supposed to be subjective but isn't always sure that it is, so most Buddhists are quite confused about it, and the Buddha was never explicit about it that I know of. I can't remember a Pali Canon Sutta where Buddha expounds the thoroughly subjective nature of experience and knowledge and action, and I've read a lot of them in translation. The Buddha was effectively talking about subjectivity and perspectivalism, but never directly and by name as we do it here. And he created a dogmatic and religious structure, with good intentions, no doubt, but it all went south as you can see if you look at Western Zen where most so-called "masters" are physicalists, which in Buddhist lingo means they're Ucchedavadins, which means they're actually anti-Buddhist, since Buddhism doctrinally flatly rejects Ucchedavada. But I digress.

So religion is basically a flawed way to try to force people to do the right thing, and it doesn't work. Even when the best person and a genius such as Buddha starts a religion, invariably it turns to absolute shit. Hell, even Buddha knew that in advance! That's why the Buddha has predicted the eventual downfall of his dispensation, lol. No shit. So over here we don't even bother trying that. It's not worth it. Dogmas stultify the mind, and to study the weird way you need a brutally sincere mind and an agile mind, which are qualities dogmas destroy.

So we're unapologetically subjective in our mind-is-all approach. Our mind-is-all approach is not just of epistemological variety, which is weak. It's both epistemological and ontological. It's a very strong, assertive, and frankly, dangerous approach. It's dangerous because it's capable of producing great changes quickly. It's like you're being handed live katanas here, and if you don't watch it, there go your ears and nose, oops. Watch where you swing that thing! This thing is a real live weapon folks. It's not just effective. It's fucking effective. It's that effective. You can dissolve your human body into a rainbow or land in a psychiatric ward, or both at the same time. And that's how it should be. If it wasn't like this, it would be weak sauce.

So, as it happens, once you realize all is fundamentally epistemologically and ontologically mind, and here I mean mind as a primordial tri-capacity to know, to experience, and to will, there is a lot you can do with it. It's like in mathematics. Once you realize what quantification is, there is so much diverse and different stuff you can do with a numerical approach. Some people use numbers to study the commonly observed visual shapes. Other people use quantification to study spaces that don't even exist conventionally and I do mean spaces and not any specific shapes that could occur in such spaces. Some people use math at the cash register. And for some people maths is a way to commune with the divine, and nothing less. So some have a very mundane and low-brow way to use math, and I personally do not respect such people. But as far as the weird way is concerned, we can't fault them because numbers are numbers, and if you're correctly using "all-is-mind" and "subjectivity is fundamental" approach at the cash register, you're some kind of a user of the weird way, perhaps a shitty one that I don't want to hang with personally, but still.

So please check your proclivity toward objectification at the door! We're not like that other tradition X, where some neutral common ground is acknowledged. Stop comparing us in a naive and blind way.

I like to imagine there is some room for intelligent comparisons that do justice to both sides of whatever is being compared. You can compare Gnostic Christianity to the weird way in a way that respects both, without reducing one to the other and without the pretense that all humans throughout history have pointed out the same truth and we're all going to sing kumbaya together, going to the same happy place together. Stop that dumb bullshit here please. You can do that bullshit somewhere else. Take it to your favorite religious or spirituality oriented sub and tell them how all traditions are the same, if they want to hear of it. But please don't bring it here. I like occasional intelligent comparisons but not bullshit "everything is the same" attitude of ignorance.

But Zen master X said ego is bad and needs to be dissolved. No. Fuck Zen master X. We don't give the slightest of fucks about what Zen master X said. Get it? We don't care. We study subjective idealism and the implications of that on cognition. Which is to say, we dream. We dream. We dream. We're not afraid to dream. We're not ashamed to dream. We're dreamers here.