I’ve grown particularly interested in developing the psychic senses (the “remote” senses) as a middle-term/long-term spiritual goal recently. Not in the sense of communicating with spirits directly or symbolically via those clair-senses, but in the sense of generally attaining experiences and knowledge from the illusory world in ways not seemingly tied to the illusory physicalist/body-centric mentality.
Now, you might say ‘why would you want to develop this if ultimately there is no world out there and it’s all an illusion?’ Well, even if it’s an illusion, you’re somewhat going to be playing as if it is not, as long as you are maintaining any sense of “senses”/“experiences” of the world that do not consciously feel like explicit actions/intentions on your part - i.e. if you want any form of othering.
So, with othering there will be a feeling of some experiences/knowledge/information coming from ‘somewhere else’ (even if you think of it as your own subconscious). The catch is that in a physicalist mindset, we limit the sorts of incoming information to strictly physically tied modes (senses tied to material sense organs that only give information/experience when in a certain spatial relationship to other material objects - and then all more abstract knowledge of the world must be derived from that materially rooted information). So, I think a materially tied conception of consciousness is a major aspect of rebirth (i.e. body dies -> mind dies/has major forgetfulness). Thus, I think one of the keys to moving toward liberation from rebirth/attaining immortality/self-deification is at least loosening up if not eliminating the fixation of physical senses from material body-organs (so at minimum having “remote senses” as an options if not always active) as well as loosening our ability to learn abstract knowledge about the world only by conclusions from sensory/experiential data (so, it should be possible to gain abstract information about the world without drawing conclusions from experience a la psychometry or claircognizance or whatever.
Of course, these alternative senses are all as adjustable as the ordinary senses. So you might remote-vision that there is a couch in the other room. If you are practiced well enough, you can make that couch dissolve, just like you could make the couch you seemingly see with you eyes dissolve before you. That leads me to an important point. Your ordinary senses are forms of psychic senses. You are just shaping them exclusively in ways that we would consider bodily/physical/sense-organ-oriented. A lot of this is related to some ideas in my post ‘The Construction of the Senses’.
So, in conclusion, I’m going to be exploring how to start taking the baby steps to develop these sorts of abilities in my future, just like I am doing with magick/manifestation/attraction/whatever you want to call it.
I feel like there’s probably some parallels between the two. With magick, a big part of it is first learning any degree of conscious focus/concentration/will even in ordinary life. Then you can apply it to things you believe are possible/probable and the idea is to progressive increase the difficulty/unlikelihood of the transformations you attempt. So, with remote senses, how to start and develop the requisite skills and powers? It’s something I’m going to be thinking about and commenting about as time goes on. I think that healing is one good beginners skill with magick. And I think that psychic-body awareness is a good correspondent psychic sense skill to develop for beginners. I realize now that in many ways I’ve already developed this skill as I’ve practiced healing, I just didn’t know it or have a conception consciously of what I was doing or what it meant in the bigger picture. But there are many many fun and interesting ways to practice. (I wonder what is the closest psychic-sense correspondent, if there is one, to the form of abstract magick that is probability/spell-casting style magick? Hmm)
I’m quite interested in hearing your thoughts on this, folks.
Imagination is as much an experience as seeing a keyboard in front of one as one types. The only difference is vividness, stability, and meaning. All 3 of these are of course mental and subjective differences that land on some continuum of possibilities. Anything unstable can be stabilized. Anything stable can be destabilized. Anything faint can be made more vivid. Anything vivid can be made faint. And meanings can all be re-assigned in limitless ways.
I do agree that involvement with a modality of senses we have convinced ourselves is “physical” is responsible for an experience of birth, death and rebirth. To the extent we have convinced ourselves that our bodies are necessary basis for consciousness, once the body is seen as incoherent in some way, our faith in consciousness must collapse, and this can explain amnesia and a kind of break in experience. One very obvious example here is when my dream body is damaged grievously and then I usually wake up. Of course there is no raw need to wake up, but my mind usually cannot continue dreaming once the dream body has been damaged beyond a certain point inside some dream environment. However there have been some notable exceptions to this especially post-training.
But, amnesia and breaks in experience also occur during the cycles of dreaming and waking, and yet there is no corresponding perceived danger to the body. Instead there is a sense of tiredness, which is a mental strain, which appears to beg itself to be resolved through an incredibly deep rest whereby one gives up on trying to keep track of the so-called “external reality.” So in other words, tracking objects during waking is tiresome work. When I say “tracking objects” I don’t only mean following some objects as if they preexist awareness. I mean maintaining conviction in such objects, creating, maintaining, destroying them, etc. All this while still knowing that there is neither creation nor destruction in an ultimate sense. I mean the whole process from top to bottom without any preexisting anything short of pure potential and mental 3-sided capacity. But there is just no good two word phrase to describe that. “Tracking” is too passive and is not a good way to describe what’s happening, which is much more creative, but I’m using it for now anyway.
So there is something incredibly bad about waking. It is so bad in fact that as far as we know, anyone who was forced to continually stay awake has “died.” As far as I know, supposedly there is only one case of a single man somewhere in China who doesn’t need any sleep at all.
That means there is something toxic about waking, and something healing about dreaming. And yet there is something about waking that we crave, so we keep trying to return to it. Perhaps the seeming solidity is addictive. Maybe we crave more epic stories than those that are possible in ordinarily very fleeting dreams. A most typical dream episode is between 15 minutes to 1 hour in my experience. There is not much story development that can happen in 1 hour. It appears we want stories that develop over decades, and maybe even longer. So we maintain consistency throughout experience. Waking can be seen as episodic in the same way dreaming is episodic. We can be seen as deliberately stitching waking episodes into a grand narrative while we allow dreams to be more disjointed.
One thing I’ve noticed is that when I have an occasional episode of “losing consciousness” I no longer lose myself or associate with what’s going on. Ordinarily I would think something like “I am blanking out.” These days I see it’s not me who is blanking out. I am fine. I see myself as being healthy and indeed invincible. I stand outside experience altogether. I observe the experience of blanking while feeling invincible and separate. I know this blanking is not me and does not at all affect me. This isn’t just how I think, but it’s a way of feeling too, and it deeply changes the whole experience of blanking. It’s like sitting in a movie theater and the screen is going dark, but you know you’re just fine because the screen is not you. You’re safe in a chair quite a distance away from the screen. This kind of attitude I imagine would very much help during a rebirth experience. It’s to avoid taking whatever is going on as happening to me. Instead I am having experiences but these experiences are not things done to me. Experience is not a wound, basically. Experience is not a deformation of my being. I have a being that remains whole no matter the experience. My 3-sided capacity remains flawless and all-capable at all times. That’s like saying that even in the middle of an experience of bright light, my ability to experience darkness is not damaged. And in the middle of experiencing darkness my ability to experience bright light is not damaged. That’s capacity. Capacity is constant. To identify myself with the 3-sided capacity is to put myself completely beyond the range of the play of experience, while still allowing myself access to mold that experience through will. So a movie director is completely beyond the range of the movie, but still is able to direct the movie. A book author is beyond the range of the in-book setting, but is able to mold that setting.
It’s this kind of contemplation that I find most helpful. From here how to structure one’s senses is very much up to me. I could develop ways to allow visions to inform me of my long standing commitment. Basically what I call “the world” is just a long-standing commitment of mine. I treat some mostly-visceral experiences as “informative” and “revelatory” with regard to that commitment. So if I look outside the window I can learn what the weather is like outside. That experience is considered “revelatory.” It reveals the state of the weather. It’s also imprinting: once I see it, I am convinced I just “got exposed to a situation” that is ongoing and relatively stable. That’s imprinting. It sticks once seen. Of course it’s entirely possible to take what is considered “loose imagination” now and stitch it (via training) in a way that’s more structured to my core commitment of what I call “the world.” This would create the so-called “extra sensory perception” although such naming is a bad one. It’s not extra-sensory at all, obviously. Imagination itself is not really extra sensory in an ultimate sense.
So I think what you want to do is possible, and any hands-on experience with deliberately changing the structure of your basic experience is going to help you gain confidence in yourself as a singular 3-sided capacity to know, to will, and to experience. Which in turn can contribute to a reduction in fearing certain types of experiences. But it would only be a contribution I think. Fear is really complex with so many variables. If you weaken a certain contributing factor in some grand fear, that doesn’t automatically mean you’ve made progress on all the other relevant factors. But it’s all good. One has to take whatever bites out of a big cake one can, in order to eat.
There are basically two flaws when relating to experience:
Exaggerated sense of foreignness.
Exaggerated sense of identity.
#1 means one believes experience hails from some extra-mental objective realm “out there.”
#2 means I believe some specific experience is “me” when in fact I am only a 3-sided capacity instead of any specific experience.
There is also something we might call “overcorrecting.” Overcorrecting for #1 we get identifying oneself with all experience, which is even worse than #2. But overcorrecting for #2 we get an extreme loss of personal agency and a sense that oneself doesn’t exist at all, or only exists as a passive and helpless observer, but only the separate domain exists “out there”.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-17 05:26:55 (dogc6rs)
Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ve felt this to a very limited extent, and I’ve also had moments where I realized it just afterward. Like the other day I was falling asleep while driving my car (or at least it felt like that, I was definitely daydreaming and blanking out and couldn’t remember the last 10 seconds of driving and became highly anxious), but I realized that it was just my experience that blanked out/changed. Not that I recommend this as a way to experiment with this.
Hmm. Interesting, and this is exactly the practical question I’m seeking to work on in terms of how this process of developing these “super”-senses would work. I don’t think you would have to take all of the “loose” imagination and bind it up into the “super”-senses. Just take some ‘section’ of it and I guess practice assigning it new meaning. I guess that eventually a new sense/s that you can control with your volition would develop if you maintain this attitude. I’m not sure if it makes more sense to focus on developing one single sense or to work on developing all “at a distance of time and space” sense-and-knowledge capacities all at once. I’m leaning toward the latter. Precognition, psychometry, clairvoyance/remote viewing, etc. I’m not sure if intuition/’trusting your feelings’ fits into this category of abilities or not. I’m still trying to figure out what people mean by that.
This is extremely interesting. In my opinion, this topic is worthy of a post all its own. But I’m not sure I fully understand you. Presumably this “object tracking” cannot be just tracking an external reality, because I imagine that this “world-ing” stress holds as much for the unilateral solipsist who maintains the illusion of a stable world for apparent decades as it does for the physicalist or multilaterlist who maintains a similar stable world for apparent decades?
Your suggestion would, on the surface, seem to be that eliminating the mode of waking and exclusively dreaming would be beneficial for one’s sense of happiness. But, by your own proposal, would this extensive indefinite fractured series of dream-narratives lack a coherent sense of personal identity as much as they lack a sense of world-identity? And why would that be desirable? Here I am focusing so much on transforming the waking mentality and you’re saying here, no no no waking mentality is fundamentally flawed in some sense.
But there’s also reason in what you say. In my vision of a successful future, I am seeing myself developing near god-like powers of psychic awareness and psychic influence over the apparent world as well as immortality. But it’s true that in this vision I very well may still be sleeping and dreaming occassionally. I’ve never really thought about the psychological function of sleep. I’ve mostly thought of it as a physical phenomena, like eating – a source of energy/rest/recovery. But I don’t even know what it would mean to break down the waking experience for the sense of self and continuity of identity. Seems somewhat undesirable to me.
I’m also interested in understanding this ‘stitching’ mental activity you say occurs between waking narratives that usually doesn’t happen between dreaming narratives. I’m too tired right now to think about it (I guess I need to stop waking and go dream a bit), but I may come back to this later on and comment more on that.
My only other thought is that it may not be this fundamental ‘object tracking’/’worlding’ mentality that is stressful. Perhaps it is just that this world here that we maintain is stressful. Couldn’t another better world, a god-like realm, be an escape from the stress of this world while still maintaining object-tracking/stitching/extended personal and world identity? Maybe then you wouldn’t need to dream anymore?
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-10-19 08:29:49 (dok4tx9)
(page 1)
I agree totally. Thing is, the specific transformation you’re discussing, which is creation of additional senses, is not an area I consider my strong point. I have some tangential understanding of it mostly based on principles, principles which I of course trust very much due to all kinds of other stuff I’ve been playing with and thinking about, but that’s about it. So, I’m looking forward to whatever you come up with. I think you speak the same language as me, so if you do figure out a way to build these senses I think you’ll have a way of explaining it that I could understand too. :) Which would be really cool to read about and to try to understand more about.
My perspective is like this: I’ve read about such abilities existing in very superficial, almost casual-cursory accounts of them, but here’s what I haven’t seen: I haven’t seen a detailed account of such an experience. I haven’t seen a detailed account of a training regimen where one goes from not having such a sense to having it. I have never met anyone who can use psychometry (which is holding a small physical object in your hands and being able to tell from touch the stories and maybe experiences associated with that object).
And besides, I have met people with psychic abilities but I have learned one thing: almost all such people are terrible at explaining their own abilities. By terrible I mean near useless. Which tells me they are either hostile, which I don’t believe. Or it tells me they themselves are not sufficiently aware of how their own minds allow certain things. So their abilities were not developed in a conscious manner, and that’s why they cannot explain them.
So having someone with a psychic ability and the ability to explain the principles and experiences in it in detail as well as being able to explain a detailed and gradual training regimen (or two) that lead(s) to such or similar ability – that’s rarer than hen’s teeth and rabbit horns. And I’ve heard claims of such people but when I examine the stuff such people say in public I know they don’t know anything because they don’t have the right “tells” that someone who would know would give off. I am excellent at picking up “tells” like that precisely because I have some ability myself so I know how to spot another one like me.
So from my perspective we’re pretty much in virgin territory here with only self-reliance to rely on. Self-reliance is the thing anyway. Even if everyone knew all about it, self-reliance would still be supreme as a matter of principle anyway. Screw short-term convenience. So I am in favor of sharing some information, assuming you’re inclined to share something, but at the end of the day we have to rely on ourselves I think.
So as near as I can tell you are pretty much on your own with all this stuff.
The closest I have come to this kind of sense that you’re talking about is that I can use the kinesthetic area inside my body, specifically near the heart region around my chest area, to tell what’s going on. But this sense is extremely general and extremely abstract, and plus, I often override it magickally and cast spells against it. In other words, I never allow this sense to imprint me, as much as possible anyway. Of course I sometimes still get imprinted anyway, so I just do the best I can. So what I mean here is that let’s say I’ll get an intuition which I feel inside my chest about something bad happening, and this feeling sticks around persistently. That’s imprinting as I mean it. At that point instead of taking this feeling as gospel I cast against it and turn everything around. Thus I dispel the danger. :) So the bad thing that I somewhat precognize is not something that comes to pass.
And for me most of the time such precognitions, like I said, are abstract. Very abstract. Only very very very rarely will I get a pretty precise impression about something specific, and there is no way I can duplicate that at will. I’ll just spontaneously know without question that something is going to happen a specific way and it does. I cannot turn this on and off at will but I can sort of attract these happenings in a general sense, like I can set myself up in a way that will increase such occurrences from say once a year to once a month or something, and vice versa I can turn these down and make them more rare, but it’s not precise control.
So in general I do not play around with that stuff too much and any ability that develops in that area for me is kind of a byproduct of the other stuff I do and not something I take care to cultivate. Which probably explains why it’s so abstract and poorly controlled. It’s all rare and spontaneous stuff for the most part, at least when it comes to detailed precognitions.
I don’t know? Maybe? I don’t think any two subjective idealists are the same. Just because someone practices using solipsistic commitments it doesn’t tell us anything about how they’ve internally structured their own mind. There is probably a subset of both uniliateralists and multilateralists that do not take on waking stress. It’s all theoretical for me. I don’t see any principle that mandates such stress. I just know for sure I get stressed out if I am waking for too long. I don’t know if I can blame some unbending principle for this. I think it’s probably more to do with the specifics of how I am involved in my mental habits and commitments and expectations.
I think both dreaming and waking lack something. Waking is stressful, but dreaming in my experience is not as consistent for epic stories. I think there is something better altogether. :) Something that isn’t like dreaming or waking, but has the best qualities of both? And that better mental modality could maybe support personal stories that span thousands of years instead of 120 years max (or so). The only thing I really want to suggest is that there is, I believe, some kind of untapped potential here in ourselves. I am 99.999% certain we can do better.
In my ideal world sleeping and dreaming is 100% voluntary. I like the ability to dream a disjointed dream or two. What I don’t like is being “kicked” into it, if you know what I mean.
Oh, no no… That’s not at all what I want to say. You’re reading way too much into my words. On the contrary. I think everything you said is very interesting and worthy, and I have relatively little personal experience with it, and I am looking forward to your discoveries in this or other areas, assuming of course you’re willing to talk about those (and if not, I honor that too).
What happened was this. After reading your post I got into a contemplative mood and I somewhat went on a tangent. The problem is that although I know it’s somewhat tangential but I thought it was worth saying because it’s not so easy to verbalize some of the things I said there, so instead of throwing it away, I just posted it as is. That’s all.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-19 13:04:54 (dokit1p)
(page 2)
That’s fair. Here’s what else I’ve heard on this topic. I’ve heard some people are able to stitch their dream episodes into grand narratives just like the waking episodes. These people, when they dream at night, immerse themselves into a consistent world state instead of short random stories. They continue from where they have left off last time they were dreaming, and develop further narrative. I’ve heard accounts like that on a sub dedicated to lucid dreaming (don’t want to link from here).
And I believe such accounts because they don’t break any principles I am aware of and plus, I had a tiny ability to sometimes continue a dream right after I awoke from one. I used to do this commonly when I was a kid with I would say about 50% success rate. So it’s nothing impressive per se, but it always makes me think like this: any small ability can be developed into a larger ability. I always think that way. So if I could stitch two dream episodes with a tiny tiny waking break in between, why not be able to stitch two with a bigger break? And then why not 3 and more episodes? It seems like a logical progression. I haven’t actually done this, but when I read other people talk about it, I believe them because of what I just said.
That too! :) Or maybe it’s just that. I don’t know. What you say certainly makes sense. The theory behind this would be that very happy people who have everything going for them should not need much sleep. I’m not sure that’s the case, but it doesn’t mean anything you say is wrong, because maybe there is something stressful about this world on a much deeper level than we’re aware of. So even a happy and content person may be stressing without realizing and thus still needs to sleep as much as anyone else. Maybe.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-19 13:05:02 (dokit9w)
In contrast, your theory about waking, long-stitched, narratives having something fundamentally stressful about them would suggest that these people who turn their dreams into long-stitched narratives would themselves be super stressed out, right?
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-10-21 07:47:56 (donkej0)
Right, and as far as I know that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t mean the theory is completely wrong though. There is a lot of non-trivial stuff going on in the psyche and much of it is below the level of conscious awareness. And it’s also true that one or both of these theories may be wrong.
I’ve read from some people who swear that lucid dreaming makes them tired the next day. But any time I’ve lucid dreamed I woke up fresh as a cucumber. So make of this what you will.
Also I was thinking about what you were saying with regard to developing new abilities, and in my experience a new ability is actually not hard in and of itself. The hardest part is to relax the aspect of prior mental activity that gets in the way of it. So in other words, unlearning that which we now take for granted is probably where most of the effort needs to be. That’s how it’s been for me so far.
Going back to lucid dreaming, I think about learning how to fly and what was hard about it. The hardest part was to overcome a prior expectation that flying is nonsense and is impossible. Then once I learned to fly even just a little, the next hardest part was to overcome the idea that the body has mass and has inertia. In this second phase of learning I had trouble accelerating, decelerating and making turns. Finally when I greatly relaxed my expectations about mass and inertia I could then fly in relatively arbitrary ways.
But as for the actual flying? I just will it. I just intend to fly and I do. So if nothing in my mind is blocking what I want, intending it is as easy as “wanting it for real” basically. It’s only because there is this massive countervailing volition in the form of habit and some tacit commitments that makes any of it so monstrously hard.
I think most instruction for psychic development that I see misses the boat here. They all tell you “just sit down and focus” and so on. They’re telling you the easy part, basically. What they don’t tell you is how to understand yourself to such a deep level that you can learn to relax around old habits and old beliefs that no longer work for you, and the stumbling blocks and fears that one has to deal with in this regard. For example, insanity and fear of it is rarely mentioned. (It does get mentioned in some sources… so nothing I say is absolute, it’s only a tendency I’ve observed.)
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-21 09:29:44 (donpdrr)
I can’t speak for myself, as regardless of how much sleep I get I don’t much get tired anymore, but I have a friend who’s weird and who you’d probably like - she gets bouts of weeks or months where every night she has very long, elaborate dreams with several story arcs woven together. And every time this happens, she’s stressed and tired the whole time. That’s just one anecdotal case, but it makes sense to me.
Still, what would they say? What would a guide on understanding yourself look like? I’ve never felt like there’s much that I could say to anyone else that would help them. They either put in the self-reflection, the mindfulness, the critical contemplation of fear and desire and suffering, or they don’t. I don’t know how much this can really be taught with words.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-22 22:35:32 (dopuw8m)
For one thing, why not mention that there is such a “thing” as countervailing volition? Othering? Sutta Pitaka is pretty close to such a guide, because although it doesn’t mention othering by name, it sets up conditions for a person to discover that on their own. I’m willing to acknowledge the matter is difficult because the specifics are all different from person to person, so the exact guidance probably could not be given. Only general principles could be disclosed along with maybe a few starter methods.
I’ve always felt anything I did to help people would create a heavy price in the long term, because the more helpful I acted, the less self-reliance would result, which would create a heavy karmic baggage later on. But not to help at all is also bad even for myself. That’s because if I say some things I create an impression in my own mind that some things like this can be heard in a social context, because by saying them I am also hearing them myself. This ensures that I retain my grasp on the precious way. That’s not to say I have to talk to grasp my way, but rather, I feel more confident that if I share I will strengthen my resolve and hold on the way.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-23 08:18:09 (doqlu8l)
I can appreciate both of those answers. :)
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-23 08:28:50 (doqmf7c)
The waking world feels permanent, and we crave it - and there’s something toxic about that, naturally!
The dreaming world is impermanent and unfamiliar - and there’s something healing about that, duh!
No big mystery here, really.
I take this description to mean this state is involuntary. You can’t bring about this state at will? I bet you can.
I agree. Experience and physicality, perceptions and bodily senses, ought not be confused for one another, or as bound to one another.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-22 22:12:59 (dopuend)
In principle I could bring about anything whatsover. But in practice I have commitments to experience the world as something with a life of “its own” and so forth. The body is on the border between the visions that I own and those I disown right inside my own mind. So the body is less unruly than the world, but not as handy as the still-owned visionary innards of my mind.
So it’s good to realize that in an ultimate sense there is no limit, but in a practical sense there is a lot I cannot do by tomorrow morning and I have to make decisions in line with both my ultimate and near term potential.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-23 08:24:56 (doqm7bh)
Sure, of course. But the state you’re describing is a tool of comparable power to meditation and contemplation, IMO, and while I can’t just snap my fingers and induce it, it’s definitely as within my grasp as a deep meditative state/jhana. That is to say, I wouldn’t describe it as something that happens to me. I’d definitely recommend building yourself a shortcut to it, or a practice for manifesting it, like you would with, say, breath-watching as a tool for bringing about meditation.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-23 08:33:33 (doqmojk)
That’s interesting. Firstly, I’m not sure what you hear when I talk about blanking out. Let me describe exactly how it happens to me when it happens. It’s when I am crouching at the store when I am looking at a bottom shelf then I stand up (or I stand the body), and then it happens. It’s common in people who don’t exercise the body enough. When I exercise regularly this never happens.
However, what I was saying, is that before when this would happen, I would feel like I am the one who is blanking and lose myself. I’d lose control. But these days when this happens I feel present, awake, cognizant, and it’s as if blanking is a telegraph that is arriving to me from France. Even though ostensibly it’s happening “here” but it feels like it is only tangentially related to me. It doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t incapacitate me. In fact I can even more clearly see how the whole blanking happens because I am not so scared to “look” at it now. I can look at it and investigate it mentally. And I also feel like I now have a small degree of mental power over it because with just a flick of my intent I can reverse this state much more rapidly than it would on “its own.” That’s how it feels. And, it’s not a state I would want to induce deliberately. The “low bodily exercise” blanking is amusing and mildly interesting but not so good or important that I would “practice” for it (or more like, avoid bodily exercise enough to allow it to happen, lol).
As for learning to control my own experience, I agree. Of course I always strive for that. Most of my progress comes from contemplation rather than from any other practice. It’s changing how I relate to the disowned visions that makes the most difference for me. That said, also just falling into a calm state is nice too, but just abiding in calmness will not bring about the same progress that contemplation brings, because calmness for all its benefits does not by itself change how I relate to the phenomena we call “the world.”
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-23 08:51:14 (doqnmlp)
Ah, alright. I think I misunderstood the type of experience you were talking about. I would break down my three primary, specific spiritual practices into ‘contemplate’, ‘meditate’, and ‘disassociate’, for lack of a better term, and it seemed to me like you were talking about what I’d call the latter - but I’m picking up what you’re putting down now.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-23 22:34:13 (dorix2r)