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.
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)