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.
Precisely the opposite of the case for me. Superficially they seem the same. Deep down is how I know they’re not.
But I don’t, of course. That’s the whole illusion, isn’t it? That my capacity for experience is dependent on some external thing. The problem isn’t that my senses are tied to organs - it’s that I confuse them for being so tied. I support chipping away at this conclusion 100%, btw. That’s an important endeavor. I just find it more productive to do so by emphasizing the similarities between seemingly-organ-based sensory experiences and non-organ-based sensory experiences as opposed to emphasizing the difference between them. I’m not saying you can’t do it your way, but for me that approach would have counterproductive elements.
That’s not accurate to my dreams. In fact, it’s fairly uncommon for me to experience my conventional body in dreams.
That’s fair. Long-term I don’t want to micro-manage every detail either. But just like I don’t want to tense every muscle in my body at once, if I’m going to exercise, I’d like to tense each and every one of them one at a time, and know that I have control over them, before deciding to let them relax.
I don’t mean to attempt to externalize your perspective itself, if by perspective you mean your fundamental capacities. I mean externalize things like your body perceptions - there are obvious issues with, for example, identifying with your circulatory and nervous system if there’s someone near by recklessly wielding a knife.
Like I said above, on an ultra-long timescale, I don’t want everything to be water either. But every time death rolls around, you’ve got a chance to wipe the slate pretty clean, and I’d rather knock down everything but the house’s foundations and start new than try to renovate this catastrophe one wall at a time.
I think there’s something pretty special about that state in the sense that there are attributes of it that can’t be ascribed to any other state. But, again, I agree, it’s not a long-term ambition.
And, IMO, a productive one.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-23 06:19:24 (doqf6qp)
I’m not going to argue this with you. I’m completely uninterested in that. Perhaps you are a totally enlightened sage already for whom there is no difference between remote viewing and ordinary vision and you can see China as easily as you can see Norway as you can see wherever you call home. Perhaps you can maintain your vision even when your eyes have been stabbed out. Who am I to know these things about you? I can only speak to my own experience and the experiences of those around me. And that experience suggests that most people have intentionality that is overwhelmingly structured in terms of a body via sense-organ experience and bodily action. I really cannot know whether or not you have overcome this intent in your own life and mind or not. I certainly have not.
You DO tie them. They are obviously tied if you are like a conventional person. If you are not, again, I may be wrong and you may be an enlightened sage with supreme paranormal powers. Otherwise, it’s not wrong to say that, even with some sense of self-awareness and subjective idealism, you tie your experiences to sense organs. You move your eyes one direction and your vision follows. Move your hand and you feel the table. Move the position of your ears and now you hear something you couldn’t hear in a different location. It’s an intention. It’s a way of dreaming. It’s perfectly OK in an ultimate sense, it just may not be ideal. Yes it is an illusion. But it would also be an illusion if you had paranormal senses or magical powers. It’s all an illusion.
Organ-centric experiences are a form of paranormal experience, you could say. The main problem is believing these experiences are out of control and rooted externally. It’s believing the material based senses are real while paranormal experiences are unreal. They are both unreal, or both real, for you if you want them to be. There is, obviously in my opinion, a certain propensity to forget the true nature of your perception if you maintain it in an organ-centric way for a long enough time while focusing on other things, like enjoying yourself in that context. And of course any resistance you feel to immediately remote viewing the other side of Earth is probably due to the fact that you still unconsciously believe that your senses are materially based and out of your control, and perhaps even desire to believe that.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-10-23 13:41:58 (dor3fc6)
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I think the origin of the misunderstanding here is just that I’m talking in ultimates and you’re talking in conventions. You’re saying that “sensory perceptions ARE different from nonsenory perceptions” and “your senses ARE tied to your organs”. And conventionally that’s true. I’m saying that they’re NOT different and that they AREN’T tied because, ultimately, that’s true, because there’s nothing to tie them to. It’s like a koan of some zen student saying, “What is this ox tied to?” and even though conventionally it might be tied to a pole, the other student replies, “It’s not tied to anything and there is no ox.” So maybe re-read what I said with the word ‘ultimately’ thrown in front of some of the sentences and my perspective on this will be clearer.
I’m not a master who has transcended these limitations you’re discussing - I’m just taking a different angle of approach, looking at the differently. Though, as we know, how you look at something is how that something is. ;)
This I am on board with 100%. I like taking an approach of saying, “Ultimately, both of these are equally real or equally unreal.” It helps me break the illusion. Your approach is also, as I understand it, aimed at breaking that same illusion. Just, for my taste, for my own benefit, it’s an approach that seems to overly emphasize the difference between the organ-sensory and extra-sensory. So instead of thinking, “both of these are equally real or unreal” and driving that home, I end up thinking, “one of these is real and one of them is a fake thing I’m trying to make real”. But that’s my only argument here: that this method can be counterproductive for me. I make no claims it isn’t perfectly viable for others and have no doubts the goal is noble and very similar if not identical to my own in this practice.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2017-10-23 22:56:04 (dorjkwn)
I think you must be taking the word ‘tie’ to have some sort of static metaphysical meaning. To me ‘tie’ is dynamic. It is volitional. So I tie objects to gravitational behavior (falling when dropped). I don’t have to tie them this way, to have this sort of committed volition, but it is an optional way to tie them that I currently manifest in my intent. Similarly, I don’t have to tie my experience exclusively to sense organs, to have that sort of volition, but it is an optional way to tie my experience that I currently manifest in my intent. I can untie them from the sense organs.
You can imagine vision being untied from the eyes in the following way. Currently, your vision tracks according to the position and orientation of your eyes relative to other objects. Specifically, the vision tracks according to the apparent position and orientation of your eyes relative to other objects according to your other senses. So, you can touch an object and move it in and out of your visual field and into different positions in your visual field. You can internally feel the position of your eyes relative to you head, relative to your arms, relative to the object. So right now, for a conventional human, their vision is tied to the orientation and positions of the eyes/body/objects.
Now, if we untie this, we can imagine the vision moving around while the eyes and objects remain still, or the vision remaining still while the eyes and body and objects move about. So imagine looking at your computer and then getting up and walking away and facing your front door 1 meter away. Normally this would mean you now see your door. But if you untether/untie your vision from your eyes then you could keep your vision clearly on the computer the entire walk to the door and while you face the door. Alternatively, you could sit at your computer and if you untether/untie your vision from your eyes you could drift your vision through your house to the front door, even while your eyes still face the computer. This is an example of some things you could readily do with your senses if you learned to untie/untether them from your sense organs. But I certainly cannot readily do this because my senses are tied to sense organs. I am unconsciously volitionally committed to a very body-centric perception as are the vast majority of humans.
I don’t particularly believe that “ultimately” there is not a chair I’m sitting in, unless you take a particular metaphysical interpretation of “chair” to mean a self-existent external, ontologically unique object. I just take “chair” to mean the appearances and behaviors that I categorize as chairlike, and then can apply that to a particular set of appearances and behaviors to say “this” chair.
But I don’t take ordinary language to have such rigorous meaning. I take it to mean what it ordinarily means and what it is ordinarily used to refer to, generally.
And yes, I know what you mean when you say “there is no chair” and I agree. I’m just not convinced of the utility of such a way of thinking, generally. It’s a totally different approach to language.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-10-25 11:29:06 (doufo80)
Hey good to see you back around here, btw, Utthana
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-10-29 09:34:22 (dp0yr2h)