Here’s my old TODO list, which is a set of hints for articles that I decided weren’t worth writing about (partly because these things have also been discussed here and there):

• the flaw of relying on evidence

• (potentially interesting) The danger and the value of certainty: sure knowledge, knowledge you can lean on with all that you are now and with all your future aspirations. We value not just our present state, but our future potential. When one feels safe in betting all one’s present and future states on a type of knowledge, that knowledge becomes certain knowledge, a yogic-grade knowledge capable of supporting a miraculous intent. (note: I have no clue what I am talking about here now, hahaha… but at the time I must have thought this was important)

• Daydreaming to the maximum extent: don’t imagine small, marginal improvements to life. Go all the way to the best conceivable vision. Then notice how you feel. Do you feel nauseated? It means you don’t believe it’s possible/attainable. Do you feel revitalized and happy? that means you know you can attain your vision.

• Take the mind as the body, take the human body as a vision. (note: this is kind of obvious, so I’m not sure why I put it into my TODO list to write an article about it)

• (potentially interesting) Imagination can be life and liberation or bondage and hell.

• (avoid feminine/masculine characterizations because they’re too anthropomorphic, instead talk about the same thing via subtle/gross, receptive/active, foreground/background, etc.) Feminine is conventional, nurturing, serious. Masculine is revolutionary, disruptive, playful. However, an interesting way to see feminine vs masculine is on a range of expressivity: subtle, faint, small expressions are feminine, and bright, raging, visceral expressions are musculine, on some continuum, so it’s not a binary. For healing and for other occult purposes it is very helpful to deliberately aim for subtle expression, working on the feminine side. So for example, focusing on soft tactile light in the human body to heal it, but delibarately keeping the perception as subtle as possible, softness just barely on the edge of being percpetible, and without any attempt to increase the vividness and visceralness of that perception resting in it, allowing it to permeate the body and wash all over the mental constructs related to the body (astral body), etc. It is wonderful. In the past I’d always try to make all my magick as vivid as possible, but this isn’t always a good idea. Vividness and blinding brightness is a great quality but not if it’s a dogma. Subtlety, faintness are wonderful qualities too and should be used delibarately and shamelessly when needed. (note: talking about polarities in terms of genders is not exactly my strong point)

• (interesting insight, but I don’t think I can make an decent sized article from it) The types of insights and ideas one will have is strongly related to one’s aspirations. If one aims to be a conventional being that in and of itself guarantees a narrow range of thought, nearly guaranteeing absence of unique thought, since a conventional being is based primarily upon copying their neighbors, which they call “learning.”

• (very interesting thought) If I could change anything, there’d be no point in dying. But if I cannot change certain things, it seems like death is very desirable. I wouldn’t want to live forever in an enviornment that was outside my control. So maybe mortality is a consequence of learned powerlessness, thanks to othering gone rogue.

• (interesting) Sleeping/waking ignorance/enlightenment doesn’t have to be binary or even objective. It can be a continuum and subjective, both. (note: seems kind of obvious now, but when I wrote it it might have seemed more revolutionary back then, hehe)

• How to relate to nightmares: do they have a right to continue? Should they only be modified gradually and respectfully? Or can’t they be just dismissed or toyed with at will? (note: I have no clue what I am talking about here, but apparently this was something I was thinking about when I was writing a TODO list for this sub)

• It’s important to have something one is ready to die for.

• One possible deity practice: taking responsibility for everything that happens in the world. Read a newspaper and think to yourself you’re the author of all the events described there.

• Knowing when to be serious and when to be playful is important. It’s not one or the other. Both should be used together in extraordinary ways. Playful toward convention and serious toward that which is weird or extraordinary. Just like in a lucid dream.

• To commit to something one has to first conceive of it, which is to say, imagine it, and then begin insisting on that conception, assigning it weight, returning to it, relying on it repeatedly, etc.

• How to deal with loss. Often when something goes away we feel like we lost something. That’s because we imagine the thing we lost would have had positive impact on our lives. In truth we have no reason to imagine that. We just do. For all we know the thing we lost would have had a horrible impact on our lives and it was a blessing to lose it. Plus, if the loss occured over a trivial issue, it’s not right to regret it. Good things cannot be lost easily. If something is hard to keep but easy to lose, then relying on it is a great folly.

• To resist or not to resist. If you think the pattern is on its way anyway, resisting it will make it stay longer. But if you think it’s stable, it may be a good idea to resist. Then once the pattern is on its way out, it may be prudent to stop resisting before it’s completely gone and just wait for it to leave. (note: although by “resist” I mean to send a bad pattern on its way with intent, which may also have a component of non-acceptance/resistance, but intent is important)

So these bullet points are ideas I thought I’d make into an article but then I didn’t cause I thought they weren’t worthy.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-07-06 14:36:01 (djuam2u)