While I’ve in no way escaped this issue entirely, all I can really attest to is the fact that, after years of doing this kind of thing, that inferiority complex is definitely dissolving.

This is good to hear! When I first started contemplating all this, maintaining “awake lucidity” for more than an instant seemed impossible. Now the stretches are getting longer, though physicalism still rears up and overwhelms me more often than I care for, particularly when life is busy/stressful.

That said, I’ve felt recently like there’s a sweet spot between contemplation/no stress/minimal activity in your life (where I struggle to maintain lucidity) and overwhelming activity/stress/lack of contemplation (where I also struggle to maintain lucidity).

There sure are a lot of balls to keep in the air with subjective idealism.

Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-10-26 00:30:09 (d96z8xe)

But don’t dismiss the artistic visualization as a mere metaphor either. There’s something to that.

Over the years my respect for the artists has only increased even though I don’t consider myself much of an artist.

This might sound lame, but here goes anyway, I also got a bit of a boost after taking an art history and appreciation class at a community college once. I forget the exact title of the class, but I remember the contents, not in terms of the specifics, but in terms of how they impressed me. What I realized is that all this stuff I previously thought was just mindless choosing between thicker and thinner arms and noses, was not at all mindless, and that behind many seemingly insignificant details of the art there lay a very deep and sustained thought, not just of one person, but often thought that embeds itself into art history of the world. For example, our teacher was explaining to us that just as there was a secret movement to study cadavers for medical purposes (it had to be secret because the society looked down on ‘desecrating’ the remains), the artists also got to study them, and as a result there was a progression toward more and more realistic muscle tone depiction in the art. I thought that was interesting. So something in the art was also connected to our history of medicine, and even religion.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-20 15:54:10 (d8zxgqf)

All right, again, my sincere apologies for being so slow to respond. I recently started an incredibly tense, mind-consuming new job which has been pretty rough for the most part and left me minimal spare time - but it also provided a good testing ground (and incentive) for putting some of the ideas you discussed here into practice.

So to get magick to work much more quickly and powerfully I think that, actually, my experience only and ever needs to satisfy me. When I get into this frame of mind, and I get rid of the idea of “the world” or the idea that there is some sort of “out there” or even the idea that other observers are something more than visions inside my own perspective, then things really get moving.

I’ve found this groundbreaking over the last month. I’ll freely admit that solipsism has always frightened me because it struck me as lonely and bleak. If you come at things from a find-the-meaning, glass half full perspective, I suppose you could say that the stressfulness of the last 4-6 weeks at least forced me to genuinely confront and consider solipsism, because of my desire to gain some control.

Putting that solipsism lens on is no easy feat, though. As you’ve said, there’s the fear of embarrassing yourself if you’re wrong about all this - and also, your mind seems to jump through hoops to re-establish the status quo. Even when I manage to convince myself that the world only needs to satisfy me, I start worrying that I don’t know what I want/what is good for me. I get into a loop of thinking that maybe I need things to be hard, maybe it’s “good” for me if they are.

I think a lot of this comes back to the fact that the human condition features a heavy loading of guilt. Humans feel illogically guilty about everything, right down to their own existence. Obviously that’s not an objective, unchangeable fact, but it’s definitely a part of my current experience.

I’ve started to remind myself of the infinite nature of existence to overcome this. Just telling myself straight out that struggle/strife doesn’t have intrinsic value isn’t enough to overcome a lifetime of conditioning telling me otherwise. But when I remind myself that there’s room in existence for everything, I can still intend the changes I want because, even if it turns out that suffering is somehow more noble than non-suffering, and I’m messing things up by removing it, there’s room for do-overs. Endless do-overs, if necessary.

Using this mentality I’ve managed to get a tighter control on the unpredictable aspects of my work - make things quiet when they ought to be busy, control the outcomes of cases where the outcome was out of my control. When I’m really “in the zone” the results have been startling and immediate. Then I start telling myself, of course, that it could easily be coincidence and I have to start over again. But realistically, even from a physicalist, logical perspective, my results have been too consistent and numerous to be passed off as coincidence, even according to the most crusty, skeptical part of my mind. It’s starting to be a case of physicalism disproving physicalism.

As for the bleak and lonely aspect of solipsism - well, it’s still there to an extent, but there’s also an exhilarating side to that degree of mental aloneness. I’m also working on viewing solipsism as an option, not an absolute. This is tricky and I’m still trying to find my level, so to speak. But solipsism, when you really force yourself to come eye to eye with it, isn’t as bad as you think it’s going to be. I’d urge anyone else who’s flirting with the idea to give it a try and see where it leads you.

One thing to understand about othering, is that it’s something you’re doing by intending it. Because that’s the case, how exactly it happens entirely depends on your intent. So othering is flexible, and you can relate to it in many different ways.

You’re absolutely right, and you’ve pointed out a trap that I’d fallen into. I’d come to view othering as a static thing - i.e. at this moment, from the point of view of this human experience, the othered self is in x state, and x state only. In my mind x might have equalled the Freudian subconscious, or a deity, or a matrix-style computer program - but it was one thing and it was the same for everyone. I think I fell into this trap because it would be nice and simple, if this were the case. But of course, it is much more fluid and complex than that, and understanding how it (you) works is a second-by-second struggle.

Just looking at this week alone, I could view it variously as a servant, a hard taskmaster working to “improve” me, a series of patterns gone awry, a benevolent god, a slightly wiser extension of my will, a slightly stupider extension of my will… and so forth.

Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-11-28 17:51:47 (daipt0d)

So it’s not even necessarily about finding the correct one, as much as finding something you can work with and when it becomes too limiting, you can upgrade at that time.

FYI (and here I’m talking not really to mindseal, because he knows this, but to those who might not): the above statement applies to nearly anything and is reflective of a deeply useful approach to virtually any spiritual work.

Independent volitions of other beings. This is when you see other beings appear to you and they can act in ways that surprise you. They may even get into an argument with you. This seeming independence of volition of the other people is something ‘othering’ can maintain.

I don’t know about you, but it’s not just beings that othering makes unpredictable to me - it’s lots of things. Things I categorize as non-beings can still be very unpredictable and I’m extremely comfortable with that.

And precisely of these desirable qualities othered stuff, which is basically the whole world, can easily go bad. That’s because the whole point of othering is to become less explicitly responsible for the various transformations, or to even feel 100% not responsible, and not just less. Because that’s the intent, that same intent is also what makes the world diverge from how you’d ideally like it to be.

Not that, in my opinion, we should have any particular disdain for othering. It’s extremely useful. I can imagine a thousand scenarios in which the absence of othering is a total drag. Othering is, to parallel other features of my reality, something I implemented because it’s an extremely useful tool for making things how I’d like them to be, and it’s gotten out of hand. And it’s a lot easier to implement it than the de-implement it.

If the separation is illusory, whatever experience of merger you could produce, it too would be an illusion.

This is very important.

Of course then the biggest challenge is the fear “what if someone else really is still out there and instead of seeing what I see, they’ll see me going insane?”

That’s really multiple challenges. There’s the doubt about solipsism being true, and there’s the fear of being perceived as insane. And those are different, and their difference is important if you want to address them. I address the former by contemplating things like whether the nature of reality (e.g. the truth of solipsism) is persistent or flexible. If you decide to use solipsism as a temporary tool, is solipsism temporarily “true”? Is it easier to make something temporarily “true” than permanently “true”, and if so, can you use this to make your doubts about the world temporarily vanish? I address the latter by contemplating being-othering, my ability to manipulate other people’s perceptions of me, contemplating the merits of sanity, etc. In other words, I think that’s a complex challenge that’s best attacked from multiple angles with multiple approaches.

Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-19 18:28:42 (d8ygrmf)