A frustrating circular argument I’ve been having with myself. Why is the world so unsatisfactory? If I am indeed omniscient and omnipotent, how could it get to this point? The “drunk on dreaming” explanation has never sat very easily with me. Whatever chain of events led to my current experience, I find it hard to believe that a wiser, all-knowing me wouldn’t have some sort of a “break in case of existential emergency” box. It seems like a pretty big oversight.

And this sub is not that box? :) I think it is, but that’s just me.

Also, why aren’t I lucid in every one of my dreams? Why only specifically those where I intend to be lucid? Why is lucidity not a default for me? But I’ve read from other people for whom lucidity is a default. Of course what I have to deal with is the peculiar way my own mind works, and so, the-world-as-I-know-it has to also be peculiar to me, and so as I see it there is all the more reason to address questions about the unfairness/rigidity, or whatever other perceived negative traits of the world, back to myself.

An interesting angle here is also to ask, “What sort of person would love this world?” I can see this world being attractive to a range of characters, for various reasons. As I dwell on what sort of person might enjoy this setup here, I grow more certain and more peaceful with the idea that this world is not for me. But I don’t say this with a sense of self-rejection! On the contrary. I know I am always here and the world is a guest. I have nowhere to go. The world is what comes and goes, and I can help it go away just as I have helped it come.

I don’t mean coming and going in a literal sense, since of course there is no literal coming and no literal going, just like if I make an object vanish in a lucid dream, that object doesn’t literally go somewhere else.

One possible pitfall I see here, that I’m very careful to avoid, is that it’s possible to translate my dissatisfaction with the world into a self-sabotaging idea of some sort, which I admit, has at times been my tendency. So the self-sabotaging mode would be to think that the world is this mighty and enduring place and that I am a small and insignificant guest, and that if I don’t like something about the world, I’m the one who needs to fuck off. That’s a horrible way to think that leads toward really really bad future lives of victimhood and dispossession. Indeed I see traces of this in my present life, since I am somewhat dispossessed now, I think it’s because I’ve been thinking along these self-sabotaging lines for more than a few lives to generate this kind of tendency.

So my rule now is I can hate anything and anyone, but never myself. (I’m not saying I should hate anything, but only saying, if I really must hate, it cannot be me that I hate.) I’m going to stay no matter what, and I am the only non-optional element of all my dreams, and if I make an enemy of myself, I’ll never be at peace. In other words, if I have to take a shit, I should never shit in the very core of my perspective, but should shit on the periphery, if at all.

One possible source of your doubts could be caused by imagining Gods and God-level characters as incapable of intending something they later regret. This, I think, is just a childish idealization of Godhood. In every state of mind there are seeds of all the other states. So in a state of foolishness there are seeds of wisdom. But conversely in a state of wisdom there are seeds of foolishness as well. The potential can never be fully extinguished.

The flaw that Gods have is that they think they can never come to harm, no matter what. And part of the problem is that it’s true too. What Gods don’t realize is that while they won’t come to any true harm, they can still have experiences that are arbitrarily miserable. But when you’re basking in radiant glory of your realized Godhood, are you really going to remember clearly what miserable states of experience might be like? So Gods can be incredibly haughty and flippant, which is both a source of strength and a source of weakness. Thus they can fall for a time, from time to time. Until they wise up again. I think it’s a game that never ends, because like I said, the potential can never be extinguished, and also because volition is an ineliminable aspect of a primordial mind: yours.

So - if you’re on a quest for magic, which is a great, incredibly desirable thing, it’s hard not to be distracted by the aspects of human experience which are only appealing in a minuscule - often really, really minuscule - way. And I think this largely comes down to the reliability and predictability of these human experiences. It’s difficult to set your sights on phenomenal cosmic powers when there’s the anticipated pleasure of, say, the prospect of buying your favourite brand of soap tomorrow, which you just ran out of. These things shouldn’t be in competition - they shouldn’t even be in the same sentence. But there is an insidious, addictive quality to wanting something and knowing you can have it, even if it’s boring and crappy.Maybe that’s one of the reasons why we human.

Well said. What they end up competing for is the mindshare or attentionshare or concernshare of your own mind. The time you spend thinking about, paying attention, and showing concern for this or that anticipated experience.

But there is an insidious, addictive quality to wanting something and knowing you can have it, even if it’s boring and crappy.

Yes, but this also betrays some doubts, as in, you don’t know if your grand ambitions are something you can have. To address the doubts is the key. I don’t think it’s simple. One aspect is to be steady and sturdy in front of doubts. Another is to understand the general nature of possibility. And lastly, one should still generate a steady stream of small successes in personal experience in order to boost confidence in one’s own mind’s ability to produce seemingly miraculous experiences. At some point such happenings may no longer appear miraculous anymore.

There’s a fantasy book I read recently. In it, there’s a character who makes and trades teeth for wishes. The wishes come in the form of coins which disappear when they’re “spent” and which, like coins, come in various denominations. The higher the denomination, the more significant the thing you can wish for. So smallest denomination - you can wish a light to turn out, or a small inkblot to disappear, etc. Highest denomination - maybe world peace, invulnerability? Also worth mentioning: the wishmonger in the book is portrayed as wise, and pretty judgey about shitty wishes.

So wishes must be budgeted? This runs off the idea that we just can’t have good things. The universe is a stingy profit-maximizing bastard that demands your arm and your leg for the slightest wish and you can only have one, because otherwise how would the universe profit if wish-fulfillment were not scarce? It’s also like the entire universe is created around the idea of profit to begin with. There cannot be profit in an economic sense without scarcity in an economic sense.

I think with the exception of wishes that mutually contradict each other, one can fulfill limitless numbers of wishes. Even with the wishes that do contradict each other, they can all be fulfilled in a one-at-a-time fashion.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-08-15 11:45:46 (dlmuhbz)

There’s a lot of appeal in this last view to me, and probably to some of you. It has some down sides too, though. There’s no sense of a home, a place to be and belong. No sense of real, stable friends to share with. Now, in such a state you could certainly make yourself uninterested in a sense of home or belonging, and uninterested in a sense of sharing and friendship. But is that really desirable? There’s no objective answer to that question, but it’s something I’m thinking about a lot. There’s definitely some downsides to such a view.

At least not in a conventional sense of “home.” One’s own mind becomes one’s own home. Home then is no longer something one can depart and reenter, like with the physicalist and some other worldviews.

Interestingly, there’s also a suggestion here that having a stable main world in our subconscious might partially be based on a desire for a home or friendship. IDK, just some speculation.

I think that’s basically right at least in the common case as I understand the idea of a “common case.” People conventionally crave companionship and a sense of sharing, which is funny when conventional physicalists get greedy, they basically go against some of their deepest desires.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-11 14:04:10 (dmud8u9)

I consider important to intend and reason while knowing that:

• From Moment to moment I’m creating the whole of this expirience drawing from the infinite potential of my imagination.

• There is no world beyond that which I infere within my own conscience, and no appearance have significance in itself but by my own interpretation.

• Therefore I’m the sole responsible for my good.

Originally commented by u/Alshimur on 2017-11-10 23:53:43 (dpm9jv7)

But if your end goal is to take control of the whole dream, you need to be supremely confident in your abilities, otherwise you won’t get anywhere. You need to be able to clearly assert an outcome and have full confidence that it will happen. There cannot be any doubt, there cannot be any feebleness or worry. Because the moment you begin to doubt your intention, the more likely you are to re-imply your old situation.

I disagree with this. Basically the formula for manifestation is like this:

constructive intent - contradictory intent (which includes habit, fear, ignorance, beliefs to the contrary about why it cannot happen, etc.) = manifestation.

Naturally if you make contradictory intent zero the result will be the best, all else being equal. However, given some contradictory intent, having some pro-magickal-goal intent vs not having any at all will still make some difference. You’re not going to get a gobsmackingly amazing result if the contradictory intent is huge and well-established, but there will still be some effect leaning toward the first term in that equation all else being equal between having some first term vs. having the first term “constructive intent” be zero.

The axiom is that no intent is ever lost. All intentionality is effective. If you cannot observe an effect it doesn’t mean there is not any. We experience this with mundane situations, like if you watch water boil, for some time it looks like the fire under the pot has no effect, and then suddenly the water decides to boil. In reality no heat is ever lost on the water all the while. I’m using this example as a metaphor and it shouldn’t be taken too literally, because after all I am only giving a fairly mechanical image here, which is not all that accurate.

Plus with magick there are two layers of intentionality. Any time you try to change something relatively mundane, a part of what you’re doing is changing that very aspect of experience, but another part of what you’re doing is changing your overall attitude about magick and the possibilities of magick in general. In other words, intents have a meta-component that implies something about how those intents should be interpreted going forward.

So basically magickal practice is a good thing.

That means having an iron hard resolve and committing yourself fully and completely to the desired outcome. Now the problem is that most of us still fall victim to doubt. We could commit ourselves fully, but there will always be a lingering doubt or even a thought “it’s not going to happen, I’m wasting my time”. And the only way to counter that is to stop caring about the results. And to stop caring, it might mean to adopt a state of “just being”.

I disagree completely. One has to be sincere. If you don’t care about a result you won’t get any result. You must be interested in a result and care about it, but not care to the point of being paralyzed and desperate. If one is desperate, that’s a fragile and disempowered state of mind, but disinterest is another form of disempowerment. The middle way is the best.

What really needs to happen is not so much “just being” but rather a state where you continually think (or better yet, know, if you can), “All appearances are false, only my will is true.” This isn’t a state of “just being” or “hardly giving any fucks.” It’s a state where you are focused on your goal, but you are able to completely disregard the suggestions in the suggestive appearances. In other words, you’re guiding the appearances instead of allowing yourself to be guided and informed by them, as would be the case with the usual evidential thinking.

Paging /u/AesirAnatman to read this reply.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-11 11:10:24 (dmu5t0f)

Hey, thanks for commenting Green-Moon! Here’s my thoughts on what you wrote.

In order to take full control of the dream, you need to have a big ego.

I take issue with the idea that you need a big ego in any ordinary use of the term ego. I think saying it like this can even mislead certain people. But, you clarify that you don’t mean this in an ordinary sense.

In order to take full control of the dream, you need to have…confidence that everything in your experience is under your control.

I would adjust this to say “you need to have confidence that everything in your experience is under your conscious control”. Everything IS under your control, and realizing that doesn’t make everything readily available to be adjusted. So much of your activity is subconscious that the much bigger task, imo, is becoming more conscious of the activity you want to change rather than knowing that it is ultimately your responsibility.

This sounds contradictory to the whole spirituality/metaphysics thing, and in a way it is. But it depends on what your end goals are.

Depends on what “spirituality” means. I think it mostly lines up with a few interpretations of a few spiritual traditions (i.e. Kashmir Shaivism, Dzogchen, maaaybe Advaita Vedanta, some Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, maybe some others).

if your end goal is to take control of the whole dream, you need to be supremely confident in your abilities, otherwise you won’t get anywhere. You need to be able to clearly assert an outcome and have full confidence that it will happen. There cannot be any doubt, there cannot be any feebleness or worry. Because the moment you begin to doubt your intention, the more likely you are to re-imply your old situation.

I agree with this idea. But it’s no trivial task to simply become supremely confident in your role as a god and to not doubt it when 99% of your mentality is still plain old human. That’s a EXTRAORDINARILY hard transition to make, let alone in a short period of time. I think for 99.9999% of people (myself included!) such a transition is probably impossible in one lifetime due to their own contradictory intent.

The big ego is needed because you cannot let the external world dictate your thoughts and worries. Your ego has to be so big and monstrous that nothing external could possibly cause you to doubt your abilities. Most of us have the experience that there are “others” who are above us and hold more power over us, whether socially, politically or economically. Or maybe certain situations hold power over us (e.g illness). A big ego means being completely unaffected by these external circumstances and having complete confidence that you are the sole creator and controller and that nothing external could possibly disrupt your abilities.

Try this reversal of perspective on. That “external world” is actually your own subconscious. And yes you can reprogram your subconscious, but it is no trivial task for most people and you probably have a lot of good reasons, at least what were once good reasons, to have your subconscious set up the way it is. It would be wise to assess those perhaps unconscious motives and learn more about how they contradict your more conscious motives and really see what you’re willing to give up and what you’re not willing to give up.

So yes. If you are confident enough in the powers of your mind you can totally adjust and reprogram your subconscious and just ignore whatever the old programming is. But you might find that some of that old programming is actually serving a useful purpose as you try to overwrite it. In that case your obstacle isn’t your ability to reprogram your mind, it’s your own desires. It’s a contradiction of intent, which plays a huge role in suffering, imo. Resolving those contradictory intentions is really beneficial.

That means having an iron hard resolve and committing yourself fully and completely to the desired outcome. Now the problem is that most of us still fall victim to doubt. We could commit ourselves fully, but there will always be a lingering doubt or even a thought “it’s not going to happen, I’m wasting my time”.

Hmm. Let’s just try not to grit our teeth to get something we think we want only to find out later that we actually destroyed something we liked. What you say here isn’t wrong, but some doubts aren’t just doubts about one’s ability. They are doubts about the desirability of some psychic transformations. There’s potentially a lot to lose playing around with insanity and I now agree with /u/mindseal that this stuff shouldn’t be taken too lightly.

And the only way to counter that is to stop caring about the results. And to stop caring, it might mean to adopt a state of “just being”.

When you are simply being, that’s when you have the most control over your dream. When you are simply being, nothing can phase you.

I don’t know that I agree with this. I honestly don’t know what this state of ‘just being’ is. But I don’t see why we should stop caring about what we want to get what we want. That seems contradictory to me. I think we just need to really decide that we truly want something. When we’re really REALLY sure, then the practical work of transforming our mentality should be relatively easy (still some work though).

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-11 04:01:55 (dmtk716)

Having a psychic energy model might be really effective as game rules to introduce Magick.

I would never use that model for myself. At best I could tolerate it, if it were not in my face, but if it were, I’d probably make a dent in it the same way I make a dent in physicalism.

There are some energy-like phenomena that happen, and I don’t have a problem discussing them using a subjective idealist way of thinking. I don’t need to actually believe there is actual energy somewhere. There is will. That’s enough of “energy” for me.

On its own this might be unappealing if you see that it would dramatically limit your own ability to perform magic. The answer is of course that you need to abandon metaphysical egalitarianism. You are god over this realm. All apparently external sources of psychic energy are ultimately rooted in you as an individual. You alone can create infinite psychic energy here. Thus you are unlimited in your magical potential while others are limited.

As a subjective idealism user I never compete or contend with the others anyway (or at least do my best to train that way… so if I catch myself trying to compete I have a little chat with myself about it). I can assist anyone on their way to realizing their own Godhood, and if they do something I don’t like, they simply diverge from my point of reference into their own reality. In other words, I never experience Gods who go against me, because all such Gods decohere from my realm. I don’t slap my own face.

So I don’t have to limit others to keep myself safe.

At the same time, I don’t want to be a nanny to others and the others tend to limit themselves faaaar more effectively than I could limit them unless I deliberately used some grand social-universe-shaping magick to limit people’s magickal abilities, which I don’t do.

I also don’t want to constantly and uncontrollably run into huge communities of these “energy” people who use that sort of language. So if the energy beliefs remain a niche that I can avoid and pretend it’s not there, that’s fine for me. Otherwise I’d have to dent it to make space for myself.

For now I try to conversationally help (meaning, I just talk to people and don’t use magick on them to give them understanding by an act of will) people to understand their own minds and their magickal abilities. The problem is, it’s not that easy, lol. When I talk to people there is an allowance for both outcomes: they understand, and they don’t understand. Had I been using will, I’d be asserting that people now understand magick, and there is no option for “they don’t understand” then.

Basically to me it’s not fun to try to force every little detail. I want a world that for the most part takes care of itself while also serving as a good, supportive platform for my endeavors. If things get really bad, I will take magickal action. Otherwise I just go with the flow much of the time. I don’t find it useful or interesting to try to insert myself into every little detail and try to manipulate those little details. I don’t want to get bogged down with trivialities and minutia.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-21 00:31:16 (dn9ft1t)

I agree, mostly. I think you do make things a bit more rigid than I. It’s true in my own experience that if I want a significant adjustment I have to re-evaluate prior long-standing beliefs and habits, and sometimes I may not even be immediately completely aware of what they are, so it’s not easy. But for mild adjustments it’s not as hard as all that, and it’s not just luck. For example, I’ve trained my vision before. The biggest conflict there is with the belief that my vision is produced by a physical structure of the eyeball and that structure is how it is and that’s that. That’s the biggest stumbling block there. But since I was able to at least temporarily improve my vision to a noticeable to me personally degree, it means even without completely overcoming physicalism I was not completely helpless.

So in other words, instead of waiting to have a perfect condition for this or that transformation, it’s a good idea to attempt the transformation and perhaps fail, and then work on both transforming things and better understanding them in parallel. So for example, don’t try to make it sequential like this: 1st, I’ll realign my belief in what the world is, and 2nd, I’ll make my or humanity’s experience abundant. If you’re going to work at it, I suggest doing both in parallel. It means your abundance magick (as an example, assuming that’s what you want, because it isn’t what I want, or at least, not that I don’t want it, but it’s a low priority item for me) will not be very smooth or successful and it will run into whatever walls, and as that wall-bumping happens you get to examine what those walls are in a way that’s much better than if you were doing a purely theoretical examination from a more disengaged perspective. So it’s learning as you play and playing as you learn, basically. There is no need to make those sequential, like learning first, and then playing second, like we do in this shitbag of a world when we first go to school, and then we graduate, and then we do whatever the fuck the school has supposedly taught us, completely sequentially. That sequential mindset is basically bad in my view and especially for magick it is bad, because a lot of times you don’t even know the real dimension of the wall you want to deal with until you first magickally bump into it in the process of attempting a real spell/transformation.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-04 06:15:08 (dmiqioh)

Any time questions like these arise to my own mind I have two things I always remind myself about:

1. All is possible.

2. How would this work in one of my lucid dreams?

So with respect to both 1 and 2 I personally don’t see any issue with the probability magick. Do I ever play dice? Of course I do. Every time I play one of my favorite genre games, their game worlds are probalistically generated by a dungeon generation engine. It’s done that way so that each time I replay the same game it seems new and fresh at least in some respects, because at least the dungeon layouts and the item placements are going to be different from game to game, so I cannot just memorize how to handle the various obstacles but instead must rely on tactics and strategies over rote memorization. If so much is possible in some measly computer game, what so say of the big dream? And then playing with probability magic would be similar to a game designer re-adjusting the probabilities in the game, which happens all the time when a game designer is in the process of balancing the game to present an interesting challenge as opposed to being trivially easy or impossibly difficult. This is just one of many ways one could conceive of probability.

I know in my lucid dreams I do not in fact consciously script every element. I just know I am dreaming and I also know I can change anything. But other than that, I can still be surprised by something that happens in such a dream. I would have to enter a no-surprises state of mind to preclude the possibility of a surprise in a lucid dream, which is also possible, but it wouldn’t be a default state of mind for me. I’d have to switch to it first. Even if I think all the elements of my dream meaningfully relate to whatever I know, I also know nothing needs to be specifically that way, because the space of all possible meaningfully relevant dreams is infinite.

But in fairness to what you said, everything in a lucid dream really does appear to me thoroughly fake and illusory, albeit extremely realistic-looking, but I know it’s all fake as a result of being lucid, which is also why I feel justified in modifying those contents.

The more “real” something seems, the less justified you’ll feel in modifying it, right? At the very least, the reality of your will and prerogative has to be at a level much higher than whatever you modify. If a painter thought that each canvas was precisely produced by their will, would they still paint? They might worry about tarnishing the purity and inherent perfection of those blank canvasses. Hahaha. And so what happens if you see your entire life as a canvas? Or how about painters changing their minds and redrawing a detail or two later? This happens too.

And then what about the things that you do already change and adjust day to day? Were those things not precisely produced by your will? Why the double standard?

One way to resolve this is to think whatever manifests belongs to your old precision and your current precision takes precedence over the old. You don’t have to respect the old decisions. This is similar to a painter who changes their mind and decides to redraw a feature later.

Edit: I finished editing this post at the 11 min mark.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-08-06 09:08:05 (dl7wqcw)

All of these hypothetical technologies, if ever manifested in your realm, are wholly illusions. I’ve had a dream where a dream character used a machine to read my dream brain-waves and detect my thoughts. Was it real? Does that mean the dream isn’t a subjective illusion? Does that reduce my potential lucid influence on the dream?

The question is about whether you want to keep digging into the mentality that has led you into this deeply unconscious embedded physicalism or if you want to start digging out of it and into a new mentality?

There’s a looooooot of unconscious mental inertia driving you in that physicalist direction. But you can start working to unearth that and transform it into something magical if you want. It may not happen in an instant. Probably it won’t, because there are likely large parts of you that still like some parts of physicalism.

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-10-11 15:09:26 (do7cty5)

So, I’ve been trying to adopt the subjective idealist view, but my materialist mindset is struggling to accept it. I’m very close to fully adopting the idealist part. I can’t see how physicality could ever be fundamental. But the subjective part is a bit harder to accept. All sorts of questions and possibilities come into mind to try to negate the idea that this is not an objective world.

So you’re saying a way of thinking that changes even the very fundamental assumptions you’ve come to fully rely on, assumptions that by now you rely on instinctively, is hard to adopt?

For example, most occultists view their mind as entirely private, unless they make it otherwise. But I don’t see this as being true. I’ve looked deeply into technological progress, and I am very convinced that within a decade or so, we will have brain/mind reading technology that will allow “others” to know what you are thinking of, what you are visualizing, etc. Yes, perhaps through will, you will be able to occlude your thoughts from being viewed, but I’d venture out to say that most occultists will not have the capability to do this.

In the view of subjective idealism your will has the power to shape your experiential reality. So what you’re talking about here is not merely a prediction, but possibly your will. If that’s the case, you may experience something like that, but that wouldn’t prove you were right in some objective sense. It would only be you creating an amenable experiential reality for yourself. If you were using subjective idealism as your understanding, you’d also then realize some very different types of worlds could also be attainable with different kinds of commitments and mind training.

I like privacy. So I will directly break any dream that disrupts that value. In my projected timeline there will not be any tech that can read minds. I’m just not interested. Travel to the stars? Sure. Getting the innards of my mind uncontrollably plastered to some website? No thanks. Even physicalism has gotten so bad that I am now canceling it. Why would I want a really bad feature of physicalism such as mind reading through the brain to be allowed to stay?

But even dreams will be fully recorded, and you and “others” will be able to view them through your computer like a movie.

That won’t happen. It doesn’t have any utility anyway, once you really think about it. Even photographs and videos are crap. If anything, photographs and videos allow people to stay at home more while satisfying their senses with visions of variety as if they’re traveling. My long term plan is to become fully self-powered to the point where I will go and do whatever I want, ignoring all else, even other Gods, never mind people, etc. Like in a lucid dream, I do anything, and recording it is not what I want, but living it all the time is what I want. I don’t want to reminisce. I want to live. Reminiscing is basically death and any tech that encourages and supports reminiscing is a life-denying tech that promotes conservatism and stubborn backward trends. So I am against all that at a very deep level. I’m not so fanatical that I want to tear down every photograph, hell no. But all that sort of tech is super-low value. Totally not worth my time. I don’t dream about it for sure. All this recording tech is not at all in my visions of the future.

If your mind is potentially not solely under your control, how do you guys reconcile subjective idealism with these possibilities?

This is a dumb question. It’s like asking if subjective idealism is potentially wrong, how do you think subjective idealism can be defended? It’s nonsense. If subjective idealism is somehow wrong, it’s just wrong. There is no point in defending it then. Of course it’s not wrong. :) So there is no problem.

There are other future technologies that complicate things, such as, the possibility of “mind uploading” and conscious artificial intelligence. I’m not convinced the former is possible, but the latter probably is.

It’s all nonsense. I don’t worry about it at all. Even if it were possible it would be irrelevant. I mean, it’s possible for me to stick a fork in my thigh. I don’t think about it. It’s not on my mind a lot. It’s irrelevant.

When I think about the future, cognitive upgrades, superintelligent machines, etc, I feel a bit disempowered.

Empower yourself! Stop letting the way things appear govern your life and intent. You know better than that by now. Empower yourself.

Understand this: no one wants you to be empowered. The more power you have, the less others around you will have. No one wants you to be powerful! They won’t help you. No one will help you. If you want empowerment you have to empower yourself. It’s fucking scary to be surrounded by powerful entities. Just the idea of others reading your mind is scary right? You don’t want that. You don’t want other people to become more powerful than you. Flip this around. They don’t want you to be more powerful than them. So that means if you want power you have to seek independence. You cannot wait for people to help you. It won’t happen.

Basically people will help you on the minimum condition that this won’t degrade their own abilities to pursue their visions. Think how scared most people are of everything. They’re scared of diseases, of crime, of poverty, of natural disasters, of political instability, etc. With a frightened chicken mentality that most people have, what sort of help do you think they will render in terms of empowering you? It’s a huge mistake to wait for the frightened chickens to help you get empowered. No way. They will instead create technologies of control and subservience that will keep people under control and suppress them. That’s what fear does. They’ll agree to become suppressed as long as everyone else is also suppressed. That’s how fear works. That’s how people will “help” you. Think carefully.

It seems anything can happen in the “future.” Things that can undermine personal power.

Subjective idealism agrees with the idea that anything can happen in the future, but not with the idea that anything will happen in the future. Will overrides can. Will/Intent > possibilities. Possibilities are infinite but only one specific scenario happens. Which one? The one you intend to happen (consciously or not). So infinite possibilities are not frightening to a subjective idealist who is well practiced. They’re simply the space within which we operate our ships as captains. The ship that you operate is your perspective. Your perspective contains the totality of your present knowledge and experience along with how that relates to other possibilities. Your perspective also contains a direction, a teleological vision you’re moving toward, be it consciously or not. Even something like “more of the same” can also be your teleology.

Instead of worrying what the future may or may not be like, consciously walk toward a future you want to be in.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-10 21:26:20 (do5w9aa)

Let’s say an omnipotent entity is travelling and comes across a community of people. He socialises with them and has a fun time. He decides to stay there for a while and creates close friendships with 2 people. He knows that he could leave that world forever if he chooses and move on. He also knows he can bend that world to his will if he wished. His two friends aren’t privy to that knowledge, they are just conventional beings.

The entity grows to really like his two new friends and wishes that they could accompany him. But the power difference is so large, these two people would get ripped apart if they traversed beyond their realm and they would probably emotionally and mentally suffer a lot. It would be like taking 1000 doses of DMT in a row, it would completely destroy them.

The entity also feels strange when he hangs out with his friends. He knows something they don’t and it bothers him greatly. And even if he told them and revealed his power to them, he would still feel weird because of the massive power difference. If your friend revealed they had god-like superpowers, would your reaction to them change? It certainly would.

An omnipotent entity would either declare those 2 friends as “powerful enough” and by virtue of this declaration it would become true for all intents and purposes of that entity. Alternatively, this entity would never get lonely in the first place, because it would routinely encounter people like itself, at an appropriate power level, because that’s the entity’s will, and it being omnipotent, as it wills, so it is.

Basically an omnipotent entity has arbitrary tuning of anything and everything. There are no problems that remains problems for long.

For an omnipotent entity a problem is when they change how they want their experience to be, but didn’t get around to actually changing their experience yet. And being able to contemplate possibilities without those contemplations spilling out into the protected domain of experience is part of omnipotence too.

Although I have to say it’s weird to call an omnipotent being “an entity.” It’s like attributing will and life to a body, just as wrong in the final analysis. I would refer to something as an entity when I regard it as distinct from myself and as being “out there.” When I regard myself I am not en entity to myself. Just like to myself I am also not a body or anything other concrete and optional.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-24 16:45:54 (dnfhzj7)

Your post just reminded me of this great song. When I heard it a few years ago and heard the line “i use the magick to glo”, I had no idea what it meant, but now everything in that song makes so much sense, hilariously so.

Anyways, your post brings up the whole “world-sharing” topic; whether or not there actually are any “other beings”, in the way you speak of them. I like to think of myself as just an open space of awareness, as shown in this model.

In regards to others, I wouldn’t assume that anything other than what you’ve experienced yourself has any kind of agency or awareness separate from you. Maybe “others” are given a sort of artificial awareness, to make the illusion more convincing, but ultimately, I wouldn’t spend much time or effort worrying about others, that sort of goes against the whole “subjective experience” viewpoint. I would ask /u/mindseal for his/her take on “others” but I think it’s best just to treat experience like a RPG game (here’s another model relating to that idea)

Originally commented by u/WrongStar on 2017-09-25 09:22:49 (dngmdqx)

As a consequence of typing these words out, I learned some things about myself. I imagine the audience here as being very elevated, and so perhaps I allow myself to inhabit an elevated position when considering how my words appear to others here, and thus allow myself to inhabit a viewpoint which perhaps otherwise would not?

After typing the above its clear that:

1. I added the word ‘infinite’ when its quite clear that I just would like to feel any love at all, I was trying to add some kind of weight to the perception others have my psychic abilities / aspirations. I would like to feel some significant feeling of love, but in writing this I used the term ‘infinite’.

2. I have an inferiority complex regarding my spiritual level or abilities, such that I am very ashamed of my (self-perceived) hobbled state, such that I am not powerfully attuned or inhabiting a state of powerful awareness in my daily round. I suppose I am ashamed of this. I wanted others here to perceive me as ‘on the level’, I guess, so I threw some big words around.

Also, I found the ‘simple, tactile healing exercise’ which seems just right for addressing the lack of love, so I’m going to experiment with that and see where things go.

Originally commented by u/isbaici on 2017-08-08 02:50:25 (dlafsba)