Recently I’ve been wrestling with the concept of Self and making little headway. I’m hoping that by writing this out I’ll generate some insights – but apologies in advance if there’s rambling along the way. I’m not sure quite where this is headed yet.
I’ll start with an experience I had recently. Years ago I used to suffer from sleep paralysis regularly. I say “suffer” because, back then, I didn’t understand SP, or realise it could be used to generate lucid dreams. I wasn’t frightened – just found it deeply uncomfortable.
Cut forward several years and I became interested in LDs and learnt about the connection between SP and LDs. For a while it was great. SP still hit me spontaneously and I could also purposely induce it and, from there, slip into LDs. Gradually, though, SP became harder and harder to produce – and eventually impossible.
This process started with an increase in false awakenings during LDs. I’d be in the midst of an LD and undergo a false awakening which would end my lucidity. It felt like my mind was literally kicking me out of LDs, as though it/I disapproved of them on some level.
For a while I could almost induce SP; I’d start to experience vibrations and auditory phenomena, but they’d peter out to nothing. For years now I haven’t been able to get even to that stage, either intentionally or unintentionally. I still have semi-lucid dreams on occasion, but they occur randomly, not through any agency on my part. I’ve wondered occasionally why this change should have come about but never gave it too much thought. While I welcome LDs, and while they’ve helped to shape my interpretation of reality, they’ve never been my end goal, so I wasn’t too concerned.
Cut to a fortnight ago. For the first time in a long time I’m on the verge of a spontaneous SP and I use all my old tricks to encourage it along. But the vibrations fade to nothing and I suddenly realise that it’s my fault. There’s an unpleasant sensation associated with the SP this time, which I think can best be described as something like descent. In the past, SP may have been accompanied by an initial feeling of physical heaviness, but there was also a sense of mental lightness – like a part of me was lifting up or being vibrated outwards. This time the feeling of mental heaviness was oppressive.
I’ve never undergone full anaesthesia before, but I think the sensation I was experiencing must be similar, though more unpleasantly drawn out. It was like being unwillingly dragged towards oblivion and a loss of self-awareness. Quite unlike gently drifting into sleep/dreams - or being hurled into them, which is how SP>>LD usually feels to me.
Anyway – even as I was trying to encourage the SP I was simultaneously fighting it because of the dragging sensation, which effectively killed the SP.
So now I’ve been more intensively contemplating this experience, along with the general decline of SP in my life, and it occurs to me that it might all be connected to some of the problems I’ve been wrestling with regarding what Self is.
I know that in this sub /u/mindseal has previously defined mind as a threefold capacity to know, will and experience, which I wouldn’t dispute.
But for me there’s a gap, in that I can’t express how a concept of self in the form of consistent (or inconsistent) personality or character fits into this model.
I suppose what I’m driving at is - in order for the mind to will anything, there has to be an impulse or desire “behind” that will. To attempt a metaphor, if will is a gun, there still has to be a someone who decides what to point it at and when to shoot.
So who is that? How “real” am I/that person? Am I just a habit, like the laws of physics, or am I more intrinsic and essential? How enduring am “I”? How inconstant?
These questions strike me as vital if a person pursues subjective idealism with a view to effecting change. I’ve experienced dreams where this entire lifetime of experiences has been wiped from my memory. I find those dreams disconcerting – but I’d argue that even in those dreams I retain core properties which persist even in the absence of memories of this lifetime. My moral code, my sense of humour, my emotional reactions and – sorry, things are about to get fluffy but I lack words to adequately describe this - a sort of observing self-aware knowingness which seems to sit permanently at the back of my mind. I also feel like these qualities have been with me in this lifetime for as far back as I can remember.
I’m not saying that I haven’t been altered at all by this life, but I think that those properties have, by and large, been central to my existence - to what I will, to how I interpret experience - and they have not changed substantially. Sometimes, as an intellectual exercise, I’ve sat down, played devil’s advocate with myself, and tried to change them, with no success.
But how does any of this connect to the decline of SP/LD in my life? I think the connection lies in my attachment to my concept of my self/my personality, to the me behind the scenes who Knows, Wills and Experiences – and a fear of losing that self.
This may seem counterintuitive. If anything, you are surely more likely to lose sight of yourself in non-lucid dreams. Except that non-lucid dreams perhaps present less of a challenge to a physicalist mindset. And I’ve recently realised that I may be erroneously attaching my concept of Self/personality to the waking world and its qualities. In other words, I’ve been mentally attaching my personality to the physicalist experience, even though I wouldn’t actually describe myself as a physicalist.
So – if I lucid dream, and if I turn the laws of physics/nature as they appear in the waking world on their head, it’s an indication that this world isn’t real/doesn’t have an immutable existence separate to me.
Well… we all know that. That’s why we’re here, right? But it’s quite one thing to know this and another altogether to really live it.
So what if lucid dreams really force me up against subjective idealism and I feel, by extension, that the Self I identify with is similarly mutable and substanceless? What if, by pursuing this path, I lose my self? I’m not saying I won’t exist – I am emphatically not one of those “there is no self” types. But perhaps I will become changed beyond recognition, just as I hope to change the world beyond recognition.
This is the roadblock I’ve been hitting and, now that I’ve typed it out in black and white, I think it’s wrong-headed. Evidently I like my personality as is (which, hey, is a bonus nice realisation) and I’m not keen on drastic alteration of my self. But I’ve been erroneously linking my self to the “outer” world instead of linking it to… my self.
And I think that the dragging/oblivion feeling I experienced in that aborted SP was a manifestation of that fear, just as the decline in SP/LDing in my life is probably a result of that fear. And I also suspect my regular dreams have been less rich, less far reaching for the same reason – I’ve unconsciously been keeping this grip on a world which, by and large, I detest.
So. Evidently I’ve identified a fear in myself of mental drifting and losing sight of the me who I feel that I am. And to counteract that I’ve been anchoring myself to this substandard existence. What I should have been doing was making my self my anchor – because then the world experience is less important and can flow/change more readily.
And perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter how mutable or permanent your personality/self can be, but how mutable you want it to be.
“What is Self”
Originally posted by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2018-04-10 02:06:34 (8azl14).
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I suppose what I’m driving at is - in order for the mind to will anything, there has to be an impulse or desire “behind” that will.
I don’t agree. If you take this route, then behind that desire there needs to be something else too. Why should that desire be the originating point? You can just keep going backward forever. Then it becomes desires and impulses all the way down and this kind of analysis will leave you in a victim mentality. You’ll see yourself as a victim of some deep past if you think like that. That’s not a healthy way to think.
On the other hand, if you don’t go backward in time, but just rise to higher degrees of abstraction right now, that can be insightful without robbing your sense of agency. So for example, I want a soft chair, but what I really want is bodily comfort. So bodily comfort is a more general, more abstract desire that is “behind” me wanting a soft chair, but this doesn’t necessarily come from my past. It’s right now. This vertical stack of desire gets produced and satisfied now and of course there is also historicity to it, but it’s important not to assign causality to history. At the very least, don’t assign too much causality to it. A hefty chunk of causality has to be your will right now if you don’t want to be a victim. A very empowering view is that you’re constructing your history right now every time you engage in a backward-looking intent. So you’re making and remaking history on the go, creating an illusion of it. I’m not saying that’s how it is. I’m am only saying, this is one way to think.
From the POV of subjective idealism, varying intents produce varying concomitant experiences. So there is not necessarily a right or a wrong way to think about something like the past or the future, but you have to be prepared that with one style of thinking you get experience A, and with another style of thinking you get experience B. As long as you accept that, and take responsibility, then choose the style that suits you best. Your way doesn’t need to be “the only one.” It just needs to work for you.
Similarly, there are many many ways to think about the self. Each style of self-thinking produces its own corresponding experiential result, especially when this style is adhered to over many lifetimes, consistently, or to such a deep level that it transcends time altogether.
There are 3 different topics here which are not wise to mix up:
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What you are.
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What you think you are.
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What others think you are.
3 gets in the way of 2 and 1, and 2 gets in the way of 1. 1 is the most important, 2 is less important and 3 is the least important. This is how I rank them. Because I rank them in this way, because this is my style, I get an experience pattern that corresponds to this style. I am satisfied with this experience pattern and I take responsibility, therefore, I can keep going while being satisfied, and nothing can rattle me. My mind is as sturdy as a fortress that occupies an inaccessible private dimension.
In the deepest sense what mind is and what you are, are the same thing.
Mind knows. You know.
Mind wills. You will.
Mind experiences. You experience.
In other words, “you” are this 3-sided capacity of mind. However, that’s very abstract and it doesn’t have any specific personality. It doesn’t even require a body or a normal space-time environmental perception. So of course you’ll end up thinking things like, “I am tall” or “I am strong” or “I am fast” or “I love SI” and so on. You’ll flesh out your personality with more details. A lot more details than your basic self would require. So it’s like having a hook and then hanging a hat on that hook. The self is like a hook onto which you can hang anything or nothing. You can dress yourself up in as many qualities as you want, or in as few qualities as you want. The fact that you have this choice is saying something about you.
Also, the way you know yourself can never be identical to the way others know you. Because you know yourself through a unique perspective, but so do the others. Therefore, whatever the other people say about you, for metaphysical reasons, has to contain serious distortions and it has to represent more the perspectives of others and their reactions to you, than what you really are. A reaction someone is having to you is based on how you are and how they are, both.
In subjective idealism “the other” is a deliberately poorly controlled aspect of your own mind. If you wish, you can control this aspect to an arbitrary degree, but then it will continue to lose its otherness so long as you do that. If you remove otherness from the seemingly “other” people, you’ll realize you’re completely and totally alone. If you want things to have a seemingly independent life and to offer you some sense of surprise, and if you want to feel as though you live in an environment of some sort, as though something surrounds you, you have to disown an aspect of your own mind and set it loose. Because of this, there is some unavoidable and metaphysically necessitated degree of distortion that you’ll be facing when interacting with either the environment or “the others.”
But even the way you yourself think about yourself is also a choice you have. But you’re not any specific choice, right? If I raise my arm, am I an armupper? If I lower my arm, am I then a downarmer? Am I defined by my choices? Others say “yes” but others are metaphysically committed to distorting my essential character, so their “yes” can be safely deposited into a trash bin. This kind of question is something I have to figure out for myself, by myself. I would suggest the same to you. You have to figure some things out for yourself by yourself. Of course you can talk about them like you’ve done now, but then you have to figure them out in private anyway. How can I force you to see these words in any specific way? You’ll have to decide what’s what for yourself, especially with regard to some things that stand beyond convention.
If you like your personality my default stance is to say, bless you, more power to you. There must be a good reason (or a good set of reasons) why you like it. Keep cultivating the things you like. In your next life your personality will be close to what it is now, because all the things you like cannot vanish when the appearance of the body vanishes. Similarly, you might have noticed that when you dream your basic personality doesn’t necessarily change all that much, right? Under physicalism the body is the causal origin of personality, but in subjective idealism your own mind, which is to say you in your most essential sense, is the causal origin of your entire experience, including the experience you have of your own body, of this world as you know and experience it, and so forth. Because that’s the case, once the body-world pattern becomes incoherent, it will not necessarily damage your commitments, and then in your next life, when a new body-world pattern stabilizes itself, you can continue forward with your commitments and habits. Often times this is not a good thing, because you might also have a habit follow you from life to life that you’ve grown tired of and want to remove, but there it is, still sticking around long past its expiration date.
Like I’ve dreamed myself as a dragon and other sorts of beings before, but guess what? Whether I take this or that shape, my attitude is roughly the same. If I am wearing a dragon body and using dragon abilities, there is still some basic mindseal-ness behind it that is uniquely my own. And yet I also know I am not that. I exist, but I am not anything specific. I can define myself, but I am not permanently chained by those self-definitions. I can change my self-definitions. That’s the sort of power I have. No one can verify my existence for me, and even if they could, it would only undermine and lower the status of what I actually am.
Also, I know myself, but no one else knows me. To others I am just a shape that talks. To myself I am not just a shape that talks. I don’t apprehend myself in the same way others apprehend me. So perspectival thinking is very important for untangling many knots.
Your commitments can be as flexible or as sturdy as you want them to be. If you want to change your personality you can. But if you want to keep it the same, you also can. :) SI is supposed to be like this: empowering. The answer is almost always: you can. Not is or isn’t, but can. Almost always.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-10 13:14:23 (dx3x93v)
If you take this route, then behind that desire there needs to be something else too. Why should that desire be the originating point? You can just keep going backward forever.
We’re agreed here! It’s certainly a bottomless pit and the source of more than one of my headaches.
Then it becomes desires and impulses all the way down and this kind of analysis will leave you in a victim mentality. You’ll see yourself as a victim of some deep past if you think like that. That’s not a healthy way to think.
I don’t… know if I agree with that. I suppose it could happen that way but I don’t think I’m in danger of it. I mean - I’m not saying that you can/should trace all of your proclivities back to their source until you remember that time you were a maltreated Greek slave in a Roman household and realise that’s why you’ve always had a mysterious fear of chickens, or whatever. I think what I’m driving at is more this:
Like I’ve dreamed myself as a dragon and other sorts of beings before, but guess what? Whether I take this or that shape, my attitude is roughly the same. If I am wearing a dragon body and using dragon abilities, there is still some basic mindseal-ness behind it that is uniquely my own.
So this has very much been my experience as well.
I don’t have a word for what you describe here as “some basic mindseal-ness behind it” - or none, anyway, that aren’t loaded with unwanted connotations and semantic baggage.
But it’s what I’m suggesting might be integral to self along with the capacity to know, will and experience, at that most abstract level.
If it isn’t then the process you describe, whereby the self is a hook upon which something or nothing is hung, becomes an extremely arbitrary one. So arbitrary that it might as well not happen, or happen in any fashion at all.
That initial decision to hang something on the hook - where’d that come from?
I realise that I’m posing questions which, as you rightly say, can only be answered on an individual level. And they circle concepts that are so abstract that language really does become grossly inadequate. My interest is (mostly) academic.
From a more practical POV I do find SI extremely empowering - and I can also see how it permits different approaches to these questions, if not answers.
Still. The questions assert themselves when you’re trying to sleep at 3am.
Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2018-04-18 19:52:15 (dxk64nh)
But it’s what I’m suggesting might be integral to self along with the capacity to know, will and experience, at that most abstract level.
What does capacity mean if it’s not exercised at all times? However a capacity that is exercised has to involve itself in some particulars. So I have a capacity to know, but what I actually know right now is specific and from the POV of subjective idealism, ultimately what I know is subject to my own will. I can change the state of my own knowing, if I so choose. It might not be easy, but I can set about it and do it.
So the specifics of personality are subject to commitment. Meaning, they can be essential to me if I commit to them being essential. Or I can change them. It’s up to me. But whether I exercise my capacity in this or that way, there is always some specific way that I am conducting myself. This is how I see it happening for myself.
That initial decision to hang something on the hook - where’d that come from?
You’re assuming there was an initial decision, and you’re asking as if it’s in the past. You’re hanging something on that hook right now. Why are you doing it? You have to ask yourself this question, if you want to ask it at all. If I give you an answer that is right for me, it might be also a good and empowering answer for you as well, or it might not. I am careful with letting others define me and frame me.
I realise that I’m posing questions which, as you rightly say, can only be answered on an individual level. And they circle concepts that are so abstract that language really does become grossly inadequate. My interest is (mostly) academic.
Not mine. I have both theoretical and practical interests. I mostly talk about theory here, but I also use what I talk about for myself in ways that are practical. These are mostly private and I don’t like talking about the details of those too much.
Still. The questions assert themselves when you’re trying to sleep at 3am.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It makes your life interesting and possibly worth living. Right? At least, I want to believe that.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-20 02:52:14 (dxmttzy)
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In my life I have found that it’s important to figure out how and when to be serious and how and when to be playful. A “normal” mentality is extremely serious about convention and what we would call “physical” appearances, and is unserious just about anything else that isn’t either directly those two, or indirectly tightly connected to them. I’ve benefited by replacing most of this kind of seriousness with playfulness, or to phrase it another way, I’ve dialled down this kind of seriousness.
On the other hand I’ve dialled up my seriousness with regard to what by convention may be considered fantastical or impossible, I’ve dialled up my seriousness with regard to my intentionality, and other such things.
That said, this is still an area I have to manage, because if I am dialling up I may overdial at times and have to somewhat dial back down. If I am dialling down I may need to dial it up a tad if I overdial.
So my impression of what you’re saying is that you’re taking your lucid dreaming practice a tad too seriously. It’s good to take such practices as LDing seriously, but there comes a point when it becomes so serious that it becomes like a job or a chore and all the pleasure starts leaking out and then in the long term it is no longer something you can’t wait to do. You may start to feel like you’re forcing yourself to do it, and you might get frustrated and give up.
Although I’ve experienced sleep paralysis a few times, I’ve attached zero importance to it on my end, and plus, I’ve had many, many lucid dreams and relatively consistently too, but never through sleep paralysis. I’ve yet to convert even one SP episode into an LD, and I don’t feel like I am missing anything either. For me SP’s are super rare. Like once every few years rare, but they’re not evenly distributed. On some years I might have a month with 5 of them in a row, and then 5 years with no SPs after that. Or something like that. To me SPs are neither scary nor uncomfortable nor good nor bad nor anything. They’re orthogonal to anything else I am doing and I don’t pay much attention to them. If I had a lot of SPs, I’d then look into converting them. But if my SPs stopped showing up, well fine, then one vector of LDing has vanished, and that’s OK. LDing has many vectors, many entry points. One of those entry points going away is not the end of the world. In a way you’ve benefited, because you never liked SPs all that much and by using them for LDing they went away.
Imagine a situation where someone has nightmares, which are naturally loathsome, but that person learns how to recognize dreaming via a consistent nightmare pattern and learns to become lucid every time a nightmare hits, but then the nightmares stop. Isn’t that good, at least in some ways? The LDing practice has undone the psychic knot that was causing the nightmares, so why not let those go? LDing doesn’t require nightmares, but nightmares can be used as dream signs to cause oneself to recognize dream state. So what if this vector goes away? What’s wrong with not having nightmares?
I see SPs in the same light. If you have them, fine, use them. If not, fine, use something else.
I’ve hardly had SPs and I’ve mostly used MILD for LD-ing. Once upon time I detected that I was having a very good mind weather one night and I tried WILD and succeeded. It was awesome, but it didn’t make me want to do WILD every night either. If I ever detect good WILD-compatible mind weather again, I might do another WILD. I just don’t get obsessed about any technique. If I want to LD, I’ll find a way. I always do. That’s my attitude. If I cannot go through the door, I can go through the window. If not the window, the chimney. If not the chimney, I’ll go through the basement. If I cannot enter through the basement, I’ll enter through the wall. I’ll find a way and it doesn’t have to be a specific way. That’s my attitude.
Now I’ll say something about the more philosophical stuff you’ve said, on page 2.
I’ll proofread these in a bit, so these replies will contain fewer typos and such in about 10-20 minutes.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-10 13:14:09 (dx3x8p6)
I think the way I wrote this post made me sound much more fixated on LD/SP than I am - my bad.
I welcome both when they come and, as I said, I find them instructive. But I see them as a tool, not what I’m ultimately trying to achieve, so when both mostly disappeared from my life, I didn’t give it too much thought, though I certainly welcomed them when they DID reappear from time to time.
It didn’t occur to me until recently, though, that their disappearance might be symptomatic of a block/wrong-thinking in my practice that I hadn’t even been aware of - and which, more importantly, might have wider implications.
So it’s the block itself I’m more concerned with, rather than the SP/LD.
Quick side note on SP - I certainly used to dislike it but this was because I didn’t understand how to physically manage it. Once I realised my autonomic system was delivering more than enough oxygen without me interfering with depth/pace of breathing, it became an interesting experience in its own right, rather than just a gateway to LD. SP for me is accompanied with astral projection-like sensations (not quite true astral projection, which I’ve always sucked at) and a few experiences that sound close to what people experience on low dose DMT.
I’m impressed you’re able to LD via MILD - that is the one technique which has consistently not worked for me. In my mind it’s definitely classified under “tricky.” WILD I generally have success with, but haven’t tried it for a while.
Out of interest, do you tend to LD or try to LD much?
I actually think you have hit on one of the reasons I didn’t care much when I stopped experiencing regular LDs. It wasn’t so much that inducing them was too much like hard work - I think that once I was in them, though, the LDs themselves were becoming too much like hard work, and not nearly enough about play/enjoyment. So I’ll try to remember that next time I’m in one and… manifest a wall of chocolate or something.
Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2018-04-18 15:12:44 (dxjxuz9)
it became an interesting experience in its own right, rather than just a gateway to LD
I see. In that case, yea. If you’re interested in SP specifically for its own sake, you might have to learn how to induce it. I’ve induced a state of sleep paralysis deliberately like maybe once or twice or three times, so I didn’t get into it all that deep.
I thought you wanted to use SP to induce an LD.
I’m impressed you’re able to LD via MILD - that is the one technique which has consistently not worked for me. In my mind it’s definitely classified under “tricky.” WILD I generally have success with, but haven’t tried it for a while.
Interesting. I’ve always thought MILD is for the newbs and WILD is for the experts. LOL WILD so far has just been waaaaay too challenging for me. I even surprised myself that one time I succeeded at WILDing (that actually happened fairly recently). I consider myself fairly advanced once I find myself inside a dream and lucid, but WILDing into an LD from being awake is not my strong point at the moment.
Out of interest, do you tend to LD or try to LD much?
In the past, yes. In recent years, no. The reason for this is because I had extremely intense questions that I intuitively felt were going to be answered through the practice of lucid dreaming. So I was extremely motivated to attain lucidity and I had attained it in relatively short order and then I split my time between having fun and seeking answers to my questions. After messing around with that state I pretty much settled all my questions from back then. That’s why my motivation for LDing dropped. I still occasionally LD.
My main interest shifted into two areas: waking experience and the between-waking-and-dreaming experience. I like to fool around with these two. However, if I am fooling around with the liminal state of being between waking and dreaming, I don’t aim for sleep paralysis. I just let my mind wonder without completely letting go of consciousness, and I get into these short visions and interesting experiences. It’s very much like eyelid gazing while lying in bed. So I don’t think about attaining full paralysis. I might have a very interesting dream vision really briefly, for 2 seconds, but I know I can move my arms and legs if I want to. I don’t need to knock out my body per se, at least, not for what I am doing right now. Although if my body did get into an SP, that would be fine as well, then I can try WILDing again.
I actually think you have hit on one of the reasons I didn’t care much when I stopped experiencing regular LDs. It wasn’t so much that inducing them was too much like hard work - I think that once I was in them, though, the LDs themselves were becoming too much like hard work, and not nearly enough about play/enjoyment. So I’ll try to remember that next time I’m in one and… manifest a wall of chocolate or something.
Yea, it’s important to have fun. :) Otherwise one is tempting a burn out. I always do it like that. That’s why even when I had a serious interest and serious big questions, I still made sure I had fun at least 50% of the time, lol. So I got plenty of flight time and other such things. :) Also, once my interest shifted, I don’t become upset and I don’t think I am worth less now because I don’t LD as much as before. LD-ing is a powerful tool, but whether or not we’re living good lives is not predicated on LD-ing 3 times a week or some such. That’s too close to a gym rat mentality for me. Also, it’s possible to study and benefit from subjective idealism without LD-ing at all. And, if LD-ing was a “must” then it would not be empowering. It’s only empowering if it’s a choice. These are some of the reasons why I respect lucid dreaming and I am eternally grateful for having learned and had lucid dreams and will gladly still have them on occasion, but I don’t obsess about them either. If I have an intense need and only lucid dreams can answer that need, I know I will be able to have plenty of LDs. Until such time, I focus on other things.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-20 03:26:20 (dxmw6lf)
What if, by pursuing this path, I lose my self?
For me personally, if I keep going the way I’m heading, I’ll eventually lose my “self”: this personality and identity that I am. My current self, like yours, is still heavily entrenched in the material world. When I identify with what I am, it’s mostly identifying with a normal person that’s still stuck in the illusion.
As I continue to move forward, I’ll lose everything about me that makes me who I am. I have facets of my personality that I like (which I very much want to keep as well) and I have facets that I’ll be very glad to be rid of. To get to my final goal, I’m okay with throwing my whole identity in the trash and the reason is because I know I can take it out of the trash later if I want to. And I definitely will at some point, probably immediately in fact because I like to keep things slow and steady.
It’s like “would you give up your car (which you really like) for a billion dollars?” Of course. Give up the car, get the billion, buy back that car and buy 10 better cars whilst you’re at it.
The beautiful thing about subjective idealism is that you can have your cake and you can eat it too.
Making your self the anchor is an option though. It’s the opposite of the eradication of the self but it still accomplishes the same goal. Above all, it requires confidence in your abilities. Usually the self is dependent on the material world because we see ourselves as products of the material world rather than the author of it. To make your self the anchor, you need make your self the author of all that is.
There are multiple ways to accomplish this. Lucid dreaming is an obvious one. Other ways just include working your way up from smaller things to bigger things. Working with new models of reality, preferably self created, is useful as well. To really gain a decent level of confidence, you really need to let go. It’s not possible to cling to what’s familiar and expect to make progress. There is a lot of fear and faith involved.
For example, if this is really a lucid dream, would you really be waking up at 7:30 am to go to work? No you wouldn’t, but the fact that you do wake up to go to work or school or wherever, implies that this is not a lucid dream, it implies that you are not an all powerful being, it implies that you’re a self, dependent on a material world.
So there is a leap involved that you need to take in order to progress. And you need to obviously take appropriately sized leaps so as to not go insane or lose all the progress you have.
Even with the erasure of the self, there are leaps that are necessary in order to progress. It all boils down to confidence. If you have confidence, you can do anything.
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-10 20:43:38 (dx4c77x)
Making your self the anchor is an option though. It’s the opposite of the eradication of the self but it still accomplishes the same goal. Above all, it requires confidence in your abilities. Usually the self is dependent on the material world because we see ourselves as products of the material world rather than the author of it. To make your self the anchor, you need make your self the author of all that is.
I agree that it’s a bad idea to make your conception of yourself dependent upon the physical. As for making my self an anchor - I think the biggest motivation for this is that there’s a risk, otherwise, of losing the progress made in this life, and falling back into the habit of physicalism in the next one(s).
Now your intention is obviously to just head that off at the pass by abandoning physicalism before your “physical death” in “this life” - and, buddy, if I’m able, I’ll absolutely be doing the same ;)
But, just in case, I feel a contingency plan is in order.
Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2018-04-18 20:01:04 (dxk6csq)
I have a contingency plan as well, it’s always a good idea. I understand the whole thing about the “succeed before your physical death”, it’s what I’m aiming for. But just in case that doesn’t work for whatever reason, a contingency plan is a good back up.
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-19 01:23:59 (dxkljea)
We need to make a distinction between the self and self-image. The self is the agency that engages in this or another commitment. It’s what does the work. It’s what holds on, or alternatively, lets go. It’s what obsesses, and alternatively, stops obsessing. It’s what is responsible in an ultimate and beyond-conventinal sense for the shape the experience is taking.
The self is not things like “tall”, “honest”, “blue-eyed” and whatnot. These kinds of specific patterns and attachments to them have nothing to do with the self as such. The self is also that which doesn’t have to entangle itself in that way.
The important point is this: how to retain responsibility while also gaining flexibility.
The problem with a conventional view of the self is that it’s tied up in the body and the specifics of a very narrow personality, and as a result of this tie the perceived capabilities are very limited. So for example, if I am a fleshy body, and this body has well-understood parameters, then of course I cannot exceed those parameters. So a very common reaction to this is to denounce the self. But the problem here is that the self is also the origin point of responsibility and empowerment and freedom. It’s that which could do something about the problems one faces in life. So, if I have a habit to hit my thumb while I am hammering a nail, I am also that which can end this habit. So if I denounce myself in order to put some distance between something (not me, right?) and my habits, I also weaken the sense of agency and power I have over those habits.
Basically how we talk about this is important. The self is not the problem and what you’re talking about here is not exactly right, because you’re not going to dissolve yourself. You’ll dissolve your own attachment to a fixed image of what you believe(d) you are (or were). That’s what you’ll dissolve. And once you’re done, there you will be, still remaining, still yourself, but minus that fixation, and as you said you’ll have even more options then and not fewer. Far from ending yourself, you’ll in effect expand your ability to be and act. You’ll dissolve not so much yourself as your chains.
What’s hard for people to realize is that it’s not the fleshy body that acts. Holding the body as the origin point and as the causal center of one’s experience (brain causing mind), that’s physicalism.
Some people identify with certain patterns and habits so strongly that once those habits and patterns go missing, the person believes they’ve died. But if you’re having any experience at all, and noticing that a certain pattern is temporarily missing is an experience, it means you’re alive, right? :) So obviously, very obviously, the so-called “ego death” is very much you being alive and not dying.
It’s also important to note that it is only from the POV of positively knowing what your usual patterns are, that you can notice those same patterns as “missing.” So anyone who experienced their “ego missing” clearly knew what it was that they’d ordinarily expect to find and weren’t finding just then. It’s only if you know what your car keys look like that you can experience those same keys as possibly missing. If anyone experiences their ego missing, of course on a subtle level that ego is very much not missing at all. If you think you’ve lost your sense of self, how do you know you’ve lost it if you don’t know what your sense of self is? Or how can you both know what your sense of self is and also lose it at the same time? This is why I seriously dislike all the self-denouncing and ego-bashing talk.
I’ve had many many experiences like this, where some or even all the aspects that I customarily hold as “myself” in a conventional sense have gone missing from my experience. At that time, I knew full well that I haven’t died at all, but only a false image of me has been temporarily suppressed thanks to episodic concentration. Once episodic concentration wears out, baseline concentration takes over again and it’s back to the baseline habitual pattern. So I’ve had moments where I have intensely focused on certain ideas, like stopping time, or finding my true core, or letting go of anything that can be let go, etc. This focus is mental effort and once the effort wears out, the effortless habitual pattern is back, and here I am like this again.
Altering the baseline concentration is the key, but to do that, far from letting go of oneself one needs to have an immensely stable and secure sense of self, so secure, that you don’t even think you depend on something like “a universe” or an external anything. Then acting from that immense space of personal security it becomes possible to let go some patterns that would have been deemed life-preserving in the past.
Basically security is a need that has to be fulfilled. For a conventional being taking care of their so-called “physical” body is what fulfills the need for personal security. Something else has to fill that role first, and then it becomes possible to no longer revolve everything one does around the body, and also at that time, the body can be reconfigured to abide new rules and new patterns, because the relationship changes from “this thing called ‘body’ is me” to “this is an experience I am having but I am not this experience.” In order to say that “I am not this experience” I have to exist first. Otherwise who is saying so?
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-11 08:40:37 (dx5jhu1)
You’ll dissolve your own attachment to a fixed image of what you believe(d) you are (or were). That’s what you’ll dissolve. And once you’re done, there you will be, still remaining, still yourself, but minus that fixation, and as you said you’ll have even more options then and not fewer. Far from ending yourself, you’ll in effect expand your ability to be and act. You’ll dissolve not so much yourself as your chains.
So by self, I’m meaning what I perceive as my current point of control. It is the self that I identify with. It is the self that is made up of a personality, of human attributes, etc. Of course what I truly am, is not this self. I am the entire scene, I am the canvas upon which experience is drawn on. I agree that the dissolving is a dissolving into your “true self”, by removing identification with the “smaller self” and identifying with the entire self. I am not fundamentally losing myself, but I am losing the thing that is writing this right now.
Altering the baseline concentration is the key, but to do that, far from letting go of oneself one needs to have an immensely stable and secure sense of self, so secure, that you don’t even think you depend on something like “a universe” or an external anything. Then acting from that immense space of personal security it becomes possible to let go some patterns that would have been deemed life-preserving in the past.
Letting go of oneself, if done correctly, will lead to an immensely stable and secure sense of self that is completely independent of any experience that one is currently having. Instead of identifying with the content of the experience, you will identify with the context of the experience. When you are the context of the experience, you are not dependent on anything. All experience can pass by and you will not be affected, because you are the context of that experience, you are the house in which the experience sits in. The experience depends on you, instead of the conventional way of you depending on the experience. To cultivate a supremely powerful self, one must cease identifying with any and all experiences and instead identify with that which holds the experience. One should not allow experiences to dictate their path to success. So many people make that mistake, they allow their experiences to dictate their results, instead of dictating the results and allowing the appropriate experiences to occur. My path consists of rejecting all experiences, I’m not interested in what my experiences show me. In order to reject everything, I must let go of all of it.
Edit: I still haven’t worked out how it is you plan on getting to where you want to be. Are you focusing on cultivating your desired end state by gradually building up momentum to bigger things? In a previous discussion you said it could take you multiple life times and I said I planned on getting my cake in this life time. Our means to ends are polar opposites but they end up at the same end state it would seem.
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-12 23:33:57 (dx8p5th)
Letting go of oneself, if done correctly, will lead to an immensely stable and secure sense of self that is completely independent of any experience that one is currently having. Instead of identifying with the content of the experience, you will identify with the context of the experience. When you are the context of the experience, you are not dependent on anything. All experience can pass by and you will not be affected, because you are the context of that experience, you are the house in which the experience sits in. The experience depends on you, instead of the conventional way of you depending on the experience. To cultivate a supremely powerful self, one must cease identifying with any and all experiences and instead identify with that which holds the experience. One should not allow experiences to dictate their path to success. So many people make that mistake, they allow their experiences to dictate their results, instead of dictating the results and allowing the appropriate experiences to occur. My path consists of rejecting all experiences, I’m not interested in what my experiences show me. In order to reject everything, I must let go of all of it.
With this explanation I have to agree.
The problem is, people rarely explain it as well as you just did, and as a shorthand (without that elaboration of yours) most of the anti-self talk ends up being mostly disempowering and wrongheaded.
So I agree with the essence of what you’re saying but I am paying attention to what is skilful and what isn’t.
The problem is that the self refers to two different things:
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Personality, including but not limited to the bodily shape which is a specific recognizable pattern of a little 4 limbed, one-headed creature.
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The fact of personal responsibility, and will.
How can one contemplate dumping or distancing from the #1, while not only keeping, but strengthening the #2? That’s the pickle. Because “the self” is a shorthand for both of those, I think the anti-self talk ends up throwing away the baby along with the bathwater.
I prefer to tell people that they aren’t who they believe they are, instead of saying they don’t exist, or telling them to commit spiritual suicide, or something like that. A lot of the anti-self talk sounds like an admonition for spiritual suicide. I don’t want to promote any notion of spiritual suicide. I don’t even want to go near it. I want to promote personal freedom and expansiveness that transcends convention, at least at a secret level.
At the level of convention I promote cooperation and balancing of responsibilities (as opposed to lumping all the responsibility on any single person for everything). Of course this sub is not about anything related to convention, but I figure I’ll mention it briefly. So inside the convention we each have to do our part, and share the responsibility together. But outside convention, where this esoteric stuff fits in, there is you as God, basically, and you as God should take 100% of responsibility for everything. But again, that’s outside convention. We cannot run a reasonable society or government based on this idea, lol. That’s why it’s esoteric and is for some individuals who so-to-say have the “karma” (intent, beyond conventional aspirations) for it.
I still haven’t worked out how it is you plan on getting to where you want to be. Are you focusing on cultivating your desired end state by gradually building up momentum to bigger things? In a previous discussion you said it could take you multiple life times and I said I planned on getting my cake in this life time.
I’m lessening my identification with the body without abandoning my responsibility for the body. So like the painting is not the painter, but the painter is still responsible for what’s in the painting. I am not this body, but I am responsible for how this body manifests. That’s the relationship I cultivate now. This body is an image I am producing and this image is not me, but since I am in fact producing it, I better produce something that suits my interests. Of course the so-called “world” is also an image I am producing, but less consciously. Although the body also has many subconscious processes that govern its apparent function, but my own world-shaping processes are less conscious and are more hidden than even the subconscious ones that govern the mental fabrication that we know as “the human body.”
So I revisit this topic in contemplation over and over, repeatedly, for many years. The result is that I am gradually changing how I think and relate to this experience. As a result, when I experience a blackout (as one example), I feel like the blackout is not happening to me. It’s like watching a movie about a blackout. In the past I would have identified with that experience of a blackout and would have instantly thought, “I am blacking out!” Now I instantly think, “So this is an experience of a blackout, and I am not blacking out. On the contrary, I am very conscious and alert, and I am looking at this blackout experience as though it were a coin in the palm of my hand, able to scrutinize it freely.” This is evidence that what I am doing is having a desired effect. I’m moving in the right direction. Of course I do not let my experience tell me how things are, so I don’t mean “evidence” in the sense that it’s guiding my thinking. I am basically designing my experience and I don’t treat any experience as informative. All experiences are merely suggestive and that’s why I can shape them. That’s why it’s OK for me to change how I experience blackouts (as one example) and the meanings I assign with regard to such experiences.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-13 00:10:53 (dx8rclm)
I prefer to tell people that they aren’t who they believe they are, instead of saying they don’t exist, or telling them to commit spiritual suicide, or something like that. A lot of the anti-self talk sounds like an admonition for spiritual suicide.
I think all the ego death stuff is just born out of misinterpretation and uncertainty about one truly wants. They’re listening to other people who they view as being more experienced than them and they don’t ever really forge a personalized, independent path for themselves.
There’s also the fact that weirdway/oneirosophy/subjective idealism is a deviation from usual spiritual paths. Most people who are spiritually inclined and motivated to pursue the path are not thinking beyond enlightenment. So they stop at “self eradication” and think that’s it. There’s the classic saying “before enlightenment, chop wood, after enlightenment, chop wood”. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this if they want to do it like that, but it’s why a lot of people think self eradication is the ultimate and final goal. They’re not thinking omnipotence or deification, they’re thinking passivity and stillness. Many don’t realize that omnipotence is a legitimate option after enlightenment, and for the normal practitioner whose aiming to reach enlightenment and cease suffering, then that’s probably for the best anyway as it might lead to distraction if they doesn’t fully understand what it entails.
As a result, when I experience a blackout (as one example), I feel like the blackout is not happening to me. It’s like watching a movie about a blackout. In the past I would have identified with that experience of a blackout and would have instantly thought, “I am blacking out!” Now I instantly think, "So this is an experience of a blackout, and I am not blacking out.
Sounds very similar to what I’m doing. The key is ceasing to identify with any object or content within experience and identifying with the context of it all. Would you say your everyday, conscious experience has been permanently altered?
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-14 12:10:33 (dxc1sqd)
There’s also the fact that weirdway/oneirosophy/subjective idealism is a deviation from usual spiritual paths.
Well, oneirosophy has deleted the word “subjective” from their sidebar, from what I can recall. It was committed to being subjective only so long as I was still there.
I very much prefer how I have explained things here to anything else, but I won’t go so far as to say only I have expressed similar ideas. And there are many publicly available instructions “out there” that if not postulating outright omnipotence certainly point in that direction, in the direction of personal empowerment. Just about anything with active magick is in that direction. Any mystics that have asserted themselves as God (there were more than a few), or have asserted the reader of their ideas as God, have been pointing in that direction.
So for me, I really do like how I have formulated things and I use what I talk about myself, and I am happy. I have shared it in the hopes others can stimulate themselves to make for themselves something which they too can be happy with. I just use whatever I talk about. But for others what I talk about can be raw material that could be processed into something they might want to use. I’ve made this known to make people’s lives better, but I also realize what I talk about is not for everyone, hence the “low key” approach.
Would you say your everyday, conscious experience has been permanently altered?
Yes. I am not the same as I used to be and the world is also not the same either. Nothing is the same anymore.
I like the new way much better. I am certain I got the principles right and now I am just getting more comfortable and hammering out some details. I see a life of independence in the future. Gone will be the days of me begging others for anything, or the days of me lookout out at this big appearance and fearing it will overwhelm me like a tsunami. I mean, I still have some residual fears like that, but I feel they’re steadily and consistently receding and the way I construe meanings and relate to my experience is changing in durable ways, slowly.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-17 00:12:18 (dxgbdrl)
And there are many publicly available instructions “out there” that if not postulating outright omnipotence certainly point in that direction, in the direction of personal empowerment. Just about anything with active magick is in that direction.
Definitely. Both magick and meditation/spiritual practice can be highly intertwined, the option is always there.
I have shared it in the hopes others can stimulate themselves to make for themselves something which they too can be happy with. I just use whatever I talk about. But for others what I talk about can be raw material that could be processed into something they might want to use.
It’s always neat to have these types of communities where we can talk about specifics on the same wavelength. Spirituality is a massive field and there’s so many subsections and interpretations to be explored, specialized communities are particularly useful in going deeper down the rabbit hole.
I am certain I got the principles right and now I am just getting more comfortable and hammering out some details. I see a life of independence in the future. Gone will be the days of me begging others for anything, or the days of me lookout out at this big appearance and fearing it will overwhelm me like a tsunami.
I’ve got all the tools that I need and now I’m in the process of actualizing it. It’s just about staying disciplined at this point. I’m also looking forward to the days of proper independence, it should be good.
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-18 01:11:52 (dxih8su)
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