(page 2)

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:

1. What you are.

2. What you think you are.

3. 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)

(page 1)

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)

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)