weirdway

In order to take full control of the dream, you need to have a big ego. This doesn't mean a big ego in the usual sense. It doesn't mean you have to be rude or narcissistic, as is commonly associated with a big ego.

In this case, a big ego means confidence that everything in your experience is under your control. This sounds contradictory to the whole spirituality/metaphysics thing, and in a way it is. But it depends on what your end goals are.

If you want to cease suffering, an ego will only hold you back. And in that case, controlling the dream wouldn't be on your list of priorities anyway.

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.

This also means that you shouldn't be overly forceful or brutish either, because that might imply that without forcing it, you are not capable. You just have to commit and leave it at that.

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.

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".

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.

Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2017-09-10 19:02:10 (dmt25i6)

Here’s an example of what I was talking about before /u/mindseal. I was talking about how probability alteration magic spells that don't involve more work/involvement seemed problematic to me somehow. I think I’ve got an example to explain what I mean. Take the idea of scarcity v. abundance. Lots of new age spirituality people talk about the need to create an ‘abundance’ mindset to replace your ‘scarcity’ mindset to get more of what you and everyone else wants out of the world. To bring more abundance to yourself and to others. This is a form of increasing the likelihood of finding/getting wealth.

So let’s talk about how this might work. Maybe it’s about something mundane like building confidence in oneself, but let’s dismiss that option for now because it is unrelated. Why do we have a scarcity mentality? Easy. Because we believe that this is a world with scarce resources and scarce space. There is a limited amount and the resources can be drained. So, assuming we maintain belief in the world ("the world" being a more long-term generally stable environment), how could you make the world abundant? Again, easy. Eliminate scarce resources by manifesting magically that the natural world is effectively infinite and has infinite varieties of infinite resources (including things we conventionally think of as requiring human labor right now) just hanging out right on the surface of the planet. You can go and just pluck a laptop and a mexican food lunch up off a plant in the park. That’s a real world of abundance with no scarcity. One other alternative would be to imagine that the natural world has abundant raw materials but that work may still need to be done – but you could create material abundance for all if you magically manifest a world where there are machines that do all the work and produce infinite finished goods for all of us as much as we want.

There are also two other ways you might change the world to make it abundant just for yourself without making it abundant for others: you could magically manifest the world the same as it is, but where every person obsessively loves you and wants to serve you so that the labor is always done by others to serve you without any effort or conflict. The other way is to keep the world as it is and magically manifest yourself as that one lucky person who just ‘happens’ to almost always have really great things happen to them.

So, mostly I’m saying that probability magic isn’t just a snap your fingers and change your experience thing without addressing some deeper beliefs about how you are manifesting your experience, or living with cognitive dissonance.

Mostly probability magic about the world will create major conflicts with the way we ordinarily think of the world. Only the luck option seems small and relatively easy without reprogramming our whole idea of how the world works, and even that necessitates eliminating the ‘randomization’ aspect of luck which may have other deeper beliefs that structure it that would become de-structured and in need of examination. I guess what I’m saying is that a lot of this stuff has deeper implications than it appears on the surface and is magic that would likely take as much or probably more work than something like healing the body from disease.

What do you think?

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-03 05:39:21 (dmh9n2g)

Just a few random thoughts I've jotted down that don't warrant a full post.

• "fighting back against streamlining"

Supposedly as you get older your brain prunes back synapses and neurons, preserving the pathways you use frequently, ditching those you don't. This leaves you with a brain that performs familiar tasks more efficiently but is slower to innovate and learn new things, or recollect apparent minutiae.

That, at any rate, seems to be one of the current physicalist takes on ageing and the brain. I'm pretty disenchanted with the idea of losing any mental functionality, so 'mind as a physical object' is one of the mental habits I try to actively subvert on a daily basis.

As such, I've been reflecting on the difference in how I think now compared to how I used to think, particularly in childhood. A few differences occurred to me. For example, my mind generates less nonsense now (nonsense is used here non-pejoratively; I literally mean that which does not make sense in the context of the apparently stable physical world). As a child I can remember my mind being a ferment of weird images, ideas and imagined conversations. It was like a part of it was dedicated to spontaneously churning up weird stuff, constantly. Moreover, it was effortless - I put it in a slightly different category to imagination, which is more active. This was almost like a viewing window into the subconscious.

Anyway, it doesn't happen so much now - or so I thought. My mental patterns are pretty direct and logical, very much based in common sense. As a teenager I had an almost physical reaction to science and empirical reasoning; it was anathema to me. I could practically feel my soul recoiling from it. Suffice to say, I studied science at university and am now working in a scientific field eyeroll. I think there was an element of “know thy enemy” about immersing myself in the scientific method, but whatever my subconscious motivation, it's had an unintended effect on my mental patterns.

So when I paid attention to my mind, I realised that the ferment of nonsense is still there, but it's stifled. As I’m going about my day to day life and my mind throws up something bizarre, my ingrained habit is to slap it down almost before it reaches a conscious level of thought. I’m so quick to assess a thought as helpful/unhelpful, rational/irrational, likely/unlikely that “useless” thoughts are gone almost before I’m aware that I’ve had them.

I think it’s similar to the way that, when you half glimpse something but fail to take in all the details, your mind auto-completes the details you missed for you, and makes you see whatever it believes the object was most likely to be. That brown smudge seen out of the corner of your eye as you’re driving along might be an owl – or a dragon, or a brownie or whatever. But as long as you train/allow your mind to default to “stick!” that’s all you’re going to see – unless you free up your mind and look closer.

So I’m trying to stop this mental habit I have of slapping down spontaneous strange thoughts before I even have a chance to recognise them. I hate the mundaneness of this world, but I’ve unintentionally made my own mind one of its most mundane corners.

(I have more random jottings but this one ended up way longer than I intended, so I’ll post them separately.)

Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2017-08-09 14:47:27 (dld6e0m)

Recently I've been adding just a pinch of magic/manifestation to my day to day life. Really nothing special from an outside POV but it's enough to get me really excited and to be a start of moving myself out of the intellectual understanding and agreeing phase and into the practicing and integrating into my life phase. Mostly things like using my will and imagination to change my mood, or to aid in minor healing, or to remind myself of goals. Small fry stuff. But feeling the urge to use my mind regularly to solve problems, even only ones of a limited kind right now, because I actually believe in the power of my mind is an exciting thing to finally see starting to happen.

One interesting barrier I've noticed. When I did Chaos Magic I sometimes would do what I will call "probability magic". So I would basically make certain worldly things more likely to influence my day to day life beneficially - things that were still physically possible in a certain sense but which were unlikely and supposed to be determined by outside events. Such as: finding a job quicker or better, coming across money, meeting friends and lovers, etc. Presently, though, I don't find myself doing much magic of this type. Not because of physicalism, strictly speaking. But of a certain kind of rigid post-physicalist idealism in my mind.

I tend to think that the whole world is unconsciously being manifested in my mind. But I think I mostly maintain unconsciously that this is happening in a very specific and precise kind of way. So the objects and people and forces that exist in this world are all specifically and carefully maintained by my deeply unconscious mind in this way of thinking. But, this means that probability magic can't work, or at least in the same way, which is why I think I don't do it much right now. This view would necessitate a much more severe kind of creation/destruction/telekinetic kind of magic to adjust the locations and existence of objects and people to adjust probabilities.

I think there might be an alternative view where the world is actually maintained in my subconscious mind in a kind of ambiguous, vague way where my subconscious mind maintains some general abstract facts and probabilities about various potential phenomena but then those only get actualized and specified at the moment of experience, so to speak. This view would allow for easier probability style magic without necessitating so much telekinetic physics-breaking stuff. But, this view also makes the world seem a lot less real and more gooey and fake.

What are your thoughts or experiences with these sorts of things?

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-08-06 08:11:52 (dl7ufty)

How would you reconcile omnipotence and companionship with conventional beings? Do you think the difference would bother you in anyway? Do you think it might affect your relationships?

I bet Bill Gates sometimes yearns for someone who is an "equal". Someone who is as powerful as he is, as rich as he is. And there are people in the world who exist that can rival his power, whether they are billionaires or politicians or whoever. But most of the people he comes into contact with are not quite as rich and powerful as he is. Even in his inner circle, I bet there's a hierarchy. He could be the kindest, most generous, most friendly guy and that unspoken power hierarchy will still be present. I wonder if he sometimes wishes that he could be 'normal'.

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.

The entity knows that if he wants to be life long companions with these 2 people, he needs to help them along with their own spiritual journey and make them equals.

If you were in the position of this entity, would you make them equals? Let's say that you really like your new friends and enjoy their company and you want them to be individuals with their own agency, even if it means that they'll eventually part ways with you. Would you want to bring them onto your level?

Or would you seek your friends in an alternate universe where they have already reached "godhood"? Thus eliminating any "mentor-student" relationship and allowing you to see them as true equals. How would you reconcile the fact that you manifested them? Would it still feel authentic? Or would you not even entertain the idea of having equals?

And finally, if you ever came across an "equal" in your travels (a subjective idealist or some sort of enlightened spiritual practitioner) through pure chance, as in you never manifested an encounter, and you ended up really enjoying their company, would you join up with them or leave them behind and move on alone?

Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2017-09-23 21:22:45 (dne6vfr)