goldisheavy

People often wonder if they can find someone who will demonstrate psychic powers. An example would be having an idea that you'll go to some location and a wonderful, amazing, magnetic person at that secret location will start to do strange things. In this case you might think of yourself as a passive observer and the person you want to observe as the doer of psychic powers. And people also wonder if others can observe and confirm certain manifestations. For example you're meditating and you viscerally feel that your body is lifting off the floor. You feel the sense of weight and pressure are lost and your body appears to hover 1 foot off the ground. Then you wonder if you weren't alone in the room, what would a stranger observe? Would they see you hovering? Or would they see your body sitting on the floor even as you subjectively experience yourself hovering? And the answer to this can be anything depending on what's called "karmic vision." Briefly "karmic vision" is a type of experience you are most likely to experience based on your commitments, habits, expectations, hopes, fears and so on. Below I will talk about how this visionary process relates to the visionary processes of other beings. First, I assume you already understand that the mind is a primordial capacity to know, to experience and to will. I assume you understand that the mind doesn't originate in the brain and is not started at the birth of the human body. If you don't get why that is so, you'll probably be confused by what I will say next. So this post is not for everyone. Now, those who are still with me, you should realize that people are not things. This means that people are not concrete objects that exist definitively from their own side. People exist more as possible points of view. Because the possible points of view are infinite, we say that the sentient beings are infinite in number. This applies to others and to oneself as an individual being. But at the same time, everyone who sees this post is more than just a point of view. What is this "more"? It's a capacity. So you can think of yourself as a capacity which can potentially know, experience and will anything at all, but right now your experience is primarily occupied by this post and the associated thoughts, imagery, hopes and fears. And because individual capacities are not things, and they do not have existence that can be concretely parametrized, the relationships between them are not established in any kind of objective sense. I see my own human body and I know my inner being. Then I look around and I see bodies similar to mine. Then I assume those bodies which resemble mine have inner subjectivities similar to mine because I know I could, in principle, be experiencing from that other POV. So if I am in the "same" room as Sally, and we both look at the "same" table, I know that in principle I could be where Sally is, I could have had Sally's parents, Sally's thoughts, Sally's hopes and fears, I could be looking at the table from Sally's angle, and so on. In other words, in principle, my subjectivity could have been Sally's instead of my own. But currently it is my own as goldisheavy. Then Sally looks at goldisheavy and thinks the exact same thing but in reverse. At the same time goldisheavy and Sally can talk and they will understand each other, so while they are different, they're not so different that they can't even talk. So there is both an element of communion and an element of differentiation in that setup. This is why the mind is ultimately uncountable. If we are unwilling to make assumptions, we cannot say definitively whether there is one mind or many. There are very good reasons for both positions, and there are reasons to maintain that the mind completely escapes counting and is open to experiencing in different modalities. Thus regarding the various individuals as having their own minds is only a convention. But if we maintained that only one individual had a mind, that too would be only a convention with exactly the same amount of substance as the first one: none. That's what it means for the mind to be "open." The mind is radically open and it can experience itself as a lone being, or as a being among beings, as everything, or as nothing, among a few possibilities. And without resorting to some sort of personal preference there's no way to affirm any of these modalities as the modality. But the sublime view is knowing that all these modalities are possible and that if it were not for bias they would all be impossible to compare in terms of which modality is more true. So if you understand this abstract explanation, then a couple of practical implications should become evident. 1. Whether or not you meet people with amazing powers depends as much on you as it depends on the other people. Crude analogy: if I want to meet a mountaineer, then my chances increase if I move away from the planes and into the mountains. You know how a lot of people who hold physicalist commitments demand "show me some magic as proof"? This is like having a commitment to living on the planes while demanding that someone demonstrate some mountain climbing. Well, before you witness real mountain climbing, even if you can't scale the highest peaks yourself, you need to move into the mountains somewhere and then you can watch people climb. So typically mountain climbers are the people who are most likely to witness other people doing mountain climbing. This is a crude analogy that should not be taken literally, because I am using materialistic language to explain something that is profoundly immaterial. 2. Whether or not others can see you perform magic depends on whether or not you've involved (or allowed) other people into your mentality. This can be called "joint commitment." 3. Subjectivities converge and diverge all the time. When the person's body dies, that person's subjectivity diverges from our waking experience. When the person's body is born, that person's subjectivity converges with our waking experience. Dreaming subjectivity diverges from waking subjectivity during sleep (but converges with other subjectivities that are present in the dream as dream characters at the same time). Subjectivity can diverge in meditation during absorption. Subjectivities diverge when the human bodies disperse geographically. However living in close quarters is no guarantee of subjective convergence. It's possible to live in proximity with others and yet mentally be a loner who lives in one's own universe. Weirdly it's possible to be very far away from someone else, but remain in a convergent state with that someone else (most often this happens with the newly separated lovers). Subjective convergence can be arbitrarily weird, and so, for example, you can have dreams that you share with the people you know from the waking experience. This converging and diverging is not an all or nothing proposition. It is gradual and it comes in degrees. With enough subjective convergence it's possible to read the thoughts of other people and sense their desires, because these people are so close to your own subjectivity. And another mind-blowing idea is that subjective convergence doesn't have to be completely reciprocal. So for example, if I am witnessing someone on Earth while in an astral body, that someone may not see me -- there is weak reciprocity in this case, assuming I identified some features of that person's waking experience in a way that the other person agrees with (otherwise there'd be no convergence at all). So the most basic joint commitment we have here is that we share the planet Earth. This level of convergence by itself is not sufficient to guarantee anything other than we can bump into bodies that look like ours while walking around the planet. To experience a connection more meaningful than bodies bumping into each other in space, deeper levels of convergence are necessary. So in our case, besides all of us favoring Earth, we also all like Buddhism, for example, and thus we are here together. So, if your mind is flexible enough to generate an extraordinary perception that subjectively feels real and visceral, and you have friends who believe such things are possible, and are joined with you in your commitments in a deep way, then these friends can observe you doing miraculous things. So besides the joint commitment that results in a very close convergence of subjectivities, some mental flexibility is needed for both beings, the performer and the observer. The observer is not passive even while appearing passive, but is actually creating the experience from his or her side by maintaining an allowing and affirmatively expectant mind. And the performer should realize that while subjectively they do everything, if they want to think of the other person as a true and worthy individual, then they have to allow that the other individual is a participant and not a passive receptacle. If you think that beings are like things or objects, then what I said will appear paradoxical. But if you understand that a being is not actually a thing, there is no paradox.

No one can empower you. When you understand this, that's called "empowerment." When you don't understand this, that's called "disempowerment."

Cool, so Malcom doesn't believe in placing restrictions on texts! That's the only thing that really matters. He also happens to think someone has misunderstood a text, which is not at all surprising. People each understand texts they read subjectively, from the POV of their inner and outer circumstances. I personally don't think there is one correct understanding of any text, but instead I think there is a range of skillful interpretations, and the less skillful ones, all appearing on a continuum of interpretation and understanding. So it's not a sharp distinction of "you got it, and you didn't get it" and not "right/wrong." It's a continuum of skillfulness, subjective, and there is an entire range of skillfulness as opposed to a single point.

It appears that Daozang, the Daoist Canon, contains approximately 1400 texts, which is a lot of material. We tend to get translations into English of the main ones, like Daodejing, Zhuangzi, and Liezi and some others. It appears to be some kind of sport to translate Daodejing in particular, which to my mind is insane from a cultural POV, although it's probably lucrative. Does anyone know of an effort, possibly academic, to translate the entire canon into English? If such an effort exists, do they have a web site?

How do you use this knowledge in day to day practice?

Nowhere. The mind cannot be located because location is itself is a cognition. Cognitions cannot and do not explain the context they arise from, but on the contrary, cognitions require context to be meaningful. So not only do cognitions not explain anything outside of themselves, but it's worse, because cognitions themselves need to be explained, and they depend on context for their own meanings. This context that cognitions depend on is a volitional formation of the mind. It's 100% immaterial. Technically things can't be said to have or not to have mind. Mind is not like an optional attachment to a vacuum cleaner. I'll put it this way. Does dryness have water or only wetness? What has water and what doesn't? Well, this is a confused question. Water has the property of wetness. It's silly to talk about wetness having and sometimes not having water. It's the same with the mind. Cognitions are to mind what wetness is to water. The mind is a greater context, whereas individual cognitions are specific, delineated, distinguishable events. So when you recognize the distance between the chair and a table, that's a cognition of distance. To experience this you need a mind. The mind as such is not an actual experience. Instead the mind experiences cognitions like thoughts, distances, hopes, fears, pressure (felt as weight, mass, inertia), expectations being fulfilled or frustrated, etc. Nothing that the mind experience is mind as such. Instead the mind experiences consequences of its own functioning, but never directly itself as an object. Similarly, no specific posture of my index finger is my index finger. If I hold my index finger in the shape of a hook, I cannot say, lo, this hook is what is my finger. That's nonsense. Likewise, when the mind undergoes any cognition whatsoever, whatsoever, without exception, that cognition is always optional the way a hooked finger is just one of millions of ways of presenting your finger to awareness. So no specific deformation of a finger is uniquely the finger to the exclusion of all else. Cognitions are like the deformations of mind, and none of them represent the mind. The brain as something experiencable is not representative of the mind, because it's just one of many possible deformations of the mind's experience. So the various states of mind are not closer to the mind or further away from it. In fact, the states of the mind cannot be related by distance to the mind at all. They can't be said to emerge from the mind, as if leaving the mind behind. They can't be said to stay in the mind, as if contained by some kind of membrane. States of mind don't stay and they don't leave. We just can't even talk about them in those terms if we want to be precise. This doesn't matter. Depending on how you consider things, your experience of life will change. That's what's important. What everything is or isn't is of no value at all. What's valuable is this: "What can I get away with?" That's something we need to investigate. If at the bottom of it all it turns out there is a series of infinitely descending turtles, who cares? The whole point of making the study of mind pivotal is precisely because we no longer want to think what is behind the mind, if anything. We give up on that idea for various reasons. What determines the solidity of particles? More particles?

It's not made of anything. I suppose I can say it's made of questions, hopes, fears, imagination, experience, etc. None of those are physical. If course not. If thought was physical, it would have weight, length, inertia, wavelength, etc. It's not physical.

Considerations are not physical things. An example of a physical thing is a chair. An example of a consideration is "I need to go bowling soon."

It's impossible to know what is functional and what isn't. If you judge function by things like taking a shower, shaving in the morning for men, putting makeup on for women, going to work and maintaining a "respectable" career, having a home and paying for it, going to sleep every night, eating on time, etc... then you need to be aware that many sages were not functional in this way. A lot of the activity that we usually consider functional is the activity of maintaining a human body and the activity of maintaining one's reputation. Such things are necessary to live in the world of convention. Once you reject the world of convention, once you realize you no longer want to be human, your idea about what is functional and what is dysfunctional can and should change. Sometimes gradually. Sometimes drastically. Most people on our path don't want to be humans forever.

From my own experience I've discovered that I needed a new way to find stability. Previously stability was assured in my mind by my willing and unbending tacit adherence to the idea that there really was an objective, solid, unchanging, eternal realm "out there", and that no matter what I thought or did, it would always be the same familiar place. This had comforting qualities. I actually believed I lived inside a Universe, and I thought that the Universe was a constant and real place outside of me where my human body was located, etc. Well now that belief system is on its way out. And so my previous source of stability (and familiarity) is gone with it. My new source of stability is my own will. I've done a lot of work on the nature of my own volition/intent. I've realized that my will has no starting or finishing point, and that its apparently vigorous activity is only vigorous from a very detailed perspective, but when taking a long view, it's very stable. I've realized that will is one unbroken flow without segmentation. I've realized that intent is layered, and this layering brings all kinds of complexity into how intent manifests. (An example of the layering would be playing a game where the will to play the game is one layer, and how you choose the individual moves inside the game is another layer. The layer of volition where you choose the moves will make no sense without the supporting layer of volition where you are committed to playing a game.) I realized the previous stability of the seemingly external and seemingly self-existent objective realm was actually a reflection of my own will's stability. What I experienced as the stability of the world was me disowning the function of my own volition, basically. So my new stability comes from trusting myself. I know I can always trust myself. I know my volition ultimately makes no mistakes. It always moves perfectly and it's always in a fulfilled state at the highest level of insight. This is something I've been learning to trust more and more. It's a completely inner, secret reliance. And there is a meditation that goes along with this. It is calm and effortless abiding in whatever situation I am in, while knowing my will is timeless and perfect, and I am always, always doing the right thing, because ultimately there is no external angle of viewing from which what I am doing can be corrected in an objective manner. When I abide in this way, I feel like my being pools itself together like a lake that's getting deeper and deeper. I feel my mind pooling and crystallizing itself in my body. All points of tension relax and go away. Anxiety goes away. Uncertainty and doubt go away. I experience nothing short of lordliness at this point, and a complete and total solitude -- I am alone. In this state I am alone. There is nothing and no one else. Oh how I used to fear being alone. How I used to fear not being known, not being seen, heard, understood, acknowledged. Especially being understood was a big craving for me. This is where my ability to explain things so well comes from! I want to be understood and I could not tolerate the idea that maybe I cannot be understood. The notion that I pass through time in perpetual obscurity, never understood, never known by anyone other than myself, that was truly a frightening notion. But actually it's only frightening from one perspective. From a different perspective it is a great source of power and peace.

Thought experiment time: Let's say 5 people witness you doing something amazing and they all agree that something happened. Then for various reasons they die and you no longer repeat your prior deed. Once the 5 people who saw you do something amazing die, their power of testimony dies with them. What is the status of the deed at that point? Is it an illusion? Is it real even though all the people who could testify to it are now gone? Is your own memory of those 5 people agreeing that you've done something amazing itself the testimony required? Even assuming the 5 people each left their testimony in writing before they died, without them being alive to defend their written words from critics and doubters, what power will such testimony have? Won't that power wane with time? Even when consensus is widely shared it doesn't seem to have a lot of stability. For example, look what happened when classical physics got displaced by the quantum-relativistic physics. Classical physics is now more like a distant memory rather than something we consider real. Nobody thinks atoms are like billiard balls anymore. That's gone. But at one point everyone agreed that atoms were like tiny little balls. And now what? So even if many people agree your powers are "the real deal" so to speak, how reliable is that? Public opinion is not guaranteed to be constant. For whose (or for what) benefit is such testimony? Please don't get me wrong, I think involving other people into the world of greater possibility is a fun thing to do. I am all for it. I'm just saying that the issue of testimony and objectivity is not so clear cut once I think about it deeper. I've had a lucid dream once where I reached out my hand to another dream character, and by doing this I was able not only fly myself, but to have this dream character fly with me. In the context of that dream, that was basically objective proof of my flying ability. When I woke up, the character who could testify for me and my objective proof were gone. Even if you convince everyone on Earth that you have genuine psychic power, where will that crowd of people be once you die? Will these folks follow you to the next life and offer their testimony there too? I think that's doubtful.

I think firstly there is a false dichotomy there: either your destination is the asylum, or you grow from it. Why not a situation where you spend a year in the asylum and grow from it? Why does it have to be one or the other? That said, I understand the nature of your question and I believe the difference between people who crumble and can't put themselves back together and those who outlast all difficulties is one of inner peace. The people who end up lasting have some reserves of inner peace which allows them to be resilient and which supports diamond-like resolve. It's hard to maintain diamond-like resolve to see a difficult stretch of practice to its next phase if one is constantly paranoid, frazzled, absentminded, scared, etc. I think all of us have felt fear. I have certainly felt insane fear compared to which fear of mere bodily death is but a joke. But what gets me through is that fear is not my defining characteristic. No matter how intense my fear, it is not able to overwhelm me, and I am always able to touch a core of peace deep in my inner being. This way it's hard for me to become discouraged or fragmented. But because I do feel fear it does mean sometimes I need to pull back and stop doing certain things. And maybe that's another thing. Maybe the people who crumbled with no hope in sight went too fast? Too much, too fast? Maybe this ability to pull back once in a while and take a breather is what keeps some of us going for the long haul. This is not a sprint. It's a marathon. Right?

Exactly! But before you conquered your fear of death, you wouldn't even dare to practice something like that in earnest!

I am sure that scene in X-men is not just invented from thin air. There must be real life inspiration behind it, because it's too realistic for lack of a better description. And remember the subsequent scene where the young Magneto can no longer duplicate his power? And so what does the camp commander do to unlock it? He shoots Magneto's mother to death, and this does it. My opinion is that when Magneto's mother was killed in front of him, something in Magneto died, and that something was the human aspect of himself. So in a way, Magneto was dead inside, because an important part of his identity was tied to his mother, and when she died, that part of him that was tied to his mother died as well. And in that moment of extreme duress Magneto didn't care about anything. I am sure he didn't care about reality or unreality, and that's when his power was unleashed for the second time. Why do we consider some situations to be extreme? I think the entire point of an extreme situation is when something very important to us is threatened. Isn't that in some important sense very similar to being on the brink of death?

ZOOM,

I can tell you from experience that my logical and mental abilities are at their peak when I am dreaming. At least as good as right now, but maybe even better sometimes.

This being ready to die is actually a very, very important clue. You were able to let go of your limitations when you no longer cared whether you live or die. I don't think this is an accident at all. You'll be able to repeat your performance once you embrace death 100%.

Well now, you've opened up a big can of worms. Firstly I want to say that I've had numerous experiences of losing distinction between dreams and the so-called "reality." These experiences were eye-opening, to say the least. As for your last question, I don't know how to answer it because I am not sure what you're asking about. I think in some sense we're always dreaming. Lucid dreaming means bringing an aspect of wakefulness into your dreams. Lucid waking means bringing an aspect of dreaming into your wakefulness. Lucid waking is hard because it's frightening. And it's frightening because we tend to want to feel like there is solid ground under our feet, so to speak, and when you know you're dreaming the whole time, the solid ground is gone. For someone who isn't used to living without a solid ground, that's a scary proposition. I speak from experience here. I too had to abandon an entire type of practice because it was producing experiences I just could not psychologically handle at the time (and probably would still have at least some trouble with it today, if I tried again). People tend to think that psychic power is all fun stuff, but I don't think that's the correct picture at all. In fact, what ZOOM said earlier about being nearly suicidal during his psychic episode is very relevant to what I want to say. Truth is, when things start to move in ways you don't think should be possible, the first reaction will be fear, and second, disbelief. It's not fun at all. I think in some ways psychic powers are like the tricks of high flying acrobats in a circus. For the viewers it is all pure fun. But for the circus athletes who are flying high above the ground, swinging from one trapeze to the next, they know an element of fear, and they also know a few who have died doing the very same "trick." Even an experienced circus performer probably experiences some fear, but what to say of a newbie? A newbie might vomit just from getting up close to the ceiling before even swinging on a trapeze. I think real psychic power is a lot like this. It's fun for the viewers, but no fun for the performer, unless the performer is either a natural freak of some sort, or extremely experienced in the course of some training, extremely familiar with what is about to happen, accustomed to it, and knows there is nothing to fear.

Because laws don't have weight, spacial and temporal extension, they are not physical. They don't have the qualities of physical objects. Sure. The mind is a capacity to know, to experience and to will. "Without the mind" is not even an option. I can be without a limb or without a body or without thoughts, but never without mind. In fact, sensing absence is a type of cognition, which of course requires mind.

ZOOM, you must have had quite an interesting experience. Everyone who's practicing something, anything, has reasons for doing it the way they're doing it. I don't bother with external validation of anything, even though I've had at least one shared experience where it wasn't just me. Why not? That's for two reasons. One, I know where I am stuck. I know where my mind refuses to move how I want it to move, and I also know why it refuses. So before I start parading in front of cameras and crowds, I am basically busy with mind training, and the thought of validation doesn't even enter my mind, because I see a severe internal limitation to my psychic functioning, and until that's gone, there is no point in validating anything. Two, there is an interesting class of thought experiments that conduces me to thinking validation is not important anyway. Let's not forget that Einstein's thought experiments have changed how we all think about physics today. I've always been impressed with this fact growing up, and I myself enjoyed the idea of thought experiments. And here's one thought experiment from that class of experiments: Let's imagine I have lived 70 years, and on my 70th year I've contracted a fatal disease. I am laying in a hospital. The docs gave me 1 more year to live. One night during sleep I am dreaming that I am someone else in some other place that is not even this Earth. I end up spending 300 years in that dream. Let's say I appear in the dream as a 20 year old, and go on to the age of 320. I sleep in the dream world and dream inside the dream (I've done this already, so this isn't even theoretical for me -- dreams within dreams are possible). I go to sleep every dream day and wake up to the same dream world every dream morning. Thus the dream appears to stretch for 300 years of time. Lots of events happen. I meet people. I make friends and enemies. I have a number of careers and adventures. And so on. Among other things in that dream I am able to demonstrate all kinds of strange abilities and everyone present in that dream can witness me demonstrating those abilities, and everything is confirmed to be genuine in the context of that dream. But as we all know, even 300 years pass in a flash. I wake up in the hospital. I am very disoriented. "What the hell is going on?" I am thinking. It takes me a few days to get my old memory back. Ah... so I was this aging human in this world... and I have 1 more year left to live. I see. Well, I take my meds, watch some hospital TV and get on with my hospital life. The year passes and I die. Now the questions: which environment was objective and which one was subjective? Why so? Is the 300 year long dream the objective one because it's longer?

No joke about it being difficult to express to one's own satisfaction. I tend to think that illusion is any kind of disappointing reliance. I consider all phenomena to be illusory, without exception. All phenomena are disappointing. However that doesn't mean life has to be disappointing. If one's sense of satisfaction is no longer directly tied to any combination/configuration of phenomena, then one can be genuinely happy. This isn't a normal way of thinking because normally we do want phenomena to fall into expected patterns of health, success, social validation, etc., and we tend to suffer no matter what because if we get what we want, we fear to lose it and become anxious, and if we don't get what we want, we remain unfulfilled. The solution is to completely decouple one's happiness from the phenomenal state. An example of what I mean by a disappointing reliance: water in a desert mirage, you try to drink it and it doesn't work, thus leading to disappointment. If one could slake one's thirst by drinking from a desert mirage, it would no longer be disappointing, and then it would stop being an illusion even if it did look whispy. So how things look/feel is irrelevant. Another way to look at illusion is as a false advertisement. Desert mirage advertises water but doesn't provide it. In this way phenomena advertise objects but don't provide actual objects.

I don't see how the mind is a physical thing.

I think that's great advice. It also helps to keep things intimate, because love makes intimacy easier. This is important because the normal state of a typical human being is to be somewhat estranged from one's own experience and one's own being, basically. This is also why I like to suggest that all the "minds" are friendly. Don't make an enemy of the thinking mind, for example. Conscious mind is not an enemy of the unconscious or subconscious. Etc. All the minds are friends, and this is consistent with the attitude of love that you suggest too.

Yes, that's what I am implying. There is no technique. It's a question of resolve and not technique. I'm not talking about destroying or harming the human body here. I'm talking about making a conscious decision to leave the body and dying (to this realm) in meditation. People who obsess over techniques will never comprehend this.

What is the difference between life and mind?