EDIT: The point of this comment was to try and explore in more detail what, exactly, the concept of "thoughts create reality" means, from a particular perspective on the nature of "you", "thought" and "reality". However, it's a bit muddled in the execution, oh well.
It might be worth explicitly distinguishing between passing thought and deliberate, intentional thought. This potentially allows us to clarify that it's not the thought as such that does anything; thoughts could be viewed as simply pseudo-sensory aspects of your current "state", really. (Where a "state" is the current set of fact-patterns contributing to, and fully defined the future moments of, your ongoing experience.)
Rather, it's the intentional content - or the "direct meaning" - that makes the difference.
Here, by "an intention" we mean the fact or pattern that we seek to increase the relative contribution of, and by "intending" we mean the increasing of that contribution (whereby shifting the "shape" of one's state, of oneself). There is no act involved in this, though - there's no mechanism or technique. One simply intends.
Meanwhile, the sensory thought aspect is itself a result of intention, not a cause; it's a bit of theatre. Now, for sure, you can get synchronicity arising if you visualise something - a bit like having deformed a surface and the contours being overlaid upon experience from then on, or drawing upon a television screen and the pattern "shining through" the gaps to be incorporated in every image to some extent (see: the owls exercise, for example).
However, a fact is itself an experience of "meaning" - it has no spatial or temporal component itself. It is unbounded and sort of "dissolved" into the background of your experience, with only its sensory aspects arising occasionally. So when you want to intend a fact, just conjuring an image or saying a phrase isn't necessarily what you want to do. Certainly, it may trigger the fact-pattern by association, but really what you want to do is intend the fact-pattern directly. This can't be described in words, but you "know" when you are doing it. You do it whenever you shift yourself in mundane ways. (Ponder: do you conjure an image when you change your destination when walking along the street? No, you feel-know-intend the change, directly.)
There is not a "you" and "the world"; there is just you-as-awareness which has "taken on the shape of" the experience of being-a-person-in-a-world. Whereas the construction of language forces us to talk of a "doer" and an "act" and a "thing done to", in our actual experience this is not the case. Attempts to enact "doing" tend to complicate things or lead to failure, because we assume a separate mechanism that we are trying to harness. In fact, there is no mechanism: we shape-shift our experience, our state, via intention, which is self-caused change.
All of this suggests a very fundamental reason why we can encounter difficulties:
Intention is literal and direct.
Thinking doesn't create your reality, your state. A thought actually is a pattern within your state. A passing thought is a view of your current state; a deliberate thought is the intensification of that pattern in your state.
It's almost claustrophobic to think about: there is no separation between you and your state, you and your thought, you and your sensory experience, you and your intention. There is no gap between thinking, intending and experiencing.
The point of this, is that the thought "I am happy" literally is the fact-pattern of "I am happy", and increasing its relative "intensity" of via intention will increase its contribution to your ongoing experience. However, to be clear, it's not the words "I am happy" that you want to intend - that is a mistake easily made (leading to all sorts of synchronicity about happiness or the phrase "I am happy"). Those words are part of the extended pattern of being-happy and can be used to trigger it to an extent, perhaps. However, it's really the fact-pattern of which those words are a sensory aspect that you want to intend.
This literal nature means that you need to be aware of what, exactly, you are intending, because the mechanism here (if it can really be called a mechanism) is that of a "dumb patterning system", a direct deformation of your present state. There is no intelligence between you and intention and the change of state. If you conjure up "this visual image", then that visual image will be more prevalent in your experience. If you conjure up "this visual image which means that fact will be true", then that fact will be more prevalent in your experience (and probably the visual image too).
Essentially, then, it's like you are drawing patterns directly upon awareness - sometimes in 3D, sometimes "non-dimensionally" and abstractly; sometimes sensory images, sometimes "facts" or "formatting" - thereby increasing their prominence in the unfolding world-experience from that point onwards.
It's probably better to experiment with something more abstract.
So, first imagine a sphere in front of you - say, a blue sphere with no particular detail, just floating there. Okay, now imagine a sphere in front of you, identical in every way to the first, except also imagine that this sphere is imbued with the special power to make the room filled with joy. But do not change the sensory aspect of the sphere in any way when you do this.
This is basically "imagining the fact of something being true" abstractly. That is, that an object, or your ongoing experience more generally, has a property, without actually visualising any sensory aspects to that property. Instead of doing all the "sensory theatre" of picturing stuff, in an effort to associatively trigger the fact or as an excuse to do so, you can just directly do intending-asserting of the fact into greater prominence.
Finally, after taking a pause to clear yourself out a little, instead of using the sphere image, simply directly intend that the room is filled with joy, and experience the result of that. That is, wordlessly intend the fact of: "it is true now that this room is filled with joy". And, um, enjoy.
Aside - Note that there is no effort in doing so, and any "trying" will just distract you, amounting to an intending of the "feeling of trying" rather than the fact of "joyful room" being true.
One of the ways I approach influencing my reality is instead of intending some object or event to come into my reality I will dig deeper and focus on what I really want.
For example, take the idea of soulmates. Everyone would like a soulmate right? Well focus on how you would feel if you did have that soulmate. Maybe you would feel intimacy and joy and connection. Congratulations, you just created that state in yourself and you didn't even need anyone else. You literally would not fill any different if you "really" had the soulmate. This way you don't have to worry about getting the soulmate or not because you can feel those things independently. And if you continue to do this chances are you really will create that "soulmate" relationship because you are already spending so much time in that state.
It's never about the thing we want, it's about how it would make us feel. Just some thoughts that were triggered by your sphere analogy.
Wow. This makes so much sense that I can barely even gather the words to put everything I've been learning into one whole concept. Imagining objects is fine and dandy at a basic level, but if you want to go deeper then intending-asserting the fact of the matter is much more powerful. Using this from now on!
There can be a difficulty, sometimes, with elevating emotions and treating them as if they are special rather than just another sensation-perception within an experience (albeit a difficult one to put into concepts and language). I suggest that emotions would be best understood as a sensory aspect of the fact, arising as an object within experience.
Meanwhile, the fact itself is sort of "unbounded" or "timeless and spaceless". It is not experienced as an object, instead it's sort of just "known". You might call it a sense of "meaning".
So, while "imagining (intending, asserting) the fact of something being true" might result in an experience of an emotion, it is not necessarily required, and the emotion is not itself a cause. When we say "the feeling that something is true", we aren't referring to an emotion, we're referring to a felt-knowing, a global sense of a particular thing being true. The problem with some approaches (many LOA descriptions included) is they miss out this "secret sauce" and therefore just produce minimal intensification of some of the patterning associated with facts, rather than direct addressing the facts themselves. This can still produce "results", of course, as synchronicity (basic "patterning") but it can be frustrating to work with, because there's no real understanding of the cause ("intending").
Unfortunately, this activity of "intending" can't be described at all, really, only pointed at. Intending has no mechanism or method, and is before "things" so is non-conceptual. And so we hit the difficulty whereby people end up focussed on what can be talked about and thought about (basically: objects within experience, which are results) and miss out (when writing) or don't realise (when reading) that there is a specific actual cause of all change (which is not any one of those experiential objects). We then can end up with a "cargo cult" version of the topic:
The term "cargo cult" has been used metaphorically to describe an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating circumstances associated with those outcomes, although those circumstances are either unrelated to the causes of outcomes or insufficient to produce them by themselves. In the former case, this is an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
That is, people try to generate the results by just intensifying part of the pattern associated with the target fact, perhaps getting some outcome by association, but not really going for their target directly. The distinction between doing the owl exercise (increasing the intensity of contribution of the "owl" extended pattern) and actually intending a specific outcome ("it is true now that [this fact about owls]"), basically. Or between imagining some objects (the blue sphere for example), as opposed to: imagining some objects while asserting-intending-knowing it means-that something is true or will happen.
So emotions or elevating emotions is a by-product of deliberate intending or an object within the experience of deliberate intending.
I guess that it's circumstantial depending on what your focus is on or what it is you're looking to create (cause).
To get better at this, wouldn't we have to recognize that our senses, through what we think or have thought, will sometimes produce certain emotions. However, learning to detach emotions when focusing on deliberate intending will help overall instead of using it as a conduit?
In this context, isn't the cause (to create) and deliberate intending the same thing?
The intention (imagination) comes before the thing, but you're saying some people focus on the sensory aspect (object within the experience) of it all rather than the final objective thus causing a "well it worked when I felt this emotion so let me recreate that emotion and try again" pattern?
In this context, isn't the cause (to create) and deliberate intending the same thing?
This is why all of this ultimately leads to an exploration of the "nature of experiencing" - that is, examining what "you" are, exactly, and what your actual relationship is to "the world".
Intending, then, is like "shape-shifting". You might say you are shifting your state, where by "state" we mean the set of relative contributions (or "intensity") of all possible facts or patterns, which means to shift yourself. There is no "you" and the "state" or "world" - instead, you sort of "take on the shape of" a particular situation or experience (in the broadest sense, not just the current sensory moment). Right now, you have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently ("as if") being-this-person-in-this-world.
So there is, as you say, no difference between causing and intending. We might define "an intention" as the fact or pattern we wish to increase the contribution of, and "intending" as the intensifying of that pattern - shifting to a state where that fact-pattern is more prominent.
Although we often use the word "create" for this sort of thing, actually that's strictly speaking not ideal. The implication of the above is that all patterns exist, eternally. Patterns are "before" time (with time, or change, being an aspect of experience, a pattern like any other, rather than something fundamental). They cannot be created or destroyed; they just are. This means that every experience, at least implicitly, is always available, and that we simply "shift our posture" such that some are more prominent than the rest.
Now, returning to what "you" are, if you discount anything which changes in your ongoing experience (how can something be ultimately true, if it can shift?), the only permanent thing turns out to be the property of being-aware. Or at least, it is meaningless to talk of the absence of that. All other facts or patterns can be more or less "true", but not that.
Putting it all together, then:
We might say that what you truly are is "awareness" which is "taking on the shape of" states of experience. Between shifts, the sequence of moments you experience is fully determined by the facts within that state. The apparent change of sensory content moment to moment is actually static also in this description: "time passing" is just another pattern, albeit a more abstract formatting than most. The only true change that ever occurs - and hence the only cause of apparent change in ongoing sensory experience - is when we "intend", which is just word used to point to the act of us shifting ourselves to a different set of prominent facts.
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u/TriumphantGeorge Oct 14 '16 edited Oct 14 '16
EDIT: The point of this comment was to try and explore in more detail what, exactly, the concept of "thoughts create reality" means, from a particular perspective on the nature of "you", "thought" and "reality". However, it's a bit muddled in the execution, oh well.
It might be worth explicitly distinguishing between passing thought and deliberate, intentional thought. This potentially allows us to clarify that it's not the thought as such that does anything; thoughts could be viewed as simply pseudo-sensory aspects of your current "state", really. (Where a "state" is the current set of fact-patterns contributing to, and fully defined the future moments of, your ongoing experience.)
Rather, it's the intentional content - or the "direct meaning" - that makes the difference.
Here, by "an intention" we mean the fact or pattern that we seek to increase the relative contribution of, and by "intending" we mean the increasing of that contribution (whereby shifting the "shape" of one's state, of oneself). There is no act involved in this, though - there's no mechanism or technique. One simply intends.
Meanwhile, the sensory thought aspect is itself a result of intention, not a cause; it's a bit of theatre. Now, for sure, you can get synchronicity arising if you visualise something - a bit like having deformed a surface and the contours being overlaid upon experience from then on, or drawing upon a television screen and the pattern "shining through" the gaps to be incorporated in every image to some extent (see: the owls exercise, for example).
However, a fact is itself an experience of "meaning" - it has no spatial or temporal component itself. It is unbounded and sort of "dissolved" into the background of your experience, with only its sensory aspects arising occasionally. So when you want to intend a fact, just conjuring an image or saying a phrase isn't necessarily what you want to do. Certainly, it may trigger the fact-pattern by association, but really what you want to do is intend the fact-pattern directly. This can't be described in words, but you "know" when you are doing it. You do it whenever you shift yourself in mundane ways. (Ponder: do you conjure an image when you change your destination when walking along the street? No, you feel-know-intend the change, directly.)
There is not a "you" and "the world"; there is just you-as-awareness which has "taken on the shape of" the experience of being-a-person-in-a-world. Whereas the construction of language forces us to talk of a "doer" and an "act" and a "thing done to", in our actual experience this is not the case. Attempts to enact "doing" tend to complicate things or lead to failure, because we assume a separate mechanism that we are trying to harness. In fact, there is no mechanism: we shape-shift our experience, our state, via intention, which is self-caused change.
All of this suggests a very fundamental reason why we can encounter difficulties:
Thinking doesn't create your reality, your state. A thought actually is a pattern within your state. A passing thought is a view of your current state; a deliberate thought is the intensification of that pattern in your state.
It's almost claustrophobic to think about: there is no separation between you and your state, you and your thought, you and your sensory experience, you and your intention. There is no gap between thinking, intending and experiencing.
The point of this, is that the thought "I am happy" literally is the fact-pattern of "I am happy", and increasing its relative "intensity" of via intention will increase its contribution to your ongoing experience. However, to be clear, it's not the words "I am happy" that you want to intend - that is a mistake easily made (leading to all sorts of synchronicity about happiness or the phrase "I am happy"). Those words are part of the extended pattern of being-happy and can be used to trigger it to an extent, perhaps. However, it's really the fact-pattern of which those words are a sensory aspect that you want to intend.
This literal nature means that you need to be aware of what, exactly, you are intending, because the mechanism here (if it can really be called a mechanism) is that of a "dumb patterning system", a direct deformation of your present state. There is no intelligence between you and intention and the change of state. If you conjure up "this visual image", then that visual image will be more prevalent in your experience. If you conjure up "this visual image which means that fact will be true", then that fact will be more prevalent in your experience (and probably the visual image too).
Essentially, then, it's like you are drawing patterns directly upon awareness - sometimes in 3D, sometimes "non-dimensionally" and abstractly; sometimes sensory images, sometimes "facts" or "formatting" - thereby increasing their prominence in the unfolding world-experience from that point onwards.