>>34280 #
Any topic is fine, the stated thought is just a motto, that hopefully each poster tries to contribute to any discussion.

>>34367 #
Worth is itself also a thought, the same thing can be worth different amounts to different people, and at different times.
Different people also have different capacities for measuring worth.
Fundamentally it all comes from indecision, two things are considered equal if you can't decide or differentiate between them, making them in your eyes the same.

I've been studying mnemonics and memory palace techniques and aside from their utility(it's really surprising how much additional working memory you can squeeze out of yourself) I can't help but notice the connections between the techniques and various esoteric practices.
Things like squares, sigils, circles, runes, etc... which try to bake certain energies into themselves to be called on later function pretty much identically to memory palaces, and I posit that many of them might actually originally BE memory palaces originally.
Like the kabbalistic system of sephirah is quite clearly an alphabetical organization system in addition to it's other uses, allowing users to break down information into images and then store them in locations on the tree for later use.
I think many of these systems can be thought of as advanced memory palaces meant not to contain just information but sensations, actions, mental states, etc... Like how mudras function by "charging" a mental state reached through focussed mediation into a hand sign and then using the hand sign to later instantly drop into the same mental state.

>>34710 #
There's also many techniques for simultaneous action, often used as party tricks likes writing or drawing with both hands, reciting poetry backwards while juggling, etc...
These techniques seem like dead ringers for some of the later "letter vibration" techniques in Bardon where he has you divide yourself into four elemental bodies and charge each one with different imagery to form a magic word to accomplish some task.
It also reminds me of the element charging into certain parts of the body, a combination of split focus and triggered sensation to automatically control your organs to perform better by pre-planning how your want them to feel and then embedding that sensation into them in a body based memory palace to cause those sensations later.

And all of this pretty much perfectly matches all descriptions of the Platonic world of Forms and the Lunar Sephirah once you take it a step further and assume that these mental spaces aren't just imaginary but really exist and can perform independent action.

Supporting all this I'd note that all the egyptian gods, the beast headed men, the chimeras, etc... fit perfectly into the categories of advanced memory palaces where you merge several images together to represent abstract concepts or to compress large amounts of information
For example if you imagine a statue in your head, with the head/body/forelegs/hindlegs being one of four different creatures painted in out of four different colors you could store 16 bits of information in a single statue. Taking it further by splitting the legs into left and right, the body into front and back and adding a second head, while upping the number of colors to eight you now have can now store 48 bits of information per statue. For reference that's 16 decimal digits, able to represent any number from 0 to about ten thousand trillion.
Or to put it another way every statue could fit any eight letter word, or any eight word sentence if you use a trick to compress words to their first letters.
These statues can then be arranged in various mental spaces to memorize large amounts of information and even to perform calculations on them.

>>36923 #
Everything is magic, nothing is magic.

>>37295 #
Indeed, it's all just martial arts of the mind, it functions identically.
Thus one very useful technique is cross training mental skills physically and physical skills mentally.
A simple example from the physical world is
>whole body tensing
Where you lock all the muscles in your body to fuse yourself into a solid mass. This technique s used for many purposes, from learning the locations and control over all your muscles, to increasing their strength and flexibility by flexing at extreme postures, progressing to explosive instant flexing, then instant relaxing, to learning to flex only certain subsets of muscles, finally combining into the arts of motions by explosively flexing agonists while relaxing antagonists to deliver high speed extremely forceful movements that can cut the air.

Now applying this basic but powerful skill to the mind is a matter of determining tension and relaxation. That's not too hard using basic meditation, tension is focus, relaxation is receptiveness.
Focusing the entire mind on a single point, becoming mentally immovable is the first step. Secondly this step is mastered to allow instantly reaching it and leaving it. Then total relaxation of the mind follows the same step, then the two are combined by focusing partially and relaxing partially, this is focused perception where most thoughts and senses are blocked but a small number all allowed and gain extreme sensitivity, as well as mental blocking where the mind is relaxed and allowed to operate as normal but certain thoughts and perceptions are locked away behind a barrier of focus.
The final ability is to instantly drop the mind into a preset pattern of focus and relaxation, allowing rapid perception and calculation without distraction.

These arts also pair perfectly, as during intense physical movement you also require intense concentration but must not lose focus on what you're doing and get distracted nor focus too much and get tunnel vision. The perfect combination of tension and relaxation is effortless rapid smooth motion, mentally and physically.

There are many other techniques that cross over, like elemental meditation applied to martial arts, memorization techniques used to store movements in the body itself, gaining mental strength as you gain physical strength by intense regimented overload followed by rec

>>37377 #
-very, etc...
Basically any mental technique can, with proper thought, be applied to the body and vice versa,
This actually applies in general to all techniques, medical knowledge for example can be used in martial arts and meditation, as can knowledge of math and physics, chemistry, and even astronomy.

This all culminates in my personal magic: the law of metaphor: All applies to All, everything is part of a whole and thus all knowledge lies in all places and is universally applicable. Any metaphor can be applied to any situation, and careful analysis will reveal previously hidden understanding in both the scenario and the metaphor itself.

Thus the most important technique is the constant acquirement of new information, and the constant mixture and application of that information to what is already known in a process of mental alchemy.

>>37744 #
I'm not certain I really grasp the essence of your posts. The first part is simple, ego death is something I've been through and understand, the second part is somewhat more mysterious.
The idea of a higher self and of a paradoxical union and disunion with it and the universe as a whole I understand butt he nature of the sky/bliss escapes me.
Speaking from my experience, the understanding that the self is just an illusion, and the world is just a stage performance, simply made me aware that that illusion is the nature of reality. I no longer see a separation between the part and the whole, and I have returned to a state similar to but distinct from the original.
Instead of playing a part unknowingly, an actor on a stage so immersed he things the play is real, I knowingly play the part because it's my nature to do so. Water flows and sits and rain falls due to the nature of water, it too is putting on a performance. But that performance is without ego, it is a real expression of it's inherent nature.
I live as water flows, as trees grow, as rocks weather.
In a way I an an individual and may be seen from the outside to have an ego, but in my point of view I don't think of myself as existing at all. My thoughts and actions are simply a natural consequence of my nature, nothing more, nothing less.

In other words, I may be the smallest part of a higher self, the sky may be impossibly large, but As Above So Below, the sky is also just a part of me, and I am it's equal.

>>38265 #
>how to fix the state
It's the simplest most natural one of all, the body and mind form the dual. You are both, you are neither, they are obviously separate and yet obviously one. Controlling one controls the other, pitting the two against each other leads to ruin.

>accumulation of inner light through despair and humility
Reminds me of the secondary path of submission to God. One abases himself and totally gives up all free will to serve only as a slave to the will of God, and thereby becomes his emissary and reaches enlightenment, because what other end would God lead you to?
It is the dual of the primary path of ascension to God, where the practitioner recognizes himself as no different from God, and thus serving only his own will he serves God.
In essence both are the same exact path viewed from two points of view, the alchemist himself and the material. You must either think of yourself as raw matter and follow the commands of the alchemist to refine yourself, or else step outside yourself and become that alchemist and command the matter that makes up your form to refine itself.

>>38265 #
>How did you arrive at this state
Through what was retrospectively obviously nigredo, the dark night where I came to the understanding that nothing made any sense at all. I started to think about where all my information come from, where all my conclusions came from, and realized even logic itself has no foundation and is self contradicting. I thought of everything I thought I knew and came to the conclusion that I didn't actually know anything at all. For several days I wallowed in depression and anxiety, but then I began to think again.
If this was the case, if I didn't actually know anything, what was I going to do? I obviously hated being in that state, so I decided I wanted to get out of it, but how? I didn't know how, so the first obvious step was to attempt to find out. How to find out? I also didn't know, but I reasoned that the only thing I could provably do was take in information. If I simply learned everything about everything then if there was any information that was useful it was bound to be in there, and if I found nothing then I had done my best and there simply was no answer.

The end result of that is me now, I acquired vast amounts of knowledge, studied many esoteric fields, and finally realized that I was actually perfectly happy as I am. I enjoy the pursuit of the answer sufficiently that that effectively became the answer. I was following the path of my own judgement and interest as bets as I was able to, ignoring everything else as unimportant, and that's basically all I actually needed.

Sure I've got lots of information and I think I have a much better idea of how things work now than before, but the real accomplishment is that I'm now certain even if I didn't know anything at all and wasn't sure about anything I'd still be fine. I don't require a foundation anymore, I'm totally content floating in a void where even I might not exist.

>>39057 #
>ambitions
I don't really have any end goals anymore, I'm just smelling the roses so to speak. But as I go from bush to bush I'm walking down a path anyway constantly looking for sweeter smelling flowers.
If I seriously try to picture a great future goal I can maintain interest for a few minutes but then I start asking questions about it and thinking about how when I accomplish it will anything have changed, what will I do afterwards, can't I get the same result by not bothering and just pretending I did, etc...
The only way I maintaining a medium/longterm goal is if it's something constantly annoying or enticing me in my life that I can't/won't get away from. Then there's no future imagination, there's irritation at my furniture forcing me to learn woodworking to manufacture my own, or pain and stiffness forcing me to work out and build muscle, or distaste for canned spam forcing me to learnt to cook.

So there are ambitions as in definite goals I want to accomplish in the future and constantly work towards, but they're all about affecting my current living situation so I can continue to do what I am now but in greater comfort.

>>39607 #
It was the result of a long bought of depression, anger, and anxiety.
Because nothing in my life worked I had a crisis and dug all the way down to the roots of my psyche through introspection to try to find the problem and solve it.
So sort of a combination of all three. I did it intentionally, but driven by crushing emotional pressure, and in the end I think my state now is actually somewhat similar to myself as a very young child. Back then I truly didn't care for anything either so in a way I've just returned to a youthful metal state with the experience and knowledge of an adult.

>how to induce voices
Which kind? The internal monologue, control of auditory imagination, creation of thoughtforms, dream manipulation, scrying, divination, necromancy?
Well from a universal standpoint you have to start with auditory imagination no matter what(and you'll probably be interested in the other senses as well especially vision). After that it's basically just an exercise of imagination and association. Basically project an image onto something, then manipulate or observe that thing and have it control the projection(cards,dice, your own dreams, imaginary characters, cloud patterns, it's all the same just pieces on a chessboard representing an army).
As for the first part, controlling the mind to produce imaginary sensory perception I can give many suggestions but I myself have always had a strong imagination so I'm not sure they'd work if you struggle to form an image or a sound int he first place.
If you can get anything, even the vaguest sensation that you might perhaps sense something, then all you have to do it focus on it as hard as possible until you can't anymore, then come back later after you've mentally recovered and do it again.
Take the body metaphor as a guide here, mental control is physical conditioning, imagination is movement. You learn to play an instrument in your mind the same way you learn to play it with your hands: constant practice and attention.

To attempt to give guidance in the situation where you don't know quite where to start, ten simply imitate reality. If you want to imagine a sound, act as if there was something you were trying to physically hear. Close your eyes, strain your ears, sift through sounds and try to actually hear it even though you know you couldn't possibly have heard anything. If you truly focus on it you can actually convince yourself that it's real and start mistaking real sounds for imaginary ones. Then it's only a step further from there to make these sounds more and more real until you can hear them as if there were actually audible.

>>39972 #
To elaborate on the method of divination or thoughtforms, take the chess metaphor again. Everything I know boils down into metaphors like I said before. So in this situation the game is a metaphor for a battle. Normally you just use this as the justification of the rules to play a game, but imagine it were an actual battle. Take a board setting for example and imagine it were not just pieces but an actual fight, what's going on? Are many of the men dead? Is the king hiding in his castle? Have the bishops fled to the four corners, are the knights engaged in battle?
Picturing this scenario, how does it relate to what you want to accomplish? Is the situation your situation? Is it a question? Is it an emotion? Play out the game and see how those things change.

Any game will do, as will any other situation you can understand and reproduce. Draw a poker hand, is it good, bad? Do you want to discard a card? What hand do you aim for, would you call, raise, fold?
In general you take your idea or question, pin it to a scenario in reality, then play that out and take the metaphor backwards for the answer.

>>39973 #
And if you just want to have a dialogue then just start talking to yourself playing a character, after a while you'll get good enough that you can talk faster than you can think and thus the character becomes real and able to respond to you without your conscious control.
This is also a trick of the ego, because in reality this is what you are, just a stream of consciousness character. You open your mouth and words come out without thought due to long practice. If you can have one ego, you can easily have more than one, switch between them, or even play multiple at once.
It really is just acting.
Ego death is leaving the stage.

>>40033 #
Indeed, all communication is telepathy.
Another piece of the law of metaphor, all communication is impossible!
If you think about what we're actually doing you'd realize that it's simply divination.
I think my thoughts, scribble some symbols down, then you look at those symbols and imagine what I must have been thinking when I wrote them.
We aren't actually communicating at all, we're both simulating each other's thoughts. We're just so amazingly good at it that we can't even tell it's happening.
Just like how you can throw a ball and hit a target without thinking about what a titanic amount of processing and prediction power it takes to accomplish.

>>40391 #
I haven't studied incantations myself, but I've been researching magic circles/squares/diagrams and I think they share a similar purpose(many even serve as a sort of mnemonic for a text).
In terms of the diagrams and invocations the mechanism is to break down the concept into pieces that can be readily comprehended, to meditate upon those pieces until they are memorized, then to slowly add them together, performing the meditations at the same time overlapping and merging until they become a singular whole.
This is a lot like how I think of speech and communication in general, if we can communicate concepts unknown to both of us through telepathy it must be that we both already know the message before it's sent. The only way to do this is to break it up into parts that we all already possess and then to transmit not the information, but the permutation and combination of what is previously known.
Each word builds an individual sensation, and each additional word layers and merges with the previous until at the end of the statement the desired state is achieved.

Thus an incantation could serve that function either through invocation(meditating upon the worlds to guide your mind into a chosen state), or evocation(using words to affect the state of others or the world itself)

Making another metaphor in a way a diagram, and incantation, and a machine are the same thing. What is an engine but an incantation spoken in the language of fire and steel to evoke the rotation of a shaft?

Now that we're all on the webring some thought should be put into how to attract users and what exactly the niche of this board should be. There are a few, fairly dead, /x/ boards on the ring, so a different approach than them is probably a good idea.
Maybe some sort of themed discussions or events would be a good idea?

>>44786 #
There are /x/ and /fringe/ threads here. Be subtle please if you want to advertise.
https://trashchan.xyz/server/catalog.html
>what exactly the niche of this board should be
Honestly I'm not sure what the difference is between this place and /asylum/. I like both boards tho.

>>57695 #
/asylum/ seems to be more directed, I want more discussion here.
I'm thinking of making this a hybrid /x/ /sci/ board just because of the pun, I think they; make a decent combo as well.
The main thing is I just have to figure out what I'm going to put on here. Needs material to function.

>thread watcher alerts me to an unfinished livepost
waow
>>57985 #
It's up to you. The only thing I'll say is that "hybrid /x/ /sci/" could attract retards like flat earthers and the people who believe in Tartaria.
>>57987 #
>schizos
/x/ schizos who think they can summon a succubus don't have the same repellent effect on newfags as flat earthers. There is a certain set of boomer conspiracies that immediately turn people off a site because they know those people are used to ruin discussion. See 4chan. idc about /x/ stuff and contrarian scientific views, but they should be seriously discussed like on /homu/.

>>57986 #
I mean is a plain /x/ board any less likely to attract schizos?
And to be honest I'd prefer flat earthers to succubus summoners.
>boomer conspiracies
Yeah that's a problem, but currently this is a dead board so it's not really an issue I have to worry about.
I think I could do some of the lesser know /sci/ topic, like numerology and neurology, they have good overlap with /x/ already and never seem to quite be at home on either board. The /sci/ homework guys aren't interested in esoteric lore, and the /x/ guys don't know how to do basic mental math.

>>57987 #
In any case it's probably best to focus on the /x/ and magic (if you want it) stuff for now. Esoteric /sci/ discussion will naturally emerge from that imo.

>>57988 #
Obviously, I'm not planning on changing any other board themeing, I'm just thinking of topics I could use as material for threads. Maybe I could make a news thread, or just post about it here, there's always weird shit happening. I really missed my chance back with that whole guatemalan alien corpse thing, that would have been perfect.

>>57990 #
>guatemalan alien corpse thing
When was this?

>>57997 #
Mexico?

>>58672 #
A very interesting history, and also interesting that it seems separation from the majority seems to always lead to the esoteric.

great channel
[YouTube] ???

Redisocvered some old bookmarks, including this very interesting site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200410183054/http://www.michaeltsarion.com/
Some interesting pages are:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200429161633/http://www.irishoriginsofcivilization.com/druidic-symbolism-i.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20200422160132/http://www.irishoriginsofcivilization.com/etymology-key-to-the-past.html

The last one about etymology is especially useful to people who are fairly new to the field, lots and lots of examples of alphabetical and linguistic magic. Also a decent enough introduction to christianity being mostly egyptian in nature and origin.