Give it to me straight. I can handle it. (😭 maybe 😭😉)
Have I vastly misunderstood what reality shifting is? Like…if I go to sleep and intend to wake up and full-experience BE at Hogwarts my next morning but I’m still in Kansas when I wake up, the whole “you’ve shifted; you’re in your DR and just not aware of it with your senses” feels like a neat philosophical trick, a tidy workaround answer for the actual question of “honestly, what am I getting wrong here in the shift?” since the experience IS the goal, not the philosophical line-in-the-sand of *well technically* you’re already there. (And yes, I’ve read my Neville, yes, have tried methods all over the map, not just settled beneath the covers and assumed it’s done.) Truly, this is a real question and not a test or a ‘gotcha’ or anything—I am just…baffled… over how to connect the dots, because my whole interest in shifting was the full senses experience part of it. (Obviously to the point of asking, with my whole chest here, wait… I’m a very literal thinker, are all y’all meaning something less, uh, literal when you shift???)
😅I mean, heck, I get closer sensory enjoyment of my DR self just journaling stories than anything I’ve managed to get out of my shifting practice. 🫣😞
*first time caller, long time listener—I see the question come up in different flavors, I’m not an anon you’ve heard from before 🙃☺️ (thank you)
no, you have not misunderstood the goal. the goal is the lived, sensory experience. you are right about that. it is not meant to stay as a philosophical idea.
but you are misunderstanding the role of identity vs experience. right now, you are treating experience as proof. “if i wake up in kansas, it didn’t work.” that assumption is the issue.
experience is not the thing that decides who you are. it is the thing that reflects who you are identifying as. identity comes first, experience follows. but you are flipping that order. you are saying “i will accept the identity only if the experience matches it,” which means the experience is in control, not you.
think about what you’re actually doing. you decide “i am at hogwarts,” but the moment you open your eyes and see kansas, you go “okay, i guess i’m not.” that means your identity lasted only until it was challenged. so it wasn’t a decision, it was a temporary idea you were testing.
a real shift in identity does not get revoked by what you see. it stays regardless of what appears. because identity is internal. experience is external. when you use the external to validate the internal, you are always going to be unstable, because the external is constantly changing and moving and lagging.
you are expecting instant experiential confirmation, and when it doesn’t show up, you conclude it failed. but what actually happened is that you returned to your old identity the moment you checked. so from your perspective, it looks like “nothing happened,” when in reality you never stayed in the new identity long enough for anything to reflect it.
this is why treating experience as proof traps you. because you are always waiting. always checking. always measuring. and that keeps you in the state of “i don’t have it yet.” even if you briefly assume the identity, you immediately undo it by looking for evidence.
identity is the cause. experience is the effect. if you keep making the effect the condition for the cause, you will stay stuck in that loop.
and no, shifting is not “less literal.”
when it happens fully, it is as real as this. there is no filter, no “dream feeling,” no sense of it being less than. you are not floating, you are not observing, you are not half-aware. you are just there, living, breathing, existing the same way you are here.
people keep softening it or wrapping it in philosophy because they’re trying to explain something that’s hard to grasp before it happens. but the experience itself is not abstract at all. it’s literal.
but that level of experience doesn’t come from effort, repetition, or better methods.
it comes from a stable identity that is not being constantly overturned by doubt and checking.
right now, journaling feels more vivid to you because you’re immersed, you’re not checking, you’re not questioning if it’s working.
so the answer to “what am i getting wrong?” is that you are still relying on the appearance to confirm your shift, while also trying to shift. those two positions cancel each other out.
to make it very literal, if you put on a jacket and then look in the mirror and don’t see it, you either trust yourself and assume the mirror is wrong, or you trust the mirror and assume you’re not wearing the jacket. you keep choosing the second option. so no matter how many times you “put it on,” you immediately take it off.
this is why it feels like nothing is working. not because you can’t shift, and not because you’re doing something wrong in terms of methods, but because you are constantly overriding your own decision with what you see. the issue isn’t effort or technique. it’s that you are asking the appearance for permission to be your dr self, and as long as you do that, you will stay in the position of trying instead of being.
that’s the gap you’re trying to connect.
i hope my answer managed to give you some level of clarity regarding this.
