2021/5/25 is a fifth part of a first draft of something Of course, it is possible to change your experience without understanding how you've done it. You can attach to new ideas and let go of old ones without noticing that the ideas were separate from you at any point. Simply identifying with the thought immediately, instead of addressing it as a thought and comparing it to others before deciding. You can let thought patterns go from this higher level as well. Rejection alone doesn't work but if a thought pattern is labeled as rejected or bad and you also have a conflicting thought pattern that you sometimes switch to, then over time you may associate (finding yourself thinking the rejected pattern) with (switching to the opposing/positive pattern) and this will reduce and eventually reverse reinforcement of the rejected pattern over time. When this happens unconsciously then you remain at the whim of circumstance as to whether the rejected thought eventually stops appearing and how long that may take. This is a good method for intentionally releasing negative/unuseful patterns but when it's applied intentionally then you can make it much more effective and track your progress. The downside is that if you try to tackle each thought pattern individually then you can end up with more work than you can accomplish in the few decades that you have. Techniques, environments, and drugs can be used to leverage large consciousness transformations into major and lasting changes to basic thinking frameworks, but with most of them you end up dependent on external instruction for effect, maintenance, and any future adaptations. You also have to find one that works for you, be convinced that it will, and spend the effort to follow through with it. There is a high failure rate for any specific method, different ones being more suitable to different constitutions. There are many many pitfalls on the course to finding a fit, many cults to join, bad trips to be had, years wasted practicing techniques without clear metrics to measure if they are working. Many leave it up to a mentor or teacher to judge their progress but this involves a lot of trust and the belief that they are competent as well. Some even expect the figurehead for a large organization they are part of to assess their progress but never actually interact with the figurehead on a personal level. Learning to connect with one of the special thoughts, one being nothing, and the other being your sense of beingness (some conflate this with feeling the presence of god), and then using that as an anchor to stay out of identifying with any other thoughts is a way to reset, detrigger, decondition, release, diminish all the patterns. It is neigh impossible to 'just do it'. It is a very subtle trick. Identification is sticky. It traps you, and quick. Years of conditioning to skip the deliberation in favor of effective in-the-moment action must be unraveled.