TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 25

POST: Is this what going crazy feels like? (crosspost from Mandela Effect)

There is nothing in quantum physics to explain having memories of a different world, or timeline if you will.

Well, there's nothing in quantum physics to particularly suggest many worlds either, although it's one of a set of unfalsifiable interpretations that are fun. Many-worlds is a philosophical musing; it's not scientific. However, surely in the "quantum immortality" view, what's happening is that we are shifting "state" - shifting to a state where the "person" we are persists? And since each "state" is basically a complete set of facts of the world, that state must also include our memories. Therefore, such a shift might well result in a different apparent history, and differing memories. As far as "other observers" go, there's nothing we can say about that. We can only speak from our own subjective experience of an increasingly observation-defined view.

The way I use "shift" is to indicate that the content of our experience changed to a different state. Aren't you assuming here that memories necessarily correspond to prior experiences? Really, there is no history other than that represented in the current state.

Let's try this:

• Let's use the word "configuration" for the total arrangement of the world as held in my consciousness = (x, y, z, m). Where, for illustration, I am using "m" to represent the set of memories "in your brain".
• Each "state" corresponds to a particular configuration. S1 = (x1, y1, z1, m1), S2 = (x2, y2, z2, m2), and so on.

If you are in S1, then S1 includes all the facts of the world, including the memories, m1, in your brain. The memories aren't in the past, they are now but "about" the past.

If my consciousness suddenly becomes attached to (colloquially: shifts to) S2, it is perfectly possible for me to have a set of memories m2=m1. That doesn't necessarily mean that m2 corresponds to experiences I actually had, to the state of the world (x2, y2, z2).

If you choose to believe that, that's fine. But don't call on anything quantum to explain it, because that's utterly wrong. No quantum theory or possible interpretation explains why you would have memories from a different state.

Remember, I am not necessarily promoting such a view, I'm just outlining how it would work.

Personally I think that quantum mechanics as it actually is, has nothing much to say other than highlight the nature of observation vs abstraction. I'd be inclined towards a simpler metaphysical model which deals more directly with experiences arising in consciousness (although the result would be much the same). However...

No quantum theory or possible interpretation explains why you would have memories from a different state.

They are not "from" the different state, they are part of the current state but apparently "about" another state. Sticking to a physicalist model:

• There's nothing special about memories; they are just arrangements of atoms in the brain - B(x, y, z).
• The arrangement of atoms in the brain is not bound in an ongoing way, via a continuous causal link, to other arrangements of atoms in the 'outside' world, W(x, y, z).
• There is no reason why the state of the world cannot change such that the patterns of B(x, y, z) remain the same as in the previous state, while those in W(x, y, z) are different.

One might hypothesise that in a catastrophic circumstance, the total configuration S = B + W, goes through something like this:

• For the continuation of consciousness to "make sense", the configuration of W(x, y, z) changes to a safe situation.
• Meanwhile, since the brain is in effect always being observed, the state of B(x, y, z) is held in its current configuration.
• We end up in a final overall state, S(x, y, z) where the memories accessed from B will no longer be consistent with the subsequent observations of W.

Of course, if B(x, y, z) was not under observation at the time, then it might not be saved from change, and the inconsistency problem won't arise, and nobody would ever know.

EDIT: Obviously, we are assuming quantum immortality is a thing here, and trying to explain stories with it. If we want to go into the validity of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the nature of measurement etc, that's a whole other deal.

If you don't know what observation is in a quantum sense, you're not going to get to a satisfying explanation. It has nothing to do with consciousness at all.

Well, we can chat away about what constitutes a measurement or "fixing", but for us to get anywhere on this topic, we'll have to include consciousness, won't we? (And you already have, implicitly.)

Let's back up a moment and clear something up, which might make the rest of it sort itself out too. So far, we've not specified perspectives, or been clear what we mean by consciousness. And we can't get anywhere with this without switching to a subjective view, I suggest.

To me, it seems that you are visualising things "objectively", as a view from nowhere, with consciousness travelling on some sort of branching trajectory, almost like it is an 'entity' crossing a landscape. What is it doing - hopping from brain to brain? I think this has of problems, not least of which is that it perhaps means our trajectories must be fully deterministic? (See example later.)

So here's how I'm taking it (I'm changing B to M=memories for clarity):

• I am talking from the subjective perspective of a "conscious observer", at all times.
• That observer is in a state, S = M + W, which completely defines the world, and defines (is) its direct experience at that moment.
• The principle of "quantum immortality" says that the observer will always be in a state, and so will always have an experience.

Meanwhile:

• You have asserted that M must always be consistent with W.
• I am suggesting that M needn't necessarily be consistent with W.

I am suggesting that so long as the current state is always coherent as a whole, all is well. And M being consistent with W is not a requirement for this. It's perfectly okay for my memories not to match my surroundings. And this has to be true, surely? It's often true anyway.

Example

Say our friend above is about to die in a swimming accident, but obviously he won't because he's immortal. At what point does he not-die?

He's at the very bottom of the ocean, and gives out his last breath. What happens then? There is no plausible next-state that doesn't involve some sort of discontinuity. The next-state has to be one where it didn't happen at all. This is remarkably improbable, but it is still possible and by "quantum immortality" it is required. And it's more probable than him suddenly becoming a dolphin.

So, perhaps he's suddenly on the beach and didn't go swimming, and has no memory. But in stories on this subreddit, people experience being reset to before their accident, or suddenly being in a safe location, and so on - obviously with memories intact.

And this makes sense, right? Things should unfold until the point where there is no plausible next-moment, otherwise we'd have to be traveling along a fully predetermined path.

Assuming quantum immortality, he will survive in a world where his consciousness still exists.

This is the core of our disagreement. We're going to need to properly consider:

• What is a world? (You seem to be treating it like a "place" rather than a state.)
• What is consciousness? (You seem to be treating it like a "thing" rather than that which experiences a state.)

But let's continue...

Mutiplicity, Forking, Determinism

Assuming quantum immortality, he will survive in a world where his consciousness still exists.

How many of him are there? Surely the only way to avoid multiplicity is to consider that there is one of him (one consciousness) that is in a particular state.

The moment of the last breath won't work because it's extremely unlikely that any event could change the outcome from that point.

My response would be that if quantum immorality is required then that doesn't matter. Probabilities are normalised, likeliness is relative not absolute. There is always a probability, say, that I will suddenly find myself on the beach, discontinuously. And as other options are eliminated, that probability might become 20%, 50%, 70%, later 100%.

The alternatives are that "something" looks ahead and knows in advance, and so those unlikely options never arise - but that means everything is predetermined, which doesn't work surely? - or that they are lots of him and they fall one by one - but that makes screws the whole thing up.

So, we have to look at events that could change to prevent the death.

But if the events have already happened, they can't change? Your next-state might be such that it didn't seem to happen, and you may or may nor retain memories, but it can't "not happen in advance".

In this new world, his consciousness isn't identical. It starts to change at the moment of the fork.

When is this fork though? The fork must happen before the accident, while avoiding the accident is still plausible. What happens to consciousness then? The fork must happen before actual death. What do the other people see in the "world where he dies"; does he act like a zombie until he drowns?

at the point of death in this world, his consciousness would only exist in a world where the dying never happened.

But we've already said that the fork must happen before we get to the death? Unless there are multiple consciousnesses. Actually, how does a fork "know to happen"?

There is no reason to believe that memories of a different world could leak into this one somehow. It just simply doesn't exist.

In the subjective view, there's no 'leakage', because there aren't actually multiple worlds in a physical sense, and memories belong to the subjective perspective.

Objective vs Subjective

All these problems arise because (I suggest) you are imagining this from an objective perspective that doesn't exist: imagining a starting point, with forking happening at certain moments, spawning copies of worlds, and consciousness travelling along "alive" paths only - all as if this structure actually exists independently of an observer. If you flip it round to a subjective viewpoint, where the conscious observer has what amounts to a "private state", and each next-moment happens on a probabilistic basis, all of these problems go away. You automatically get "quantum immortality" because the conscious observer always exists; only the content or state changes. The world is the state of the observer. (This is the route Christopher Fuch's QBism interpretation takes, for slightly different but still related reasons.)

In this view, there are no rigid rules as regards memory, because all that matters is that at any moment the state itself is coherent as a configuration. And there is no problem with memory states differing from the state of the apparent world, they are not connected by an ongoing link to the past - no state has a past, it is completely self-contained.

This is philosophy, and there's not a lot of right and wrong answers here. I just think that if you believe in dualism, you should not pull in quantum theory to try and prove your point, because by definition, no science can possibly explain anything related to consciousness in that view.

Thanks, so I'm clearer about where you stand - I wasn't sure about how you envisaged consciousness and the multiple worlds. Just to say up front: I'm not a dualist, that kinda takes care of itself. The main thing is: there is no "outside view" to my take on this, which I think dodges quite a few hurdles.

You

So, in your description of quantum immortality, which is imagined from an objective viewpoint (you imagining being "outside" of the system and seeing this stuff happen):

• It doesn't really involve a particular conscious person living forever. It amounts to lots of duplicate persons (more accurately: duplicates at the point of creation, they then instantly differ) each of whom are conscious.
• Since forking happens constantly and started at the very beginning of the universe, we are basically dealing with a finite but enormous infinite number of worlds, each with a copy of our person (at this moment).
• Meanwhile, there is no communication between the worlds, they are sealed. From inside a world, strictly speaking we can say nothing about the other worlds.
• Those worlds are "made from" energy/matter.
• Consciousness is emergent somehow in some regions of that energy/matter but not others.

(This reminds me of why I think many-worlds is so ridiculous! Although it's fun because of it!)

In this view, we are envisaging that the multiple mathematical solutions of an equation are "real" and exist, even though only one solution is actually observed. Now, the problem with this is that it is unfalsifiable - but that's why we're doing philosophy here of course. :-)

The meaning of "quantum suicide" in this version:

• It's not so much that your consciousness persists, it's that one of the many consciousnesses will inevitably correspond to the path of survival.
• Really, this is many worlds, many deaths, single survivor.

Me

In my description of quantum immortality, which is imagined from a subjective viewpoint (from the point of view of an actual conscious observer, basically a person):

• We are only describing the situation of a conscious observer (or mind).
• The conscious observer is in a particular state, and will always been in a state. This is the observer's "private view" of the world.
• The current experience of the observer = that state, obviously.
• Meanwhile, there is no communication between any other observers. From inside a "private view", strictly speaking we can say nothing about other observers.
• These observers are made from whatever it is that states are made from - we could call it energy.
• The conscious observer is conscious by definition, and since the world is his state rather than something separate from him, there is no dualism or emergence to worry about.

In this view, we are envisaging that the multiple mathematical solutions of an equation represent the expectations of the observer based on his state. As more information becomes available, these expectations narrow down to a single value, which is the point of observation. The observation is "real", but the expectations are not. (Fuchs describes this better, of course.) The benefit of this is that it doesn't propose anything that cannot be observed.

The meaning of "quantum suicide" in this version:

• If a person exists, then they by definition survive because a person is a conscious observer (or mind) in a particular state.
• This is single world, no deaths, single survivor.

Joining it up

[EDIT: Apologies, had to rush this bit, so it's not as clear as I would like, hopefully you can discern what I was trying to say. Also: thanks for engaging in this discussion!]

So my problem with your "quantum suicide" - based on many-worlds - is that when you look at it, it's the story of lots of different people, most of whom die. You're having to sacrifice the notion of a single identity. The consciousness you are right now, reading this message, might be the one to die in an accident next month. That will be you, dead. Sure, another copy of you might carry on, but it won't be you. In my "quantum suicide" - based on QBism and "private views" - I really do survive forever. I am by definition always in the "winning" POV because it's the only one there is - my experience always continues, just by the nature of being a conscious observer. Now, obviously neither of them can be verified. Technically, if I shoot myself I can prove to myself that I am right. You, on the other hand, can never prove yourself right. However, I think my version potentially allows stories on this subreddit to be explained - such as the resets, the memory shifts, and so on - because memories do not necessarily need to change with everything else, memories are laid down sequentially as observations are made. Memories belong to the observer rather than to the world. (At a push, you could think of M and W, from earlier, as being two parts of a brain. Why would a sudden change in W necessarily cause a change in M?)

As you say, the laws of physics are obeyed, but in a squeezed situation, unlikely changes of state do become more probable relatively speaking. Just as there's a small probability an electron will tunnel through a barrier, so there is always a probability that the world will shift very discontinuously. Usually the relative likelihood is negligible, of course. But if in my version, I fall off a cliff and my body is destroyed, experience must continue from that moment, so one of the more unlikely outcomes must happen. There are no prior branches; there is only this observer, which is always in some state or other.

Note - The subjective version doesn't mean there is no shared world as such; it's just that the larger world becomes a dimensionless "shared resource" of information equivalent to "all possible states". There is no time or space between observers, in much the same way as there wouldn't be with multiple worlds.

Just quickly -

I like Tegmark a lot, but I'm not with him in his treatment of mathematics as "real", and the whole notion of consciousness being a "thing" that can be duplicated doesn't work for me. We've been round that same ride, with different wording, for hundreds of years. But there is much confusion about "consciousness" (its nature) and "consciousness-of" (its content) anyway, and often people are not disagreeing about the same thing, so to speak.

We can at least say we live in interesting times, what with neuroscientists like Chrisof Koch trying out panpsychism, and others also approaching the property of consciousness (as distinct from "self-consciousness" or intelligence) as fundamental. Good point on the proof on your version, of course. In either case, having no access outside of your own experience means you can only be proved right, to yourself - or be dead. I'd rather be alive than try to be right, in this case. :-)

Of course, what people really mean here when they say "quantum suicide" is just that in "some way" the notion of many-worlds means that they always live, subjectively. When you get into specifics and try and actually describe that, you're dealing with the problem of quantum interpretations multiplied by the problem of consciousness - i.e. these are matters of taste, not of science. So it can never be more than a bit of fun, although I think you can get quite close to a "pleasing" description. Anyway - yeah, check out QBism maybe. Why it's interesting is, it begins by admitting that there is no omnipotent view we can refer to, and so tries to avoid including fictional "objective" entities. Instead, it readmits the subjective view and tries to build out from there. I don't really agree with it completely, but it was refreshing in its avoidance of reification of the abstract. (See co-author N. David Mermins's article, if you haven't, for that perspective.)

Cheers for now - - -

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It's not exactly like that. It's more like if an ant dies, then there are still a lot of ants that didn't die. The other ants will never have experienced dying. They don't suddenly have the memory of some random other ant dying. The only thing is, that since this is a series of universes that hold different possibilities, somebody there is going to look exactly like you with the exact same lifestory, except they didn't die.
So you are not immortal. Your conscious may be, dependent on how that works, but that doesn't mean you get to keep the memories. In that regard it's more like, if you are fast asleep and somebody tickles you but you didn't notice, then you'll never know. Your body will know, because it felt the tickling, but consciously you'll never be aware. Which means that you'll simultaneously be aware and responding and at the same time you'll never ever know. If your body died, your conscious wouldn't know it got tickled one random night, nor would your body hold your memories if your brain stopped functioning. The memories are still separate, even if we imagine one could exist without the other.

Hey, yeah I was just trying to work up a formulation which fits OP's story (follow the thread for the details) and actually does give single-perspective immortality.

As it stands - and as you indicate - that many-worlds description isn't immorality, it's effectively a set of clones (not even!), one for each possible branch and hence outcome. If each clone has its own consciousness, it's not immortality, it's just survival of the luckiest clone. And how does consciousness get created at the branch? Or if there's one consciousness which transfers, then are the other clones empty? There are logical problems with that process. If it's a distributed consciousness but there's a notion of "attention" being on one, then isn't that effectively just a single perspective adopting different states? (Also: what is consciousness? Emergence is a hope, not a theory. Better if we can avoid the issue completely.)

Really, the problems arise from the idea of actual creation of branches in time, which itself comes from imagining an objective view which can never be experienced (the problem with most quantum interpretations).

If instead you switch to a subjective perspective (as some recent interpretations have sought to do), a lot of these problems go away. Instead of multiple worlds being created, never interacting, and struggling to account for the operation of consciousness, we have a "conscious observer" as the starting point. And the "world" is whatever state that observer is currently in, and the observer is always in some state or other. You can have all the same laws of physics, immortality is built in, and consciousness doesn't need to be explained - it's fundamental.

Here, instead of ever-multiplying non-interacting worlds with an observer inside them, you have non-interacting observers each of whom are in a world-state. Multiple observers are not connected in time and space (which are aspects of experiences) so their creation makes no difference, and in fact it makes no sense to talk of their creation since they have no context in terms of time or location.

Anyway, interesting to play with.

I did follow the thread. There is no problem with your theory, it's just not quantum immortality.
Quantum immortality does not mean you have one consciousness that shifts universes. It means you have several consciousnesses, that are all active at the same time.
To simplify, just think about it as having 6 senses at once. In each universe you have 6 senses. That may round up to several thousand times 6 senses, but they'll never interfere with each other. They all exist at once. They are not seperate, they're not clones and you don't "shift" into another universe (that's something else entirely). It's just that, when you die, you lose 6 of those senses. You can no longer sense them, but you still exist in all those universes where you still have 6 senses. Therefore, you'll never experience dying. You'll still be alive. And you already are. But your brain can only process 6 senses in total. So you'll never be aware of the fact that you exist in multiple universes. However, you have several brains as well, all experiencing their own universe. But they're still you in all senses of the word.

The point of the thread was to explore the notion of quantum immortality (in the sense of: a theory of immortality based on the concept of quantum states) as it could be applied to OP's story and to other stories of near death with subsequent changes - i.e. cheating death and having a subsequent discontinuity between memory and experience.

Okay, so let's pursue...

What you've described is the "attentional" model of quantum immortality, but it's fraught with philosophical problems, mostly arising from imagining "objectively" a system that can never actually be observed in any way.

EDIT: Actually, sorry, it's not even the attentional model. These are simply separate consciousnesses or aspects of a single consciousness, which operate independently and are therefore essentially separate.

It means you have several consciousnesses, that are all active at the same time.

I don't see how it can make sense to say that "you" have "several consciousness"? What is this "you" in that case?

In what sense is another consciousness "me" if I'm never aware of it and can never be aware of it? Are all consciousnesses not therefore having an independent experience? Then, in what sense are they not actually separate consciousnesses?

Surely these other "me"s are as much me only in the sense that other people are me. In the sense that "consciousness" can never die - as independent from particular manifestations as "people". I-as-consciousness might be immortal, but my identity is not immortal.

So when you say "still you in all senses of the word", that is not true in the way most people experience and conceive of themselves, which is as an observer with an identity and a history. It's basically a restatement of the mystical approach - i.e. that consciousness is undivided and eternal, although its forms may rise and fall.

Q: The point of the thread was to explore the notion of quantum immortality (in the sense of: a theory of immortality based on the concept of quantum states)
The quantum states are existing in multiple places at once. It is not a switch. It is constantly existing in multiple places at once.
as it could be applied to OP's story and to other stories of near death with subsequent changes - i.e. cheating death and having a subsequent discontinuity between memory and experience.
Which means you're not cheating death. You simply die in this universe, but you can't ever experience that, because death is the end of experiencing. You will only experience being alive, no matter how you look at it. The moments up until your death don't exist in the other states of your existence, and because of that, you would never be able to remember them. Because there is no switch, there's only two possibilities: You died or you lived. Since you can never experience "you died", you will only experience "you lived". And that's why, according to quantum immortality, you could never experience both, and so you'll never be able to remember dying.
What you've described is the "attentional" (separate consciousness) model of quantum immortality, but it's fraught with philosophical problems, mostly arising from imagining "objectively" a system that can never actually be observed in any way.
The consciousnesses are still not separate. You still experience life as progressing linearly. You are constantly dying for one reason or another. As long as there is a possibility that you will survive, that's what you are going to experience. But it's all happening at once, that's where the quantum states come into the picture.
It's not supposed to be observable. There are many theories that could be observable. There's nothing wrong with that. As I've said the entire time. But it's not quantum immortality. Quantum immortality is an unverifiable theory. That's why it can be taken slightly seriously, at least philosophically speaking.
I don't see how it can make sense to say that "you" have "several consciousness"?
You don't have several consciousnesses. You have one consciousnesses, that exists in many places at once.
What is this "you" in that case?
Physically speaking, you is every atom that makes you, it is every electron being fired in your brain, and so on. They all exist in multiple places at once, according to quantum immortality (and they actually do, when you observe them). Philosophically speaking, you would not be the memory of another universe, as once these things that make you you cease to make you you, you can never experience that, nor can you access those memories.
Are all consciousnesses not therefore having an independent experience?
Multiple experiences at once.
Then, in what sense are they not actually separate consciousnesses?
Because the entire essence of quantum immortality, and the string theory, is based on the fact that on a subatomic level, things have the ability to appear in multiple places at once. So it's one consciousness in many places.
It's basically a restatement of the mystical approach - i.e. that consciousness is undivided and eternal, although its forms may rise and fall.
No, it's not. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. For one, quantum immortality is not actual immortality. It's just the fact that stuff can appear in multiple places at once, and as such, if it dies in one place, you can't experience that place, so you won't experience that. But that's only as long as there is a possibility that you may survive, because according to the quantum immortality theory, you will be in all places at once, so when you've run out of possibilities to survive, you'll not be able to experience anything at all.
There's nothing wrong with your theory, it's just not quantum immortality. Quantum immortality means things existing in multiple places at once. Every possibility existing at the same time, but not on top of each other. Just simultaneously.

Good coverage, and mostly agreed. Stripped back to (for simplicity's sake) an omnipotent view of "arrangements of atoms", all is well.

The issue remains, on what we consider as "you" and what we think of as "consciousness". Which are both perhaps philosophical points, hovering at the subjective-objective border, and not really resolvable by thought or external experiment, I suggest. We might assert that these are identical with arrangements of atoms in the brain region, but without a way of connecting across that border, it's not very meaningful to say so; it cannot connect to personal experience.

So, in my (basically) banter on this before was an attempt is to take a subjective viewpoint and follow it through - because in reality there is no other - to see what intuitive notions of "you", "world" and "consciousness" would be, and whether they could be applied to explaining these people's glitch accounts. (Particularly because if we take "conscious observer" as the starting point, we can dodge the consciousness issue.)

Anyway, a question: What do you actually think of string theory, many-worlds? Do you consider them to be more than "a bit of fun"? Are they models to be taken seriously, or are they guilty of taking unobservable mathematical structures as "real things"?

[COMMENT]

Q: Yeah, with quantum immortality, it's not like you in the original universe somehow magically survived. That person would still be dead. But I still think the two are connected, because it's literally the same material (as far as quantum immortality goes, in reality, I'm not sure if I believe in anything). It's the exact same neurons, just now one less point in which those atoms can experience the world in the sense of being "you". But those atoms still exist, and they're still in multiple places, including those, where they are still observing the universe as a human. Because of that, I believe the views are all (or would all be) connected. Because they are the same material, all with the same background, only existing in multiple places at once. So while those atoms are still in a universe where they are not experiencing anything, they themselves are still experiencing in all the other universes. They are not aware that they are in multiple universes, but regardless, they are observing. And they all rightfully feel that they are the "right" atom, because they are. So together, they'd form the exact same sense of "you" that you are carrying right now. Which they are obviously also forming right now. So do you get to experience that? I'd say you already are. You're just not aware of it, because you are limited by a brain. But we know for a fact (or that's bad wording, but presuming the string theory is correct), that your atoms are in multiple places. So they are not limited, only your experience. And that's limited by a brain - that goes on to die. While the sense of you is still alive. I don't believe the "two yous" can be separate, when they are the exact same. Not just physically, but also philosophically in the way that both instances of you, or the particles in both areas, define themselves the exact same way. And I'd believe (and this is where this stops being quantum immortality for me, too, and becomes speculating on top of it instead) that it's all connected. I don't know what I'd call it. But I think in the sense of quantum immortality, I'd be scientific and say we are just parts of the universe experiencing itself, thus we are the universe. Assuming there is nothing outside of the universe, then that would make sense. We are built from the universe, by the universe, experiencing the universe, like a set of conscious Lego. And so I don't think there is a huge consciousness called The Universe, I believe it's just a way to process what's going on in more complicated terms. Just like one atom knows what to do when it encounters another atom, just in a larger sense: how a cluster of atoms knows what to do when encountering another cluster of atoms called, say, a bear. If that's how it functions, then it all boils down to the fact that we are just like a star or a planet; we are the universe. But that's just my personal belief. I wanted to say, but forgot, that I didn't say anything to discredit you, but with your last comment I feel like you realized that already. You obviously thought a lot about this. You're not just blabbering out of the blue and making stuff up as you go. I know you have an idea about what you're talking about. It was purely a terminological thing I was going to argue on. I can respect the rest of it. Besides, it's just fun to talk about, so I will never turn down an opportunity to write away. And... This is somewhat out of the blue and maybe I'm just projecting, but I sometimes feel like you may have death anxiety. Does that make sense? Of course if you don't want to talk about it, or I'm way off, that's fine. I'm just asking because I have death anxiety disorder (or, I'm pretty sure it's just diagnosed as anxiety disorder in many places, including where I'm from), so I know what it feels like and what thoughts it brings with it. I got it when I was 13, out of the blue, due to many deaths in my immediate family 5-6 years earlier. I never got to process those emotions, as my entire family was in grief, so they didn't have the capacity to talk to me about it. Besides, I just hid my emotions. I was a quiet kid who spent a lot of time by myself and enjoying my own company, so I guess people thought I was fine. Laid in my bed one night, as many others, and tried to imagine infinity, as I had done many times before. I liked the way you get that sudden moment of clarity when you understand what infinity is, and then swiftly forget as if it's something you're not supposed to know. My mistake was I tried to imagine being dead for infinity. And the moment I grasped it, I scared myself shitless. Of course, I swiftly forgot, so I couldn't tell why it was so scary, but I was terrified. And then I spiraled into depression for the next few years. Thankfully, it was mostly due to unprocessed emotions, and it took just a few months of therapy and some great tools from educated people to bring me back to normal (roughly speaking, it took a little more than that to get through the depression and everything) but it's how I found this subreddit, for instance. And it's also still a part of me, in the sense that I have never since attempted to imagine infinity, and I'll sometimes still have those thoughts. Only nowadays, I process them quickly and it can usually be undone by getting on my phone a few minutes or thinking of something else. So yeah, that was just to be open and honest in case you can identify with it. I know what it feels like to find out you're never alone no matter what you're battling with. And if you're not battling with it, then I may look ridiculous now, so please forgive that, haha.

[END OF COMMENT]

Hey, that was a great comment well thought out, will reply properly tomorrow.

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The rest of your comment involves a whole bunch of philosophy and scientifically unexplainable beliefs, which is fine, I just don't like it when people abuse well-defined scientific principles to hand-wavily explain their personal beliefs.

To be fair though, quantum physicists do exactly this all the time (and I've known a few), as soon as they stray from the mathematics and very limited experiments. It comes with the territory on this subject. Scientists love their pseudo-science sci-fi (and sometimes take it as seriously) as much as the lay enthusiast, really. Actual science, on the whole, isn't particularly scientific, in the way that those from the outside imagine it to be. (EDIT: In the sense that it is not really a highly-structured endeavour, following a definite method, coupled with controlled logical thinking. Quantum mechanics itself was a total hack job.)

The whole twisting around to interpret the delayed choice experiment as "retroactively" doing anything is irritating though. If the experiment underlines anything, it's simply that our knowledge of the world is defined by accumulated measurements (Observation Accumulation), that new observations will always make logical sense in the terms of previous ones (Law of Coherence), and strictly speaking we can't say more than that. Nothing is "violated" except our fantasies about what state things were in prior to being measured. There is no retroactive component because nothing "happens" other than observation. Before quantum mechanics, we could indulge ourselves in a fantasy that we knew that something and what something was going on between measurements - no more. To be fair to the general reader also, typically they are learning about "parallel universes" from awful documentaries like the recent BBC Horizon edition, Which Universe Are We In?, which actually features Tegmark prominently (mostly playing with Lego, walking about a bit, saying suspect things about the reality of mathematics). Here's the blurb:

[QUOTE]

Which Universe Are We In?
Horizon, 2014-2015 Episode 17 of 19
Imagine a world where dinosaurs still walk the earth. A world where the Germans won World War II and you are president of the United States. Imagine a world where the laws of physics no longer apply and where infinite copies of you are playing out every storyline of your life.
It sounds like a plot stolen straight from Hollywood, but far from it. This is the multiverse.
Until very recently the whole idea of the multiverse was dismissed as a fantasy, but now this strangest of ideas is at the cutting edge of science.
And for a growing number of scientists, the multiverse is the only way we will ever truly make sense of the world we are in.
Horizon asks the question: Do multiple universes exist? And if so, which one are we actually in?

[END OF QUOTE]

It comes over like one of Philomena Cunk's Moments of Wonder episodes.

...

The question is though.. how could the particle at detector 0 have known the random path it's entangled particle was going to take before it took that path?

My suggestion: the detector doesn't "know" anything. Nothing ever "happens" except for observations. In other words, strictly speaking, no paths are taken, because "paths" are a narrative we infer based on the results of the experiments, and don't exist other than this.

POST: Universe doesn't want me to change my name I guess

The more you look, the more you find! Yes, it's a fascinating place, this place (whatever it is).

Actually, "pattern overlay" is meant to describe a mechanism too: that what you hold in mind is literally overlaid upon your environment, and can become entangled with it, creating a persistent observation. It's a fun idea to experiment with, to try and make synchronicities deliberately.

A little thought experiment:

The Owls Of Eternity

Imagine that there is a TV screen, and that the programme that's showing is the programme of your world as you are looking at it. You decide you want to experience more owls in your TV programme. How to do this?

For this, you draw a picture of an owl on your TV screen. From that point, the owl picture always there, but its visibility depends upon the rest of the imagery onscreen. When the dark scenes of the TV show switch to a bright white scene, suddenly the owl "appears" - it is "manifested".

Now we adapt this to daily life. Imagine an owl idea being dissolved "holographically" in the space around you, and replace the notion of dark/white scene with appropriate contexts. Having "drawn" the owl into the space, you go about your day.

Mostly the owl isn't anywhere to be seen, but wherever an appropriate context arises then aspects of the owl idea shine through and are manifest: A man has an owl image on a t-shirt, the woman in the shop has massive eyes and eyebrows like feathers, a friend sends you an email about a lecture at the zoo highlighting the owl enclosure, a newspaper review of Blade Runner talks extensively about the mechanical owl in the interrogation scene, and so on.

Fun eh? For background, the reason they are called "The Owls Of Eternity" is because of how it progresses from "maybe confirmation bias" to obviously not that. As you've noticed, it's not just that you are seeing owls around in the environment, it's also that events start arising which result in owl experiences. The owls start coming for you.

See below for a cut and paste of a follow-up comment that goes with the experiment:

Additional Owl Adventures

The crossover beyond possible confirmation bias to something less easy to dismiss, comes in the following steps:

1. The Owls Are Internal - You notice more owl-related stuff in the world around you. It could have always been there, but you are just noticing it more. This could be confirmation bias.
2. The Owls Are External - Events occur such that owls appear in your life. A friend messages you with an owl-related joke, a colleague invites to see a band called The Owls, your mother talks about how she has bought a DVD about owls because she's totally into them suddenly. This is coincidence surely, or, okay, maybe synchronicity.
3. The Owls Become Eternal - You notice that you actually own owl-related stuff. You have an owl-shaped lampshade in your lounge, your tea-towels all have owls on them, you realise your desktop wallpaper has lots of owls in the background, you find that the label in your favourite t-shirt shows the brand logo has an owl in it. These things must, surely, have been true before you did the exercise, and when you think about it you can summon memories of them and their history, but still it's kinda strange...

Confirmation bias or frequency illusion or similar?

On Confirmation Bias

As in "seeing more red cars because you are thinking of buying a red car and looking out for them". If you experiment, you find it's something more than that. I'd scale it like this:

• conf. bias > coincidence > synchronicity > "manifestation" > shifting > "jumping"

They're all just varying levels of "pattern selection" or activation or overlay, of course. The exact same attentional mechanism that's always happening when we redirect ourselves, just to a greater extent. The thing to consider is, what are you selecting the pattern from?

You might be tempted to say that we select the pattern from the 3D-immersive environment around us, but actually that apparent 3D-immersive environment is the result of pattern selection. Instead, we might consider pattern selection to be a filtering of the possible experiential images available in a 4D space. We are selecting events or moments from possibilities, rather than just zones from our surroundings.

POST: Telepathy is normal

So I guess saying that any thoughts are "your thoughts" is problematic, perhaps.

EDIT: Rambles and strained metaphors to follow...

Just because a thought appears in your spoken voice, doesn't mean it is "yours"- that it represents your considered view on something or it is "what you think"- any more than a muscle twitch in your leg is. Passing thoughts can then be viewed as merely part of the current state of your subjective world, just like any other sense or body sensation is. When you see your girlfriend lying next to you, that visual image is an experience arising in your mind, but you wouldn't normally say that it is "your" image of your girlfriend. The thought "I'm going to go" is arising in the exact same space as that image, and yet we tend to label it as "my" thought. Really, it might be more accurate to label such a passing thought as the world's thought. This leaves us with only intentional thought as being "ours". But following on from the above, perhaps that is really wrong too. The intentional act is ours but the resulting thought is not; intentional thoughts are best described as "the intentional creation of a world thought" perhaps. It's like we are all sculptors making modifications to a shared "shape". We confuse some parts of the shape with "ourselves" but actually that part is being modified by everyone else too. Telepathy is when we stop hacking at it with our own chisel (so to speak), notice the more subtle changes that are happening anyway, and realise it's not just "our" part after all.

I agree. So if this is common knowledge... why is it not common knowledge?
Do these experiences imply something more than physical existence? Are thoughts possibly metaphysical?
Also, why am I being down voted?

Actually, these experiences imply something less. They imply that both "physical experience" and "thought" are sensations arising in the mind, and that the only difference is in their persistence and intensity. The physical world becomes just a particularly bright, stable, 3D-immersive strand of thought which arises from a single "world-pattern" that underlies all your experiences (think: the sun obscuring the stars in the daylight sky). It's not common knowledge because this destroys the notion of an "external" world, and leads to philosophical idealism and eventually non-dualism. It's not easy to grasp conceptually - it changes how you must conceive of "you" - and it's contrary to the dominant narrative that we've been using successfully for the last 50-100 years (although the debate is turning). The voting is always a bit flaky here initially!

Do you feel that there was an effort to push away from the reality of non-dualism? Is there an effort to keep this suppressed? It seems as though half of the world has known the truth all along, and the other half is slowly waking up. But why? How did we forget in the first place?

There is no conspiracy or effort, other than the effort of people to pursue what they perceive as beneficial to them, and shape the world accordingly. These things naturally fluctuate, ebb and flow. People adopt the narrative that best supports their ambitions, not necessarily the one that is true; ambitions change over time. [1]

The "strong materialism" of the last half-century was really not about "material" so much as the underlying belief by many that our explanatory fictions were "true" - an unfortunate reification of successful abstractions. Prior to this the likes of Neils Bohr suggested that (say) quantum mechanics revealed the subjective nature of observation - harking back to the Greeks before the arbitrary objective/subjective division was introduced for ease of theorising - and recent approaches such as QBism are a return to that.

[1] Of course, this is complicated by the fact that the worldview you adopt becomes the "formatting" of your mind, leading to experiences which support your view, in a pattern-triggering feedback loop. This applies to your thinking about this topic also.

...

It's better if people realize this all on their own or with trusted people who care about them than over the internet.
That's why it's a faux pas to talk about this, why you're being downvoted.

I think that many people who have experiences that they can't explain are not fortunate enough to have the time or resources to "realize this on their own", or have trusted people who can help. Surely the great thing about the internet is that it can make others' experiences and worldviews available to them, even when those are niche and unusual, whereas before those people would probably... die in ignorance. Let's face it, most people read such things and dismiss them as a bit of nonsense, while also having a mild intuition that occasionally things happen. They think no more of it! But if they are already thinking about it, then surely it's better that they can come across some discussion before the synchronicity effect gets a hold of them. Society isn't ever going to be educated in a responsible way about this sort of thing, unless it's by people like the participants on this forum.

Some related thoughts, perhaps they might be useful - Something to maybe notice: when you are out and about vs at home, how expanded or contracted is your attention? If you were to think of your ongoing experience as a vast imagination room, would your attention be localised around your body or head, or would it be open and full and at the outer reaches?

Expanding your sense of "presence" to fill the entire space of your body, and then the room, and then beyond is a great way to feel alive and open and better (I have found). And although it may be somewhat daunting at first, it can be enormously helpful to expand this "space" out when you are interacting with other people. It's counter-intuitive (surely you'd want to protect yourself by withdrawing from them?) but including other people, the whole room even, in your "presence" dissolves them within you, makes them part of you and under your experiential control. It means they are not "other" and not a threat, and you pick up full information from them. I feel a large component of social anxiety eventually arises from the issue of being disconnected from your surroundings. Other people, without realising it, literally "share space" when they interact, and automatically feel each other out in a sort of "direct knowing" (this is the true nature of empathy). To the person who has accidentally withdrawn from that, situations involving other people become confusing - because they have one of their sense turned off. An additional trick, related to this, is to centre your attention lightly in your lower abdomen area when you are interacting with other people (and even just living life generally actually). This location is where the felt-sense resides, that "global summary" of a situation. This is where people "connect". It also tends to spontaneously open out your attention, make you feel more "spacious" and "here", for free.

I had been analyzing people rather than allowing myself to share the same space as them.

Right. It's the difference between direct-knowing and thinking-about. You know something by literally touching it, rather than conceptualising it. Trying to work things out sans overlap leaves you situationally blind, but unaware of your predicament. If you reach out and touch the surface of a table, you know it is textured and hard; you don't think about "hardness". You include it in your awareness and witness a direct truth. Really, you interact with something by becoming it - and that understanding leads to interesting places. You really don't need to think at all, except to choose what "formatting" you want to have overlaying your experience. When you think intentionally, you are literally tugging at the fabric of your "world-pattern". Note that passing thoughts are fine; they are just fragments of your world state briefly revealing a sensory aspect.

"Jumping" - For that stuff, I'd recommend you start simply. You might begin by summoning The Owls Of Eternity and then you might do the Two Glasses Exercise for a situation in your local sphere. Just like the other stuff we're talking about, you only understand it by having the experience, so the first port of call is to give yourself an experience.

I notice my most intelligent moments are ... but rather responding naturally to the given experience I find myself in.

An experience already implies a response, a problem already implies its solution - because this-moment already implies its next-moment. That's why it's good to keep intentions broad rather than niggling at details, I'd say. You'll notice that I say in the exercise description something like "knowing that it is now done, carry on with your life". This refers to not constantly playing with the world-pattern. It's what is meant by an attitude of non-attachment (being okay with whatever happens), and notions of "faith" and all that stuff. If you are sitting down and want to shift to a standing state, keeping thinking about "being sat down" would reassert the sitting state and prevent it shifting into standing. You can probably see the relevance...

I'd leave the hair thing for now, but you can certainly come back to it, once you have a feel of things and how it applies to you. For your initial experiments, it's better to choose something that isn't constantly within your attention, since until you are convinced, you will find it harder to trust. The overall approach is: you do the experiments, draw your own conclusions, your results are the authority.

POST: When I wasn't looking for it, I was surrounded by Synchronicity. Now that I'm looking, it's nowhere to be found. (Kind of a long read.)

I've been playing with this a bit recently. I say: Don't look for "messages" via synchronicity. Synchronicity is basically you experiencing the state of your own mind, via the senses. You might think of it a bit like a mirror - or better, that your mind is a perceptual filter. The filter dictates what subset of the extended dimensionless reality will appear in your ongoing 3D sensory moment. So, if you spend 20 minutes today imagining owls, as vividly as you can, as if they were in the room with you... you'll spend the next week encountering lots of owls. It's as if you have created an "owl-shaped hole" in your perceptual filter, and the "infinite light of creation" (or whatever) now shines through it, giving you owl-shaped experiences. The summary:

• Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. (Leave shapes on your "perceptual filter".)
• Thoughts also leave traces, as in-form-ation, affecting subsequent experiences. (You can use this deliberately.)
• Synchronicity is the name for the experiential patterns which result.

So, not much good for messages since you'll just be seeing what you've been thinking and experiencing, as residual indentations on your filter (although you might get some insight into things you are thinking in the background that you're not aware of). Better to use the technique deliberately. You might not be into owls, but you are probably into something, something that would make you happier? Deliberately spend some time vividly imagining that, so that you are more likely to encounter/notice it. (It's a kinda magical approach, I suppose.)

EDIT: Note that you can think about more general "facts" rather than just images. Also, sorry to hear about your situation. Hope things turn around. Watch out for those owls. They can be sexy.

Nice. This is really interesting. So by imagining owls, we're sort of summoning owls out of the "infinite dimensions" of creation into our current reality. Have you played around with this in practice?

Yes, it's much simpler than the other ways I was looking at things.

My poor old Mum is great to experiment on with this stuff (I've already taught her how to win any arm wrestle without effort, and to find hidden chocolate via intuition - yeah, she'll be great at Extreme Easter Sports) and I gave her this metaphor to explain it and get her using it (excuse length, but perhaps others will find it useful):

The Imagination Room

There is a vast room. The floor is transparent, and through it an infinitely bright light shines, completely filling the room with unchanging, unbounded white light. Suddenly, patterns start to appear on the floor. These patterns filter the light. The patterns accumulate, layer upon layer intertwined, until instead of homogenous light filling the room, the light seems to be holographically redirected by the patterns into the shape of experiences, arranged in space, unfolding over time. Experiences which consist of sensations, perceptions and thoughts.

At the centre of the room there are bodily sensations, which you recognise as... you, your body. You decide to centre yourself in the upper part of that region, as if you were "looking out from" there, "being" that bodily experience.

At the moment you are simply experiencing, not doing anything. However you notice that every experience that arises slightly deepens the pattern corresponding to it, making it more stable, and more likely to appear again as the light is funnelled into that shape.

Now, you notice something else. If you create a thought, then the image will appear floating in the room - as an experience. Again, the corresponding pattern is deepened. Only this time, you are creating the experience and in effect creating a new habit in your world!

Even saying a word or a phrase triggers the corresponding associations, so it is not just the simple thought that leaves a deeper pattern, but the whole context of that thought, its history and relationships.

Now, as you walk around today, you will feel the ground beneath your feet - but you will know that under what appears to be the ground is actually the floor of the room, through which the light is shining, being shaped into the experience around you. And every thought or experience you have is shifting the pattern...

Asserting Facts

You can also use it to "assert" new facts-of-the-world. I leave it to readers to experiment and take this further - but instead of picturing owls, what if you asserted a fact?

You do this by "feeling it to be true" rather than picturing it, to allow for a more general pattern. For example, "people are always bumping into me on the street". I'm sure you could think of better "facts"...

Those were other examples, pre-room metaphor, but the same basic principle applies. Here's how they work:

• For the arm-wrestling, withdraw your "presence" from your arm so you're not tempted to try to make it happen. "Decide" that you are going to win, feeling the winning position - get out of the way and just wait for it to happen.
• For the chocolate-finding, think of your body like a "shell". Withdraw from it, letting it move as it wants. Command it, "body, go and retrieve the object", and get out of the way. Let your body go as it pleases.

In both cases, you are essentially declaring that something is going to happen - that it really already has happened, a "fact" on your timeline - and then staying in a state of "open allowing" to let circumstances unfold without interference.

Huh, this is really interesting.

And something you can easily experiment with! Particularly the first one.

Your body actually always works like this, it's just that you've got into the habit of constantly intending a "posture/position" for it, effectively asserting it stay in a fixed position - so in daily life you have to overcome that to move. Stop asserting the position, and it's instantly much easier (that's why we "withdraw our presence": this stops us re-activating the "staying still" habit).

...or just watch myself do it?

This.

And how hard is it to let go?

Have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds? ;-) It's better to phrase it as something you stop doing: stop interfering, or "absolute allowing". In terms of what it feels like, it feels like you are stopping holding on to your focus of attention, and it opens out in response. Meanwhile you adopt that attitude that you are okay with whatever happens, including nothing happening.

Don't overthink it. In fact, one problem is you can't conceptualise non-doing, and you can't experience intending - you can only experience results.

If you want a little exercise to practice (which I steal slightly from this great Missy Vineyard book which takes the Alexander Technique and discovers some of these ideas along the way, although not quite so extended), do this one:

• Lie down on the floor. Couple of books to support your head. Feet flat on the floor, knees up.
• Give up to gravity completely. Let go absolutely, of your mind, body and attention. Let them do whatever they will. Give up to "God" or whatever; abandon yourself. Release yourself into the space in the room around you; become that background space. (These are just different ways of saying "let yourself be".)
• "Decide" that you are going to roll over onto your side, but do absolutely nothing about it.
• Wait until your body moves by itself.

Eventually, it will. It'll feel like magic. Then realise that this is how it always is; it's just that you have developed the habit of tensing up your muscles, tensing up the universe, to hold it in position, or to "feel yourself doing something".

The feeling of "doing something" that you normally have is actually the feeling of resistance of your bad habit, which you have to push through.

Once you've got the "happens by itself" vibe, experiment with leaving your body functioning that way. Just "decide" things, and let them happen by themselves. One way of conceiving of this is to think of it as "allowing yourself to experience..." something; releasing in a direction, rather than moving in a direction.

The experience is already there, you are just "letting it in". Letting it "shine through".

I've got a lot of time tomorrow; I'll post results if you want

Do it! Remember, you've spent a lifetime doing the opposite, so it might take a little while for the "moves by itself" exercise to kick in. But this is because you are still resisting a little. You might even feel a bit uncomfortable when it first happens, but stick with it.

Do you think this can help me find stuff I've lost, like my Gameboy from a few years ago?

Give it a shot. "Just decide" that the Gameboy is going to come back into your possession, and maybe feel excited about this. Then, see what happens.

Something to note: Sometimes the gap between the deciding and the result can take a little while. For instance, if the object is not local, it may take a while before the sequence of actions you feel "inclined" to do (even unwittingly) eventually leads you there. But it's pretty reliable. Fear not, something is happening - remember, you can't feel intention at work, only the 3D sensory experience that results from it.

(You've set the pattern on the floor; you're waiting for the image to appear in the room.)

...No problem - have fun with it! :-)

I try as hard as I can, but I can't seem to really "let go".

Yes, it's not to so easy to let go if you try to do it. You're not trying to lose attention, or manipulate yourself into a particular state - you're just aiming to stop interfering and accept whatever experiences come up. You are not meant to be using effort at all. You are giving up direct control.

For immediate things, like "find the chocolate that's in the house somewhere", you feel an urge to go somewhere. But if it was in the car, say, you might later that day feel the intuition to fix a shelf, which means you go into the garage, and then you suddenly think "I'll just look in the car door sidepocket".

That's why, after you "ask", you need to let go and be okay with anything that happens. When it's time to take action, you'll feel the feel.

Also, this doesn't reach into occult stuff, does it?

Not really, just your extended memory or intuition, which you don't have direct access to, but you can allow to lead you. In effect it's not different to the arm-wrestling or being good at catching (technique: centre your attention behind your forehead, let your body move by itself). You're just trusting your nervous system to operate spontaneously and correctly, rather than trying to control things manually.

There's no danger of "possession" - that's just people being scared that if they loosen control, their own impulses and urges will take them over. Letting go can feel a bit scary though, because it feels like you are lowering your defences and becoming completely open. But you are only lowering your defences against your own self! :-)

Q: [Deleted]

No problem. Remember, the larger picture is basically telling yourself you want something, and then getting out of the way, forgetting about it.

The biggest impact is the just the simple one of stress-free living without tensing your body. The "imagination patterns" is then extra icing on top.

Very good explanation.

Thanks. Always trying to come up with good ways to describe this, even thought it's slightly not-describable!

Interesting, your stretching idea. Wanna share?

My general feel is that you can't harm your body so long as you aren't forcing it. If you switch you attention to the "open background space" of your awareness, then "just decide" what you are going to do in broad terms, your body will get the job done.

Micro-manage it though, you can't.

What my teachers always taught and tried to convince everyone, is that muscle reflexes that you would normally only be able to control yourself, like raising your hand, absolutely cannot be autonomic (visceral).

If you have got into the habit of "holding onto" yourself then you will indeed get in the way of things like automatic arm raising - because you are constantly asserting yourself into your current posture. If you do that, you then have to "fight past it" to get anything done. This is why people feel they are putting effort into movement and activity, rather than experiencing it "happening to them", as they should.

...

I just thought of something before going to sleep. Maybe your mom is influencing the other person's thoughts when winning those arm wrestles. I've been looking at some reddit posts recently about energies that we can transmit. I'll link them later. You may have seen some of them because I saw a post about it on this subreddit.
This also makes me remember how I finally talked with a friend who also acknowledged the ability to visualize (while concentrating really really hard) what the opponent in a RPS game will do. And then win. Oddly, I have always visualized what hand will be needed to lose, so I have to quickly reverse the idea to make my decision and win. My friend would visualize the winning move. We did not test this on each other because I was too tired during that time period.
Jeez, and I might as well share this too. I was playing CS:GO with a friend and some other players I was sort of friends with. I've played Counter Strike for thousands of hours previously, so I had a really good idea of how people move around in the map. So I ended up predicting perfectly where the opposite team would be going every single round, for almost all 15 rounds, until I realized that my microphone was off. I was shouting to my teammates where the enemy team was going, but we always ended up going somewhere else. My friend was impressed lol...but we would have won way more easily if my team had heard my directions. In this particular map, there are at least 10 places the enemy could be heading towards to defend (they were Counter-terrorists), and many other paths they could take to get to these places. A lot of choices. Basically, it wasn't chance. To reiterate, I accurately predicted the enemy's exact movements, which I know because there are points on the map where it becomes obvious where you and the enemy may have intersected or not intersected as the game goes on. So either I predicted accurately due to my extensive skill in understanding the enemy and knowing what choices they make based on previous map gameplay decisions and turnouts, or I used the method of asserting facts, and the enemy team followed my facts. Just as a note, I'm generally really good at identifying human patterns and conditions once I take a long time to learn them, so it's not impossible that I predicted their movements simply based off of our round wins/losses, and the previous choices in movement that the enemy and my team had made in the other rounds, as well as available money and weapons, which affect future game play choices.
I've included this story because it combines mental gymnastics with asserting facts. Both are ideas you included in your comments.

Hey, good stuff!

I think it's not about her influencing other thoughts, although that's how someone could imagine that it was happening (and then the limits that implies would apply). It's more straightforward than that: she is simply deciding that something is going to happen and, remaining in a relaxed state, she is then allowing that to unfold (without re-deciding or preventing it happening).

Possible interpretations in general (pushing it out a bit here):

I say: We can't tell the difference between experiencing something we caused, something we influenced and experiencing something we predicted, because it amounts to the same thing:

• Although we encounter time in a "moment by moment" sequence, it is actually laid out like a landscape - always there even though you are only "looking" at a certain part.
• If we predict something, we are "reading" the landscape before getting to a location.
• If we assert something, we are "writing" the landscape before getting to a location.
• When we get to the location, it is whatever it is. We can't then tell whether reading/writing occurred specifically, or whether reading/writing occurred indirectly.

For instance, by "asking for information" you might be implicitly "asking for information that corresponds to your desire", which involves making the information correspond to your desire. The background intention or assumption behind the act makes a difference.

Basically, it's like you dream your world. It unfolds spontaneously according to the current "facts"; you have the ability to modify "facts" whether the evidence corresponding to those facts is present within the senses at that moment or not; subsequent experience will be in alignment with those facts. As suggested earlier: once we've made a decision about what's going to happen, though, we have to then not "re-decide' and thereby re-pattern events again, undoing our good work. That's why you need to be non-attached and allowing.

From elsewhere:

However you imagine that it works,
That's how it works. - TG

That's one take on it anyway: What you are sensorily experiencing arises as a 'transparent mirage' from the facts-of-the-world in the background. All intention operates indirectly, via adjusting the facts-of-the-world. We never actually interact with our sensory experience. We never actually "do" anything directly, instead we just experience things.

EDIT: Inserted earlier paragraph which I'd omitted.

Ever since I read your post there have been bloody owls everywhere!! I even bought a T-shirt the other day with an owl on it and realised after I left the shop!! You and your bloody owls! I mean, it could be worse I suppose, but it could have been better dammit! I have had to route out your comment again just to tell you about the curse you have bestowed upon me. Its no hoot I'll tell you that much, aw God damn it.

Haha, a hoot indeed! :-) Thanks for sharing.

You've got off fairly lightly: people who've done it more deliberately suddenly find that, apparently, they've been amassing owl-related objects for years without noticing...

Still, if it works for summoning The Owls Of Eternity, perhaps it might work for other, less beaky items eh?

The Owls are a good way for people to explore the idea, I think, because it can't cause any damage. Well, bar a few sleepless nights from nocturnal noise, perhaps. (8>)=

A nice way to think of this is, you are "recalling" an idea or thought-pattern into your experience from the background memory of the world (summary here with deeper links [A Line Of Thought]). Objects are like ideas overlaid onto experience - and more interestingly, aren't situations a bit like momentarily-present, environment-sized objects?

Worth experimenting with anyway, I would imagine (excuse pun)...

POST: Discovered this sub and have two things I can't understand

A few of those "crash didn't happen" stories on the sub. Did you notice anything else different about the world afterwards? Randomly:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/ofqic/escaping_a_crash_by_flipping_through_the/]

This happened to both my friend, Steve, and his father. Steve's son was accidentally shot by another family member. Steve remembers seeing his son die in front of him, but suddenly his son was fine and had only been hit in a non-vital area. His father and 3 friends accidentally drove off a cliff, but suddenly were all back on the road. All 4 remember this very vividly!

So, basically these are Ctrl-Z events.

POST: A Hiccup In Time

[POST]

My husband and I just got home from my parents house. I have to take the interstate to get home. Well, we had just passed the tall buildings downtown and were coming around the curb on the interstate that's right before our exit when we heard a train blow it's horn not far from us. I laughed and said it sounded like a crash symbol and that it scared me, it was so loud. Then when the train stopped blaring it's horn, I suddenly had no idea where we were at. Neither did my husband. After about 30 seconds of silence we realized we were about to pass the downtown area AGAIN. Everything happened is less than a minute and we both witnessed it.

[END OF POST]

Q: That's trippy as shit! I've had some... eh... interesting things happen to me while driving, as well. I recounted one in another thread; the only one I recall in enough detail to actually talk about. I started driving with a dash cam about 2 years ago, though, and such events have utterly and completely ceased since then. The system, it seems, doesn't like to change things there is a provable record of; probably because there would then be concrete proof of the glitch and not just the ramblings of a handful be people who may well by psychotic (yes, I'm including myself in that group).
Of note in your story is that you say the train horn sounded like a crash symbol. That's not at all what a train's horn sounds like, but clearly it sounded like a horn at the onset, as you were able to identify it. Did it seem to morph into the crash symbol sound after it started? Was there any type of electrical buzz or harmonic sound to it that would have been atypical of either a train's horn or a crash symbol?
If you want to dig deeper into the "reality is a simulation" concept, google "Tom Campbell Calgary". There are 3 talks by him on YouTube, all given over the same weekend, each a little over 2hr long. The first 2 cover much of the same material, but it's important to watch both before watching the 3rd, since there are some different bits in them; anything he repeats, he's repeating for a reason. Pay really close attention from 21:35 to 29:11 of the first talk, though, if you're at all skeptical. In fact, watch that first to decide if it's something you even want to get into.

Funnily enough, I've not long finished reading My Big TOE. It's a bit of a slog, and I don't quite agree with it, but it's full of interesting reality-as-simulation stuff and pertinent to this sub. (I agree with him on the potential flexibility, but I think he overdoes the "digital reality" stuff.)

Probably easier to watch the vids - good call!

Q: Yeah, if my glitch experiences tell me anything, we're in an analog simulation; definitely not digital. But, then, he does talk about everything he says being a metaphor, and we do generally have a better understanding of digital computers than we do analog, so it's possible that's just another metaphor, as well.

Yes, he does emphasise it's a metaphor - I just feel he's a little enamoured with that one beyond its usefulness. It means he ends up talking about defined 'rulesets' when in fact I'd say that something more like 'established habits' would be appropriate.

At that level, everything gets metaphorical because the "basic stuff" isn't really an object anymore... it's the "non-material material" that objects are made from.

POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!

I've got a couple of silly tricks that are good to try, which benefit from randomisation. I'll stick with the more obscure but easier to perform one for now. It'll sound odd, and it's not exactly an obvious glitch generator, but there's method in the apparent madness. Here goes:

• Choose a situation that you want to change, but one that you don't necessarily have much influence over.
• Decide clearly what the current situation is, and what the desired replacement situation is.
• Get two glasses.
• Get two bits of paper or labels.
• Fill one of the glasses with water.
• On the first label, write a word that summarises the current situation, and stick it to the filled glass.
• On the second label, write a word that summarises the desired situation, and stick it to the empty glass.
• With the two glasses in front of you, pause for a moment, and contemplate how your life is currently filled with the first situation, and empty of the desired situation.
• Then, when you're ready, pour the water from the first glass (the current situation) into the second glass (the desired situation), while really noticing the sounds and feeling and shifting of the water from one to the other.
• Sit back and see the glasses in their new state; allow yourself to take deep breath and feel relieved.
• Take off the labels, put away the glasses, carry on with your life.

The audience should feel free to try this one at home.

POST: What happens if you get stuck in an alternative universe?

Q1: it's a sad thing that /r/DimensionalJumping/ is closed. It was the best sub to explore this idea. According to the leading contributers of this sub, everyone experiences such timeline changes all the time but mosts are unaware of it, because of a mix of conditioning, brain automatic filtering, and our own memory limits.
Also timeline changes are controlled by our unconscious mind. It's hard to control this part of our mind, but there are methods to tricking your mind that such or such thing is true when it's not (yet). It looks more or less like a metaphysical prey and its associated rites. According to the sub, by following these non-religious rites, you'll trigger successive timeline jumps in the direction of your wanted reality.

Q2: Is there a reason this sub was closed?

Q3: It has been said the sub had been started from the wrong basis (with a bad name to begin with) and it lead to confusion for newcomers. For example, the sub attracted perturbed people who got anxious about jumping into a bad time-line. My opinion is that the growing popularity of both the sub and u/triumphantGeorge started to turn the whole experiment into something a bit dangerous.

One version of the answer [POST: Ever heard of r/DimensionalJumping?]. Essentially, it became unwieldy to operate the subreddit as it was designed and keep it on track - as a dialogue-based subreddit where moderation would be via participation (the content would be in the comments, with everyone unpacking people's ideas and experiences, based on previous insights).

POST: Raining on me inside

UC, you insist on taking all the magic away... ;-)

...Understandable. Shitty stuff abounds. :-/

You can't escape from anything though, escaping implies existence and perpetuates things (in my experience). The rule turns out to be: no-one ever wins a fight, you have to turn away and forgive (=forget without trace). Very Biblical. All we can do is assert a new experience and open up to it.

Today the Owls Of Eternity, tomorrow the world! ;-)

On eyesight - now this is for something different but maybe it could help a bit indirectly - after years of mucking around with exercises and the Bates method and so on for variable short-sightedness, I realised that if I instead "sat back" in my head and "let the world come to me" suddenly my vision (or actually perception) was transformed. Can't find the original article, but there's a paper by the same person copied here: Seeing from the Core [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml].

POST: Wrote a 'prison escape via tunneling' story featuring a 'Dave.' Five hours prior, a 'Dave' actually tunneled out of prison.

MuayThaiJudo: Write a story about a redditor named /u/MuayThaiJudo winning $10,000,000 just days before Adriana Lima slip, fell and landed vagina first on his dick.

Q2: This is the most practical response.

Yesterday I wrote a story about a reddit user who wrote a story about how they wrote some dialogue about a prison break and then discovered that a reporter wrote a story about an actual prison break which followed the same scheme as the story they wrote. So everyone better watch be careful what they reply to this, if they value their tomorrows - I've still got my Word document open and the Cursor Of Synchronistic Doom is blinking...

Q1: Write a story about a redditor writing a story about /u/imalurkerwhocomments curing cancer while he wins $10,000,000 on the lottery and moments later he actually does

I've gone one better and outsourced it: I've written a story about someone else who writes that story, thereby saving me writing the story but still, in effect, writing the story.

Q3: Things like this happened all the time when i was working on my science fiction novel, except it was with technology and scientific discoveries. Maybe I should start writing again.

Got any personal examples to share?

My favourite well known one is Philip K Dick's tale in How to Build a Universe... where his novel Flow My Tears the Policeman Said is later reflected in real life and a Bible passage he hadn't read. Whatever's on your mind does seem to get reflected in "external" events. We've covered mind-formatting & synchronicity before but the reality of it - your insides appearing on the outside - is never not freaky.

Q3: 2007: I start working on the story and set it in 2008. Some of the characters have PDA's to share information over long distances. A week later, Apple announces the first Iphone and Ipad.
A few months down the line I've wound the story backwards in order to flesh out the story. I come up with a space plane to make the space portions of the story to work. I came up with a "Revolver" type aircraft engine which starts off like a normal jet engine and transitions into a hypersonic engine and eventually a rocket engine for sub orbital / low orbit travel.
Skylon was announced 3 days later, and it turns out i'd described the XB70 without realising it.
An as yet unwritten portion of the story takes place on Mars, and so I was working out how to keep the astronauts safe from cosmic rays and other nastiness, so I got to thinking about magnetic shielding. The next day a scientist releases a paper saying pretty much the same thing. One of the setttings for my story involves a highly implausible setting of a gas giant between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud for some aliens to hide and repair their ship. According the Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomy" something like that may actually exist. I describe at the start of my story a spaceship full of dials and gauges which makes it to low orbit, and I was informed it sounds like an early Apollo mockup. I invented a mega corporation for my story, which I know call the "Foundation for Peace and Brotherhood" the back story being they started in Italy after the black death as a way for neighbours to help each other out, and over time it spread and gained influence etc etc. The original name was "The Medici Foundation" as I knew a little about history and thought it would be a good name to use. But guess what?
There's other small things as well, like the "Lunar Ion Freighter" from 1959, which i thought at the time I would have had to defend to the death, but it seems that could have existed. Those are a few things, sorry for the wall of text.

Those are a few things, sorry for the wall of text.

Thanks, that's exactly the sort of thing I was interested in. There's something about writing fiction in particular which makes this phenomenon more apparent. Perhaps because it's a process where you are inherently more aware of what you are imagining. It's always hard to tell the difference between these ideas being part of a "larger movement" or whether our thoughts "pattern" our subsequent experience. I've been experimenting a little with (so-called) synchronicity and generating it deliberately. Lots of fun to be had.

...

Did he affect the ancient past with his powerful ability to visualize?

Thinking about this, it's not necessarily "the past" that gets affected, it's that subsequent observations take the form of previous ones. Even if a discovery is "about the past" it is really an observation of something in the present. So, Hancock "has the experience of" writing about about red-haired Neanderthals. Later, he "has the experience of" reading about an archeological exploration which finds red-haired Neanderthals. The "past" is nowhere to be found in this description except as "the experience of" thinking about the "past", in his imagination. All three experiences occur in the present, one after the other. Once Hancock has invented the "fact" of red-haired Neanderthals, all subsequent observations will be consistent with this new "fact" (even though he made it up).

Q4: Thinking about this, it's not necessarily "the past" that gets affected, it's that subsequent observations take the form of previous ones. Even if a discovery is "about the past" it is really an observation of something in the present.
Yeah.. yeah.. yeah.. that make sense. I'll have to ponder some more on this. It's hard to talk about in lots of ways. There is some connection between observer and creation of "reality."

One way to approach this is to just keep it simple: [1]

Pay attention to the actual forms that arise, and not your explanations about them. Those explanations are just stories you invent to connect different observations. Also, don't separate out inside or outside: If you are experiencing anything, then it's a pattern arising in your "perceptual space" - it's all in the same "place". Looked at this way, it's like Hancock created a pattern in his "perceptual space" which then persisted, intermingling with and superimposed upon the other patterns that were going on - one of which was "reading about archeology". (Like mentioned in the link I posted above.)

He then ascribes meaning to this (via concepts of "the past" and "a world") but really there are no such things. Only patterns swirling around and unfolding in his perceptions. Of course, this brings up issues of identity and how the world is "shared" between us, if patterns in Hancock's experience result in patterns in our experience. This is solved if: there is no difference, there is no Hancock, or you, only perceptual patterns in one conscious space.

[1] Okay, so I guess that's simple in the sense of "there are only patterns" but not very simple to describe and think about! :-)

POST: Forbidden knowledge erased

[POST]

Has anyone ever felt like they've had a thought that gives you a deep answer or key to life, only to forget it seconds later? I've had this happen a few times recently. It's like a thought will enter my head, or rather be "pushed" into my head, that leaves me in awe. Then, it just disappears from my head and I can't even remember what it was, or a trace of it, no matter how hard I try. All I'm left with is the feeling of awe, like I saw behind a veil to something incredible and someone whisked me away before I was able to fully see it. Anyone else?

[END OF POST]

It could be that the "thought" is actually the experience of the gap between thoughts - the raw openness - and so you can't re-member it. You can't remember it, because it can't be conceived of, and it leaves no trace because it's a lack of sensory content.

So a taste of death?

Hard to say. Some stories here and elsewhere would suggest that experiencing of some sort continues after experiencing "dying". Perhaps it's better to say something like: it's a taste of not-being-a-person.

...

"How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?" :-)

So - it's probably more accurate to say that there are light-as-wave observations and there are light-as-particle observations - but beyond this "light" doesn't exist in any particular state, other than as a concept in a fictional narrative, a story we use to connect the gaps between observations. Light doesn't "happen" except for the observing of it.

A1: Aha! So if this goes for light, this should go for everything else too, right? Nothing happens except for the observing of it? So the observing, done by an observer, creates(?) (renders?) everything as it's being observed/experienced? So there is no world except for the observer and what he observes - and how do you separate the two? Is it even possible to separate the two?

Yes, it goes for everything! So there is no separation between the observer and the observed. We might think of "the observer" as being an open aware space in which his experiences arise - we could say that an observer takes on the shape of their observations. This does leave us with a couple of questions though, which I'll have a stab at:

• How is it that the world appears to-have-happened though?: It does seem like things have been going on while my attention was elsewhere, hwo can this be? This might be explained by "creation-by-implication". When we direct our attention in a particular direction, an experience is triggered which is plausible given the observations thus far.
• If the world isn't out there then in what sense does it exist?: Maybe it exists only in the sense that all possible experiences are simultaneously available - like all the individual frames of all possible movies being stacked in the projector at once - and all that changes is the "brightness" of them, varying in their relative contributions to our current moment.

It only seems like there's a world happening "out there" because we've got into the habit of selecting our next-moment based on the contents of the now-moment plus our history. Except when we slip up and things seem to shift discontinuously and break the rules - a "glitch"!

A1: I think you nailed it right on the head! I would even take it a bit 'further'.
When we direct our attention in a particular direction, an experience is triggered which is plausible probable given the observations thus far.
My theory is that our experience of now is just a collapsed point of several probability lines. The past is a 'written' line, the now is the current focus, and the future is a string of probablity lines that are always in flux until you reach the next 'iteration of time' (aka. next delta-T) where it collapses and manifests as the most probable function. Each line of probability is continously moved towards or away from the collapse point (now) according to how previous collapse points have occured. In this model everything that can happen is possible, but everything that can happen has a different degree of probability of happening.

Yes, you can certainly describe it that way!

I've been trying not to use "probable" because (of course) we never actually experience probability - it's a tool, an abstraction, but some groups have taken to be objectively true lately. "Plausible" makes it sound more like what it is: a story we make up and make a judgement on. But "probability" is as good a metaphor as any!

Now the fun stuff. Given that all possible experiences are available, and it's our previous observations that define the contribution of possibilities (your "probabilities") towards future observations - is it possible to influence this?

All possible observations are "here, now" - even unlikely ones. Is there a way to make an unlikely one take priority? How can we force a glitch or discontinuous change?

A1: Well, learning from established physics and quantum mechanics, isn't it now a common understanding that whatever is observed becomes affected simply by being observed? So how to influence the possibilities could maybe be, at least first, to observe the possibilities in some way?
How to observe probabilities/possibilities when all you are is "aware space" or "consciousness"? Imagination!! Until we get a machine that is able to calculate and/or discern future possible probabilities, I think that is as close as we're gonna get to manipulate the outcomes. But merely observing something and therefore changing/affecting it is one thing - if we assume it is possible to at least influence the possibilities in this way, can we assume it is possible to influence the possibilities in a controlled way? In a directed way? In a way that intends one possibility to become manifest instead of another? Or as you said, is there a way to make an unlikely possibility take priority over a more likely one?
Here we would need experimental testing, re-testing and triple-testing. Let's set up the premises we would need:

• 1: Probabilities can be affected by observation
• 2: Imagination is a form of observation
• 3: Probabilities can therefore be affected by imagination
• 4: Imagination can be controlled
• Inference from previous premises: Probabilities can therefore be affected and controlled by imagination
  Then do rigorous testing to try to disprove any of these premises. First and most obvious flaw in this experimental setup is it would rely almost entirely on subjective reporting (but then again, as we've already covered, there can't be observation without observer - it's impossible to get around the subject). But maybe that wouldn't matter, because in any case we could set up imagined possibilities, then have a subject attempt to control the imagined possibilities into a certain desired 'state', then observe if the 'outside Universe' conformed to the controlled imagined possibility or not, or if it did so to any discernable degree.

An excellent summary and I completely agree. The only area I would pick at would be the idea of an "outside universe", since such a thing can never be experienced. Earlier we established that there is no observer-observed separation. This means that we don't affect things by observing them, we bring them into fact by doing so. This means that the world is our accumulated observations, and that includes the observations of (apparent) other people. So, we hit a problem. Although we have ignored the situation for 2000 years, we are forced to admit (to re-admit) that the world is subjective and we each have a "private copy" or view of it. And this means that the experience of "observing someone use imagination to influence the world" is also a part of the private copy.

In other words, we cannot prove this to someone else, because that proof is always really to ourselves and within ourselves!

A1: Absolutely! And that's why I wrote 'outside Universe' with apostrophes ;P
Formulating it as "bringing them into fact" is as succinctly as it can be put, I think, because as words are limiting at best, this description says a lot about the apparent mechanics of this process. And yes, finally, it's impossible to prove anything, and even to ourselves that proof would be dubious. Our private copy of existence is like a self-referential loop, or a mirror placed in front of a mirror, creating an endless fractal of self-referential data. Oh, and even if we can't get out of our own private copy and therefore never know anything about any fictitious/non-existant 'outside' world, for practical purposes, the experiment could still be attempted in the subject-in-object reality view that today's science use, and would likely produce entertaining data no matter what the results were :) It would actually be interesting to test, if only on a very small scale!

Sorry, mere apostrophes just weren't sufficient there - it needed to have full quotation marks! ;-)

Because the looping/mirroring metaphor can get a bit tangled and implies two parts where there is really only one - I find it easier to describe in terms of the activating of already-existing patterns. This lets us dodge infinite regression and maintain the idea of an ongoing "now" - but different metaphors are good for different contexts anyway. As you indicate, we can't get out of our own private copy, because we aren't actually in it. Rather, the private copy is within us and it includes our bodies as part of the world! Even the latest interpretations of QM (such as QBism) are giving up on objective interconnected aspects, although they hand-wavingly say that maybe some sort of objective explanation might come in the future. (Nope!)

However, if for fun we at least allow there to be multiple "perspectives", then there's still value in doing the experiment. We can think of the world as being a shared set of patterns (rather than a shared environment). By contributing new connections or activations from our private copy, we are making those available to other copies - albeit indirectly - thus spreading the magic for everyone else! :-)

A1: Hehe. Yep. And on that note we conclude this circle jerk ;)
PS. Even "within us" brings up a separation problem, but all words would eventually be insufficient to describe anything. They work like approximations, always beating around the bush, indicating or pointing to that which it is beating around :P
PPS. This has been a riveting discourse to have after being awake for more than 36 hours!

Well done us for solving reality! ;-)

PS. Yeah, true, there's really no way to say it because all words and metaphors imply separation into parts and then a relationship in space.

PPS. Haha, well, I have a sneaking suspicion that lack of sleep helps rather than hinders these sorts of conversations.

Catch you next time!

POST: The silent, faceless fifth housemate in The Young Ones TV show

Really one for the /r/MandelaEffect subreddit. I suspect Ben Elton is just being playful here, and doesn't want to get into all the legal issues for having invented and used the character from the movie Ringu 15 years before he sold it to the Japanese...

Q1: Hi, TriumphantGeorge, always enjoy your posts. It was x-posted /r/MandelaEffect and the GITM Mandela effect thread shortly after here. It's unfortunate that the "glitch" and "Mandela Effect" terms became standard. The former implies a temporary error, the latter doesn't mean anything at all. "Reality shift" is a better term for most of the stories. The changing-histories type of shift was the first type recorded at Cynthia Sue Larson's RealityShifters site in 1999, Sun Dial Rality Shift. The "Alive Again" type of shift, later called the "Mandela Effect" is another sub-type of time-shift, specifically involving people, which has been stretched to mean all kinds of discrepancies between memory and evidence, but M.E. is a less descriptive term than "time-shift" or even better "history-shift". A full taxonomy of shifts would have at least a dozen types, but it's difficult to make one without assuming that similar effects are similar in origin, and that dissimilar effects have dissimilar causes, which may not be the case.

I agree, the categorisation is a bit arbitrary when we start to think about what such experiences might mean "fundamentally". While we want to avoid presuming that various shifts have a common cause, or have uncommon causes, we're still left with the practical requirement of organising things somehow so we don't end up with one big gloop. The reason that "glitches" and "Mandela Effects" are handled separately is partly historical - how the two subreddits arose - and partly because the "Mandela Effect" is a much more general category, usually not a direct experience, and is somewhat difficult to define, so it tends to dominate a subreddit unless it is kept separate. Of course, the dividing line is fuzzy, which is why your post, for example, and others aren't just removed. To some extent, this depends on the amount of effort put into the post, and the quality of discussion it generates. I'm still duty bound to point out that "there is a place for this" even if it's left to stand though!

Yeah, I think Cynthia Sue Larson's site was probably the first to log "shift" experiences in an organised way. Being a fully "curated" site, she avoids encountering many of the issues we do in a public forum type environment, partly because her site is in effect pre-moderated, but also because she holds to a particular perspective on what constitutes a shift and what is behind it (to some extent). We don't really have that luxury here - which is why we try to define "glitches" and "Mandela Effects" in terms of the experience rather than the explanation, even avoiding saying that change happens in "the world" rather than "in our ongoing experience". For example, even the idea that the concept "the world" corresponds to something actual - e.g. that the-world-as-it-is really is a "shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time", or any other worldview- rather than being a convenient "parallel construction in thought", is potentially somewhat suspect. Even simple categorisation schemes contain hidden assumptions! Having said that, I'm working on an idea for sort of linked tagging for the other subreddit, which might apply to this one also, to try and counter the "memory hole" issue of subreddits, where knowledge isn't accumulated (the rudimentary search function really doesn't help much).

What does "parallel construction in thought" mean?

Very simply put, it's the recognition that you never get "behind" your experience of the world, that your thoughts-about the world are at the same level as your experience-of the world - and, if you attend to your actual 1st-person experience, both are made from the same "stuff". Loosely speaking, they are both bubbles of "sensations" within your space of perception; your ideas about the world are actually like a little simplistic mini-world of their own, with only a small overlap with your main strand of experience. Keeping this in mind (excuse pun) helps us avoid making "map is not the territory" type mistakes, and realise that: observations dictate the possible models; models do not dictate the possible observations. For this subreddit, where one might easily dismiss someone's experience (as in, what arose as sensory patterns in their main strand of experience), it helps us be clear about the distinction between the experience vs the explanation, and recognise that this is typically a one-to-many relationship (even though we typically default to the very simplistic "spatial world" metaphor without noticing).

POST: Question for people who have been (or know) about parallel universes?

Can you repost with a "[THEORY]" tag at the front of your title? Thanks.

But since I'm typing anyway... My first thought: If we go with the "parallel universes", you are not physically moving there (what would that even mean?) you are changing your perspective so that you are now experiencing that point of view. You inherently would never switch to a state that had no point of view for you; it would be meaningless. My second thought: Such parallel universes should therefore not be thought of as "places", they are more like potential experiences.

Q1: Sure. Does that mean some were there is a body sitting ther Your second point: but if there is a universe absoloutly everything there must be a universe that someone breaks out of there universde and coem s into one that they are not.

Well, "universe" is just a concept, not a place. It's a name we give to an idea about a set of possible facts we might experience. So you can have the subjective experience of, say, the scene of the current room fading away and being replaced by a scene of a purple bubblegum landscape - and you might call that "moving to a parallel universe" - but that is a shift of your experience, not a movement into another place. Because you can't really talk objectively about that shift, it's not meaningful to say you went anywhere - and even other people apparently going somewhere, is really a change in your state. Anything beyond that is a fiction really. To go further, you really need to nail down: a) whether the world is shared and, b) if so, in what way exactly it is shared. It is not necessarily true that the world is shared in the sense of an overlapping 3D-space.

Word in the senses of unvierse not planet? If not then I am lost. I am not sure if I get it sorry.

Sorry, yes: "world" in the sense of "shared realm" or "universe", rather than "Planet Earth".

Q1: But I don't exactly see how if every posible thing happens in some universe that there isn't a universe were some enteres that they aren't meant to be. You have to remeber that this defention is made by this universe. There should be (if the theroy is correct (which you probably can guess I am a skpetic) ) a universe with my defention (not that I have really stated one) which would make what I am saying feasble.

What I am suggesting can't happen is: you can't have the experience of going to a universe where you are not, because you are not there; if you try to go there, you will by definition experience a universe in which you are there. It becomes logically impossible for something to exist which "isn't meant to be", because the fact of it existing means it is meant to be.

But that means not every possible thing Happens. Because thats a posiblity

It is a logical impossibility. The hypothesis doesn't say that "for anything you can say, there will be a corresponding universe". It says that, implicitly, all logically coherent universes exist. So, just as there will be no universe where "red=blue", or "north and east are the same direction", there will be no universe where "things which do not exist in that universe, also exist". There may be a universe where somebody suddenly appears, and there is no record at all of them existing until that point, since that doesn't break logic, because both before and after the appearance, the universe remains internally consistent. However, that's not the same as "a person being in a universe where they don't exist" - because, as of that moment, they do exist there.

Q1: But Isn't logic a contract/ opinion? In Asia a common way to wipe instead of Toilet paper after is to use your hand and a built in water gun ( bad description) then wash it afterwards. That comes over as ilogical to the western community (or me when I first heard of it) logic isn't clear. Relgion is an example of that.

This is a different sort of logic. This is isn't the everyday version ("doesn't make sense!") it is the specific version ("these two things can't be true at the same time!").

[COMMENT]

Q1: What about schrodinger's cat? It feels that the definition is based off our universe (fair enough) but the assuption is that it is the same when you go into another universe. Well whats the cause? We are confied to the logic of our universe. Say the statment " the world is spinning". From this we logicly know

• the sun/moon/stars rotate above us in a pattern (pretty much consistently)
• Gravity has the same (noticeable) strength anywhere on the planet
• Newtons laws of motion
• We have seasons
• we have days
• All statments about time
  All of these are logical statements right
  Now Imagine if the world didn't spin
  I have to assume that everything elses stays the same (which it couldn't/wouldn't/can't (one of those))
• 180 "days" of the year we are in the dark
• we would not have seasons.
• friction would change
  there are probably loads more changes. But do you see what I mean
  Last point Logic of what can't and can't be is a construct based on what we know.
  Defention of Logic
  Key word validity
  definition of Validity
  Key words : Logical (sort of circular I just realised) and Factual
  defention of factual
  Key word: situation
  Defention of situation
  a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself; a state of affairs.
  A long way of saying it but our circumstances have lead us to build/come to these logical conlusions
  Sorry for spelling as I am in a rush for a psych exam
  Looking forward to your reesponse

[END OF COMMENT]

I do follow what you are saying - but what this comes down to though is what is meaningful. Specifically, what is meaningful to discuss. So, I can say that "there is a universe where things exist and don't exist at the same time", but the statement itself is not meaningful, unless I can clarify it further and resolve the contradiction in some way. I am bound to try to say in what sense does something exist and not-exist simultaneously. If I can't state what I mean, then I'm not saying anything. Which isn't to say that other universe have to be intelligible to us or correspond at all to ours - however, the most honest thing is to say that we can say nothing about such places because they don't make sense in our terms, surely?

(Good luck in your exam!)

POST: I'm a God and so are you

Maybe posting to /r/psychonaut for this? Thanks.

• "A personal, everyday-mode experience for which you have no explanation."

How do you know that I don't do acid everyday?

Heh. On the topic though: basically I think you are right, just not in the way you might assume. Your current experience is like an "imagination space" in which both inner and outer experiences (thoughts, sensations, perceptions) arise - there is no outside. The space = consciousness = god = you.

Q1: =you to:)

Yes! Although that's where it gets tricky, right? - Because it means the world can't be a "spatially-extended place unfolding time". It's more like a bunch of ideas that we can pick and choose from... where "we" are conscious spaces that are somehow separate but also the same space, overlapping but not simultaneous, happening but eternal - n'stuff.

Q1: This is where the illusion part comes in handy haha. From my hippy bullshit perspective, it seems to me that consciousness is the fundamental truth of the human experience, but we are interconnected with this web of consciousness. It also has a source that seems to come from a separate entity/dimension and we confuse what we normally view as reality to something that isn't reality. Consciousness gets super crazy when you go down rabbit holes like I have gone down, but even Buddha at one point said that the world we observe is an illusion. Which is something that is now being posited as Hologram Theory in Quantum Physics, but people have interpreted what Buddha meant differently as time went on. Maybe he really meant that the universe is a hologram, but maybe he only meant that "We see what we want to see in the world." Does that kind of make sense? I'm trying to get better at explaining things, but in my 25 years of this life I spent the first 19 of them in a cave of anti-intellectualism, then like the next 4.5 thinking I was a genius because I read articles on the internet, and just in like the last year and a half have I realized that I don't know shit about anything but if I do have something figured out I need to be able to explain it better.

It make sense, yes. There's also the idea of the "two truths", which is pretty handy for finding a balance between the hippy and the theorist:

• There is the relative truth of the world as it appears, the content of our experience.
• There is the fundamental truth of the world as it is, the nature of our experience.

In a metaphor I quite like, we can think of (our) consciousness as a blanket of material, whose only property is awareness. There are folds in the blanket. The shapes of the folds correspond to our experiences. Those shapes are real experiences, however if we assume them to be real objects that are separate from us, we are mistaken: they are folds in the blanket, they are the "relative" truth. The "fundamental" truth is the blanket itself, taking on shapes. So:

• Relative truth = the shapes. (You can intellectualise about this, just as you can make shapes in a sandbox which are like other shapes in a sandbox.)
• Fundamental truth = the blanket. (You can't intellectualise about this, just as you can't make shapes in a sandbox which capture "sand" or "the sandbox" itself.)

You can get a feel for this right now, if you look around the room you are in right now: View the visual image of the room as "floating in a vast open aware space". Now think about the room next door. Is that room really "next door" right now? Is it "over there"? Or is it actually "dissolved" into the background awareness, waiting to be unfolded into the senses when you "go there"?

I think of this as: you are not actually a person in a world, you are an open space which is "taking on the shape of" a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. (Recent approaches like QBism seem to me to be getting closer to these views.)

The most important thing though, I reckon, is to realise that all descriptions are metaphors, stories, when it comes to describing content. This is pretty important, because if you start playing with stuff, you find that the metaphors you adopt actually shape the experiences you have. (Hence the infinite rabbit-hole issue, usually leading to massive synchronicities, where everything goes exponential.)

Anyway, you get the idea. Although the main idea seems to be that I have to use loads of quotation marks whenever I talk about this sort of stuff! :-)

That's a really cool way of explaining it, and one of the biggest things I've learned thus far in life is to doubt what I think I know, because I keep looking back on myself and saying "Goddamn, you were an idiot." But I think I will do this my whole life until one day I'll be like, Goddamn, for an idiot you figured out a lot of things.

Yeah, that's the thing: you never reach a final understanding of content, because whenever you go looking, you get another experience in response - you find more detail. There's always... more dream. So it's probably best to treat it like an adventure, an exploration, an associative traversal of all the possible experiential moments. Or that's what I'm thinking this week, anyway!

Q1: That's actually a really good way of looking at things. It's truly been a pleasure exchanging ideas with you. How about this one. What if time travel was developed at the beginning of the universe? Now we just have to obey the laws that the first time travelers made, and that includes seemingly not being able to time travel despite the fact that every moment of every day we are traveling through time? Rabbit holes man. Goddamn Rabbit holes.

Likewise! What if the universe never had a beginning, because time is an aspect of experiencing, and not a fundamental part of the universe? What if the so-called universe was actually an unbounded collection of eternal states, a sort of Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments...

Q1: Dude, I am really glad I keep throwing ideas at you right now. Are you writing a book or something? You seem to have some very interesting ideas about the nature of reality and such. The Infinite Grid of Moments is a mind-blowing idea.

Ha, no book, just all for conversational fun, and it's just new ways of rethinking and connecting older ideas really. Although I do think adopting alternative descriptions can help us experience the world differently, sometimes dramatically so.

(For instance, the idea that we "select out" our experiences from a pre-existing structure suggests that it's as if we are exploring a "memory block", and that living is an act of recall - a mode of thinking. Can I apply the behaviours I notice occurring in thinking, to living?)

Q1: Hmm, that's an interesting thought. I'm actually attempting to begin writing a fictional book about my life where I describe myself in the third person. I've been at this for about a few days, but my memories have gotten a lot more crystal clear after I started doing that. It's almost as if I was experiencing a mental block prior to undertaking this project.

Actually, here's a post I did a while back which is another way to look at it: The Hall of Records. It's related to viewing experience as 3D-immersive imagining: A Line Of Thought. I think it's quite a powerful way to view the world: the world becomes a "shared resource of experiential patterns" that are dissolved into the background of your awareness, rather than a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Interesting to play with.

...

A1: Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.

POST: [META]Let's pull the alternate dimensions and aliens and demons away for a sec- Your brain lies and takes shortcuts

One potential issue here is, you are invoking "the brain" like it is some sort of all-purpose explanation black box, without being able to go into how, exactly it accounts for the experiences. (Not your fault: nobody can.)

The Baader-Meinhof explanation, for example, is remarkably hand-waving as a "theory", as indeed are most descriptions invoking fallibility of attention and memory - because we lack actual models for those things (memory is particularly problematic, in terms of form and location; we don't know the nature of memory at all). These descriptions tend to be not much more than reformulations of the basic observation - they are often namings and categorisations, rather than actual explanations. Which is not to say that, um, "parallel universes" or whatever is the preferred explanation either. It's more about recognising the crap nature of some of the default generalisations we might invoke, as well as the crap nature of the more esoteric ones. Critical thinking, deep unpacking, applies to all potential explanations. We really have to take reports on a case by case basis, I think, because these categorisations often don't really respond to the details of the report, and are more like an "explaining away". (Of course I'm talking about the more in-depth posts here.) This is really a specifics-based topic. "it's just your memory" or "you were a child" or "frequency illusion" all rather depends on the exact context. It's also important to recognise when we simply do not have sufficient information to properly account for the experience. Which, here, is almost always. Mostly, the correct response is an open verdict. But that's okay, because - Surely the real underlying purpose of the subreddit isn't to "explain away" every post, but instead to use them as an opportunity to explore our hidden assumptions - the "facts" of the world that we take for granted which are not, when examined, particularly "factual" at all. They are more like automatic responses. Some of these assumptions are very fundamental - for example, even the idea that "the world" is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". If one examines one's actual, direct experience, we might discover that we don't truly experience the world that way at all. That "world" is an idea that we think about now and again, but it might not be what we actually experience when we attend to our ongoing sensory experience. "The world" is, basically, a concept, and its familiar properties might just be habits of thinking...

Perhaps.

These things are fun to think about, anyway. And that's why this subreddit continues: because unpacking these ideas creatively in response to unusual experiences is fun and interesting. It's not necessarily about "being right" or "winning" an exchange by pushing a particular worldview as "how things really are".

Aside: I think there is an increasing tendency for people who are enthusiasts for certain subjects, but who have not read particularly deeply into them, to use that limited view as the basis for dismissal or promotion of a particular line of thinking. If you actually read the studies some accounts of "____ phenomenon" are based on, they are often pretty limited in scope and applicability. Meanwhile, if you are a popular science reader, your notion of the true weight of a particular theory might be incorrect - as in, the philosophical aspects, the "meta" stuff, may be lost on you, when it is this which often determines what it actually can be said to "explain" in the big picture view. Again, this all works both ways.

POST: [THEORY] Virtual Reality and You.

[POST]

verything you've been told about reality as being a physical material world is false. We 100% absolutely exist in a virtual reality. The evidence for this has been known since the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics back in the late 1920's. The Copenhagen Interpretation states that physical systems do not have defined properties prior to being measured. This means, an atom like carbon does not exist as a solid particle until measurement takes place. The double-slit experiment which I am certain most of you are familiar with proved that sub-atomic particles exist in two defined quantifiable states: A probability distribution or a particle. The criteria for a particle to behave like a particle is measurement. Throughout the years, more experiments exposed that not only sub-atomic particles behave this way but entire atoms and molecules exhibit the interference pattern. All matter exists in two defined states as probability and particles. The measurement problem is at the root of this enigma. What is the probability distribution? This is when a particle exists in a state of superposition. For example, the electron circling a hydrogen atom exists in all possible locations at once. The act of measurement causes decoherence collapsing the wave-function allowing only one measurable location to appear. The best explanation of what the measurement problem is comes from simulation theories. It looks at the probability distribution as information. Measurement becomes data access whereby the virtual reality simulator only renders information that is being accessed. The probability distribution is an exponential library of data, meaning its an astronomical probability database. It would be pointless to render all information at once. Instead, the simulator follows the Laws of Information Conservation only rendering at run-time data that is accessed. The particle that emerges from information is nothing more than rendered properties of information. This means we exist in a rendering. A composition based on information that describes the attributes which the simulator processes and outputs as reality. Understanding this basic fact is just the tip of a much larger paradigm shifting knowledge which involves you. You are part of this system. You also use virtual reality through which you experience yourself and the many compositions of virtual reality in which all of your experiences emerge. I'll give two undeniable examples of virtualism in your life which you can only dismiss as poppycock or actually sink your mind into and begin to understand just how deep the rabbit hole goes. The first example is the way you experience reality through the sensory model. The five senses are data input devices. They take information, albeit limited and constrained, and send this information to the brain for processing. It is the brain that interprets the data, calculates what this data means, and outputs a view of the data in a virtual interface that you, the observer can then make choices and act upon. Let's look at vision as it's one of the major senses. Light passes through the pupil through the lens in which it becomes inverted, upside-down and is two-dimensional when it reaches the retina. Rods and cones are then stimulated by the light, and this is where light stops. It is not light that passes through the optic nerve to the occipital lobe. Rather, a series of encoded electrical signals traverse the optic nerve. When it ends the journey at the back of the brain, it is up to the occipital lobe to process this data and convert it from optic signals to a visual rendering. It inverts the upside-down 2D image and calculates an approximation of 3D space. It then outputs this data into a visual interface which you interact with. All of the senses follow a similar process. The outside influences of energy and chemistry stop at the sensory cells and all is converted to electrical signals and sent to the brain for processing. It's easy to test that the brain is in fact rendering sensory inputs by closing your eyes. Suddenly the visual datastream is blocked and instead of a vivid view of the world, you are left with a blank black screen. Your perception of reality is entirely dependent on information processing. How you experience reality is through the rendering of the sensory data by the brain. There has been a lot of attempts to describe what this is. Ideas and theories can go all the way back to Plato and the Allegory of the Cave where Plato attempts to describe what one can see, touch, hear and smell is just half-seen images of the reality of forms. In the 16th century Rene Descartes introduced the Seat of the Soul which linked the pineal gland. Descartes theory amounts to imagining a tiny theater in teh brain, where the homonculus performs the task of observing all the sensory data. Danniel Dennet describes it in the context of the Multiple Drafts model. Charles Sanders Pierce described this as the Phaneron which is the real world filtered by our sensory input. More modern definitions come from Anthony Peake's Bohmian IMAX or BIMAX and Donald Hoffman describes as an interface. All of the above are ideological efforts to describe the simple fact that the brain takes sensory information and outputs this information into a view so that you, the observer can act on this output. Donald Hoffman's interface model is more accurate because the way in which the mind facilitates it's rendering of reality approximates with sufficient accuracy an interface to the outside world. It is through this interface that you can then navigate the body through the observable world. In your mind, you see a door. The door in your mind is just a rendered approximation of the actual door in the observable world. It is not the real door. Just an interpretation of a door based on what your mind thinks the door is. You think to open the door, which causes the body to start to move towards it. The hand in your mind, which is a virtual simulation of your physical hand touches the door knob in your mind, successfully navigating the real hand to the real door. What happens in the mind, happens at the interface level. You simply interfaced with an interactive virtual reality as a tool to navigate your body. However, what is important in all of this is the fact you will never really know 100% what that door is because the constraints and limits of your senses gives you just enough information about the door as required through millions of years of adaptive survival based evolution. That is the first example of virtualism at work in your life. It has been that way since you were born and will continue that way until you die. It's simply the way it has always been. Even if physical reality is not virtual, the way in which you experience it is. The second example of virtualism at work in your life is the act of dreaming during sleep. Think about your most vivid and realistic dreams. The dreamworld is not composed of atoms, nor do you have physical senses by which to observe the dream. Instead, the mind does something more amazing through dreaming and actually simulates an observable world. Creates a virtual avatar simulating the physical senses but the mechanics of dream perception is the same as physical sensory models. Your mind takes virtual dream information that it's generating and interprets this into an interface so that you can navigate the dream world through the same interface that you use to navigate the observable world. The bridge between the dream world and the physical world is the interface of perception you use to interact between these two information systems. It is far easier to see that dreams embody virtualism because we know there is no physical structures present in a dream. Only thoughts. Dreams exemplify Plato's idealism, and it is here were we find his theories and ideas thrive and have relevance. Two examples of virtual reality and you. It serves to prove that all it takes to have an experience of reality is information and information processing. That information becomes fundamental to the observer. From these two examples of virtualism in your life, we can now go back to the the observable world, and begin to understand the role of information and information processing is at the root of what all reality is. It is with no coincidence that particles exist as probability distributions and only become rendered particles when measured. This is an expected requirement of any virtual reality. But we are just starting to unravel the mystery here. What is the information we observe? Where does it come from? What is running the simulator? How is it programmed? How does this involve you? Have you ever had deja vu? More importantly, have you ever had deja vu where you linked the familiarity of the memory to something you dreamed about in the past? You'll know if you have. I can only point out this relationship, and only some of you will have made it that far. If you have, then something even more amazing is presenting itself to you relative to reality and your relationship with it. That there is another form of dualism similar to particle-wave duality. You are seeing through your own experiences, in first-person a relationship between the dreamworld and the physical world. You may not understand why some dreams come true. It may invoke a large list of questions, or a myriad of beliefs. What it is revealing is that physical reality and the dream world are related. They are part of the same system. Want to know what is programming reality? Start looking here for the answer and there you will find it. It is through the precognitive dream experience that a much more involved creative process becomes exposed. It is here where you will find a part of yourself involved in the programming of the datastream which later renders out as an experience of reality in your phaneron. That's right. Your dreams are the programming language. You are the programmer. You may not remember this, it may seem entirely alien or outlandish that such an ongoing process involves you. If you have the type of deja vu linked to dreams, then you are just starting to see and remember this relationship. You are one step closer to knowing one of the greatest secrets that you've kept hidden from yourself. The Universal Computer which drives the simulation of reality is a you/me/us. It is akin to Carl Jung's collective unconscious. To really describe it, we have to move past the current distribution of this dreaming self-awareness and go back to a monolithic singularity of awareness, a time before this virtual reality emerged and we called it the Universe birthed by a big bang and became locked into the physicalism and beliefs. This is the way in which I have come to understand it. In many ways it explains God and how God created the Universe but I don't like to use the term God as it may invoke the idea that this is somehow not related to you and that you are separate from this in any way. So instead let's call it the self, or the Universal Self, because that is precisely what it. Before all of this, existed a Universal Self. It was awareness, and it could think. It's thoughts, like any thought formed a recursive feedback and we've come to know this form of thinking as dreaming. Thus this universal self-awareness started to dream, and through dreaming it began a process of self-evolution. Each new pattern of thought began to evolve and grow into newer patterns of experience for the self. Eventually, the manner in which thought could form these vivid dreams became the vehicle in which all reality would emerge. This dreaming self-awareness would find out that not only could it dream, but it could project a part of its awareness into the characters it dreams about. Eventually, it became like an awareness fractal distributing awareness into every aspect of the thoughts it was creating. It evolved into this collective distribution of dreaming self-awareness using thought as the language by which it communicates with parts of itself. It is this language, which is what we have come to know as reality. It is thought which has programmed the reality interface and created an astronomical number of virtual reality experiences for this Universal self. This is why for some of you who remember you can see in your dreams this creative process in which dreams are programming the datastream and later emerge as future events. This is because all awareness has to create reality with, is thought. And in the case of a Universal self-awareness, this thought becomes vivid dream simulations. Hence why all we really have is the self, and the dreams in which it thrives. You are the self, you are the dreamer. Hope this shines some light on what you really are.

[END OF POST]

That was a good read! More later but a quick thought for now: Really, "information" and "data streams" are things that we infer from our ongoing sensory experience, because we see that it is structured, and that structure implies a non-sensory persistent aspect to experience of some sort. So every time period has its particular metaphor to try and make this understandable, and that's fine - so long as we recognise it for a metaphor. It gets called the collective unconscious, the universal self, the dreaming awareness - but really it is not a thing at all, because it is "before" the experience of things. In some ways, calling it "God" - but not an entity god - might be the most honest, in the sense that it doesn't suggest a particular structure, and so we're less likely to take one metaphor as being "what is really behind the scenes". It is the "infinite gloop" whose property is being-aware, which takes on the shape of patterns and structure, and from which sensory experiences arise - and you are that gloop, imagining the world. Or more specifically, imagining being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. I'm not sure that we can really take the step of saying that is a "collective distribution of dreaming self-awareness" though. The idea that it "projects awareness" into something... I think it might be better to say that awareness "takes on the shape of experiences", since there isn't an outside view with all these different experiences happening; it isn't laid out like an actual landscape unfolding in time. Then we don't have to work out how a consensus reality works - which is what we have to do if experiences are happening at the same time and place - because it isn't one.

...

To be fair, myself I assumed that people would interpret OP's post as philosophy or metaphysics, rather than as a scientific theory - but it's definitely good to explicitly underline that any interpretation of quantum physics is in the philosophical realm, and non-scientific. Not that "non-scientific" means wrong or not useful, it just means that its usefulness isn't attached to the "objective world" container concept. In fact... It's probably also valuable to emphasise that science is not a discovery of "what is really happening behind the scenes" - it is the cataloguing of a certain subset of observations or experiences, and the creation of conceptual frameworks and connective fictions to link those together in a useful way. That recognition alone might help stop the growing trend of people trying to use scientific models - as-is or with custom tweaks - to find the meaning or life or understand the nature of experience. That's like trying to build a sandcastle which represents both "sand" and "the whole beach", while not realising you are only building low-grade facsimiles of other sandcastles (and only ones which fall within particular design parameters at that). The early 20th century physicists seemed to know where science ended and mysticism began; I'm not sure the current science fans do. Which isn't to say that those conceptual frameworks or "thinking patterns" can't be reused in some way, but I think that trying to "scientifically" explain the nature of subjective experience as if it were an objective phenomenon is a waste of time. (Although maybe it is time to consider whether the concept of an "objective world" is still serving us well anyway - example.)

There is some scientific evidence that actually backs up the OP's post. It could also explain glitches somewhat.

I've seen the research before. For me personally, it seems to beg the question, and is another example of pattern-matching with our current favourite metaphor (universes and brains as simulations and computers). Still, as philosophy it's interesting to think about and may lead to good ideas. I don't think it particularly explains anything though.

Note for context: I'm with George Ellis on this, and don't think that string theory is science either. But as I say above, that doesn't mean it's not true in some sense and or that it's not useful. It's just not "what is really happening" more than other versions of "what is happening", because we are hitting the edge of our ability to observe "what is, really".

* * *

TG Comments: /r/occult/

POST: Do Sigils really work?

Like everything else, it's a kind of "dreaming". I think of it as an "active metaphor". Play it out, play by the rules, you'll get results. You're playing out a little bit of theatre: creating an intention, wrapping it up in something, launching it like a rock into a pond, with the assumption-knowledge that ripples will result. Since ripples always result from rocks being thrown, you can leave things alone after the throw - safe in the knowledge that your "results" will, after a time, inevitably arrive at the shore. So long as you are "with" the model, it'll work.

POST: [deleted by user]

A1: Since time is an artificial construct built by the mind to split up unmanageable concepts (like infinity) into chunks that it can process, and as such, doesn't really exist outside the mind, yes, once proper control of the mind is gained, anything in it can be manipulated at will to one's heart's content.
Go tell Kant that time is an artificial construct
I would if I knew who that was, maybe.
????
First off, I am not an asshole. I have one, but I am not one. No need to resort to profanity. That is only an attempt by a weak mind to express itself forcefully. Secondly, I understood the question just fine, and I answered it in the best way I knew how, according to what I believe. If that happens to differ from what you believe, then that is your problem, and not mine. I do not have to get upset, offensive and resort to profanities when someone else believes differently than I do, as my belief system does not require either other people to think the same way I do or defend it. Go eat a Xanax, or have a bong rip, or a beer, or meditate, or whatever it is you do to chill out before you pop a gasket or something .......
A question was asked, a response was given. They asked if it could be done, and I said yes, and explained why I though so, no more, no less. Nobody is forcing anything on anyone. And a user can be well respected and still have a weak mind, or be a complete jerk, especially when it comes to being provocative and/or insulting, so that is no surprise at all, to me. Just because you or yer opinions are popular doesn't make you or them right .......
Time for an end of discussion, (EOD) here, I think, so have a nice day and enjoy whatever it is that you find pleasure in, and thanks for chatting. Goodbye.

...

DD, you're a right cock sometimes but I did laugh out loud at your examples!

Q1: I'm a right cock, but I make OK points? Funny how only one of those things is ever emphasized. It's almost as if people here don't actually separate moral judgements from insights, as they claim we should. It's almost like we will always be judged as normal people while certain other people are put on a pedestal and any negative thing being dismissed as brilliant satire.

Well, you know your tone rubs up people the wrong way, right? You've got wit and things to say, but it comes over a bit fighty often. ALL CAPS is one of the greatest evils there is! ;-) Strong language is a barrier to communication, it just is. If someone is verbally punching your head, it can be hard to discern their well-reasoned arguments through the ringing in your ears. Maybe people ignore it because it's off-topic? Most people aren't thinking of the things you are, or seeing the world in terms of injustice everywhere. They're not thinking about excluding rapists and murderers, fir instance. Particularly not in a quirky wee post about (what if?) time travel. If you wanna talk about the other stuff, though, we can.

Harsh. :-) Y'know, PM me if you do want to talk about this properly. I totally agree about autocorrect - it's ruining my life now that it looks at the whole context.

...Got ya. Offer stands though for future.

Q1: It always does, and it never really helps. Everyone wants to calm down the retard after they make him snap. Everyone was the nerds friend after he shot himself, nobody would be seen with him beforehand. I'm only treated like a person when I stop acting like one. Until then I'm just some stereotype or label.

You're a passionate person who feels the world in a way that other people don't. Basically, other people simply don't feel the underlying emotional world situation that you do. This means that they don't understand the world you describe, and therefore why you are upset. What at first seems like aggression and ignorance, is finally revealed to be empathy and distress, and that where irritation turns into compassion. Unfortunately, inevitably, people have usually stopped reading what *seems * to them like abuse, before they get to that revealing point. For sure, there have been horrors, and the planet hasn't shown itself to be a very considerate place (mostly due to ignorance, but a lot due to greed and maliciousness). I've long admitted this to myself, and figure that we can only work our corner (although that can actually have far-reaching effects).

Well, by "corner" I don't mean geographically, I mean in our areas of knowledge, expertise and influence. So if I have ideas, I contribute them; if actions occur, I take them; a helpful word, I give it. There's no point in me fantasising about transforming despotic regimes in Africa, but I can keep an eye on oppressive movements closer to home - and so on.

I need to delete all this stuff now, and stop posting for a while. Sorry. My bad. Again.

No worries. Leave all the time discussion stuff though, yeah? I think that was useful and we were getting somewhere exploring it. Take it easy.

...

Q2: 'mentally' yes. 'physically' I don't know.

If you do it "mentally" and don't come back... is that not the same as doing it "physically"? As if you entered a lucid dream and then never resumed this waking dream.

Q3: there is no space in 'mental' unless you will it to, so you can come back.

Hmm. Is there even a space in "physical" though? Surely it's just the same as dreaming: space is part of the experiencing, not necessarily the world.

EDIT: What I'm getting at is that there's no difference between mental and physical time travel, until you experience "coming back". Just like you only know that you were dreaming (rather than being transported to another reality), when you wake up.

...maybe if you imagine hard enough/obe/astral project/whatevs that you can experience alternate realities or "time travel."

Because what would "time travel" be, I suppose, except an "experience that seemed like time travel". Interesting on your intro. The exercise you describe is one of the first types of things I did too - found some old 1970's psychology book where people (unknowingly) did a variation of Doors of the Mind and explored strange new lands and reported back, bringing knowledge with them. Having experimented a little with metaphors such as [the Imagination Room] and doing lucid dreaming and the like, it's pretty hard to ever say what is possible and not, purely in terms of what we've experienced. If we follow George Berkeley and the like, then there is no solid substrate underneath our experiences - our worlds are basically a matter of habit... I do wonder sometimes: Where do the ideas for fiction come from? If our experience is basically "imagined" anyway, then what is the barrier between conceiving of something and experiencing something - is it just a matter of it persisting?

Q4: Regarding where ideas for fiction come from, a few summer's back I started experimenting again (post partying stage) with psychedelics but in a more controlled environment. One night during this period I started thinking about how much of my life I've lived emulating characters and lifestyles that my favorite authors had created. It was kind of intense to think about how much of my life was spent following some imagined life of someone that doesn't exist. From there I fell into Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces]
It made me start thinking about how it seems like we may just fall into this archetypal roles, but how we identify with them is beyond me. Which led me to start actually using the idea of the hero's quest to start controlling my life and trying to do things that would make an interesting story. I forget that it's a continuous experiment all the time and fall back down into my animal behaviors, but it's fun when I remember what's actually going on. The idea of reality being habit is interesting. As in matter existing due to energy taking the path of least resistance then even society being as such because people found or were trained to acquire certain habits. I need to read up on George Berkeley.

[QUOTE]

The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) is a non-fiction book, and seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell. In this publication, Campbell discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. Campbell explores the theory that mythological narratives frequently share a fundamental structure. The similarities of these myths brought Campbell to write his book in which he details the structure of the monomyth. He calls the motif of the archetypal narrative, "the hero's adventure". In a well-known passage from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the monomyth: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

[END OF QUOTE]

Ah, that's interesting, playing roles. We completely do this. A book I read fairly recently - Synchronicity by Kirby Surprise (check out a good interview here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]) - had a fun section about how your life "takes on" the style of the character or storyline you have adopted, in a synchronistic way. You trigger patterns corresponding to that worldview. I've definitely done this unwittingly before, and more consciously more recently - adopting a "character" appropriate to the task at hand. (I've also played with the Michael Chekhov acting technique for this, fun.)

Yeah, Three Dialogues is the Berkeley text to read; it's quite approachable. Only caveats: Replace "soul" and "God" with "mind" and "extended mind" when reading the last dialogue, and focus on the point of the creation part rather than the Biblical reference. It basically nails the whole experience-of-reality thing; the only thing it doesn't quite touch is magickal-type influence (but then you realise you are the extended mind, filtered through a localised mind, and it becomes clear).

Q5: Without you the world stops eh?

Yeah, the buck stops here! So you better watch your mouth! ;-)

No, the world revolves around nobody. The point would be that "the world" is less like a spatially-extended place in which events happen, and more like a whole stack of dimensionless "facts". It is the perception of the world (by a "consciousness") which is formatted in terms of time, space and so on. A bit like Immanuel Kant and friends. Dreams sure feel like spatially-extended environments when you are having them, but they are not. So what makes us think that waking life is spatially-extended any more than a dream is? The fact that other people report the same experience? That just means that "human formatting" involves space and time as basic perceptual structures.

EDIT: Added the word "dimensionless", which I'd missed out and is sorta important here.

[QUOTE]

Transcendental idealism:
Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves.

[END OF QUOTE]

Sure every occurrence can be simplified to a bland statement of fact.

Ha, I missed the key word, and I apologise: dimensionless facts, as in they are not inherently organised in terms of space and time. We might call it "information" but even that is to frame it conceptually in a misleading way.

Time and space proven mathematical and historical realities. They are independent of humanity and will persist even with humanity's extinction.

That's plainly not true. They are experiences that people have, and the theories are also experiences that people have. Our theories describe the formatting and regularities of human minds and experiences, not of external worlds. I don't think any of our ideas predates human existence or will continue afterwards.

These perceptual structures are greater then humanity.

So, you are suggesting that human perceptual structures are greater than humanity, and exist even without humans? That's like saying that human bodies are greater than humanity, and will exist even if there are no humans. We have a Plato in the house! ;-)

Hey, this is an interesting topic...

Could you elaborate and give an example?

Perhaps it's better to say it this way: That the world as it is "in itself" is not necessarily of the form we experience it. It is our minds that format the-world-as-it-is in our immediate perception - in terms of objects, and in terms of space and time. Beyond our immediate perception, we tend to imagine that the universe is laid out in a way that naively corresponds to our experience of, say, this room. But it is just that: us imagining the universe as something, as a "shadow sensory experience".

So without humans to bear witness unstable molecules decay instantly? Riverbeds are formed and dried? Our universe created and destroyed?

All those things may be true simultaneously, in the same way that if I see a tail and then shift my attention and see a trunk, I don't have to conclude that a tail transformed into a trunk over time. I could take the bold step of suggesting that something - let's call it "an elephant" - existed throughout this experience, as a persistent and complete structure.

Your position is ridiculous and indefensible.

What is ridiculous about it? It seems more ridiculous to suppose that our mind-formatted experience corresponds to how the universe is in itself. That our concepts (and this is important: we perceive concepts, we do not perceive directly) are fundamental and are the "concepts of the universe".

Time, and the mechanisms the universe known and unknown continue to function with or Without a human to bear witness.

We cannot take the step of supposing that reality is organised in terms of dimensions, objects, and the like. We cannot study this. We can only study the regularities of the human experience - and even then, we can only make models of those regularities that can be conceptualised and communicated in language. Things like "time" and "mechanisms" are human concepts. The idea that the universe "functions" itself presupposes time! The universe doesn't necessarily function at all; perhaps it simply "is".

Note, I'm not saying we should do away with the scientific method or logical thought. I'm just saying we must be clear about what we are actually studying. We are not uncovering the secrets of the universe, as popular science articles would have you believe. (This was not controversial among early 20th century physicists. Models were not confused with "truth".)

TL;DR: Theories and models are thoughts about human experiencing, and subject to the formatting and the restrictions of human experiencing. They are not thoughts about the universe as it truly is.

...

We need to define what we're talking about in order to have an opinion on what's possible. If we're not clear on what the experience of time actually is, then how can we comment? We don't know what exactly we're trying to do!

I have a glass. I break it. It is now broken, but further back in time it's a glass. I can't see it, but I can remember it. My memories can be wrong, but the glass could still have existed.

Exactly. What do you mean by "further back in time" in this example? Or "existed", in what sense can the past glass exist other than in memory?

Q6: We don't understand why gravity works, we can still discuss it without just insisting that it doesn't exist. The glass did exist outside of memory. If it didnt, there would be no broken glass in the present. That's not the point. We are not discussing how to prove the past happened or what it was. Now you are really double talking. If there is no time" then the glass was and is always there in that point, as is the broken glass. If time doesn't exist, the glass must be as it always was. If you actually believed that nothing ever changes, you wouldn't be on this sub I take it. A catapillar becomes a butterfly, it wasn't born a butterfly. If there was no time, there would be no change, there wouldn't even be a birth. We age. You were not born an adult. You changed OVER TIME and it's likely been recorded in photographs and video. Not just memory. If a thing can become something else, that means it is now something it didn't use to be. That implies change or at least entropy which is the thing we call time. Again, the word time is man made and an illusion, not time itself. People are an illusion, but they also still exist. My clock doesn't stay static, it changes as a tool to mark and measure the flow of time. I'm sure you've heard about the research with atomic clocks, one in orbit and one in earth, proving that the speed of time cchanges based on the speed you travel. That wouldn't be possible if it was an arbitrarily invented concept.

So, skipping along: Is it the object that changes or is it our experience that changes? Does the glass break or does our experience move from seeing-intact-glass to seeing-broken-glass? If the second one, how do we shift from one to the other? And where is seeing-intact-glass stored when not being experienced?

We need to know this in order to work out whether we can jump or not. How are we moving forward in time anyway?

Q6: Did that mean anything to you? No, it's a broken glass. I'm not imagining and seeing that it's broken. I can take it to another person who can see the broken glass. If it was just perception, someone should be capable of filling it and drinking from it. Where it's being stored is memory. That doesn't mean it only exists in memory, Mr semantics. You only exist in my imagination foe me, that doesn't mean you don't actually exist outside of my mind. We are moving forward in time because we are in time. Time is change. You age, gravity affects you, objects can hit you, this is only possible because of time. You can't age if there's no passage of time to alter your body. Gravity cannot work if an object can't be in different locations at different times. 3 minutes till I can post. the glass hit the floor and shattered. What possible reason does your brain have to make a broken glass hallucination if you have never seen something break for real? You can't say "tto make it seem real" when it only helps make it real because it's how the real world works otherwise since you are implying that it's always that way.

What I'm getting at:

• Does the "moment of experience" before the glass broke still exist in the background? And:
• Does time pass or do we (our conscious attention) pass over moments?

Q6: Either way implies that time exists. Your consciousness can't pass over a moment if there is no time and all moments are the same. 9 minutes. Funkcveryone. Funk google. Funk autocorrsct. FUCK FUCK1FUCK. Five minutes. If it's just us moving consciousness through time, memory would be peffect. It's not, sI I think it needs rethinking. 4 minutes. if we got rid of all the christians, muslims, and jews, our country would be so much better. 3 minutes. Jewish people destroy the economy by hoarding money, that's why they were marked for extermination. They still use that as a defense for anything while continuing to lie, cheat and steal. They use to own slaves, but they live to tell a version of history where they were slaves who had to free themselves.

The difference is that time is an activity rather than an occurrence. This holds out hope for time travel.

Q6: Possibly, but that would imply that we would have some lighter version to practice and strengthen. As is, we seem unable to do more than remember parts of the past. I hope I'm wrong. I would love for it to be real. Maybe we can alter the speed that we experience it in the very least.

My feeling is that it is certainly possible to open our attentional focus and loosen our binding to time a little (as in, the rapid passing of the particular path we are on). If we believe in some ideas previously suggested by philosophers and religious texts - that the world is "eternal" and "all creation is done" - then it may be the case that we can jump from one time-based experience to another. Although done to illustrate something else, I posted this visualisation a while back to illustrate the idea of a consciousness + a moment of experience [The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments]. But, y'know, this isn't time travel in the Back to the Future sense; it's about connecting to different parts of a (excuse the phrasing) universal memory-block.

I think equating time with memory is a bit of an issue.

Not personal memory in this case. Loosely, I'm suggesting that everyday moments might be compared to browsing the 'experiential records" in the "universe's memory". So time becomes the experience of change, of switching from one moment to another - which doesn't itself take place in time. (Yeah, I get that this sounds tricksy. It's hard to describe; it implies another level of "time" in which attention moves from one moment to another, but we don't need to go there I don't think.)

And I conceive of this to be very similar to what you've said here:

. . . list of details that our imagination makes real and fills in any blank spots . . .

In other words, each "moment" would be like a list of "facts" which our imagination (minds) expand into a 3D sensory "experiential moment".

Maybe time travel would involve the "multiverse" of infinite branching possibilities" in which case you could probably find a reality to match any even false memory but I'm not sure if that's what you meant.

Right. Well, if all possibilities are available then in theory you could have any experience you could conceive of. Time travel becomes just switching from one "moment" to another one, as usual, but one that is dissimilar to the previous one. Also, phenomena like personal time dilation and expansion are easily explained - you are simply transitioning more slowly between moments, or even skipping moments. And it takes care of this "jumping universes" or "magick" stuff by saying: What you are doing is intending to switch to a moment where your desire is being experienced.

I do find your model of "time" to be pretty fascinating.

I think it might (hopefully) help make it easier to be able to think of some of this stuff. It's basically saying "look, you are a consciousness having a being-a-person-in-this-situation experience", and then it let's you focus on: How do we select experiences ("moments") we want?

I wish it was that easy. I have tried. I don't think any amount of meditation and belief will just take me to a better place. Sometimes your just an animal in a trap.

There's hope. But you gotta stop pushing. And start small. We were just talking about the exercise to do in the comments here [Super-Simplified Models of Reality]. Do it. Every day. Give up completely twice a day. There's not much point in doing other stuff until you've let your nervous system settle out a bit like this.

Q6: I still have a lot of work to do today, and I'm behind. It's getting harder to find time. It looks like an exercise I can do while working so I'll try it out. I just need a fucking break and nobody cares, nobody believes me. They seem to think overworking me will magically make me normal. I'm going to fucking die like this. I just want it to hapoen. I want to collapse from heat exhaustion and die. But I never do, and it just keeps going. Thankd, I'll try out the exercise later when I can read it.

It's literally lying on the floor for 10 minutes, but with a certain idea. Do it first thing in the morning, do it when you get home at night, any other time you need a break. Trust me: it seems like nothing, but it'll make a massive difference. But you have to stick to it, and when you do it you have to "give up". Always make time for it. 10 minutes stopping for it, your whole day will be improved and more efficient. To me you sound super-stressed!

Q6: I am super stressed. I'll try, but I already do meditation. I can only do so much. Over stimulation creates more mental noise.

Give up the meditation. You are probably trying to "do" it. (I speak from experience.) Just do this for a week. Literally, lie down and let go of yourself, twice a day. It's the opposite of stimulation. Here's the comment.

[COMMENT]

I couldn't find the exact link but I had it saved in a word document (that's how good it is people!)

Daily Releasing Exercise

• Twice a day, 10 minutes, lie down in the constructive rest position.
• Completely let go to gravity. Give up totally, play dead.
• If your body moves or thoughts come up, let them be. Just let them release without interference.
• If you find your attention becomes focused on something, the same: just let go of your attention. Give up, again.
• At the end of the session (don't worry about exact timing), decide to get up, but don't make any movement. Wait until your body moves by itself. This won't happen for a while, but during one session, it will.
• In general, resist the urge to interfere with your body and mind, to push it along. Settle back and let it run at its own pace.

[END OF COMMENT]

Q6: That sounds like exactly what I need. That's an interesting practice. I'll make it my night and morning ritual for a while. Thanks!

Great! :-)

POST: What are your experiences that have validated your belief that "holy shit this stuff works?"

Q3: Made a sigil for a free bike. Got a free bike. Made a deal with an entity for money in exchange for harming an acquaintance. Friend lost his left arm while I made a fortune at work. Various successful "love" spells. It's not a question of whether it "works" for me at this point as it is a matter of using it responsibly in a way that makes me grow spiritually instead of getting caught up in material bullshit.

Q4: Made a deal with an entity for money in exchange for harming an acquaintance.
That will come back to bite you.

Q3: Yeah, it did. The money I made went to immediately repairing some mysterious car troubles.
Also, did I mention a friend lost their arm?

Q4: Yes you did. I hope multiple lessons were learned :)

Sounds like he did:

• On the one hand, his friend lost an arm.
• On the other hand... oh.

It just goes to show that all this stuff does work, without moral filter. I don't believe in the "comes back to bite you" as an independent law though; I think it's something you do to yourself. Interested in other opinions/tales though.

Q4: It just goes to show that all this stuff does work, without moral filter. I don't believe in the "comes back to bite you" as an independent law though; I think it's something you do to yourself. Interested in other opinions/tales though.
Yeah, there are many "theories" about this, some as simple as Karma, some as simple as we are all connected and what we do to others we do to ourselves...my general comment was around the preponderance of evidence that what we "put out there" tends to come back to us.

I still file it under the "make your own mind up" heading. I think belief probably plays a part here as much as with any of it.

...

Q1: I let my hood down, exposing my head to the pouring rain, not in hopes that the rain would stop, but because I knew it would stop. Within roughly two minutes, the rain stops.
Be careful with this. It usually only rains in 15 minute bouts. Anyway, today I decided to meditate and set a timer for 30 minutes. I wasn't doing much specifically, but I was experiencing fractals and vortexes of light. More intensity than usual. I gave up on the timer eventually and noticed only 10 minutes had passed. Time dilation much? In my usual daily routine, time passes quickly. And afterwards I could think so much clearer. I should also point out that I haven't really used any drugs in the past few months, so that's not related.

Q2: STOP DENYING HIS MAJIK YOU MEANIE

Q1: HE CAN'T CONTROL THE WEATHER BECAUSE I CONTROL THE WEATHER, AND I SAY IT RAINS OFF AND ON IN 15 MINUTE BOUTS

I was gonna say that you better watch out, because I control ALL THE CAPS LOCKS IN THE WORLD! Too late.

Q1: Too late?! You're going to have to convince me time is real. Checkmate, dream reality

Damn you, Eternal Block Universe, scuppering my smartitude!

POST: Would anyone be interested in a more serious forum?

I think... people generally don't want to talk personally and in detail, once they get going. Because the experiences are personal, and the beliefs that arise from it are sometimes best kept quiet. Also... I can't take you with me, as it were, once certain paths are followed. Trying to, would prevent the process.

POST: Does it matter if it's real?

Well, what is "real" is shaped by what you accept. Basically, asserting a fact makes it so in experience. You might say that facts-of-the-world constitute a formatting of the mind - and that this formatting is what shapes and filters infinity down to the present moment you perceive. When you accept that "doing this means that will happen", you are inserting a new one-off fact - resulting in a future experience - into your mind-world. More generalised facts work in the same way, such as charging an object, changing a person, etc. The world is just facts dissolved into the background awareness, from which then unfolds sensory moments as our attention moves. We can each choose our own facts/habits as we please: The Experiential World = The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments, filtered through Belief, Expectation and Knowledge, and selected via Intention = Your personal Timeline Trajectory (amendable) = The Ongoing Sensory Now

The difficult bit is describing the apparent interaction between these personal dreams. For simplicity, it's easier to assume "it's all taken care of" and you only have to worry about defining the rules of your own personal "hologram".

...

A1: A matterialist would say that if something is real then that matters, but if it's not real then that doesn't matter.

A2: hahaha, gravity is real, but we haven't seen matter so far.

Have you seen gravity?

A2: The movie? Yes, I have. What about it?

I was going to catch that in advance, but...

A2: Never saw the real thing, but for some reason I know it is real, in a way.

You've seen objects moving. That's it.

POST: What am I seeing???

[POST]

(This is my first time putting anything on reddit, so...be gentle?) I am somewhat new to the occult. I have something that I physically see sometimes that no one has been able to explain thus far. History: It began in my earliest childhood memories, when I was about 3 years old. When it got dark, at night, I started seeing a dancing, moving squiggle of "static", made up of tiny, tiny white circles with dark in the center. The longer I concentrated on them, the bigger and more refined/clear the squiggle grew. It goes away when I turn my attention away from it. Not knowing wtf was up, & being a 3-year old, I decided it was a harmless imaginary friend to play with when bored. At night, when I was alone, I'd "conjure them up" & distract myself from being scared of the dark. However, on multiple nights around when I was doing this, a Shade started visiting my room. My mother ended up seeing the same Shade walk thru the hallway on it's way to my room, before I screamed for her. They (my father was a Christian minister) did an exorcism on the house & I didn't see the Shade after that. More recently, I have acquired several friends in the Occult. I've brought up my "static squiggles" with some of them. They say they can feel it when i am doing it. They've been able to guess what part of their body it's on when I "project" it on them with their eyes shut. I also see it a lot when I try focusing on my third eye when meditating. One friend says they have a certain animal show up that is connected to me in their mind's eye when I do it. The same friend says I may be unintentionally doing something that attracts things from the spirit realm or that makes me "show up/stand out" to other entities, which could explain the Shade that would show-up the same nights I was doing it when I was little. Has anyone else here seen these "static squiggles" or read about something similar? Any ideas for what it might be? (Before anyone says I'm seeing "floaters" or "floaties", this is completely different. I also have floaters, just like most people & it looks nothing like that. I can turn the static on & off & see it in the dark & light. Completely unrelated.)

[END OF POST]

Like hypnogogic sparkles/fragments, more obvious pre-sleep but actually always there and available (just obscured but the brightness of the senses, like stars/sun)? Literally "the stuff that dreams are made from".

Related article I found interesting [https://web.archive.org/web/20060511053653/https://cref.tripod.com/wakingsleep.pdf].

POST: How to find something that was hidden from me by another?

Try this:

• Sit down. Quietly.
• Decide that your body is a "shell". You are simply an observer of its movements.
• In other words, you do not interfere. You simply allow your body-shell to move by itself.
• Command it thus: "shell, go to where <object> is"
• Wait for the shell to move by itself, to wherever it wants to go.
• Enjoy being reunited with <object>

EDIT: Additional point: Send Triumphant George a share of the treasure! ;-)

What is the word that even in plain sight remains hidden?

• Answer: Hidden

POST: The importance of belief is undeniable, what is a single line of belief that can change a life forever?

A1: “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”

(It's never not good.)

Q1: Nothing really matters.

Q2: Too meeeee....

Mama?

POST: Any well known people/celebrities/public figures that have admitted to practicing the Occult who you might not necessarily have thought would be interested in it?

Ashton kurcher and Milan kunis both study Kabbalist teachings and Ashton was seen wearing a free mason hat

"free mason" or Freemason?

Probably he's got a pal in jail, called Mason.

POST: Tapping Into The Collective Unconscious

Just... stop interfering. Let the ripples dissipate.

POST: Where to start regarding the occult?

Ask yourself what your purpose is in doing this. Don't worry about beliefs: they are all correct, as far as they go. Read lots to get ideas, but don't necessarily get hung up on one approach being 'the truth'.

POST: Freestyle Ritual

It's the meaning you give things, not the act itself - kinda thing?

Q1: Yes! You subconsciously know the ritualistic actions that will work best for you. Crowley knew the ones that would work best for him. I've never been too great at explaining myself but I feel like this will either turn out to be a good post or people will get pissed and think i'm an idiot.

Or it will be a good post filled with pissed idiots, because everything is permitted! ;-) Doesn't it really mean that, in the end, you don't need to perform any rituals or do anything much, except to 'decide that something is going to happen', and let it? The reason for ritual is because you feel that something must be done to 'earn' it, before you will allow it to appear in experience? After all, people might want power but the idea that you could literally just say something or think and it would happen, is quite disturbing...

Q1: "The flesh exists only to verify one's own existence" applies here.

Or as I was just saying elsewhere:

TL;DR: We are dreaming.
As there is no solid substrate behind the scenes, we can dream anything - including being confused, or experiencing an 'illusion', or dissolving into non-dual awareness, or uncovering the Super-Real Truth Behind It All, which includes maybe even identifying a solid substrate behind the scenes...
But all of those are just more experiences; there is no real truth to be discovered, except to realise the arbitrariness of it.

Q1: I feel like we would have some great acid talks.

Y'know, I've never partaken of the like. Which I suppose is quite worrying really: it means my mind is naturally full of this shit! :-)

Q2: This book is incredible. Could you please tell me more similar titles and/or point in the right direction to find more?
Many thanks for posting it!

Welcome! My main recommendation is SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic by Ramsay Dukes. Also - it may seem non-magickal at first glance, but the core sequence in this book by Missy Vineyard where she learns how to "allow movement to arise" is a great way into a larger world. You might also fancy experimenting with this to help "clear the desks" for freestyling intentions. Finally, Neville Goddard's The Power of Awareness is worth a look. That's what I'm playing with at the moment, anyway.

Q3: Same with medicine. It was all created and built upon by other people, probably people you've never met. I say make up your own ideas about medical care. What you're presenting as a logic argument is just plain wrong. I'm not saying that blindly following other's rituals is a good idea, and that coming up with your own is bad. Just saying that your argument is weak.

I think this is wrong. Magick works "the other way around" from science and medicine. Whereas those approaches assume a world of fact which we discover and utilise to find routes by which we can get what we want, magick involves creating such routes. Magick involves creating new facts-of-the-world. Which isn't to say that we can't reuse traditional rituals, but the reason they worked was because of the meaning attached to those rituals at the time. As that fades, the simple acts themselves have no inherent power. What are your reasons for suggesting that coming up with our own rituals is bad? Do you think that those who came before have some secret nature that we don't/can't access?

Q3: Yeah, you're missing the point.

Y'know, I did mistake what you said, because I was reading new posts having forgotten what OP actually said. My valid point is a valid response to... a point you probably weren't actually making.

POST: [discussion] mental illness and spirituality

Q1: I'm going to voice an alternative, controversial persepective. Maybe I'm full of shit... The "you" isn't pointed at anyone. I'm passionate about this topic and admittedly (melo)dramatic. Mental health, or any type of health, is something you have. It is not something you are. While everyone has different raw materials (experiences, genetics, etc.) we are constantly building our health. Nothing about health implies a stable and perpetual condition. Health is a dynamic and multifaceted system embedded in the larger system that is you. Does a lifetime smoker choose cancer? He probably didn't choose to smoke. His parents and friends smoked, and he only meant to smoke at parties initially. I'm calling bullshit. Read some stories about cancer survivors. How dare they rise above illness. How dare they choose to beat cancer and find happiness despite chemo or radiotherapy. Does a person choose mental illness? Honestly, it would be absurd to deny genetic tendencies are traumatic experiences, but who chooses what they do with these raw materials? How can a girl who was born to abusive and bipolar parents (who's parents were abusive and bipolar) break the chain? How does a rich kid with golden parents and golden and prime genetics end up paranoid and homeless after living the good life for 40 years? People know there depressed because they're sleeping all day or not sleeping at all. They're eating too much or not eating at all. They don't have a job or friends. They never exersise. But does this correlation imply causation? Or are they depressed because they don't have their shit together? They just need Prozac because because it's not their fault. How many people have been sold this lie? You don't know what's best for you because you don't have fancy letters infront of your name. If you aren't taking care of you body or your life, you're supposed to feel depressed. Ifyou go trough bouts of complaining, laziness, and bottling up your life you're supposed to explode with reciprocal mania. Are you going to be a victim? Life happens to you and there's nothing you can do about it? Or are you going to be a magician? You activavly participate in life and your own unfoldment? Just don't neglect the mundane stuff. Work. Family. Friends. Sleep. Diet. Self expression. Clean enviornment. It's all important.

Q2: I don´t see why this perspective could be controversial. In fact I mostly agree. The only thing I can slightly disagree is that, I my opinion, you don´t "choose" an illness but you "allow it".

Ah. Expand on "allowing"...?

Q2: Just as we allow things that are not entirely beneficial to us in our everyday life. There´s always someone or something that want´s something from us, who doesn´t have our best interests in mind. The first analogy that comes to my mind is being mugged. You could probably have avoided it by not walking into that dangerous neighborhood or by taking a cab or something, probably, maybe not. Once this person is demanding your money you can always run or do something. But you don´t, so you allow it to happen. Of course it´s harder to avoid as it escalates. This is related to illness that have episodes. A similar analogy for continuous illness could be blackmail. Don´t get me wrong, I don´t think it´s easy to avoid, or not allow, something like this. It´s just that things happen all the time, not doing something about it can have detrimental consequences to us. There´s always something to learn either way :)

Interesting. I was thinking you might mean "allowing" in the sense of perceiving that there was a possibility of something and, in addition, not taking the intuitive action to avoid that possibility. Combined, that would be creating (indirectly "selecting") the path by releasing into it. You make a good point about this also being true in a more grounded way. Not adjusting the pattern (habit, belief, trajectory) to avoid what you have realised the trajectory is heading towards.

Everything has to be true in a more grounded way...

Well, quite. There is only one "nature of things", otherwise it isn't the nature of things...

...

Commenter has maybe been round the studies-theories-claims-fade cycle a few times, correlation + simplistic model. Not to disparage the work, it's just the grand final claims. Remember when DNA was a "blueprint" and there was going to be a gene corresponding to every disease and personality trait and vulnerability? Ah, not quite so simple, it's more of a "platform" than a blueprint. Phrenology was once called "the only true science of mind" in the 1800s; in the early 1900s eugenics was seen as a medically and ethically sound approach to population management until the association with Nazi Germany scuppered it after WWII; Egan Moniz won the Nobel prize in 1949 for inventing the lobotomy; now we have "chemical imbalances"... Each was groundbreaking and a triumph of understanding at the time, and the result of thorough research and persuasive studies and theorising. These were not stupid people. We are not stupid people. But we are not any cleverer, and we are just as in love with our own Thinking Of The Day, on the lookout for a new "simple certainty", seeing the world through our Shiny New Metaphors. In 100 years time, this will all look ridiculous.

(But - if it's useful, we should use it of course. I'm just saying that historical evidence suggests we should keep it in perspective, particularly with no integrated model, more of a "promise".)

Rant over! :-)

POST: Astrology on other planets?

If the basis of astrology is the accessing of inner knowledge, then it wouldn't matter what approach he took, so long as it had some sort of formal structure and he arrived at it by contemplation?

Q: But what if inner knowledge is predicated on real relationships to the planets. All of my ancestors and relatives back to the origin of life on this planet lived and died under our moon and sun and neighbors. Fungi and plant amd other apes and bacteria and all. If we leave our home, do we lose the support of our cosmic family? I have no idea how to test this without blasting myself out of the solar system, but its a fascinating thought. What if our consciousness is dependent our system, and we will have to find new sources to derive our inner life from upon relocating?

An interesting thought. I'm inclined to say, though, that for the "inner knowledge" aspect the system of the planets is within consciousness - at all times. The entire universe is dissolved into the background of your awareness right now, in this room. The reason you think you are in the room is just because that particular aspect has been unfolded into sensory experience. All knowledge is present, now. That's a different thing to bodily support and experience, though, and physical dependence. It's easy to imagine that the state of the whole universe contributes to the events of a particular moment. Would we become... different... when out of our localised, consensus region? Hmm!

POST: Have you ever asked yourselves

Q1: No one ever did, I think: what a strange question, if you let me say so.
Look at the Baal Shem Tov (all my love & gratitude upon his name): he knew that he knew a lot, and he knew he could perform wonders. And he was humble, knowing that he knew a lot... and then one day his dear wife died... ow, and you have to read that... Martin Buber. Go read it.
EDIT: of course, I agree with the other comments too. I just wanted to express my surprise...
You see a man who could do wonderful things & was absolutely enlightened & was taken aback when his wife died: he never knew he was going to feel what he felt.

Synchronistically, I came across this yesterday:

[POST]

DaVE's BaSeMeNT
There is a Zen story about a Zen Master and his Wife... Sometimes it happens: Masters achieve Samadhi after already committing themselves to life as a householder; some have married and fathered children before Attaining... This is the Story of the Master whose Wife became his Number One Disciple.
The Master had become famous for the Depth of his Enlightenment in his 40s, after his children had grown and he and his Wife opened their home to any and all who would devote themselves to the Dharma. The Master taught while his Wife cooked and fed all who would come.
For many years, students from many miles away came to study and be with this Dharma Master who espoused the Zen values of Emptiness and the Doctrine of Nothingness and the Ultimate Illusion of Temporal Reality. Over the long years an entire community developed around the Master and his Wife until he had 100s of disciples...
One day after teaching for many many years, his Wife suddenly sickened. For a week the Master attended to her in her illness, forgoing his teaching and ignoring his disciples. His disciples began to whisper and speculate among themselves... "How will the Master cope with this? What if she dies? Will he hold to his Serenity? Will be keep the Dharma?" And then after a week of nursing her and caring for her, his Wife died quietly during the full moon in the middle of the night.
The next morning the community was roused by a terrible racket and ruckus! All the disciples came running in great concern... And there, at the doorstep of his home, they found their Master--drunk!--sitting in the dirt, his clothes rent, his hair wild and loose, tears streaming down his face... He was banging with a ladle against an old iron pot and crying and wailing like a lost child. He was inconsolable. They knew that his Wife had died in the night...
His disciples were shocked to see their Master displaying such emotion! Never had they seen him like this before!
Some began to question the Master and even to berate him:
"But Master! Did you not teach us that Life is an Illusion?" "Yes!" The Master continued to wail and beat his pot.
"But Master! Did you not teach us that there is no Death?" "Yes!" He cried harder, still beating his pot.
"But Master, did you not teach us that one day we all awaken in the Pure Land and dwell in Eternal Bliss?" "Yes!" Wailed the Master again, beating his pot even louder!
His disciples were stunned... They shouted at him: "Then if what you have taught us is True why are you now drunk and crying and carrying on so?"
The Master stopped long enough to look out among the disciples gathered round him. Through his disheveled hair he met the eyes of those nearest him... He said, still sobbing: "Because my Wife was my Number One Disciple. She taught by my side these many many years. I loved her! And now my Wife has died. And I shall miss her!"
Contrary to the popular Myth, Zen does not spare us from Suffering. Zen does not eliminate difficult Emotions. In fact, Zen brings our Suffering and our Emotions into sharper clarity. You will feel them more immediately, without buffer. They will feel stronger! Despite the portrayals of Zen in Films and Television, Zen is not a tranquilizer! It is not a Pacifier. SO, if you have been attracted to Zen in the hopes of finding an end to Suffering then you should begin looking elsewhere. Zen will not save you...
Zen makes your Life more Real; more Immediate, more Authentic. When you suffer you will be MORE aware of Suffering. When you are Compassionate you will suffer not only for yourself, but also for everyone you meet! YES, Zen will actually increase your Suffering. There is no doubt of that. But Zen will also help you survive it. And it is equally true that in time, Zen will also increase your Joy. With Zen you will cry harder and faster and you will laugh longer and deeper. Isn't that worth it?
Enough for today...
--Pahka Dave

[END OF POST]

Q1: Would you recommend me a book about this philosophy? Zen is my first layer of knowledge. On it I go from one master to the other. Castaneda & Baal Shem Tov being the main 2.

Cop-Out Response

Hmm. I'm not quite sure what to recommend these days, because my own take is a mix, and therefore what I'm about to say probably won't be quite what you are asking for! So I've added that below. :-)

The response of the students is that of our secrete hope that the world is magical and we can somehow avoid experience, in some mysterious way we will be spared. But that's not what Zen promises - Zen promises (apart from nothing at all) that we can see things clearly and directly. [1] Any philosophising that a tradition does is then patterns on top of that clear seeing, basically a vain attempt to convert it into ideas and language that can become guidance. Zen is, I think, the closest tradition to admitting that the experience is what counts, and that stopping interfering long enough to see the true nature of experience is the only lesson.

As I see it:

• Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences.
• Thinking is an experience also, and produced in-form-ation which affects subsequent experiences.
• You need to take time to let your attention open out into the background space in order to see what is behind/beyond the patterns.
• Only with this foundation can philosophies for living make sense and not be castles in the sky that are confused with cityscapes of a solid reality.

Reading Recommendations

So... I'm inclined to say we should put aside the thinking and go for two specific experiences, because otherwise we read and read and think-about and conceptualise forever - when this actually conceals our basic experience. Having had these, our personal philosophy will naturally follow.

• The first, is to have the experience of your body moving by itself, and allowing it to respond (not react) spontaneously. I recommend Missy Vineyard's How You Stand, You How Move, How You Live for this. It's says it's based on Alexander Technique, but actually she's had an insight[2] which leads to a different way of viewing it.
• The second experience is to directly experience yourself as the background awareness in which experience arises. For this, Rupert Spira's books Presence Vol I & II (sample here) and Greg Goode's Standing As Awareness (sample here) are excellent. This interview may also be of interest, as might this approach to dissolving yourself (do the non-assertive version daily).

Once we're on your way with those, we can mess about with any metaphors that take your fancy, while realising that they are just metaphors ("mind-formatting") - but that adopting metaphors affects (or "in-forms") the pattern of experience within our awareness.

[1] I personally think we can have a little more influence than that, as illustrated in the diagram and bullet points a little further down. We can... re-format. But if you do this without being stabilised as the background, you can get lost.

[2] The insight she has comes from realising the trick to direct, "allowing" perception is spatial awareness, and that this involves either detaching from or completely becoming the space in which your experience arises.

Zen is practice. Above all is practice. There's no knowledge, it's practice. I love it. There's nowhere to hide, ha!

Yes! Well, how can you escape from what you are made of? :-)

I'd say the English language isn't great on it - there is actually knowledge in Zen but it is direct knowing by being rather than the thinking-about knowledge that comes from conceptualising. Direct truth (you are this, this is how things are) vs conceptual truth (something that feels coherent). In Zen, we put aside the conceptualising and let the mind settle to reveal that, amongst other things, the world is not made of "parts". There is extra stuff though which can subsequently be gleaned from philosophy and experimentation: Zen is based on this world as it is and our ideal state for responding to it. If it is possible to tinker beyond this however you cannot experience yourself doing so because it is out-with the senses / behind your viewport. That's where the magick (literally) happens - that's where intention is.

EDIT: Although I'll say - it's practice as in, stopping interfering regularly. It's not something you get better at, so it's not practice in the sense of a skill. Although you can be more pro-active about resetting your experience if you choose to be of course.

You have to 'be' it. Incarnate it.

Although even that... you already are it. What you are is the "open aware space" which takes on the shape of experience. Doing some quiet sitting or an equivalent allows the transient conceptual noise to settle such that you are left with the longer-term patterns and habits. Gradually, those too settle, and you are left with something more direct. The background becomes clearer as you are no longer filtering experience with attention. And you see how things were all along. You can't get better at being what you are. If you are feeling confident, you can simple assert this to be true and get to the experience immediately. You really do have to step boldly and confidently though! I guess that's where talk of "faith" comes in. It's a fun dilemma!

Do you know Japanese, Chinese or Indian?

Unfortunately not. I've been to Japan and got some language going but these days all I can recall is "Hai" and "Oishii desu"...