Oh goodie!

I took a month off from the lottery, due to the low jackpot amounts over the course of October.  And it couldn’t have come at a better time - October has been especially stressful for me for many reasons.  Changing jobs, changing shifts, changing apartments, and in general just changing my whole day-to-day activities.  But that stress is finally equalizing itself, and life is starting to get back into a pattern, so I’m free to experiment with more fun ideas on reality.  And it just so happens that the lottery jackpot has gotten within my acceptable range :-).

I played on Friday, but didn’t get any numbers, unfortunately.  But that’s ok.

I’ve come to accept that I’ve failed over the summer (in terms of the lottery).  If you remember… the lottery motivated me to start living my ideal life right now (instead of waiting around for a huge jackpot).  That meant learning more about music, exercising and eating healthy, investing, and thinking about tough subjects like value, choice, faith, etc.  So the lottery was a success in terms of motivation and life-stuff, but the act of winning was a failure.  I didn’t win the jackpot.

However, I now think that it was better that way.  I’ve come to reject the ideas of personal development and intention manifestation.  And I think that it’s important to reject those ideas.  They served me well for quite a while, but now it’s time to move on.  Had I won the lottery in the summer, it would have validated the ideas of personal development and intention manifestation… which would have been incorrect, and messed with my head.  So it’s better this way.  Or at least - that’s how I currently rationalize my failure at the moment ;-).

Now that I have finished my rejection, I feel more free to win the lottery without all the intellectual baggage associated with it.  During the summer, success of the lottery project was directly linked to correctness of my belief structure.  That’s a wonderful way to inject emotional stress into a situation :-).  However, now I feel like my success with the lottery is independent of my beliefs.  So I can relax.  I feel more playful and curious, as opposed to forceful and frustrated :-P.

We’ll see how long this lasts ;-P.

Either way, I want to do more experiments, and gather actual EVIDENCE to figure out how I can pull off this win.  I most definitely believe it’s possible and plausible to win the jackpot.  I stand by my rejection of modern statistics and probability, and my rejection of randomness.  That’s sound logic right there - and the evidence supports it.  Now I just need to keep reminding myself to focus on the evidence, and not any willy nilly emotion or philosophical idea that flutters across my creative mind.

Hurray :-).

I had an OBE this morning.

According to my logs, my previous one was August 5th, so I was certainly due for one.  I used to have them about once a month, but now it’s more like once every two or three months.

Even though I hadn’t had an OBE in a long time, I was fairly confident that I would have one.  I fell asleep accidentally watching TV at 8pm, and woke up at 2am.  Then I spent 5 hours messing around on my computer, and doing laundry.  I fell back asleep at 7am, with the intention of sleeping for 3 hours.  I knew it was likely that I would have an OBE because of the awkward sleeping schedule I was demanding from my body.

Whenever you change your sleeping pattern like that - whether it’s accidental or on purpose - it increases your chances of having an OBE drastically.  The trick is to sleep about 1.5-3 hours less than what you are comfortable with.  I usually sleep between 7.5-9 hours a night (which is a lot compared to most), so when I only slept for 6 hours because I fell asleep early, my body was very confused.  Was that my “night”?  Should my body be prepared to be awake now?  Or are we going back to sleep?  What the hell was that?

By staying awake for another 5 hours, but not really doing that much physically, my body stayed confused.  Finally, when I lied back down, my body hesitantly went back to sleep… but didn’t go into deep sleep.  This is perfect for OBEs.  It might not be too healthy :-P, but every once in a while it works flawlessly.

During my OBE I floated around quite a bit.  Since I was expecting it, I remained calm, and didn’t try to “control” anything.  I just drifted.  I went up through the ceiling, then drifted back down… then through my apartment, and close to my kitchen.

My vision faded in and out during that time, and I was playing with just trying to remain as passive as possible.  This helped my vision a lot.  When I relaxed, and didn’t try to force my vision, it would gradually fade in.  Everything had that trademark gray glow that is normal in OBEs :-).

At one point, while floating through my kitchen, my feet started to get pulled back towards my body.  I didn’t fight it, because I didn’t really care, so I slowly went back.  I woke up back in my body, and looked around without moving.  I played around with the vibrations at this point, and just observed them.  At one point I remember thinking the vibrations were too intense, so I stopped playing with them, and forced myself to wake up completely.  Upon waking and moving around, I noticed my right arm had been numb from loss of circulation.  Perhaps that’s why I got yanked back?

Overall, it was a fun experience.  I just moved into this apartment about a week ago, and it’s cool to have an OBE in it so soon :-).  I enjoyed the passive attitude I had, and it made the OBE less frustrating, and more like a calm roller coaster.  Perhaps I’ll have another one soon, because usually they come in groups of two or three.

Science is great.  And I’m not just saying that.

I used to consider myself very scientific… but really I never understood why science was correct.  I just knew that it was suppose to be the best system of discovery, so I should trust it.  It came down to trust.

When I discovered that psychic abilities were actually real, I felt like my trust was betrayed.  I felt like science had led me down a faulty path, and that path had turned out to be incorrect.  Science had failed me.  My trust was broken.  So I started to look towards other things to trust in.

Nothing really grabbed my eye, though I did try a lot of belief structures over the years.  I would always end up rejecting it because it wasn’t scientific enough :-).  Eventually I did settle somewhat on the idea of personal development.  It was scientific to a point, but there was a lot of intuition and psychic ideas in it as well.  Sounds perfect :-).

But lately, I’ve come to discover that the personal development mentality is flawed as well.  The flaws are very clever and creative, and very hard to detect.  Ideas like meta-beliefs can really screw your mind over… Intention manifestation is a very clever idea as well.  Ultimately, I do not believe in intention manifestation, and the things that are incorrect with the intention manifestation model can be detected by being scientific.

Which is why I feel that science is the best method for discovery.  At this point, it doesn’t feel like before - I don’t feel like I “trust” science, instead I feel like I’ve derived the scientific method by trial and error.  Every other belief system I’ve tried out has failed because there are gaping holes that are easily prevented using logic, reason, experimentation, and evidence.

I can disprove intention manifestation pretty quickly.  Let’s make an experiment.  Intend to win the lottery for a month straight.  And if you win, then intention manifestation has some evidence to support it.  And if you fail, then intention manifestation has some evidence to disprove it.

It just so happens I did that exact experiment :-).  I believed 100%.  I visualized.  I intended.  I put my heart into it.  I got my emotions going.  I did this religiously for a month.  And I got zero results.

Now before everyone flips a lid, let me make something clear: there is evidence that the process of intention manifestation actually does affect reality.  I’ve seen it with my own eyes, with different intentions.  However!  It is NOT as simple as “placing your order” with the universe.  The universe is not a genie.  Or at least - that’s not what the evidence suggests.

In the future I may delve further into the raw evidence, and look for alternate explanations.  However, the point of this post is to express the simple point of view that: science produces the most accurate observations about reality.

Period.

The best way to learn about reality is to actually play around with reality and see what happens.  I know this seems obvious.  But that’s not what a lot of us do.  A lot of us form our opinion of how reality should function - and then we play around with reality until we notice the results that confirm our opinion.

Or we play around with reality until we form an opinion on something… then we only do things to confirm our premature assumptions.  There is actually an amazing idea in psychology that looks into this phenomenon - it’s called confirmation bias.  I recommend reading about the experiments they did to observe this phenomenon - it’s very interesting.

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It’s hard for me to express why science is important while in the same breath say that psychic abilities and intention manifestation do produce results.  But here I am :-P.

I think it’s important to separate skepticism from science.  The scientific method says nothing about skepticism.  The scientific method can be executed by a computer program.  But in the real world, we are humans, with emotions and opinions - and it’s very very hard to remain objective and judge the outcome of something fairly.  Especially once we start investing a lot of emotional energy into one outcome or another.  The skeptical person usually displays a heavy emotional tendency towards evading admittance of ignorance, among other obsessions.  But hey - no ones perfect :-P.

The scientific method - the idea that we need to objectively play around with reality to understand reality - and that we need to constantly change and evolve our understanding fairly and without bias - is a beautiful goal.  It might be impossible to be 100% scientific, but putting our focus on evidence, experimentation, playfulness, and objectivity (even if objectivity is inherently impossible), is the most rewarding belief structure for learning about reality.

A lot of times it feels like I’m living in a story.  Like reality is just a play - a scripted sequence of events - and we all just play along.

When I talk to someone, I’m simply reading my lines.  And they return with their lines.  The dialog has already been created, and we simply walk through it.  Just acting it out.

Even the supposed “zany” or “random” people follow a predefined script.  They say the funny things they’re suppose to say, and everyone else laughs like we’re suppose to laugh.

Sometimes I do wonder whether life is deterministic or not… but I think just the fact that I’m contemplating such a thing proves that it’s not.  I don’t know about anyone else for sure, but I do know that I am aware.  I am aware of this moment.  I can cut right through it.

One thing that makes me curious is to think about my memory.  What am I working with?  What is in my head?  What is my earliest memory?  I mean… how did I get here?  When did I first become aware?

It seems like I should be able to scan back in my memory, and remember the moment when the I - the me - first arrived.  But instead it’s just a gradual blur.  Was it always like this?  Am I just in a state of perpetual amnesia?

*shrugs* Thoughts…

Ah, hearing voices :-).  Is there anything more creepy and weirder than that :-P.

I’m sure there are psychotic people in the world who claim to hear voices, but are really just insane in the membrane.  I honestly don’t believe I’m one of those people :-P.  But talking about voices in your head is a good way to get people to question your sanity, which can really spice up a conversation :-).

The types of experiences I have - I believe - are somewhat normal, just slightly more frequent and extreme.  Everyone hears a tiny voice in their head they call a conscience.  Everyone gets gut feelings.  Everyone has dreams.  When I talk about voices in my head, I’m talking about the same exact phenomenon - only more frequent, and more clear.

Lately I’ve been putting emphasis on paying attention to my dreams.  I’ve been going to bed earlier (due to new work hours), and this has altered my dreaming experience.  I’m having longer lucid dreams, with different feels to them.  Nothing drastic… just a slightly different vibe.

The reason I’m talking about all this is because this morning, I had a weird experience :-).  I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience quite like it in the past.  It wasn’t mind blowing, but it did strike me as interesting and unique.

I went to bed with a lot of life-problems on my mind, trying to sort them all out.  I tossed for about an hour and a half, just thinking about life.  When I finally went to bed, I had some cool lucid dreams, that consisted of flying around, and teaching my dream characters how to alter their dreams.  This is a common theme for my lucid dreams.

I woke up about 15 minutes before my alarm.  I came back slowly on purpose, playing around with my mental state, like I normally do.  I was fading in and out, and all of the sudden, a clear message started getting transmitted to me, out of the blue.  It started to form a dream, but I was on a border-line state, so the dream didn’t take hold.  The message repeated itself two or three times, and it felt like it was urgently trying to be sent to me before I woke up.

The message was basically that solutions arise from action.  I have a tendency to think about things too much (gee, ya think?), and over-analyze things.  Sometimes my thoughts paralyze me, and stop me from acting, because I don’t see any correct paths.  So I don’t take any path.  The message that repeated to me was basically: when there are no correct paths, just take action, and the correct path will reveal itself.  Then you can hop over to that path.  There’s no need to see the correct path before taking action.

Pretty basic lesson, which I’ve certainly learned and studied in the past.  But it was interesting to receive it in a border-line state of mind.  It felt like the message was coming from outside of myself, being urgently sent to me, and repeated on purpose.  Just to ensure I would get it before waking up.  I would like to think that there are “spirits” out there watching my back, and this definitely gives me that feel.  Maybe some day I’ll be able to figure out the validity of the experience.  Until that day arrives, it will have to be cataloged as: “Important message received from unknown source, by questionable means.”

I have to pass this link along… it’s totally sweet.

It seems the Berkeley, the University of California, is posting lectures on YouTube. Full lessons, ranging from biology, physics, and search engine technology. Right now I’m watching the quantum physics series. The link is here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley

Here’s one of the 200+ videos on their directory:

Enjoy, science nerds!

(Sorry for the small break - I might be moving apartments and we canceled our internet service and cable in response.  Now I’m on a new connection…)

I reject New Age.

There was a period where I thought to myself, “Well now, let’s give New Age a chance.  After all, they are basically the only group that really delves into psychic abilities.”

Well, I gave New Age a chance.  And New Age failed.

It’s such bullshit.  For every ounce of usable information, there are 300 pounds of backwards illogical bullshit.

I re-read some of my New Age books I have on my bookshelf.  All I did was change my perspective from, “Wow this is interesting” to “How do they know this?”  Holy crap what a difference.

Let me give a quote from one of the books on my shelf (random book, random page):

Generally speaking, you are here to expand your consciousness, to learn the ways of creativity as directed through conscious thought.  The aware mind can change its beliefs, and so to a large extent it can alter its bodily experience.

[another random quote…]

Man is so highly verbal that he finds it difficult to understand that other species work with idea-complexes of a different kind, in which of course thought as you consider it is not involved.  But an equivalent exists; using an analogy, it is as if ideas are built up not like “mental” patterns structured through touch and scent - in other words, thinking, but within a framework entirely different and alien to you.

If you read the quotes from a perspective of, “How interesting this is!”, then everything is jim dandy.  But if you slightly change the perspective to, “How do we know this is true?”, then everything falls apart.  These quotes were taken from “The Nature of Personal Reality”, by Jane Roberts - usually considered somewhat of a classic in New Age culture.

After picking up these books after years, I almost feel offended reading them again.  Who the hell are you to tell me why I’m here?  Maybe I came here to shrink my consciousness, and destroy creativity?  I don’t believe that to be true, but you have no authority to tell me otherwise.

What does “expand your consciousness” even mean?!  Honestly.  “Learn the ways of creativity”?  Says who?  Heh.

And how the hell do you know how a cat thinks?  What makes you qualified to write about how other species think?  Have you DONE anything?  Other than sitting in a chair and spout out nonsense as it floats around in your mind…

I am now very cynical towards New Age (if you couldn’t tell :-P).  I went along for a ride, assuming it would eventually lead somewhere… but it doesn’t.  It’s a circle.  Just like any other belief structure.  Where is the real growth?  Where is the self-destruction?

It’s funny… if you have one requirement for a belief - that there needs to be evidence to support it - then 95% of the belief structures on Earth fail.  Even science and atheism fail quite a bit.

New Age is just another example of how creative human beings can fail at understanding the world around them.  Another one for the recycle bin…

“Mind is not Buddha. Learning is not the path.” -Nansen