Hey everyone!

Per request of SheepKing, I decided to make game based on influencing my Geiger Counter!

Check it out, and let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

Hidden behind the idea of “practice” and “success” is this idea of separation.

If we want to become a great baseball player, then we clearly need practice. Becoming a great baseball player takes some natural talent, but like other skills, it mostly takes dedication, training, and repetition.

A lot of times I will equate psychic abilities to other normal skills. I might say that, just like becoming a great baseball player, if you want to learn to be psychic, then you need to practice it as if it were any other skill. Don’t treat it special. Don’t think of it as something mystical. Treat it as if you were learning anything else.

I like this method of instruction for a lot of reasons. The main reason I like to equate psychic abilities to other normal skills is because it breaks down the association between psychic abilities and religious beliefs.

It would be silly of me to be religious about playing baseball. While some great baseball players are certainly religious, and some might even claim that their religion has helped them become so great - one thing is certain: You don’t learn to hit homeruns by closing your eyes and believing in some mystical force. You hit homeruns by practicing. Maybe religion plays a role in motivation, but the actual skill needs to be developed, and the only way to do that is to practice.

Likewise, when I talk about psychic abilities being like any other skill, my real goal is to break this mental association between psychic abilities and personal religious beliefs. I might instruct someone to treat psychic abilities like any other skill, but what I’m really instructing them to do is to drop their insistence of explaining something unknown using religious ideas.

There is a slight problem with this though. Psychic abilities aren’t like other normal skills.

Normal skills need to be learned. The skill is external to yourself, and through training and practice, you slowly learn to perform the task correctly. The information on how to perform the task is external to yourself. Someone else created the game “baseball”. You must learn what they created. The information is inherently external.

Psychic abilities are not external. Psychic abilities are inherently internal. This is where the analogy breaks down. At this point, psychic abilities are not like any other skill. They are not something created by someone else, that we must learn the rules to. They are inside ourselves, at this very moment. We are psychic creatures - right now.

We are not all baseball-playing creatures right now. Some of us learn to play baseball, others don’t. But we are ALL psychic creatures.

It’s important to think of psychic abilities like any other skill in order to break our addiction of explaining unknown things using religion. However: once that addiction is correctly broken, we must deal with the reality of the situation. Psychic abilities are not like other skills. Normal skills are external to ourselves - something that we must engage with the world around us to learn. Psychic abilities are inherently internal.

Put another way: a newborn child, whose destined to be the greatest baseball player of all time, must at some point learn the rules of baseball. But a newborn child, whose destined to be the greatest psychic of all time, doesn’t have to learn anything. In fact, they may already BE the greatest psychic at the moment they are born.

So the next time you find yourself looking externally for answers on “how to be an awesome psychic”, remember that you are psychic right now - it is something inside of you at this very moment. The real question is at what depth do you understand your own true nature.

Ernesto e-mailed me a question:

“As of now, I have just finished reading your incomplete sequel to your first E-Book. It left me feeling empty as your new website does not talk about all of the “Psi” phenomenon discussed in your first. I wish you could publish a blog in which you finish expressing the ideas of your sequel. Do you still practice Telekinesis and Psi Balls? Do you have any new ideas about how they function with this new broader outlook?”

One reason why I don’t talk about some of my current beliefs is because they sound insane :-P. Part of me would rather quietly hold on to my bizarre beliefs, and work on them in private, than to express them for everyone to read and criticize. Keep in mind that a lot of my friends in real life and co-workers read this blog, and my name is attached to every post, so I feel an increased burden to tone things down :-P.

Another reason I don’t talk about my current understanding is because it’s not clear. I don’t see it clearly in my mind, so I have a hard time explaining it. I’ll start to write a sentence, but it won’t feel correct, so I’ll try again. And again. Ultimately, the problem is that I haven’t “figured it out” in my own head, so I won’t write about it.

But for this post - sure, I’ll give it a shot:

The biggest belief that I struggle with is that it is my understanding that reality is a dream of some sort. And I hate saying that because it’s very cliché, but I’ve yet to find any other explanation for what I’ve observed.

I’ve outlined this belief in past posts: Everything is Meaningful, and I am Probably Insane.

The basic idea is that the things we experience in reality have deeper meaning. Just like in dreams, where certain metaphors drive the experience, these same metaphors are also the driving forces for what we experience in reality.

The reason why I believe this is because I’ve been tracking it in my own life. I have these experiences which are too bizarre to be labeled “coincidence”. I see the metaphors, sometimes while the experience is happening, other times after the fact. I can predict what’s going to happen by looking at what the metaphor requires. A lot of the time I’m correct (though I will be honest, I am not 100% :-P).

Now of course, the same old arguments can be brought up, that I am biased because I’m looking for meaning, or that I’m a sucker, or whatever. Those arguments don’t really bother me, because I know I am very honest with myself, and that no one is more critical of my own thoughts than me. But, from an outsider’s perspective, they do seem like legitimate complaints. One reason I don’t like discussing my beliefs is because I’ll have to argue these worn out positions with people who don’t care as much as I do. I’ve put years of blood sweat and tears into my current beliefs, constantly challenging them from every perspective I can think of, testing reality, forcing myself to drop incorrect beliefs (at the expense of my ego and pride), etc. It’s very frustrating to argue with someone who is just trolling around because they have nothing better to do.

Now, the question that I’ve yet to answer, is how deep do these metaphors go? On the surface, it might seem like I’m just arguing in favor of basic psychology. I’ve observed these metaphors manifesting themselves in reality - not just in my own head - so at a minimum I’m talking about something more than psychology.

Right now I’m divided between three basic explanations:

#1. Reality itself is governed by these metaphors. Reality is a dream. Science is derived from this dream. Examples of this theory are cited in the above links: Everything is Meaningful, and I am Probably Insane.

#2. There is an underlying physical reality that is governed by science, but there is a mental reality governed by these metaphors that co-exists with this physical reality. This would mean that the metaphors are a result of the mind, but that we see manifestations of these metaphors in reality because of large scale unconscious telepathy. I talk about this idea here: Current Understanding of Intention Manifestation.

#3. Something I haven’t thought of.

If explanation #1 is correct, then reality is a free for all. There are no rules. Psionics, and all belief structures, are now easily explained. This sounds a little outlandish, so I tend to side with #2.

If explanation #2 is correct, then there is a very large question. How does this “mental reality” affect the physical reality? In this explanation, macro-psychokinesis is not explained.

Most likely, explanation #3 is correct. But since I’ve yet to think of it, I don’t know how it works :-).

Now, the next question might be: how can we determine which is correct? What would be a wonderful test that would clear a lot of this up?

Well, winning the lottery.

The lottery is void of mind. If this “mental reality” exists, then the lottery would not be a part of it. Therefore, intention manifestation wouldn’t work on the lottery (which is my experience). So, according to my experiences so far, #2 looks like it might be correct.

However, the problem with #2 is the question of macro-psychokinesis - i.e., how does the “mental reality” affect the physical reality? Is the physical reality deterministic? Where does free-will fit into this?

If #2 was completely correct, then you couldn’t use psychic abilities to win the lottery. Yet I have already succeeding in breaking the mathematical odds, and other psychics have won the lottery as well. See: Psychic Wins Lottery, I Won, I Won… Again.

So, #1 doesn’t feel correct, and my experiences back it up because I failed to win the lottery using intention manifestation.

But, #2 is also incorrect to some extent, because I have succeeded a little bit in winning the lottery, and others have done better than I have.

So, in conclusion…

In my last eBook, I talked about belief systems, and how we can succeed with psychic abilities using drastically different belief systems. The question that I had at the end of that eBook was basically: how can that be?

My answer to that question is that reality is some form of dream. I haven’t posted a lot on this subject because a lot of the revelations have been very personal as I inspect the metaphors driving my own life.

The next question is: to what extent do these metaphors affect reality? Either reality is a dream, and physical reality is derived from that dream (#1), OR there is a physical reality, and a mental reality, each governed by different rules (#2).

Judging from my experiences, and my intuition, I believe that #2 is probably more correct. However, then the question becomes: how is macro-psychokinesis possible? I.e., how does the mental reality affect the physical reality?

At that point, a good test is to attempt to win the lottery (something completely physical), using mental means (psychic abilities). This will get me lots of money, play into my own life metaphor, and help answer these glaring questions about how reality works.

Any questions?

I stumbled on the site DemonTales.com today.  It’s another paranormal blog, and it mostly focuses on videos.  A lot of the footage seems fake, but it’s still fun to browse and check out.  Here’s one that didn’t set off my bullshit detector:

Check out the site if you have some time to kill.  It’s pretty cool!

Everyone knows I love a good story, and apocalypse is one of the best.

It seems a preacher is touring around, claiming he is one of the two prophets talked about in Book of Revelation.

For those that don’t know, the Book of Revelation is a Christian prophecy about how the world is going to end. It is extremely hard to read, because it’s very vague and riddled with metaphors. One thing the Book of Revelation does say is that there will be two prophets who do amazing things and spread the word about how awesome God is before Jesus comes back to Earth.

And apparently one of the prophets runs the website, http://the-end.com/.

If you enjoy religious prophecy talking about how awesome God is, and how much humans are going to get bitch-slapped by him, then check out the site.  And to tell you the truth, the author sounds like he actually knows what he’s talking about!

Recently I got into an argument about whether out of body experiences were real or not.  Whenever I get into such an argument, I always force myself to be as scientific and logical as possible.  This usually pisses skeptics off, because they are used to being the scientific guy, and the other person being the religious nut job.

I insisted that scientific evidence - if studied without bias - actually supports the theory that OBEs are real.  The skeptic was quick to jump on that claim.  He stated that OBEs (and their close cousin, near death experiences) were nothing more than a brain going crazy from the chemistry.  He presented me with recent scientific studies and articles as proof:

1. Scientists Induce OBEs in the Lab - A scientist used virtual reality goggles to trick the brain into thinking it was out of body.

2. Extreme Gravity Triggers OBEs/NDEs - A report stating that extreme G-Forces will induce an OBE because of the lack of blood flowing to the brain.

3. People have NDEs While Brain Dead

Seems a little daunting at first - I mean, how could I call myself a scientific guy, when there is scientific evidence that OBEs/NDEs aren’t real?

It turns out it was pretty easy:

1. Did the scientists really induce an OBE? No. The virtual reality goggles gave a creepy illusion of being out of body, but the OBE state of mind wasn’t actually induced. It’s an optical illusion. Just because you can fake it, doesn’t mean that the original isn’t real. I can create a fake video of me walking - that doesn’t mean I can’t walk.

2. All the report states is that lack of blood flowing to the brain can induce a near death experience. Well, that doesn’t really say either way whether the experience is real or not. It just says that when you do things that might kill you, you might have a near death experience. Which is actually pretty obvious :-P. I can induce a gun shot wound by shooting someone in the leg. Does that mean gun shot wounds aren’t real? Of course not.

3. The third piece of evidence was the best. How many of you read the page? Probably not that many. It turns out that article is in favor of NDEs being real. The person I was arguing against only read the title. I read the article.

I want to point out two things: 1. I am right about the evidence supporting OBEs being real.  I may make a separate post with a list of evidence in the future.  But more importantly, 2. skeptics are full of shit.

Skeptics hide behind citing work, and long articles, and scientific studies - but they can only get away with it because it’s very rare for them to actually be challenged.  It’s a game of intimidation - not one of pursuing truth.  The strategy is simple: argue the skeptical position, and when someone challenges you, just google the topic and paste a bunch of links to scientific documents.  No real effort required, and you look smart in the process, and feel good about bitch slapping some “moron”.

And for the most part, science has figured a lot of stuff out, so this strategy actually works really well.  For example, if you were to get in an argument about evolution vs. creationism, you could just google it, and find enough links on the internet that supports evolution, and throw them in the religious guys face.  You win.

But the reality of the situation is that science hasn’t figured everything out.  And when it comes to the subject of parapsychology, they are light years behind.

The down side to this is that you have to know your stuff if you want to challenge a skeptic.  The skeptic won’t put in the effort, so if you want to sound credible, you have to put in the effort for both of you.  It is an uphill battle, and I’ve yet to see a skeptic change their mind, but it’s an important battle because it teaches us that science is far from perfect, and suffers from the same fundamentalism as any other system of beliefs.

Alrighty!

I’ve updated the look of ALW, along with adding some forums!

The look badly needed an upgrade.  The old layout was made as a temporary placeholder, and was a little bland.  The new is similar, except it looks more bad ass, and has bigger buttons.

I decided to add the forums for two reasons.

1. Some people were using the Video Board as a forum, and just posted multiple replies to get their message across.  I figured that would happen, and didn’t attempt to prevent it, because communication is good :-P.

2. Forums create a wonderful community feeling, which I don’t think was really captured with the Video Board.  I had hoped people would post videos of themselves, but I learned just as everyone else did - it takes a lot of effort to make even a simple video.  And a lot of people really don’t want to broadcast themselves over the internet for everyone to see.  Fair enough :-).

I scripted the new forums from scratch, because I didn’t feel like hacking around bloated forum packages found online (compare my script, 1,100 lines of code, to SimpleMachines, with 59,000 lines of code).  I’ll be adding more features over time, and if you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Other than that, I hope everyone enjoys the updates!

Sorry for the lack of posts - a lot of my time spent recently has been on the stock market, and on watching politics.  I’m continuing to train in OBEs and play the lottery, but I haven’t had noteworthy results (a few small OBEs, but no video).

Either way, the other day I was reading Mad Hatter’s blog, Dreaming to Infinity.  In it, he talked about a cool sounding shared dreaming project being set up call the Green Room, by DreamPort.  The basic idea is to get some people next week, and try to meet up in a shared lucid dream.  I thought the idea was cool, so I signed up for it.  I’ve attempted shared dreaming in the past, but never had any luck.  Perhaps this time we can get some cool results :-).

If you want to join the project, be sure to check out DreamPort, and see the registration thread here.  The deadline is this Friday, February 8th - so hurry!

Other than that, nothing too crazy going on in my world at the moment.  I’ll be sure to continue to document my progress in my blog.  Maybe I can think of some more cool things to put online, like a psychic game or something.  Have fun!

My previous post was made just a few hours ago, so please don’t forget to read that if you missed it.

Cutting to the chase: I got a video of myself having an out of body experience, but it doesn’t look like anything amazing is going on from the video :-P. I suppose I should be bummed out or something, but honestly I just feel really excited! I can’t believe I was able to catch the experience on tape - even though there isn’t anything amazing in the video itself.

I’ve uploaded the uneventful video to YouTube, for those that really want to watch it. The second half is a zoomed-in high-contrast version.

(Note that in my excitement, I accidentally typed the timestamp of 3:55am, when it was actually 3:38am - I must have been thinking of my previous night’s OBE when finalizing the video).

I had been trying to get an OBE on video for about a week, and had just recently perfected my technique. Last night I had an OBE, but it turned out my camera ran out of tape mere minutes before the OBE actually happened. This night, I tried again. I found another setting that extended my tape length from 92 to 94 minutes (by changing the sound from 16-bit, to 12-bit). I pushed the record button, and jumped in bed ASAP - in order not to lose any time on the tape.

I tranced out from 2:05 to about 2:45, listening to music. I shut the music off, then did some more meditation for another 30 minutes. Then I rolled over to my side in order to get more comfortable, and attempt an OBE.

I fell asleep and started dreaming. I was dreaming I was laying in one of my old beds, trying to trance out :-). My mother came into the room and laid next to me. She started talking to me about my sister, and I was getting annoyed, because I was really focusing on trancing out, and wanted to get the OBE on video. My desire to OBE was so strong that even my dream-self kept the mission alive :-).

Eventually I told my mom about my frustration, and she didn’t say anything - just gave me this really strong bear hug. It was really painful, because it wasn’t a nice hug or anything. She grabbed me and started squeezing the breathe out of me. This snapped me out of the dream state, and propelled me into having an OBE. I “woke up” out of body, but laying inside my body.

My right arm was free to move. I checked the clock (while out), and it was 3:38am. I did some quick math and realized I only had a minute or two left on the tape! I started to frantically wave my right arm, and tried to escape my body, but I was mostly stuck (probably because I was trying so hard :-P). All I could do was wave my right arm. So I just kept doing that. After about a minute of that, I jumped back into my body, and wiggled around to wake myself up. I got up, waved at the camera (with my left arm, instead of my right), in order to show the camera where I had just been waving.

I got over and looked at the camera - Tape End! Oh no!, I thought :-). I was about to flip out, thinking I had just missed my OBE for a second night in a row. When I checked the tape, I saw that the tape actually ended right after I had woken up and waved at the camera. I literally had about a 10 second buffer :-). The end of the video on YouTube is the exact end of the tape itself (I just trimmed off the first 92 minutes of trancing out).

It’s 5:40am now, and I really need to get ready for work. I just played the tape again, and it’s getting corrupted for some reason. There are large green bands across the video. Luckily I was able to extract and watch the end before the data corruption took place. I’ll have to mess around with it to see if the tape is really corrupt or not. At least I have the digital data :-).

I had another out of body experience (OBE) last night.  Three in a week!  This one was induced voluntarily.  I’ve mastered the technique :-).

A good portion of the questions that people ask me are concerning OBEs.  The question might be, “I can trance out, but then nothing happens!”, or “How do you know when it’s time to actually leave?”, or “I had a weird experience… do you think it was an OBE?”  These are all great questions!   Unfortunately, my honest response to each one is: “I don’t know” :-P.

Maybe I can be more helpful than that though…

The hard part about learning how to have an out of body experience is that it is so dependent on feel, that it’s very hard to teach.  There is a certain feel that goes along with the build up to having an OBE.  Whether that “feel” is a brainwave frequency, or chemical imbalance, or some other weird thing in the brain - I don’t know.  What I do know is that I can usually predict within the first 5 minutes of a trance whether I’ll be able to navigate to the correct feel required for an OBE.  Not intuition, not talking with my subconscious… it is a feeling in my mind.

Having an OBE is just one of many outcomes of trancing out.  In order to have an OBE, you must navigate your trance towards the OBE-feel. So, if you’ve never had an OBE, how can you figure out where to navigate your trances towards?  Basically, brute force.  You trance out, try new things, mess around, and just hope for the best.  Yes it sucks, but I can’t think of any better way (maybe hemi-sync if you want to cheat :-P).

Once you have your first OBE, then you have a basic idea of where the OBE-feel is.  But it takes practice to really pin-point it down, and possibly years to get there willfully.  I don’t know why it’s this hard, but it is what it is.

I can have an OBE using a lot of different techniques because I know where the OBE-feel is located, and I can use the techniques to help control my mind to get there.  If you don’t know your destination, you can have all the control in the world, but it won’t really help you :-P.  Only until you start to lock on to the OBE-feel can you start having them consistently and willfully.

My OBE last night was induced via a Wake-Back-To-Bed method (those in the Lucid Dreaming circles will know the basic idea).  What I did was fall asleep at 8:00pm.  I told myself to wake up at 2:00am, but my body must have hit the snooze on my internal alarm clock, because I woke up at 3:00am.  I got up, walked around, surfed the net, thought about my future OBE, etc.

At around 3:15am, I felt awake enough to have confidence that I wouldn’t just zonk out once my head hit the pillow.  I set up my camera, with hopes of recording my OBE.  I found some new settings on it, which allows for (crappy) night-vision, and changed the settings from SP to LP - which basically meant I could record for 92 minutes (instead of 64 minutes).  I put it on record, then laid down.

I listened to some Daft Punk music - specifically, their live album.  My alarm was set for 6:00am, which is the time I get up to go to work.  I got a decent trance going for about 30 minutes, and then decided that the music was distracting more than it was helping, so I shut it off and went solo.

I fluttered in and out of consciousness for quite a while.  I kept trancing, and nearly fell into a dream state, but managed to keep myself from falling asleep.  Between black-outs, I noticed I was in the right state of mind to have an OBE.  I left for a short while and had a lot of trouble with my vision.  I didn’t remain passive, like I had been on my previous OBEs last week.  I was really disorientated, and having a hard time in general.

I floated over to my door, then back to my bed, and then it dawned on me: I’m filming this!  So I quickly floated towards my camera.  I couldn’t see anything, but I knew I was where it was pointing, and I tried to do crazy stuff with the intention of being caught on film.  I went back to my body, woke up, and checked the clock - 4:55am.  I made a mental note to myself that my OBE was probably around 2-3 minutes long, and made sure I wouldn’t forget the time frame.  I needed to remember exactly when my OBE occurred so I could check the tape when I woke up for that exact moment.

Well, for those of you doing the math, I’ll cut to the chase.  My tape ran out at 4:47am.  My OBE started at around 4:52am.  Noooooo :-).

I checked the tape, and I didn’t see anything noteworthy.  I’ll check again, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.  The good news is that I have locked on to the OBE-feel, and I am confident I can OBE at will.  This should make future experiments much easier, and tonight I may even catch myself on camera :-).