Astral Projection and String Theory

I try to keep an open mind. I'm not stating any of the below as fact, but just food for thought. ;)
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So last night I was watching something on YouTube about String Theory by Michio Kaku. He was explaining how the next step in modern physics, after finding the Higgs Boson and completing the Standard Model, is to find particles that correspond to the "next vibrational frequency" (String Theory). He mentioned how our physical universe is made up of strings, and these strings are at the lowest vibrational frequency (by the theory). He seemed to suggest that dark matter may be made up of particles, that we have yet to detect outside of gravitational means, are made of strings of higher vibrational frequency.

So I sat there thinking that all of this sounded all too familiar, from another topic that I had read about a long time ago. And that topic was astral projection. It sounded almost exactly the same. From what I've read of astral projection, our physical universe is a plane of existence at the "lowest energy frequency", and that astral projection consists of shifting our focus into "higher frequency energy bodies". Once focus is shifted, you're tuned into planes of existence that are higher frequency than the physical plane, for example the ethereal and astral planes.

Here's something I cribbed off Wiki :

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One unique prediction of string theory is the existence of string harmonics. At sufficiently high energies, the string-like nature of particles would become obvious. There should be heavier copies of all particles, corresponding to higher vibrational harmonics of the string. It is not clear how high these energies are.

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This made me think of the higher energy body doubles we supposedly have. And it made me wonder if this "ethereal plane", that is described as the next frequency above the physical plane (and hence it looking like a copy of physical reality), where we begin our OBEs, may actually be made up of this dark matter. And the same goes with astral plane, and etc. And if this were the case, would it mean these particles are effected by thought? In our dreams we can create things on the fly. And could the instability of these higher planes (like how things are always changing in your dreams) be the reason dark matter has such a low density, and no seemingly dense structure detected throughout our universe?
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I'm going to stop there because it goes beyond the connection here. But nonetheless, I thought it would be interesting to post. We might be in for some very interesting times ahead if String Theory starts to gain any validity.

Nice post. I do feel like vibrations we sometimes feel while WILDing or OBEing are representation of our bodies changing vibrational frequency, so we can "visit" planes of existance of that frequency.

And I think, that dark matter is those parts of the world that we don't see. Like right now, we are in physical and that's what we see. But everything in physical has it's counterpart in other planes, and all of those planes can be of different density or vibrational frequency. Physical is like the tip of the iceberg that's visible to us. Rest of the mass we see only if we change our perception.

Since I'm sort of a physicist, and have experienced astral projection, and believe its more than "just a dream", I've thought about how it might make sense in terms of string theory and dark matter. I agree its exciting that there's so much unknown in physics theory that leaves room for astral projection. And its exciting that other people are recognizing this.

So I hope you don't take the rest of this as a downer, since the important thing is that spiritual stuff is real and there is so much left to be discovered.

The size of a particle physics 'string' is on the order of Planck length, which is about 10e-35 meters. In other words, take 1 meter and divide it by 100000000000000000000000000000000000. The vibrational frequency of a string will be proportional to its size. If the vibration propagates at the speed of light, that's about 10e38, in other words 100000000000000000000000000000000000000 oscillations per second. The frequency of 'middle C' on the piano is about 16 oscillations per second, and already that's fast enough that its getting hard to feel it as a vibration by touch. And that's already 'higher frequency' than the vibrations most people describe in relation to astral projection. So you can't feel the vibrations of a particle physics string, and those vibrations have nothing to do with the 'higher frequencies' of New Age lingo. Furthermore, if astral matter is in any sense 'higher frequency' than normal matter, you can not feel that as a vibration either. Vibrations of ordinary electron orbitals, for example, are on the order of 1000000000000000 oscillations per second.

One of the main ways 'dark matter' is known to exist, is it's gravitational effects show that its distributed in a spherical cloud around the galaxy, rather than being flattened out in a disk like the visible matter. This implies that it interacts almost not at all with normal matter except gravitationally, and more importantly, it mostly doesn't interact with itself. In other words, it doesn't clump together into forms, aetherial or otherwise. This doesn't fit our experience of 'astral' matter very well at all. And there are other issues, I just gave the first one that came to mind.

Another idea I've had is that astral matter could be sort of a cloud of 'virtual' parallel worlds. But this idea doesn't work either, since we can do stuff astrally that's probably impossible in any physical world. The idea might work for things like teleportation, but not for things like levitating. So all I have presently are a couple of really hazy ideas that don't amount to much:

1. The difference between 'astral' matter and ordinary matter may be more akin to a difference in reactivity than a difference in activity. (I didn't come up with this, it's my interpretation of an image from a dream my sister had.)
2. Providence shapes our world by a process of removing potential outcomes, and leaving a smaller collection of preferred ones, almost like an etch. 'Dark matter' could be involved in this. Spirits have access to a larger cloud of possibilities than what we experience, though I can't say exactly what that means. Their knowledge of this greater meta-reality is part of what allows their understanding of ours.

Maybe what we experience as 'astral matter' when we 'astral project' isn't actually quite synonymous with 'real' astral matter, but its metaphorically quite similar so we confuse the two? In waking life, we have a tactile sense of where our body is, which is essential to being able to move it around without bumping into things. And we typically coordinate that with our visual image of our body and surroundings. These mental models help us predict what is happening, what has happened, and what is going to happen. And they're what we use to make things happen. Suppose there are worlds that are not quite real, but are spiritual models of what can happen, and fates use those to predict what can happen and to make things happen. That seems to me to be a lot like the same kind of thing. However, our mental models aren't always accurate. We can lie to ourselves, or be mistaken. So our thoughts aren't necessarily 'real' in that sense. Maybe the thoughts of the gods are like that too. Maybe the astral is not real in the sense that there's actually stuff there, obeying rules like the Pauli exclusion principle. (I think that one is pretty much essential for something to behave anything like what we might call matter.) So maybe when we try to think of it in terms of some kind of finer matter we have the wrong idea.

I guess it does seem to me though that human imagination and divine imagination must at least in some sense be the same kind of thing, because we do consciously precipitate events in the objective world. We just do that almost exclusively by influencing our own bodies. Off hand I can't see how that can be essentially different, even if the angels do it with considerably broader scope and intelligence.

This is somewhat off topic, but I thought I'd point out that if you have a bright light that is uniformly smooth, the same in all directions and at all frequencies, that's the same as darkness. Energy is about differences. Maybe this thought helps a tiny bit towards understanding what the moon represents spiritually. (It seems to me this follows from Light not being subject to the exclusion principle, which is what reminded me of this.)

Going a bit further off topic, here's the thought I'm working on today, see my dream in the general forum for context if you want to. When we fly in dreams, this is a metaphor for our freedom to move as minds. When I experience some other place or way of being in a dream, I am flying to that place. If I extend my identity to embrace yours a little bit, we fly there together. This freedom starts in our hearts. It wards of the destruction of despair. In life, we are also supported by the comfort of circumstances - food to eat, a chair to sit in, a TV show to watch - and these ward of despair also. But its our will, our movement of our spirits, that gives us freedom to soar to something new or better. Affection, such as expressed physically with sex, is metaphorically like sharing our ability to fly. It expresses that levity as something like a physical support. If we express that freedom or levity in a way that is destructive to our physical conditions, then we have a problem. By 'physical' I mean everything that has a physical basis, seen or unseen, impacting pretty much everything which might be called emotional or spiritual also. Sometimes when we do something to gain happiness, its like taking a higher interest loan to pay off a lower interest debt. We gain a moment of relief, but inevitably we sink lower. We often use sex that way, and use chemistry that way, and even use the affections of friendship that way. We need to use that freedom, our love, in a more intelligent way that nurtures, and builds things up. I'm just brainstorming here, thinking about what I experienced in my dream. Since it ties metaphorically love with the experience of flying, and with moving energy in a dream, it seems relevant to understanding our 'astral' experiences. But not because flying is love. The gears of my mind sort of seize up at this point. From love, all of these other things are possible, yet none of them are love. They aren't love in the same way that buying something with a credit card is not wealth? Everyone knows that none of these things are love, and we can all give obvious illustrative examples that nearly everyone understands and agrees about. At the same time, it seems we're all almost perpetually confused about this. It seems to me like swinging on a swing. You lean back and put your legs in the air, but if you do it at the wrong time it drags you to a stop instead of lifting you up. It seems to me that intelligence is required. And its a global, universal intelligence as well as a personal or selfish one. All of the pieces have to be coordinated. It matters not just where the swing is, but where the rest of the earth is in relation to the swing. So we have to think for ourselves, because only we have the perspective of who we are and what we need, but all the while we need to listen to others also, taking who they are and what they see into consideration. And this has to be anchored in the spirit that ties us all together, and ties our collective human island to the wider reality that we can't see.

I realize this last bit goes pretty far off of the string theory topic, but tend to go overboard as a critic and wanted to try to offer something constructive. And metaphorically it seems related, and attempts to get towards the heart of it all, for me anyway.

Physics has taught us the lowest energy state of anything, is the stable state. Our universe is described as being made up of strings of the lowest frequency (or energy). And coincidentally, our universe also happens to be stable. I'm guessing this is why String Theory suggests our universe is made up of strings of the lowest frequencies.

Our dreams, or projections on the other hand, are not stable. If "astral matter" were made of up of strings that are of higher frequency/energy, it would make sense that it is not stable, since it would (maybe) have the potential to be in a lower energy (physical) state. If it is not stable, there should be no ordered and lasting dense form of it similar to physical matter. Maybe it does on the small scale (on our scale), or on very small but on the astronomical scale it should be nothing more than a light sea of free floating particles. And that's what "see" as dark matter as right now.

Dark matter could also be nothing more than a parallel universe right next to ours, made up of nothing more than hydrogen atoms. Hopefully we find out what it is soon, before some self proclaimed physics majors come in here and talk about how they've rewritten the equations of gravity to prove it doesn't exist. :cheeky:

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Originally Posted by blade5x

If "astral matter" were made of up of strings that are of higher frequency/energy, it would make sense that it is not stable, since it would (maybe) have the potential to be in a lower energy (physical) state. If it is not stable, there should be no ordered and lasting dense form of it similar to physical matter.

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If it were unstable in that sense, there would be a vast release of energy as it transitions to a stable state, and that would be the end of it.

The basis for this really doesn't go any further than the fact that the term vibration is shared between AP and string theory.

As far as theorizing goes, I think it's great to try think of new ideas and we should never get overly serious into the science of things in just an everyday conversation but that doesn't do enough to validate this idea.

Firstly string theory is largely in it's infancy, barely a theory for that matter. Preons have never been detected let along quarks, we still don't properly understand the standard physical model.
Secondly the mechanism of string theory is fairly unknown, how strings pass through dimensions, what the 6 other dimensions look like, at what frequencies most properties of our visible universe are created.
Thirdly there is no explanation as to how AP could work. The mechanisms proposed don't explain what they mean by vibrations nor do they explain what part of you is being "projected"

Admittedly I have little knowledge on AP but It's pretty obvious that right now there is absolutely no point in trying to use theories like these to give an explanation for it. I understand why you would want an explanation but there just isn't any right now. None the less it's an interesting idea.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

If it were unstable in that sense, there would be a vast release of energy as it transitions to a stable state, and that would be the end of it.

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The Big Bang maybe? :panic:

I know String Theory isn't an explanation, as String Theory itself requires an explanation. It's just the first time I actually saw some kind of actual possible explanation to AP. The whole "higher frequency dimensions" and "body doubles" and etc. I don't even know if AP is real or not, based off the lack of hard evidence (and even personal experience). But I don't dismiss it like many do for that reason alone.

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Originally Posted by dutchraptor

As far as theorizing goes, I think it's great to try think of new ideas and we should never get overly serious into the science of things in just an everyday conversation but that doesn't do enough to validate this idea.

Firstly string theory is largely in it's infancy, barely a theory for that matter. Preons have never been detected let along quarks, we still don't properly understand the standard physical model.
Secondly the mechanism of string theory is fairly unknown, how strings pass through dimensions, what the 6 other dimensions look like, at what frequencies most properties of our visible universe are created.
Thirdly there is no explanation as to how AP could work. The mechanisms proposed don't explain what they mean by vibrations nor do they explain what part of you is being "projected"

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I agree that trying to match the details and hard evidence is most likely a difficult task, however I don't think one should discount intuitive and mental exploration of such things just because there seems to be so much data to work through. I will offend many scientist with this point, but I believe focusing so much on detail is in many ways a detriment. If understanding could be likened to a large building, the hard science approach is to build that building one nut, one bolt, one brick at a time without much consideration for the complete blueprint. I take the opposite direction, start with the big picture, and the details will emerge after. In an infinite universe you are going to be working with details forever.

Blade5x, your ideas and comparisons are a good jumping off point for your own exploration and understanding. More details may emerge later if you don't fret over doubt.

The idea that the universe is composed of ranges of frequency in ascending vibration is a simple and eloquent concept. The many forms these vibrations can take, how they interact across dimensions and how this all corresponds to the models humans have made over the years is more complicated. Nevertheless the basic concept connects with string theory, as well as wavelengths of electromagnetism. Details may emerge later.

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The size of a particle physics 'string' is on the order of Planck length, which is about 10e-35 meters. In other words, take 1 meter and divide it by 100000000000000000000000000000000000. The vibrational frequency of a string will be proportional to its size. If the vibration propagates at the speed of light, that's about 10e38, in other words 100000000000000000000000000000000000000 oscillations per second. The frequency of 'middle C' on the piano is about 16 oscillations per second, and already that's fast enough that its getting hard to feel it as a vibration by touch. And that's already 'higher frequency' than the vibrations most people describe in relation to astral projection. So you can't feel the vibrations of a particle physics string, and those vibrations have nothing to do with the 'higher frequencies' of New Age lingo. Furthermore, if astral matter is in any sense 'higher frequency' than normal matter, you can not feel that as a vibration either. Vibrations of ordinary electron orbitals, for example, are on the order of 1000000000000000 oscillations per second.

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Perhaps we should take scale into consideration. If your body, or astral body, is composed of "material" vibrating at a certain wavelength, and this frequency is increased, it may reverberate into the whole structure. The effect you experience of these vibrations may be how they are perceived in the macrocosm of your body, while the microcosmic vibrations would be far to fast to actually experience.

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Another idea I've had is that astral matter could be sort of a cloud of 'virtual' parallel worlds. But this idea doesn't work either, since we can do stuff astrally that's probably impossible in any physical world

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The physical world is solidified thought. It is a symbolic representation of that which is inner, or immaterial. In terms of vibration, the lower the frequency the more solid or structured the representation. You can imagine these immaterial planes as being vast networks of possibilities, only a few of which have become crystallized into physical form within our time-stream. The "matter" of such realms, if you wish to call it that, would behave very differently than the matter of its physical symbol.

Or as you put it:

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Suppose there are worlds that are not quite real, but are spiritual models of what can happen, and fates use those to predict what can happen and to make things happen... Maybe the astral is not real in the sense that there's actually stuff there, obeying rules like the Pauli exclusion principle. So maybe when we try to think of it in terms of some kind of finer matter we have the wrong idea

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The point I'm making is that these immaterial possibilities actually give rise to physicality, rather than being some adjunct or offshoot which require physicality to exist.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

Perhaps we should take scale into consideration. If your body, or astral body, is composed of "material" vibrating at a certain wavelength, and this frequency is increased, it may reverberate into the whole structure. The effect you experience of these vibrations may be how they are perceived in the macrocosm of your body, while the microcosmic vibrations would be far to fast to actually experience.

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A couple of reasons this doesn't work for 'string theory' vibrations:

There are a vast number of particles in a body, and the 'string' vibration isn't coherent across them. The vibrations don't accumulate to produce a larger vibration, they cancel out.

The scale is still way, way wrong. If a smaller coherent vibration were two, or three, or four, or some other small multiple of the natural frequency of a larger body, it could produce a lower vibration. But this mostly breaks down even by the time we get to double digits, and we're talking about factors of 100000000000000000000000000000000000.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

If understanding could be likened to a large building, the hard science approach is to build that building one nut, one bolt, one brick at a time without much consideration for the complete blueprint. I take the opposite direction, start with the big picture, and the details will emerge after.

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This only works if you know enough details to have a general idea what you're dealing with. If you set out to build a 100000000000000000000000000000000000 meter high building while worrying about the nuts, bolts, and bricks later, this isn't even sane.

Gaining a general idea what you're dealing with is a process of bringing your hypotheses into focus with the information available. If you decide stuff from the top down, then you just have a fantasy. You can't fill in the details later because the details don't fit. A top down theory of planetary orbits based on Platonic solids isn't ever going to work, for example, however elegant it may seem in concept. That building will never, ever stand up.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

The idea that the universe is composed of ranges of frequency in ascending vibration is a simple and eloquent concept.

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I agree that its a concept that keeps talking. I don't think it sounds very eloquent though, once you've done a cursory checking of details. It seems ridiculous to confuse 1 meter with 100000000000000000000000000000000000 meters when designing a building, because everyone understands what this means. But I think the things that are being said about frequencies are every bit as ridiculous if you understand more what those statements mean.

It seems to me that the idea of spiritual frequencies mostly started as a radio-tuning metaphor, back when Theosophy and 'Spiritualism' were still going strong and radios were cutting edge technology. Then people never moved on to better metaphors because we failed to develop any. (Much of quantum mechanics, where we get some of our other metaphors, is over 100 years old now also.) I agree that radio is a useful metaphor, better than nothing at all. But in most ways spiritual growth really isn't very much like adjusting the size of a capacitor attached to a big antenna, and there is no way to fill in details that will make it very much like that.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

The physical world is solidified thought. It is a symbolic representation of that which is inner, or immaterial. In terms of vibration, the lower the frequency the more solid or structured the representation. You can imagine these immaterial planes as being vast networks of possibilities, only a few of which have become crystallized into physical form within our time-stream. The "matter" of such realms, if you wish to call it that, would behave very differently than the matter of its physical symbol.

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I think this is mostly nonsense, and that it seems plausible to you only because you're missing details as important as the difference between 1 and 100000000000000000000000000000000000. Not that I can do any better, or that we should stop trying. But I think that realizing that you can't just make stuff up and expect to to be true is a crucially important part of the process.

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If you decide stuff from the top down, then you just have a fantasy. You can't fill in the details later because the details don't fit.

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I understand your viewpoint, and do not expect mine to translate without direct experience. The top down approach is, ideally, not something created by the physical mind. The grand picture is fed into the physical personality which acts like a receiver. It happens in a flash. So you are trusting that what you receive comes from a level of existence/yourself which has a much broader viewpoint, and is attempting to translate it down into your own mind's symbol system. It may not convince anyone else, often do to the lack of detail, but inside you can understand quite clearly. The problem is turning the vagaries of mysticism into useful information for society.

Ignoring frequencies because you dislike that model, do you have some preferred idea for different dimensions and how they operate?

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

I understand your viewpoint, and do not expect mine to translate without direct experience. The top down approach is, ideally, not something created by the physical mind. The grand picture is fed into the physical personality which acts like a receiver. It happens in a flash. So you are trusting that what you receive comes from a level of existence/yourself which has a much broader viewpoint, and is attempting to translate it down into your own mind's symbol system. It may not convince anyone else, often do to the lack of detail, but inside you can understand quite clearly. The problem is turning the vagaries of mysticism into useful information for society.

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Based on my experience, the biggest difficulty here is that the "level of existence/yourself which has a much broader viewpoint" is often wrong about stuff. Most people assume that if the intuition has a clearly divine origin, and doesn't seem evil, then it must be true, and that any errors must be in their personal interpretation of the message. This is definitely not the case for me though, and I can see that its not like that for other people either. A person can get a powerful, plausible seeming intuition accompanied by a joyous feeling and a bona fide miracle, and it can still be dead wrong. The gods, so to speak, are confused in ways that are deeply connected somehow with our own confusion.

I guess I'll stop there.
This is by far the biggest criticism I have of raja yoga and other similar mystical approaches. Their meditative method for obtaining knowledge is ostensibly infallible if you do it right. So when it fails there's no corrective feedback, since the intuition is believed to trump all other means of obtaining knowledge. They protect against this to some extent by checking religious intuitions against the teachings of the best traditional authorities. But once something false gets deeply into the canon they're pretty much stuck with it, since their dogma informs all of their subsequent intuitions.

Actually I guess all systems of thought have a similar kind of positive-feedback problem. Even science will fail for anything where self-confirming experiments are possible. But religious intuition is the area where this issue has come up in the biggest way in my life.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

Ignoring frequencies because you dislike that model, do you have some preferred idea for different dimensions and how they operate?

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Unfortunately, no. This is most of the reason I initially signed up for this site, to try to get feedback and ideas to help with this. I found that the quality of my ideas about this sort of thing has had a fairly strong connection with the kinds of experiences I get. And I could see major problems with all of the esoteric religious ideas I've encountered, and I've read a lot of fairly obscure stuff. So I thought it was important to try to sift through all of this and develop something a little bit better, for the sake of taking the next step. If nothing else, I think that if we relax the strength our beliefs in all the areas where we can tell that those beliefs are inadequate, that will provide an opening for something new to begin germinating.

I can say with absolute certainty, for myself anyway, that there are 'other dimensions' or something like that. But I don't have any good ideas about how they might work.

Imagine if you or I were to try to come up with a basic theory of electromagnetism (Maxwell's equations), with no information to go by besides knowing how to rub balloons on our heads until they stick to the wall. I think that's a fair characterization of our situation with 'higher worlds'.

I can say some more minor things that might help a little bit. Many of these ideas I've posted previously.

People sometimes think of our world as one unified whole, and of 'parallel worlds' as being countless, distinct alternative worlds. But our world isn't really one globally well defined thing. Its more like a vast number of very, very similar and not completely defined worlds packed close together, separated from other potentially real bunches of very very similar and not completely defined worlds. Our momentary experience spans one of these 'clouds' of worlds, which is local to our immediate environment and things we are interacting with. As we move through other local environments, the intersecting clouds of worlds are usually reconciled in a consistent manner. But in rare circumstances there are wrinkles, and two instruments don't always measure the same thing.

Saying this another way: the present moment in time isn't a point, its more of a ghostly blur that only firms up into definite objects and events to the extent that it has to in order to interact with itself. And our world is a crazy weave of a whole lot of those localized blurs. An object has many particles that have to interact with each other, so the object is a fairly definite thing, to itself and to anything else that is contacting it. But that whole system of definite things isn't well defined for some other group of things that is not in contact with it.

OK, moving on....I'm fairly confident that 'reincarnation' is a mess of separating and rejoining branches like this also. The idea of a single, isolated, sequence of lives, unique to a particular individual, doesn't make any sense to me conceptually and doesn't fit anything I experience either. It would be like trying to adequately describe your body's ancestry using a line instead of a tree.

I think that most ghosts are not spirits of dead people, and are more akin to desired events that couldn't quite happen.

When we say things like "physical events are manifested thoughts", I think we use the word "thought" here because its the closest idea we have to something like that. But I think that what we call "thoughts" are actually manifestations too, for the most part. And the spirit-like soup that the physical world is embedded in is not primarily made up of human thoughts. Human thought is one part of a much greater class of thought-like things which also includes objects.

Fate and intuition and synchronicity are different expressions of the same thing.

Imagine a 'lower' spiritual realm that is a big, complicated mess of wrestling desires. (A 'higher' realm would be less chaotic and not as close to manifestation maybe.) Here desire isn't the right word, but I lack a better one. When you get a premonition that something will happen, its what will happen due to the existence of some portion of that mess of desire. You don't know the whole mess of desire though, because of the limitation of your individual perspective. And what actually will happen is an outcome of all of the relevant desire. So what you see in your premonition might not ever have been possible. Its not that you misinterpreted it, or that something changed. The vision is real in the sense that the causes are there, even though you can not see all the relevant causes. Its a little bit like seeing that a lot of parallel worlds look a certain way soon, but with no way to verify whether those worlds are even potentially connected to the one you're in now. And the existence of these worlds isn't just extrapolated from the present state of our world. The future caused somehow, it unfolds according to some kind of a plan, constrained by considerations that we have almost no understanding of. In other words, that churning mess of desire is conscious and highly intelligent.

I think that most misfortunes are like this, they're things that happen because otherwise the worlds pull too far in too many different directions. Sometimes there's just no way to make everything work without a "Bob falls down the stairs and gets mauled by a polar bear" event to put things back in harmony a little better. Bad things happen to us repeatedly because we're already so far out of harmony that there's just no other way for the world to move from one day to the next.

In most eastern teachings, its a mistake to project your feeling and identify yourself as being some particular person or object. I think that teaching is a mistake, that this capacity to move around and become different things is natural and good, and if you were able to stop doing it somehow that would have bad results. Obviously, if you project your identity too exclusively into something that lacks the capacity to project identity, you put yourself in a kind of a paralyzed trance. I don't think this is the primary cause of our present difficulties though. I think we're spiritually paralyzed mostly because our world is so fucked up there's no way to make it work even as well as it does if we had more power. I think the root cause of our troubles might have more to do with some kind of selfish dishonesty. But I don't think we're in a condition where we can fully understand it now. I think that there are mistakes that are possible that we have no idea about because we lack the intelligence and awareness to do any of those kinds of things. There are reflections, so to speak, of those mistakes in our world though. And it helps if we make the right choices in relation to those reflections.

I realize none of this answers the question, I'm just saying some peripherally relevant things since I can't answer the question.

One of the things that being able to 'move' your identity lets you do is share experience with other people. I think that we do this whenever we try to understand each other, and you're doing it right now if you're trying to understand me. Its like you become the other person a tiny bit. This same kind of movement is also what allows us to feel these 'other worlds' that we don't really understand. And its pretty closely tied in with how fate works somehow. The identity, so to speak, of fate is semi-collective, and highly fluid.

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But once something false gets deeply into the canon they're pretty much stuck with it, since their dogma informs all of their subsequent intuitions.

Actually I guess all systems of thought have a similar kind of positive-feedback problem. Even science will fail for anything where self-confirming experiments are possible. But religious intuition is the area where this issue has come up in the biggest way in my life.

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This does seem to be how religious and spiritual dogma is formed. Some initial mystical experience spawns a slew of mental beliefs which carry on long after the experience fades. Ideally the mind should be allowed to reset frequently, discarding all beliefs - even those created from such experiences - to allow fresh, new inspiration.

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People sometimes think of our world as one unified whole, and of 'parallel worlds' as being countless, distinct alternative worlds. But our world isn't really one globally well defined thing. Its more like a vast number of very, very similar and not completely defined worlds packed close together

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I wonder how much all these worlds really synchronize? One world may have its own probable pasts and futures, weaving in and out of the global reality and sharing its rules, yet carrying its own destiny. I perceive all beings as being their own parallel world in a sense, whether it be a human being or an atom. What you see of others and the world is where their realities and yours intersect.

Since you brought up parallel worlds I can't help but throw in frequency here. All interaction is energy exchange. All energy is self aware. The parallel worlds, intersecting each other, are awareness intersecting with itself. The rate or speed at which this occurs could be called frequency.

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When we say things like "physical events are manifested thoughts", I think we use the word "thought" here because its the closest idea we have to something like that. But I think that what we call "thoughts" are actually manifestations too, for the most part. And the spirit-like soup that the physical world is embedded in is not primarily made up of human thoughts. Human thought is one part of a much greater class of thought-like things which also includes objects.

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Yes. When I make phrases stating that physicality is thought manifestation, thought is a poor choice of words but the best we have in our vocabulary. Consciousness comes close as well. It points towards a level of awareness and intelligence far beyond the thoughts spawned from the brain, but the word serves as an indicator to the immaterial and self aware nature of that which creates the physical universe (the brain being part there of.)

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Imagine a 'lower' spiritual realm that is a big, complicated mess of wrestling desires. (A 'higher' realm would be less chaotic and not as close to manifestation maybe.) Here desire isn't the right word, but I lack a better one. When you get a premonition that something will happen, its what will happen due to the existence of some portion of that mess of desire. You don't know the whole mess of desire though, because of the limitation of your individual perspective. And what actually will happen is an outcome of all of the relevant desire. So what you see in your premonition might not ever have been possible. Its not that you misinterpreted it, or that something changed. The vision is real in the sense that the causes are there, even though you can not see all the relevant causes. Its a little bit like seeing that a lot of parallel worlds look a certain way soon, but with no way to verify whether those worlds are even potentially connected to the one you're in now. And the existence of these worlds isn't just extrapolated from the present state of our world. The future caused somehow, it unfolds according to some kind of a plan, constrained by considerations that we have almost no understanding of. In other words, that churning mess of desire is conscious and highly intelligent.

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I see such realms as not something we are caught in, as small debris to be tossed around by the waves, but as our mass mind. A human being extends up into, or more precisely is these higher dimensions. The physical self being akin to a protrusion or bud of a larger entity. The non-physical consciousness of humans also coalesces into a mass consciousness, which is a being of its own. If the components which make it up change their desires it will reflect that as much as we are influenced by it.

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In most eastern teachings, its a mistake to project your feeling and identify yourself as being some particular person or object. I think that teaching is a mistake, that this capacity to move around and become different things is natural and good, and if you were able to stop doing it somehow that would have bad results.

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From my experience its not that this is a mistake, its simply comes from a certain perspective needed to operate within this dimension. It is the lack of ability to expand beyond that perspective which causes difficulties. Its not that the individual self must be replaced by non-self or unity, but rather that both experiences are available. Without the larger connection the individual builds up fear stemming from mortality, which is the root many painful thought patterns and actions.