understanding transcendent experience

This is a branch off of the hallucinogen thread so that people can contribute transcendent experiences irrespective of whether they are drug related.

I'll summarize my experience to date, followed by some speculations towards making sense of it, followed by some questions. My hope is that people can expand on this with their own experience or some potentially new speculation or answers to any of the questions.

1. Premonitions are somehow possible
a) Here I'm not referring to predictions that can plausibly be extrapolated from past experience, or regarded as random, or attributed to selective attention or interpretation
b) Premonitions seem to be easiest a few hours before the corresponding event, but can come years ahead of it
c) Premonitions seem to be easiest from a standpoint of identity that is more abstract or collective than one's personal identity
d) Premonitions don't seem to be literal visual views of the event, but rather detailed representations constructed from some other kind of contact with it (correct me if your experience contradicts this)
2. Telepathy is somehow possible
a) For me this is at a level that is more abstract than normal conversation, and is from almost exactly the same semi-collective mindstate as the premonitions
3. Sensory perception at a distance is somehow possible
a) For me these are again not literal views, the picture is constructed from some other kind of information, almost as if the objects are in my mind much the same way thoughts are in my mind.
b) Again for me this is way easier when sharing a something-beyond-just-myself mindset
4. The present state of reality does not flow from a fixed past
a) Discontinuous jumps are objectively detectable only when the jump is to a state that is impossible to get to from any other state except by a jump. Otherwise, your memory changes with everything else in your environment and you can't tell that anything happened. Objectively detectable jumps must be relatively uncommon, or else one consequence would be that most of our electronics technology would not work. Plus most people would find it incredibly disorienting.
b) In Feynmann's description of quantum mechanics the past isn't concretely defined, but I mean something more than that, where the present can suddenly have a collection of potential pasts that is statistically inconsistent with what it had a moment before.
5. What we want has some kind of formative impact on what develops.
a) I mean aside from our ability to move our own brains and bodies of course.
b) I can't say that I have any outwardly objective evidence of this, but it seems to be strongly implied by many of my other exeriences

In a dream a few months ago, I saw a wide path cleared through a forest, sort of like what sometimes runs under power lines. The space over this road was like a 3D-mesh, and brush and wood had been removed from every section. Tiny bits of the removed materials remained, sort of like after a tree has been cut out of a chain link fence, except in 3D instead of 2D, and the wire is invisible. My impression was that the forest is supposed to represent a continuum of possible worlds. The cleared path is a part of that continuum in which most of these possibilities have been removed by some unseen road builder. (I think the image isn't intended to imply that this is done in anything like a grid, that's just a limitation of the metaphor.) An implication seems to be that the reason we can see the future is not because it has somehow already happened, but because most of the alternatives have by some mysterious process been excluded. By excluded I don't mean that they're not possible due to the present physical condition, but that the tree of futures that are possible under strictly physical considerations has been dramatically pruned somehow. (So in my view here the future is both a lot more open and a lot less open than is commonly assumed. It is not anywhere near as limited by currently recognized natural laws as is commonly supposed, but it is limited in other ways by something else.)

Now it is seeming to me that the 'pruned' futures haven't been blocked so much as made radically less probable by something that has slightly increased the coherence of the 'probable' states. Maybe just a perception would do that. Perceiving something in the 'usual' way, with one system interacting with another electromagnetically, slightly steals some of its ambiguity. Maybe if you do that with a system that's almost all noise of uncertainty, it doesn't take very much of a nudge to freeze an event out of it. In other words, you're entangling your own mind with one set of a vastly larger set of possible future outcomes. Maybe that doesn't even require mental action at a distance, since there will be time for outward, causal interactions later. Maybe entanglement with future events explains the telepathy without remote sensory interaction also. Maybe entangling yourself with a future that is vastly more likely to follow from a different present than your own can somehow account for item '4' above.

Moving on....

Recently it has also seemed to me that the fluid-like spirit that this all comes out of is more like a swarm of countless invisible creatures than a substance. Within that broth move dragon-like entities that are individually conscious but made up of a shifting assortment of less conscious creatures.

Following is a listing of some example personal experiences that go along with the phenomena I listed above. I'm too lazy to describe any of these, and too lazy to argue about most of them, because I've been over a lot of that before.

1A. Short term premonitions (typically a few hours)
a) Lethal train wreck
b) Aircraft bird strike and water landing
c) BP oil well fire
d) Conception of child
e) A child fell to death at the mall
f) Others significant examples, plus hundreds or even thousands of more trivial examples.
1B. Longer term premonitions (months to years)
a) Marriage
b) Eventual outcome of new job
c) Death of roommate
d) Several personally meaningful encounters with bulls while hiking
e) ??? These are harder to pin down than the short term ones
2. Telepathy
a) Maybe the word telepathy is too misleading. Its not one person reaching out to another so much as a deeper part of us expressing itself through multiple people in closely interrelated ways. This really just makes it another form of remote sensory interaction, and the semi-collective nature of identity follows as a direct consequence of that.
b) I read a short story in which an owl picks up a mechanical mouse and the mouse cuts the owl. That same day I contemplate the nature of 'astral' matter in terms of kinetic energy and greek elements. That night my usual interesting dream is conspicuously absent, but my sister (who knows more chemistry but less physics than me) has an unusual dream which seems to suggest that I've been confounding motion with reactivity, along with other interesting points.
c) I guess I'll skip most of my other examples because by definition they involve another person, and I'm mostly only willing to spread my own life all over the internet. I'm always open to experiments with interested people though.
3. Remote sensory perception
a) Missile strike on bus (could have actually been a premonition, timing was too close to tell)
b) Almost all premonitions involve some interaction with remote places
4. Miracles
a) I have a jar of turtle food on my desk which I believe to be from a world in which I kept a turtle that I found in the woods then returned a few hours later. The date on the jar is several years later. I realize this sounds crazy, but there was a thought process that led up to the appearance of the jar.
b) I guess I'm getting bored with this post. I've posted some of this stuff before.

I've got one new thought out of this just by typing it, not really new but new to me, so thanks for your contributions.

good Lord....any psychiatrists online?

Thanks, my mental health is excellent. I apologize if I lost you with my physics brainstorming, though I assure you that I do understand the meaning of the words I was using.

I posted this in Beyond Dreaming. Criticisms supported by honest arguments are always welcome. Otherwise there may be a Snap Judgements by Smug Ignoramuses forum elsewhere if you look for one.

i only meant that there is SOOO much info in your thread it will literally take a psychiatrist to tackle it. i'm not sure what hallucinogens you have been working with here but what i eventually have come to realize after over a decade of trying to make sense of those experiences i've had: it seems to all relate to dream states or for me personally OOBE's. i actually started to study OOBE's after noticing how many of the same types of experiences were shared with what i had experiences while using hallucinogens. i could never shake the feeling that it was "just the drugs". as far as transcendental experience from using hallucinogens the biggest thing it did for me was open my mind to other possibilities that i probably never would have considered. i'd say more of a stepping stone experience. it gave me a respect for how powerful the human mind really is and changed my concept of what reality is in general. after reading DMT the Spirit Molecule by Dr. Strassman the connection between hallucinogens and OOBE's made a lot more sense in my mind. not sure if you're a believer in the OOB stuff but most of the things you're describing fit in with the literature. telepathy, premonitions, remote sensory perception, miracles, all of it.

I've never used hallucinogens, I've never even smoked pot or been drunk. That's why I started a new thread. I think that hallucinogen use is good for producing weird experiences but doesn't do much for a person's ability to make sense of those experiences.

When I was having a lot of premonitory dreams I would commonly write them down before the event occurred, so I know I haven't been retroactively creating memories. In the example of the plane bird strike dream, I even e-mailed it to my brother an hour or two before the event happened.

No I am not a 'believer' in New Age or paranormal ideas, I think their explanations are largely made up and don't make sense. But a lot of people believe in premonitions and whatnot because they have them, even if nobody can explain how it works.

I've posted about out of body experiences elsewhere, since I've had some. I think that its a type of hallucination, a warping of a tactile mental map, and that a person doesn't have an 'astral' body that goes anywhere. So for a few years I assumed that it meant nothing. But then I started having hundreds of these other experiences that I could produce some objective evidence for. So now I think there's probably more to OOB besides fantasy, its mostly a fantasy but there's something else subtle and real that can be connected to it.