Thread: Astral Projection and String Theory

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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 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.

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.

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.