mirrors

In a dream a week or so ago I rode on a cart with an old man along the edge of a frozen field. He suggested I think about why my impressions from him are not time-reversed. The implication seemed to be that if I understand the answer to this I'll understand something more about how fate works.

I've read that the 'astral plane' is like a two sided mirror that reflects both the physical plane and a higher 'spiritual' plane. I'm not sure that thought actually makes sense, though its probably the immediate source of my impression from the old man. If there is a 'master' or wise spirit somewhere that actually understands this sort of thing, my sense is that it doesn't bother to create new impressions if it doesn't have to, but uses what is already available. Or maybe a better way of saying that is it doesn't generally create new impressions that are distinct from all other impressions. Somehow it coordinates all of them, as if they're all different aspects of the same thing, even though from our perspective they appear to be in different places and some of them appear to occur before others.

Not knowing where else to start with the question in the dream, I ask myself why a word appears reversed in a mirror but not upside down. (This question appeared in an xkcd comic a while back.) It takes me ten or fifteen minutes to figure this out, which I find funny. Other people might find this funny too if they try it.

To avoid spoiling it for anyone, rather than giving it away I think I'll just stop here. If anyone is interested we can discuss it later. I do think the answer is at least somewhat applicable to the 'astral plane' topic.

I am curious on your theory, I find the question interesting.

Astral reality appears to be something beyond my understanding, however I'm beginning to try and sort in the possibility that every time we make a decision, we create two new realities, and merely filter out all but one reality. This allows time to be two dimensional rather than one, and changes the concept of fate. This is my way of possibly rationalizing the subtle differences between waking reality and astral reality, like perhaps it's reflecting time in a more two dimensional form.

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Originally Posted by Original Poster

I am curious on your theory, I find the question interesting.

Astral reality appears to be something beyond my understanding, however I'm beginning to try and sort in the possibility that every time we make a decision, we create two new realities, and merely filter out all but one reality. This allows time to be two dimensional rather than one, and changes the concept of fate. This is my way of possibly rationalizing the subtle differences between waking reality and astral reality, like perhaps it's reflecting time in a more two dimensional form.

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Original Poster, your idea of creating two realities every time we make a decision doesn't that mean that there is an infinite number of realities or close to infinite? At first I thought it would negate the idea of free will, but I guess the free will would be the choice of which of the realities I inhabit ... but then there would be another me stuck in the other reality who did not have free choice about it?

^ We don't always make choices (but when we do we choose Dos Equis) - most of the time we just let things happen however they will. So most of the time you are not actually exercising free will, even though you do have the option.

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Originally Posted by Darkmatters

^ We don't always make choices (but when we do we choose Dos Equis) - most of the time we just let things happen however they will. So most of the time you are not actually exercising free will, even though you do have the option.

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Well, I today among other things chose to shake hands with the elderly guy I like the least at my church, and he chose to compliment me on the necklace I was wearing which my four year old son made, which I chose to wear this morning. Some of those choices are very minor, but even every minor choice might make a difference. Perhaps this guy and I will actually start getting along? I tend to think of him as the grumpy old man who does not understand people with kids, and he tends to think of me as the mom whose kids at times disrupt church. Perhaps now I will instead tend to think of him as the guy who complimented me, and he may choose to think of me as the woman who chose to shake his hand? I could choose to think that this does not change our realities much, but I choose to think that every time two people start to get along better that has a large impact on reality.

I was trying to explain something that you seemed to be asking about, but now it seems we're going off in 2 different directions.

But isn't not making a choice also a choice, and in some cases a very poor one? Also some choices one makes the alternate choice would be such a horrible choice that then there would be an alternate reality with myself who made a stupid and dangerous choice?

Plus this idea would diminish the value of my choices: I chose to become who I am, I chose to no longer be a homophobic person who thought that I knew right from wrong and there were no shades of grey. If there were another reality out there where that self righteous bitch grew up to be as old as I am now, then my change of my personality for the better would not be as worthy because then I did not stop her from telling uninterested bystanders that abortion is murder and she would still be out there thinking that she is right and has a right to offend or bore to death other people with those ideas.

i cannot believe that there can be alternate realities for every choice because then might as well have them preexisting from the get go with predestination, and then those people who claimed that it is already decided who is saved might as well be right.

What would be the point of a myriad realities for all choices? Wouldn't that make life meaningless and kind of boring?

"What would be the point of a myriad realities for all choices? Wouldn't that make life meaningless and kind of boring?"

For who? Each 'you' only ever experiences one of the possible choices. And as far s each is concerned, it's the only one in existence.

"If there were another reality out there where that self righteous bitch grew up to be as old as I am now, then my change of my personality for the better would not be as worthy because then I did not stop her from telling uninterested bystanders that abortion is murder and she would still be out there thinking that she is right and has a right to offend or bore to death other people with those ideas."

You don't seem to understand the concept of alternate realities very well.. :lol:

Plus, you didn't just make one simple choice to change - that was the result of many things - some of them your choices, some things that happened to you.

Also, I'm not sure any of this is lining up with the OP or Original Poster's response.

For what it's worth: JoannaB, since "your" reality follows your decisions, all those alternate realies are no longer yours once you've diverged, by choice. No need to worry about the bitch who didn't change! ;)

Also, since it seems a magnificent waste for all all these realities being created by billions of "deciding" souls, I really can't believe that these decision-fueled reality creation engines have a real fit in, well, reality. It just seems something that would not work in nature, even if the math works. Oh, and keep in mind that there are likely many other sentient races in the universes with billions or trillions of more souls, each creating new realities under this plan... seems a bit crowded to me.

But what does this have to do with mirrors? What'd I miss?

It's what I have heard referred to on another forum as look-a-squirrel syndrome. We got distracted following it up the tree.

It relates to mirrors in the sense that what we observe when we astral travel is a distorted, or perhaps a widened grasp of reality than what we observe wakefully. We can observe the future as many possibilities, but then the past appears to solidify itself once the possibilities slip through the present and the choices are made. However, this does not appear to be precisely the case in the astral plane. Reality still remains quite shifty. That is not to say it's like a dream world, it's somewhat more stable than that. Dreams are constantly changing, always moving. If you don't move in the astral plane, everything remains pretty much still.

Take, for example, the fact that if I astral travel and ask someone to write a message and hide it in an envelop, I often read something different from reality. Most of the details are the same regarding places I've never been before, but some things are off. I'm simply attempting to theorize why this is so.

And yes, the number of alternate realities would be infinite (or so massive it's not worth contemplating), but I don't understand how that would make things crowded. Possibility is infinite, and all things in both the past and future are occurring right now, along with every single possibility. That is the vastness of existence, but we narrow our vision to explore one person and one of their possibilities.

To understand free will in this cluster fuck, the required postate is that everything we do to the world, we truly do to ourselves. We can explore various choices because each decision changes the quality of our life, sometimes very subtly but every decision matters and sometimes very small decisions change the world very drastically.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. I think the multiple-reality thoughts are on topic, because multiple realities must have something to do with how 'astral' stuff works.

I'll start off by continuing about mirrors, then come back to the multiple reality topic. I have a better handle on mirrors, even if its a fairly trivial point....

Objects don't actually appear reversed in a mirror. If you write on a piece of transparent plastic, and hold it up in front of a mirror, it looks exactly the same in the mirror as it does directly. Or use scissors to cut a word or a letter out of paper, and hold that up, and it looks the same in the mirror.

If you hold an open book up to a mirror, and the text looks reversed, its not reversed because of the mirror, its reversed because you turned it around to face the mirror. And the reason its not upside down is because you didn't turn it upside down. If you turn it to face the mirror by turning it upside down instead of left-to-right, then its upside down and is not reversed left-to-right. Likewise with images of people, though most people turn left-to-right or right-to-left to face a mirror, rather than hanging upside down from the ceiling.

If you could see your own face without a mirror, while facing in the direction you are facing, it would look like it does in the mirror. It looks reversed to other people though, without a mirror, because they are facing in the opposite direction as you.

I think that if 'you' did not have a particular location in time and space, and therefore no vantage point, and did not 'see' things by focusing light through a lens, but could still somehow see, then you could see things like how they appear in mirrors. I think that there are astral entities or higher selves or gods or something like that which perceive things this way.

I've previously mentioned that I had a dream once where I could see an object from several directions at once. I was still seeing the surface of the object, but my vantage point was somehow not a point, it was the whole surrounding area. And my vision wasn't just multiple views cobbled together or warped, the 'scene' was three dimensional. This contrasts to my usual field of vision, which is three dimensions projected onto a two dimensional surface which I sort of pretend is three dimensional. I think if you look around you, you can see that you only see two dimensions. You imagine depth, but in terms of the visual information present, objects are like a lot of cardboard cutouts. Yes you get a little bit of stereo information from having two eyes, and from inferring distance from context and shadows, but its still an enhanced two-dimensional view, not truly three dimensional. My dream, in contrast, was two dimensional in that I was not seeing into solid objects, but the objects were embedded in a three dimensional visual scene. I have no idea how something like that would work, but that is what I experienced, so it is possible, apparently.

Suppose that the 'astral plane' were a mirror, and we could use it to see reflections of physical objects. The objects would not be reversed, for the same reason objects in a physical mirror are not reversed. I think this gets closer to the point that was in the dream I started the thread with. I have to stop now because my plane is boarding, but I'll continue later. Yeah I realize I haven't said anything very profound or significant so far, but its all I've got, and I have to start somewhere. The 'other worlds' come in because most or even all of the objects we see reflected are somehow in other worlds, apparently, though I'll share more of my thoughts on that later.

Continuing....

Are all of the conditions in 'astral reality' even physically possible, in any universe? I don't think they are. So it seems to me that there must be something else besides filtering out alternative universes which accounts for the difference between 'astral' and physical. For example, if you fly or levitate when you astral project, like most of us do, does that mean that you can fly or levitate in another universe? A lot of people think so, and even posit 'fire' and 'air' civilizations where humans can levitate in waking life. And of course yogis are said to be able to do that, even in historical times. I don't think that makes sense though. If you can fly without wings, what do you need legs to walk for? And if you can cause objects to float around, why do you need hands? How would legs and hands even persist under the pressure of natural selection, and what's so special about wings that makes those different? Maybe you don't believe the flying example, for instance you could say that people evolved legs when they couldn't levitate, then kept their legs under pressure of sexual selection. But levitating during astral projection isn't even possible, its usually easy. Why should an alternative universe be so consistently different, unless its not really an alternative universe in the same sense that our universe is a universe? I could also give a lot of other other examples of astral experiences besides flying that seem real and yet are apparently impossible.

One potential answer to this is that things you imagine 'astrally' which are impossible just aren't real. Or maybe they're misinterpretations of a physical reality. And yet, somehow I don't think that can be completely right. Of the experiences that seem to be of 'alternative' worlds, some of them seem to interact with this world somehow, and even some of those seem to be of the impossible variety.

Like JoannaB, I don't buy the idea that all possible 'choices' result in multiple, equally real realities. We'd be able to feel those other realities more than we do. And there wouldn't be so much of a destined 'story' to our own reality. Though it seems to me that there must be something like multiple realities, as numerous as those may be, there must in some sense be fewer than the total number of choices. The whole tree of realities gets pruned somehow, we're not merely selecting one branch from many. If we could understand how it gets pruned, then we could understand 'astral' and fate and all of that.

I agree with Darkmatters that a lot of what seems like choice is not actually choice. But since we all seem to agree that we do have some choice, I'm just avoiding that whole tangle. I think that other so-called random events are also not essentially different from choices, but the identity or perspective of the one who makes the choice is different.

I agree with Sageous that having a reality for every 'choice' would be too crowded. Not because that's too high of an order of infinity to contemplate, but because it violates what we feel intuitively. And we're not locked into 'one' reality intuitively, we can feel other stuff, which is where this whole conversation comes from. What we feel is that not all potential realities are equally real.

I also agree with Joanna that a real choice would not really be a choice if another version of 'me' takes the other path. If we can all do that, why don't we just all choose a reality where we have everything we want? Making those choices would force alternative versions of ourselves into realities that nobody would want. And statistically, we would be forced into such a reality by other versions of ourselves. There's no choice at all in that. This almost seems to me to be another way of saying its too 'crowded' though.

I guess we didn't get very far on mirrors. I feel like the mirror thought is one that won't make much sense for a long time, that there are a lot of other pieces that need to fall into place, and this is just one of them. I also feel kind of cheated by providence, that we have to try to make something out of such tiny scraps of insight when we have such big questions. But at the same time, we're not mature enough to handle a lot of the power we already have without destructive consequences, so maybe its for the best.

When my almost 2 year old daughter is trying to do something, she'll accept help when she's right at the point where she can't do it, but if you try to help her even a tiny bit more than that she gets mad. Of course she's right, in that 'helping' her too much would be bad for her. Does providence have just the right touch, giving us just enough help? In one way of looking at it, I think so. But from another standpoint, it seems like the natural world is so brutal, its unconscionable. Maybe logically bridging that apparent contradiction is one of those things that requires insight that we're not ready for.