Well this encounter happened between July and November 2020.
A relatively young couple, 30ish, moved in to the building in the unit on top of mine. Keep in mind this an old Montreal building, so lots of wood and you can pretty much hear everything ... She would basically tell her partner what I was doing/thinking or even dreaming, the relation wasn't amicable at all they would wake me up at night and I would blast the TV to retaliate and things spiraled for a few months until I moved out.
I have the same feeling. Not only that, but since learning about the properties of subatomic particles, and how different their behavior is from everything we experience every day, I have the feeling we are in a kind of Truman Show. Every time we find some answers, we discover another layer of mystery.
It is as if we had two lives: one conventional, with our partners, work, worrying about Russia etc., and another one, where the universe is made up mostly of void, with the rest of the space being filled by what we currently call quantum fields organizing in particles forming our experience of the universe and being, down to photons reflected from surfaces and striking cells in our eyes so that the brain can flip the vision upside down and interpret it with some anticipation, so even our idea of "present" is somewhat illusory. Frankly, the reality itself is just amazing.
We all have iphone cameras with image stabilization and autofocus, bigfoot only visits you if you have a 240p manual focus camcorder and a hand tremor.
Everything I do always ends up fitting exactly into the amount of time that is available to do it, whether that amount of time is excessively short or excessively long.
Many years ago I was rowing at night with a few friends, two small boats on a little lake. One of us noticed across the night sky a satellite or something like the ISS, so we looked at it in awe. The light then took a 90 degrees turn, went on and after a while it disappeared. We packed our stuff immediately and went home.
I frequently have experiences where I’ll think something and it’ll happen, like “I haven’t heard from x in a while” and a few minutes later an email from them arrives. There’s lots of rational explanations (like, if I was thinking about them then whatever inspired my thinking could have inspired theirs) but it’s to the point where it happens so frequently that if one day it’s plausibly demonstrated that we are in a simulation or there’s some mystical way that we can influence the universe, I’d believe it. The more this happens, the more I understand how people end up believing in manifestation and the like. Obviously it’s not true, but my dumb lizard brain cannot help but believe the pattern has some meaning.
I was once camping at a lake with some friends sitting by a campfire, and the wind was calm. Suddenly it became really stormy out of nowhere for about 5 to 10 minutes, and then the wind became completely calm again.
We were looking over the lake and there was some light in the air, which was seemingly ascending. It would sometimes jump left and right, which looked extremely unusual. After a while it was like passing infront of us over the lake and we heard some weird loud noise that echoed over the lake. We couldn't tell how far away it was due to darkness and its movements being pretty weird.
It was a really weird experience and we still sometimes talk about and ponder about it. It was probably just a plane but the way it moved just looked so unusual.
So when I was young I dreamt far more often than I do now and in one of these dreams I had a frighteningly real experience of some kind of dark spectre hanging over me. I remember a terrific pressure in my ears and the whole world feeling like it was moving away from me. Felt like I was awake in terror for hours that night.
Where I lived, earthquakes were very rare, this was my first time experiencing one. I also had poor ear canals so the pressure was likely a mix of blood rush and pressurized ear drums. As for the spectre, coming from a dreaming state to so many different stimuli, my mind must of just though up something I would see as imminent danger.
The fact that anything exists at all. I’m not talking about matter-antimatter asymmetry or consciousness, but rather the fact that there is no causality-compatible answer to “where did the universe and whatever it exists within come from?” For all the arguing about creation vs evolution etc, this sure seems like a glaring issue sitting out in the open that folks don’t often acknowledge. And when it is brought up, people often get sidetracked with something like gravity or matter-antimatter as above.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it hurts my brain, and it also scares me. It seems definite to me that there must be some truly incredible quality of existence which allowed it to come to be out of nothing, one that I don’t have even the slightest hope to even explain or probably even understand.
Exactly my thoughts. My conclusion was that the idea of cause and effect is something that only applies inside our universe, and not in the system our universe is embedded in (whatever that is). In other words, to us time is a basic feature of existence, while on some most basic level it's not. That's why existence itself seems to counteract our most basic intuitions.
> time is a basic feature of existence, while on some most basic level it's not
I've come to two conclusions, only one of which is correct:
1. We are in a continuous universe, and time is a human construct. The only thing that actually exists is force interaction and momentum/velocity. Time is merely an emergent property of these things, and one that we use to measure, as humans. God may or may not exist.
2. We are in a discrete simulation, and time, specifically the Planck Time, is derived from the clock frequency of the computing substrate. God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator.
In both of your described scenarios time would still exist (because cause and effect would still exist), they are just different abstractions. When I say "time doesn't exist outside our universe" I don't mean it's an illusion, or that it's something else that we think. I mean it literally. On some most basic level outside our universe there's nothing that could be construed as time, so there's no cause end effect.
> The only thing that actually exists is force interaction and momentum/velocity.
Why do those things exists at all? And not 'why did they start in the first place', but rather why don't they stop existing? What causes them to keep going?
> God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator.
That doesn't answer anything, it just moves it to another layer of the stack: what is running the simulation?
at its core this thought is unsolvable from our current state within the universe
Our reality exists because existence was possible. there are no contradictory rules to the way the universe functions. maybe for all abstract possibilities of non-contradictory existence, it spontaneously happens. this is where the multiverse theories come from.
The fact that anything is tangible, or has a "where" or any property at all is just a subset of that existence so as far as "where did this all come from" goes.. it didnt. It exists to us only because we are in it, but is as consequential as a thought experiment. This spawned the "universe is a simulation" theories. the universe is large because we are small within it, it feels so full of time because we are shortlived within it.. but maybe the entire thing is a near instantaneous collapse of some wave function in some other system.
Maybe that system is looking to us to use our relatively fast existence to give it answers in its slow world.
I agree, I used to think about the possibility for absolute nothingness when I was younger and it terrified me - I still kinda get chills when I do. I don't see why the universe has any reason to exist in itself, but I could imagine that being the case for a higher power, which is one of the reasons I do believe in God. Even so, thinking about nothingness still messes with me - I think it's the closest feeling to the literary "staring into the abyss".
It is odd how much materialist strong atheism exists considering it’s literally impossible for there to be nothing bigger than us. The entire materialist context is embedded into a reality we have no explanation for and this gets forgotten or ignored.
I agree-ish - I think you could reasonably hold that the material world must exist for some reason, though I think such a view is weaker than holding that a perfect being like God must exist.
More impossible from a materialist perspective to me is the experience of the self - I experience myself in a non-physical way. I can tell (though I cannot possibly prove to anyone else) that I have a self-aware internal life. From the outside it would be indistinguishable from a simulation of one (via computer or via atoms/molecules/neurons), but for every person's internal life they have a self-experience that I don't believe can be explained without the supernatural (a soul or similar). Certainly it's extremely connected to the physical, and chemicals/impulses etc shape my entire experience, but the experience itself is not physical (IMHO).
I don’t know how to explain your feeling of existing in a non-physical way. I feel that way because I’m the only one who exists and you’re all philosophical zombies…
I've always found this line of reasoning interesting, because to me it just kicks the can down the road. What created the universe? God. Ok, so what created God?
The idea would be that a perfect existence must exist as a part of being perfect, thus God (or some primary existence/force).
That may sound handwavey, but lets look at it the other way around - something existed "first" casually, because the universe exists. (Note I'm saying casually, I'm not ruling out something existing "forever" or getting into the existence or nonexistence of time, but something exists/existed without a cause that caused everything else.) Either that primary cause is the universe itself, for some reason, or it was something that caused the universe (force, God, whatever). It's unclear to me why the universe itself needs to exist, and to me the alternative that makes more sense that a perfect being needs to exist and caused the rest of it.
> The fact that anything exists at all. I’m not talking about matter-antimatter asymmetry or consciousness, but rather the fact that there is no causality-compatible answer to “where did the universe and whatever it exists within come from?”
You're asking "where it came from?" in the sense of "who pushed the first domino over in the chain of events?". A more interesting question is "what keeps it going?".
As in: if the universe/reality was a song, who is playing the instrument that is making the sound?
The fact that there needs to be an Uncaused Cause is the Argument from Motion of Aristotle/Aquinas:
1) A family member died, unbeknownst to me, when I was young. The night he died, while I was reading a book, I felt the weight of a hand pressing down on my shoulder. I was distracted by reading so instead of being startled, I merely touched the area with my hand and looked over my shoulder, noting that no one was present, while continuing to feel the hand.
2) One day in high school, for no apparent reason whatsoever, I informed a friend that I believed something bad was going to happen to their vehicle. Later that day, someone unknown to me (ie: not someone I might have “overheard” discussing this) broke into it and stole things.
3) In my 20s, driving at night with a friend along a highway that bordered a US army base, with giant evergreen trees along the boundary there, a flying object with dozens of lights appeared on the other side of the trees, matching my speed, and only slightly higher “altitude”. This went on for a minute or so. After we reached the destination, I began telling other friends about the weird encounter with a helicopter we had just had, and the friend with me looked at me like my brain had fallen out and exclaimed that was definitely not a helicopter. (The encounter was silent, and whatever it was flew at about 50 mph at 20-30 feet above ground, so he had a point, but I had fully bought into “it was a helicopter”.)
#1... I used to work in different country, when my father suddenly passed away. I used to stay alone in an apartment, and had no knowledge of he being admitted to the hospital. Last I spoke to him, he was busy with (my) marriage preparation, that was planned a month later.
I had a couple of weird experiences (will not share here) while making my dinner late at night. I got creeped out to the extent, that I knocked my next door buddies. Had no history of such occurrences before and after. Few hours later, I got the call from home.
One summer night I was having difficulty falling asleep, my mind was racing, so I read a book until my eyes couldn't stay open. I had a very vivid and lucid dream. It was like I was driving on winding and curving roads through the hills/bluffs. Then I began going faster and faster and faster. I felt terrified. Normally in my lucid dreams I can take control of what is happening. I tried to slow things down. But in this dream I couldn't which made me feel even more terrified! Then I saw and felt it all go slow motion and felt like I was falling back and to my side and sliding on the roadway. Then everything froze. I woke up frightened! I said some prayers and asked for comfort. Then I heard a strange (yet slightly recognizable) sound in my room. I was frozen stiff, scared to move. I felt someone in the room. The sound repeated a few times. Not knowing what to do I made the same sound with my mouth. I got goosebumps and chills that ran all over my body. But I felt a bit less scared and a bit more at peace. I was able to say a short prayer and fall back asleep. The next morning I found out that my cousin had died the previous evening in a motorcycle accident while driving along and through the river bluffs. His back tire hit some loose sand/gravel and he ended up in the ditch. He wasn't wearing a helmet at the time. :( The sound I heard in my room that night was one he used to make all the time when we were young.
Seeing a lot of reddit style joke comments or 1 sentence answers. I am really hoping to read some more in depth personal experiences, and critical analysis of others experiences.
I know how to explain them because they were dreams, but I can lucid dream on command (for the past 30 years; took 1 year of training) and I had many very realistic experiences other people would describe as religious apparitions or paranormal activity.
Like chatting with my future wife, chatting with my dead grandfather, seeing christ, seeing satan, Grudge like Japanese girls under my bed etc.
I never believed in anything religious or paranormal so I figured that people who have outer body experiences are, in fact, lucid dreaming. There are many books to learn OBE; I got one from the library and trained from it; one year, every night when I was 19. And that was it. I think the book was from a guy called Monroe and was, outside the drivel about OBE, very practical with lessons and exercises to practice OBE.
Most likely: Journeys Out Of The Body, and/or Far Journeys, both by Robert Monroe.
I recall borrowing both from the library and reading them when I was in my late teens or early twenties, found them utterly fascinating.
The Monroe Institute also had (or developed?) an audio technique to help entrain the brain, called Hemi-Sync - with a set of cassettes for OBE / lucid dream training, and various other cassettes to train other brain skills. In part they used a tech called 'Binaural Beats' (along with guided meditation), which is where one frequency, e.g. 440hz is played into one ear, and e.g. 450hz is played into the other, which makes one hear/percieve an internal oscillation of e.g. 10hz (the difference between them). The tapes used different frequencies to target different states, at different stages of the meditation, believing them to enhance different types of brain waves (e.g. 10hz is in the range for alpha waves), which was intended to teach the student how to invoke these states themselves at will.
I still have some of his original cassettes, although nowadays they can be bought on CD IIRC (or perhaps snagged in mp3 format, if one looks around torrent sites). But I believe there is also an app nowadays.
Interesting topic - and Monroe was an interesting guy.
FWIW: back then, I believed in all manner of strange things, including OBE, but nowadays I'm mostly a rational skeptic. Monroe's books were very interesting to me back then, because they were quite fantastical, and claimed to have been written over many years of experiences.
Not sure if that was is but it was definitely that writer. It has been 30 years and I have no clue how the name monroe popped into my head?! I did have a photographic memory back then (gone now and my short term memory is pretty bad now) so maybe it stored really insignificant stuff; I read 2-3 books per day back then but yeah I spent 1 year practicing from this so it stuck. Thanks for the heads up; I skipped all the OBE stuff back then and just went straight to practice ; I remember it was very effective and a worthwhile skill. I also remember that sometimes I slept 16 hours a day because I didn’t want to stop dreaming. Got up to eat and go to the gym to tire me out more to sleep more.
That’s a hell of an experience to mention casually! Did you wish for these terrifying encounters and they happened? Or the control over your dreams isn’t that fine grained?
Not that fine grained, but I enjoy nightmares very much. Best horror movies you actually feel you are part of. Usually they are about zombies or robots (galatica cylons from the old show to be precise); those are excellent and I am immortal there so a bullet or laser hits me then I can just go on and I can fly when I want too (in actual life I have terrible fear of heights; I cannot stand games like The Climb in VR for more than seconds).
I was laying on grass in Tenerife reading R.A.W.'s "Prometheus Rising" when I saw big white circular object in the sky. It was quite big, moving in zig-zag pattern for several minutes and then became smaller and disappeared. I recorded a video with phone but it was your typical 'ufo' recording - shaky white small dot with autofocus missing all the time. The phone unexpectedly turned off and died few weeks later before I transferred video anywhere.
The lesson was to backup my phone as I do with PC and never buy Samsung again.
81 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadIt is as if we had two lives: one conventional, with our partners, work, worrying about Russia etc., and another one, where the universe is made up mostly of void, with the rest of the space being filled by what we currently call quantum fields organizing in particles forming our experience of the universe and being, down to photons reflected from surfaces and striking cells in our eyes so that the brain can flip the vision upside down and interpret it with some anticipation, so even our idea of "present" is somewhat illusory. Frankly, the reality itself is just amazing.
Keep digging, the truth is out there.
EDIT: Our software ist not that buggy!!
I recommend the book “deciphering the cosmic number” which is a biography of Wolfgang Pauli and his efforts towards studying the paranormal.
We were looking over the lake and there was some light in the air, which was seemingly ascending. It would sometimes jump left and right, which looked extremely unusual. After a while it was like passing infront of us over the lake and we heard some weird loud noise that echoed over the lake. We couldn't tell how far away it was due to darkness and its movements being pretty weird.
It was a really weird experience and we still sometimes talk about and ponder about it. It was probably just a plane but the way it moved just looked so unusual.
Where I lived, earthquakes were very rare, this was my first time experiencing one. I also had poor ear canals so the pressure was likely a mix of blood rush and pressurized ear drums. As for the spectre, coming from a dreaming state to so many different stimuli, my mind must of just though up something I would see as imminent danger.
The earthquake was around a Mag. 3.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it hurts my brain, and it also scares me. It seems definite to me that there must be some truly incredible quality of existence which allowed it to come to be out of nothing, one that I don’t have even the slightest hope to even explain or probably even understand.
I've come to two conclusions, only one of which is correct:
1. We are in a continuous universe, and time is a human construct. The only thing that actually exists is force interaction and momentum/velocity. Time is merely an emergent property of these things, and one that we use to measure, as humans. God may or may not exist.
2. We are in a discrete simulation, and time, specifically the Planck Time, is derived from the clock frequency of the computing substrate. God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator.
Currently leaning to option 2, but who knows?
Why do those things exists at all? And not 'why did they start in the first place', but rather why don't they stop existing? What causes them to keep going?
> God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator.
That doesn't answer anything, it just moves it to another layer of the stack: what is running the simulation?
Our reality exists because existence was possible. there are no contradictory rules to the way the universe functions. maybe for all abstract possibilities of non-contradictory existence, it spontaneously happens. this is where the multiverse theories come from.
The fact that anything is tangible, or has a "where" or any property at all is just a subset of that existence so as far as "where did this all come from" goes.. it didnt. It exists to us only because we are in it, but is as consequential as a thought experiment. This spawned the "universe is a simulation" theories. the universe is large because we are small within it, it feels so full of time because we are shortlived within it.. but maybe the entire thing is a near instantaneous collapse of some wave function in some other system.
Maybe that system is looking to us to use our relatively fast existence to give it answers in its slow world.
More impossible from a materialist perspective to me is the experience of the self - I experience myself in a non-physical way. I can tell (though I cannot possibly prove to anyone else) that I have a self-aware internal life. From the outside it would be indistinguishable from a simulation of one (via computer or via atoms/molecules/neurons), but for every person's internal life they have a self-experience that I don't believe can be explained without the supernatural (a soul or similar). Certainly it's extremely connected to the physical, and chemicals/impulses etc shape my entire experience, but the experience itself is not physical (IMHO).
I've always found this line of reasoning interesting, because to me it just kicks the can down the road. What created the universe? God. Ok, so what created God?
That may sound handwavey, but lets look at it the other way around - something existed "first" casually, because the universe exists. (Note I'm saying casually, I'm not ruling out something existing "forever" or getting into the existence or nonexistence of time, but something exists/existed without a cause that caused everything else.) Either that primary cause is the universe itself, for some reason, or it was something that caused the universe (force, God, whatever). It's unclear to me why the universe itself needs to exist, and to me the alternative that makes more sense that a perfect being needs to exist and caused the rest of it.
The logical conclusion is that there needs to exist an Uncaused Cause:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
If you're asking "What caused God?":
* https://strangenotions.com/if-everything-requires-a-cause-wh...
Generally, starting with the premise "everything has a cause" is where people's problems start.
You're asking "where it came from?" in the sense of "who pushed the first domino over in the chain of events?". A more interesting question is "what keeps it going?".
As in: if the universe/reality was a song, who is playing the instrument that is making the sound?
The fact that there needs to be an Uncaused Cause is the Argument from Motion of Aristotle/Aquinas:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...
> I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it hurts my brain, and it also scares me.
For a fuller treatment on these question see:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
2) One day in high school, for no apparent reason whatsoever, I informed a friend that I believed something bad was going to happen to their vehicle. Later that day, someone unknown to me (ie: not someone I might have “overheard” discussing this) broke into it and stole things.
3) In my 20s, driving at night with a friend along a highway that bordered a US army base, with giant evergreen trees along the boundary there, a flying object with dozens of lights appeared on the other side of the trees, matching my speed, and only slightly higher “altitude”. This went on for a minute or so. After we reached the destination, I began telling other friends about the weird encounter with a helicopter we had just had, and the friend with me looked at me like my brain had fallen out and exclaimed that was definitely not a helicopter. (The encounter was silent, and whatever it was flew at about 50 mph at 20-30 feet above ground, so he had a point, but I had fully bought into “it was a helicopter”.)
Could go on, but this seems a fine place to stop.
neither of us in the car thought it was a helicopter. timeframe was late 90's.
I had a couple of weird experiences (will not share here) while making my dinner late at night. I got creeped out to the extent, that I knocked my next door buddies. Had no history of such occurrences before and after. Few hours later, I got the call from home.
One summer night I was having difficulty falling asleep, my mind was racing, so I read a book until my eyes couldn't stay open. I had a very vivid and lucid dream. It was like I was driving on winding and curving roads through the hills/bluffs. Then I began going faster and faster and faster. I felt terrified. Normally in my lucid dreams I can take control of what is happening. I tried to slow things down. But in this dream I couldn't which made me feel even more terrified! Then I saw and felt it all go slow motion and felt like I was falling back and to my side and sliding on the roadway. Then everything froze. I woke up frightened! I said some prayers and asked for comfort. Then I heard a strange (yet slightly recognizable) sound in my room. I was frozen stiff, scared to move. I felt someone in the room. The sound repeated a few times. Not knowing what to do I made the same sound with my mouth. I got goosebumps and chills that ran all over my body. But I felt a bit less scared and a bit more at peace. I was able to say a short prayer and fall back asleep. The next morning I found out that my cousin had died the previous evening in a motorcycle accident while driving along and through the river bluffs. His back tire hit some loose sand/gravel and he ended up in the ditch. He wasn't wearing a helmet at the time. :( The sound I heard in my room that night was one he used to make all the time when we were young.
Like chatting with my future wife, chatting with my dead grandfather, seeing christ, seeing satan, Grudge like Japanese girls under my bed etc.
I recall borrowing both from the library and reading them when I was in my late teens or early twenties, found them utterly fascinating.
The Monroe Institute also had (or developed?) an audio technique to help entrain the brain, called Hemi-Sync - with a set of cassettes for OBE / lucid dream training, and various other cassettes to train other brain skills. In part they used a tech called 'Binaural Beats' (along with guided meditation), which is where one frequency, e.g. 440hz is played into one ear, and e.g. 450hz is played into the other, which makes one hear/percieve an internal oscillation of e.g. 10hz (the difference between them). The tapes used different frequencies to target different states, at different stages of the meditation, believing them to enhance different types of brain waves (e.g. 10hz is in the range for alpha waves), which was intended to teach the student how to invoke these states themselves at will.
I still have some of his original cassettes, although nowadays they can be bought on CD IIRC (or perhaps snagged in mp3 format, if one looks around torrent sites). But I believe there is also an app nowadays.
Interesting topic - and Monroe was an interesting guy.
FWIW: back then, I believed in all manner of strange things, including OBE, but nowadays I'm mostly a rational skeptic. Monroe's books were very interesting to me back then, because they were quite fantastical, and claimed to have been written over many years of experiences.
That’s a hell of an experience to mention casually! Did you wish for these terrifying encounters and they happened? Or the control over your dreams isn’t that fine grained?
The lesson was to backup my phone as I do with PC and never buy Samsung again.