Carl-Richard

Ascended as Top G, arrested as Bottom G.

Why? Ah, appeal to "common sense", the ultimate auxiliary hypothesis.

Last night, I had a dream that I was being chased by several tornadoes. Then today I read about the tornado incident in Kentucky with an estimated death toll of 100 people, which is the worst tornado event in the history of Kentucky. About two weeks ago, I had a dream where PsychedSubstance got kicked out from his own house. Today he released this video: The night my dad's boss died from drowning, I had a nightmare where I was being chased by a ghost, fearing for my life. I usually never have those types of nightmares. What is this?

Why is "that doesn't happen usually" relevant? And "loosely resembling" is interesting: I gave you an analogy for the dreams I've experienced. I literally experienced 1. being chased 2. by tornadoes (and 3. the tornadoes literally sucked me up at times, and 4. I felt like I was about to die); all of these things happened in real life. I literally experienced 1. PsychedSubstance, 2. being kicked out, 3. of his own house, and 4. he was distressed; all of these things happened in real life. In the analogy, you were 1. driving a car and 2. you got a scratch on the paint and 3. you were distressed. Did the analogy not feel convincing? Imagine if I had been dreaming 1. you writing a math equation and 2. the math equation involved the circumference of a circle, and that actually happened in real life at the same time. What would you think then? How so? What level of consistency is that? What level of consistency is satisfying for you? I explained exactly the difference between classical cause and effect and the analogous concept I was suggesting; I did not suggest they were the same. The point is that we use causality to give credence to the reality of something, but that is not the only thing we use to do that (like with multiple sense streams being coherent). If I had instead said "I dreamt you writing something and I felt like that actually happened in real life" but we can't confirm it being temporally parallel and it's very generalized/vague ("writing something") and we can't confirm a match in emotional state, then of course there would be less credence, but the crucial point is exactly that: it's always just less or more. At what point it crosses the threshold of being believable or thoroughly convincing, that's up to you. And of course, you weigh it up against things like law of large numbers, base rate neglect, but that's a calculation you do. These things just add or subtract credence to something.

The problem is you have no standard for judging when it does. When you propose the reason for why your car is not in the garage or your sister allegedly lied to you, how does that escape the law of large numbers, base rate neglect, selection bias? If you have no standard for when your hypothesis is disproven or invalidated, you're just as bad off as the hypothesis you're supposedly invalidating. This is called an ad hoc rescue/hypothesization, and it's used regularly when paradigms like materialism are challenged: when your hypotheses seem less tenable, fall back on unfalsifiable auxiliary hypotheses.

@Jirh Imagine if I had dreamt you drove a car and then you found out you got a scratch on the paint and this was highly concerning to you, at the exact same time as this actually happened to you in real life. Imagine if I had never dreamt about somebody getting a scratch on their car before, and that when I dreamt it, I woke up when it got the most intense. What would you think if I told you that? Content - analogous/match. Content being a previous experience in the dream state (being more likely to come from my mind) - not the case. Time of occurrence - match. Emotional significance (you were highly concerned; I dreamt that you were highly concerned; I woke up as it was a nightmare) - analogous/match. These criteria start to resemble how you judge "normal" physical perceptual phenomena to be real. If you can confirm it through multiple sensory channels (the phenomena resemble each other and mirror each other temporally and behaviorally e.g. through sight and touch), you start to entertain them as real. For example, an increase in luminosity of an object corresponding to an increase in felt heat, you become more convinced that the object did indeed change state and it wasn't something you simply were imagining. So perhaps if I experience it through a dream at the same time as you experience it in real-life, from the perspective of God, us two being its two different sensory organs, God would conclude that its experience of reality is now more real than if only one of us had experienced it (given the human perceptual 'logic') 😆 We can also start to tease out an analogy for causality. Causality is inferred when you have two events ("cause" and "effect") that follow each other in time and the cause seems necessarily to imply the effect (or there is some mechanism or property that explains the relationship). Instead of the cause preceding the effect in time, we have the "cause" and "effect" being mirrored in time (parallel). Similarly, instead of a mechanism explaining a connection or relationship, the experiences are mirror images (they have the same content). So while we cannot think of causality in a more classical mechanistic sense, we can think of an analogous way of lending credence to the reality of the phenomena: A doesn't precede and explain B. A co-arises with and mirrors B.

For the three original dreams, what struck me about them was: 1. They mirrored the exact type of content (2/3) or the themes were closely related (1/3). Being chased by tornadoes was exactly what happened for people involved, PsychedSubstance getting kicked out of the house was actually what happened, and being chased by a ghost by presumably somebody who just died (and which I've met in real life and have worked with painting and restoring a house one summer and he got frustrated at me at times), those seemed to mirror the real life events very closely. 2. I've never had those exact types of dreams before as far as I could remember (3/3). Being chased by tornadoes was definitely a first, I can't remember being chased by a ghost (only a weird character from the Moomies which is not really a ghost but looks like it), and witnessing PsychedSubstance getting kicked out of his house was definitely a first (I can't remember dreaming about somebody being kicked out of their house). 3. They happened seemingly temporally parallel to the real events (3/3). The death of the person and the tornado event was confirmed to be parallel as far as being asleep at the same time; the PsychedSubstance event was not confirmed in the same way but occurred in a way that could line up with the actual event. 4. They were the most significant event of that kind for a long time or simply highly signficant events. The tornado event was the most devastating tornado event for that area in 100 years. My dad's boss dying was a highly publicized event in our country as he was a leading environmentalist; newspapers wrote about it all over. PsychedSubstance getting kicked out of his house (which was also a breakup) was highly significant for him and his life (and the subscribers who received the news), it ended a long-term relationship involving kids. 5. The dreams occurred as nightmares (3/3), and for all those cases, I could not remember the last time I had a nightmare before that (i.e. they're very rare). They were nightmares in the sense that I woke up at the peak intensity (due to the intensity). That I get a nightmare is itself already very rare, and that I get these highly weird above things happening in conjunction, that makes you think things. All in all, the type of content mirroring the real-life events somehow, the type of content being a first, the dreams happening seemingly temporally parallel to the real events, and the events being significant in the real world, and the dreams being nightmares. The skepticism will of course be "how much does it have to mirror it for it be 'proof'?", or "how significant is significant?". Well, these things are not as much "proofs" as interesting considerations. If you want "proofs", go down the ("pseudo"-)scientific research rabbithole (but they're in reality not really proofs either; all scientific investigations are probabilistic). Very rarely can you say to have proved something in life. Most often it's about what you find convincing or reasonable. I acknowledge many things which are not "normal", like enlightenment being a real phenomena. Is that ego? Or is it based on seeing things, experiencing things, learning about things, drawing conclusions, which are reasonable and likely true? Does something need to be normal for you to think that me acknowledging it is not "ego"? You go down to your garage and find your car is gone. You see a broken door handle and not much else. The garage door is open. The door handle belongs to the second door to the garage. "Ah somebody must have broken in and stolen it". You might be right, but that's a probability calculation, an inference based on limited evidence. For all you know, your car could have malfunctioned (it's electric) and it started backing out of your garage, forced open the garage door, teared down something which smashed the door handle and then the car rolled downhill and disappeared out of sight. That's an outrageous example but you make these calculations all the time and sometimes you're dead wrong. "She lied because this happened and this happened", but turns out you were missing crucial information and it looks now much less likely that she lied and you were just mistaken about your level of conviction. Most things we entertain are probabilistic, but we entertain them sometimes as logical necessities, when in fact they're simply seeming consistencies, and when something changes in the situation, often very subtle or minor or unacknowledged, that alleged logical necessity breaks down. What standard of evidence do we use to explain our conviction? It essentially always changes depending on the situation. How many criteria do you have to add before you feel convinced, before you can draw a connection that seems to make other competing alternatives seem less likely? Depends on the situation. Psychic or not, this is a calculation we do. Me listing five "criteria" like that is not "proof", but it explains my level of conviction.

@Jirh For these kinds of experiences, there are alternative hypotheses, yes. But the hypothesis that it's real seems more convincing. And there are other reasons to believe in psychic phenomena. Essentia Foundation has various good videos on the topic, Rupert Sheldrake has some interesting studies on the topic, the Monroe Institute as well. I used to be a skeptic, but I was convinced. I didn't want to be a "psychic". It was constantly socially stigmatised, even in these kinds of communities. I don't feel special for these things happening to me, anymore than anything else happens to me. I'm not "doing it" virtually at any point. It's not my doing. What has been my feeling all along is that I had the materialist paradigm (with respect to the 'behavior' of reality; I explore this distinction here) as a starting position and then the evidence started piling up to the contrary and I gave all the rationalizations that you did (selection bias, etc.). But after a while, I realized that the materialist assumption was just an assumption and that I had been playing favorites for it. And when I opened my mind more to the alternative that the assumption was wrong, the evidence started becoming more salient, I started to not neglect it as bullshit a priori, I 'actually' opened my mind. And then the evidence just became such that accepting the alternative hypotheses were much more attractive to me, because the evidence was starting to get overwhelming and the alternative was starting to feel like gaslighting and defending epicycles. My hunch is that the lengths you go to defend the materialist paradigm and shoot down the psychic paradigm, were you to apply it to some of your own materialist beliefs and judgements, would probably not hold up. There are probably way more spicy beliefs you entertain daily, way more tentative causal attributions, that you give credence to than what I've been doing in my dream interpretations. That's my interpretation as a behavioral science graduate, where you start to learn that even materialist behavioral interactions which you think to be true, are often highly tentative and likely spurious, but you still entertain them as true.

People don't really care about calling you thinking differently "psychosis" unless it impacts them or someone else negatively, or it leads to an inability to function or take care of yourself. If their different thinking is seen as positive, you'll be labelled a creative person, and at the extremes, you'll be labelled a genius. If it's seen as neutral or negative, you'll be labelled as odd and eccentric, and at the extremes and especially when it's negative, you'll be labelled as psychotic.

This one:

I'm careful with these types of beliefs but I still have them. Heh nerd. Geniuses believe in telepathy too. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/the-eldritch-things-famous-rationalists I don't "need" it but I still think it happens. There is another dream I had recently that seemed telepathic in nature that I have not told about publically on the forum (I dreamt it seemingly temporally parallel to what was happening in real life). You can try to extract telepathically what it was about

Sit in an upright relaxed posture whereever feels best (on a pillow on the floor, with or without back support, or a comfortable chair), first body scan from toes to face, then down again. Then watch/feel your breath, watch your thoughts, hear sounds in the room, feel feelings in the body, tensions, let them dissolve/relax. When you lose track / get lost in thought, return to breath and watching thoughts/feelings/sensations. Other times just sit and do nothing. Other times try to track the origins of thoughts and relax their root, free up whatever is causing them to come back. Track down emotions, feel them, engage in them. Feel energy moving thoughout your body, in the spine, in the head. Play games with yourself, imagine that there is no tomorrow or there is nothing you have to do tomorrow, imagine that you're not alive, that you're a rock, try to not move, try to feel what is the natural flow of movement in the body, imagine you're trying to disappear, imagine that you don't have a physical body, imagine that you have no mind and that thoughts can just disappear and there is just complete silence, try falling asleep. Intelligence and creativity is not a hindrance towards meditation. It's a benefit.

I prefer making an explicit distinction between transpersonal and personal self. Regardless, my experiences of "solipsism" were interpreted as my ego reacting to the non-dual experience and focusing in on one previously held notion that was found to be untrue (that others are real). Another such notion is that you (the personal self) are real. Both are in truth notions. It's just that your ego can react to different notions it holds being challenged and it tends to do it one at a time (your symbolic cognition is limited like that). In reality, there is no such distinction. But if you are actively entertaining the notion that you are real (or the non-dual state is not making that abundantly clear for you that you're not real), enlightenment is not the case.

@Sugarcoat In other psychic news, there is currently a big ass fire in our country that has taken over a 100 homes and it's the biggest fire in over a hundred years, and last night I dreamt that I was hanging out with Joe Rogan and he was playing with RPGs and he fired a couple of missiles straight above my old house and one of them hit the roof and exploded in a big fireball and the house caught fire extremely fast and was essentially beyond saving before any firemen had arrived (they seemingly never did). I do admit reading about it before going to sleep, but I opened the news and read about it again and it struck me that I was probably picking up on something anyway because 1. why would I dream about that and not something else?, and 2. it was rather dramatic of course and I can feel when a dream is more of the dramatic kind and not just a normal dream (follows the usual psychic pattern), 3. it's the most significant event of that kind in a long time (also follows the pattern).

If you talk about other people being unreal but not yourself being unreal, you're not quite there yet.

I feel little girls before they feel it themselves 🥸

Wut

I was about to say it looks like Leo but I'm the one with the brownish beard and nearly bald so it's a toss up.

The few people I consider enlightened tend to talk about very specific points where everything is let go of and where "there is no me" anymore. None of them happen to be currently posting AMAs on this forum, currently in their early 20s, or posting about other people being "NPCs".

Is this emotion I'm registering? 🤔

Alien Dickenlargement™ is what I'm waiting for.

Actually I'm 7ft4 tall and my dick is 128 inches long.

I'm a 5ft11 nearly bald guy dreaming up a 6ft bald guy dreaming up mice, telling the 5ft11 nearly bald guy that the mice are absolute truth, when the 5ft11 nearly bald guy thinks that mice are relative manifestations inside the dream of the 6ft bald guy, not absolute truth, any more than the dream of the 6ft bald guy being in the configuation of no mice manifesting being absolute truth. I'm actually 5ft10.5 but it's mathematically sound to round up 0.5 to 1. And isn't the bald guy 6ft2-3?