Thread: What if life actually is all a dream?

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Original Poster, Sageous, myself, and a couple of other people argued at length on the LOA topic in the inner-sanctum forum a year or two ago. There are informed criticisms of LOA that don't involve denying power of thought.

How can you tell that the Mercedes appeared because of your meditation, instead of your meditation occurring because of the impending appearance of the Mercedes? Its not clear to me that one causes the other, even though they are clearly related somehow. It seems to me that my thoughts are manifestations also.

that sounds like a free will kind of debate. I'll relay an experience I had a little while back, since it was I who experienced it and not anyone else I don't expect it to have an impact on you but whatevs. I was standing in a line in the early am in an airport, waiting to check in. I was wearing a red sox shirt and wondered to myself "I wonder if people occasionally mistake me for being a part of the red sox" and that idea of being on the red sox kind of came in and I tried it on because I was bored. I kid you not, a few seconds later the guy standing in front of me in line, who hadn't turned around up until that point or had seen me get in line, turned around and asked me "so do you play for the sox?". Once I picked my jaw up off the ground I said no and had a nice conversation with him, he mentioned it again asking if I worked for the team as opposed to played. Coincidence? technically maybe it was, the odds of it being pure coincidence must be astronomical though, no one has ever asked me that when I wore the shirt before and I've had it for years.

Did the thought and impulse to try on being a red sox member come to me because some all knowing intelligence knew the guy was going to ask me, therefore manifesting the thought in my experience beforehand so as to prepare me for it or something? that seems like an unnecessarily complicated way of explaining it just so that the external world continues to remain separate from and in the position of authority over a person.

Originally Posted by tofur

that sounds like a free will kind of debate.

That discussion was not primarily about that.

Originally Posted by tofur

Did the thought and impulse to try on being a red sox member come to me because some all knowing intelligence knew the guy was going to ask me, therefore manifesting the thought in my experience beforehand so as to prepare me for it or something? that seems like an unnecessarily complicated way of explaining it just so that the external world continues to remain separate from and in the position of authority over a person.

I agree that your posited explanation doesn't entirely make sense. But I don't think it follows from what I said either. Although I can't give you an adequate alternative explanation, we don't have a good explanation of how it would work in any other way either.

Note that if you think of the man's question as being a result of your thought, which you have free control over, that reduces the control he has over his thought. In either case, somebody's thought is at least partially outside of their own personal control. Your perspective seems to maintain a strict cause and effect order in terms of time, but this goes against my experiences which say that order isn't an issue, that it works the same way irrespective of the order.

To illustrate with an example: In my nap-time dream a few hours before birds flew into a jet engine a few years ago, I experienced myself intentionally directing a bird-size blob into an opening containing an engine-like contraption, which started vibrating and tore itself apart after the object went into it. I highly doubt that I personally caused the event though. It affected hundreds of other people, and I was only partially aware of what I was doing during the dream. So there is apparently some way to know about impending events without personally causing them. Also, it shows it is possible to shift one's first person perspective to something else that knows of or causes events. I've had hundreds, maybe thousands of those kinds of experiences now. And just the fact that we share one reality, even though we have individual personal wills, shows that there must my some kind of semi-collective interaction that reconciles all of our independent and competing wills. And in my experience, when two different people's thoughts affect something, its possible to move your subjective perspective to a place that shares something of the thought of both those people.

Here's another example: The radio saying "Eww that smell" right as my car passed over a dead skunk a few months ago. This could not plausibly have been caused by my willing it to happen. And I don't think its plausibly a 'random' coincidence, because I've had too many similar experiences and that event fits too well into the development of my thought process about this. And its not a "premonition of the future". But I think its exactly the same as your baseball experience, even though the time order is simultaneous instead of staggered. I also have many, many similar examples where the event precedes my thought instead of the thought preceding the event, even though I wasn't aware of the event until later. As I experience them, all of these experiences are essentially the same.

I am not denying free will by the way, or positing that an all-knowing personal god is causing any of this.

yeah time is a strange thing, and I'm not sure its necessarily only linear as we experience it. The implications of that are crazy though. I think that we are all interacting on a mental level all the time, reading each other and influencing one another, etc. So thoughts/impulses that pop into our experience might be picked up from someone else. Only thoughts I can be sure are of my creation is the ones I consciously create, as opposed to the random ones. I consciously created the red sox thought and the feeling along with it which lead me to conclude I played a direct part in him getting the idea. Maybe we all share the same mind (whatever mind is) and our conditioned sense of separateness makes us feel like we all have individual ones, I duhno. That dream of yours is interesting.

I've only experienced one "aware of the future" kind of thing and it could have just been my mind but it didn't feel like it. I was driving back to my parents house after having picked up coffee, and got a text from my dad saying something like "leaving for course". He lives on a golf course and has his own cart so he drives over to the course. Right after that I got a flash of 'knowing' that we were going to meet perfectly right in between the house and the course. I was a ways away and the space between the house and club house is pretty small, so the odds of meeting him weren't great, there wasn't reason to think we'd meet, if anything it would be the opposite. We ended up meeting just as I saw it and I handed the coffee out the window on the fly like I 'knew' I was going to. It was freaky, but I really wish I could operate like that all the time

Originally Posted by tofur

that sounds like a free will kind of debate. I'll relay an experience I had a little while back, since it was I who experienced it and not anyone else I don't expect it to have an impact on you but whatevs. I was standing in a line in the early am in an airport, waiting to check in. I was wearing a red sox shirt and wondered to myself "I wonder if people occasionally mistake me for being a part of the red sox" and that idea of being on the red sox kind of came in and I tried it on because I was bored. I kid you not, a few seconds later the guy standing in front of me in line, who hadn't turned around up until that point or had seen me get in line, turned around and asked me "so do you play for the sox?". Once I picked my jaw up off the ground I said no and had a nice conversation with him, he mentioned it again asking if I worked for the team as opposed to played. Coincidence? technically maybe it was, the odds of it being pure coincidence must be astronomical though, no one has ever asked me that when I wore the shirt before and I've had it for years.

Did the thought and impulse to try on being a red sox member come to me because some all knowing intelligence knew the guy was going to ask me, therefore manifesting the thought in my experience beforehand so as to prepare me for it or something? that seems like an unnecessarily complicated way of explaining it just so that the external world continues to remain separate from and in the position of authority over a person.

?? Isn't the most likely answer also the most obvious here? I would say this is a case of the guy being slightly telepathic. You have a distinct thought while standing next to him. he picks up on it, but not on a conscious level, then voices his thought. So, a small innocent case of low grade ESP on his part?

Sorry too butt in, just an observation.

Originally Posted by sivason

?? Isn't the most likely answer also the most obvious here? I would say this is a case of the guy being slightly telepathic. You have a distinct thought while standing next to him. he picks up on it, but not on a conscious level, then voices his thought. So, a small innocent case of low grade ESP on his part?

Sorry too butt in, just an observation.

Based on my experiences, tofur's interpretation is as valid as your interpretation. But for most of my experiences neither interpretation works if making conventional distinctions between 'me' and 'him' and 'cause' and 'effect'.

Also worth noting, if tofur is 'slightly telepathetic' that will amplify that tendency in the other person also. If I'm interacting with a psychically 'strong' person, my experiences become much stronger, which is almost the whole reason that people follow gurus I guess. I think that tofur's role is probably more important than the other person's here, since tofur likely cares a lot more about the question than the other guy does.

Something else I forgot to mention when I responded earlier....I think that a person can experiment and probe the differences between

1. events are happening because I'm causing them to happen
2. events are happening because of historical, mechanical cause
3. events are happening because of what other people collectively want
4. some greater intelligence is causing things to happen
5. events are happening because of random chance

For me, it seems to be clear that the first four dynamics are all involved. My evidence for '4' is that experience is coordinated with what seems to me to be remarkable intelligence, even though the nature of that intelligence is elusive. For instance, if I ask a question mentally, I can usually count on getting some kind of answer within 24 hours. I don't come up with those answers or the metaphors that express them, something else is doing that. The answer might not even be right, but it definitely draws on thoughts that are outside of my personal experience.

Another kind of evidence, though not one I've paid much attention to personally, is that many things don't seem to add up if considering only the other causes. To use a celebrity example, Dave Mustaine convinced himself that God exists in large part by trying to kill himself repeatedly and never coming close to pulling it off. It seemed to him that he couldn't account for this outcome just in terms of luck and his own will, that something else seemed to be blocking him. He looked mentally in the direction of where that 'something else' seems to be, and found what seemed to be some other kind of internal confirmation.

For myself, the 'something else' that blocks me seems to be more directly related to environmental conditions and other people's desires. However, it seems to me that there is also a subtler coordination of those things. To use a hypothetical example, if two teams are playing a competitive game, one team will win and one will lose, that doesn't depend on any kind of unifying intelligence. And if both teams have equal athletic talent, the team with more mojo will win. Yet behind that there's also something else that manipulates the timing of the expression of those factors, affecting the outcome depending on how and when they counteract or reinforce each other.