Multiple planes, parallel dimensions, and leaps of faith.

Your core philosphies were at odds with his, and you didn't really speak the same language. Philosophies can't be argued well.

I know philosophies can't be argued, but he still displays an extraordinary lack of common knowledge about simple things. There is even a lack of logic. Ideology doesn't make people logic poor, or perhaps certain ideologies are adopted by those who can't see the world logically.

I was thinking more along the lines of how a topic like 'the validity of vengeance as a response' can't be argued with any logic. You either believe in vengeance or you don't, and theres plenty of logic to sustain either side of the argument. The complication (and this applies to larger socio-political issues too) is that the domains of the logic, though both valid, are not necessarily congruent. When you throw spiritual ambience (tangential karma) into the mix, you've got something less susceptable to logical argument than even an analysis of psychological statistics could provide. Few people are qualified to make an argument in terms of psychological or spiritual statiscal effect, and so the fundamental basis of such arguments is generally a semi-conscious, deep felt understanding of reality and righteousness clouded in an attempt to demonstrate that pure physical behaviours support what the opponents unconsciously take for granted. This is further complicated because people argue based on their personal experiences, and yet the experiences which come our way are shaped by the understanding of the universe we already have. People who believe in vengeance will experience a universe in which vengeance is justified, and those who don't believe in vengeance will experience a universe where vengeance only makes matters worse. All personal universes are valid unto theirselves, so the real issue is not so much which world-view is correct, but which one would you rather experience. There are several reasons that eastern spiritual philosophers and some western clerics don't generally argue with people.

I don't agree. There are some things that are simply lies. No amount of belief in these lies will ever make them true. Some personal universes are based on lies and are delusions. Objectively, it is impossible for all beliefs to be true so on a subjective level some have to be false. It's simple.

I agree; unless we enter the rare universe where the actual physics, like walking on water are alterable, there are universal truths, gravity falls down, and someone who claims otherwise is lying. But, there are people who can say that everyone one meets is cheerful and outgoing, and people who can say that everyone one meets has a nasty attitude. 'One' only means them, but they don't realise it, and if you were too look at both persons from a detached sattelite with no personal universe of it's own, you would find people who interact with cheerful people, and people who interact with nasty people. and there's room for people with personal universes of self-delusion too.
It's possible for all (most) subjective beliefs to be simultaneously true within personally created subsets. The non-vengeful microcosm is evidence that one can exist and is available to the person who lives in a vengeful universe, in spite of the fact that as long as the vengeful person maintains their original position, their universe continues to demonstrate that vengeance is necessary and effective. Imagine two opposites, hot and cold. You say they can't coexist, and they don't; but there are people who live on the poles where it's always cold, people who live on the equator where it's usually hot, and people who bring their own weathar with them when they travel. It would be foolish to say 'the Universe' is hot or cold but can't be both at once, but fair for any/some person to say that all they experience is hot or cold. What is reality? For the person living on the pole - it's cold! For the person who gets hit with lightening 7 times in their life, it's something different. Some people are seeing ghosts all the time, or stumbling upon constant miracle, for all I know, others live in a domain where space travel and comic characters are interspersed. The universe is infinite. It can be anything and everything, even if it currently follows some agreed upon common conventions.
This is a bit off topic, but imagine that matter has four states: light, energy, mass, & consciousness. It never goes away though, just changes permutations. Now imagine the universe lasts forever, not just a trillion bwagzillion phrazillion years. Eventually every permutation of every particle being energy, light, mass, or consciousness from the tip of your toe to distant galaxies will exist. There will be two trillion mile long intergalactic rainbow glowing space worms. There will be a universe where teleportation windows between stars occurs naturally. Even if you attempt to insist on current physics, there will be one's where people molecule sets fall apart based on quantum probability just as they enter these windows, and coincidentally, by random accident, loose subatomic particles will form identical persons at the other end of those intergalactic windows. Infinite recombinant matter. ..and that's a rather limited sort of universe in my book, where it's all just God dreaming on the fly.
God can be anything. That's simple too.

If all of the things you talked about exist or will exist, they still have to obey certain laws, so there will always be lies and truths. We however, live in the here and now and operate under a set of laws that must be maintained to avoid chaos. Elements behave in certain expected ways no matter what differing individuals think. BrianW's belief that the sun has nothing to do with global warming is a lie, and it will remain so no matter how hard he believes or until the day when the sun no longer exists and Earth is somehow heated by people driving cars alone. Lies are easy to spot and lies are not sunjective.

If all potential laws of the universe will eventully apply, there's nothing to say they wont start occuring now.

Even if all the potential laws of the universe may one day apply, they don't all apply right now so they are lies as far as we are concerned now. One day the sun might orbit the Earth but right now that's a lie.

The sun does orbit around the earth, the other planets have weird flower petal like orbits, and the other stars gyrate around us like you can't imagine.

The sun orbits around the Earth? It might wobble but orbit?

Yeah sure. The earth is the center of the universe. Only the sun orbits it in a circle though. The other planets have these weird spirograph orbits around the earth because they have (circular) orbits around the sun too. The whole galaxy spins around the earth too. You can see it as the seasons change. Actually, to be more specific, it all orbits around you. You can suck in the entire universe just by bending your knees, and get it to push away from you for a few feet by quickly straightening your legs out again. Alas, you have so much gravity that it all comes back to you in a moment.

Ok?

HA! Never heard that theory before? It's all in the perspective.

So when I jump I am really pushing the universe away huh? Sorry, I've been willing to buy some of what you say but this goes against all the laws of physics and common sense.

This theory's just for ludicrous fun, not like my talk of karma or anything, but still, except for the current explanation of gravity, from a visual standpoint, you couldn't disprove it. I could work up an orery animation showing the relative positions of all the planets and stars relative to Earth or you as the fixed center of the universe, and a scientist could verify that, yep, that's where they all travel relative to you. All the stars and galaxies are moving. Our galaxy seems to have a center, but I doubt they've ascertaineid a center of the universe. If all the galaxies fly off in different directions without any statistcal rotation, except perhaps the center of gravity of the masses of galaxies (and even that's no assurance of 'orbit'), then it can be said that the universe has no center now, and thus such an arbitrary relative distinction is up for grabs, of course I'm the center of universe and gave you credit only as a generous gesture.

Oh, I thought you might actually believe it, I mean you believe people get what they give and clearly that is false. Center of the universe? Hmm. I think people underestimate the size of an infinite space. The theory of the Big Bang is based on the assumption that all matter in the infinite universe behaves like it does in the very small area we can see. It's like amoeba scientists in a sink in Australia claiming that all water on Earth rotates anitclockwise because that is their experience in their small section of their universe. There may have been a localised big bang, but anyone who believes all matter in the entire universe was once located here in our region in a single object is delusional.

We don't know if that's delusional, but we should know enough to know that our understanding, as you say, may be a but a drop of water misunderstanding in the greater scheme of things. The universe may have once been a giant squirrel named Frzhdwick. We have no proof either way.
As far as believing it, theres really nothing to believe. Two people can be standing next to each other, and either can claim that they are standing further in the honorable compass direction. The definition of 'center of the universe' is up for grabs too. Had we agreed that 'center of the universe' means 'strongest center of gravity amongst all physical bodies known to mankind', then no, I couldn't claim that you or I were the 'center of the universe'. The church ran into trouble a few centuries ago when the paths of perceptual reality and scientific reality diverged. From a philosphical/spiritual outlook, perceptual reality is a step above physical science, and in some faiths, there is also a step above perceptual reality. A physical realist could argue that physical sciengce is paramount, but to do so, even they have made a precursory philosphical/spiritual 'taking-for-granted' that what they 'see' in their 'scientific observation' is the ultimate reality. For myself, what I have experienced follows the rules of a dream. That 'dreaming' could explain the appearance of a physical reality more readily than the common phsical reality explanation could explain the dream-like qualities of spiritual planes, mind-matter connections, and synchronicities, so based on my experience, even fully utilising scientific logic, I personally have to say that scientific physical reality is but one aspect of a grander dream.

I think perception is below science. What can be more true than photosynthesis in plants or preotein synthesis in animals? You can't fight a war over the ideology surrounding photosynthesis because it is believed by all no matter what their religion. Perception is ideology which is dangerous.

Photosythesis is a moot point if physical reality itself is in question.

I think you can safely say that matter exists my dear.

For me, it exists like a movie , and there are so many types of movies. Do you watch a variety of international and sci-fi (like Matrix or Brazil) movies? Even those that attempt to be purely realistic each have their own rulus of reality. In some, everyone you run into is shallow, in others everyone is ready to stab each other in the back. That same thing happens for real people, regardless of geography. If you can understnd how each movie is a sort of universe in itself, thats (not all but much of ) what I've been trying to explain about multiple existentialism. The southern hemisphere toilet algae scientists can be compared to a person who lives in a back-stabbing universe. It's not just a perception, but a localised physical reality. If they changed who they were though, they would have a different localised reality. For a social person, God is about people interacting; For a physicist, god is about physics. God of course, is about everything, but different people see only different selected parts.

'Matrix' last best described my total being, but just a few days ago I got to see an animated flick called 'Waking Life', basically based on a guy walking around asking about life philosophy. It was a bit like my first three years of spiritual life, minus the telepathic stuff and a lot more synchronicity. The movie aligns well with a second tier of meaning within the movie. I seem to recall Woody Allen had more than one 'Manhattan Murder Mystery' (if that's even what it was called) starring Alan Alda which was written in three tiers of meaning, much like I was going through 14 years ago when I saw it.

Perception is subjective sure, but perception doesn't alter the fact that if you are dropped from a plane with no parashute you will gravitate at great speed towards the ground. People may perceive that a scene is ugly or beautiful, but the scene is there nevertheless.

Meaning and understanding changes for sure. Synchronicity of events changes too (known as things like grace and karma). Actual laws of physics can change too, but that's a rare advanced state for christ types. I had one telekinetic experience, and that's all the proof I need that even gravity is subject to change.

Even levitation is effected by gravity because there is a need for an imput of energy to resist it.

Not in the experience I had. Most people attempt telekinetics from the bottom-up world view, molecule objects, and as you say, have to counter gravity. I did it top-down, where the world is considered to be a sort of hologram, and willed that something soft, nothing in particular, would fly through my living room sometime that day. It turned out to be bicycle luggage which leaped a few feet through the air followed by my cats which ran to attack it. They are fairly heavy; there wasn't any wind involved.
In my world-view, life is an abstract archetypal illusion (narrative energy and beauty/aesthetics are paramount); Things like placement in time, gravity, history, peripheral geography, etc. (the concrete things) are all the finishing details in a painting created on the fly by God. There are those with a bottom-up view of God (you resemble that crowd) in which spirit is a physical evolutionary after-effect of matter and mind. I am not in that camp. For me, God is all that exists, and the entire universe is but a mementary whim subject to radical instantaneous reconfiguration, including the past and future of a moment.

I find it hard to believe that heavy object just flew across the room with zero energy being contributed to the action from any source.

Yeah well, I've seen lots of stuff, that's just the most direct physical of them. The other one in that category was when I changed the direction of magnetic north in my living room through ritual magic.
You believe that the physical universe is the foundation of everything, while I believe that it is merely the finishing convincing details of an elaborate dream. My idea of ultimate physics is more like dividing light into land and water, and in the case of the mystic, reversing the process. Your realm of physics, even when allowing for things like undiscovered brain-waves, could not explain what I have been through, and so I resort to it only as a convience, in much the same way that mathematical systems are used to model physical reality, even though it's only a contrivance that may or may not mirror physical truths.
'Where the opposing energy came from' is an irrelevant issue, since it wasn't a Newtonian event to start with. As long as you limit your belief to the conjuration of a Newtonian universe, that's what you will experience, but it's only a subset of infinite parallel planes of existence. Had we both witnessed the same event, I reckon that some additional information would appear, ie incredible static charges from everyone in the building doing laundry on the same day or something, such that the experience made sense to your reality, and to mine. Science too is infinite. I believe they will always find sub-sub-atomic particles within the last generation of sub-atomic particles. If one century telepaths start steering the course of moons, there will be a parallel scientific explanation for what is happening as well.
Perhaps, as an entertainment of consciousness, you should spend a day, from the moment you wake till you drift off to sleep, contemplating your surroundings as a cosmic dream of sorts. It can't hurt anymore than wasting similar time on drinking beer and watching movies, and you might at least appreciate the notion better than evaluating the notion externally from the newtonian stance. It's like appreciating music. No degree of mathematical/physics analysis will get you to feel and understand that music is it's own landscape/language universe.

Even if what you say did happen, there has to be a scientific explaination for it. As you said, dryer static or anything like that could have been responsible. I don't believe things just happen for no reason and with no force acting on the situation.

I won't do the contemplation thing. I find the suggestion that life is just a dream as ludicrous and it sounds like you've taken the concept of the Matrix a bit too seriously. Sorry. It just sounds stupid to me.

That's your choice, but it does make you like the mathematician claiming there is nothing emotional about music. Until you have examined a concept from the inside, you aren't qualified to make claims about it. I try to take on others ideologies from the inside all the time. Polygamy examined externally by a monogamist is different than that experienced by a polygamist, and if one wants to speak with jurisprudence about polygamy, they have to have experienced/analsyed it from both inside and out. To understand things like vengeance and competition requires an internal experience, and not mere theoretical speculation. People who just claim it's lame and senseless are missing half the reality, the reality in which it does make sense. Most people are stubborn in this sense; they do not really want to learn someone elses reality, because it would make them someone else. I don't believe there is 'an' ultimate reality, and consider my core being to be something unascertainable, deeper or above anything I take for granted, and this gives me the freedom to step into other world-views without fear of losing myself. I am willing to bet that you wouldn't play dolls with four year old girls until their paradigm made sense, nor try on the philosphy of someone who considers us all to be walking dead ghosts, even for an afternoon, because by 'stupid', you mean 'not your current understanding'. Try to find that movie 'waking life'. Every minute is an interview of someone with a different understanding of what the world is. Until I was about 25, I made the presumption that everyone perceived more or less as I did, and that those who didn't were a bit touched. I later discovered that very few people perceive the world the same way, even if it appears on the surface that they share your view of physics and the foundation of social interactions. We are all wired differently. Even when doing data entry for an election, what I expected to be a straight forward process turned out to be a different process with every partner I had, since some were wired more for sequence, placement, iteration, emotional association, phonetics, etc. I enjoy how different we all are while sharing what we believe to be a common universe. I had to takes risks stepping outside of myself to find what all is really out there. I listen to radio station which has several diverse shows all loosely based on the spiritual matrix paradigm, and those hosting or calling into the shows experience the world in that framework. Perhaps 60,000 people in LA are hallucinating. A friend of mine is getting scrutinized as being crazy by her family. My point to her was that if you're all alone, it's up for question, but if 'crazy' is defined as 'out of touch with reality', and if you can communicate with someone else about seeing and experiencing the same thing, then you have 'a' common reality, and aren't crazy. That it's not the 'majority concensus' reality is besides the point. The problem with science and religion is that all these factions believe there is only one common reality, and wish to force a majority concensus upon others. No one is willing to step outside theirselves and consider that buddhism, hinduism, catholocism, and newtonian physics may all be simultaneously true, though each conflicts. I believe them to all be sub-domains of the grand reality, sometimes in parallel, and sometimes in conflict. Most spiritualists in any faith have experienced a dual or trascendant reality. 1000's of texts have been written on the subject. Generally they conclude in one of two directions A) That our newtonian reality is incomplete and their is more in the encompassing reality which we generally do not see. B) That spiritual life is a separate plane from earthly life. Most spiritualists stop there though, content to have found the spiritual reality which they consider to be the path of ultimate truth. Few go on to discover yet a third reality which suggests that there is no one separate spiritual reality. From there, they have the choice to A) look for one grand common transcendant reality which integratively supports all of the puzzle pieces they have thus far encountered, or B) consider that grand reality, if there even is such a thing, can support multiple dimensions which may be in harmony or conflict. The notion of earth/heaven/hell is such an umbrella reality divergency scheme. People with no spiritual experience tend to explain/think of it in terms separate geography. It doesn't occur to them that with three people sitting in the same room, one could be experiencing heaven, another earth, and the third experiencing hell. You might even get two people sharing words on the heaven they are experiencing, while those sitting next to them are still experincing earth or hell. No boulder drops from the sky with the words 'there is only one reality'. We make that assumption because we generally only have one perceptual-consciousness to examine reality through. When new unexpected experiences occur, we hold on to that belief and merely presume that until then, we just had an incomplete understanding (and fortunately many there will also then presume that there is still much more understanding to come). Your belief that there is only one reality, and that it is newtonian, is based purely on the intuitive limitations of your experience. You are not willing to make what they call the required 'leap of faith'. Accomplished spiritualists are also often not willing to make additional leaps of faith. Personally I find it addictive and exhilirating.
My experiences preceded the movie Matrix. The movie just later became a convenient tool to convey to others what my experience looks like.

 

Music is fact. There is a format that is pleasing to humans. Outside of that it's just noise. People can be effected by noise too but as I said before, no matter how people react to sound it still exists. There is no living dream where maybe there is no such thing as sound.

It's not that I don't want to learn your reality. I just don't believe it and have never seen anything to change my opinion. Some things I just don't need to experience to know I will reject them. Killing a human is one such thing.

I've said it before, differences in perception do not change the reality of a situation. A schizophrenic may hear voices telling them to kill themselves or feel the world is getting to them but that doesn't mean those perceptions are real or actually happening. If the Newtonian world is incomplete it doesn't mean that those aspects we are yet to discover do not exist. I do believe there is a spiritual realm but I also believe that too is governed by basic laws. You are suggesting that perceptions are real. Logically that is impossible since you can't have 6 billion different realities happening at once. I could have been taught from birth that the sky is green but that doesn't make it true no matter how much I believe.

The leap of faith you ask of me is plain silly. It's not like you are asking me to believe in a faith healer. You are asking me to believe in something that isn't and can't be. It makes no sense.

 

In the sense by which I believe you mean fact, music is not a fact. On one end of the spectrum, you have the emotionless mathematical analyst who can tear it apart into tones, waveforms, and rhythms, and still not feel that is is communicating anything. Then you have your typical teen who can hear melody and rhythm and get a basic feel for a sentiment being expressed in a musical language. You also have your people who have devoted themselves to musical appreciation courses, and hear much that the original artists intended that the general public can not hear. You also have your spiritualists, listening in the moment, hearing an eternity of archetypal narrative above and beyond the original intent of the original artists. Your definition of common true reality is what is called 'apodictive' reality (look it up). It is the minimal common denomintor truth that can not be doubted regardless of ones philosophy or perceptions. Music makes a great metaphor for reality as I am explaining it. The apodictive component of music is patterns of tonal rhythmical waveforms. There is however some concensus, especially amongst musicians, that it is much more. The sychronous events of the universe are just like this music. You have your mathematicians living in a void newtonian evolution realm who do not see any meaning in events. You have your superstitious (in a fond sense) religious folk, who like teens listening to music, see patterns of sentiment (omens and karma) that can not be explained solely by newtonian evolution, but which suggest an artistic orchestrating force, and then you have those who can see every moment of the spectrum of the world's languages and events as the active communicative expression of an archestrating force.
I too believe that there are basic laws even in spiritual realms, but they are so beyond the scope of newtonian limitations that a comparison is absurd futility.
Why can't we have 6 billion simultaneous realities? I enjoy the model of the shattered hologram; from each shard the entirety can be seen, but from each shard, the view is unique. An old hindu tale explains this with several blind men describing an elephant, but each is feeling an ear, a trunk, a leg or something different. Although I believe in multiple planes an individual can access (say for instance one in which everyone communicates with telepathy), my practical conception of multiple simultaneous existentialism is more like an interweaving of gears in a clock, such that all people with common experiences synchronistically gather and interact with each other, and do not interfere with the workgroups of those for whom no one has those common experiences. One model for this has been the celestial spheres of angels, although in my life, that third ring, rather than out in the milkyway somewhere, may exist at 5:04 pm Dec. 18th, 2004 in the corner of a crowd on Hollywood and Vine Blvd.'s, those who incidentally find eachother there collaborating on some common 'work', 'know' eachother, though they never met before, and their conversation will not shake up the reality of another crowd gathered at the same moment in a bowling alley in Ohio. Seperate domains, same planet. Recall your request for rain, I was one domain, you were another, and the crowd of 200 praying locally there was another. Each lived in seperate parallel domains sharing the same planet geography. The apodictive reality there was a set of events related only by time, that I said you would have rain and personally experienced an intense conjuring meditation on a plane I rarely visit, that people gathered going through the motions of prayer, and that it rained. You're the one here hearing meaningless apodictive noises while others have created quite a celestial concert.
Look at early myths from most cultures and you will find a lot of common parallel material on synchronicity, and things like how 'words' hd power to create. Such a reality has been obfuscated by a complexity of an alternative newtonian cause and effect explanation. Our ancestors weren't stupid. They described the immediately obvious observable apodictive correlations of events. These seperate ancient cultures didn't all aim simultaneously for the most far fetched of explanations, they went for the most obvious. At the time of spiritual awakening 15 years ago, over the span of 3 weeks, what had been the most preposterous had become the most obvious, and it had always been that way. I found it absolutely incredible that I had spent my life until that point as ignorant of the orchestrating synchronicity as if I had been ignorant of air and gravity until that point. Once you realise it's there, you see it everywhere, until then, it never occurs to you that it even exists.
Do you even have a definition for what I am asking you to believe in? I don't. I'd be happy to have you make a leap of faith into some realm I've never even experienced or heard of, and I'd be excited to get reports on what goes on there.
My best friend has a reality that might be the result if our versions met halfway. The primary archetype of her universe is merideans (as in acupuncture), but it applies to everything. Her and I are on a meridean, such that no matter what time of day or night that Imay go to sleep, she always calls me the moment I am drifting off to sleep. There are probably a hundred other parnormal experiences we share regularly, and I see them in the context of a top-down orchestrating force, while she sees them as not quite bottom-up nor top-down, but of the universe as more of collective consciousness being. I see a singularity, she sees a scattered collective, you see fractured diversity. Each of us lives in a parallel plane of reality with different laws/explanations/observables, and yet the same physical events happen for all of us.
What do you think would happen to you psychologically if things all started lining up with an explantion that you could only describe as paranormal? Would you have to repent because you had been an ignorant ego? Would you fear craziness and loss of social security? Would you instantly gravitate towards some particular religious faith you had shunned? Would you feel insecure from not having a fixed sense of reality (the only way to really being open to learning)?
Storm clouds, crickets, and melodic power grid transformers are united in an expressive song, if you're willing to patiently hear it. You could be the mathematician that says it isn't and can't be, but such mathematicians have limited their faculties to begin with.
I'm sure there are a lot of toddlers whom when confronted with a box of jig-saw puzzle pieces, insist they can't be connected. 'Visions' are like the picture on the box. They may not persist, but they inspire and teach that we can learn to connect the pieces that surround us on a regular basis until the picture starts to become solidly clear on a regular basis, and gets easier to assemble.