Messages

I tried it and was too frightened by the possibility that I could do it. Life would never be the same again. Every philosophy and general view on everything would be different.

Frank was definitely dedicated. He went toe-to-toe with anyone who was confused, disagreed, or just wanted to know more. I really thought he was mistaken when he emphasized "acceptance," and would have much preferred to have heard his empirical success stories, but c'est la vie.

[Update]

well I voted for you but I havent seen your posts in a while

That's because I don't feel like I have anything to contribute. I really despise dream journaling and it's difficult for me to have experiences without it. This app is meant to fix problems for everyone who has difficulty journaling.

Thanks for the vote. I seriously don't mean to bother anyone, but I'll be eliminated today, if I don't pick up less than 0.5 percentage points, and this opportunity to make a great video dream journaling app will be gone.

Enjoy your free copy of pzizz. 

Update: Voting has been extended. I only need 0.2 percentage points. 

I love these new emoticons, by the way. Very subtle.

[Update]

There's a really sweet deal available right now where you can get a free copy of pzizz, a normally $40 Mac/Win application that helps you fall asleep with audio. It's not binaural beats, but definitely high quality. I'm confident it could help everyone, either with AP and meditation, or just generally getting a good rest.

What you do is vote at mydreamapp.com for what you think are good application ideas. You'll have to sign up, but that's just to prevent fraud, so you won't have to worry about spam.

Also - I'm one of the contestants! My application idea is called "iVlog." It's a video journaling application and I specifically intend it for dream journaling.

It's so hard to be a good dream journler. It takes a lot of diligence, writing, and time. With video journaling though, you can just talk and that's it. You'll even be able to look at your emotional reaction on your face, which provides for a much better mnemonic. I know for me this would cut down the difficulty of dream journaling immensely. It would even record in nightvision, so you don't even have to turn on a light.

Okay, go vote quickly, because the offer ends sometime tomorrow night.

Remember, if iVlog wins, I'll be intimately involved with the development of the app, and so will you, because you can send us your ideas. Let's make the perfect video dream journaling app.

Update: After the first few hours of voting, I'm actually in danger of elimination. So, if you really want to help, just vote for iVlog only and don't risk other apps edging me out. Of course, it's up to you.

Update: They've extended voting into Saturday.

So, the entanglement phenomena can be likened to the two ends of a single sheet of folded paper appearing to be two separate objects to a two dimensional entity? When in fact it is the same object in a higher dimension.

I don't think so. The only time I ever hear that folded sheet analogy is for wormholes. And wormholes don't travel through extra dimensions, but through a shortcut resulting from the shape of space.

Also, entanglement doesn't require extra dimensions either. Someday I'll go back to school for this stuff...

entanglement in and of itself has nothing to do with communication, but one CAN communicate by utilizing the entanglement phenomena (with seemingly unbreakable security) as long as the actual channel used remains classical?

That looks about right.

Thank you for the reply. (Bumping must be allowed since I disappear and do it occasionally  )

I'm very happy you have this realization. I also value honesty incredibly, in myself and others. I think being able to not lie to one's self is spiritually paramount, the way others might see God or love as paramount.

Varnes mentions a good number of supernatural feats in the book, though, like becoming invisible to the human eye. But honesty has not yet given me supernatural power, despite my openness to it.

Telos that does not make sense.  

Religions are tribal and cultural.  There are lots of people who are rich in spirit who follow the tenents of a religion.  There are also lots of people who are willing to put down what they do not understand.

Following the tenets of a religion does not mean following the religion. For example, I practice abstinence from alcohol, but I am not a Muslim.

People who are willing to put down what they do not understand are not religious, from my perspective. A common feature of religion seems to be the acceptance of something by faith that is otherwise principally not understandable.

Whoa it's been a while for this thread, but I think someone explained that entanglement isn't communication rather well at PhysicsForums.

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=124883

We have not experimentally observed information transfer by quantum entanglement, or anything that might suggest it to be possible. In fact, there are strong no-go theorems against it - basically nonlocal or acausal communication would violate Special Relativity. (In short, communication is a causal physical process, hence it is limited by the speed of light.) This does not contradict the usual formalism, in which certain mathematical objects appear to travel FTL, because they are emphatically not observable!

The confusion about "information transfer by entanglement" is probably because there are communications protocols, involving entanglement, but not as an information channel (which we believe it cannot be). In short, if you have an entangled pair of qbits between users A and B, and also a supplementary communication channel between them (classical), then A and B can communicate securely by a mixture of classical communication and operations/measurements on their qbits. Example: they share a pair of entangled spin-1/2 particles, and A performs an operation on his/her qbit, then sends a message to B with instructions which basis to perform a measurement in, to "read" the message. The actual speed of information transfer is limited by the classical channel; however, an eavesdropper with access only to this and not the entangled qbits, cannot possibly decipher it - hence secure communication! (we hope) This is a frequently-discussed topic (related to quantum teleportation) and may explain the common confusion about this being "information transfer" - which it is not, sticking to standard terminology. Usually we talk about "correlations" between the states of the entangled qbits in different places and times.

Isn't QM fun?

Faraz, then I will give the special honor of paying $40.

I appreciate the inquiry, gdo. How about I rephrase the above comment?

Religion is for people who are poor in spirit.

Religion is for poor people.

Spiritual knowledge is more valuable when you pay for it.

That'll be $20, please.

[economic law of spirituality]

I wrote a review on this here earlier as well.

I'm curious to know, has the change in your life that resulted from reading her book persisted?

It's been a year and a half since I read it and none of it stuck with me, except her stories of her poor and abused youth, and how lucky she was to find a mentor. I've since met other very active and wealthy people who spent their youths in poverty, but who were lucky to find someone to guide them.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that having a mentor adds uncountably many times to the richness of youth than money or objects. Books would be the next closest thing, but they don't exactly compare.

Since then she's gone all pyramid-crazy, cluttering up her site with Google ads, and is selling her once free book. All of this no doubt because of the economic law of spirituality that says spiritual knowledge is more valuable when you pay for it.

Thanks, Nick.

Sorry it took a year for me to reply to this post, but you know - timelessness in wider reality and such.

Sorry I took so long to reply. I guess I'm a little disappointed. I was expecting that the book would be more rigorous than it actually was. It was surprisingly indirect and meandering. Things didn't flow smoothly. The author hurdled from one major topic to the next, and answers to the homework problems were supposed to be given online, but never were as far as I can tell. Talk about frustrating.

And the author uses the word "magical" far too often for me to appreciate it. I know he's just trying to communicate his excitement for the topic and dress up mathematics so that people become interested in it, but I don't need that.

Anyway, I became very frustrated that I didn't know exactly what a Riemann sphere was, or what the Riemann hypothesis actually stated, etc., and left the book many times to try to learn more.

I may have to go back to school.

Well, perhaps the scribe is now speaking through another medium, or Frank died and then went back in time to assume the name of Elias and speak through this scribe.

I bet he'd get a real kick out of doing that.

Hey, do Frank and Elias know each other?

Or, do Frank and Elias' "scribe" know each other?

Thank you so much for sharing this story with us.

Your retelling of the phenomena without inserting prejudgments impresses me.

It's great to see you again, stone!

I would definitely love to hear more stories.

[attract]

I just noticed that the front page says, "How to effortlessly attract infinite wealth, health and happiness," not actually get it. Very clever.

He said follow the way of natural curiosity. If the same logic applies, one would find that this will naturally lead to more curiosity, hopefully retaining the openness that doubt offers without gullibility.

Well we know he's not dead.

Because there's no such thing as death.

Bearing all this in mind, you need then to be careful how you go about things... else all manner of reality fluctuations can come about. For example, it is only natural that you should question your experiences. This is a great way to make progress provided the questioning aspect comes about as a result of natural curiosity. Over years of trial and error, I found the best most productive mental state to have while within the Astral realms: is to remain emotionally neutral, while maintaining a natural air of mild curiosity.

However, if the questioning comes about as a result of Doubt, then you need to be ever mindful of the fact that any release of thoughts of Doubt - while within the Astral - will instantly lead to you experiencing circumstances that support whatever level of Doubt you are feeling.

Then, just like in my release of fear example above, finding yourself all of a sudden in a situation where your doubts are justified, will normally have the effect of making you feel even more doubtful; so your circumstances will instantly become such that your doubts are reinforced all the more; which in turn makes you doubt all the more still; and so on, and so on.......

It's unfortunate that now and again I come across a person who once managed to successfully project to the Astral and subsequently concluded that it was all some kind of brain-generated fantasy.

We had someone come onto this BBS last year who was adamant on this. From reading into where they were coming from, it was obvious the person had been projecting to the Focus 22 state while releasing feelings of doubt. Of course, this person's doubts were immediately reinforced each time to the extent where they became utterly convinced their doubts were 110% genuine. All of which then blinded this person to the facts about what had truly taken place.

I really want to know who he was talking about. ;)

http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html

52 episodes of scientific goodness. All you have to do is sign up!

This ain't your garden variety science television. Prepare to learn calculus. And more calculus.

Telos,

I understand what you mean ... sort of.  Could you help me better understand what that would involve?

Peace,
Beth

I'll try, Beth. I have written a number of drafts for this post so far, but it seems like I get needlessly verbose.

I think the spiritualization and occultization of dreaming has been self-defeating and very limiting.

I know this may sound odd at first, for the goals of each are liberation and self-empowerment. Spiritual people seem almost by definition to adopt an inclusive and holistic worldview, while aspiring to a paradigm of open-mindedness. Right?

I aspire to that paradigm. I do not think there is such a thing as too much open-mindedness. Some people have said that too much open-mindedness is a bad thing - that we should not be so open-minded that "our brains fall out." It's incorrect, I think, for people to say that. What they mistake for too much open-mindedness is actually another kind of closed-mindedness.

In most cases I think too much open-mindedness is mistaken for closed-mindedness to falsification.

I think it's possible that the connection between lucid dreams and spirituality is an accident of appearances.

To illustrate, an idea entered the philosophy of art sometime in the 20th century. It stated that a work of art needn't be aesthetically pleasing in order for it to be good art. Thus, according to this idea, aesthetics and art have no real connection whatsoever. Our habit of seeing them as connected was just that, a habit, and not an observation on the dependence of art on aesthetics.

The same thing has happened, I think, to dreams and spirituality over the years. Thanks to Judeo/Christian/Muslim holy books, ancient eastern philosophy, more modern authors such as Carlos Castenada and Robert Monroe, etc., we, in our limited view, saw lucid dreams and spirituality as part of the same thing.

Lucid dreams can be very profound. They can even be meaningful, beautiful, or life-changing. Perhaps they can even be supernatural. But why, despite appearances, should they have anything to do with the grand design?

Imagine, for a moment, that dreams are like an undiscovered country. A very large, impressive one. Who's to say that this is the country where we came from? Or that it's connected to all others? Or that it's our goal?

What if instead of going in the direction of that country, we go another?

Or go around?