Just before I get out of bed this morning I hear a loud, clear thought.
“The scientific method.”
Then the impression of someone wiggling their eyebrows. “Think about it” that seems to imply.
There’s nothing else. That’s the entire experience. On the surface this is a somewhat silly thing to occur. But that little thought domino knocks into another one, and before I know it, I’ve knocked around a bunch of dominos into a few conclusions.
If you’re new here, these kinds of things happen all the time. Not just to me, but literally to every human. Many traditions and even fields of science all tell us that “our thoughts are not our own”. Well, they’re really not.
I like to think of it like this: some thoughts are more ours (caused very directly and willfully). You can do that now. Think about your favorite color. If you’ll handwave that I from across space and time just knocked my domino into yours to make that happen, this thought was almost entirely yours.
The thought I experienced was at the exact other end of the spectrum. As out of context and not-me as a thought can be.
Think of thoughts (ha.) as floating around in the air like little motes of light. Sometimes you run into them (they literally go through you) and they pop in. They are no more yours than looking at someone’s car makes it yours. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a car too.
At this point I run through a set of questions reflexively.
What was I doing just before this?
I was trying to have a conversation with my soul family (I’m not doing another disclaimer). And… it wasn’t going well! I could tell that 80%+ of the information was just my own mind fabricating the experience. Everything was conflicting. It stank of my insecurities and fears.
Why would I hear this, much clearer, message now?
If someone bothered to go through the effort to give me a message, it’s timely! It’s almost certainly for me.
How do I know?
Ah. Here’s the juice.
How do I know any of this? This example lesson is self-similar, which is why I picked it. It’s a lesson about the lesson and that just tickles me.
The scientific method is how!
Well, parts of it anyway. And that was the very conclusion I drew. I’d been using it the entire time, for years now, to make sense of the ineffable. We all do, of course. This works for determining why replacing your wife’s car shocks cost $4,500. It works for determining why the same people keep trying to talk to you in your dreams, in your meditations, and whether they are “just yourself” or something more.
Technically, what I’d been using was “intervention”, a subset of the scientific method that can be best descibed as “what happens when you poke it?”. We don’t need a formal hypothesis, perfect experimental setup with blinding, etc. etc. That stuffy process is too slow and not necessary outside of demonstrating one kind of knowing to a certain kind of person in a very specific sort of way. It’s amazing, but we limit outselves when only accept evidence from reproducible, peer reviewed, scientific papers based on acceptable experimentation. (This is to say nothing of the reality of the business, politics, and very human foibles inherent in Science).
As you can see in the Ladder of Aausation, Intervention isn’t even the best way of determining cause and effect! That’s reserved for, shockingly, faculties that depend upon the imagination.
To answer my own question, the way I know (in this case) that thought for sure ain’t mine is because I’ve tested this kind of thing over and over.
I took advice, often based on information I never knew nor considered, and it worked.
I looked up the definitions to words I heard, but didn’t understand. They matched.
I tested the ideas given to me in the real world. Myself. The models comported with reality.
(That’s Association in the ladder above, by the way.)
It’s the same way I learned to move piece of aluminum foil under glass (update: I did this from 3 feet away without touch the glass for the first time this morning!).
What happens when I’m in THIS state?
What if I did the opposite? (counterfactual!)
Do that enough times and something very special happens.
Form your own models for how reality works
You can find the shape of any system in an intuitive way — again without the full, formal scientific method — just by playing with it. That’s what humans are great it! All intelligent life does this.
If this were merely a blog about mundance and acceptable truths, this would be a neat idea you didn’t need to be told. It’s fun realizing that’s how we work. That we can ascertain the working truth of any system ourselves. We don’t need to be told anything. In theory, we could eventually learn how anything works this way. I think that’s amazing.
But this is a blog about weird and impossible shit.
And in that domain, you need to form your own models. Sure, you get told things directly sometimes (as seen above). But do you think I would have taken that seriously if I hadn’t already come to the conclusion this was a valid communication medium? That I could receive thoughts that were a lot less mine?
The non-physical is largely a maybe-space. And in that space you have to use your inner senses to navigate. Those are, often but not always, your only sources of evidence.
So if you want to understand how reality works, you’re going to have to start accepting every part of your experience as valid evidence. Then, you need only apply the VERY ADVANCED methods above (poke it, play with it) to form flawed but ever improving models of the system.
That means how you feel, the thoughts you experience, intuitive senses — these are your compass. Until you accept these senses as evidence you will forever let this magic pass you by. Invisible intangible miracles that, even if you experience them, never stick because you cannot recognize them for what they are. Like snowflakes that always melt on the ground. You can never build anything with them.
Knowing
That method of knowing is a lovely dance between left and right hemispheres. The right takes in it, feels it, and the left takes those pieces, interprets them, and builds working models with them.
For me, at least, it’s how I know most of what I profess to know. Even then, I understand just how flawed this method can be. It’s eventually right. Can you stare at a piece of aluminum foil for ~100hrs on the hope that you’ll be eventually right that you can move it under glass?
I can’t!
And that’s not what I did. There’s no way I could have stayed motivated long enough, whethered all that frustration that way. Sure, I did a ton of things. Most of them didn’t work. I did eventually form a fairly accurate working model for telekinesis under glass. But what kept me going?
Because I already knew.
Direct knowing. Gnosis. I just knew it could be done. And I knew I could do it. It was a deep certaintly. I had a ton of doubt along the way, but that feeling never left me. I simply knew.
This is one of the most important, most profound ways to know something. You just… already know. There’s, ironically, an ineffable certainty to it. There is no explanation. No model. It’s true. It’s an atomic truth from which you can build other kinds of knowing. Like a single snowflake that sticks to the ground. All the others can stick to this one, and soon you have a snowman.
It’s from this inner certainty that I acted, even as I played around, trying to understand how this could work in other ways. I couldn’t have told you, then, how or why this was possible. Only that it was.
NOW I can tell you how and why this was possible.
This is the most amazing, shocking truth in understanding. Knowing something is true before you have any evidence at all. From that position you can go gather the evidence, build the models. But they’ll only tell you what you already know.
We’re cheaters, is what I’m saying. We’re all filthy cheaters. So go do that. Use your inner senses, your different compass. It’s already telling you what’s true. All you need to do is take is seriously.
Then go play!