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Michael, I think you are in rather good, if not notorious company when you say you are partial to the idea that information is fundamental to our reality. Rupert Sheldrake has proposed something similar in his theories of morphic resonance and formative causation. Sheldrake is attempting to explain why if DNA only codes for proteins, what is it that produces form; that is, what causes the proteins to form livers, hearts, brains, etc. as well as crocodiles, bears, and giraffes etc; water lilies, sunflowers and corn etc rather than one giant amorphous mass of goo. "Morphic resonance" has been likened to a kind of cosmic immaterial memory bank that stores all kinds of information about form and growth in nature. Similar to what you have suggested previously at times.

Sheldrake has also referenced tests on animals (rats) which suggest that once an individual or genetic line of individuals learns something, it becomes easier and easier for succeeding generations of rats of that species to learn it, even if they are on the other side of the world; as if the new behavior somehow became part of the universal memory bank from which new generations of individuals draw up on as they develop. - AOD

Michael,
What you say makes sense to me. It explains what we observe with parsimony.

I must say, this forum has really been arriving at some meaningful theories and conclusions lately! So many great thinkers contributing level headed pieces of the puzzle!

I think that "bleed throughs" are most likely to happen to us when our normal attention (or focus) breaks down via certain drugs, meditation, repetitive behaviors, deliberate concentration on non-normal aspects of reality or due to the influence of others who for one of those reasons (or others) have at least temporarily let their hold on normal reality slip. Then the larger realm of possibilities opens up to us (i.e. we re-set the tuner a la the transmitter/receiver model of consciousness).

Michael,

As usual, I appreciate your post and your knocking away at the problem of Reality. I think this practical kind of philosophy has the greatest potential to produce real breakthroughs, and I think your blog represents some very good work indeed in this regard.

I am curious about your use of the word "timeline," which is trendy these days in New Age circles. I would appreciate your thoughts on what it means to you.

To your list I would also add "dreams." Yes, I think dreams are a paranormal phenomenon hiding in plain sights. A paranormal phenomenon that is extremely normal, if you will. Simply put, dreams are OBEs, a shedding (mostly but temporarily) of our corporal limits for a dip in the astral waters. I'd appreciate your thoughts on that as well!

Matt, I may as well keep knocking away at Reality, because Reality sure does have a way of knocking away at me!

I didn’t know "timeline" was trendy, and it may not be the right word. I’m thinking of parallel storylines that sometimes brush up against each other, allowing for weird anomalies. I wouldn’t say these narrative lines, or data streams, or different VR environments, or parallel worlds, or whatever they are, are necessarily running at the same clock speed. Or even that clock speed (or time as we understand it) would apply when comparing two different streams. Clock speed would seem to be a feature within a given stream, but not necessarily one that two streams would have in common.

Dreams seem to be related to OBEs, premonitions (as in Bruce Siegel's book and some other studies), and access to a different level of consciousness that is more symbolic and holistic than ordinary left-brain reasoning. I think some dreams — perhaps many — are projections into another plane of existence, though others may only be the mind crunching data. The only experiences I’ve had that *might* qualify as OBEs have taken place while I was asleep, and took the form of exceptionally vivid dreams. (Of course, they may have been "ordinary" dreams and not OBEs. But I suspect the dividing line between dreams and OBEs is pretty permeable, so it may be a distinction without much of a difference.)

Thanks for the good questions and kind words!

I think "bleed throughs" is a good explanation for reincarnation phenomena. I think the evidence we have for reincarnation is real enough only our explanation for what it is and what it means is not quite how we interpret it. I believe it has more to do with the interconnectedness and oneness of the Universe.

I'm sorry if this is off topic but does Chris Carter, author of Science and the Near Death Experience, read this blog? I am presently reading this book and in the first part he spends a lot of time talking about the productive model versus the transmissive model of consciousness and how insults to the brain affect consciousness but that doesn't mean the brain produces consciousness....

While reading I kept thinking about Terminal Lucidity and how people with alzheimer's and other brain problems sometimes wake up right before they die and become lucid and have normal conversations with their loved ones right before they die? And that scientists have no explanation for terminal lucidity and can't explain it? Also Dr. John Lorber's research and work with people essentially no brains but they led fairly normal lives, one guy who had an I.Q. of 126 and was good at math, but only like a centimeter of brain?

These two things alone negate the production model of the brain and consciousness? I wonder why Chris Carter didn't talk about or mention them in his book? I have met people at my church whose family members woke up right before they died and also I met a Methodist Minister at the hospital who told me that right before his mother died (just a few weeks before I met him) woke up and started talking to him even though she hadn't been able to talk for a couple of years due to alzheimer's. From what I've read terminal lucidity is very common and has been known about for years?

Anyway if any of ya'll know Chris Carter, author of Science and the Near Death Experience could you ask him why he didn't talk about or bring up terminal lucidity or Dr. John Lorber's work in his book? I think both of these things negate the brain producing consciousness question.

One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity - Scientific American

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/one-last-goodbye-the-strange-case-of-terminal-lucidity/?redirect=1

Art, thanks for linking to the article on terminal lucidity. What a great intro:

"I'm as sworn to radical rationalism as the next neo-Darwinian materialist. That said, over the years I've had to "quarantine," for lack of a better word, a few anomalous personal experiences that have stubbornly defied my own logical understanding of them."

I'll bet *lots* of experiences remained similarly quarantined within the minds of skeptics.

And you're right: terminal lucidity is yet another strong indication that consciousness originates elsewhere than in the brain.

I'm a big dream person, I keep up a huge dream journal, and my dreams are, for me, just as exciting and interesting as my regular life.

Personally, I do believe that our dream world is synonymous with the astral plane. I believe the extremely mercurial nature of our dreams is due to "coloration" by our waking mind, because the dreams we can remember are those we experience when we're partially awake. The more awake we are, the more our dreams are colored by our conscious thoughts, worries, environment, and physical senses. When the ratio is at 100% asleep: 0% awake, I have little doubt that our deep dreaming -- our nightly experiences on the astral plane -- are more stable, consistent, and perhaps more profound, than the "adulterated" taste of the astral plane that we get in our remembered dreams.

Ro said:

"the dreams we can remember are those we experience when we're partially awake."

Hmmm. I wonder if you dream differently than I do, Ro! I've recorded hundreds of dreams, many quite vivid, and it's my impression that I'm 100% asleep during many—or even most—of them.

Now sometimes I do recall dreams that occurred in the hypnagogic state, so I know what that feels like. But to say that the *only* ones we remember take place when we're partially awake doesn't feel right to me. What's the experience of you other readers?

Not that it really matters, Ro, but are you male or female (or other)? Your name has me perplexed. :)

Hi Bruce,

When I say I believe we are partially awake during the dreams that we recall, I don't mean that we are groggily lapsing between sleep and waking as though we're in full hypnopompic mode. I just mean that, in my admittedly anecdotal hypothesis, the dream/astral world is our unconscious mind, and it is completely closed to us unless it is illuminated by at least a shred of waking consciousness. When you sleep and are able to remember the dream, I would suggest that you are not 100% asleep during those times, but that the ratio is more like 98% asleep: 2% awake, so that a small sliver of waking consciousness is aware of, is able to bring back, and is even coloring what is taking place in your dream. You may believe you are "100% asleep," but I would suggest that you're close to 100%, but not quite that far gone; I'd bet that you still retain a teeny-tiny sliver of waking conscious during those times. The times that you are truly 100% asleep and are dreaming, I believe those dreams would be very difficult to remember or comprehend, or would fade very quickly like sand through fingers, because they did not have the spotlight of consciousness to bring them into one's waking awareness. They were only experienced by your deep unconscious, which operates on completely different thrusters than the waking awareness of the physical world.
This is just my interpretation as a long-time fascinated dreamer.

I am a woman in my early 40s. Ro is a contraction of my name. :-)

Thanks for the clarification(s), Ro! I think it's cool that your dream life is such a thrilling adventure for you.

“There can be intrusions from other dimensions or timelines, resulting in anomalous phenomena. This is essentially what I mean by "bleed-through.”

Michael, Matt, I like the idea of bleed-through. It’s close to my own way of perceiving these things, for which I long ago adopted the phrase “intersections.” It’s my way of describing intrusions from other realms or states of consciousness.

And my favorite insight into such anomalies is perhaps best demonstrated in the analogy of Lord Sphere, as he intersects the plane of Flatland. For just as there is no way—NO WAY—that a Flatlander can ever understand such an intrusion, there is no way we, from our Earthly perspective, can EVER understand what’s happening with respect to the sorts of events we’re discussing, be they ET’s, the afterlife state, past lives—you name it.

The best we can do, when we’re lucky or brave, is to learn of such things through our own spiritually transformative experiences. With the caveat being that once we return to ordinary consciousness, only echoes of the truth remain.

Which brings to mind a book I’m currently reading and loving: Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.”

Thanks for your great posts over the years, Michael, that keep these marvelous mysteries rolling around in my mind.

@Ro:
"the dream/astral world is our unconscious mind, and it is completely closed to us unless it is illuminated by at least a shred of waking consciousness. When you sleep and are able to remember the dream, I would suggest that you are not 100% asleep during those times,"

A few decades ago the Maimonides (sp?) dream lab in Brooklyn woke people up when they were in REM mode and asked them about their dreams. I don't know if those dreams differed from the ones we remember or not.

Here's a quote I posted before but not in threads as relevant as this one:
------------

Upstairs in his Evanston, Illinois home, Dr. J. Allen Hynek leaned back in his office chair, puffed on his pipe and explained his thinking on the theoretical presence of UFOs in our world to Quinlan.

Between the nucleus of the atom and the outside electrons there is relatively as much space as between the sun and the planets. There is a lot of space in matter. Matter is almost a vacuum really.
There could be interlocking universes. The cultists have been saying that for centuries but that’s not science.
If I had to be pressed to the wall for a hypothesis I would say we live in a multi-dimensional spacetime continuum and the typical world we see around us represents a cross-section through that.
Look at the evidence that these things are reported to do. They appear very suddenly and disappear very suddenly. The question is where are they right now? Where is this thing that visited these two in Mississippi [Pascagoula Abduction] right now physically?
Time and again I’ve had reports of where a sort of fuzzy cloud appears around them and then the whole cloud disappears. Almost like ectoplasm disappearing into another dimension.
They violate gravity. They take off with enormous acceleration without any sonic boom. A physical object can’t do that. They make right angle turns. Any object with appreciable mass can’t do that.
They behave more like holographic images, like projections, more than physical things. Yet they produce real physical effects, stop cars, frighten animals, break branches, leave marks on the ground, and in that sense they are almost like poltergeist phenomena. Nobody knows what they are but they’re pretty well documented.
That is why I say think the UFO phenomenon is a signal of another domain of nature that we haven’t explored yet.

||They appear very suddenly and disappear very suddenly.||

They could be plasma balls, because that's exactly what a plasma ball would do. They could also not be, but there is no need to postulate bleeding from other dimensions for it.

Juan, have you read this book? I found it generally persuasive, with the exception of the "Phoenix lights" case, which doesn’t impress me.

https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Officials/dp/0307717089

In case the link doesn’t work, the book is "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record," by Leslie Kean.

I haven’t read much about UFOs, but these cases seem pretty airtight, unless they’re being grossly misrepresented.

I experience what might be called "reincarnational bleedthroughs" fairly regularly, both in the conscious waking state and in dreams. I accept them, but also allow for the possibility that, possibly, I am simply imagining them, although if I focus on this, I remember that "imagination" is one of the primary doorways to inner worlds.

One particular experience was much more intense than others -- it was certainly not an everyday experience, and too strong to be "mere imagination."

I was sitting in the back room of a coffeehouse/cafe in Marblehead, MA, in 1983 or so with a woman friend. The decor featured cable spool tables; the room was dark, lit by candles.

Without warning I was simultaneously in a barn in France during WWI with a young French woman. "I" was wearing a uniform.

This "bleedthrough" lasted for a long moment.

A kind of bleedthrough -- but involving "probable" selves, not "reincarnational" selves, can be initiated by doing the exercise found at the beginning of Session 687 in Seth's _The "Unknown" Reality_ Volume One.

Per my understanding, both types of experience involve accessing what could be called "information" that resides in the "region of self" (my term) Seth refers to as the "soul or entity" linked to the "outer personality" or "outer ego" by the "inner self," although Seth stresses that there is no place where any of these start, the other begins.

Although some would place the "soul or entity" in the "unconscious," there's nothing even slightly unconscious about it -- that's a belief or view of the "outer personality" that is quite biased.

Per Seth, probable realities are created whenever anyone makes a choice, but this can be extended beyond personal realities and here is where Michael's use of "bleedthrough" in relation to UFOs (and other experiences) makes great sense to me.

Another part of this, though, has to do with perception -- I could provide a variation of Seth's teachings on this but if anyone is actually interested in those teachings, I suggest they get this more directly by reading Seth's words, not my paraphrasing, but note that Seth spoke through an entranced Jane Roberts from 1963 until her death in 1984; later explanations are often somewhat more sophisticated.

Meanwhile, I've just finished Gary Lachman's _Lost Knowledge of the Imagination_. The book features a number of "esoteric" thinkers, some very well known(Lachman is something of an historian of the esoteric).

Here you can find ideas and concepts that have much in common with some of core concepts of Seth's teachings, but expressed by human personalities -- writers, philosophers, etc. -- not an invisible "energy personality essence no longer focused in physical matter" as Seth described himself.

(Ms. Roberts at one point questioned her sanity -- was Seth real? -- and was thoroughly tested by a professor of psychology, but as with UFOs and "psi" in general, who ultimately decides what is "real" and what isn't?)

Here's a 34-page pdf on the topic (_The Problem of Seth's Origin: A Case Study of the Trance-Possession Mediumship of Jane Roberts Paul Cunningham Rivier College_ for anyone who wishes to wade through it):

https://www2.rivier.edu/faculty/pcunningham/Research/Problem_of_Seths_Origin.pdf

Bill Ingle,
Thanks for the link to Mr. Cunningham's paper considering possible sources of the Seth personality of Jane Robert. It is clearly written and thought provoking, well worth the time required to read it. - AOD

One example of bleed-through no one's mentioned is the appearance of mysterious strangers. The most famous of these is said to be the case of a man in 1954 who's said to have arrived at a Japanese airport and claimed that he came from the non-existent country of Taruad. The Taruad case might be urban legend, exaggerated retelling of a Cold War spy story, or something else. But there do seem to be many stories of mysterious strangers speaking strange languages and hailing from non-existent countries.

And then there are fictional animals such as the unicorn that might be bleed-through. Occasionally,animals that are thought to be myth, like the giant squid, or kraken, actually turn out to be real though.

Hey Bill,

I'm reading that paper on Seth whose link you posted. Much appreciated!

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