[John Freestone]

Originally Posted by cylon

A little frustrated at work today, but whatever. A lady I work with is there, she's off doing something, I'm thinking about her thinking "man she doesn't even like her job either" and right then she says (sarcastically) "I LOVE THIS JOB!" She was complaining.

For me this goes beyond LOA though. Maybe it's just tuning into someone's mood.

I wonder if you mean the LoA theory goes beyond this, like this doesn't necessarily support more psychic interpretations of the LoA.

I'm working it out and don't have a fixed position. I'm inspired by Ken Wilber and Ram Dass, etc., who would probably say that at some level we (you and your colleague, or all of us humans) are in the same place psychologically, and what you've done is tap into that realm of reality. If I'm not very much mistaken, what some debunkers like Derren Brown would say is that that is a very superstitious and completely wrong way of interpreting it, and in fact you are just getting very good at 'tuning into someone's mood', as you put it. Subconsciously, you are apprehending, remembering and comparing gazilions of bits of information from the context of your conversation, the whole of your previous relationship, all your previous similar experiences of being with human beings, and the minutiae of the person's current expression (what they're giving off at that moment in all sensory spheres from visual clues to pheromones to tiny twitches of muscles, micro-body-language) and it's popping a very near miss into your conscious mind (don't forget, that's what it is, you didn't predict exactly what she would say) in a purely probabilistic way, albeit with the brilliance of a large number of room-sized computers.

Just because you're a genius, that doesn't make you psychic! But I flip myself depending on what I'm reading and how much I'm meditating and so on. Sometimes I'm a real sceptic, other times I'm pretty damn sure that the rest of the world (I mean, the reductionists) have got it all wrong.

Oh! And yesterday I was running late, and said "just give me all the green lights" I must have gotten lucky, because I sailed through at least four major intersections (the ones I was worried about) in a row. I don't know how they time those things but I timed my intention with those traffic light regulators just in time. Probably saved me twenty minutes. But it's not the sort of thing I usually worry about, I'll take the traffic lights. But it was nice yesterday.

One further temptation for self-delusion (because it's so nice, all this playing god, and as you say, scary) here may be the counting of the run of lights. I'm no expert, but from what I observe in England, the lights are programmed in sequences related to each other. In other words, if you get to flow through one set, it is natural that you'll sail the next, and sometimes many more sets of lights. Other times, you'll get stuck at every one. Now, the human mind, having evolved to deal with questions of human motivation (our own and other people's), is prone to think that the Traffic-Light God is with or against us on those occasions, an illusion that is reinforced by going "My God, another one! And another! This can't be coincidence!"

...it is a challenge though. I don't have the problem of looking for coincidences so much as I have a bit of fear when I experience them so much, because like I said previously I was very skeptical and these "new" experiences do take a bit of time to get accustomed to, that reality may be different than what you perceived it to be. Sometimes I just say "yeah that's random" so I don't go nuts.

I know what you mean, cylon. I think I said earlier that this primitive decision-making process, the grasping at explanations, especially human or animalistic-deistic ones, increases as we get aroused (pardon me, I mean in physiological terms, not sexual terms!) - adrenaline and cortisol and what have you pumping through the body - that state makes us ready for action, it's the 'fight or flight' response, and it makes shadows in the trees appear like demons and confident liars appear like angels and will convince you subjectively of any number of things.

The trick is to relax. You can practice this when watching scary movies - concentrate on keeping your body relaxed when that severed head appears or the knive comes through the door, and you don't jump. I keep telling my partner, but still we have to keep mopping coffee up off the floor and I have to dig her fingernails out my arm again. In fact, I'm getting jumpy again waiting for her to shake me violently and scream in my earole!

Try it next time you're fearful of anything. Dark shapes in the trees, REAL situations with real people. What it does is set off the relaxation response, and that allows you to take in more of reality, be more comfortable with not knowing everything about the situation, and thus not jump to conclusions so easily. But of course we also get off on fear and adrenaline, we love our delusions. People say "I just KNOW what I felt in there!" and forever there was a ghost or an angel for their subjective reality.

It might be all there is, subjective reality, or it might not. Now are we going to dive in until we forget we ever thought the other way? What if we get more and more into I-M and almost accidentally forget there was another way of seeing the world, as we get so wrapped up in the excitement of the traffic light games?

SR is a bit like VR. If someone said, Hey, there's this theory nowadays that everything is virtual reality (and they do), would you just live online forever, deny the reality of the burgers you keep stopping to cram, and the visits to the toilet? The great sages often don't even deny the existence of external, objective reality, but might say that it's just one kind of reality, one level, or they will say that it's relatively real, and the truth of an Absolute Reality (the Void or whatever word they might use) doesn't make fish and people and traffic lights suddenly disappear. Physics is the same - it has the insight that walls are almost entirely empty space, but it doesn't stop it hurting when you walk into one.