Sometimes, I think I'm in Hell

[stuckinthemiddle]

I’m curious – if discussion of simulation theory is so common these days, why do you feel it is a bad thing? If we are in a simulation and it is being discussed, isn’t it possible that discussing such a thing is a good thing?

The New York Times recently had a piece arguing that we shouldn’t try to figure out if we are in a simulation as it might “upset” the simulators. But I felt it was a shortsighted view of the topic, as it already is a common topic of discussion especially as we hit boundary conditions on the universe in physics.

Might not a discussion about the nature of a simulation also lead to discussion about a “win” condition for our universe? Better understand the purpose of things?

Our minds seem quite able to manifest our fears/desires/insecurities/fantasies.

As to your point about Christianity and Jesus being the son of God…

What if the point was that all of us were the Son of Man and the Son of God? Maybe Jesus’s message got a bit mixed up in the roughly 40 years between his death and when scholars think Mark got around to writing his version of events (which both Luke and Matthew copy passages of verbatim, so they likely came even later, and John includes Gnostic aspects that put it more likely around 200-300AD).

In particular, one passage that comes to mind is when Jesus is eating from a field on the sabbath and gets criticized. He responds that man wasn’t made for the sabbath, but the sabbath was made for man, so as the Son of Man he is king of the sabbath. The clear later interpretation of that passage was “Jesus was special so only HE was the king of the sabbath,” but was that really Jesus’s point? Aren’t we all sons of man? Doesn’t scripture cite that all of us are children of God made in His image?

A lot of people that find themselves to this forum believe or believed themselves to be Jesus come again. But what does that really end up meaning? That they are an incarnation of God as a human being? Well certainly Genesis suggests the very thing. And if we look across the pond at Eastern religions, they too suggest the very concept. Maybe literally thinking we are Jesus is going a bit overboard on the specificity, but the idea that we have divine natures isn’t that far off the mark.

If you are the child of God, does that mean if you let your fears run wild they will become palpably real for you? Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening. Maybe it’s not that you lack faith in God, but that you lack faith in yourself.

Try forgiving yourself any past transgressions. Recognize that you deserve happiness. Recognize that everyone deserves happiness (yes, even terrible people – “forgive them for they know not what they do”).

Because if you deserve happiness, and if everyone does, and you are yourself a child of a supreme being, then maybe the reality you find yourself in – not the one that we all share (which to be fair isn’t one we can simply decide to be different without working together with others) – but the terrible reality you and only you are experiencing, that your step-father doesn’t remember (or anyone remembers)…maybe that aspect of reality is something you can change.

Try it. Pick a small aspect of it. Maybe deny “them” their existence. Why would there be any being in between yourself and God? Sure, we could all probably imagine some version of reality where it’s a dystopia and we’re being controlled for some reason…but is that any more likely that a utopia where the way the world is has a greater purpose like teaching us empathy and right and wrong by way of experiencing the effects of it firsthand? Or how to control our consciousness in a world that won’t change no matter how we think it might?

From all appearances on this forum you are an intelligent and well read person. And that intelligence can be a double-edged sword when your mind escapes your control. We all know the experience of what happens when our minds create an alternate reality and makes the dots connect in such a way that the resulting picture feels as real if not more real than the one everyone else sees. But maybe you can seize back the reins by re-drawing the picture.

I found it easier to start with something insignificant to try this out, like a coin. Can you take a coin and stare at it, and force yourself to believe it is somehow connected to a sinister world? Can you then change your mind and believe that it’s the key to preventing that sinister world? Can you go back to thinking that it’s just a coin you picked up? It’s a bit of a silly exercise, but if you can do it with the coin, it should be possible to do with everything else.

Also, it became much easier to manage these ideas for myself when I accepted that I was no more or less inherently special than others. I couldn’t let go of the paranoia while still holding on to the idea that I was “chosen” or “destined” for great things, no matter how I tried to alter the parameters with the coin trick. It’s not that bad being on the whole average. In fact, I strongly suspect that the reason there’s an inflection point for Dunning-Kruger at around 75% is that it’s the ideal place to be. When you are in the very top percentile at something, it’s very isolating and lonely so your brain tries to assume more people are as skilled as you are. When you are in the bottom, you want to be better than you are.

So maybe don’t strive to be number 1 or number 2. Just aim for roughly number 1,925,000,000 (75th percentile of 7.7 billion). Given that we all tend to regress towards that mean anyways, chances are we’ll be much happier being one of many than “the one.” Including being better able to let go of a version of reality in which we are persecuted for our specialness.

[insidemind]

I will respond to this and maybe other posts later. I’m on my phone. I realize you are an intelligent, well thoughtout guy. I appreciate your feedback.

[insidemind]

Thank you for your response. It’s because of my memories that I really do struggle. I’ve been abducted by real aliens a lot, sometimes they were fake like in the military or Illuminati or something. I call them Milabs and so do others on the internet. It’s very scary and sometimes I died. I’ve lived countless lives. The longer I live, the more I remember. I was told in a past life I was in a causal loop. That’s what it certainly feels like except reality does change a little bit for me.

It’s hard to tell what’s real sometimes. I cannot remember being alive or conscious before 2011. I can feel, notice, and sense, and even see when my mind transfers bodies or goes through space (like Michio Kaku talked about recently).

I was told in a past life by the military they don’t care what mental illness I have. I know I’ll never serve, which is fine by me. In a past life, they told me I was a super soldier. It’s some stupid project. I have to follow a script of reality because the person who was alive in 2010/2011 wasn’t me but a consciousness copy or something. A different version of me. I had my mind uploaded to a computer over a trillion lifetimes ago. I lose count on how many past lives I’ve had – not that it matters. I heard over 7000 one time. But I hate the mental hospital and I hate going back in time. I’m tired of being seen as a crazy person. I admit I do have real psychiatric issues. If I could work and go to school, I’d be fine.

They can and do wipe memories. The aliens did let me join the military in a past life via consciousness transfer and manipulating time. Furthermore, I’m afraid the military will use my brain after I die for experiments or possibly put me in another computer program. I’m 100% confident the military doesn’t run the program, but human looking aliens.

This is just a glimpse of what I’ve been through over the years in my head and thinking. I have to strive to get better and heal. Every time I die, I start back again. Similar to source code (movie) and edge of tomorrow (movie). Except for me, it is hell or worse sometimes. These two movies are just examples that I have thought about. I think about how the mind moves through time and relate it back to me and maybe they’re doing it to all of us except I have a keen insight into this. I have memories of being teleported and stuff by the computer simulators and stuff popping in and out of existence for example like this were in a video game. Like time was resetting or going back to normal. Very strange stuff I still recall in my past lives.

I don’t know what else to say. No one believes me and for good reasons. I don’t want them to. Not anymore. I do have a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia but I’m healing and getting better. My vision was so bad, I was in mental agony 24/7. I’m at peace now and I’m happy. Just trying to work on the motivation part and the hygiene aspect.

It would be ignorant to ignore the religious aspect of things and simulation theory. Maybe I’m making a bigger deal about it than I thought. Knowledge is important. But I think about Socrates, Copernicus, and Galelio for example. I’ve been tortured before many times in my past lives. I don’t want to repeat that scary and horrific experience.

I’ve seen the so called End of the World many times and lived through it. Some call it the New World Order or the Book of Revelations. Hopefully, it will never happen and we can all live happy and in peace or most of us. I would say God is in control but there are malevolent forces like aliens that are among us. I did not hallucinate those crafts in 2016. I’ve seen those in my causal loop thousands or millions of times.

I’ve seen green fire in the sky in my backyard. I’ve seen strange looking drones, one that don’t even look real one time. It was following my mom in the car. I’ve seen other things like my mom’s car shifting by itself but it could have been an accident. I got scared.

[stuckinthemiddle]

Do you think that at least one of your memories isn’t real? If you do, then you are left with an interesting situation. If at least one isn’t real, then it’s possible that more than one isn’t real. But there isn’t any effective way to discern which is real and which isn’t beyond finding out which ones other people have a shared consensus on, or simply choosing which ones to believe in and which ones to discard as byproducts of an overactive brain.

So choose.

Do you want to believe that your memory of something terrible that’s improbable according to general consensus is true? If not, chalk it up to your brain playing tricks that most people don’t have to deal with.

Your diagnosis comes with a lot of lame stuff you need to deal with. But there’s a power to the diagnosis too - you know that some things you experience simply aren’t real and are a symptom of a misbehaving brain chemistry.

I strongly suspect that the experience of sz roughly approximates the experience of someone without sz when on hallucinogenic drugs, but because that’s the default state of sz, one is never really able to “come down” from the dissociative state without successful response to AP drugs.

So without the ability to re-center yourself with the reference point of the reality of shared consensus, it’s really hard to correct course when fears take over and start defining reality.

But you can Google pretty much any one of the sensations you’ve had along with the term “DMT” or “LSD” and you’ll probably see very similar experiences. Now - is this because this is some sort of hidden truth that can be revealed with a fluid mind? Meh, probably not. Some of the tropes that occur more commonly now don’t predate their points of reference (i.e. experiences of being abducted by aliens before the 1950s). It’s more likely that our brain isn’t that creative so it pulls from material it’s been exposed to in constructing a divergent reality that conforms to whichever trope fits with an experience based on physiological foundations (such as an out-of-body experience manifesting pre-50s as a spiritual communion and post-50s as an alien abduction based on which reference material was most accessible to an excited brain).

Which is really empowering, as it means that the reality our mind creates for us isn’t something fixed and static. Because just as there’s reports of drug trips experiencing being on a table examined by aliens or being in hell, there’s also reports of experiences of euphoria and a sense of wonder and majesty.

I really do think self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others is key. For me, I simply couldn’t run away from my paranoid thought loop until I sat down, and really thought about if I forgave myself. I’m not perfect. But I’m certainly “mostly” a good person. And I still couldn’t escape it as long as I thought that others deserve punishment either. So I forgave them too. I decided Hell is simply a bad person’s idea of heaven, where they can hurt people because that’s what they enjoy (and with our knowledge of simulations and the Turing test, that could simply be a GTA-style simulation with NPCs that don’t really experience anything but are convincing enough to fool people). Maybe everyone gets whatever they want after this life, and part of this world being the way it is is so that people can figure out what their idea of paradise is by having a balanced and random reference against which they could define what they think would be better.

The other key to breaking the thought pattern was recognizing that when something isn’t observed, it’s every possible thing (which we know is “real” at the smallest level of reality). And what’s interesting, is that the property can apply backwards in sequentiality (the “quantum eraser” concept). So I basically decided to stop observing a version of reality that only I could observe that I didn’t like, and only observe/recognize it as possibly being real and not a figment of my imagination if I actually liked it. Because both heaven and hell are equally “real” as concepts, and both are at a physical level equally accessible for a wandering mind, but it’s a lot harder to manifest a world of positivity when we are angry at ourselves or others.

And I think you’re spot on when you say “I may be making a bigger deal about it than I thought.”

Do you believe in God? Do you trust God? Then trust that things are going to be alright in the end. Personally, I’ve been entertaining the idea that the lack of punctuation in ancient languages caused a bit of a misinterpretation when the first commandment was “You shall have no gods before me.” Maybe it was “You shall have no gods before ‘me’”? Basically, don’t put the pursuit of religious truth above your own well-being. If God exists and we are part of God’s intention, then we exist for a reason, and it may well not be God’s intention that we spend all of our time obsessing over the how and why of things and should just trust the process a bit more. Life is so complex and dynamic and filled with such a vast array of experiences. Part of free will means that we can go down the rabbit hole of thinking about the unknowable, but we probably shouldn’t do that excessively to the point it negatively impacts us, and should probably only do that to the extent that the pursuit of observing the unobservable is enjoyable as a concept and not frustrating as an impossibility.

My favorite Socrates quote is “All that I know is that I know nothing.” Nothing in life is certain. And because of that generalized uncertainty, a better compass to guide our assumptions of what is real or isn’t might better be “will this make me happy?” as opposed to “do I think this is plausibly real?” Because an infinite number of things might be plausibly real, which leads to circular reasoning and downward spirals of thought. But theoretically, by A/B testing concepts and ideas, we can define a singular version of what we believe about the world that makes us the happiest. So if you believe you deserve to be happy (which is its own hurdle to get past), then the next step logically would be “what can I change about my current situation to help achieve that result?” You seem like you are on the right path with some of the physical stuff like living a healthier life. Maybe applying the same process to the mental stuff can help start moving in a positive direction on that front as well. Or at very least, recognizing that the unknowable is less important in the immediate than the knowable of friends, family, and self-care.