A Journey of Psychic Journeys, Part 1
What is happening to me?
I’ll tell you a story, of my multidimensional self. ;) If you’ve seen the show Severance, this might make more sense to you, because it feels like I have multiple selfs with different paths and memories. Yet, they are also connected.
Character 0: The Religious Self
Character 1: The Truth Seeker
Character 2: The Renegade Scientist / Batman
Character 3: The Psychic
Character 4: The Coach
Character 5: The Self
These are not all the roles I’ve played in the last few years, but are the ones most relevant to psychic development.
Character 0: The Religious Self
As a young adult:
I want to know everything about personal revelation, and I want to witness my own spiritual experiences, like the stories I’ve heard about in scripture and modern cases as well. I want to do everything right, be as perfect as I can be, so that the Spirit can be with me. As you never know what insight may be incredibly important, like a warning to avoid danger or help someone. I do proactively find ways to help people and sometimes wonder if my ideas or desire to help is from the Spirit.
I pray very often, and have done experiments of trying to pray always. I practice writing down personal insights on a regular basis. I study the scriptures every day; obedience and diligence is what makes it likely for me to have personal insights. It feels right. In contrast, when I’m not following a rule or commandment, I feel anxious. I love obedience, and seem to be significantly more obedient than most people in my religion. During my two-year mission, it was stressful when my companion was doing something wrong or the situation made it hard to follow the mission rules. Love is most important, but not being obedient could cause me to not have the Spirit with me and miss out on an impression to help someone. At least with obedience, it’s clear what I’m supposed to do.
As the years passed into my late twenties:
I maintain my diligence and religious studies every day, but I’m no longer feeling very fulfilled at Church or like I’m progressing. I feel like I’m waiting for a more interesting assignment that would allow me to fully use my skills and be more helpful, and am planning to ask for one. However, I love being a nursery worker and its lack of structure, which often allowed for meaningful conversation with parents. I realized the deep conversations about personal topics of interest are more meaningful to me than religious class material.
I use my skills elsewhere. Day-to-day, most of my energy is going into a tech startup as an interim CTO (or various other job titles), where I often work overtime, in addition to my hourly paid job as a data scientist.
2022
A few months before my reality crashed, I had a couple other major shifts. I decided to leave the tech startup where I had dedicated myself intensely for two years and was running most of the company, without pay. I was rethinking my career, decided to prioritize personal finances, and got a certificate in project management.
Around the same time I also decided to go barefoot, 24/7, to overcome my running injuries (which worked, to a large degree). At that point I was clearly a rebel.
The end of the beginning
My wife declared she was leaving our religion. What does that mean for our “eternal marriage”?
I’m angry, and distraught. There must be some solution to this. She’s probably focusing too much on biased material. I’ll use my skills in project management to draft a plan to experiment with testimony seeking the next month as a final attempt, and send that to her.
She recommended I read the CES letter she just read, as that’s what persuaded her to finally make the decision to leave. Okay, no problem, I’ll go through it and analyze the main arguments; that might resolve this.
I color-coded the arguments that were concerning. One stood out among the rest, which was not really about evidence: people have had spiritual experiences confirming to them that their religion is the one true religion. What makes my feelings of confirmation better than theirs? I was taught humility all my life, and now it’s humility and truth vs religion. Subjective isn’t enough anymore; I have to look for objective answers. At this point, I had to admit a lack of certainty.
The Religious Self died an ego death, but was transformed into other characters (other egos).
What is real? Am I going to die and that’s it?
Is the future undetermined, and anything can happen? No clear Second Coming? That actually feels freeing, in a strange way.
Character 1: The Truth Seeker
Left with an existential crisis, a reality crisis, and no job at the time, the data scientist in me kicked in and I decided to investigate spirituality objectively. I started analyzing previous miracles in a spreadsheet, so my wife told me about a movie of a near-death experience. Next was the Google search query which changed my worldview: “record of near-death experiences.” I did my own analysis of near-death experiences, read the work of others, and quickly learned that there were whole fields of science (Parapsychology, Near-death Studies) which had already demonstrated the reality of spiritual concepts for decades. This, after being taught my whole life that God wouldn’t allow reliable evidence so that we could have faith. What had led society to ignore this, which resulted in me not hearing about it until I searched for it?
Per my perspective: authority is what got in the way, whether that’s religious authority or the authority of scientific experts. I was looking at the wrong place for answers. Now I’m looking at the data directly to determine what’s most likely true, and learning from multiple experts while taking their opinion with a grain of salt. Mystics, scientists, mediums, out-of-body experiencers, you name it; anything tied to firsthand experience or statistics.
Character 2: The Renegade Scientist / Batman
The Truth Seeker found the answers that were most important to him fairly quickly, within a few months. But what about everyone else in the world? My family and relatives? I wish that others had given me persuasive arguments early on, so shouldn’t I help them learn what I learned? If someone had shown me what evidence there is for spiritual or metaphysical concepts, this would have been more effective than evidence against my religion, as I had prepared answers for that. Yet, few know about this because scientific authorities assume it’s pseudoscience, and parapsychology doesn’t have many full-time missionaries.
I needed a relatively unbiased way to take into account all data, including people’s experiences, to rank metaphysical theories, while taking into accounts the limitations of such data. AI and computational linguistics could do that, and this is my expertise. So, I founded the nonprofit Spiritual Data and used nderf.org’s dataset of near-death experiences as a starting point. I also applied for a PhD in Psychology, as I will probably need that to be convincing.
Like Batman, I’m on a mission to overcome corrupt authorities (or biased). To go against convention and use intellect as a super power. With principle: The solution to science must be worthy of trust. That’s why it’s a registered nonprofit. The data should speak for itself, whatever the answer to reality is.
There’s just one problem: For many people, intellectual evidence isn’t enough. There will always be room to doubt it’s reliability, or go on faith.
There’s evidence that some people can do psychic abilities reliably, so what if people could witness this in a way beyond doubt?
Character 3: The Psychic
If psychic abilities are possible, then I want to develop them. I want to push the limits of what I’m capable of, and become a human resource for what I’m studying as a scientist.
There are many psychic abilities people attest to: Telekinesis, levitation, astral projection. What do I focus on? I want to learn all of them. So, I started various classes, particularly for telekinesis and astral projection.
And thanks to MindValley, I decided to get a certificate in hypnotherapy.
To be contined in Part 2