A Quantum Immortal

Life is a movie. You sit in the cinema, watch it, eat some popcorn. Stuff happens to you all the time. You are passive.
But it’s not a normal movie. It’s a VIP cinema and a VIP movie.
You can change the script while it’s going on.

As you are watching it, if you don’t like the plot or theme of the movie, you can ask for a switch.

If you notice you are in a romantic comedy while you want drama, you can tell the conductor “less humor, more drama and plot twists”.
If you lack action in your life, just shout it out, and suddenly you’ll be a car chase, killing some dirty cops and sleeping with hot babes.

You can take the director’s seat of this movie. You usually just watch this movie… but it’s totally up to you to be the director.
Or, if you like the plot and the actors, just keep watching for a while… you can also change it later.

Reality is what happens when the tension between different people’s dreams is resolved.

I just work up from another dream.

I’m in a very tough place.
I don’t remember the details, but me and other people are all being picked on, monitored, punished for every mistake, real or imagined. Constantly. Severly. This has always been the situation.

Then, at some point, we discover the power of the do-over.
We find in ourselves an ability to go back in time, and Choose Again.
We start doing-over small things.
Gradually, we build up the power to do-over larger and larger tracks of time.

We take back our life, our freedom, our happiness. We reach the state of always being able to choose our absolutely optimal, happiest reality. It’s wonderful.

Cut to the next scene. I’m with family, about to do something cautious, “just in case”.
And then I get it.
With the power of do-over, I never ever have to be cautious again.

Being cautious is what’s holding me back, even after I found the do-over power.

With this power, I never ever have to be cautious again.
I can do what I want, when I want it … and if something really bad happens … I can always do-over, even do-over years or decades of my life if need be.

I wake up, and realize … this may apply to real life.

In this life, it feels like I don’t have any do-over power.
I certainly don’t _feel_ like I have the power to rewind time even one millisecond.

However, what may be happening, is that since I always do have this power, completely and fully, I am choosing to never use it right now, but rather explore each situation to its fullest. I can always “do-over all the way back” if I reach a fork I don’t like. Even dying – isn’t that the ultimate do-over?

Imagine the quantum multiverse, the one with every chance ever taken, with ever coin landing in a super-position of heads and tails … the multiverse with an infinite number of collapsed universes as parts of it.

Imagine a single timeline along this multiverse, cropping from it out a single four-dimensional universe.

Imagine a being, a soul, traversing this single timeline.

The soul remembers the infinite nature of the multiverse. The soul knows that everything happens at once, all possible outcomes materializing in different branches of the multiverse. The soul can only see one timeline at a time, it cannot be everywhere at once.

The soul has the power to rewind arbitrary short or long tracks of time. However, as long as she remembers she has this power, she keeps using and abusing it, only exploring “the most perfect reality”. By always staying on this one specific “perfect branch of the multiverse” and never accepting any setback, any downside, no matter how minor, the soul is missing out big time. It can never explore the true depth of the multiverse, because she is afraid of the “not perfect”. Perhaps it is even bound to a local maximum – it is on a “hill of goodness”, but because it doesn’t dare venture off this hill, it can’t reach the huge mountain awaiting it across the valley.

So in order to truly utilize her amazing powers, the soul makes a conscious choice. She vows to never use this rewind power until “the end”, until she really really needs to … until things get too shitty to stay. To make it so, she sets it up so that we forget we have this power. The soul remembers, but the mind doesn’t know … and so we continue on believing that we only have one life, that there may be such a thing as a “wrong choice”, where in fact all choices are equally beautiful and valid in a multiverse where you are free to do unlimited do-overs.

Imagine the power you would have if you remembered this simple fact.

And the kicker is – there are indeed infinite do-overs!

Read about Quantum Immortality.
You can never experience the “sensation of dying”.
Your consciousnesses is created from this physical reality.

All physical realities happen simultaneously in parallel universes. The many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is the one requiring the fewest philosophical assumptions. It is the best way I found to understand the concrete data we have about how the world actually works (if you’re not convinced that Quantum Mechanics is how the world works, please stop using your computer, because it depends on QM to function).

If I’m not mistaken, I just made a breakthrough, connecting there core parts of my worldview.

• I believe in the idea of “the multiverse”, the many-worlds interpretation of QM. That is the interpretation of QM that I adhere to.
• I also believe in the idea of Quantum Immortality – essentially the idea that there exist infinite versions of you, and you can never experience dying, then you are immortal and will literally live forever – we all are.
• Finally, on a personal note, I also believe in Zen Buddhism … my best yet very crude explanation of Zen would be “nothing really matters, just live your life and don’t worry too much”. It is the “religious” or spiritual attitude that has best served me personally over the years.

However, until now I haven’t made the connection between these three major parts of my belief. I haven’t realized that the reason nothing matters is because everything happens everywhere on some branch of the multiverse, and that “we” always get a do-over … because of the very way we define “we”, as something that is generated out of a physical reality.

There could be something more core to the definition of “we” or “I”, that isn’t derived from this physical reality … a soul, if you will … or perhaps it’s bullocks and everything is strictly physical. I don’t know if we will ever have the means of creating an experiment to separate a soul-less, completely physical universe, from a universe with “souls” … I think it’s more of a philosophical exercise.

In fact, there another “interpretation” that can be defined here … just like the many-worlds interpretation is by now one of the standard interpretations of QM, we can define a “soul interpretation” of the phenomenon of consciousness … and every person is then left to decide whether they identify with this interpretation or not … there can never be any physical experiment to distinguish between the “soul-less reality” and the “soul-full reality”, so it would be up to each person to make up their philosophical mind about the matter.

And so, the Soul Interpretation of Consciousness, combined with the many-world interpretation of QM, may lead to the conclusion at the core of this dream and that lies in the core of Conversations with God – you are all-powerful, you can do anything you want, you can check out multiple realities and do-over whenever you want … you just temporarily forgot how to do it.

Here is the content of a dream I just had (it’ 3:20 AM and I just woke up from my dream, had to write this down).

We’re having a gathering (friends? professional?). I am also due to participate in some sort of quiz tonight.
I am going to the airport to pick up someone and get them to that gathering (Anton? Antony?).
I pick them up, reach the gathering, take the quiz.

Perhaps even I am ready to have a lingering state of precognition – to know multiple realities and choose the ‘best’ one, to learn lessons from ‘potential timelines’ and apply them in my real timeline.
In my dream, I have no questions, I am confident, content and strong.

… and then I woke up. The sensation of the dream was so strong, I just had to write the above text before it faded away.

A few times in the last year I’ve had waking ephiphanies like that.
A sensation that All Is Well, I’ve Found My Place, There is Nothing to Fear.
It’s a feeling I can only describe as Connection with GOD.
And then, after a while, the feeling goes away.
And it’s so hard, dealing with the fact that this feeling is temporary. Not feeling like this, after feeling like this, is hard for me.

I’ve never been religious in my life, always the atheist, the realist … but after experiencing this feeling multiple times, I find myself longing for this feeling. For me, it’s been about six months since I last felt that. This is the first time I remember having this feeling while dreaming (the other times I was awake).

I usually don’t write my dreams, but I knew I had to write this dream down before it faded away.
It reminds me of the contents of the book Conversation with God (a book which I highly recommend and identify with!)
The next logical step after writing the above text was publishing it in my blog.
I’m also going to get in touch with the friends I remember from my dream, and check whether they have some sort of message for me.

Have you ever had such feelings in your life? A feeling you have found your place, know all the answers, are in a complete state of Flow, have no fear, on doubt, are Connected?
Do you know the feeling I talk about?

I’ve lived for 32 years without ever experiencing that … and in my 33th year had multiple separate experiences like that … it’s perfectly ok if you haven’t. If you did happen to experience something like what I’ve described, please do share it with me, either in the comment section or in a private message.