Let's talk DimensionalJumping! Any techniques, philosophies, stories, and experiences welcome
Some of my favorite experiences on Speztopia were forged in and throughout the DimensionalLeaping/Jumping/Shifting subreddits, where I quickly came to understand and appreciate a variety of methods and principles underpinning the idea that our conscious experience is only part of the equation (and yet, at the same time, is all that there is). Such thoughts as "we are all collectively dreaming one another into existence," "advaita vedanta nondualism and its implications," and other notions were uniquely inspiring to me.
I began to have experiences of my own, when I meditated on the Oneness that had been revealed to me. There were instances where I would wake up and realize that minor things in my everyday had been altered subtly. One morning I had a very vivid dream (or perhaps, a true experience--because what really is the difference?) of witnessing my own death. It was somewhat traumatic, if I'm being honest. But I arose following that incident and realized that the hot and cold water knobs at my sink had changed seemingly out of nowhere. It was also the case that a close friend of mine and I were suddenly no longer in an argument, despite it being a rather trying and difficult situation--he had no memory of it having ever transpired, and insisted I was making things up. There were other small things like that, that I began to notice as I wandered around my college campus. Events that I vividly recalled attending had never happened, or were about to happen the next day.
I had made what I knew then to be a "discontinuous breach" or an acute dimensional shift, an abrupt and often confusing repatterning of a worldline in ways that is not congruous or otherwise defies certain expected patterns/physical laws/metaphors. This is compared to a continuous breach, one that occurs in ways too subtle to recognize, in a series of understandable and acceptable steps, or otherwise in keeping with the established order.
As I have grown in my experience and understanding of nondualism, just as I have gained some answers, I find that ultimately I am left with ever more questions. I think others who participate in intentionally weirding one's quantum consciousness know what I'm talking about.
I wanted to start the conversation here in the hopes of a sustained community discussion about and around these ideas. TriumphantGeorge, if you're here: Your tutelage and constant availability for bouncing ideas off of was nothing short of heroic, in my mind. I still number you among my mentors and appreciate so much the time and effort you took to open my mind to a whole new way of thinking. Being strictly dualistic throughout my childhood, learning that there was another way of conceiving of things opened countless doors in my life.
An open question in addition to an invitation to share: What are your favorite methods for astral projection? I find that I am somewhat resistant to most elementary or straightforward projection techniques, so the more complex and systematic, the better!
I tried out some of this stuff, I can highlight some of my experiences.
Someone on an IRC gave me a healing session where they talked about what they were doing and asked me if I felt anything. I didn't feel anything.
Another person, also on an IRC, insisted that they were capable summoning lightning. I've drilled them on the topic for a few minutes, and their idea of magically summoning lightning was sitting outside and looking at a tree during the lightning storm until lightning hit.
Others have played terrible curses upon me as a result of me disagreeing with them on these topics around the internet. To date, no terrible curses have been following me, I have taken to saying that I have an invulnerable and invincible occultic shields surrounding me that prevents any curse from affecting me. In reality, they just don't work.
There are forum threads where people have talked about astral projection, putting a little card up on the top of a nightstand so that they can go read it. I remember the forum thread being a little bit hilarious because everyone was really insistent that someone should go test this. People were sure that someone would be able to do this to prove that they could astral project, but yet nobody showed up to say they had succeeded. Why? Because nobody had ever succeeded. They aren't actually going out of their body, they were just having a lucid dream. They had no knowledge available to themselves which was not already accessible to their mind.
Dimensional jumping is another iteration of this sort of thing. Most occult practices rely on lots of mind tricks in order to function. This one in particular uses memory. Your memory is very bad, and most people don't realize that. Studies have been done where people were ask questions about a event that they were never part of, and most of them said they weren't. Days later they were asked that question again and about half of them said that yes, they did that.
Every time we recall a memory we screwed up a little bit, so even when you close your eyes and open them after a few minutes, if you're looking for things that are different in your room then they were before it's going to be very easy for you to convince yourself that they have changed even if they haven't.
In this world, you should be far more prone to believe that your brain isn't doing its job correctly than you are to believe the world is changing around you, because basically every time anyone has tried to test this sort of thing, it turns out it's brain trickery and not physics trickery.
So for those of you here who are new to this topic, as I was once when I was 17 or so on the internet, you can waste your time looking into it, just remember that this is brain trickery and you should be very cognizant of the fact that a lot of these techniques are going to try to fool you. It's very possible you fall for it, and if you do you're going to go down a rabbit hole of false beliefs that's going to suck down years of your life and spit you back out with nothing to show for it.
I'm sorry that it sounds like you've had predominantly negative experiences with these fringe philosophies and beliefs. I will say that in essence, everything we experience is some form of brain trickery or another—it may seem trivial to assign validity to one lived-experience over another, especially when analyzing it under purely scientific auspices, but there is surely a matter of faith involved, too. Much of what dimensional leaping involves builds on ancient belief systems, like advaita vedanta, and other forms of nondualism. Trying to test the validity of faith and the soul with current scientific tools and methodologies would, I believe, be similar to attempting to detect radiation with tools calibrated in the 1500s. Being an empirically-minded individual myself, I hold out hope that some day we will in fact have such an ability. I can only say, again as someone who believes in empiricism, that I have had far more mystifying and bizarre experiences since I set down this path; experiences that have been corroborated by others beyond myself. I accept that the brain can be lacking when it comes to its ability to recall accurately. I think science and faith are actually arguing for the same or similar things, but from opposite ends of the candlewick if you will. Whether or not that is a bunch of hooey or not truly hinges on perspective; I respect your perspective and viewpoint but I do not share it, in short.
Thank you for your engaging and detailed response to my post!
Rupert Spira's works are what got me started down this rabbit hole, and on the off chance you were interested in looking more into nondualism, that would be my recommendation for reading.
Somewhere around 20-ish years ago (my latter high school/early college years) I was deeply interested in the idea of astral projection, among a host of other topics that would have fallen under the blanket term "paranormal." I read a lot of online guides and practiced daily, and can honestly say I had some of the strangest experiences of my life as a result. I was frustrated though, because even though I was able to trigger the buzzing or vibrating sensations that people described as the precursor to astral projection, the experiences that followed were (to me) very obviously lucid dreams (which was, incidentally, another interest of mine).
It was during this period of frustration that I picked up one of Robert Monroe's books (I believe it was Far Journeys, but may have been one of the others from his Journeys trilogy). Reading it was extremely discouraging. My strongest recollection was how it described the astral realm (and I am heavily paraphrasing from distant memory here) as resembling but not being a one-to-one mirror of the physical plane. For example your house may take on a different or shifting layout; objects that exist in the physical may appear different, or not appear at all; you may encounter objects, people, or entities that exist only in the astral plane and have no analog in the physical. To my mind it was the final nail in the coffin--discovering that even astral projection "experts" who publish books on the subject are almost certainly having lucid dreams and just not recognizing or describing them as such, since the "astral plane" they describe is, for all intents and purposes, entirely indistinguishable from a dream world.
It helped to launch a swing for me in the direction of science, reason, evidence, and skepticism, and now I can recognize the experiences I had back then (and still experience) as things like sleep paralysis, hypnogogic hallucinations, and other physically explainable phenomena. My purpose here is not to discredit or disparage your experiences in any way, but to express my own opinion that I believe such experiences can alternatively be explained by the fact that our only interface to the world and our own existence is the human brain--a squishy, fallible, mysterious organ that in addition to acting as our gateway to all external stimuli can inject its own creations, modifications, and "glitches" into our consciousness. And while it can be quite intoxicating to attribute these things to real external forces that defy our understanding of the universe and laws of physics, I have come to accept that the much more likely explanation is that they come from within instead of without.
That's not to say I don't still have an interest and find value in exploring these things. I've only recently started meditating regularly, and find that it's a gateway to some of the same experiences I had 20 years ago, and I'm very interested in continuing down that path of self discovery and learning just how much control it's possible to exert over my own consciousness and experience. So far I'm finding it just as (if not more) exhilarating as I did back then when I still believed astral projection was possible.
I'm not sure the fact that the astral plane is mutable and not grounded solely in the physical universe is itself evidence that those experiences were just lucid dreams--I have myself experienced data sharing through the astral plane. Confirmed that I received a message from another individual while I was asleep, a code word that would have been impossible to contrive any other way (aside from perhaps the infinitesimally small chance of blindly guessing it). It's my understanding that as one increases the frequency of astral travel (which often does indeed begin as a lucid dream, as lucid dreams can easily be understood as astral travels to adjacent universes, or universes that never were or never could be), one's ability to "tune in" closer and closer to the physical universe without "falling out" of the astral improves. There's a whole litany of soft and hard skills that one picks up through these sorts of explorations.
Meditation is definitely an excellent practice regardless of your intent. Many provable health benefits, the incredible mental stability aside. And you're right, learning to be present and experience real tranquility is where many subtle and spiritual experiences can begin. Thank you for your post :)
I do trust that you believe you received that message, but if such a thing were truly possible then it should also be possible to reproduce under controlled conditions. Any time claims like that have been put to the test, they have failed to produce results. And that is not to say that the claimer is always lying or intentionally being deceitful--often they truly believe their own claims and just didn't realize how they subconsciously became aware of the message when they had their experiences outside of a rigorously controlled environment.
This is what I mean by being entirely indistinguishable from dream worlds. How could you possibly tell the difference between something that your brain created entirely on its own versus something that actually exists in some fashion as an alternate universe?
My perspective is that as our body's sole experiential hub the brain is responsible for all our experiences, thoughts, and sensations--both interpreting and processing external stimuli as well as generating its own through the process of formulating ideas, thoughts, dreams, and so on. It just makes sense to analyze anything that a person is experiencing through the lens of whether or not their brain can explain it or not, which becomes quite boring because the answer is invariably that it can and that no external or non-physical force is ever necessary.
My opinion could easily be modified--all it would take is a claim such as the ability to divine otherwise unknowable code words or information from another person or location that could be reliably reproduced under controlled conditions. However even then my opinion and world view wouldn't be completely upturned; instead it would be modified to now include some form of telepathy as being another possible function of the brain and I would expect science to study it (probably in great depth with much enthusiasm, as it would be an exciting new field of study) and come up with new theories about the mechanisms behind it and add this new discovery to the existing scientific understanding of the universe.
In the off chance this is a doorway to an ARG, sign me up!
If it’s legit, what’s the overlap with lucid dreaming? I’ve been wanting to get back into that.
Hey there! Nope, not an ARG. It's all the real deal interestingly enough.
Lucid dreaming is, in a sense, a "clue" to us that our waking reality may be more than it seems to be. After all, what ultimately makes a lucid dream any less real than our experience of being awake? We attribute one a "less real" nature because it is less permanent. We maintain certain consistencies between periods of dreaming, there is a solid and unchanging quality to our waking lives. But then again, speaking as one who has had vivid dreams in the past, I've had several dreams in my lifetime that felt extraordinarily real. To me, in a couple of them it felt as though I had spent several months in a relatively static and consistent dream world. I was exhausted when I woke up; the mental weight of having gone through several months in a dream was definitely a real experience to me in that moment.
If you get deep into this philosophy you start to think of dreams as just another form of experience. You might also begin to look at your waking life as just a particularly "sticky" dream in the sense that we have a lot of unconscious assumptions about the stability and unchanging quality of it. When you start to unravel and challenge some of those assumptions, the static and unchanging quality of waking life begins to erode as well. That's how you can force changes to occur through "directed idealism" or "active nondualism." Believing in your heart of hearts that you are in a dream-like universe allows you to become lucid while you're awake (oneirosophatic).
I recognize what I'm saying might be a bit overwhelming; it's hard for me to filter it having been so steeped in this stuff for so long. Suffice it to say that lucid dreaming is an excellent trailhead for an adventure that could very literally shape the course of your future for the better. You can very easily use lucid dreaming as a precursor to astral projection, but it's a worthy goal no matter how you decide to utilize it.
Your experiences sounds intriguing, but this is all way over my head! Do you have any introductory materials for someone unfamiliar with dimensional jumping or even know what it's about.
Absolutely, I'm glad you asked. As I stated in another comment, I relied mainly on Rupert Spira's works starting out (courtesy again of TriumphantGeorge). I'd suggest reading a copy of Presence volumes 1 and 2 if you can find a copy, although his website has a lot of the same material posted piecemeal for free. The didactic method (really, more of a one-sided socratic method) he employs to get the points across was very effective for me in particular, and helped me to really experience timeless oneness. Frankly it was far more of a moving and religious experience than I'd ever had before.
There's also a read-only archive, a trove of useful tidbits, methods, and ideologies still hosted on reddit. /r/DimensionalJumping should have more than a few trailheads for you :)