The LCS can and does manipulate the import of certain rationalizations, emotions and everything else inside ones mind to manifest the optimal way for all IUOC’s to grow in the long term.

I realize that this is done with good intentions, but it is creepy nonetheless. I personally don't like being manipulated, especially when my own vision for personal growth is in conflict with my oversouls/LCS vision.

Can anyone give me some advice as to how to better communicate with the larger consciousness system? It would be much appreciated.

Your data stream from The Big Computer does get filtered before it gets to you. You could not handle a huge stream of data. But in no way does the LCS manipulate anything in your mind. You have free will to make any choice you want. And by getting feedback from those choices is how you evolve.

The best way to communicate with the LCS is to meditate. You have to stop your internal dialog before you can do anything in NPMR.

Subject: Synchronicities and other manipulations from the LCS
Thank you very much for your reply.

Indeed the best way to communicate with the LCS would be to get more proficient at meditating and shutting up the voice in my head. Until now I've not been successful at keeping a regular meditation schedule, and even though I've had some succes at the time I started, that experience has mostly faded as I stopped for a year. Right now the LCS (could also be my oversoul, even though I dislike that word) has found some ways to interact with me in the sense that I notice the subtle messages and steering it offers.

But sometimes it has been not so subtle. For instance, one time it blocked acces to some files on my computer I had encrypted. This happend after I got home from some friends who somehow were behaving very abnormally, and were very much trying to convince me to stop with my job for which I needed that encrypted file. Also randomly another friend came to that house in the night even though he normally would not have been welcome there, but it did fit the narrative of that synchronicity perfectly.

This has been something I've noticed maaaany (~50 times) times since then; friends randomly asking to come by or asking me to come, nearly always exactly at the right time. This means that even though all these people have free will, they still get a (strong) hint from the LCS to contact me. Sure, they choose to act on it, but their free will is mostly limited to whatever options come up in their mind from which they can easily choose. It is pretty hard to actively add options yourself. You can get better at this I'm sure, but most of the time people are just running along with their daily lives making decisions whenever something comes up. Most people are not all that spontaneous and only try to be actively creative a small portion of the time. (in my experience)

In this sense free will is already limited. Now when a LCS comes in that hints people options to choose from, and perhaps even alters the probability of you wanting to choose it by making it more or less seemingly attractive, you can see how I've come to call it manipulation.

It is true that most, if not all of the time these 'manipulations' will be for the best. That is, the best according to the probable future database for the entirety of involved IUOC's. Many times people are just self destructive or plain dumb (including myself). I've noticed that the LCS at times changed some small things in my reality to help guide me or mitigate the damage I've done to myself. Most times I've been appreciative of that help, but sometimes I didn't agree with where it steered me to. It is frustrating when you have ideas for your future, or when you just seek some short term pleasure, you feel some pressure leading you away. It could also be that this pressure solely comes from me agreeing with the LCS or simply disagreeing with myself, but this doesn't take away from the other things I said.

To get a better sense of where I'm coming from, I've been standing mostly still for about 2 years now, mostly passive and apathetic to things that once exited me. I've found no way to get control of myself, and every time I did, it wouldn't take long before I fell back to my usual behavior. Also I've had a job that was very comfortable, but very unhealthy in ways and had no future to it. Then there is also me having some very unhealthy friendships that I should get out of, but really can't find a way. These three things, combined with me having tried to find ways to rebel against this new paradigm and it's implications for my reality, have led to some very strange situations.

Right now things are going much better luckily.

One last thing that is important to note; most notable things only happen whenever I'm alone. either that or in the company of people that are not sober and will not notice or take it serious anyway.

I don't know if you'll agree with me, but let me paraphrase some things Campbell wrote if I remember correctly: This PMR is like a kindergarten with many restrictions to limit the ability of IUOC's to damage each other or themselves so they have an optimal growth potential for rapid learning and entropy reduction. Also something in the line of: During sleep the LCS comes in and fixes certain problems in that IUOC that occurred during it's time awake.

Don't fall into a trap where you try and figure out every little thing in your life and how it fits in with the LCS, NPMR, PMR, etc. Learn to live gracefully with uncertainty. Trying to categorize everything just comes from your ego. Do they get a hint to contact you? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But who cares? You have free will. If you don't want to see them, even if they've had a nudge, then you don't have to. Your decision space is limited by your entropy. Very high entropy entities see a very limited decision choice. And they have to make decisions from those they can understand. As the quality of your consciousness grows then you see more choices. The LCS never manipulates anyone. You always have the free will to chose what you want to do. You are abdicating your free will by thinking like this. By and large the LCS does not influence our lives at all. Don't get lost in what you think is going on. This is the way of ego and not the way of evolution. The restrictions are really the ruleset. There is not much paranormal activity that the average person can do. They would do too much damage to themselves and others. And the PSI rule makes sure that the integrity of the PMR stays intact. No, not really. Your feedback from what you do while you are in the PMR data stream is what you get. No one comes in and bails you out while you are asleep.

TOM:
Stop thinking, judging, expecting, analyzing, comparing, assessing, guessing, second guessing, assuming, etc. Stop thinking. Just be and experience existence without analysis. Simply experience the world you sense without attaching anything to it with your intellect. Be in the moment, observe without assessing or judging everything by how it affects and interacts with you. Do what seems intuitively right each moment -- accept and learn from the consequences -- experience/live reality moment by moment rather than limiting your reality to a little more than a reflection of fears, worries, needs and wants projected by your intellect.
http://www.my-big-toe.com/forums/viewto ... 149#p61149

First of all, I really am appreciative of all your quick and well stated responses, both on my posts and nearly all posts I've taken a look at, that is actually really impressive I'd say.

That said, do you agree with everything Tom wrote in MBT and elsewhere? I don't think I've ever seen a response that wasn't exactly in the same line as everything I've red in MBT, which by now I've went through 3 times, and many of the interviews/talks on youtube. You can take that as a compliment, but it also might be something to consider that Tom has made some mistakes here and there or left out certain things for instance. As I red MBT I've always felt like he was not telling everything even though all of his writings seem really carefully thought out. He would do this obviously to limit the already great 800 pages readers would have to plough through, or maybe to make it more accessible to a greater audience by leaving out certain things that might've been too difficult or perhaps repellent in ways. Of course I'm being purely speculative here, but I don't find the idea that he had to consider these things too far out there.

For instance, he very obviously intentionally left out examples of his many adventures in NPMR apart from a few in the beginning of the book and maybe once or twice later. Also these don't really give you a good image of what NPMR would look like. I think he wrote that the reason for leaving that out is that he wants to avoid people just reading it like a fun novel, but actually go out there to gather experience by themselves. Perhaps he also wants people to do this with a mostly clean slate regarding NPMR interpretation systems as to creating a more interesting world of very diverse NPMR travelers, instead of a very homogeneous one.

This might also be why, aside from the first part of his book, I don't think he ever mentioned Robert Monroe again, or maybe very briefly. He also never hinted to looking into his books which are all very beautiful well documented collections of his NPMR adventures. It could also be because there are some seemingly meaningful differences in how they both conceptualize the larger reality.

Another thing I can think of is him cleverly calling our free will unconditional , and not unrestricted or something of the likes. Unconditional merely means that it will always be available to exercise free will, and not to what degree. Exercising free will happens by altering the probability distributions that hold meaning to any certain decision to be made. These distributions can be altered by all involved actors in every certain decision to be made, which always includes the LCS. This means that also the LCS has the ability to alter all these distributions which very much can be seen as manipulation if the intent behind these alterations is to nudge us in a certain direction other than the ones we might've preferred more. This should in theory always be in the most profitable direction for all involved entities regarding lowering entropy, according to it's best calculations that is. (which means that a single person (in theory) might get severely manipulated if it's implications might severely hurt a great deal of other people, by not only changing the probability distribution of the choice at hand, but also perhaps that of people around this person to steer them into trying to change their mind a certain way. I'm just letting my fantasy run wild here :d)

Now a little bit on why I started using my free will in the way I do and talked about earlier. Before 2.5 years ago I certainly was much more decisive than I have been since then. This was also when I first came into contact with MBT. My reasoning by that time was that I should approach such a big change in paradigm with insanely many implications to everything I once thought with great caution. With my old paradigm I thought it was best to try to gain experience data while interfering as little as possible with everything that might have implications for making my own Big TOE, as Tom suggests everyone to do. This has led to many weird yet also very interesting observations that I never could've been able to make if I were to constantly meddle with what I was dealing with. This turned quickly into a habit and spread into a very annoying (yet also strangely relaxing) apathy. I knew this was not good for me, and would hinder my growth in nearly every way, but it is really hard to continuously make decisions to break the habit of not making any decisions it seemed haha. Luckily by now I am doing pretty well in breaking the pattern and getting back at exercising my free will more frequently and forcefully.

This doesn't take away from me having some very interesting data acquired in this period that I cannot just ignore in making my own Bit TOE. It very well might be true that my drive to do this originates from my ego. Then again, I was 21 when I first started with reading MBT which radically differed from how I viewed reality. It's no wonder then that ego, which tries to hold onto the old, would come up with ways to slow down and maybe even hold back this change. In this case that might've happend by making me use my intellect on everything I came in contact with. On the other hand it is not crazy to be cautious when first coming across MBT.

Also, trying to categorize everything you come across is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is done with great attention to nuance and always be aware of what kind of new data might make your categorizations useless or otherwise bad. This doesn't exclude living at grace with uncertainty, I just try to limit the uncertainty regarding my intellect to my best ability. Actually in nearly all facets of my life I have no problem with uncertainty whatsoever, it's just that I do like have a certain control over my intellect. I do realize that this very well might be holding back me growing at the being level and raising my QoC. However, it also has it's advantages. Right now I cannot say from my own experiences how these weigh against each other so I will need to find ways to get more useful data regarding this choice.

For now that just means getting back at meditating and shutting down my inner voice as much as possible I suppose.

I agree with the whole MBT theory as it correlates with everything I've experienced. Tom wrote My Big TOE with the layman in mind and not for scientists. And while I don't think he ever hid anything, I do think that he has expanded the concepts over time with so many people asking him questions. Like any other VR data stream any NPMR adventures are purely subjective for 99.99% of explorers. Tom doesn't want to influence what anyone experiences through the filter of his experiences. I think I remember Tom saying that he has read all of Bob's books. But Bob like so many other NPMR explorers thought many things were objective when they were completely subjective to his experiences, beliefs, expectations, etc. A good example of this is the Focus Levels. Those are not fundamental at all. They are tools that Bob made up. Tom is really the evolution of what Bob started. Yes free will is not unconditional. In a situation you may really have 10 choices, but because of fear and belief you only know of 4. Then you are free to choice between those 4. As you grow up your decision space expands. The probability distribution does not really work that way. You may be able to influence a probable future if there is a lot of randomness around the choice. But if the probability is 90% against what you want, and with focused intent you can nudge that down to 80% then those still are not good odds that what you want will happen. Most of the time the probability wave collapses with a random draw without any influence what so ever. I think this idea comes from fear. You want to try to manipulate reality so it always comes out better for you. Just go with whatever you get and do the best you can.

As I've read your reactions a second time I've found much use in it. Thank you :)