Idea: a professional high-quality illustration of a giraffe dragon chimera...
Symbols that DALL·E generates:
Idea: an armchair in the shape of an avocado...
Symbols that DALL·E generates:
One can never be sure whether the spectacular architectural structures NDEers encounter are realities or just allegorical phantasms. For instance, both Moody and Ring have reported cases in which NDEers said that the buildings of higher learning they visited were not just devoted to knowledge, but were literally built out of knowledge. This curious choice of words suggests that perhaps visits to these edifices are actually encounters with something so beyond human conception — perhaps a dynamic living cloud of pure knowledge, or what information becomes, as Pert puts it, after it has been transformed into another realm — that translating it into a hologram of a building or library is the only way the human mind can process it.
Even the symbolic language of the psyche is given "objective" form. For example, one of Whitton's subjects said that when he was introduced to a woman who was going to figure prominently in his next life, instead of appearing as a human she appeared as a shape that was half-rose, half-cobra. After being directed to figure out the meaning of the symbolism, he realized that he and the woman had been in love with one another in two other lifetimes. However, she had also twice been responsible for his death. Thus, instead of manifesting as a human, the loving and sinister elements of her character caused her to appear in a hologramlike form that better symbolized these two dramatically polar qualities.
Whitton's subject is not alone in his experience. Hazrat Inayat Khan said that when he entered a mystical state and traveled to "divine realities," the beings he encountered also occasionally appeared in half-human, half-animal forms. Like Whitton's subject, Khan discerned that these transfigurations were symbolic, and when a being appeared as part animal it was because the animal symbolized some quality the being possessed. For example, a being that had great strength might appear with the head of a lion, or a being that was unusually smart and crafty might have some of the features of a fox. Khan theorized that this is why ancient cultures, such as the Egyptian, pictured the gods that rule the afterlife realm as having animal heads.
DALL·E was created by training a neural network on images and their text descriptions. Through deep learning, it not only understands individual objects, like koala bears and motorcycles, but learns from relationships between objects.
And when you ask DALL·E for an image of a koala bear riding a motorcycle, it knows how to create that or anything else with a relationship to another object or action. [...]
The technology is constantly evolving, and DALL·E 2 has limitations.
If it’s taught with objects that are incorrectly labeled, like a plane labeled “car”, and a user tries to generate a car, DALL·E may create a plane. It’s like talking to a person who learned the wrong word for something.
DALL·E can also be limited by gaps in its training. For example, if you type “baboon” and DALL·E has learned what a baboon is through images and accurate labels, it will generate a lot of great baboons. But if you type “howler monkey” and it hasn't learned what a howler monkey is, DALL·E will give you its best idea of what it thinks it could be: like a “howling monkey”.
DALL·E was created by training a neural network on images and their text descriptions.
Through deep learning, it not only understands individual objects, like koala bears and motorcycles, but learns from relationships between objects.
And when you ask DALL·E for an image of a koala bear riding a motorcycle, it knows how to create that or anything else with a relationship to another object or action. [...]
The technology is constantly evolving, and DALL·E 2 has limitations.
If it’s taught with objects that are incorrectly labeled, like a plane labeled “car”...
...and a user tries to generate a car, DALL·E may create a plane. It’s like talking to a person who learned the wrong word for something.
DALL-E can also be limited by gaps in its training. For example, if you type “baboon” and DALL·E has learned what a baboon is through images and accurate labels, it will generate a lot of great baboons.
But if you type “howler monkey” and it hasn't learned what a howler monkey is, DALL·E will give you its best idea of what it thinks it could be: like a “howling monkey”.
The holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between the consciousness of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples of such linkage is embodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Early in his career, Jung became convinced that the dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their personal history. Instead, such symbols closely resembled the images and themes of the world’s greatest mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that myths, dreams, hallucinations and religious visions all spring from the same source, a collective unconscious that is shared by all people.
One experience that led Jung to his conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing, he explained that he was looking at the sun’s penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun’s penis moved and caused the wind to blow.
At the time, Jung viewed the man’s assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had any contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man’s vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it’s as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious mind.
In describing the hereafter one child said that food appeared whenever she wished for it, but there was no need to eat, an observation that underscores once again the illusory and hologramlike nature of the afterlife reality.
This isn’t enough for Friston, who uses the term “active inference” to describe the way organisms minimize surprise while moving about the world. When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction—absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world—or it can act to make the prediction true. If I infer that I am touching my nose with my left index finger, but my proprioceptors tell me my arm is hanging at my side, I can minimize my brain’s raging prediction-error signals by raising that arm up and pressing a digit to the middle of my face.
And in fact, this is how the free energy principle accounts for everything we do: perception, action, planning, problem solving. When I get into the car to run an errand, I am minimizing free energy by confirming my hypothesis—my fantasy—through action.
I have heard the crying of your heart. I have seen the searching of your soul. I know how deeply you have desired the Truth. In pain have you called out for it, and in joy. Unendingly have you beseeched Me. Show Myself. Explain Myself. Reveal Myself.
I am doing so here, in terms so plain, you cannot misunderstand. In language so simple, you cannot be confused. In vocabulary so common, you cannot get lost in the verbiage.
So go ahead now. Ask Me anything. Anything. I will contrive to bring you the answer. The whole universe will I use to do this. So be on the lookout. This book is far from My only tool. You may ask a question, then put this book down. But watch. Listen. The words to the next song you hear. The information in the next article you read. The story line of the next movie you watch. The chance utterance of the next person you meet. Or the whisper of the next river, the next ocean, the next breeze that caresses your ear — all these devices are Mine; all these avenues are open to Me. I will speak to you if you will listen. I will come to you if you will invite Me. I will show you then that I have always been there. All ways.
How does God talk, and to whom?
I talk to everyone. All the time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens? [...]
Why do some people, take Christ, for example, seem to hear more of Your communication than others?
Because some people are willing to actually listen. They are willing to hear, and they are willing to remain open to the communication even when it seems scary, or crazy, or downright wrong.
We should listen to God even when what’s being said seems wrong?
Especially when it seems wrong. If you think you are right about everything, who needs to talk with God?
Go ahead and act on all that you know. But notice that you’ve all been doing that since time began. And look at what shape the world is in. Clearly, you’ve missed something. Obviously, there is something you don’t understand. That which you do understand must seem right to you, because “right” is a term you use to designate something with which you agree. What you’ve missed will, therefore, appear at first to be “wrong.”
The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, “What would happen if everything I thought was ‘wrong’ was actually ‘right’?” Every great scientist knows about this. When what a scientist does is not working, a scientist sets aside all of the assumptions and starts over. All great discoveries have been made from a willingness, and ability, to not be right. And that’s what’s needed here.
You cannot know God until you’ve stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you’ve already heard God.
I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.
But my truth about God comes from You.
Who said so?
Others.
What others?
Leaders. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Books. The Bible, for heaven’s sake!
Those are not authoritative sources.
They aren’t?
No.
Then what is?
Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth. [...]
Many people choose to believe that God communicates in special ways and only with special people. This removes the mass of the people from responsibility for hearing My message, much less receiving it (which is another matter), and allows them to take someone else’s word for everything. You don’t have to listen to Me, for you’ve already decided that others have heard from Me on every subject, and you have them to listen to.
This is the biggest reason for most people turning from My messages on a personal level. If you acknowledge that you are receiving My messages directly, then you are responsible for interpreting them. It is far safer and much easier to accept the interpretation of others (even others who have lived 2,000 years ago) than seek to interpret the message you may very well be receiving in this moment now.
Yet I invite you to a new form of communication with God. A two-way communication. In truth, it is you who have invited Me. For I have come to you, in this form, right now, in answer to your call.
The Tarot is a deck of 78 cards, each with its own imagery, symbolism and story. The 22 Major Arcana cards represent life's karmic and spiritual lessons, and the 56 Minor Arcana cards reflect the trials and tribulations that we experience on a daily basis.
Every spiritual lesson we meet in our lives can be found in the seventy-eight Tarot cards. And when we consult the Tarot, we’ll get shown the exact lessons we need to learn and master to live an inspired life. It’s like holding up a mirror to yourself so that you can access your subconscious mind and tap into the wisdom (and answers) that lives in us all.
Tarot is perfect for self-development, making choices, manifesting goals, coaching others, planning a business, meditating — you name it. Simply ask a question, pull a card, and dive into the imagery of the card to give you instant access to your inner wisdom and the answer you need.
How can I know this communication is from God? How do I know this is not my own imagination?
What would be the difference? Do you not see that I could just as easily work through your imagination as anything else? I will bring you the exact right thoughts, words or feelings, at any given moment, suited precisely to the purpose at hand, using one device, or several. [...]
My most common form of communication is through feeling.
Feeling is the language of the soul.
If you want to know what’s true for you about something, look to how you’re feeling about it.
Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover — and often even more difficult to acknowledge. Yet hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth. [...]
I also communicate with thought. Thought and feelings are not the same, although they can occur at the same time. In communicating with thought, I often use images and pictures. For this reason, thoughts are more effective than mere words as tools of communication.
In addition to feelings and thoughts, I also use the vehicle of experience as a grand communicator.
And finally, when feelings and thoughts and experience all fail, I use words. Words are really the least effective communicator. They are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood.
And why is that? It is because of what words are. Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.
Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know.
So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the on about every art book ever written. Michelangelo. You know a lot about him. Life’s work. Political aspirations. Him and the Pope. Sexual orientation. The whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. If I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends.’ But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
If I ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone who can level you with her eyes. Feel like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of Hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel. To have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer.
And you wouldn’t know about sleeping, sitting up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms ‘visiting hours’ don’t apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss. Because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you, I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared-shitless kid.
But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you.
But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine. You ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that. Because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you that I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in.
But you don’t want to do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
Your move, chief.
I was in my bed, mind racing. It was 2016. I was 25 years old.
What was that?
It seemed so... real.
A moment earlier, I'd been asleep when John walked into my dream. I was not expecting to see him in the private confines of my mind.
John and I had had a falling out about six months earlier. I'd joined his business, and things were not what they looked like from the outside. Or at least it seemed that way from my perspective.