Shush... I thought. Quiet your mind. Focus. Calm.
I was sitting cross-legged on the bed in my Chiang Mai apartment, staring at the wall. It was August 2017 — the same month as my Akashic records reading. I was 26 years old.
I began to meditate.
A few months prior, I'd stumbled upon an online energy school — and by 'school,' I just mean a private forum. The students were doing all kinds of strange things: telekinesis, pyrokinesis, orbing, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences. It all looked rather weird and wonderful.
My ego snorted its disapproval. Your father is a doctor — a man of science. You're in for a lifetime of playful mockery if he ever finds out about this.
But I'd already deduced, several years prior, that I was living in a dream world — a world that was far more malleable than scientific consensus would suggest. I trusted scientists to answer the small questions, but it was obvious they couldn't handle the big ones. You should never send a scientist to do an artist's job.
Actually, that was something I found quite odd about modern physicists. If their full-time job was to understand the laws of nature, shouldn't they be analyzing edge cases and scenarios where those laws fail? Shouldn't they be exploring the weird and the counterintuitive? Shouldn't they be focused on falsifying their beliefs?
This is very simple logic. To discover something new, things that we think are wrong must be right, and things that we think are right must be wrong. If everything we think is right is actually right, then we would have all the answers already; we would have a perfect model of reality.
And since physicists didn't have all the answers and were failing to find them, an efficient search algorithm would have them exploring edge cases. By definition, edge cases are only labeled 'edge cases' because they don't behave as expected. In other words, an edge case exists when something we think is right is actually wrong.
As an outsider looking in, the scientific community's dogmatic belief in materialism puzzled me. Obviously, consciousness is more fundamental than the external world. I mean, consciousness is the only thing we know for sure exists. Why were scientists treating it as an afterthought? It just seemed so... odd. Weird. Mad, even. A collective delusion of the masses.
So I'd pulled out my debit card and paid my money to enter the magical portal of this online school. I didn't trust other people to tell me the Truth. I needed to experience it firsthand and decide for myself. If high school taught me one thing, it was nullius in verba: take nobody's word for it. The System was run by adults who played silly games to win silly prizes — and consequently believed silly things.
I committed to doing the energy exercises every day. Worst case scenario, nothing would happen. I'd cross the idea off my list and label it a failed experiment. Best case scenario, my deepest suspicions about the universe would be confirmed: we live in a world full of magic.
After several days of practicing the first exercise, I was able to feel a kind of magnetic flux around my body. Within a few weeks, I could sit in the park for hours and watch thick waves of energy emanating from the trees and the flowers.
The instructor would make a claim, then I'd confirm it with experiment — and I was only doing the easy lessons. More advanced students were learning telekinesis, pyrokinesis, orbing, healing, and how to have out-of-body experiences at will. That forum was like a silent underworld in a computer game where all the cheat codes were exposed.
So that's how I found myself in a deep meditative trance, sitting on my bed cross-legged, staring at the wall. I'd taken off my flip-flops and placed them next to me in the center of the bed, upside-down.
About ten minutes into the exercise, I heard something smack the floor. I snapped out of my trance and turned around to see one of my flip-flops on the ground, several meters away from where I last saw it.
That's odd, I thought. A moment ago, the flip-flop had been in the middle of my queen-sized bed. And I'd been perfectly still. So how did it get on the floor?
And then I saw it — the strangest thing I'd ever seen. The biggest prediction error of my life.
My flip-flop began moving across the floor by itself.
I'm not talking about grand, sweeping movements here. I'm talking about short, sporadic jolts — just an inch or two at a time. The movement stopped altogether after a few spurts.
I stood up on the bed and stared at the flip-flop, my mouth gaping open in shock.
It's one thing to know something intellectually — to know, for example, that the laws of physics are consistent emergent patterns of information. It's quite another to experience that knowledge for yourself, integrated into your see-it-smell-it-hear-it-taste-it-touch-it life. The word 'surreal' doesn't even come close to describing it.
My logical mind immediately jumped into action, trying to minimize my raging prediction error with a solid explanation.
Wait... am I insane? I wondered. Or maybe there's a cockroach underneath the shoe...
I reached out and flipped it over, half-expecting to see a bug scurry out from underneath.
But there was nothing. It was just a flip-flop.
Did I imagine that? Am I hallucinating?
No, I concluded. If I were hallucinating, then I should've been able to snap out of the trip to see my flip-flop back on the bed where I left it. A hallucination is supposedly "all in the mind." It can't move physical matter through space and time.
I paused for a second to assess my options.
A moment later, I slipped the flip-flop onto my foot, grabbed my tattered copy of The Holographic Universe from the bedside table, and rapidly exited the room. At least if the flip-flop was on my foot and I was nowhere near that bed, I wouldn't be tempted to retroactively brush it off as a hallucination. The object physically moved from point A (the middle of the bed), to point B (across the floor) to point C (outside the room) in an unbroken chain of observation.
As I waited for the elevator, I flipped to page 137 of The Holographic Universe...
Indeed, given that the universe and the laws of physics that govern it are also products of this flux, then they, too, must be viewed as habits. Clearly they are habits that are deeply ingrained in the holomovement, but supernormal talents such as immunity to fire indicate that, despite their seeming constancy, at least some of the rules that govern reality can be suspended.
That's it, I thought. The construct's been broken. The system just revealed its hand.
God winked, and I smiled.