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Reality hacking

#1
Magical Realist Offline
I like the idea of hacking into reality. Of using codes, metaphors, algorithms, paradoxes, and rituals to pry apart the noumenal fabric just enough to take a peek inside. It's a powerful metaphor in itself, and immediately plays into the mindset of the occult, where the symbolic and metaphorical and the virtual take on living intelligent properties. It is my suspicion that successfully hacking into the ontological hardware may require a suspension of disbelief on our brain's software level. But I'm fine with that. Belief, as well as doubt, are tools, not ends in themselves. Reality is a whirling kaleidoscopic work in progress. Throw a wrench into it and see what happens!
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"If reality is truly made up of highly compressed information and/or is holographic in nature then we should be able to hack our physical world just like a large computer system.

"The Reality Hacker" site is taking all the cool new theoretical spiritual/scientific blends out of the seemingly endless discussion stage and getting down to some serious quantum action. "We have already had some wild results and a few really weird accidents with the more complex things we are working with."

What do you get when you dive headlong into unbridled spiritual exploration guided only by computer hacking concepts, comic books, movies and theories from quantum physics? The answer: reality hacking.

Reality hacking is based on a popular theory that our physical world is actually made up of little more than highly compressed information. If this is true then our entire world is very similar to the computers we use every day. This means that reality itself can be "hacked" — broken into and manipulated — just like any other large computer system.

"It's an outlandish idea," says reality hacker Lisa Bruder. "And it gets even crazier when you begin to realize that you can pull material from literally any source and it can potentially work.

I actually got the idea for reality hacking from a comic book that pointed out that reality is just another operating system and that magic spells are a messy attempt at hacking it. I stopped dead in my tracks and wondered why something like that had not occurred to me before! Soon, I was figuring out ways to work the idea for real. Like information from any fictional (or non-fictional) source, it needed some serious tweaking, but dang it worked."

Here is how reality hacking works:

The idea is that there are small weaknesses in our reality—parts that are thinner and more pliable. (Interestingly enough, Lisa got the idea of "thinner reality" from the same comic book series) A few quick examples of these thin areas include sacred spaces, highly emotional group settings or virtual reality environments. Any place that alters consciousness and fools the brain into temporarily loosening its death grip on physical reality will probably work.

The thin areas are then exploited by applying an experimental hack – usually a combination of mixed spiritual practice, modified ideas from fictional sources rounded out with a good dose of hardwired technology. If the hacking combination is successful, something weird and unexplainable will happen that everyone can see and experience. If the results are good enough, another hack will be stacked on top of the first one to worm in even further. The process is repeated again and again, going deeper and deeper, getting more and more creative as each bizarre twist and turn is explored—uncovering larger and stranger effects.

"The process for hacking reality is very similar to cracking a computer, but it requires a unique brand of instinct, on-the-fly creative thinking, spiritual training and some impressive mental adjustments," continues Bruder. "Learning to stop thinking in only three dimensions may be our biggest ongoing challenge.

We are teaching ourselves to wade into a rippling, liquid environment where linear formulas and rigid 'logical' thinking almost never apply."

It also doesn't hurt to be willing to look a bit foolish at times.

"I always look like a dork when I'm actually running a hack stack," laughs Bruder. "I'm either doing some very noisy breathing exercise, building or borrowing some strange structure, referring to a scene from a Star Wars movie like it's a serious scientific source, or wearing various layers of goggles, headphones and biofeedback sensors."

If you decide that reality hacking is something you want to explore, here are three tips to help you get your toes wet:

1. Become a Mad, Wild, Crazy Spiritual Alchemist

Don't get stuck in rule-bound spiritual applications. Follow your instincts instead. Play with new combinations, share ideas, finger-paint with tradition and mix it up.

2. Don't Kill the Quantum

The fluid world is around us all the time. Sometimes we even manage to stumble into contact with it and have an extraordinary and unexplainable experience. Unfortunately, these rare and fantastic experiences are so alien to our established sense of reality that our first instinct is to clamp the experience off and pretend it didn’t happen. As soon as you can train yourself to not explain away random spiritual events you will be ready for the next reality hacking tip.

3. Follow Your "Hackcidents"

This tip is the simplest idea of the three and probably the most powerful. A "hackcident" is spiritual accident that can be reverse engineered into a stable reality hack.

Here's how you do it: Instead of shutting down an extraordinary event — follow it. Don’t run away from a reality-bending experience. Train yourself to run towards it. Shove your foot in the door and start scootching your way in. Ask questions. What is this? How is it happening? Why is it happening? Muster every bit of your curiosity, knowledge, personal training and sense of adventure and put it to work. See if you can find out more about what this thing is and how it might function. This is your White Rabbit. Learn to follow it all the way down the rabbit hole and you just might find Wonderland."===http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/07/...ality.html

http://www.therealityhacker.com/


[Image: Favim.com-34340.jpg]
[Image: Favim.com-34340.jpg]

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#2
Ostronomos Offline
This idea that reality is made up of compressed information is an absolutely true statement. For information to exist it must be contained in a mind. Information is mind. It is absolutely true that we have difficulty accommodating spiritual and mystical other-worldly experiences unless we are able to explain them.
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#3
Yazata Offline
MR Wrote:I like the idea of hacking into reality.

It sounds like a modern (hence pseudo-scientific) restatement of magic (not unlike how ufo mythology is a modern restatement of angels and demons).

Magic was the belief that there are secret unseen ('occult') powers controlling events, powers that the magician could influence for his own ends. The similarity with conventional science is obvious and is probably historically significant. So, why wouldn't an engineer's use of 'the laws of physics' to achieve his/her ends (a aircraft's flight for example) constitute "reality hacking"?

Quote:Of using codes, metaphors, algorithms, paradoxes, and rituals to pry apart the noumenal fabric just enough to take a peek inside.

I'm not convinced that the universe we see around us is just a phenomenal appearance, generated by some mysterious software running on some transcendental computer that we might somehow 'hack'. That idea seems to me to be an overly-speculative analogy with computer graphics and virtual reality, perceived through the lens of doubtful Kantian-style assumptions.

Quote:It's a powerful metaphor in itself, and immediately plays into the mindset of the occult, where the symbolic and metaphorical and the virtual take on living intelligent properties. It is my suspicion that successfully hacking into the ontological hardware may require a suspension of disbelief on our brain's software level.

We can perhaps convince ourselves of the truth and reality of anything if we can just eliminate all of our disbelief in whatever it is. That's a road to madness more than it's a path to truth, in my opinion.

My impression is that might be what this Lisa woman is doing, perhaps trying to justify her own hallucinations and delusions not as false products of her mental illness, but as the true product of her ability to 'hack' reality.

It reminds me of the 'open your heart to Jesus' rhetoric, that insists that if we just let ourselves believe in Christ, then we will know with certainty that what we believe in is true.

Quote:What do you get when you dive headlong into unbridled spiritual exploration guided only by computer hacking concepts, comic books, movies and theories from quantum physics? The answer: reality hacking

I don't see a plausible path to truth in that collection of contemporary pop-culture icons.

Quantum mechanics may or may not reveal something deeper about reality, depending on whether we give it a realist or an instrumentalist interpretation. But QM is very technical and very difficult. I doubt whether the kind of people who learn their science and philosophy from movies and comic books could ever use quantum physics as more than a magical fetish, a power-object to wave in the face of a reality they want to go away.

Quote:Reality hacking is based on a popular theory that our physical world is actually made up of little more than highly compressed information.

That's a leap. The reason why reality might seem like little more than information is probably because that's how we represent reality to ourselves and how we think about it.

Quote:If this is true then our entire world is very similar to the computers we use every day. This means that reality itself can be "hacked" — broken into and manipulated — just like any other large computer system.

No it doesn't. A computer is an abstract process (and the physical system that embodies it) that manipulates information based on commands expressed in programs. Do we really know that there's some transcendental computer (never mind how and where) that's running 'reality' like a virtual reality simulation? If there was such a computer, how would we, products of the simulation, access and then alter the source code that controls the process that supposedly generates us?
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#4
Magical Realist Offline
Well stated and analyzed Yazata. Thanks for re-grounding me in what is real. But I still sent off for some books on magick yesterday. I have alot of time on my hands and am already half insane. What do I have to lose?

Really, when you think about religion, it is nothing more than magic parred down and simplified for the masses. There's talismans, and rituals, and blood sacrifice, and invocations, and spells of protection, and spirit beings both holy and diabolical. Nothing demonstrates the power of altering one's own reality more than the religious or mystical experience. Whether this is mere self-delusion, or the creative essence of spirtuality, is always debateable. Is reality set in stone, engraved in some permanent material substrate? Or is it fluid and in constant flux--a confluence of innumerable factors reaching extraordinary ends?

Hacking reality for me involves more than just magic though. It might incorporate elements of Zen, Taoism, psychedelic substances, chaos theory, Jungian psychology, lucid dreaming, the paranormal or "fortean" aspect of reality, art, neurolinguistic programming, visualization, philosophy, and technology. I'm an eclectic, wary of putting all my eggs in one basket. And I want to get away from just constructing another abstract worldview for myself. I take an experimental approach to the Real, treading the thin line between the objectively unalterable and the subjectively malleable. To what end? Towards a deepening experience of whatever it is I am and this place I interpret to be the physical universe.
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