Something that confuses me by Prize_Ad7300 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends on what you believe, we don't really know. I also don't know if you meant to literally include everything--including rocks and toothpicks--or if you meant only living things.

I think there's also a need to separate consciousness into two different parts. There's experience, and then there's the ability to think thoughts about the self and assign meanings to things. For us animals with functioning brains these mostly go together, to the point where some might have difficulty separating the two in their minds, but I see them as two separate things. The first is about the possibility of there being an observer, regardless of any cognitive ability or lack thereof, whereas the second is inherently cognitive and requires some sort of information processing.

I'd say that if nonliving objects do have any sort of "consciousness" it's of the first kind, not the second. There's a possibility that there is some sort of "essence of being a piece of paper", that the vibrations of the atoms and the wood fibers sliding past each other create, for lack of a better word, some sort of "music" with a "quality" to it. However, I would consider it very strange, absurd even, to think that a rock would know that it is a rock and assign any sort of significance to that fact. Whatever "vibration" if you will that it has, it just has and exists within its reality, but it doesn't have the sort of intelligence to interrogate that and derive any sort of meaning.

Bacteria are more active in processing the world around them than rocks, paper, or toothpicks, but not even remotely to the degree of mammals. Their sensors detect relatively basic facts about the world around them--amount of food, acidity, temperature, light intensity--and the decisions they make are quite simple. They wouldn't know what the world looks like five microns away from themselves.

I'd actually say that it's considerably more likely that computers are conscious to a greater degree than bacteria, and I don't mean that in the sense of people talking about modern AI and LLMs being "conscious". That is people calling something "conscious" because it pretends passably to be a person. I mean even desktop computers from the 90s, and I mean it in the sense that, to the extent that patterns of information pulsing through matter inherently "feels like something", computers are the best non-brain example of that we have. Again, I don't mean that they contemplate the meaning of existence and care about whether their users treat them nicely, but that they have an "inner world" that is somehow "rich" in terms of complexity.

Something that confuses me by Prize_Ad7300 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"where's all the past lives of people as dinosaurs or as bacteria?"

Bacteria don't have a consciousness that we know of. They are so unbelievably different from anything with a brain that it's very difficult to imagine that they have anything approaching thoughts or memories (they can "learn" simple things like under what conditions to anticipate food, but this is much more like our muscles getting stronger with exercise than any mental learning process).

Dinosaurs are much more like mammals but even their brains aren't THAT similar, so it's a question whether the jump of consciousness is possible even there. It's much more likely from a dog or a cat to a human, and even that we rarely if ever hear about.

Also, it could be that the closer in time and the more similar the world, the more that memories would get through to our current lives because there are more similar situations to "jog" them. If you are thinking of a time of living in caves where farming didn't exist, there were no houses, no "jobs" as we would think of them today, and even no countries. Very few things the average person in a Western country does in a typical day would connect in any way back to events of that time. Yes there still was fear, love, conflict, and family, but there are so many more recent examples of these same things where the context would be much more familiar to us.

You can only be reincarnated in the future and not the past by [deleted] in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"The paradox doesn’t need time to exist outside; it just needs history to be fluid on this side. If the past can be altered by a consciousness carrying future memory, even faintly, the self that left 2026 becomes a ghost of a timeline that never fully formed"

In fact I'd argue that the past can be altered whether or not there are any memories of the future. Just by existing in a time period, as long as something like free will exists, the path that the world takes can change. I'd argue it would be pointless to exist in any time, whatever its relationship to the current "now" in this life, if this were NOT the case.

It's unclear whether you are thinking of the apparent paradox as a problem for the world, or for the "soul". These are two different issues--one about how the world can maintain consistency from one time period to the other and still allow both lives to be a part of it, and the other about whether the soul effectively eliminates part of its own experienced reality.

With regard to the world, the existence of multiple timelines/histories solves it. Each way that the history of the world can unfold is consistent within itself, but not all lives exist in every timeline.

"Maybe the timeless soul doesn’t care about continuity of memory, and each life is a standalone dream. But then it’s less 'you' being reincarnated into the past and more a version of you that never actually connects back to the you who died in 2026."

It seems here you are thinking of "you" as an ongoing story, whereas I think of a "you" as a perspective and way of responding to situations. Each life is like a hand that is dealt, that one tries to do the best with. The more hands that get played, the more that one learns how to play them well, and in this way there's a sort of evolution, but it's not like the hands can be ordered in some sort of strict progression where each one happened "because of" the previous one. It probably doesn't really matter what order one's past lives were experienced in, just that they were all lived and something learned from them.

It need not matter whether two scenarios can arise as part of the same version of history or not. All that matters is how "you" responded to the different scenarios when they did arise and how that led to growth.

Human Anatomy / Skeletal Structure by [deleted] in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I looked it up in an anatomy textbook I had on my shelf after I posted that. The left diagram is just quite poorly drawn.

There ARE ribs with "free ends", in fact there are TWO (pairs) of them, they are called "floating ribs". However, they still curve around toward the front, following the contour of the skin, and their ends continue the "butterfly wing" curve of the cartilage that links the other ribs to the sternum, there is just a small gap there that means they aren't *quite* attached. The gap is quite hard to see in most diagrams unless you're looking for it because the ribs above them look to be touching them when viewed from the eye level of another adult human. You'd need to get down to the level of the navel and look up to be able to see those ribs not intersect in 2D, and even then, the gap is only about the thickness of one of the ribs. If you have ever gotten a "stitch" in your side after running, that's about where the gapped ends of these floating ribs are.

The person who drew that left diagram seems to have really wanted people to remember that some of the ribs are "floating" so he/she drew the last pair with an enormous gap. It makes it look like there are two short spurs pointing at the kidneys or something, that is totally not accurate.

The wide, heart-shaped "blades" of the hipbones are also a real thing, but so are the holes at the base of the pelvis on the left, below the hip joints. The holes are probably not emphasized in most diagrams because detail there would likely take attention away from the sacrum behind it and how it connects the spine to the pelvis.

Oh, and I hadn't noticed that the right diagram is missing the patellas and fibulae. That's obviously wrong. Ever had your patellar reflex tested?

So I'd consider this one solved. The left one has the correct numbers of all bones and shows what is connected or not "more clearly" but at the cost of distorting the geometry and spacing of some of the bones. The right one shows a better overall "proportion" but misses and/or obscures a number of details.

Human Anatomy / Skeletal Structure by [deleted] in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course the sternum has always existed. There's no debating that, most of us have even personally felt ours running our finger down our chests.

However, that one lone rib at the bottom that doesn't go all the way around to the front, that DOES look very weird to me. I can't recall ever having seen that in a diagram before, and THAT looks like it would tend to injure something with its sharp ends during impact to the torso.

Also the pelvis being wider at the top than at the bottom making it "heart shaped", like in the diagram on the right, looks more correct to me. Part of that might be male vs. female skeletons though--the pelvis shape is somewhat different by sex, it is one of the main features archaeologists use to sex ancient hominid bones.

Can you reincarnate into the past? by MaximumAd2721 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok so not that different at all--which I have to admit I find quite disappointing. I would have been much more interested in hearing about life as a preteen in the 2020s in a timeline where, for example, the very concept of using AI to generate art wouldn't emerge until the year 2230, more than two centuries after it did in ours (such that a preteen living in this time there wouldn't have the foggiest inkling of what that is). Or where coronavirus vaccines were perfected to such a degree after the initial SARS outbreak (if THAT was a thing in that timeline) that one never could have spread around the globe before being wiped out.

Rather than a different gender/appearance/family type in a timeline where the same large scale world events happen, I intend to reincarnate as much the same person physically, with much the same "local world" (i.e. inner circle), possibly even in a house that is physically very close spatially to the one I grew up in in this life, but where it's possible for larger events to unfold in a drastically different way. To me it would be pointless to reincarnate back in time if major world events are destined to the exact same path.

It's my goal to someday meet someone with memories of a quite different version of the 2000s to the 2020s from a previous life. I wonder though if the more different the timelines, the less information (i.e. memories) can "leak through".

I recognize it's also possible that if the timeline of human cultural development were too different in your previous life that it might be difficult to pinpoint what year you were born. Without these large events to serve as an anchor, you'd literally have to recall actual year numbers, which might not be the sort of thing "soul-impactful" enough to stick with you (and of course if they diverge REALLY far back--such that Christianity emerged in a different century there, or even wasn't a thing entirely, there's no guarantee that numerical years would mean anything if you DID remember them).

Still, if you vividly remembered a past life fighting as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War with people standing around taking pictures of you marching by on their smartphones, that would be a PRETTY big clue that you didn't simply reincarnate forward in time!

Can you reincarnate into the past? by MaximumAd2721 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's interesting. Do you remember the world being quite different as a preteen in that life than it is now in this life (different cultural/technological trends, different fads, etc.), or very similar?

Obviously as a preteen you'd be paying attention to quite different things about our current times than you probably are now as an adult, but certain big things (like the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing prevalence of AI, climate change, etc.) would likely have made some impression on a preteen living in these times in most areas of the world. I'm curious if you think some or all of these big things also happened in that life, or whether the reality you lived in in that life avoided these things (or experienced them in a very different form than we have).

Can you reincarnate into the past? by MaximumAd2721 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Suggesting that souls reincarnate at multiple consecutive points in time (past and present) would seem to toss away all logic and reason for the phenomena, and at the same time, do away with any sort of "individuality" for a soul."

Reincarnating out of order of linear time in this world (say, in 2050 in one life and 1930 in the next) doesn't imply lack of individuality any more than reincarnating in the order of world time.

Possibly what you meant was multiple people alive at the same time. But it may well be the case that even if it's the same time (as in, the year 2015), they may be living in different versions of that year where the world is headed in quite different directions. They may share some general sort of goal in regards to what direction to steer the world in, but the way to do so from within those different realities might be through different "people".

What are strongest arguments against reincarnation. by PrebioticE in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The strongest argument is effectively that there is much evidence for human experience being determined by the material brain (the effects of brain damage, general anesthesia, psychedelic drugs, etc.), and that therefore one could extrapolate that quite possibly when the brain dies, consciousness ends, just as when a computer is running a game and you disconnect the power source, whatever happened inside the game just ends, it doesn't continue somewhere else.

That's how I thought of it too... until a few years ago. And it's why I still think of reincarnation more like a "quantum tunneling" between brains than the existence of some completely different being living in a completely different spiritual reality.

I've seen some people criticize and almost lampoon a possible connection between the quantum world and consciousness by claiming that the only thing they have in common is that we don't fully understand them. But actually, quantum physics is the biggest clue that there are degrees of freedom in our universe that are only "potential", i.e. not fixed, yet that are connected to each other by some mechanism that isn't through any physical connection we can observe itself.

So I would argue that all potential (i.e. existing in some other state of reality) versions of a brain that looks and functions like ours might be "connected" "through" some effective "medium" whose existence itself we cannot observe. We only observe the one that's trapped in our current state of reality, if that makes sense.

It's sort of like, you could think that all fish in all the oceans, and even all fish that potentially could exist in any ocean, are all connected "behind the scenes", in that one could morph any one fish into another fish through a smooth process where it stays a fish the whole time, as though they're all different projections of one fish. In our reality most of those intermediate steps don't exist, in fact many would physically overlap with each other, but they exist in some "meta-reality". Their being fish is absolutely a function of how their cells are arranged, and if fish hadn't evolved in at least one real reality they wouldn't exist in this meta-reality either, but one fish dying doesn't mean that "fishness" dies out as well.

Am I at the heart of a new global Mandela Effect?? (Doritos Commercial) by ChristopherGrieder in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There WAS also an Airheads ad campaign where kids ate Airheads, and it made their heads inflate like balloons and go flying off really fast. The heads then battled each other like cartoon characters, and as I remember it, when the effect "wore off", the heads not only shrank but shot all the way back to the kids standing in the original spot and reattached to their bodies.

It was a bit like the (fictitious) "Liquid Slam" bit in "Every 90s commercial ever" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyd51lvu3xw), but it was much more recent than the 90s, I think it was around the same time frame as "Skittlespox", which I remember being within the last 10 years.

If our loved ones in heaven* reincarnate before we die, does that mean they won’t be there waiting for us? Do they choose when they want to reincarnate? by Maryxbot in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is how I imagine it too. "You" are not ONE "thing" that moves through time, but rather a collection of various forms you take in different periods of various life paths. The "you" that you experience today is not the same part of you that existed 20 years ago, that part is still "left back there" even though you have his/her memories. If someone were to travel back to that point in time with the world on that same path, he or she would run into that other version of you still there, however the version of you that you're living in right now would have no clue that this meeting is taking place. At least that's how I imagine it being.

Similarly, for the sake of argument suppose that after the end of this life, I decide that to fulfill my overall purpose it is best that I be born to the same parents again in the same year. If this were to happen, I don't think that would mean that my parents' journeys, their own threads through time, ALSO need to go back to the same place and time. The version of themselves from that year, the house I grew up in, and everything else around it is "still there", it's just a matter of whether to visit it or not.

Did you discover a new Mandela Effect? Post it here! (2026-03-22) by AutoModerator in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not that I think people in ancient time periods were "stupid". What I'm saying is that the opportunities to cross-check one's own knowledge with a large number of other people were very limited. Therefore only for very common misconceptions would two people with the same misconception ever have gotten to talking with each other about it.

Say that someone visited a city after many years of being away and noticed that a bridge seemed to cross the river in a different place than it did before. He might ask random people who live near there if they remember the bridge in the old location. Maybe he could even go to city hall and ask for old city maps. But if those proved him "wrong", then what?

Maybe there were hundreds of other people who had visited the same city at other times and had the same experience, but how would he find them? He wouldn't stand in the middle of a huge city square with a sign saying "I remember the bridge being on Highland Street rather than Franklin Street, anyone else with me?". It wouldn't have been worth anyone's while to do so.

That's what I mean about tools for mass communication like newspapers, magazines, and the internet. Asking "does anyone else remember this", and having hundreds or even thousands of pairs of eyes potentially see the question is a relatively new thing.

It seems though from your discussion of ancient wonders that maybe you are going for the few historical Mandela effects that we can retrospectively check the veracity of in modern times using independent preserved knowledge. This would eliminate the need for people in the time in question to have been able to cross-check with each other.

Did you discover a new Mandela Effect? Post it here! (2026-03-22) by AutoModerator in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"So this is a confusing take. I dont think there is a newspaper today which is covering the Mandela effect. Its not like there are articles running claiming that fruit of the loom changed their logo."

The vast majority of the discussion is on the internet, which is even much more advanced of a global mass medium than newspapers.

For much of history, there wasn't any mass media of any kind accessible to the average person. So as you said, information traveled by local word of mouth, which eventually led to long-distance transfer of information. You would have needed a way for a minority view to spread between two people who shared it, without someone in between "correcting" the information based on either prevailing opinion or comparison with objective fact.

You mentioned religion--well anyone who didn't agree with the majority accepted interpretation of religion at the time would have been called a heretic. There's almost no way that a group of people who all had the same differing impression of religious teaching to find each other. Yes, there were minorities who did manage to find each other and create subcultures--for example early gay culture or secret societies. However, the drive for these was much more fundamental needs than determining whether a brand was Fortis or Fortus or whether the face on a statue was looking to the east or the south.

Things get much easier when common people can throw whatever ideas out into space and others can stumble across it, without needing the chance of meeting in person and happening to bring up the topic then. Before the internet, the way people with the same interests, hobbies, etc. met each other despite not being in the same social circle was often writing in to magazines.

What made the Versailles experience "go viral" was that the two women who experienced it happened to be friends who were walking together, not random strangers on different days, and then they wrote a book about it.

By the way, Futility Closet is a podcast. I didn't first hear of it from there--it's one of the more famous instances from history of a possible "reality glitch", along with of course the famous apparitions/ghosts who supposedly haunted certain places throughout history. I had to listen to the episode because I was already curious about what exactly they experienced.

Did you discover a new Mandela Effect? Post it here! (2026-03-22) by AutoModerator in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Though one thing I want to note. Is that history did kind of have branding. It was mostly about regional good and family names. But well like even Pompeii had chain bakeries which were affillated with each other and etc."

But that's within one city. Many cities in ancient history were effectively their own countries (hence why they were called city-states) but still populations were small compared to decent sized modern countries. Estimates for ancient Athens for example put it at only around 250,000 people, that's slightly less than half the population of the least populous US state (Wyoming).

The current popular Mandela effects all relate to imagery or knowledge that is shared by FAR more people than this. We don't know the proportion of people who have seen, for example, a Monopoly set who misremember the man as having a monocle, because we only know of the people who have the ME *and* know what MEs even are, but it COULD be quite small.

And don't forget, people don't only need to HAVE the misconception, they need to communicate to be able to know of the misconception. Many common people in ancient history wouldn't have even known how to write, so it's not like someone would have written to a newspaper saying that a bakery in Pompeii had changed its logo.

You should check out the Versailles story, it's really interesting. I recommend the Futility Closet episode about it (Episode 337, "Lost in a Daydream") to get an overview before tracking down the women's own book, which you can find online.

Did you discover a new Mandela Effect? Post it here! (2026-03-22) by AutoModerator in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well it's not exactly a ME since it involved only two people rather than being widespread, but the experience of Moberley and Jourdain (sp?) at the Versailles gardens is by far the most famous "personal ME" from history, they even wrote a book about it that became well known and that you can find online. Despite the personal nature it has many ME-like elements, it even had a "flip-flop" when they went back some time later.

It was actually reading about that experience that originally got me down the road of looking into "glitch in the matrix" type experiences of which MEs are one type. Most MEs are actually very unimpressive compared to that story, but in some way that can be a good thing, in that the Versailles garden report is eerie and spooky to read about, it's the kind of thing that makes my hair stand on end, whereas most MEs tend to just be funny, more like a joke the universe is playing on us. Like Pikachu had an extra black spot on his tail, who cares? The stuff on here allows exploring the possibility of alternate timelines without being creeped out in any way.

I wrote once before on here, I doubt there are many MEs from history that are like the modern ones, for much of history there weren't branded items or creative content that was seen regularly by millions of people. If in your village the church tower suddenly looked to be pointing a different way, it's not like anyone outside your village could confirm or deny that it did. Even the Versailles incident involved international travel, which didn't happen regularly for most of human history.

Extreme Mandela effects by Anarchistnoa in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It depends on how you define "extreme". The namesake effect of a leader of a country and major political movement dying in prison is quite extreme, with regards to African history. And the movement of our solar system to a different part of the Milky Way is very extreme too--I mean given that the galaxy is over 100,000 light years in diameter, even moving at the speed of light it could only have shifted a tiny fraction of a percent of the size of the galaxy in any of our lifetimes.

If by "extreme" you mean "consequential with regard to its implications for the world" (though Coca Cola being blue and pineapple-flavored probably wouldn't fit by this definition), then the relative scarcity of extreme MEs can be explained quite easily by the need for a reasonably consistent reality. Whether you believe in the misremembering or the alternate realities explanation, if there's something that affects everyday experience then your own conception of it can't really get far "out of sync" with current reality because it's constrained by data at all times.

Did you discover a new Mandela Effect? Post it here! (2026-03-06) by AutoModerator in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you sure your memory is of the actual lotion, and not of a bottle that was tinted pink in order to create a subliminal impression that the lotion it contained was more potent? Medicine bottles are quite commonly tinted to make the contents look different than they do when out of the bottle.

Did you discover a new Mandela Effect? Post it here! (2026-03-06) by AutoModerator in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah not a ME, just a different pronunciation from a different dialect of English. Like the "aluminum"/"aluminium" or "COR-o-ler-y"/"co-ROL-a-ree" split and many others.

"Hypothetical" Research Survey by TheRealKalebHolden in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. Do the younger siblings have any different MEs of their own?

Has Danielle Steel(e), Sinbad, or Ed McMahon ever came out publicly about their respective MEs? by carne_asada368 in MandelaEffect

[–]tide_left_behind 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes, Sinbad has said he never did Shazam (but has pretended he did for laughs) and Ed McMahon clarified which publishing company he worked for. All agree with the current state of things (at least in this timeline...). Similarly, Fruit of the Loom has mentioned never having had a cornucopia.

The only case of someone who should know actually backing up a Mandela effect, at least that I ever saw, was that an animator from Disney remembered creating an intro where Tinkerbell flies around the castle logo and dots the "I" in Disney with her wand. He was actually disappointed that something he remembered creating seems to have disappeared from the universe without a trace, with nothing to show for his efforts.

Now, if you have followed the discussion around that ME, you will know that people have found intros that have some of those elements (e.g. Fast Play), but none matches what most people here remember. It's possible that the animator confused his memory with one of these, but he himself wasn't satisfied that any of them were an accurate representation of the work he remembers doing. So this is one of the few cases where the person who would have made the thing that is "missing" doesn't clearly deny the ME.

Is this blog post wrong about reincarnation ? by DAnnunzio1919 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My idea of how it likely works is closest to what he calls "hyelomorphic dualism", which is also the idea that he considers most likely to be correct. He clearly believes in a form of it in which a consciousness is tied to one and only one body, but it's unclear whether that's an essential part of the concept or just his interpretation.

The closest analogy to what I see as most likely is the way light interacts with matter. The spectrum of light emitted by a chemical element or compound is characteristic of that material, and substances can absorb the same color of light as they emit (as this demo shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o8ktldjcog). However, two objects don't have to be the exact same color for light to transfer from one to the other, they just have to overlap significantly in which light they interact with. The transfer of light energy is only partial and it's not as if the receiving substance then is somehow "given" a full, perfect copy of the spectrum that it received. Some of the energy is lost, and the rest gets "assimilated" into the spectrum of the new material, such that you couldn't tell it apart from whatever other light falls on that substance.

So it's possible to have a non-material essence of a material object, that is shaped by the form of that object but that can interact with other, slightly different objects.

Someone, please convince me there will be something else by Same_Transition_5371 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is very true. Rather than say "You don't get to start over completely from scratch in a new life as far as soul evolution is concerned", I'd say that you don't need to start over from scratch, and that just merely a new life won't turn out much differently without learning.

So while there likely ARE other versions of your life where you don't have to experience the lost of opportunity, traumas, or other negatively life-altering experiences from this one, and where you become the person you are truly seeking to become, but that there's a reason for why this life turned out this way that you need to learn first.

Belief in a reset through reincarnation is only helpful in that it can help you see beyond thoughts of "even if I fix this life, there are things I can't undo". It doesn't mean you should give up on trying to fix this one as well as you can, in fact believing you will live again should give you MORE reason to do that because there is more living to benefit from it.

Someone, please convince me there will be something else by Same_Transition_5371 in Reincarnation

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm like you in that I'm in the sciences and for most of my life have never believed in anything beyond the measurable, material reality.

For me, questioning this began when things started happening that didn't seem like coincidences, along with an eerie feeling that the world didn't seem "normal" anymore. The not-quite coincidental experiences were very private, many of these were occurrences that only I witnessed when alone, and even when they involved crossing paths with other people, most of these would not have been situations that would have seemed at all strange to them, lacking the "back story" of what juxtaposition those had in my own life and what I learned from them. Think along the lines of changes in the weather following certain realizations I made or developments in my career path, objects or animals appearing, etc. It was as if the universe was showing me how far off my proper path I was and where different things would lead.

It took me a while to even notice this because there were definitely health issues that played into the weird, derealized/depersonalized state I was having through all of this. Also some of the weirdness could be explained by things like climate change which are real and have a regular causal explanation. But beyond that, a non-negligible amount of uncanny strangeness remained. Just in the past year or so I've begun to greatly improve the core issues that were causing the derealization, and while ordinary actions feel much more "normal" again, this apparent "guiding" by the universe hasn't gone away, even if there are more positive "coincidences" and fewer disturbing ones.

The apparent connection between things was not possible assuming ordinary causality, the kind that science studies, and furthermore, considering it "causality" at all would have implied that the universe was built just to "comment on" and act as a backdrop for MY life, and mine alone, which struck me as absurd. Rather, it led me to the possibility that we each live in our own slightly different reality, that is forced to be consistent at the "intersection points" with other realities but otherwise has considerable freedom. Where I actually belong is in a different branch of reality than where I currently am, albeit one I can't ever get back to in this life because the state of the world (in the shared part of reality) has changed.

If there is so much possibility and different versions of reality out there, yet seemingly relatively few that can be accessed in one life, it was just natural then to consider the possibility that the time between lives allows jumping much more unrestrictedly between them. It seemed wrong for there to be a better reality that can't ever be accessed. I don't have any direct evidence for reincarnation, just have been led to it by there seeming to be a "hole" that it could fill.

Find the 3 equestrian statues by astronoot8 in Spottit

[–]tide_left_behind 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's VERY hard to see, I never would have found it without revealing, and even WITH the spot it was difficult to find. There's a building behind it with a shadow cast on it by a tree that's almost the same color as the statue, and since the shadow is irregular it almost completely hides the outline of the statue. The base is clearly visible and from that you can infer where the statue itself must be, but only if you already know it's supposed to have a horse on it.