Discerning between maya and atman (or- how I don't let much bother me)

When it comes to surfing the joys and tragedies of life, I have learned one very good parameter which has helped me numerous times not make a big thing out of something that is, to most, quite unfortunate. This is asking myself: who is suffering here? my lower self or my higher self? who is the reactor? 
Let me define what I mean by lower and higher self. The lower self is Tiffany, this material human form, incarnated here for specific purposes and goals. This is also called Maya, which means illusion. This self is finite, temporary, it will not always be, so it's important not to get too wrapped up in or identified with it's dramas and shenanigans. Then, there is the higher self. The blessed soul, or Atman, inside each of us. This is immaterial, eternal, infinite. My firm knowing, as I continue to practice Sanatana Dharma (not to be confused with modern Hinduism), is that this eternal higher self is truly me. I carry it with me into each incarnation, or- more accurately- it carries me. And it is that, in conjunction with my relationship and devotion to God, that matters more than any of the Maya-filters I can so easily fall prey to viewing life through.

A new book for a new season

 I haven't finished the Bhagavad Gita yet, in fact I'm barely three-quarters of the way through, but I did finish Little House on the Prairie Volume 1, so a new "fiction" to pair with the Gita.

Sourdough

Here marks the beginning of my long-awaited sourdough experimenting! Thanks to a kind lady who was giving einkorn sourdough starter away at the local co-op last week, I brought some home and--so far!--have managed to keep it alive. Yesterday I experimented with my first loaf: a small rye loaf, no extra flours or ingredients, just straight old-fashioned dark rye with a little salt, water, and the starter. The result is a tangy, slightly nutty, ferment-y bread. I just had a piece with butter this morning and it's really good. I like knowing that if the proverbial poo ever hit the fan, as long as we had flour, salt, and water on hand, we'd be able to have fresh loaves of bread. Tip I learned: Put a baking sheet with water in the oven while baking, and your bread will have the perfect moistness to it.  Next, I want to master the Alaskan sourdough hotcake, the kind that Dick Proenneke made so often.

Portals capturing wave functions

Last night we watched the documentary Vanished, with Dave Paulides. It was really good. I know that speaking seriously of portals can be humorous to some people, but if someone taking portals seriously and truly believing in their existence makes you chuckle or discredit them, I would suggest delving deeper into the portal phenomenon yourself, and physics altogether. 

In the documentary, the McCabe scientists, a father and son team, were brought to one of the sites where a man disappeared seemingly into thin air some years ago. He wasn't remote, there were people around, he didn't fall or get attacked, zero remains of him were ever found in this highly tourist trafficked area. The site is in Mesa Verde, Colorado, a place with ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs that were once inhabited by Native Americans- not just any Natives, though, but the Anasazi people who disappeared suddenly about 900 years ago. To this day, no agreed upon reason is known for why these people disappeared altogether so abruptly. 

Included in this old site are circular rock formations, called kivas, which were sacred spaces for ceremony and other forms of ritual. But those areas weren't just chosen out of thin air, for no reason. The sacred sites were deemed sacred for already existing reasons (I think). 

In this case, the McCabe scientists performed experiments to determine if any factors could be pinpointed that would signify this area possibly having special features...

A time dilation experiment was performed, which measures the passage of time at two different locations. Time, as I'm sure you know, is impacted by the different laws of nature, such as bends in space, velocity, and gravity. What they found is that time actually moved differently between two of the kivas, which were only feet apart. There was a .6% change in time between the two points, which, frankly, is insane! Normal would be 0%. So a person standing in one kiva was aging faster than a person standing in the other, though they were only mere feet away from one another. Not only are these very credible scientists, but the experiments were ran again and reported the same exact results. 

Furthermore, the static electricity in the area around the kivas was measured and some areas of up to 40 volts per meter were recorded! The normal range is 0-10 volts/meter. Fluctuations like this can be caused by geological anomalies such as a high level in quartz in a rock. 

But what really intrigued me was the time difference in that specific little area and how this could relate to the mysterious disappearance of Dale Stehling. 

Just to be very direct: are some people who go missing, especially in national parks, perhaps passing into a kind of portal? Do I believe portals exist? Yes, 110%, but here are some questions I still have: are portals fixed or transient? I now believe it to be the latter, otherwise they could be observed and located and "found out." Do they just happen as a part of nature or are they created by some kind of intelligence? Right now, I think the latter. 

Multiple people have gone missing in the same exact area at Mt. Shasta (which is not very precarious, has no ridges or crevasses, and in fact you can see for miles in any direction) and were never found, not even a single piece of clothing. A man and woman were driving forest service roads looking for a camping spot one night, I think it was in the Yosemite area, and the back of their truck began to spin around kind of slowly and when they turned to look, the back of the truck was warping out of its shape, stretching, as though being affected by some space-time irregularity. And this story really speaks to some high strangeness going on, especially as it relates to time being affected in a way we don't understand, even distance, memory (his phone had welcome messages from dozens of different countries within the same minute time stamp, which coincided with seeing this creature who was trying to jump up into something and the upper half of his body disappearing each time he jumped!).

Anywho- interesting things to think about and learn more about.

Oh, but an original thought of my own I had last night while listening to these physicists discuss portal theory is this: from a quantum perspective, matter doesn't really exist and instead everything we observe as solid and "real" is just a wave function, which collapses into totality to become a "thing" (a cup, your car, a building, your wife, etc.) only upon observation. Knowing that this is true of quantum mechanics, and therefore true in reality, I wondered if it's possible that somehow the quantum world is related to people getting absorbed into portals? Maybe when being observed, a person cannot enter into a portal, which is why it only happens when people are alone. There are no cases of someone watching another person disappear altogether into thin air, and my theory is that that's because a totality cannot go into a portal, only a wave function can. 

Does that make sense? I'm going to think on it a lot more.