My wife and I are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's far more important to her than it is to me though.
For me a large part of believing in something greater in myself is the hope that I simply won't cease to exist when I experience brain death. I pray hoping someone is on the other end at least listening to me, I rationalize life on our planet as some sort of orchestrated miracle, I look to the vastness of space to realize that I am insignificant beyond imagination and that our planet and solar system are also insignificant beyond imagination.
I think of my friends and family that have died, and hope that I get to interact with them at some point and try and approximate that right now with things like writing the annual letter to my father and telling him what has been going on in my life since he died 12 days before my 13th birthday which I place on my blog here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/category/dad
I think of the incredible age of the universe and the tiny blip that is a human's lifespan and hope that I am not some sort of chemical accident. That I'm not a bunch of electrical/chemical reactions that believes it is self aware by some fluke.
On any given day I'm 50%+ (sometimes 100%) of the opinion that we likely exist in a simulation which, at least to me, explains why we have such rapid tech advancements, why we have not detected any other sentient species in the universe, why we haven't seen any evidence of Kardashev 2+ level building in our galactic back yard, why so many things have be invented/discovered within weeks or years of each other by human beings with no contact with one another. I also like this thought because, like in the book series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer, there might be some hope that I can exploit some conditions of the simulation to directly benefit myself by either altering my character database or a database of something around me. Silly, but sometimes it keeps me going.
I'm an exmormon (thanks to the CES Letter and A letter to my Wife)...
This led me to become agnostic mostly, Still have some hope for life after death of some sorts, but without deity as a requirement... i.e. our energy source lives on...
However in April last year, I witnessed a Mandela Effect w/ my wife, I was reading about the movie Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and how he said in the movie: "Houston we've had a problem". I was literally reading about a "flip-flop"... where to the person writing the thread on reddit it flipped back and forth from "we have" to "we've had" like twice for them...the current state from the thread being: "we've had"...
Now I hadn't seen the movie in over a decade, but I remembered "we have", but I thought that could easily just be because it's a pretty popular saying in pop-culture.
Anyhow this was a Friday night, and we watched it on youtube. Sure enough Tom Hanks says... "Uh, Houston we've had a problem".
Fast forward, I'm reading a list of common mandela effects in the format: Current => Previous, and it says Houston We Have a Problem => Previously: Houston we've had a problem.
My first thought: Well, that's obviously a typo,but just to be sure I go check.
The scene is completely changed. In fact the entire cadence is changed. It's now "Houston we have a problem" but also Tom Hanks is a lot more "frantic" and intense, when he was a little more laid back in the other version.
It's the fact that I honestly believe reality "changed" that I have to agree with you on simulation theory being a possibility that or many worlds...and somehow we're traveling through them, or maybe we do when we die and I died of sleep apnea or something...
Simulation to me seems most likely though, as it would explain the double slit quantum eraser experiment pretty handily. It could be then that reality's "truths" or "facts" then become some sort of consensus mechanism where if 51% of people remember "Houston we've had a problem" it changes back to that...
Like you I also thought maybe I could interact w/ the "matrix" and tried researching occult, magick, etc... and really never figured much out in that regards.. though /r/castaneda was probably the most interesting rabbit hole I found... darkroom gazing was very interesting indeed and trippy.
I was a bit manic/hyperfocused on this for like 3 months ...almost in a bad way. When you doubt reality it's easy - esp. if depressed to think about if reality is fake then quitting reality doesn't even matter.
For my own sanity, I gave up on the endeavor of finding out what's going on and how to control it, but go back to just appreciating the beauty of what we do see, and admire the complexities - though I do still read any threads I can find on new discoveries in consciousness-related neuroscience, quantum mechanics, etc...
It's just an easily misremembered movie quote. When everybody remembered "Play it again, Sam," being a line from Casablanca, instead of the less pithy actual line, nobody posited that the world had changed around them. It's always struck me as an extremely self-focused view of the world to prefer the explanation that the entire universe has been changed, rather than to believe that you made the same easy-to-make mistake that millions of other people did too.
For me a large part of believing in something greater in myself is the hope that I simply won't cease to exist when I experience brain death. I pray hoping someone is on the other end at least listening to me, I rationalize life on our planet as some sort of orchestrated miracle, I look to the vastness of space to realize that I am insignificant beyond imagination and that our planet and solar system are also insignificant beyond imagination.
I think of my friends and family that have died, and hope that I get to interact with them at some point and try and approximate that right now with things like writing the annual letter to my father and telling him what has been going on in my life since he died 12 days before my 13th birthday which I place on my blog here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/category/dad
I think of the incredible age of the universe and the tiny blip that is a human's lifespan and hope that I am not some sort of chemical accident. That I'm not a bunch of electrical/chemical reactions that believes it is self aware by some fluke.
On any given day I'm 50%+ (sometimes 100%) of the opinion that we likely exist in a simulation which, at least to me, explains why we have such rapid tech advancements, why we have not detected any other sentient species in the universe, why we haven't seen any evidence of Kardashev 2+ level building in our galactic back yard, why so many things have be invented/discovered within weeks or years of each other by human beings with no contact with one another. I also like this thought because, like in the book series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer, there might be some hope that I can exploit some conditions of the simulation to directly benefit myself by either altering my character database or a database of something around me. Silly, but sometimes it keeps me going.