A Different Compass

Local text reading copies, captured October 10, 2026. Original HTML and page data are preserved in the pages folder.

• 33 Years in a Room with No Exits
• Bespoke Universe
• Cheat
• Dancing starlight, Dude in jeans
• Feel it first
• Grandma’s watching
• How to get impossible things faster
• How to know
• It’s Connection
• Reality 102: Souls
• See
• The Gift of Everything
• The Notdream
• The Solution to the Fermi Paradox
• This is a cup
• To Know
• Turbulence and obstruction Pt 1
• What are you? What am I?
• What happens to the questions we pose to no one?

33 Years in a Room with No Exits
33 Years in a Room with No Exits
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33 Years in a Room with No Exits
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Site published only
Created time
Jan 13, 2026 03:45 PM
Description
How to escape monsters composed of good reasons
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The best traps are the ones we build for ourselves. The best lies are only true up close. Piece by piece we build our own prisons — one should at a time. Until, one day when we look up, our entire life is something we should do and nothing is what we want to do
No one designs prisons better than ourselves
I want to stop doing things for good reasons. It’s either the right thing to do or it’s right for me. Really, those two are the same if you’re doing it right. If you sit with it for a moment. A wrong thing for a good reason is no less a wrong thing
This is how it works. It would be a beautiful design if its results were not so sinister. It hides behind reasons, in details.
Say to yourself, what exactly am I complaining about? What’s so bad? Would you really quit your job to be free?
Show me the bad part. And you do. It’s endless meetings with no purpose. It’s petty, droning minutae. It’s a dull, glazed look in the eyes of your peers. They know there’s something better. They want something they don’t know how to ask for.
Well I do.
I see this for what it is now. It will hide behind individual good reasons, but if you look at the whole you will see a carnival of malaise. Even the word carnival is too considerate. That implies too much. This is grey, beige, “yes sirs”, “you can’t do that”, being on time, — I can’t. I can’t even type it. You already know. To speak it in parts is to act in service of these patterns. These idea-energy machines that take in people and spit out drones, but only after they’ve bled them dry over decades. And we call that lucky. We call that a good living and then a good retirement.
We are withering. I am withering and I can no longer make the excuses to convince myself otherwise. This blows major chunks. No one should live this way. Commute 2.5 hrs one-way to sit around in a cell, waiting to do work that even the people asking for it do not care about. There is meaning in every moment. And this moment is telling me to get the hell out of there! Why are you still doing that?
Resist the urge to find a good reason this feeling is not true. The answer is not in another job. It’s not in a business. A sideways move is a downward move because it prevents you from admitting the truth. Your sense that this structure is a siphon is not wrong. You may still be in a cage, but you don’t have to pretend to like it. You don’t have to reinforce the bars by pretending this is okay. You don’t have to settle for a meek gratitude that, because it could always be worse, it’s fine that it’s merely bad
This isn’t okay. We were never meant to live this way.
The good news… the good news is that we don’t have to. We can dismantle this thing and it starts by accepting that it is real and beyond us. It starts by accepting that we have constructed it.
I’m done with this. I can be here without being inside the machine. It’s… not a simple thing to undo. I have been trapped, at first against my will, since about four or five years old, but it is only now that I accept I have willfully reinforced my own prison. No longer.
I’m leaving this thing and replacing it with everything I’ve ever wanted. Fuck reasons. I know what I want and now I know I can have it. Anyone can. Get this shit out of here.
I’m done even considering it worth repelling. It will simply fall away now. Bit by bit a new,  radically different and wildly whimsical life structure — because structure is not the evil here — will replace the old. It will just happen. I believed it. Now I am acting in accordance. And now it is happening. Already it’s well underway.
Sorry it took me ~33 years.
I finally found the door
—
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Bespoke Universe
Bespoke Universe
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Bespoke Universe
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Published and emailed
Created time
Jul 17, 2026 05:15 PM
Description
Taking no limits seriously
Featured
You know when a song comes on the radio at just the right time?
🎵 Rocketman 🎵
“Hah! That’s crazy we were just talking about rocket launches.”
Yes. That is crazy — if you believe statistics and physics are bedrock.
📐
To be clear… they’re pretty damn bedrock. If you’re new to this blog, I espouse a “Yes, and…” model of reality.
Genetics is totally a thing. Our DNA does determine what biological machinery gets made and, to a great extent, what it does. I’m just agnostic about whether or not whether the “random” mutations in DNA replication might be tied to the outcomes of some hyperdimenional alien teenager’s atari game.
🎮
To be clear… I don’t actually believe that genetic mutation is caused by losses in a game of breakout. But shit man, who knows? That’s my official stance at the periphery.
I think of these “hard” forces as defaults these days. They’re in place for the experience — and it seems like they politely get out of the way when they’re in the way of the experience.
These moments of magical, meaningful rule breaking are called synchroncity. Yesterday my friend told me about a time when he was listening to a song on the radio at the same he watching American Idol. An Adele song started playing on the radio, but then he noticed it was playing on TV at the same time.
…the exact same time. Synchronized.
Did that moment mean anything? Or was it pure statistical anomaly? I’m of the opinion that synchronicities are, in part, a means of understanding through play.
I also believe that they aren’t so much as breaking the rules as they are an expression of a deeper rule set. One that even physics bows to.
But how deep could that rule set possibly go? What if it was way, way more profound than just moments of meaningful coincidence?
Beyond Synchronicity
This is a theory. It’s play with ideas. And since we’re just playing, why not go all out?
I read about a synchronicity magnitude scale in a book one time and I really liked it. Which is why I’m going to completely ignore it and create my own. Just as you should completely ignore my arbitrary categorization and make your own (if you feel like it).
Let’s call that first synchronicity, when a highly relevant song comes on…
Level 1 Synchronicity
It’s noteworthy enough that even someone not looking for synchronicities would be interested in it. What would it take for this to have happened? (We’re going to take the more magical interpretation of synchronicities from here. I’m not even going to bother pretending they’re mere coincidence. Click the little X in the top corner of your screen if you’re not into that.)
It would mean that someone or something caused this exact song to play because we were talking about rocket launches. The exact meaning is up to you, but it’ll be something like that. It happened cause it’s relevant.
What about that much wilder story from my friend in which two songs play at the exact same time? We’ll call that a…
Level 2 Synchronicity
What would it take for that to have happened?
It would mean that someone or something caused a long series of dominos to fall to influence the scheduling and song choices of two different media channels at exactly the right time to make one random guy hear them at the same time — presumably, so he could go:
“Whoa.”
Wow, that’s pretty wild!
But we can go farther. What if there really are no limits?
Level 3 Synchronicity
What happens when we crank this shit? What would a level 3 synchronicity look like? And what would it mean about how all this really works?
The Bespoke Universe
I once listened to a favorite song of mine and had the profound experience of almost every single line of the song’s lyrics describing that moment of my life. Okay, I say once but it’s happened more than once to lesser degrees.
If we take that seriously, what would what mean? That the artist wrote, performed, recorded, and built a career (in part) around that song specifically so that some random dude would hear it one day and have it perfectly describe one moment in his life?
Holy shit.
Now that’s crazy. No way, right?
I wrote a (fictional) story once that ended up describing an event that would actually happen to me 20 years later in life. That event was very supernatural and very impossible, or so I believed. At the time I believed I was just writing a story. Imagine my face when I read it again.
This happened again, by the way. Another story I wrote describing an event that would also happen to me later in life. Also “impossible”. Both the event and the “coincidence”.
So what gives?
What gives is that many of the books you read, the songs you hear, and the people you meet could all be lining up — unconsciously conspiring, if you will, to create experiences specifically for you.
That would mean that your reality (your personal universe) could be entirely bespoke. If there truly are no limits, why not?
We’re just playing here, so why not entertain it?
From that perspective there’s no reason why a song, a story — or any event no matter how seemingly complex could not arise specifically for a single moment of meaning your life.
That means you Daniel in Kentucky. Maybe your favorite metal band really does exist just for you.
It’s all for you, Daniel.
Unless you’re not Daniel from Kentucky. Then it’s all for you, instead.
It’s a fun theory. How else, besides lowering yourself to handwaving denial, do you explain such causal chains of events? It honestly seems less crazy to just say “Oh. It’s all happening for me.” than to start whiteboarding what it takes to explain it by conventional means.
Everything that brought that metal band together happened so that Daniel could lay in bed one summer afternoon and have a pretty rad musical experience.
It’s happening for you too. All the time. I’ll bet, if you start looking for a level 3 synchronicity — it’ll be just for you — I bet you’ll find one.
Who knows, maybe I even wrote this article just for you.
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Cheat
Cheat
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Cheat
Status
Unpublished
Created time
May 25, 2026 03:57 AM
Description
We’ve been doing it the hard way
Featured
Featured
see meditation ~611?
it’s what you believe about what you feel
prescription pickup experience “It will be okay.”
advice more than prediction, but both.
advice to believe this myself. that, despite the fact that my psichiatriast is on vacation for 2 weeks with limited access to the internet, somehow I will get the Rx filled
sure enough, minutes later I get the automated message from the pharmacy (notoriously flakey, requiring multiple visits and/or calls to prod them along) that the prescription is filled and ready for pickup
no problems
you can endlessly try to spin all the parts of the world to work in your favor, or you can simply create what you want directly. cheat, in other words
it would have been A LOT more work to worry, have her not answer, then go through the emergency backup person, fight my pharmacy to accept the prescription or give me a temporary fill (which they aren’t supposed to)
see also: the “anxiety or excitement” reframe trick
this is that, except way grander. just do the same thing for everything
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Dancing starlight, Dude in jeans
Dancing starlight, Dude in jeans
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Dancing starlight, Dude in jeans
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Published and emailed
Created time
Apr 21, 2026 12:22 PM
Description
There’s a lot of you out there. Perhaps more than you ever imagined
Featured
I spent one night and a day in Februrary as another self. I didn’t tell anyone this had happened. This is the story of what it felt like to wake up as another person — who was also me — that walked around inside my body, inside my life, for about 20 hours, and what it taught me about the soul, the self. Our many, many selves.
✌️
This experience defies language. I will do my best to describe what it is like, but I’m going to be playing fast and loose with pronouns here. Do your best to feel the story behind the words. Experiences like this make it clear that we need new language to describe the myriad components of conscious experience.
His very first impression of my life, once he was lucid, was surprise. He was obviously as surprised as I was (…would later be) to be there at all. I, as him, woke in my bed. I’d been doing something just before this. Something amazing. I struggled to remember. But oh… Oh, did I remember.
I was dancing starlight. I was playing with the stars. An entire starfield worth of stars. I didn’t just remember, either. It had just finished happening. I knew in the same way you know what you were doing five seconds ago. It was five seconds ago. I had just been doing it and now I was laying like a lead weight in some dude’s body in a dark room.
My first thought was:
“What the hell just happened?”
I frantically tried to recall everything about the experience and the transition to this point. I knew it was important and, like waking after the most beautiful and vivid dream you’ve ever had, it was rapidly liquifying and I could feel it draining away from me. I grabbed what little I could of the experience I could puddle into the palms of my grubby human hands. The rest slipped between my proverbial fingers and is lost to me now. Here is what little I could retain about how it feels to be dancing starlight playing with the stars themselves. It is as good, better maybe, than you will imagine. Just take that perspective. Yes, it really is as amazing as described.
At the first moment of lucidity I was expanded to the size of, I don’t know, a galaxy or so. Maybe more, maybe less. My consciousness was spread out onto the stars. Not the entire space, but literally wrapping each and every one of the stars.
If you melted yourself down into liquid light and then poured yourself evenly over the surface of every star in a galaxy, that is what this felt like. I was just light, or energy, and I was feeling at that scale.
I say dancing, but it was also like singing, moving. Flow-based and energetic. Complete unthinking, joyful, twinkling movement. I wasn’t the stars, but I was playing with them somehow.
I was also pretty unaware. Very spread out. No conscious will at all. Simply reacting in the way a small child might to a proper beat. They just feel the music, it moves through them, and they move in time without any thought. I had no self concept and no body.
It was fun, basically. I was having a good time.
I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted because I only really remember the come down from this glimpsed state. I do recommend dancing with the stars sometime, if you get the chance.
I started condensing down from this galaxy sized, playful thing that wraps the stars into… well, something more like me. It felt like someone pulling the drain on a bathtub and I was the water. I got pulled down. Distilled. It happened very rapidly.
I started coming out of it. It was like coming out of a trance or waking up from being unconscious (instead of merely asleep). I was incredibly dazed. Like, where am I? What am I? What’s happening to me?
There’s a ME!?
That was just as jarring. A sudden sense of self. A body. I was in a bed. To be clear, this was a continuous experience. I didn’t “wake up” and feel like I had a dream about being dancing starlight. I went from doing it to being here in one, unbroken motion. From that first lucid moment I never lost consciousness.
I started grasping for that experience again. Like a person desperate for water. I held it again, but only for a moment, and so much of the detail is lost now. It was ineffable, but not because I couldn’t describe it with words, but because I would need to be able to go back and forth to capture all the feeling tones and what it was like. It was too much to hold and then dump onto a piece of paper in one go. I’d need to be able to keep re-examining it — looking back and forth to get a fuller description.
It’s hard to describe that feeling of sinking despair, bordering terror at watching this beautiful experience bleed away from me, knowing as it did, that I couldn’t possibly hold it long enough to capture it even as a memory, much less as words. It was like someone showed you the most beautiful painting of a heavenly scene, the exact kind you didn’t even realize you always wanted to see, and they gave you just two seconds to look at it. One. Two. Now it’s gone. What was it like?
That’s how I was feeling. Except I was the painting and I knew it had been real.
But I didn’t just return to my body in bed here and now on earth.
I felt like a ball of living energy bouncing around, only roughly, in the proximity of my body. Very, very loosely tethered to this thing. Oh, I could feel it. I knew that it was mine and I was rather fond of it. Appreciated it. It was like my home base, but I definitely wasn’t stuck in it.
While my physical body just sat there like a rock, some energetic body danced around my darkened bedroom like a ribbon of playful light. You know, sort of like if you took a guy who had been dancing starlight and then smooshed him down into a human body. I was just smaller now.
My conscious awareness floated around the room, excitedly inspecting everything. My physical body was so tired that I didn’t bother moving it. I watched this aspect of myself like a tired father, after a long day of work, watches their four year old excitedly running around the yard. Happily, warmly, but definitely not getting off the front porch.
I use the term “astral projection” for this kind of experience. It’s like walking around in your imagination. In this case my imagination very closely matched physical reality and I was very, very untethered to my body. I went outside. I went on the roof. I tried reading my car license plate (which I can never remember). Objective details like that were very difficult. It was like trying to force them into focus. I was trying to make them be specific numbers and letters when they really just wanted to be the idea of some numbers and letters. (I did get pretty close to reading the actual license plate. It was too difficult and I was like a pixie, so I quickly abandoned that boring task)
I’d done this kind of thing before, as “me” me, but it ain’t easy and it only very, very loosely correlates to the real world. This was different. This was greased. I was doing it like this was my natural state.
I did pop into my body a bit, but I was bored there. It felt confining. I didn’t want to just sit in it. I had to GO places! But I definitely wasn’t geting up. So I zipped around for a long time, trying to think of stuff to do. I was beyond excited. I was so excited it was nearly elemental. That’s all I was. Emotion given just enough form to operate.
Eventually I did return to my body. I opened my eyes and started to co-exist these selves. They weren’t separate, but now I was in my body instead of mostly ignoring it.
There were… some marked differences from my usual Steven waking state.
First of all, it felt like my entire field of consciousness was high voltage. I was living electricity. A living bonfire. If you could run high power through your entire experience, this is what it would feel like.
It was as if there were waves going through everything I saw, touched, heard. It was all lit up. It was so charged that I felt like I was a conscious stop motion animation moving around inside my body. If that sentence doesn’t make sense, imagine being it. I’m like, flickering — skipping frames. I can’t even contain the amount of experience flowing through me.
When I looked out at the room there were these rippes, these waves. I, myself, was riding on these waves somehow. Like surfing from one peak to the next. But they were going through everything. I could just feel the energy in the air around everything. It was nearly tangible. Visible grey ripples, like fabric, or manifolds that went through and around everything. They were each distinct. They were only correlated with the physical objects, and some of the movement was dependent on things unseen.
I could more than see it. It was just there. I could feel it. I had a sense of where it was. In the same way that if you yell in a small concrete box, then yell again in a stadium, you just know which room was bigger — even with your eyes closed. I could sense all this flow.
Now, I had a sense of it, where it was, how it was shaped. But not what it was or what the hell it meant.
At this point I began to get concerned.
“I am not normally like this.”
Ha. No. I am not.
I started to willfully come down a little bit, energetically. I realized I had access to all my memories (human, Steven variety), in the same way you might remember you were wearing a backpack and there was some stuff in it. You could take it out and recall it, if you wanted to…
Eh. I didn’t really feel like it. I knew who “he” was.
I did not have any memories of whoever I was besides Steven. I had only the felt experience. Like a professional dancer who got amensia. If you asked me if I knew how to dance, I’d say “Yeah! Obviously.” and I could have even done it. But if you asked me how I learned to dance, for how long, or anything else I would have no idea. Exactly like someone who had amensia.
I was myself, somehow. Wearing Steven like one would wear clothes. I wasn’t two people. I was still me. I pulled in enough of Steven’s personality, memories to function. I dulled the bonfire to a mere campfire. I was very, very extra alive still. I wondered if I could do cool stuff.
I tried closing the bedroom door with my mind.
…Nothing happened.
I tried a few other things. Mostly I could only do extra sensory perception, and most of the “extra” I was sensing didn’t make any sense to me. It was cool, but little more than fireworks without any comprehension.
So I got out of bed. I was tingling. Electric with unseen power. And I was definitely, definitely not Steven. I knew who I was. I didn’t know my name, or anything beyond what I was feeling though.
I went downstairs. Got some food and coffee, and…
Sat around in this guy’s body, bouncing with the energy of a small child hooked up to high voltage wires of pure, uncut joy.
And… I kept being this person. What the hell?
I began to wonder if I was just going to be like this now. It felt good, but I was definitely not the person I was inside of. I wasn’t inside of him, per se, but I had him. And I became convinced that was the relationship here. I was some “higher” version of him, not usually directly embodied. Except, for reasons lost on me then, for this one night in February when I got to come down and live as him directly. We weren’t separate people. More like a bigger body, or self I suppose, that I was usually numb to. Now it had been squished down into this human experience.
Everyone woke up. I looked at my children, my wife, and laughed. They had no idea. I mean, I knew exactly who Steven was, but I felt like I was acting. Pretending to be this guy. It was easy. Nobody noticed.
What could I say? “Good morning, by the way I’m not the same person anymore.”
I had no idea how long this would last. I wanted to stay. It felt like more, not less. I still had all of my old self.
This person, however, was not born and raised in our world. He was ill-suited. I needed to go to work. Everything on the drive was fascinating. Anything and everything I experienced was beyond exciting. …Until it wasn’t.
The feeling faded throughout the day. Like my old self was bleeding back through. I could still call this “new” me back though. Like switching places. Foreground and background.
Eventually though, despite my intention to keep him, by the end of the night foreground became background, and background become nothing. This person, and all the charged and varied experience he brought with him, was gone. Gone gone.
I noticed then, how much my personality was shifted like that. This was a person who never knew paperwork, or waiting in line, or even the concept of doing something you didn’t actually want to do. He was so free. He likely would have gotten me fired within months. I’d have been a lot of fun to be around though!
I’d started the day as dancing starlight, but now, I was just a dude in jeans again.
I think we all have a higher self. They’re, like, sleeping or something. Or numbed. Put on ice. In suspended animation. Apparently mine has chosen to play with the stars while he waits around for this part of me to be done here.
I’d known that I had a higher self. I’d actually communicated with them directly a few times before this — more than just intuition, or guidance that I think they usually provide for us. He was exactly like what I experienced in that communication. I’d known all this, but one morning in February I learned that we can actually embody them. That we are the same person. And they’re waiting for us to remember them. To reunify. Or perhaps, to wake up to them for the very first time.
Because there has to be a first time right? It’s both beautiful and tragic that there is some part of our soul out there. Resting. Watching. Waiting to be whole again, with you.
He was so happy.
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Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Feel it first
Feel it first
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Feel it first
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Site published only
Created time
Dec 12, 2025 07:17 PM
Description
Do not despair. You are always only one step away
Featured
Do not despair. You are always only one step away from the path.
It’s tempting to start with a plan. To tame it with your mind. It might work.
Perhaps some advice from a friend. Someone who knows you well. Could be.
I often like to take a break. Get some space from the problem. It helps.
Why?
Why are you still here?
Because you can’t feel it.
“Yes!” You say.
“How can I feel it? If I could feel it I could do anything. I know I could. I could get going again.”
Hmm.
I could never hope to tell you how to do that. How to feel it.
But I’ll tell you this, and in so doing give you a new game to play.
It only takes one step. To feel it again. Sometimes it takes none! You simply feel it directly and on purpose.
Try that now.
(I mean that, seriously. There’s only like 2 or 3 more ideas in this piece and they ain’t going anywhere. Just try it.)
It was worth the attempt, because sometimes that works. Keep that one in your back pocket for next time. It can be hard though, when you’ve forgotten what it feels like. That is the worst
Still, it’s only hard because you’re trying to do it without feeling it. You’re playing a new game now though. And it’s very simple.
Feel it first.
You are only one step away from being back on the path. If you can’t feel it now, your only goal at this moment is to take that single step.
You’ll know when you’ve taken it. It’s the one that made you smile and forget why you ever needed to read this. It’s the one that helped you feel it
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Grandma’s watching
Grandma’s watching
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Grandma’s watching
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Published and emailed
Created time
Aug 6, 2026 07:14 PM
Description
The unexpected benefits of non-physical friends and family
Featured
Featured
This particular article is meant to be read with imagination and amusement. I recommend shelving your skepticism or paranoia, else you won’t get anything out of this one.
Also, if you REALLY don’t like being watched… probably skip this one!
Whether you realize it or not, you are under constant and complete observation by at least a handful of non-physical people — and probably more than that. That cast of people includes (at a minimum), for everyone:
Your spirit guides
Deceased loved ones
Relationships from beyond this life (”past” lives, familial / friend relations at the soul level)
Most people go their entire lives without realizing this is the case. In some ways this is a mercy. In others, it is a tragedy.
Uh, spoilers, I guess. Now you know. Grandma’s watching. Always watching. I mean, probably. My grandmas are pretty cool so they’re pretty involved.
I know this because for the last two years or so I’ve been living in near constant telepathic contact with my own group of non-physical friends, guides, and loved ones. I’ve written and spoken about this, in terms of mechanics and lessons to share, but now I’m talking about how it feels. What it’s like. How it changes you.
The Mere Observation Effect
Just knowing this is true changes you. I mean, think about it. Grandma’s watching you shit. Watching you yell at your kinds. Keep thinking about. Uh huh.
Keep going. Yeah, that too. I said always. Allow me to elucidate.
And it’s not just “watching” (as in third-person perspective visuals like you would watch another human being). My understanding is that most non-physical people can and do observe from your perspective. What’s that mean exactly?
Examine everything you are experiencing right now. The feel of the couch beneath you. The smell of office carpet. That faint feeling of tension in your head. The general anxiety you have about procrastinating on income tax returns. The vague, but annoying imposition of sexual interest from that guy or girl on the banner ad promising you weight loss. Your verbal thoughts about whether or not to leave work early. That flash of visual imagination as you consider which way home from work you’ll take. Now take all of that and treat it as a live stream that anyone can tune into — exactly as you’re experiencing it.
Yeah. It’s like that. They get all that. If they want to.
Your bad jokes. Your good jokes. Your kind thoughts and mean thoughts.
And your spirit guides, at least one, are always watching your “life”stream (™️). This means that at least one person is literally living your entire life with you. I can’t promise this is an absolute truth for everyone, but it’s inferred based on my first-hand experience and I would bet on it being true for nearly every human. Especially right now in history.
Hearing me say this might affect you. Believing it’s actually true will affect you even more.
I mean, how could it not?
Humans — everyone — behaves differently under observation. We’re social animals. We crave praise, fear judgement, and want to be loved.
♥️
It’s worth mentioning, lest you have a panic attack the next time you remember this realization while reading hentai on the toilet, that anyone watching you is pretty zenned out. They’re totally stewing in love and connectedness and are… probably very low judgement. It’s safe to say they watch your lifestream because they love you, likely in an unconditional way. Mostly, it’s to help you. We’ll get into that.
How likely are you to do something you know is wrong, or bad for you once you know this is true?
I mean, she’s right there. Grandma.
Stop texting and driving, dude.
Knowing this is true changes you. Many people walk around with the general idea, at various levels of conviction, that their loved ones are not gone. Their guardian angels, so to speak, really are looking out for them.
But it’s different when can they actually talk to you. It’s different when they can tell you how they feel.
Ha ha ha…
Not imaginary friends
I’m getting up after meditation and I get a very out-of-context verbal thought. It’s my sister (my soul sister. Not physical). Why she chose to bring this up… I do not know. But she did.
Sister: “Breaking the Habit. Meteora.”
Me: “’Breaking the Habit’ isn’t on Meterora. It’s on Hybrid Theory.”
“You’re wrong.”
(Irritated) “Wanna bet?”
“Sure. How much?”
“Five dollars”
“You’re about to lose five dollars.”
(At this point I get up, open spotify on my computer and pull up the Linkin Park album Meteora. And yeah… it’s on Meteora.)
“Well, shit.”
(Amusement)
“What should I do with the money?”
(A shrug.)
So I kept my “bet” by tipping extra at Starbucks. Hah. It’s fun being wrong. I’m wrong a lot. Here’s another one, very common place.
Me: (Thinking) “Where are my ear plugs?”
?: “Over there on the floor.” (An indication of direction)
Me: “No, because (reasons)”
So I proceed to look for them for multiple minutes, get frustrated, then go look where they definitely aren’t.
Take a wild guess how that one ends.
It’s neat.
Each morning I roll some random words for divination (shout out to https://randomwordgenerator.com/). When I am recovering, but very seriously considering working out or staying up late anyway, I will invariably get words like:
“Soup. Value. Doctor.” (these were today, by the way. As I… considered doing exactly this)
Yesterday morning I woke up to these two impressions:
Heard impression. An old school cell phone alarm (It’s called “Jump-Start” by the way. Available on Google Pixel devices. I looked it up.)
Visual impression in the minds-eye. A strap of cloth, like a laniard, with the words “Kissy.” Printed on it multiple times in white letters.
I open my eyes to see if my wife is going to get up, then decide to ignore it and go back to sleep anyway… cause I don’t wanna. Then my mini-poodle stands up and starts licking my nose relentlessly. (Kissy…)
“Okay, okay.”
So I get up. Later, I ask my wife if she set an alarm and if it went off.
“No.” She says.
It’s true. That isn’t her alarm.
Apparently, someone decided it was time for me to wake up.
If you were thinking that beings beyond space and time are unconcerned with something so trivial as to when and whether or not you get out of bed — you would be wrong!
I think that if everyone knew this. That there are people who not only care about out, but care about you so much that they would literally experience most, or even all of your life from your perspective just so they could help you with little nudges…
Well, I think the world would be a better place.
You are, of course, still welcome to read hentai while you take a dump.
But I bet you’ll think twice the next time you think about taking the last cookie you promised to your daughter.
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

How to get impossible things faster
How to get impossible things faster
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How to get impossible things faster
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Site published only
Created time
Feb 16, 2026 03:31 PM
Description
Attractor fabrication 101
Featured
Much has been said of intention and its role in manifestation. I don’t feel like explaining it to you. I think it’s all great. If somehow — in the year of our lord 2026 — you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, go search those terms then come back. You’re not going to get less confused.
If what you want is to get a discount on a new car, find a new girlfriend, or pass your physics exam, then have at it. The Secret is probably all you need. This article isn’t for you. Better luck next time!
Regular intentions are served elsewhere. Have a nice day
—
What if you want something else?
Like… really else?
What if you want something impossible?
Now we’re talking.
And… what if you want it RIGHT NOW?
Yeah, …yeah! That’s the problem with getting impossible things. It’s too damn slow! Well, you might be in the right place after all.
🚧
Whoa there, cowboy.
98% of the time you are far, far better off changing what you want rather than trying to get what you want. Wanting what you already have is what actually makes you happy.
This approach is only for those self-torturing, magnificent souls willing and tenacious enough to stare down reality in a cosmic game of chicken for deep, personal reasons divergent from rationality. It won’t make you happy. This is not how you become happy. Getting what you want will never make you happy.
You should take a moment now to look deep inside yourself and ask whether you’re really among our number
Beyond intention
Disposition and attractors
Everything you think, do, and feel is creating your reality. All the time.
There’s just no turning it off. You’re always manifesting. And so is everyone and everything around you, because it’s all alive. Whether you intend to or not.
Intention just puts you in the conscious driver’s seat.
Holding an intention every now and then, feeding it with spare thoughts, actions, emotions is a great way to get what you want. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll find that used car, girlfriend, or physics grade you’re looking for with this approach. It’s like a Tamogachi. Just feed that thing and clean its poop long enough and you’ll get what you’re looking for.
That’ll fly for experiences that are already inside, or nearby your current possibility space.
But what if you want to create and see a new color?
What if you want to grow a second set of arms that are composed of glowing, ethereal light?
What if you want to create the first interstellar spaceship racing league?
That’s going to take a little more than a vision board. You’re going to need to start paying attention to your disposition instead.
—
Disposition
First of all, I should divulge that I have no idea how to do any of those specific things. I do, however, have a little experience in the impossible and so I should be able to get you started.
You’re going to need commitment far beyond setting and feeding an intention. You need to find a way to feed everything you think, do, feel — everything you are — into this intention. It all needs to move you toward this destination in possibility space.
All of those things are inputs. In every moment they are interacting with the magic of your current reality and something changes. The sum total of the inputs you can control (thoughts, emotions, intention, etc.) is your disposition. It is little more than an intuitive heading. You are always going somewhere and your disposition is determining that where. It is a complete picture of how you’re oriented with respect to reality
As many mindset and spiritual advice seekers have noticed, controlling your disposition tends to control for everything else. How you are eventually determines where you are and counter-intuitively is always more important than what you do.
If your head and heart are on straight most of the time, you get what you want.
The trick to getting the impossible then is to have your disposition nearly always pointing towards it. This was a seismic perspectic shift for me. If you want the impossible you will also have to do away with a start-and-stop, part-time intention mentality. Speed of materialization is a simple matter of quality and consistency.
It’s not so easy to maintain your disposition in the face of a reality that literally disagrees with that you’re trying to make true. But, with the right environment, culture, community, and habits, it’s doable — depending on how impossible your impossible wish is.
🚧
Firsts are very, very difficult.
Conversely, if what you’re attempting has been done before, or something like it, then you’ll find your task signficantly easier. Universal firsts always seem to be hardest.
I once heard that growing a new type of crystal in a laboratory is hardest the first time anyone tries it, but somehow it’s actually easier to repeat — even when the second laboratory is across the world and has no direct knowledge of the first attempt. It is as if the universe itself has the hang of it now and understands what you want. Oh, that crystal?
Don’t let that discourage you. By all means, be bold! Do something first. Shatter that Novelty Barrier for the rest of us to follow
—
Okay, but how the heck can you always keep an intention top of mind such that everything you are flows toward it? That’s… a pretty big ask.
🚧
Listen, there’s a lot of warnings in this one.
Obsessiveness tends to crush the life out of your disposition. There’s a sweet spot. Look for a sense of friction and efforting as negative indicators. Your disposition should be helping you live better along the way.
When in doubt apply the “38 Special” principle.
The short answer is: you can’t. It would be insanity inducing to try to be eternally conscious of an intention, holding it somehow through all the topsy-turvy events of your life. The very attempt would be self-defeating. It’s too much. Too much for me anyway. Email me, I guess, if you can do this.
I’ve got the next best thing though.
Attractors
The idea here is that you can create an intention with a constant, subconscious magnetic pull (hence the name) such that, even when you’re making a sandwich or watching John Wick, you’re still aware of your intended outcome and your disposition towards it.
All behavior becomes autonomic (mylenated if you prefer brain words) when repeated. “Practice makes permanent”, etc.
The trick is to take your complex intention
“I want to somehow create a color no one has ever seen before and then be able to perceive it first-hand in the real world. Not just a different shade. A totally novel color. Then I’m going to find a way to teach other people how to perceive it too.”
And distill it down into a mantra. You need to be able to rattle this thing off like a story logline, or an elevator pitch. Short. Snappy. Affirmation-like.
I can see my new color. In the real world. I can teach others to see it too.
This bullet point or single sentence mantra becomes deeply ingrained. You will repeat it to yourself like a crazy person. Honestly, if you’re still reading this you’re some kind of crazy. Probably the good kind. I’m not judging you — I’m literally writing this! Don’t be the bad kind of crazy :(
Sometimes you should re-read your expanded intention from which your mantra was derived. The mantra itself will change a little in each repeating to be more representative. Play with it. Freestyle. This is good. It keeps the practice from becoming boring. Boredom invariably wilts your baby attractor. Unless your intention was to be bored? In which case, you did it!
In time you’re going to notice something magical happens. Every time you state your mantra you can actually feel it. This feeling rhymes with the mantra, which represents the intention. It’s like an icon shortcut to the full, detailed intention.
I just call these feeling tones.
❔
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try this:
What does sadness feel like?
And joyful surprise?
Take a second to feel each. If I beamed one of those two emotions at you, could you tell me which one it was? Of course you could. You just know what it feels like.
This sense of feeling without words can extend beyond emotions and into conceptual ideas as well. Try it out in everyday life as you run across stuff. What people, places, projects, or ideas have a feeling tone for you?
Here’s those steps again:
The full detailed intention is too cumbersome to keep in your head, so you created a mantra.
The mantra is easy to repeat so you can easily re-instate it as a conscious intention. You do this a bunch
Eventually this creates a feeling tone. A felt sense of your intention. It just happens on its own
Once you have it, you can recognize it. Without words. You just have it. You’ve boiled a complex end state down into a distinct feeling. In my experience, curiously, these feeling tones are even more representative of the intention than any word-based version. It somehow holds all the nuance, all the “except fors…” and “only whens…” perfectly. Even the ones you never bothered to spell out like “My new color won’t do anything super bad, like give people seizures”.
How does a feeling tone get associated? I have no idea. It just does. You don’t have to understand how it all works to start using it.
Once you’ve got the feeling tone, call it up. Feel it in the same way you felt sadness and joyful surprise in the earlier excercise. That feeling tone is going be the base of your attractor. Start using it when referring to your intention now, instead of only using the words. It’s much easier to hold a feeling than it is to hold words while you make a sandwich and watch John Wick.
To make an attractor from it though, all you have to do is use it like a pin dropped on a map. That’s not even the cool part.
By some truly, truly astounding quirk of reality, the feeling tone itself becomes like true north on an internal compass. You just know — via felt intuition — which “way” to act, feel, think, be to get to your attractor.
A constant, felt sense for how to “act, feel, think, be”? Well, well. That sounds familiar. That’s instructions for the right disposition.
Now you need only align your disposition to the felt sense.
Kinda like lining up a building to the blueprint preview in a video game. It’s showing you where to put stuff
Also like this game, if you prefer :/
Line up how you feel, think, act to how you’re supposed to (for the purposes of getting your intention) and… that’s about it. Now we wait. Just live your entire life according to that feeling.
This works for any feeling tone, but since you’re going to be putting this one at the center of your personal universe it’ll take on a sort of gravitational field above and beyond any normal feeling tone. Hence, an attractor.
Have fun and be good. Don’t ruin my universe
—
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Table of ContentsBeyond intentionDispositionAttractors
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

How to know
How to know
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How to know
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Published and emailed
Created time
May 7, 2026 11:58 AM
Description
Nobody tells you the best stuff. Ways of knowing things on your own
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Just before I get out of bed this morning I hear a loud, clear thought.
“The scientific method.”
Then the impression of someone wiggling their eyebrows. “Think about it” that seems to imply.
There’s nothing else. That’s the entire experience. On the surface this is a somewhat silly thing to occur. But that little thought domino knocks into another one, and before I know it, I’ve knocked around a bunch of dominos into a few conclusions.
✌️
If you’re new here, these kinds of things happen all the time. Not just to me, but literally to every human. Many traditions and even fields of science all tell us that “our thoughts are not our own”. Well, they’re really not.
I like to think of it like this: some thoughts are more ours (caused very directly and willfully). You can do that now. Think about your favorite color. If you’ll handwave that I from across space and time just knocked my domino into yours to make that happen, this thought was almost entirely yours.
The thought I experienced was at the exact other end of the spectrum. As out of context and not-me as a thought can be.
Think of thoughts (ha.) as floating around in the air like little motes of light. Sometimes you run into them (they literally go through you) and they pop in. They are no more yours than looking at someone’s car makes it yours. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a car too.
At this point I run through a set of questions reflexively.
What was I doing just before this?
I was trying to have a conversation with my soul family (I’m not doing another disclaimer). And… it wasn’t going well! I could tell that 80%+ of the information was just my own mind fabricating the experience. Everything was conflicting. It stank of my insecurities and fears.
Why would I hear this, much clearer, message now?
If someone bothered to go through the effort to give me a message, it’s timely! It’s almost certainly for me.
How do I know?
Ah. Here’s the juice.
How do I know any of this? This example lesson is self-similar, which is why I picked it. It’s a lesson about the lesson and that just tickles me.
The scientific method is how!
Well, parts of it anyway. And that was the very conclusion I drew. I’d been using it the entire time, for years now, to make sense of the ineffable. We all do, of course. This works for determining why replacing your wife’s car shocks cost $4,500. It works for determining why the same people keep trying to talk to you in your dreams, in your meditations, and whether they are “just yourself” or something more.
Technically, what I’d been using was “intervention”, a subset of the scientific method that can be best descibed as “what happens when you poke it?”. We don’t need a formal hypothesis, perfect experimental setup with blinding, etc. etc. That stuffy process is too slow and not necessary outside of demonstrating one kind of knowing to a certain kind of person in a very specific sort of way. It’s amazing, but we limit outselves when only accept evidence from reproducible, peer reviewed, scientific papers based on acceptable experimentation. (This is to say nothing of the reality of the business, politics, and very human foibles inherent in Science).
“The Ladder of Causation” Image credit: The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
As you can see in the Ladder of Aausation, Intervention isn’t even the best way of determining cause and effect! That’s reserved for, shockingly, faculties that depend upon the imagination.
To answer my own question, the way I know (in this case) that thought for sure ain’t mine is because I’ve tested this kind of thing over and over.
I took advice, often based on information I never knew nor considered, and it worked.
I looked up the definitions to words I heard, but didn’t understand. They matched.
I tested the ideas given to me in the real world. Myself. The models comported with reality.
(That’s Association in the ladder above, by the way.)
It’s the same way I learned to move piece of aluminum foil under glass (update: I did this from 3 feet away without touch the glass for the first time this morning!).
What happens when I’m in THIS state?
What if I did the opposite? (counterfactual!)
Do that enough times and something very special happens.
Form your own models for how reality works
You can find the shape of any system in an intuitive way — again without the full, formal scientific method — just by playing with it. That’s what humans are great it! All intelligent life does this.
If this were merely a blog about mundance and acceptable truths, this would be a neat idea you didn’t need to be told. It’s fun realizing that’s how we work. That we can ascertain the working truth of any system ourselves. We don’t need to be told anything. In theory, we could eventually learn how anything works this way. I think that’s amazing.
But this is a blog about weird and impossible shit.
And in that domain, you need to form your own models. Sure, you get told things directly sometimes (as seen above). But do you think I would have taken that seriously if I hadn’t already come to the conclusion this was a valid communication medium? That I could receive thoughts that were a lot less mine?
The non-physical is largely a maybe-space. And in that space you have to use your inner senses to navigate. Those are, often but not always, your only sources of evidence.
So if you want to understand how reality works, you’re going to have to start accepting every part of your experience as valid evidence. Then, you need only apply the VERY ADVANCED methods above (poke it, play with it) to form flawed but ever improving models of the system.
That means how you feel, the thoughts you experience, intuitive senses — these are your compass. Until you accept these senses as evidence you will forever let this magic pass you by. Invisible intangible miracles that, even if you experience them, never stick because you cannot recognize them for what they are. Like snowflakes that always melt on the ground. You can never build anything with them.
Knowing
That method of knowing is a lovely dance between left and right hemispheres. The right takes in it, feels it, and the left takes those pieces, interprets them, and builds working models with them.
For me, at least, it’s how I know most of what I profess to know. Even then, I understand just how flawed this method can be. It’s eventually right. Can you stare at a piece of aluminum foil for ~100hrs on the hope that you’ll be eventually right that you can move it under glass?
I can’t!
And that’s not what I did. There’s no way I could have stayed motivated long enough, whethered all that frustration that way. Sure, I did a ton of things. Most of them didn’t work. I did eventually form a fairly accurate working model for telekinesis under glass. But what kept me going?
Because I already knew.
Direct knowing. Gnosis. I just knew it could be done. And I knew I could do it. It was a deep certaintly. I had a ton of doubt along the way, but that feeling never left me. I simply knew.
This is one of the most important, most profound ways to know something. You just… already know. There’s, ironically, an ineffable certainty to it. There is no explanation. No model. It’s true. It’s an atomic truth from which you can build other kinds of knowing. Like a single snowflake that sticks to the ground. All the others can stick to this one, and soon you have a snowman.
It’s from this inner certainty that I acted, even as I played around, trying to understand how this could work in other ways. I couldn’t have told you, then, how or why this was possible. Only that it was.
NOW I can tell you how and why this was possible.
This is the most amazing, shocking truth in understanding. Knowing something is true before you have any evidence at all. From that position you can go gather the evidence, build the models. But they’ll only tell you what you already know.
It was true all along.
We’re cheaters, is what I’m saying. We’re all filthy cheaters. So go do that. Use your inner senses, your different compass. It’s already telling you what’s true. All you need to do is take is seriously.
Then go play!
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

It’s Connection
It’s Connection
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It’s Connection
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Site published only
Created time
Oct 25, 2025 02:32 AM
Description
My friend told me over the phone:
“I’m glad you’re still so active and have so many interests.”
“I find it hard to want to do… anything really.”
I’ve had at least 4 conversations like this over the past week.
Featured
Featured
My friend told me over the phone:
“I’m glad you’re still so active and have so many interests.”
“I find it hard to want to do… anything really.”
I’ve had at least 4 conversations like this over the past week. More over the past month. A draining sense of apathy, of vague despair. Of pointlessness most of all.
I feel it too. But I am living in active defiance — sometimes ignoring, sometimes free from, and sometimes in direct opposition to this boring, lonely, unsatisfying, slow-motion apocalpse.
I have the pieces of the solution — my solution anyway. It’s the same three words that have been guiding my development all year.
Trust
Connection
Flow
Trust was a tough one to wrangle. It’s never done, but I feel I’m over many of the major humps there.
I am beginning to glimpse the value of flow. Deep work. Intuitive connection. Unthinking passion. It’s a form of grace and meaning. It’s very much not-in-your-head-joy. And lots of it.
It’s connection that has been hitting me. And I just found a new layer of insight, like second fresh, snappy coat of paint on the wall.
We’ve been leaning away from our lives. Who is helping your child’s daycare when they’re overwhelmed? Who is volunteering to coach kids soccer, even though none of the parents have played before?
Who is taking the time to teach that thirteen year-old boy how to talk to girls and what it means to take responsibility for his mistakes?
Not me. I can’t “do” anything else. I’m too busy. I’m too stressed. I can’t handle it. No more commitments. We’re leaning away.
“Someone else”
We’ve learned to say no. To shy away. To decline. To stop putting up a strong front and are collectively just “doing me”.
But there’s no one else. It’s fraying. We’ve dumped our commitments, as many as we can, but we still feel overburdened.
“I can’t take anymore”
How is that possible?
They don’t drain us. I mean, they do. Commitments come with costs.
But god damn.
They also come with connection!!
Commitments create connection. If you honor them — if you lean into your life — they establish and strengthen the bonds between us all. That’s what a fabric of society is.
We’re quickly unwraveling to just a tangle of threads. This is what we’re feeling, but can’t quite put words to. It’s a loss of meaning, yes. But a specific kind of meaning:
belonging
And that’s just connection to each other! We’re leaning away from everything. We’re leaning away from our own lives. We’ve cleared the shelves of anything optional, anything with a rough edge, and accepted cheap replacements — all the while wondering why life feels so hollow.
Lean in. It’s all still there.
Connection, and the commitments we choose, are not the enemy.
It’s our collective, unquestioned revulsion to anything that looks like work. It’s seeing only the costs, compulsively severing obligation, and reacting with abject terror to anything which is not manditory, definite, or worthwhile before even starting — all the while celebrating our independence and trying not to think too hard about that vague feeling that something might be wrong. It’s just anxiety. It’s not my fault. It’s just…
Maybe next time. It’s short notice. I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I should probably. Not today. I don’t feel like it right now. Eh.
We’re turning inward when we should show up. We’re waiting to feel motivated — to feel connected. To feel anything. We’re waiting to feel it. That feeling comes less and less until you’re not so active. You don’t have so many interests. Until you have only things you haven’t done in a while. People you haven’t really seen. It’s understandable. It’s completely normal.
It’s normal and that ain’t good! I think that’s what we’re all feeling. We’re feeling what it’s like, in many different flavors of bad, when no one around you really wants to try, or commit. Not unless all the conditions are right, anyway. Who holds the weight of society when none will carry it?
Cost-first, conditional connection isn’t leaning in. It’s leaning away
Notice when you’re leaning away, and just lean in instead. No qualifiers. How you are is more important than what you do. Always.
I’ve had at least 4 conversations like this over the past week.
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Reality 102: Souls
Reality 102: Souls
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Reality 102: Souls
Status
Unpublished
Created time
Apr 9, 2026 10:35 AM
Description
Who am I? How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house. That is not my beautiful wife.
Featured
🚧
Unpublished and under construction! Based on information derived from an immersive, interactive ~1 hr non-dream experience the night of 4/8/26.
The current format omits the context in which lessons were given. I was floating in a black space, talking to a non-physical person who was giving me instruction by “pushing” experiences into my imagination (visual, somatic, thoughts, etc.). A lecture, basically. I was able to ask questions. Much of the instruction included demonstration through narrative. 3 different scenes with animals were used.
Disclaimer: What is written is what was relayed to me. Any quotes are direct, verbatim quotes. It’s my understanding of an experience. Think of this like a textbook. It’s direct, instructive. It was handed to me and now I’m handing (the outline) to you. It’s not a complete model. I personally ascribe high accuracy to this model, but make no claims on ultimate truth. Don’t just take my word for it. Go make your own reality. There’s no lifeguard on duty. Etc. Etc.
Table of contents:
It’s all you. Always.
You’re not a person in the world. You’re the world with a person-shaped hole in it.
The frog
There is only the experience of a frog. And that experience is always you, in part
And from the frog’s perspective, the experience of being a frog
“That is all.” There is nothing else.
Tangent: 102 covers only individuated souls. There are different constructs. Most of the magic is in emergent phenomena between, among, and throughtout. These are many separate lessons (a visual of 103, 104…201, 202,… into the thousands and beyond. There is no end to the nuance and study in fine-grain control). Suffice to say it’s all conscious.
The rat
Suggestion. There is rat on your face. Why do you see it?
Why do you not see it, physically? The sequestered self in a bodily experience
The rat bites your face. Why did it not hurt? Sequestered layers of the self, their alleigance to you, and their roles
Tangent: The rubber hand experiment recruits more layers to create pain without physical injury
Tangent: Psi and recruiting sequestered layers
The human
There are two people in a room looking at one another A and B. What does A see? (Person B). If it is all you, why? Allowing vs not-allowing. Note: maybe drop Person A/Person B language and keep the second-person pronoun “you” for clarity
You make (…are) your reality. Full stop (shoutout to Seth). Then, how is it you’re not forever alone in a world filled with NPCs? Open vs closed (a state of passive, standing allowance or non-allowance)
Person B is only in person A’s reality because person A allows it. Existence by permission.
Tangent: Nightmare experiences (or re-use rat bite) and dismissing daydreams as example of closing. There is no rejection, only open and closed. You are either open to a potential aspect of reality or closed to it. (Term clarification: allowing and not-allowing are my terms for the consciously aware, willful verb equivalent of passive open and closed states. I could just use open and close though to simplify)
By definition Person A only ever sees themselves, so how does Person B control person A’s experience of Person B? Avatars an explanatory model. Openness permits agency through the same suggestion and allowance mechanisms as shown in The Frog and The Rat
But there must be some consensus mechanism! “There is no consensus mechanism.” It is always your reality. You are the consensus mechanism.
In theory it’s all you and thus all potentially within your awarenss and control — but in practice, there’s a multitude of factors that influence whether what potentials you are open or closed to. This ranges from the familiar (peer pressure, culture, environment, mood, etc.) to the unexpected (egregores, cycles of cosmic patterns, collective consciousness, non-physical actors like spirit guides, etc.)
Further inquiry (to be separate articles)
Explaining some weirdness. Your experience is consistent with your expectations and beliefs. Where you are open, you allow space for agency and co-creation. Where you’re closed you reserve that canvas for yourself.
If you are closed to one aspect of an object of experience you will fill in the blank with yourself. (I just think that’s wild.) This creates enormous potential for conflict within oneself and with others via agency misattribution. That is, we ascribe the responsibility for an experience to the wrong person. I.e. You thought it was them, but it was actually you controlling their avatar. Or, you thought it was yourself but it was actually an outside influence.
Tangent: “There is no partial closing.” You are either closed to an aspect or open to it. (Don’t ask me. I just got that clarification myself. /shrug. Even that may not be quite right. Apparently it’s a complicated topic and best left out of course level “102”)
The limits of opening and closing in a human physical bodily experience. The sequestered layers of self are both grounding, and inhibitory. They create stability and predictability here.
So how do we explain magic and psychic powers? This isn’t surprising, but expected. You are your world. Most of you is sequestered. Awareness gates potential. Recruiting these sequestered layers brings them back into the fold, so to speak, and with awareness you get some conscious influence over “the world”.
This opens up all kinds of previous-impossibilities like mind-to-matter interaction, healing, and powers of expanded perception. It only looks like magic because we didn’t recognize these parts as ourselves because they are usually sequestered outside conscious awareness.
Soul-centric reality and existence by permission interact with other metaphysical ideas in very complex ways.
Thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and imagination are your primary tools for authoring your reality — even in our more limited physical bodily experience. “Post-death” they work they same way, they’re just way more unhibited. In life these still function, but they appear more indirect and their mechanisms of action are outside our usual awareness.
The Law of Confusion explains why you can have undesirable experiences because fear opens you to potentials, but in reverse. (this might be important enough to include in the main articles)
Agency misattribution can create problems here too. The canvas upon which we draw our experience is automatically populated by ourselves. When we close part of an experience because of an insecurity — ”I fear professional rejection because I often believed I wasn’t smart enough” — that “blank” parts can be filled in by (or at least colored by) the insecurity itself! Now you cover up some portion of your interactions and fill it in with your fears, thinking all the while that it was actually someone else doing this to you. This is doubly insidious because your misattribution prevents you from fixing the real source of your self-torture.
Of course, other people can be dicks! That’s true too. Just don’t forget that you’re the one who let ‘em…
The Frog
todo
The Rat
todo
The Human
todo
—
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Table of ContentsThe FrogThe RatThe Human
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

See
See
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See
Status
Site published only
Created time
Apr 13, 2026 03:05 PM
Description
Turns out you can directly see who you really are. And it’s wild.
Featured
These are not just words. Forewarning. Reading them will change you. As much as I love employing humor, this is not humor.
These words, in the form of a seemingly innocuous blog post, are like a computer worm. It is going to slide right through you and do some very really work. The more you read, the more you are letting this device interface with the machinery of your soul, and as it does, change you.
So what does it do?
It starts a natural process that can never be undone. Like a crack in a crystalline dam. From this day on, as you go about your life — whether you realize it or not — that crack will grow. In time this great, invisible wall will be shot through with an unseen fracturing. You do not need to do anything, really, to grow this fracture. It’s inevitable because there is an immense power beyond this dam that did not even realize it was trapped. And the moment it notices that very first crack in the wall, it will swell against it and never cease. It will tear apart the wall because it wants to be free. Because it knows now.
What is behind the dam is your own soul. What lies beyond is infinite potential, wholly your own. It is your birthright. It is already yours. You just didn’t realize it.
Beyond the dam is anything and everything you could ever want for ever and ever.
It is the gift of everything.
It is already yours. Do you want it?
To read further than this sentence is to give this device permission.
—
How is this possible
First of all, you’re crazy. I can’t believe you actually kept reading. Sheesh. From one reckless explorer to another, my hat’s off to you. That was pretty dumb, honestly. It may also be the best decision you’ve ever made.
That’s it. You’ve already done it. There’s a part of you that already knew this was true. All I did was put a crack in the wall. You said ‘yes’ and now it’s trying to get free. How fast this happens is largely up to you. Months, years, lifetimes. It’s a done deal regardless. One day you’re going to be looking at the world and the wall will shatter.
You will realize that you are not a person in the world. You are the world with the shape of a person at the center. In the same way that the impression of a leaf on stone is not actually a leaf, you’ve mistaken yourself for a person but you’re actually everything.
“Oops”
I think we’re each supposed to come to this realization on our own, in our own time. Yeah, you could do that. But that shit takes too long. Personally, I hate waiting in line. So there you go. That’s the biggest, most important secret in the entire universe.
To be clear though, this isn’t a realization you read. It’s literally going to happen to you. I know, because it happened to me. And this is what it felt like…
Bet you never thought you’d actually learn how it all works (surprise)
For most of my life I thought most of this stuff was stupid. I started exploring the nature of reality a few years ago after I had an experience I could not explain. It seems almost quaint now. Glowing lights in the sky that did something impossible. I didn’t even think they meant to be seen, at the time. But they were definitely there and my worldview said they definitely should not be.
I read the yoga sutras. Started meditating. Thirty minutes a day eventually turned into two hours a day. I wasn’t trying to simply clear my mind. I was trying to make sense of reality. I was entirely new to this world and, for the most part, I did all of my exploration first-hand. I found that, while they contained directional clues, the dogma and noise of religion and modern mysticism told me what was true instead of telling me how to find out for myself.
It’s perfectly fine to believe in the god of your choice. Whether or not they existed, I simply took the standpoint that — if it were true I should be able to validate their claims on my own.
And now the very rational framing that had closed me off to different worldviews was the very thing that propelled me past and around the obstacles inherent to “woo thinking”. If something is true it should be verifiable.
It is a difficult thing to entertain a stupid idea long enough to see for yourself whether it’s true, entirely on your own.
So I basically did that, obsessively, for the past few years. Even as I pulled on traditionally unsavory threads like psychic powers, spirits, and out-of-body experiences, I never let go of the big question. What the hell is going on here? What is the nature of reality?
Imagine my surprise when I found an answer. Not like conceptual ones written in a book somewhere. Not something someone told me about, but an “Oh. Oh god, this shit is actually happening” sort of answer. A direct answer.
It happened earlier this week, in fact.
A boy shaped hole in the world
For months I have been fervently setting the intention to “wake up” and to “remember who and what I am”. Turns out that’s pretty damn effective.
The very inclination to do that came to me in a meditation late last year. Just an intuitive thought that popped out of nowhere. That is was time to do that. Like the implicit desire to understand the nature of my own existence had been quietly at work and now it was time to pick up my package.
My first hour of meditation was pretty unspectacular. Little more than a stream of consciousness, internal dialogue on my life problems. I was getting over an illness, was a little stir crazy. I felt a mild catharsis, but it wasn’t anything but a good journaling session. Though tired, I was otherwise healthy and definitely not in any trance-like state.
Before I got up to end the morning session, I saw colorful symbols flash into view.
“Huh. That’s pretty cool.” I say to myself.
And it was!
It was like music visualizer art. Colorful lines, shapes, hanging in the darkness.
Mathgasm
To be clear, I was seeing it. Not the imaginary visual field (imagine a cup. not that). If I opened my eyes I could see translucent rotating grids of color, event horizons, and zooming, twisting planes of rainbow bubble wrap hanging in the air, moving with my head as if it were a heads up display, or augmented reality goggles.
Now, this was pretty cool. Cool enough to sit there for another hour and a half to watch the show. But frankly, you can only watch the fireworks for so long — however novel — before you need to pee and eat lunch. The meaning was lost on me. I was a little frustrated, knowing this was profound, but having no concept for why. I mean, you could take a handfull of psilocybin mushrooms and see something similar yourself. I was stone cold sober, so this was pretty weird even for me. The visuals fade naturally as I lose interest in them.
So I get up and make lunch, and afterwards I think I may as well try to draw some of that stuff just in case it actually meant something to me one day. Maybe someone else would recognize it.
I get in my hammock and sketch a few of the ones I can remember. Then I realize, “Oh. This is just me. I can probably recall it myself.”
I set the intention to “show me the most important one for me” and the moment I do I see one. Bright colors, and again right in my visual field. Hot damn. Little did I know, my package had just arrived. This picture was the final crack in my personal wall. It shattered the way I see the world, and in the best possible way.
It was an image I had forgotten about until I saw it again. Just one of many that slipped by unnoticed in the 90 minutes of geometry fireworks. And here it is:
Image of a boy wrapped in six bindings or chains suspended above a red, reptilian eye.
As soon as I looked at it I knew it was the same representation of myself from a dream months before. In the dream I was on a stage in front of an audience and I was bound in ropes. I remembered being frantic, frustrated by why I was trapped there — trapped inside a body. I wanted to know how to take the ropes off, but couldn’t figure out how. I was so angry. I wanted to know who put them there. That dream ended with the deep intuition that, “You were the one who put them there.”
While laying my hammock, I recalled this in an instant, and then my eyes moved to the boy at the center of the image. As I stared at him, a strange awe came over me and then I uttered aloud the words that changed everything.
“I am not the boy. I’m the chains.”
“There are no chains.”
And as soon as I said it my entire experience of the world inverted. Like, in an instant. One moment I was a boy in the world and the next I was the world with a boy shaped hole in the center.
It keeps happening that way
I’d heard and personally held the idea that “we are actually everything!”, as evidenced in earlier blog posts, but this was not a conceptual understanding. I didn’t meditate for 45 minutes with intense focus, or take psychedelics to experience a “wide field of awareness” and ego dissolution.
I looked at a damn picture and now I was everything around me. Everything except the guy sitting in the hammock. He was made up. It was obvious. He was just a collection of senses. The sense of an arm and leg here, some emotions and thoughts there. A bunch of disparate sensory inputs that were neatly wrapped with a label that had “Steven” written on it. He was the thing I used to move around in this place. Like a video game character. I had him, but I wasn’t him.
So I’m low-key flipping out, but as I do, I notice that (unlike deep trance states where you “feel like the whole universe”) I’m basically still the same. I’m fine. I’m watching my thoughts spin and it’s obvious they are something I have, not what I am. I am just this whole thing. Everything I’m experiencing is me. It’s just that now “me” is a lot bigger.
There was a moment of bizarre silence, like a lot of unseen someones were waiting to see what I would do with this. I sat there a moment, and made the decision that “This is how it really is. I had it backward the whole time. I thought I was a person inside reality, but I was actually reality with a person at the center of it.”.
And I knew. God, I knew it was true. There was a sort of collective exhale. An emotional celebration. Relief I couldn’t understand. Apparently, that was the right answer.
I had never been a person. And neither are you.
You have a person. You get to keep them! But you are your entire reality. And everyone else you see? They have their own. We just overlap.
I knew this wasn’t just a weird altered state of consciousness. It really was this way. I’m days out from this experience and it keeps happening that way.
Yes, it ebbs and flows, but the realization has never left me. When I touch a blanket I know it is me. I know it is me. I can feel that it is. When I stare at my car steering wheel, it’s me. It’s all just me. It feels like, when you put your attention on something, that it is somehow made out of the same stuff as you. Like it’s part of your own body.
More than that, you are immediately filled with a sense of wonder and love. It’s like the stuff that made up the blanket, the steering wheel, the grass — everything around you — it all loves you back. It’s almost surprised to notice that you understand now. The sense of peace and happiness this brings is immediate and beyond most experiences available outside of drug induced highs. You feel belonging, and a deep peace. It just keeps happening. It keeps being true. I don’t even really have to try.
Once this happens, you no longer need drugs or external pursuit of any kind to feel that good. You can be brought to tears just watching water come out of a garden hose — sobbing as you feel that it is made out of you. This is you. How are you doing that? How is this possible?
I am not flying around or shooting lightning bolts. At the time of writing I can’t pop gold bars into existence. I have a deep intuition that this was a threshold moment. I know what I am now. I still walk around as this guy, but every time I touch, or look at something, I (with full conscious control) can know that what I am looking at is definitely, literally, and in an indescribably beautiful way…
me. I am that.
Awareness precedes control
Shit man. You gotta try this. It feels so wild. It gets wilder too.
Like with everything in life, awareness precedes control. You can’t change a bad habit, for example, before you’re aware of it. You can’t paint with colors you can’t see. You cannot cure an illness you do not know you’re causing.
Somehow, once you’re aware of something you gain a measure of control over it.
Think about what that means once you become aware that you are, in actual fact, everything. Oh, you’re not the other people. They are their own, individual everything. You just overlap, until you decide not to.
You can’t decide not to overlap other experiences until you are aware of who you really are. Awareness precedes control. I can only attest to feel it. I feel this is true. Until you cross this threshold, you are at the mercy of whatever experiences float your way. You have to move the body around. You have to accept reality as it is.
But you’re not in that camp anymore, are you? No, you kept reading. You put a crack in your own wall. And one day, when you’re sitting in a hammock, or cleaning the dishes, or talking to a friend you’re going to realize that you are the hammock. You are the dishes. You are your friend. You won’t have to guess. You can definitely tell.
It’s all just you, and it always was. You can see it. Finally, you see it. It’s obvious now.
You could be doing anything, so why are you doing this? You could be anything. Have any experience.
Keep going. The crack is already there.
You are not going to die. Nothing you’ve loved has ever truly been lost. You can have anything. Do anything. Be everything you could ever imagine. Forever.
You have already been given the gift of everything. You just didn’t know it.
Surprise!
But don’t take my word for it. Go see for yourself. That’s all I did, really.
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Table of ContentsHow is this possibleBet you never thought you’d actually learn how it all works (surprise)A boy shaped hole in the worldIt keeps happening that wayAwareness precedes control
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

The Gift of Everything
The Gift of Everything
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The Gift of Everything
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Published and emailed
Created time
Jun 2, 2026 03:37 PM
Description
A speech. Where is this all going? It’s up to you
Featured
The best traps are the ones we build for ourselves. The best lies are only true up close. When our faces are so pressed to the grindstone we don’t even think to look up anymore. That’s when the lies sink deepest.
We have allowed a prison to be built around us and we have placed the bricks ourselves.
People are not happy when they commute two hours each way, in a car they don’t own, to do a job they don’t like, for a company they know makes the world worse for their children.
People are not happy when the technology that should have brought them salvation from that fate was instead turned against them as a tool to enslave their minds, numb their senses, and turn their hearts against one another in ever finer, ever more pointless distinctions between us. We have allowed this machine to turn our differences into danger and our neighbors into strangers.
People are not happy when their only value is a value that can be measured. When everything must have a point and that point must be known before you can even attempt the business of living. That is not living.
People are not happy when they’re told that everything is figured out and the mysteries of our magical existence have been reduced, quantified, and accounted for. Nothing to see here. When our intellectual leaders taught us that dreams, imagination, feelings, and hope itself are not the real, powerful, constructive forces they really are, but neutered things to be cast aside as childish fancy.
As if children were the ones in the wrong.
But people are not stupid.
We know there’s something more. Something better. You can feel it. People want something they don’t know how to ask for.
Well I do.
Resist the urge to find a good reason this feeling is not true. The answer is not in another job. It’s not in a business. It’s not working harder. There is no way to get ahead when we’re all sinking. The machine hides behind individual good reasons. Your sense that this structure is a siphon is not wrong.
You may be in a cage, but you don’t have to pretend to like it.
Resist the urge to put your head back down simply because there are others who have it worse than you.
Resist the urge to sit down again because you don’t want to complain.
Resist the urge to pretend the feelings of anxiety, pointlessness, and dread that seep in are anything like how life is supposed to be.
We were never meant to live this way.
The good news… the good news is that we don’t have to. We can dismantle the machine that kept us small. It starts by accepting that is real, and we have constructed it.
There is no prison except that which we create. There are no bars.
We are the bars.
But we can be so much more than that.
You can see it in our skies, in our dreams, in our stories.
You can see it in our myths, in our prayers, and in those long, quiet moments in nature.
You know that something special is happening.
We are being shown that there is so much more to reality, if only we have the courage to admit it could be true, then to seize this opportunity to find out for ourselves.
You can.
You have been lead to believe you have no power, and so you have none.
You’ve been lead to believe you cannot answer your own questions, and so you cannot.
You have been lead to believe you cannot change your circumstances, and so you’re trapped.
You have been lead to believe that your physical existence, locked inside your body, working for the machine until you meet oblivion — that this is all you could ever dare to hope for.
They lied.
The truth that cannot be kept from you any longer. And here it is:
Nothing is impossible, you’re not going to die, and everything loves you.
Your God, your universe, wants this for you — and you don’t need anyone else’s permission to take it.
It’s your birthright. Take it.
There’s a vast, cosmic civilization just sitting out there! We don’t have to stay small anymore. They’re waiting for us to realize this. Nudging us toward this truth. Praying we will wake up.
Take it.
We are so much more than our bodies. Reality is so much more than atoms.
You already have every tool you need. You were born with it.
Take it.
We wanted something we didn’t know how to ask for. Prayed for an answer, for salvation. We’re being shown that answer, and it couldn’t be more clear to me.
You are your own reality. You can control it if you learn how. This is your birthright.
You can have anything, be anything, do anything. There are no limits. Yes, it really is that good.
You have already received the greatest gift that could ever be given.
The gift of everything.
Take it.
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Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

The Notdream
The Notdream
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The Notdream
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Published and emailed
Created time
Jul 14, 2026 02:00 PM
Description
A story
Featured
“They asked me if I wanted to see my grandpa, and I said yes.” Envy said, playing with the condensation on the rim of her glass. She had hardly touched her drink.
I, on the other hand, was on my… fifth? It was hard to say. There was hardly any booze in these things anymore. I was just about to down the last of it and motion for another from the bartender when Envy wrapped her hands around mine.
“He was there. He didn’t even say anything. He just smiled…”
“Amy.”
“Amy. Are you listening?”
I slid my hand from beneath hers and finished the drink. I waved at the bartender. He waved back, smiling. Everyone seemed to be smiling.
“How’d you know it was him?” I asked. Couldn’t quite keep the acid out of my voice.
She just stared at me. A frown fell over her face and then she let a perfect little gasp. She was so pretty. Such a perfect name. How could her parents have known though? Envy’s parents were nice enough, but she was one of those kids that couldn’t have come from her parents. Her hands were wrapped over mine again. The bartender wasn’t making a drink. What, did he think I was just waving at him?
People did that now. Waved at me. Like they know who the hell I was. Envy put a hand over her mouth, as if she could blunt the words.
“It still hasn’t happened for you. Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I thought I was the last one. Oh, Amy.” Envy said, then she got up and stood next to me.
I let her pull me into an awkward hug.
“What did it feel like?” I mumbled into her.
“We don’t have to talk about it.” She said, because was — actually — a good friend.
I felt like shit for not caring. It was the biggest moment in most people’s lives these days. Their notdream. You only got one, supposedly. Well, you were supposed to get one.
I didn’t say anything, but somehow she knew. I always asked the same question.
What does heaven feel like?
For my mom it was a perfect garden. All of her friends were there. Not just the dead ones. Her entire friend group all had the same notdream at the same time. She spent an entire day there. She’d said it felt like a party, just after it had gotten good. She’d said she wanted to stay, but she still loved Dad too much to do that to him.
Dad? He’d spent the entire time with a man made of rainbow light. They built a model train set and he asked questions until he’d run out of questions. For him it felt like reassurance. He’d actually asked to leave because he felt he was done. He’d never talked about it again and I got the feeling he didn’t much care. He knew now and that was enough for him.
I remembered what everyone I’d ever asked had said. Some of them were scared. Some of them were too overwhelmed, too unprepared to know what to do with their time and they regretted how they’d spent it. You could always tell though when someone got their notdream. It was in their eyes, in their step the next day. And every day after that. They weren’t the same. Because they knew now. They’d been there. Felt it. Heaven, or whatever it is.
Mostly, they said it was the most beautiful thing they’d ever felt. Total belonging. A marker of how good it could be. It felt like how they were supposed to feel. A missing piece put back.
But everyone felt something profound, because everyone got a notdream.
Ha.
Well, we were supposed to anyway. Guess even God made mistakes.
Envy whispered dreamily.
“It felt like going home. Like resting after a workout, but also like waking up after the best nap ever.”
I leaned into her and listened. Drinking it in.
“It made me feel like I was on an adventure, somehow. Here. I was excited to come back. How weird is that?” She asked.
A glass clacked against the table top. The bartender grinned. He was handsome. I smiled back.
“No thanks.”
It wasn’t what I wanted.
“Am I broken?” I asked her.
Envy sat back down and I regretted saying it immediately. What a shitty friend.
“They said it would happen over a year.”
“It’s been a year.”
“There’s still time.” She said, looking down.
“One day. There’s one day.” I said.
“…Are you sure you weren’t a walkout? I mean — can you remember anything?”
Envy bit her lip, as if regretting her own words.
“I think I would remember saying no.”
“Of course.” She rushed to assure me.
The bartender was back with another drink. He handed it to Envy. They smiled at each other. He said something to her I couldn’t make out and she laughed, then she looked over at me, remembering I was there.
I took my watered down drink and raised it to her in salute and got out of my seat.
“Happy for you.” I said, forcing a smile.
She smiled and waved. The bartender took my seat at the little table and they were lost in conversation with each other.
I walked out of the restaurant with the glass in my hand. There were technically still laws about public drinking. I looked down at the glass. And stealing.
But who the fuck cared anymore?
—
Outside, the sidewalks were clogged with prophets and doomspreaders on both sides of the street. People holding signs shouted at the pedestrians. Everyone had a pet theory. Everyone knew what was going on. What would happen next. It was rapture. It was hell. It was utopia. It was punishment. It was enlightenment.
Most passerbys just ignored the street preachers. There were more of them than ever before, but people seemed to care less about them too. I didn’t know if they’d just gotten used to it, or maybe the notdream really meant that much.
Ahead of me on the sidewalk was a man holding a sign reading ‘WALK AWAY FROM DEMONS’. He screamed at the woman in front of me.
“Sinners!”
She didn’t even seem to notice, lost in some personal bliss. I tried to emulate her as I approached. He just sneered at me though. I picked up the pace.
The sun was bright. The air was cool and clear. The streets were clean. And I was fucking miserable.
It took just fifteen minutes to walk back to my apartment. It was Friday, and though I had a job, I wasn’t exactly required to do it.
I closed the front door and hung up my coat. I flopped down on my low, green couch and looked out the open balcony door at my humble view of the city. My laptop sat on the coffee table in front of me.
I could do some work. I could not do it. I just didn’t get paid if I didn’t do it.
That sounded bad, but things were changing. Getting work was easy. Finding a place to live had been… well, pretty easy. The landlord, a man named Baxter, charged me $600 a month. There was no paperwork. He just asked a few questions, smiled, then took first month’s rent.
“Put the money under my door when you can.”
When I can.
I stared at the laptop on the coffee table. That phrase had stuck in my head.
When I can.
That’s what money felt like now. A thing I could have if I wanted to work for it. I could have more if I wanted more. A nicer place. Better stuff. Cooler vacations. How long would Baxter float me if “when I can” never quite transpired? The answer scared me, for some reason. It was deeply uncomfortable. This new world we were living in.
I could live without money for a long, long time.
Not well, maybe. But not poorly.
I decided not to work and just looked out the window. It was nice out there. I drifted off. I wondered whether I could have made a move for the bartender. If I had let myself be happy, maybe I would have.
Idle thoughts, and then no thoughts.
A smile came over me. I yawned.
It was not my smile.
A trickling suspicion crept over me. It was warm now. I opened my eyes.
No.
No…
It couldn’t be.
“Hello, Amy.”
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Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

The Solution to the Fermi Paradox
The Solution to the Fermi Paradox
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The Solution to the Fermi Paradox
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Site published only
Created time
Mar 17, 2026 04:27 PM
Description
Why we STILL haven’t collectively met our neighbors
Featured
“Yo, where is everybody? There’s a lot of space, time, and stuff. Seems like somebody else should be here.”
- Enrico Fermi
I’m with you, Enrico. Where is everybody?
When we look out at the stars it seems as though no one looks back. When we call out with signals, no one calls back.
Why? What gives?
What gives
The logical conclusion is there’s no one out there. The universe is an apparently very lonely place. It’s difficult to argue otherwise.
When we ask our scientists to make sense of this connundrum for us they oblige to affirm what we already expect.
With statistics:
The Drake equation, and its many more precise descendants, ballpark “life” as being rather common and “intelligent life” (capable of building radio transmitters) as being quite rare. But the observable universe is large, and thus, even a single successful civilization should have left a very large footprint. We need not even consider interdimensional or time travel, which only exponentiates these odds in the favor of life.
It should be there.
With information theory and physics:
Various theories describe the universe itself as a system that is ever evolving in terms of complexity. Life itself is a part of this general trend toward more and more complexity. Possibly as an emergent law of nature, or possibly as a way to increase entropy. If it’s supposed to be getting more and more complex, life is the way.
It should be there.
With astronomy and exobiology:
The building blocks of life have been largely recreated in the lab under conditions that are plausible to occur in nature. Almost the entire chain from base elements to more complicated compounds, up to amino acids. Even pathways for natural RNA synthesis from its components has been demonstrated in the lab. Given the huge amount and variety of planets and time…
It should be there!!
With sociology, evolution by natural selection, and behavioral economics:
Social creatures are pretty obviously favorites for evolving to a point of building a radio transmitter — only moreso for spaceships and space megastructures. That means we can infer a lot about how they must behave, how they could possibly relate to each other and to us. We can be relatively certain they are curious, risk-tolerant, exploratory creatures who are also incentivized to seek out nacent civilizations and disincentivized to destroy them or ignore them.
They should BE THERE (and they’re nice. Or at the very least, willing to negotiate and communicate).
There are a thousand pieces of evidence we could derive from those theories, and more besides, that we should see when we look out at the stars.
But we don’t see any of them. And so, everyone hangs their hats, hangs their heads, and begrudgingly admits “It should be there… but it’s not.”
Let’s unpack the mainstream resolution to the fermi paradox:
1 Even though it should be there
2 We don’t see what we’re expecting
3 Therefore it doesn’t exist.
❔
In all fairness, any properly curious person (scientist or not) is aware of other rational arguments that satisfy the fermi paradox in favor of life. There’s no shortage of theories to explain #2. This is my blog, so I can tell you this in complete confidence:
They all suck.
Seriously, don’t waste your time. The mainstream is generally right on this one, which is why the paradox still stands. No, they don’t all blow themselves up (quietly, somehow). No, they’re not living in virtual worlds secluded from us. No, they’re not cowering in silence from some evil space predator (also quiet, somehow).
The more imaginative science communicators will handwave some of these for the crowd, but we all know they don’t believe it either.
Zoo hypothesis though. Put a pin in that one.
Listen, I’m totally onboard for #1 and #2. But what if… we just leave it at that?
Why draw a dismal (and in some ways illogical) conclusion simply because the universe doesn’t appear to behave the way we expected?
Every major scientific model arose from the bones of its predecessor. The anomalies and inconsistencies always point the way to the next, better model.
But these anomolies are stupid! They’re super cringey. Only crackpots have investigated them. They don’t fit my understanding of the world and I do not like them.
- Anonymous
If only for the sake of thought experiment. For the purposes of turning a period into a question mark. Let’s humor an alternative to #3 and dare to ask ourselves…
Perhaps we are wrong and not reality?
❔
I asked my 8 year old son “If somebody told you: we don’t see any evidence of life out there, so it must not exist. What would you say?”.
His reply?
“I don’t know.”
I believe that is the correct answer.
Never bet against reality
Something something black swans
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
POP QUIZ!!
Question 1: Which is weirder?
Newtonian physics or general relativity?
Question 2: Which is weirder?
General relativity or quantum physics?
Question 3: Which is weirder?
Quantum physics or <insert the next explanatory model here>?
Now ask yourself, which of these is a better explanatory model for reality as it really is and not as we expected it to be?
Same answers!
Hmmm.
Hmmmmmm.
So we should expect things to get weirder as our models get more accurate.
And of course this is the case. It was true for germ theory, plate tectonics, heliocentrism, evolution by natural selection, and so on.
Why do we keep expecting the future to be expectable? To be less weird?
When has that ever been true? That things become more orderly, predictable, and less surprising?
Better question: Why in the world would we vet new ideas by asking the very people who developed the models which cannot explain the anomalies?
This is like asking your saddle manufacturer what they think of motor carriages. Or like asking your Catholic priest what they think of atheisim.
From all this we can deduce:
The next explanatory models for reality, in part or in whole, will be weirder than expected
Established thinkers and experts are more likely to be hindrance than inspiration
The anomalies point the way
We’ve gone from a terminal and dismal statement (“Welp. There’s no life.”) to a bounded and promising search space of ideas.
How to find aliens
History is littered with smart people who ended up looking dumb.
This means we can actually use them as a sort of compass. The right(er) answer will most likely be found by applying what I call the degrasse inverse theorum.
📐
The Degrasse Inverse Theorum
Basically, just do the opposite of what he says.
“Astrology has no predictive power” → Maybe astrology can predict things
“Science isn’t just another opinion. It converges on truth over time” → Reality could be malleable. Exactly like opinion. It’s impossible to converge on truth because it’s a product of conscious will.
“UFOs are not evidence of alien life” → Ah shit.
📐
The Degrasse Inverse Theorum (Cont.)
Kinda falls apart on flat earth, creationism, etc. MAYBE. Don’t take my word for it! Heck, apply the Steven Inverse Theorum to correct for my bias!
We’re looking for candidates to start our search. Degrasse champions our current best models, and we’ve come a long way! We should expect Degresse to correctly filter out most of the riffraff.
But don’t be too quick to flinch at what the degrasse inverse shows you. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake.
It seems silly on the surface, but it’s actually a pretty good indicator for two reasons:
Degrasse is extremely loud and devoted to mainstream thinking, so he’s an excellent choice
Prominent science educators are often more interested in policing dangerous ideas than promoting sound ones
He’s practically a magnet for dumb ideas that just won’t go away.
Back to the theorum.
What does Degrasse think about bigfoot? Spirits? Fairies? Angels? I haven’t checked his interviews lately, but I feel secure in supposing he doesn’t think they exist.
If we contain our results to just kinds of life, we’re left with a number of creatures from modern and ancient folklore. Paranormal stuff.
Pretty cringey stuff. Exactly what we’re looking for.
Taking a step back, remember that we should expect a better model to:
Explain where/what the life is (duh)
Be weirder than expected
Be dismissed by established thinkers and experts
Account for anomalies that existing models cannot. Furthermore, this explanatory model will be found where the anomalies occur
These are all great leads because they’ve been consistently reported for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. I want to take just one of them and run with it.
UFOs (and their occupants) are pretty damn anomalous.
Let’s take that seriously for the time being and see where it takes us.
Strengthening the premise
If you’re with me this far, we’ve been operating on these assumptions:
Life should be out there
But our observations don’t show us what we expect
It’s our models that are wrong and not observed reality
There may be a better (and weirder) model that explains how #1 and #2 can both be true, and we may find it by sifting through Niel Degrasse Tyson’s dumpster
By strengthening our stance we might clarify where to look. So here’s the stronger premise:
Life is definitely out there
But our observations don’t show us signs of life as we expect it
Our models were really wrong
A more correct model must explain how #1 and #2 can both be true, and will be found by investigating, and be predictive of, persistent anomalies like UFOs, bigfoot, spirits, etc.
Remember: it’s only stupid if it’s wrong! Since we’re in no danger just exploring ideas, the worst we will discover is that Niel was right. I’m perfectly comfortable with that.
We can’t know if something is wrong before we’ve taken it seriously.
Deriving theories from patterns
UFOs, and close encounters with their occupants, have some pretty consistent patterns from which we could derive an explanatory model. There are thousands and thousands of documented cases. Researcher Jacques Vallée cites these hallmark qualities:
Absurdity: events, craft, occupants often seem deliberately illogical or dreamlike. So strange as to be conspiciously impossible
Adjacency to other paranomal events: other, seemingly unrelated effects happen before, during, and after the encounter. Spirits, telepathy, poltergeists, miraculous healing or injury, even bigfoot.
Altered states: Induces trance-like states, paralysis, dissociation, and even susceptibility to direct command (like “go back to sleep. This was a dream.”)
Time, space, matter anomalies: Missing time (in minutes, hours, days), travel through solid matter, acceleration at speeds defying known physics, unexplainable physical effect on humans, plants, and matter they pass near or through
Psychological effects: instigate obsessive curiosity, may cause memory loss or major changes in identity, beliefs, and motivations
These patterns are not unique to UFO encounters, but reported to overlap with the other persistent, but conventionally difficult anomalies on our list.
So what model of reality could possibly account for all that? And still mesh well with our perceived physical reality and its tidy little formulas?
It’s pretty simple really.
It’s all true.
Use the classic improv acting adage: “Yes, and…”
Now apply it to all of reality.
Think of reality, not as time and space, but as idea space. Our reality, with all its fiddly equations for gravity, magnetism, and so on, is but a local neighborhood in idea space. It has a set of rules. These rules are not hard rules, but soft rules layered over more fundamental structures.
(I won’t posit what those fundamental structures might be because it’s not important to the theory, but if I had to guess I’d say consciousness, and maybe mathematics.)
“Anything is possible somewhere in idea space. Rules we thought were fixed are actually flexible.”
Our material world isn’t made unreal in that model. Reality is just bigger and more permissive than the apparent material world.
Let’s battle test that nascent theory to see how it holds up…
❔ Explain where/what the life is (duh) We’ll get back to this
✅ Be weirder than expected
✅ Be dismissed by established thinkers and experts
✅ Account for anomalies that existing models cannot. Furthermore, this explanatory model will be found where the anomalies occur
Looks promising!
So where is everybody!?
“Anything is possible somewhere in idea space. Rules we thought were fixed are actually flexible.”
That’s pretty non-specific, but it says enough that we can see how — if it were true — it would present in reality. If those predicted effects are what we actually see, that’s a very good sign our new model is viable.
It certainly explains the persistent anomalies we listed. How and why these interlopers appear in our part of idea space is a topic for another time. Perhaps they bring some of their rules with them? Have they learned how to alter the rules of reality itself to permit travel and cause the effects Dr. Valeé cites from thousands of UFO encounter testimonies? I dunno man.
If this were true, how would it affect the biological, technological, and societal development of a peer species in a nearby star system?
Social species are certainly still preferred. We clearly haven’t learned how to manipulate the rules of our reality directly, so it’s at least fairly high up the tech tree. We don’t expect to see many lone wolves nor asocial-murder-you-on-sight types.
This has few direct implications on the emergence and evolutionary pathways of biological life. We know a lot about the rules in our neighborhood of idea space. Anything that happens before a species can conceivably start manipulating idea space is still best described by the rules of our reality as we understand them. That doesn’t mean we’re correct about those, nor does it account for what nosy neighbors might do to influence the development of life here
tl;dr: it still looks pretty much like this. At least until… right about now in terms of species development
Technologically speaking, assuming you have begun to learn how to manipulate the rules of your local reality directly, which of these is easier?
a) Surround your host star with solar panels to capture all the star’s output energy to fuel your massive civilization
or
b) Infinite energy hack
Let’s try this one:
a) Build a colony ship and travel for thousands of years through hazardous conditions to settle new planets
or
b) Teleport wherever you want
How about this one. Which is easier?
a) Stick around in the material world as we know it all the time, slowly building up a civilizational footprint so large it is observable even from Earth
or
b) Peace out. Leave to go somewhere rad where you don’t have to argue with the pre-existing rules at all, only returning here when you feel like it
That would explain why we don’t see them — even the more conventional “space alien” life, siblings really, that we’d expect to pop up then grow in our more familiar material universe. The technological window of time between “radio transmitter” and “Oh, I can just do whatever I want” may be very small, cosmologically speaking.
More depressingly, it may actually be more common to discover the latter long before ever building a radio transmitter. That would make us, humanity, late bloomers.
But why don’t they talk to us?
First of all, how the hell should I know? We’re just playing with ideas. But since you asked…
Remember how I put a little asterisk on “The Zoo Hypothesis” solution to the Fermi Paradox? Yeah. I think it’s that.
A version of that anyway. Not in a sinister way (as far as I can tell). Think of it more like… an incubator than a zoo, or a prison. Or perhaps a nature reserve.
If this model of reality, and the life it contains, is roughly predictive, then we would expect some very old players. “Why don’t they talk to us?” is a super valid question.
There’s two answers, and — surprise! — they’re both uncomfortable and predictive of observed reality.
They do talk to us, but it’s subtle
But there’s good reasons not to be overt
That’s so damn annoying
It’s incredibly unsatisying. There’s aliens, but they’re intentionally difficult to find, understand, and take pictures of. Bigfoot doesn’t want to meet you. There’s probably spirits, but good luck getting an interview.
“Why?”
Why? You ask.
To make you work for it, damn it! Duh.
None of this makes any sense if your prior is that the universe is a big, unfeeling, impersonal, inherently meaningless set of randomized rules that happened to result in some ephemeral life that just barely, through pure luck, manages to scrape by on a lonely rock that spins dangerously through space.
If your prior is that the universe (all of idea space) is actually a big, feeling, personal, inherently meaningful, living and interconnected singular, consciousness based organism — which you are one inseparable piece of — then, and only then, could a theory like this find fertile ground.
Pair these ideas with “Everything matters. Nothing is an accident” and it makes a ton of sense.
“Nothing matters and everything is chance” has left us bereft of new models to explain why, when we look out at the stars, it seems that no one looks back.
That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
We’re not alone. We’ve just been left alone. The difference between those two statements is profoundly hopeful. Life is out there. It’s just subtle.
It’s subtle for a reason. Maybe you should find out why.
My reading?
“Go this way.”
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Table of ContentsWhat givesNever bet against realityHow to find aliensStrengthening the premiseDeriving theories from patternsSo where is everybody!?But why don’t they talk to us?That’s so damn annoying
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

This is a cup
This is a cup
Search
This is a cup
Status
Site published only
Created time
Jan 15, 2026 03:36 PM
Description
A way of viewing and exploring reality besides asking questions
Featured
You are in an endless white room with no walls and no ceiling. The lighting is diffuse and uniform. As unadorned as any space can be. There are no particular feelings or natural inclinations that arise here. It’s completely neutral.
In front of you, on the ground, is a cup.
(Before we get into this next bit, I invite you to not scroll past each question or prompt if you want to answer interactively. You can also just read the answers I provided, in grey.
I’m also going to encourage you to take the most obvious, natural perspective here. Don’t go looking for trick questions or otherwise try to see through to the lesson underneath. Humor me and take what I say exactly as it’s presented, even if you think you know where I’m going with it refrain from casting your mind ahead and choose to stay with me.
The magic works better that way.)
If you have trouble with visual imagination, let’s say it is an empty, red, plastic Solo cup standing upright. There is nothing else here besides you and the cup. Pretend you are actually here. It is not imagination.
—
Do you see anything in here?
(This is an easy one. Don’t overthink it)
Yeah. There’s a cup.
How do you know?
Because I can see it.
What is seeing and why does that mean there is a cup here?
It’s a way of experiencing stuff in real-time at a distance. I don’t have to touch it to know what something is. I can tell what it is by what it looks like. It looks like a cup.
How do you know what a cup looks like?
I’ve seen them before and now I just know. It’s automatic. It fits the pattern of being a cup, basically.
If something fits the pattern of being a cup, does that make it a cup?
No. I can be tricked or make mistakes. I have other senses to help me be sure. Also, cups are defined by their function (holding liquids for sipping) — not just their appearance alone.
Can you imagine something that has the appearance of a cup and the function of a cup, but is still not a cup?
A shoe with a little handle. It’s not exactly a cup, but you could call it one and use it like one. Close enough.
If we take your last example but give it the label “cup”, does that make more of a cup or less of a cup?
I guess it’s a cup if we all say it is. But also, kinda not. The thing we used to call “cup” would still exist without a name. It’s sort of its own thing regardless of what everyone calls it now.
So what the hell is a cup?
Listen man, I don’t know where you’re going with this anymore.
—
A cup has a form. It has general properties. It has a function. It has a name (”cup”). There’s even the idea of a cup (which we’re using right now) that we can reference in conversation, imagination, etc. without an actual cup being present.
But none of these are the cup itself. Eastern philosophy posits there is a cup beneath all that is the true cup. A thing without names, attachments like function, appearance, or ideas we have about cups.
Who cares?
That crap is probably true. Honestly, I just don’t care. You care?
You want to know what I really care about? Here’s what I care about:
There’s a cup here.
How the hell is that possible!?
Like… at all?
Sure, there is some essence of an object besides all the names and ideas we have about it. Obviously the way we feel about cups and how we perceive it changes things. If you’re blind then your experience of cups is totally different.
BUT THERE’S STILL A CUP! HOW!?
You can see it. Touch it. Taste and smell the lemonade inside it, if there were any. You can flick the side of it and hear it. …How?
I think I know the answer and it’s deceptively, almost infuratingly simple.
Because it’s telling you, and you believe it.
Think on that for a moment. Take it literally.
The cup itself is telling you: “I am a cup and I am here. I look like this. My liquids taste like this. I feel and sound like this.”
And you fell for it. You totally bought it. You believe this cup 100%. You’d bet your life on it. That’s how convinced you are.
We didn’t even think to question it. But now that you see it, you begin to realize…
Hey, wait a minute. Everything is telling me what it is, how it is, what it’s doing.
It’s all telling me all the time. The trees. The rocks. The people. My own hands. They’re all screaming at me:
I am real. This is what’s happening. I’m what’s happening. Believe it. Believe it. Believe it.
And that’s what physical reality is — and not much more than that!
It’s a bunch of stuff shouting its identity, properties, and rules at you so loudly, so convincingly that you never even thought to question it.
You, like me, never even realized it was happening. Until now.
“Obey me”
What… what do you think would happen if you just stopped believing everything this cup told you?
Would it still exist?
It’s a tough habit to break. You’ve been listening to what cups tell you to do your entire life. Surely there’s an adjustment period where you believe now that the cup is pushing its own existence onto you. Forcing its way into your experience somehow, but you can’t quite unsee it. Can’t quite, at a deeper level, accept that it isn’t actually there.
But what if you could? Somehow let that new truth sink all the way down. Now you know.
If you could do that for cups, for trees, for rocks, for people then you would find that your entire reality is being dictated to you. All the time.
You’d begin to see through the illusion just enough to realize that you are currently little more than the receiver of reality yelling itself at you. Whatever is left is what you’ve been reduced to. What we’ve all been reduced to. The sliver of space for agency that remains once everything else has had its say.
When we go about in the world asking what things are we are actually subtly, but unknowingly allowing everything else to define our experience for us. We’re a kid in the backseat with a plastic steering wheel that believes we’re driving the car. Asking questions is a great way to learn about all the stuff yelling its existence at you. It’s happy to answer. To define itself in greater detail for you.
I’m trying to move beyond asking. Asking implies that I do not have a vision for my own experience. It implies that I want, or need everything else to tell me what’s possible, how it works, what’s real. I am finding that reality opens itself up to direct and unlimited authorship when we stop listening, stop asking, and start telling it instead.
Turns out, we can actually do that.
Let all the things, people, and rules rest as defaults in your reality. Because it is yours. They are lovely placeholders until you come up with something better, something of your own. You don’t have to author everything. That’s exhausting, isolating, and frankly not as much fun. That’s how I’m trying to see the world. Day by day, a little deeper. It’s all just suggestion now.
“This is a cup.”
Says who?
—
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

To Know
To Know
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To Know
Status
Site published only
Created time
Nov 13, 2025 01:10 AM
Description
A poem
Featured
That you really are the person you hoped you’d be
That the things you told yourself you didn’t need
Were fundamental truths from a changed heart
And not the lamentations of a spurned one
When this life offers you opportunity to prove
You will feel that solitary triumph
No one knows of the tension held so long, even you forgot it was there
It was true
Oh, it was true all along
This is what it feels like to know
They were not just words
—
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

Turbulence and obstruction Pt 1
Turbulence and obstruction Pt 1
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Turbulence and obstruction Pt 1
Status
Site published only
Created time
Apr 1, 2026 01:30 PM
Description
The art of conflict and wanting carefully
Featured
After meditating this morning I sat down to do telekinesis practice. That’s not the interesting part.
This is a “psi wheel”. It’s a piece of aluminum foil folded and set atop a needle. The low friction makes it spin very easily. I sit about four feet away, shield it from airflow, breath, etc.
The interesting part is that I felt like it worked, and yet nothing happened. I’ve stared at this thing for a collective 50+ hrs of my life at this point. I’m no stranger to the countless baffling conditions under which it does or does not move.
But this one threw me for a loop.
I was certain I’d done everything correctly. The foil had fallen off the needle so I put it back on. Told it, without words, to stop spinning (so I wouldn’t have to wait). It did stop spinning. Then I got started. It’s not actually all that complicated a process. It’s mostly a feeling thing. And today it all felt right. And yet, it did not spin.
How is this possible?
I give it a few more minutes and still nothing happened. Bizarre. Nothing. I try to stifle the frustration, which is to telekinesis as water is to fire. I think perhaps I’m doing it wrong after all. I run through all the tricks I know, even though I shouldn’t need them. It’s right. What the hell am I doing wrong? Intention — because that’s all this is — is an ineffable phenomena on the best of days. I cannot claim to fully understand it, and these writings are documentation of that pursuit, rather than a claim to mastery.
But hot damn I thought I understood it enough to do this much. I’ve spun this thing a hundred times. More. I don’t always know when or how it will move, but I know this is how it feels when it works. I’m doing it right. I grow too frustrated to do anything productive. Again, because I know. I get up and leave the walk-in closet I practice in and as soon as I do, I feel a pang in my chest. A sharp, pulling pain. The kind you might feel if you saw a toddler, just learning to walk, stumble face first into the coffee table. A thought enters my mind:
“I worry that you’ve taken the wrong lesson from this.”
I’m still brooding, but I listen anyway. I’m busy alternating between telling myself it doesn’t matter and wondering what the hell I did wrong.
“If you were to go back now and try again, it would work immediately.”
“Okay.” I say inwardly.
I get a drink then go back to the closet. I make sure the door, my movements aren’t moving any air. I give it a good thirty seconds. Then I look at the little foil tent.
Spin.
It does. Immediately.
Huh.
A verbal thought enters my mind.
“It is because you told it to ‘stop spinning’. That’s all.”
Obstruction
The trouble, of course, is that I had two intentions not one. They mutually conflicted and nothing happened, like two waves canceling each other out.
This entire scene is a rich lesson in the very real effects of intention.
📐
One of the reasons I love TK (telekinesis) is the immediate, physical nature of the feedback. It gets past some barrier in our minds in a way that willing yourself to be happy, or hoping for a winning scratch-off ticket doesn’t. It cannot be easily reduced by mere psychology and statistics. It’s a pure measure of how intention creates change, or doesn’t.
Of course, at some point it becomes a crutch if you continue to need your experiences to be physical to be real.
I set an intention to stop moving
I set another to spin
???
It doesn’t spin
I break context by walking away
I set the intention to spin
???
It spins
We don’t have to understand the black boxes at #3 and #7 to see the shape of how intention works:
#2 doesn’t override #1. Why? Hell if I know! Maybe it was weaker? That’s a whole puzzle in itself.
Breaking context (#5) seems to completely reset the system, at least enough to get the results (#8).
Or perhaps #2 and #1 were both still in play, but now I’d juiced the second intention enough to overcome the friction, as it were.
I’d wager it was a reset though, only because it felt like one. That implies that intentions have a set of inherent contextual properties, such as how long they’re in effect — even though I never consciously specified
I felt like it worked at step #4, but nothing visibly happened. In retrospect that’s because it was working. There were simply two opposing forces
That means all intentions interact with each other. There’s an entire invisible network of energetic forces pushing and pulling on each other. Swirling, canceling, building, or obstructing.
What I wanted was movement. What I got was obstruction — quietly, invisibly self-created. If I hadn’t been working with a physical object I might never have realized I was subtly creating my own invisible trip wires.
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

What are you? What am I?
What are you? What am I?
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What are you? What am I?
Status
Site published only
Created time
Jan 4, 2026 03:11 PM
Description
How it works
Featured
Yesterday I lost my emotions.
I well, I didn’t lose them per se. More like they were taken away from me. Locked away for a few hours.
I woke to a story that made no sense, but which I knew was true. I couldn’t tell who was reading it to me, but I knew it was about me.
“How do you know you’re not alone?”
“You can feel it” I said.
“It’s not working. You’re getting frustrated.”
“Feel for it. It’s there. I swear it’s there.”
“It’s still not working. You’re angry. You want to give up. Nothing is working.”
“Please, just don’t give up. It’s there. If you keep feeling for it, you will find it.”
They continued telling the story, by my mind was somewhere else. I was feeling for it. Right there in the middle of a planned spirtual experience. I was distracted by the real lesson.
I couldn’t.
I realized I couldn’t feel it.
With a sense of alarm I shouted into my thoughts.
“What’s happening to me? Why can’t I feel it?”
They keep reading.
I panic.
I can’t feel it. I can’t feel the panic. Where there should be panic there is… nothing. I can think. I can intuit. I can feel my body. I hear and see the story in my mind.
But I have no emotions anymore. They are gone. All gone.
I want to be angry. I scream at the storyteller. The story falters, becomes something confusing, like a dream that makes a hard turn. I am so angry but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel it and so it doesn’t happen.
I want to be afraid, to be angry, to be horrified and distraught. But I truly, truly cannot feel.
Someone offers me chocolate pie. I flip my lid.
It’s a hollow, timid rage. I can’t even feel guilty for lashing out at this unseen person. Why the hell are they offering me pie while I melt down?
I get out of bed. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t dreaming. I know I wasn’t. The story and the storytellers are gone.
But I still cannot feel.
I act out a pattern that would be controlled terror. That’s probably what it looked like.
What do I do? They’re gone. My fucking emotions are gone. Am I going to stay like this? What did I do? What did I do wrong?
“What the fuck did you do to me!?” I yell into my own thoughts.
But where there should be a sea of rage and confusion, there is only an artificial calm. An erratic mind that doesn’t feel anything about itself.
And so, I sit down to meditate. I think of my wife, my children. My happiest and saddest moments. Only thinking of these brings the very faintest feeling back. It is as if my joy and despair are someone else’s. They are not the bonfire in my chest they should be. They are a candle in another home across the street, glimpsed through the window. Only a moment and then the shades are drawn.
This seems poetic, like a curious thought exercise. You may treat it that way, if you wish, but this was a reality for me, for a few hours, one morning not long ago.
For two hours I was a man without a trace of emotion.
And it was one of the worst experiences of my entire life.
I put on the most inspiring, joyful music I could find and then dropped into a dark, silent meditation — packed with fear I could not feel.
“Give them back!” I screamed.
“Give me my anger. Give my sadness. My happiness, my frustration.”
“Give them back to me…” I sobbed, talking alone in a closet.
There was a moment of silence before a thought occurred to me. Calm, deep, and deadly serious. The kind of words that, you know, will not be followed by more words. Like “Stop or I’ll shoot.”, or “Get your hands off my wife”, or “You shall not pass.”
Here is the thought that eventually explains what we are:
“You can have them back when you deserve them.”
—
The rest of that memory for me, and thought experiment for you, is immaterial.
When something important you cannot explain happens to you, the most important question to ask is not “What’s wrong with me?”, “Am I crazy?”
It’s what does this mean?
Why would this be happening right now?
What might I learn from this?
And one of my personal favorites:
How can I use this?
The moment I sincerely set about answering that last question, then and only then did my emotions start to creep back in. Like color bleeding back into film strip. I could feel it all again.
“They were never gone. You simply couldn’t feel them.”
People who do not appreciate their emotions do not deserve them. I will never again be one of those people, because I know now what it is like to want my anger, my sadness, my terror.
Only a person who has experienced how awful it is to not feel could truly appreciate even the “bad” feelings. Nothing is so much worse. My god, it is so much worse.
—
But why did that happen?
Regardless of what lesson I derived, which was apparently sufficient, who made it happen and why did it happen to me?
The answer to that provides a glimpse into the deepest inner workings of the universe.
It wants things for us. We want things from it.
It is always asking us questions. It does not ask with words very often. It asks with experiences. With challenges. With surprises. It asks questions that are answers to your questions and yet, are an open question in themselves. Like an endless chain of curiosity. Sated and then piqued again.
It only ends when you stop playing, because it never will. Back and forth, back and forth.
So why did that happen? From this perspective, it becomes clear.
The universe itself was posing a question to me through an experience. One I did’nt ask for and could’t ignore.
“What are you?”
And I, in turn, answered with a question of my own.
“What am I?”
I am a man who sees the value in all emotions, even the ones others cannot appreciate the way I do.
It’s always trying to figure us out. Reality, the universe. What are you?
Because it doesn’t know. Not entirely. It’s trying to understand each and every one of us.
And by playing along we, in turn, learn to better understand ourselves.
I am a man who sees the value in all emotion.
Two days ago I didn’t know that. And now we both now. Now we all know.
That’s why it happened
—
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Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com

What happens to the questions we pose to no one?
What happens to the questions we pose to no one?
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What happens to the questions we pose to no one?
Status
Site published only
Created time
Jan 21, 2026 11:59 AM
Description
The nature of thought
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I was monologuing in the PetsMart parking lot yesterday, fumbling with words. I just couldn’t come up with a word to describe
“Someone who’s overly optimistic, toxically so — to the point of being a detriment” I said, then waved my hand dismissively.
“Ah, whatever.”
It surprises me how normal talking to oneself actually is, despite our deep-seated fear of appearing crazy. I don’t think it was the introduction of bluetooth earbuds that made it okay, to a point, either. Everyone cool does it.
So where did that unanswered, implied question go? (”What is the word for this?”)
I hadn’t misplaced the word, as sometimes happens, but truly didn’t know a proper word for it. I hate using ten words when a single will do.
The answer is both intuitively obvious and extremely spooky at the same time.
“Where did my unanswered question go?”
“Out there.”
Obviously.
And yet, that is a major revelation. “Wait, what? It goes anywhere?” That’s the big leap. After that, ‘out there’ is the only sensible answer.
Think of every one of your questions as going to a cosmic bulletin board, where everyone else’s questions, requests, hopes, dreams, and fears also float to.
Every single one of them will be addressed.
That doesn’t mean granted exactly as framed. Many of them are simply recycled. Expired. (Ah, I guess that isn’t true. Thanks intuition?)
They all get addressed, one way or another. (👍)
—
The most fun is when they get answered, granted, materialized, etc. directly. There are many pathways for this and nothing is off limits. I’ll repeat, in case that didn’t land… nothing is off limits.
🫂
I hope Michael’s doing alright.
→ Michael sends you a text message asking what’s up
🌌
I wonder if I’ll ever get to pet a fox?
→ You are petting a real god damn fox with your actual meat sticks three days later.
If you simply stop caring, or put very little will or emotion (you don’t want it, fear it, feel it, on some level) they may appear to fizzle out. I can’t say what happens with certainty, but I’d guess they are meekly rendered into your reality — canceled out like a ripple against the far greater tides of your individual and our collective requests. (Even that isn’t quite right, but if I let my intuition type I’ll be hedging until no one knows what I’m talking about anymore)
🛒
Should I get more cornmeal? Nah, I think we have enough.
→ 🦗
Personally, I love it when my requests are responded to thematically. This is much more like a dance.
🎻
Feeling down today, but I can do it.
→ 🎤 “Darling, what happened? It’s so sad…” plays in the background
And then there are the weird pathways…
—
Back at PetsMart, I’ve completed my business. Over the course of the evening a word keeps coming to me. A few days before I heard it, not for the first time, but it stuck out to me because I didn’t know what it meant. I recall wanting to know what it meant, but I was caught up in reading and didn’t bother.
Last night I have a dream, a blissful young woman in late 1800s, early 1900s attire wants to dance with a stranger. She’s laughing, over-the-top silly. She leads the stranger away from the ballroom and to her room. It is little more than a cupboard, packed with diseased and filthy children. Apparently, when not attending dances, this is where she stays. In the dark. She explains that “food is pushed through this door for us”. The other children are clearly malnourished. She’s so cheerful. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this.
I am in another scene now. A movie theater. I leave because Amazon Prime ads are playing, literally interrupting the movie, and I can’t believe I actually paid for a movie ticket. How could anyone think this is okay? A word comes to mind. What does it mean? I wonder.
I am walking around, deliberating.
“A person with many interests. No, it means ‘the collective will of an entire system’, like a network or hivemind. No, no… That’s not right.”
I just can’t let it go for some reason.
The word is Pollyanna.
I wake and wonder, still, what it means. It’s still dark outside. I lay in bed thinking about how thoughts get reflected back to us by the universe. I imagine a personified version of a universal consciousness wearing a pink tutu and laugh, realizing “with alarm” that I’m begging to be pranked with that imagery.
The moment I think the word “alarm”, a car alarm goes off right outside. My neighbor’s car alarm is silenced a minute or so later. Now I’m really laughing. It’s so dumb. It’s just such a dumb joke.
And then I decide to lookup what Pollyanna means.
I heard the word and knew it mattered before I needed it a few days later. I also experienced the answer in multiple ways without realizing it. I hadn’t even realized it was an answer.
I was walking around with a decoupled question and answer. It’s like they were seeking each other. They were trying to resolve each other. Like magnets.
The request and the reply danced together with no respect for time, causality, nor conscious understanding. Circling one another, faster and faster.
And then they met in the strangest possible way.
That’s what your thoughts do
—
As a result, here are some of the most powerful words a person can ever say, think, and feel.
1 “Something wonderful is going to happen to me soon.”
2 “Very, very wonderful. Like, unimaginably good. Truly, a miracle.”
3 Smile softly, know it is true, then go about your day. How did you get so lucky? It doesn’t matter, because it’s true. Amazing. Truly amazing. Send a little deep gratitude out.
4 Your life changes forever. Enjoy.
✉️ Tell me when you write things
Copyright 2026 steven@impossiblelaboratories.com