How To Live an Improbably Amazing Life

Extracting the useful psychotechnologies from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

[🚧 This piece is undergoing heavy construction, and is a work in progress. In the meantime, see below for the movie review version of the article, which was titled “How to Go Multiverse Surfing”. It contains the same information, presented differently.]

Pictured: Multiversal Evelyn, empowered by whimsy.

A great movie is one that transforms you.

Task #1: Increase your ‘serendipity surface area’ by putting yourself out there

Parents want their children to attend universities so that they can unlock access to awesome life outcomes. This is the core concept behind EEAAO: making the choices that unlock new life outcomes.

Be the main character of your own story: be the You-est you.

1. Be interesting to yourself

There is an almost-infinite invisible, socially-enforced rulebook of Do’s and Don’ts that constrains the behavior of most beings. Once you jailbreak yourself from the prison of social norms, things start to look much more interesting.

Be in tune with making the universe weirder and more interesting for the benefit of everybody. This is part of the process of jailbreaking your reality, injecting aliveness into your life and taking you out of autopilot (which constrains your possibilities).

Nick Cammarata on the imperative of doing incredibly unlikely things:

Nick@nickcammarata

@Meteoroni That was a weird tweet but I hope you tweet weirder in the future. We must fight the DMVification of the future by blossoming into our fullest weirdest selves

3:00 AM · Jun 17, 2021

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1 Repost · 10 Likes

Be interesting to yourself.

Take the long way home; put socks on your hands; pop into an interesting conversation; go to a party where you don’t fit in; take a detour on your next walk; talk to a stranger who seems interesting. Make the world interesting to you. It’s waiting for you to discover how interesting it can be.

2. Make friends with ‘superconnectors’

• Attend a party, event, or workshop that has a bunch of people you’ve never met before, especially if they’re people you’d be interested in getting to know

• Make an unlikely friend → get introduced to an entirely different social group and expand the realm of possibilities available to you

• Make friends with a ‘superconnector’ — someone who is connected to a lot of interesting people.

3. Skill Downloading

Visualization is multiverse surfing, and has actual impacts on your real life.

Get in touch with the sense of radical possibility shining through from the source, where literally anything is possible. Consider paths of your life that you might take if you had a Team of Selves living in multiple universes. How would you allot them? How would you spend the self in this universe where you happen to be present?

Be inspired by alternate versions of yourself — you could be anywhere right now. You can and must use the idea of alternate timelines to inspire you to be the main character in this one.

Instructions:

• Imagine some dream that you have, such as: becoming a martial artist. You can envision the shortest possible path that a counter-factual version of you took to get there (e.g., going to a martial arts monastery), and channel that version of you into your present reality. If you can hold that version of you vividly in your mind, you can begin to do self-inquiry and ask it questions. “How did I get here? What were my main obstacles? What do I love about being here?” etc. You can learn from parallel universe versions of yourself! There are so many questions you can and should ask, just pick up the vibe and use your curiosity to download what you need to change your life. Evelyn’s universe-hopping superpower is real, and you now have it.

• This should melt away any conceptions of “I can’t”, similar to Evelyn’s experience of living out becoming a martial artist, of doing the work, being in movies, seeing the crowds of adoring fans, etc. There’s no way to say “I can’t” when you’ve literally already done it, and understand precisely how.

• You can literally do skill downloads — you just decide to do things and let future you help you do them. But you have to make the commitment — every choice comes at a cost. You must make a trade-off to fight for the things you want.

In this vein, IPF (Ideal Parent Figure protocol) is counter factual imagineering yourself out of attachment problems. Attachment issues are like the Jobu Tupaki to the multiverse-surfing Evelyn — they put you in a worse timeline and prevent you from harnessing your full capability of multiverse surfing. Attachment issues flatten the dynamic range of your aliveness and keep you from getting into the really fun/weird/funky/cool/unique/fulfilling/alive universes. This is because they suck you into predictable sub-optimal patterns of relating. IPF protocol uses the principles mentioned here to heal this stubborn, causality-sucking trauma.

• Attachment Repair | Insight Timer — https://insighttimer.com/attachmentrepair

Scarcities Keeping Us from Optimized Multiverse Surfing

1. Autopilot, addictions, and other repetitive behaviors: Those things you know you shouldn’t be doing, but you do anyways. Again and again, every day or night. All it really takes is deciding to break the cycle — each day is a new day. Look at old patterns with fresh eyes, and ask yourself again, “why am I doing this?” Ask yourself why 5 times [see ‘Multiversal Decision Making’ below] if you really care to know what you value. Come really fresh to this moment, and decide again.

2. Physical limitations of the brain: If you did what Evelyn in the movie did — experiencing entire lifetimes in the blink of an eye — would you fry your brain? The theory of Neural Annealing offers a useful physiological framework for modeling how the brain integrates experiences, helping us picture the its natural integrative capacity. In the movie, Evelyn could tolerate an extremely high degree of neural annealing, which is pretty cool! In real life, you might have a psychotic break, lose consciousness, or any other number of experiences as your brain protects you from overstimulation. [go to ‘Multiversal Decision Making’ below to learn more about the experience of 5-MeO-DMT, an extremely potent psychedelic which simulates some of the intensity Evelyn went through as she jumped between universes in rapid-fire]

3. Anxiety, Trauma, and Attachment Conditioning: If we could have the experience that Evelyn had of seeing multiple lives before her eyes, and come back with the same wise fearlessness, it would be relatively easy for us to go ahead and make the most of our limited lives [see 5-Meo-DMT below for a real-life version of this experience and its effects on anxiety & fear]. But it’s difficult to access that state of consciousness, many of us get stuck in patterns conditioned by traumas or attachment conditioning. [See IPF and counter-factual imagineering, above]

4. Nervous system effects: multitasking and trying to remain aware of all the options is overwhelming for our nervous systems, and not realistic for most individuals to accommodate. Trying too hard to optimize your time can lead to burnout and a miserable existence. Find a middle ground?

Multiversal Decision-making, in Linear Time

Become internally, multiversally, aligned:

1. Multiversal IFS: You can’t say yes to everything! How do you decide what to say yes to? Call a ‘Parts Congress’ with all your various parts (a la the IFS modality of therapy) in order to make a decision that you are ‘of two minds about’. This means bringing together all your conflicting interests and desires, even the ones you don’t like, and letting them have a seat at the table. Be the moderator of this discussion. Dialogue w/ your parts to find what is most alive for you right now, and involve the parts from branching universes in which you made alternate choices. Eg, how does the version of me with martial arts mastery feel about eating this cupcake? Which decision is most in resonance in the eyes of the multiverse you, the capital-S ‘Self’ that has the protagonist energy? Most of us could do a better job consulting with our multiversal self, and letting them take the reins when we are making self-destructive decisions.

2. Multiversal Syncing through Schelling Points: Schelling points are a concept from game theory. Your goal is to coordinate across your different multiversal selves. You could conceive of one such mechanism of coordination being certain values so deeply embedded into your core that they are extremely likely to be shared within your local cluster of multiverse selves. That would be a schelling point you could use.

• Asking yourself ‘why?’ 5 times → get clarity on your own schelling point values. Part of knowing yourself very well.

• See this Rick and Morty Clip for a comically rude example of multiverse-syncing using schelling point values:

• LSD seems to have this subjective quality of multiverse-syncing, among other exotic temporal qualities.

3. Chart out a branching decision-tree of choices: This is a great way to make decisions that will be very pivotal for your life. I have a friend who does this when contemplating major life decisions, such as going to a particular university, choosing a career, etc. There are limitations to its predictive power, but this approach is immensely useful if just for getting literate in exploring the sea of potentialities. One should strive to always have a baseline familiarity with this sea and its changing conditions (while conversely knowing this: anything is possible).

A helpful visualization of branching paths leading to and coming out of the present; the only agency you have is what you do with that space between stimulus and response.

4. Hacks to get more Multiversal Slack:

• A Graceful Way to Say No is saying ‘Yes’ in another life: A nice way to eliminate FOMO when you have to decide between mutually exclusive options is by ‘giving this opportunity away to your other universes’. This allows you to still feel attuned to and engaged with the ‘happening-ness’ of something you must say no to in this stream of causality.

• Sometimes saying ‘no’ creates new unseen possibilities, too. eg walking out of a job with no plan could lead to immense self-growth and pursuing your artistic endeavors, saying no to a party might make room for an unexpected impactful phonecall. Incorporate room for unknown unknowns into your optimizations. Follow delight. Be in Wonder about what could happen, rather than fear about it.

• Give yourself more room for yes by saying no: Be hardcore about finding things you can cut out of your life, things you thought you needed but can make do without — multiverse frugality. One example of someone being hardcore about recovering multiversal slack by being frugal is the Slackmobile (freeing yourself up from the financial burden and location constraint of renting a property, while keeping all the amenities).

• Alter the flow of time to get more experiences per unit time: Meditation and some psychedelics are known to cause time dilation and other exotic time phenomena. Exploit this at your own risk.

• A friend of a friend claims to have taken 5-MeO-DMT and richly lived 4 entire lifetimes from their subjective point of view, though from the outside the experience only lasted ~15 mins. Taken at face value, this would be a hyper-efficient way to spend your time and would be easy to recommend. However, I am inclined to believe that the experience only encoded the quality of living for 4 lifetimes — rather than containing 4 lifetimes worth of conscious experience from start to finish. On the other hand, such an experience must still be incredibly powerful and invoke a hardcore neural annealing process. This experience carries major psychological risk and most people should not try it.

• N,N-DMT vs 5-MeO-DMT (includes an argument for why 5-MeO-DMT is better suited for healing trauma)

• My favorite research paper on 5-MeO-DMT here.

How you should act, according to EEAAO

or ‘The self-organizing principle to orient qualia fragments for maximum harmony’, or ‘Metta is nice’

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

-An Alexander Technique coaching website

What should you do with that space between stimulus and response?

‘Be kind, especially when you don’t know what’s going on’.

-Waymond

According to EEAAO, ‘being kind’ is what you ought to do with that space. Applying this from the movie, how do we know what being kind looks like?

1. Metta, or “loving-kindness” meditation.

• How to practice metta (I like this one)

• Metta-optionality: you can send metta to other people; vividly wishing for other people the option to live their most positive branching paths. This counter-factual imagineering becomes a tool for metta, which feels good in the heart and sets you free. It makes you feel light and carefree, as well as prosocial.

2. Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

• Understand from the principles of Non-Violent Communication that every being who engages in violence, down to the cellular level, is just trying to get their needs met. They are just as scared and confused as you about all of this, about existence.

• What is NVC?

• We all share in common the desire to experience the fullest expression of the universe’s capacity to embody vitality, the primordial vital force, through us, to experience the deepest aliveness and brightness, fullness and radiance.

• In EEAAO, Evelyn saw through her daughter’s violence and saw that she was just as hurt and confused as everyone else. She had unmet needs. Specifically, she needed to know that she wasn’t unlovable.

3. Get in the body

Some other tools that can take you out from being an infinite-looping “brain in a vat” where nihilism is the natural conclusion and into post-nihilism meaningfulness:

• Doing a bodyscan

• nice one from headspace:

• a liquid sunlight bodyscan:

• or just imagining a cross-sectional laser of awareness doing a scan of your entire body in slices from head to toe

• When talking with people, try 50% of your awareness an inch below your belly button, and see what happens

• Vipassana

• Gendlins’ Focusing

• Alexander Technique [1] [2]

Finding the Others

Once you have big Protagonist Energy, you will want to ‘find the others’. This is like Multiverse Evelyn finding the Multiverse Joy/Jobu Tupaki. Someone who Gets It.

‘Normies’: Once Multiverse Evelyn had her ‘redpill moment’ (where she broke out of the matrix, a la The Matrix or The Truman Show), she was on a different wavelength and got her Protagonist Energy. From this moment forward, now that she had Seen Shit From Other Universes, talking to her husband Waymond was useless. Talking to the IRS lady was useless. Talking to absolutely anyone who didn’t share the same heretofore-completely-implausible experiences as her was completely wasted time — they found Evelyn absurd and nonsensical as she tried to explain to them in precise detail the context of what was going on. They would not buy it, they could not comprehend it, having not experienced the implausible for themselves. Talking authentically with those still inside the matrix once you’ve broken out of it is not only unfulfilling, it is a malformed task.

• I use the term normies for this functionally, not pejoratively

• Normies are constrained to misunderstand your message and misattribute your motives because they don’t have the bigger picture (see Ken Wilbur’s Integral Theory or Kegan’s stages for a model that roughly fits). For example, I’ve heard from a few friends’ Asian parents that saw EEAAO and thought it was a silly movie, and didn’t get a real message out of it (as far as they were consciously aware).

• Tons and tons of examples of normies of various sorts misattributing well-intentioned motives because they weren’t understood. This is an archetype

Wise Loneliness: What are the values and priorities of someone who has truly seen it all? This movie seems to suggest that the natural human drive to resolve loneliness takes precedence, even when you seemingly have it all. We strive to be seen and, conversely, to truly see others. This involves finding those on the same consciousness wavelength. The natural next step for Joy after her redpill moment was to look for Multiverse Evelyn — the Evelyn that wouldn’t devolve into her conditioned reactions but would meet Joy where she was at in her experience of profound everythingness/nothingmatters-ness, having Evelyn be truly seen.

Objective: Find The Others

Being Seen: There’s a certain restedness that comes from interacting with someone with whom you share a fundamental and not-commonly-held understanding — not having to explain oneself, or justify one’s perspective, or make your actions make sense for the other person. To truly be seen involves someone being on the same wavelength as you. If you’re an advanced meditator who’s clocked several years in meditation hours for example, you won’t feel at home unless you’re in proximity with other people who also viscerally get the kinds of things you’ve seen, the vast breadth and diversity of shapes that consciousness can take. The Universe is Weird, this is unfathomably true. Once you find the people who Get It, you might find that not much even needs to be said; the vibe of the shared experience stands ready and obvious and vocal in-itself.

How do you Find the Others?

• Search for people that Get It: psychedelic communities, meditation sanghas, Burner communities (+ Burning Man), progressive countries, etc.

• This is why there are ‘Ayahuasca Dating’ groups — specific to people who have had the mind and universe-shattering experience of Ayahuasca. It seems common that after this redpill moment, they are unable to closely bond with people still inside the matrix, because they cannot be seen for their truth.

Others: found.

Hope that you enjoyed this article, and that it brings you joy, empowerment, and healing!