What data

Experience. Through meditation. What follows is one of those things where it's like "Only me and any other jackass that's done this has seen it, so use your critical thinking cap and call me a retard if you see fit. Really. I'm a big boy. I can take it. You asked, so I'm sharing. "

Meditation is getting pretty popular in western culture as of late, very ironically, as a way to help the ego get ahead in life. People hear studies of how meditation statistically increases the volume of grey matter in the brain and that attracts them to trying the practice for themself. Also it's just a great way to deal with the stress of modern life, so that's another attractor. Eastern religion has successfully been packaged and presented in an enticing commercialized box for western consumers.

But you can't get to what the Buddha was talking about by being selfish. You might achieve some higher level of awareness of yourself, but you're not going to be able to get rid of self by using self.

Let's say you went full Fat Buddha and were to completely acknowledge the self to be a falsity that we've just been accepting as truth out of convenience; then where does that leave "you"? You've decided that there is no "you". The division between yourself and everything else is gone, and you, in a way, lose your old perspective. Your new perspective becomes instead a non-localized, un-centered shape, the shape of EVERYTHING. and boy do I mean EVERYTHING. If you can experience something about reality, it's in this other perspective.

So people have this vision of enlightenment as being able to totally detach from wants and desires, but it's deeper. It's a detachment from the abstractions and compartmentalizations our brains make in their attempt to try to categorize reality. It's saying "NO" to every layer of our neocortex that wants to pretend that reality is something divisible. It's saying "YES" to the only truth we can know for certain: that we have a mind.

Let me elaborate on what I mean by "you are now everything"

You're space; You're time; You're possibilities; You're E V E R Y T H I N G

And you'll look down at yourself and see that there's a shitton going on down there, but really you're just one massive multidimensional shape. One solid entity! Any divisiveness that the people living inside of you are making up is purely their own convenient delusions. Delusions that make them really good at reproducing inside of you, but still delusions. Evolution didn't saddle us with a sense of self for nothing! Thinking we're separate and isolated is a VERY GOOD MOTIVATOR for wanting to not die!

And by the way, at this perspective of one-ness you've all but completely forgotten that your identity is that one dude named notlambda or Swamp85 or whoever the hell you identify as. That guy is as much "you" as any other human(or other creature) that ever:

• Has existed
• Is existing
• Will exist

or

• COULD exist

in fact at this vantage point of having no identity, time is inside you too, so there is no reference point by which you can claim to be "now". There's no "now", and there's no "correct timeline". Remember general relativity and how time is relative to the observer? Einstein was right in that regard. Remove the individual self(observer) and it can be whatever time you want it to be! It's 5 o'clock somewhere, in all possibilities, and always, Jimmy Buffett!

Deep breath; almost there. I didn't forget that we're not talking about time, we're talking about alternate universes!

It turns out that if you look down at yourself from this big ol' perspective, you'll see that all time is happening simultaneously, and all possibilities are happening simultaneously, as I've said. So the universe is not linear. You're not canoeing down a linear stream called time in which there's only one way to go. You're a vessel in an OCEAN of time and you can go any which way you want, but you're floating within a gulf stream which is your timeline. It might seem like it's linear but it's truly not. It's diverging constantly into other streams and what you perceive as free will is the stream you decide to diverge into when a divergence occurs, which happens VERRRRRY often. Like once every planck second. There's going to be like a virtually infinite number of people that read this reddit post because the universes will have diverged so many times by the time people start reading it. How's that for social media exposure.

So how does this fit in with things like the mandela effect? I'm not sure anyone really knows with confidence yet. This is my tenuous guess based on what I know: you can think of it as if there are an infinite number of gulf currents in this metaphorical ocean, each gulf current representing a timeline. There are LOADS of vessels in each of these currents, each vessel representing an experience of self. Sometimes these currents cross streams, which as we all know from Egon, would be bad. You end up with vessels spilling out into currents that they haven't been floating in, and now they have to re-learn facts about their new timeline/current.

So assuming that BerenstEIn is from another one of these currenty-timeliney-possibility-thingies, then that's the stream the lot of us came from. We've been unceremoniously dumped into the oncoming current of BerenstAIn and here we live.

Like I said. I don't know whether the Berenstein stuff is alternate universe mumbojumbo or not, but I've blown myself up until I was as big as the universe, then I looked at my innards, and sure enough, there's more than a single timeline. So there you have it; completely unscientific and yet still observable.