been here before

[Diana]

Let's take the flat/sphere earth debate as an example.  In the Western tradition, we have this approach to reality that draws from the ancient Greek's law of identity: that A is A.  A thing is only what it is, no more, no less.  A thing cannot be two different things at once.

Humanity seems to learn slowly and resist change, at least at certain nexus points. We have had quantum mechanics for over a century, and according to its (observable) predictions, a thing can be at two places at once, so it follows logically that it is at least possible to be two things at once.

Somehow, scientists and lay people can be aware the "craziness" of the quantum world and draw a line in the sand between the microcosm and where we are, as if it were separate with separate laws and tendencies.

But the scientific method flies in the face of this approach.  In order to investigate reality using this method, we invent hypotheses and then test them.  If the data proves the hypothesis correct, then strictly speaking that doesn't tell us what something actually is; it only tells us that the hypothesis was useful in making certain predictions about reality.  The hypothesis is a lens through which we view reality, but we don't mistake the lens for the reality itself.

This is so true. Science is cautious and very left-brained in general. But not where the virtuoso scientific theorists are concerned: as Einstein said, The greatest scientists are always artists as well.

Newton's laws of physics are a perfect example of certain things being useful but not a description of what is. Though we know the static view of the universe to be wrong since relativity, Newton's laws still accurately predict reality for our purposes on the planet.

And when it comes to quantum physics, only probabilities can be predicted, which opens up enormous speculation as to why that is. The uncertainty principal, quantum entanglement, superposition, etc. all point to a reality utterly outside of the Newtonian box. 

To the extent that we can juggle multiple different models of reality, we can maintain a flexibility towards our experience.  I don't believe in a round Earth; it's simply a useful model for explaining why the sunset and sunrise behaves a certain way.  Most of the time, I behave as if the Earth was flat, and that model serves me well in other contexts.  I don't know what the Earth, the ding an sich as Kant would say, actually is.

This is an excellent point. I agree that bypassing 3D "reality" is useful. It relates to being in the moment, and only using linear time when the need arises, thereby loosening the grip on linear time and expanding into a larger apprehension of what is possible—becoming more wave-like and less particle-like.

In my experience this is a really good way of dealing with what the Confederation tells us is an illusion.  We construct these models of reality in our head, but they are conveniences, shortcuts that we take.  They are not the way things are, only the way things seem given a particular lens.  Change your lens, change the reality.  Timothy Leary called this a "reality tunnel", where we use our minds and perceptive capacity to reduce all of the trillions of signals coming from the universe at any given moment to a tiny fraction so that we can cope with it.  But all those other signals that we're ignoring are reality, too.

And this, I think, is the secret to ritual magic: changing your consciousness at will results in perceiving a different subset of reality.  Science, in a manner of speaking, is just one particular form of it.

This is where "beliefs" get in the way. If you believe, you have created a box to exist in, and anything outside of that box is not accepted.

Letting go of beliefs is like opening a door to possibilities, but it's not as cozy.