OldManCorcoran

There are lots of analogies about the existence of individual selves within existence. Many of them are things like, for example, waves in an ocean. In a more mainline view, when you are unconscious or something, it's like a wave temporarily going down under the ocean but being the same wave when it resurfaces. However, I think this is probably applied by most people to mean their "I" is a wave, and the wave is the essence of them. Because people are sort of disavowing the external world trying to look inwards for an essential component. In other words, it causes a sort of idea that there is a wave, and the wave is aware of something else around it. So a wave and around that wave is sights and sounds and thoughts which the wave is aware of. In actual fact, it is not that way at all. The wave isn't your essence or soul, the wave is the entire experience taking place. So rather than being the consciousness around which red appears, the wave exists as the very seeing of red itself. There is never anything "doing" the seeing except from the ocean itself, and rather than the ocean seeing things, it exists as things. So rather than a wave being you, the waves which appear are transient experiences which appear in the ocean and made of the ocean. Rather than a wave consisting of a seeing entity around which are sensory perceptions that entity knows, the seeing of red itself is the wave. Being knocked unconscious and waking up after some hours is not a wave temporarily going under the ocean and resurfacing. The wave is the very experience happening which is transient in nature, so when you fall asleep tonight, or even as things change around you, it's not a wave self which remains, the wave is the elements which are transient. The only essence of you is the ocean itself and all of these transient experiences happen within it and made of it. The only difference between your "wave" and my "wave" isn't that there is a different soul in each, but only that there exists two different forms of experience. So perhaps your sight of the landscape around you and the landscape which appears around me. The distinct sights are the wave elements, not any form of self or soul. There is only one soul and it's the ocean only. That's the only thing which is unchanging. None of us have little wave selfs, waves are the very experiences happening. They might consist of thoughts related to ego, but that's it.

Everything is intuited but the logical mind adds words onto the process. We don't really think to a conclusion, the process of thinking doesn't happen in words, the words follow. Consider that animals don't have language to even think in, but are still able to figure things out.

I find "who am I" completely useless. It's crap really.

Something that occurred to me earlier while driving and trying to remember something... You know how sometimes when you've forgotten something and try to remember and can't, then randomly out of nowhere the memory comes to you say, 30 seconds later? What is your mind even doing in the meantime? And when the memory comes back, what exactly is it that comes to you? Because when you remember what it was you were trying to think of, at the a-ha moment we put words to what is not previously linguistic knowledge before the words were applied. It's almost like a sensation, and THEN from the sensation we are like "oh that's X memory of Y event! I remember now!" and then we can explain in words exactly what it was we were thinking of. So in many cases the logical wordings etc follows after a more intuitive knowledge which exists more as a sensation, which our mind applies the words to. I thought that was quite interesting.

It's pointless, it's just a massive cope to be able to handle life. "Awakening" is inevitable for everyone at the end of life, but some people are too anxious of mind to be able to just enjoy things as they are. It's probably not worth it if you're happy in life. I am bugged by bizarre thoughts daily. Especially just after waking from sleep. Usually when I first wake from sleep I trip a little bit.

Acid makes me feel similar to being drunk or dreaming, so I stop feeling fear etc, everything just feels un-real and hence I don't feel to be in danger. So ego death while on acid was always easy for me to handle. Subjectively it was sort of cartoon-world bizarity. Not anything which could be recalled well enough to describe, but sort of like screen tearing effect slices of fever dream delusions repeated in each slice. Like Cheryl from Riverdale with pineapples and a "sense" of Bugs Bunny and stuff. So yes, exactly as that sounds, it was basically falling into a literal insanity - though not in a usual sense of a crazy person, more of a Dr. Seuss or Looney Tunes vibe of crazy. Actually, if I smoked DMT by itself, I would often have severe panic attacks. The sort of panic attack that you can't experience sober. Just sheer uncontrollable utter panic. But, if I smoked DMT while on acid the trip was much more intense but the panic attack didn't happen. Which meant the experience subjectively was quite different as my mind wasn't being distracted by terror. I don't remember the experiences well enough anymore. I know there was zero sense of love, and I know that I came out of the strongest trip considering it to have been a religious experience of monism and was altered permanently for life. That experience began subjectively as a very fuzzy visual delusion as well as mental sense of shedding my body, like the Russian doll figures which sit inside each other, and you open them and take a smaller one out. It was like removing shells of dolls where I was the dolls.

It can be seen in action within our own dreams at night. When we walk around in the dream the landscape around us appears all by itself without intervention. So too do all the laws of physics within that dream world. In dreams people tend to walk on the ground as if gravity exists unless they become lucid and just suddenly take off. A specific phrasing which sometimes has resonated with me, is when people say that existence is God "happening". Rather than God or you or Self or whatever else "controlling" or "doing" anything, reality is God, or you, or whatever term, "happening". This sight and my actions right now are not God controlling the senses or actions but are God HAPPENING... That is preferable I think.

There is, the objects of your experience are not made of "stuff" and is entirely outside the realm of consensus reality. This is definitively the case, since even if it was discovered with certainty that the brain and neurons produce qualia, the qualia itself is not made of anything material, only the brain which generates it is said to consist of matter. But of course things are only called "supernatural" when they are BS, as soon as something is verified as being a fact of reality it is suddenly called "natural". Because people agree that subjective experience exists, we categorize the elements within that subjective experience as "natural" despite it falling beyond the realm of consensus reality and not being reducible to atoms etc (again, only the physical things allegedly responsible for generating the subjective experience are thought of as "matter", not the subjective experience itself).

Yes, a lot. Mystical experience means moreso things like oneness and interconnectedness with existence though. You probably mean supernatural. Supernatural is sort of a strawman concept though, because anything established as fact is accepted as part of the "natural" regardless of how bizarre it is. If conscious beings didn't exist, the idea that qualia exists would be supernatural. But just because we experience them, they are considered "natural".

I recently read a book called "No Self, No Problem", it's written by a professor with a PhD in neuropsychology. He discusses, particularly, the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain. Now this is very interesting... In patients whose hemispheres were surgically separated, the two hemispheres can no longer communicate with each other but they are still functional. So in some studies they conducted, they would cover one eye of the patient and hold up a sign, so that only the right hemisphere would see and react to a sign which read "Stand up". The doctors would then ask the test subjects WHY they stood up. The left hemisphere is responsible for that type of thing, linguistics, logic, whatever... Because it did not know why it stood up, it just simply made up a story like "I stood up because my legs were aching". It's completely wrong but the left hemisphere of the brain works to apply stories and wording to the more automated responses conducted by the right hemisphere. Because it did not know why it stood up (because they saw a sign telling them to stand), they filled in the blanks. So maybe it's the case that the ego and words, including the voice in our head which talks to us or interprets events, isn't actually doing anything at all. But adding the words on top of something more ethereal (as in, abstract sensations that we can't really describe, like the "sensation" of the will we use to reach out and grab something, which isn't a sensation made of thoughts or feelings or sights or sounds - we just reach out and do it)... So with these lost and recalled memories, perhaps all the action is happening in that same ethereal sense, more right hemisphere working, until the left hemisphere action can actually grab hold of one of the produced senses and turn it into a tangible "thing" we can "understand".

Buddhism and stuff is all well and good when it's just words on a page. I think deep down with all spiritual traditions people don't ACTUALLY believe, it's more like roleplay. It just isn't fun anymore when it stops being words and becomes actual reality. Reading about Gabriel appearing to some dude in the Bible would quickly become alarming if you looked up and saw Gabriel actually there in front of you irl... Same with Buddhist ideas.

Lucid dreaming forums have been more interesting than Buddhism. Meditation does nothing at all. What really is useful is the moments immediately after you wake from sleeping. Before the ego comes back online you can explore really strange things. Sometimes though it just startles me and I panic and stop the dive. Hopefully when we die our mind releases some sikk chemicals so we don't experience that terror.

It's pseudoscience, does nothing at all. I know because I naturally have a very low sex drive and go long periods without ever looking at porn or jerking off. Allegedly I should be reaping all these hidden benefits... But no...

I at least do know that every way I know another person is a product of my own consciousness. Their voice, looks, size. Their words have no sound outside my mind, each word exists only in my mind... A rock doesn't experience them that way. To that extent each person is nothing outside me.

That's a philosophy thing. Probably the entire idea of what a "mistake" is, is wrong. The idea of a mistake only exists in people's heads as a thought, it's not actual... Everything unfolds exactly as it does, from a ridiculous cascade of events leading all the way here downstream. There might feel to be intelligences beyond us which sort of puppeteer our universe. Well, if there were, I don't think they could be exempt from that as they are also just part of total singularity.

People who think it's bad identify with the body-mind and think it means that is the only thing there is. Obviously it doesn't work that way it's inverse, where the body-mind is an appearance in you. You are unattached to anything in this universe including the body-mind via which you write your posts.

Karma just means cause and effect, you've been told the "My Name is Earl" version. Karma means you light a candle, the candle burns down to a stump, rather than accruement of good or bad energies etc. Which aren't real, like how morality is relative to the beings in any case. What even is "good" or "bad"? On mushroom analogues your mind may not even know if what is happening is good or bad.

There's a sort of weird difference between infinity and limited, and time vs timelessness, when compared to traditional views. People who have experienced timelessness or boundlessness on psychedelic drugs probably understand. Because a traditional idea of timeless would be like Bernard's Watch (old British kid's show lol) where time freezes and nothing moves. Actual timelessness is more to do with a sort of undercurrent which is inherently changeless. Time takes place within it... Timelessness or eternity isn't time freezing or lasting a super long time, but it's devoid of it. So moments still pass, people "stuck in eternity" on a bad trip aren't literally experiencing a jaunt, things still change... When I was caught in such a state I used a large digital clock beside me as reference to remind myself time was in fact moving and the drug would soon wear off. And it's the same with infinite vs limited. You have a field of vision right now, and try to find the exact border of where it ends and where non existence begins. You can put your fingers into your peripheral and find out that way, but I don't mean that. Your fingers are part of the image and world. I mean the actual boundary and size of the entire mental picture in your head. And you will see "spacelessness" there. It's just an absence of boundary or size. You can't measure your mental image, you can measure distance inside the mental image using rulers or other techniques, to say you have a 180 degree field of view or whatever. Or map the precise point your view cuts off. But you can't actually measure or assign spatial size to the mental image itself. If you see how both of those work, then being unlimited is like that I think... So whereas timeless is NOT freezing time or just "a really long time" but recognition of something IN which time appears, and sizelessness does not mean tiny or huge but recognition of the ABSENCE of any spatial dimension at all... Infinity is recognizing what limitation and boundary appears IN, where it in itself is not anything at all. I think it's like that. I know timelessness and sizelessness are like that first hand, and those are just specific types of limitation.

Ibogaine, it's not close even.

You aren't the person so it doesn't really make a difference. The death of the person is just another image which passes by like the sights you see come and go each day. Doesn't make a difference. I don't know for sure that's the case but it's logical.

Bufo Alvarius venom, the stuff they have you smoke at ceremonies. The main ingredient contained in that is 5-MeO-DMT. You will notice that while being touted as the most powerful psychedelic drug in existence, and inducing life altering mystical awakenings in people, it is also the LEAST visionary and least thought producing compound. In fact it does the opposite, it forcibly shuts off your mind. And that is why it is so excellent at revealing truth. Truth is in absence of the mind. The absence of the mind is the means by which it is known to be unmistakeably true. There is a Vedic text, something Gita (NOT the Bhagavad-Gita), where it says: "I am an infinite ocean of consciousness, in me all these beings, including this body of mine, they come up like little waves, they play with each other, they fight with each other and they merge back into me again." When you don't identify as the person anymore and understand that instead all people, such as yourself when you fall asleep or die, are merging into yourself, it becomes more obvious why deactivating the mind reveals truth while more mind activity obscures it... The less of your mind is active, the closer you are to the underlying purity, and as a result it becomes clear. Too far and the person won't benefit from the knowledge because a mind can't know something it wasn't present for. That's called a whiteout, but is also true if you get knocked out for surgery or go into a coma or die. The human doesn't know what it wasn't present for. So at least some of the separate human must remain to gain insight.

Most books and teachings on these subjects are junk. Real teachers of these traditions generally have a lineage, they grow up with a sage who himself grew up with a sage and so on, and eventually you get to Adi Shankara or whoever. Still, though those teachers can be very good at helping a person integrate especially, the issue is that the teachings are quite prescriptive. Statements cannot ever themselves be the thing itself... 1000 years of reading about what it's like to ride a rollercoaster, cannot ever be equal to riding it. When you're actually on the ride, it's as real as real gets, and it has authority over any reading/knowledge you had studied about what it would be like... In the midst of a "mystical experience", the experience supercedes any and all teachings. Reality is THE authority, it is THE truth. Of course, some people get mixed up with drug delusions and reality. Delusions come to a person in the form of thought or sensory perception, which is very common on psychedelic drugs. It is always delusion or a cheap imitation attempting to capture reality. Reality is prior to any thought and any sensory experience. It's the IS-ness of those delusional thoughts and sense perceptions. Truth is largely revealed when thoughts and sensations go away as much as possible, that's why toad is so effective.

No serious mystic sees any overlap contradiction between materialism and science, and spiritual facts. There's an inevitability to the fact of oneness. If you make an origami swan, there is still no substance other than paper there. If folding the paper a certain way created qualia (so if certain arrangements of atoms create subjective experience), the qualia would also be paper. You simply cannot manipulate something and generate something substantially other than the thing you are twisting around. See how many ways you can fold a piece of paper, screw it up, do whatever you want with it. See how no matter what you do, never will a sheet of ice be conjured beside the paper from your manipulations. That is why materialism and science have no bearing at all. If the brain generates conscious experience it is irrelevant. The brain and conscious experiences (i.e. seeing, hearing, tasting) are substantially just paper. It's all one. It's inescapable. Inevitable. If you understand that then you will never again be bothered by these musings.

ALL things are substantially the same. The way real is defined in different mystic traditions can vary. As an example, some traditions define real only as something which is forever unchanging. Other traditions consider everything real. Others consider things simultaneously real and unreal. There are various tales to illustrate these different outlooks. Depending on how you think about real, the answer to your question will differ. For example, if you are to take anything which comes and goes as unreal, then even your own self is unreal since there is no element of you which doesn't change. Your body changes, emotions change, thoughts change. There is only the single real element of "Brahman" so to speak, the unchanging element. Which you would think of as "consciousness" probably. My life and your life are substantially nothing other than Brahman, even though we may live separate lives and be having different experiences from each other right now. The idea is to release identification from the self, so recognize your reality is beyond the mind and body of the human you think you are. The person is an appearance WITHIN you. Both you and me are appearances within what we both refer to as "I".

No, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what an "observer" in this experiment is. In actuality, material science has absolutely zero contradiction with correctly understood mysticism. That is why many serious monks etc can rather enjoy chatting to neuroscientists if they enjoy scientific topics. There is no contradiction whatsoever anywhere between material reality and spiritual reality. It is as simple as this: If you have a sheet of fabric, no matter what shape you fold it into, you never create something of substance other than the fabric. No matter how many times you twist and fold a sheet of fabric, you will never magically conjure beside it a sheet of ice or gel or w.e. other substance. It will ALWAYS be substantially fabric and NO other substance will ever be there. ALL elements of reality are precisely like that. Everything in existence, both things with experienced qualities, and matter without subjective qualities, are SUBSTANTIALLY equal. There is only one "sheet" in different "shapes" and it is the only thing there is... If there is ever anything that is aware, what could it possibly be that is aware other than reality itself? People are too focused on the micro level, so they say THIS specific tiny portion is aware. But they are missing the substance of that tiny portion. Like folding an origami swan and the wing has awareness somehow, and it might think sure I the wing am aware but no other part of the swan is. Because the wing is completely overlooking the unassailable fact that it is paper, and that the paper is absolutely singular, one.