Revealing the Mind: The Promise of Psychedelics

[WaveInTheOcean]

A talk about the future of psychedelics in scientific and clinical contexts. Interesting. Exciting future ahead.
 

Btw @Leo Gura Anil Seth calls himself a strict materialist and says accordingly: "As a firm materialist, I believe every experience that we have has a basis in the activity of our brain". Do you agree/disagree with that statement? It's hard to disagree with. Everything is consciousness and our brains are computers that create a special form of "software" that we call the individiual separated self aka ego. Since God/Consciousness is fundamentally the only "thing" that exists, it is God that is imagining all this: the brain, the experiences, the separated self.

It is also hard to make a causal order here. Does the psychedelic/mystical experience induce a special observable brain-state or is it the other way around, as Anil Seth wants us to believe? Perhaps it is both. They rise simultaneously. In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. 

"God is love. And Love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is Existence infinite and eternal there is no one for Him to love but Himself. And in order to love Himself, He must imagine Himself as the Beloved whom He as the lover imagines He loves. Beloved and lover implies separation. And separation creates longing; and longing causes search. And the wider and the more intense the search, the greater the separation and the more terrible the longing. When longing is at its intensest, separation is complete, and the purpose of separation, which was that love might experience itself as lover and Beloved, is fulfilled; and union follows. And when union is attained, the lover knows that he himself was all along the Beloved, whom he loved and desired union with; and that all the impossible situations that he overcame were obstacles which he himself had placed in the path to himself. To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are!"
- Meher Baba

[Leo Gura]

Reality is groundless. If you try to ground it in anything, like a brain or atoms, you still aren't getting it. Oneness cannot be grounded in anything but itself because oneness can have no other.

Brains have no absolute reality. They are imaginary. Just like all form is.

It's very simple, you cannot ground form in another form. That is delusion.

Discover this for yourself.

Brains are a relative duality which we use to speak about relative reality. This concept works, but only up to a point. If you examine it deeply enough you will hit upon a self-reference paradox which results in a strange loop. That's your clue that you've reached the limits of that concept of "a brain".

The strange loop is this: if the universe in happening in brain, then where is the brain happening? In the universe? You can't have it both ways. On the one hand you say that the universe comes before a brain, on the other hand you say the whole universe happens in a brain. Which is it? Is the brain itself happening inside a brain?

[Paulus Amadeus]

50 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Reality is groundless. If you try to ground it in anything, like a brain or atoms, you still aren't getting it. Oneness cannot be grounded in anything but itself because oneness can have no other.

Brains have no absolute reality. They are imaginary. Just like all form is.

It's very simple, you cannot ground form in another form. That is delusion.

Discover this for yourself.

Brains are a relative duality which we use to speak about relative reality. This concept works, but only up to a point. If you examine it deeply enough you will hit upon a self-reference paradox which results in a strange loop. That's your clue that you've reached the limits of that concept of "a brain".

The strange loop is this: if the universe in happening in brain, then where is the brain happening? In the universe? You can't have it both ways. On the one hand you say that the universe comes before a brain, on the other hand you say the whole universe happens in a brain. Which is it? Is the brain itself happening inside a brain?

But I guess a regular materialist would just say that the brain is in the universe, and that the perception of the universe is happening in the brain. 

I don’t see how we get strange loops if we assume the ‘‘behind-the-scenes’ reality.

 

[Leo Gura]

Yes, that's what they would say, but their position is incoherent and circular.

What is your behind-the-scenes reality grounded in? You're not questioning that deeply enough.

You cannot ground reality in the brain because the brain is already part of what you call reality. This is classic question begging.

It's like saying God is true because the Bible says so. And why is the Bible true? Because God wrote it.

[Neo]

But isn't this world view simply saying the brain has a mirror like device in it which reflects the outer reality and supplies the raw data from the senses in a coherent manner?

 

By the way I love the picture of the universe with spiral galaxies curving round into an eye looking at itself. Does anyone have that picture and can post it? Something seems inherently true about it.

[Paulus Amadeus]

Just now, Leo Gura said:

Yes, that's what they would say, but their position is incoherent and circular.

What is your behind-the-scenes reality grounded in? You're not questioning that deeply enough.

You cannot ground reality in the brain because the brain is already part of what you call reality. This classic question begging.

But say I would make a hole in my own head, and I took a mirror to look at my own brain.

in the materialist paradigm this could still make sense. Light goes from my brain, into my eyes. Then in my brain a image of my brain get’s created, and that’s the image I’ll then see. 

My actual brain would be part of the ‘behind the scenes reality’, to which you can never get

this would be kind of like a camera having a picture of itself in it’s memory. Could easily happen.

So my experience is grounded in my brain, my brain is grounded in the ‘behind the scenes reality’.... and there the chain breaks down of course. But I see no brain strangeloop stuff.

[Paulus Amadeus]

Of course knowing that this chain breaks down and that materialism doesn’t make sense does mean that tradition brains do not exist. So I guess I am splitting hairs here.

[Leo Gura]

56 minutes ago, Paulus Amadeus said:

My actual brain would be part of the ‘behind the scenes reality’, to which you can never get

No! You still aren't getting it.

You are using an imaginary notion of a "behind the scenes reality" to ground reality.

Your are fooling yourself when you do this. You are anchoring reality in a fantasy.

You might as well believe that there exists a behind the scenes space kangaroo who runs reality. There is as much evidence for space kangroos as there is of a behind the scenes brain.

THERE IS NO BEHIND THE SCENE! There is only a groundless scene.

[daramantus]

2 hours ago, Paulus Amadeus said:

But say I would make a hole in my own head, and I took a mirror to look at my own brain.

in the materialist paradigm this could still make sense. Light goes from my brain, into my eyes. Then in my brain a image of my brain get’s created, and that’s the image I’ll then see. 

My actual brain would be part of the ‘behind the scenes reality’, to which you can never get

this would be kind of like a camera having a picture of itself in it’s memory. Could easily happen.

So my experience is grounded in my brain, my brain is grounded in the ‘behind the scenes reality’.... and there the chain breaks down of course. But I see no brain strangeloop stuff.

Huh?? Cyclops, is that you?? ?FULL STOP. Light goes from the light bulb to your eyes, not from your brain.

Edited October 12, 2019 by daramantus

[Paulus Amadeus]

@Leo Gura yes I know! I was taking the position of the materialist. I see how reality is a hallucination with nothing as a grounding substance.

With ‘then the chain breaks down’, I meant that this is where the materialist paradigm stops making any sense.

you explained all this very well in your video’s, and I’m pretty sure I get it.

[King Merk]

@Leo Gura I realize that reality as well as my sense of self are groundless. I’ve done the self inquiry to understand these “realities” on a conceptual level. However I’m struggling to embody these teachings in my day to day life. Am I doing something wrong or do I just need more self inquiry work? 

[WaveInTheOcean]

"I guess a regular materialist would just say that the brain is in the universe, and that the perception of the universe is happening in the brain. "

The idea that you can have an outside external world (aka universe) exisiting independent of a brain is flawed. It's equivalent to believing you can have selling without buying. They go together, i.e. each one gives rise to the other.  

[daramantus]

On 10/12/2019 at 8:19 PM, Paulus Amadeus said:

@Leo Gura yes I know! I was taking the position of the materialist. I see how reality is a hallucination with nothing as a grounding substance.

 

Eh, try sleep deprivation and you'll hallucinate things that don't exist, I wouldn't be able to see, only you, now there's a difference, find that difference and you'll see that how a meaning is created and how you are distorting it, what is more reality to that which we call reality by using the proper meaning? If distorted, then they all become vague and we won't communicate anymore. Definition is key.

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by daramantus