Are there hallucinations?

[Vagos]

Are there any hallucinations ever? Or is every experience, every moment of being, every nugget of perception, true in its form? If there were only two people in the universe and one of them heard a noise or a voice, and the other did not, could that voice ever be considered to be a hallucination? Or is the inability to hear it a handicap? In other words, when did humanity start delegating truth-ness to democracy? What if two people trip on a psychedelic and see the same exact vision at the same time? Is that vision a common, false, hallucination or did these people gain the means to access a part of reality that they didn't have the means to access before? And if there is actually such a thing as a hallucination, in what precise ways could it ever be distinguished from reality?

Edited June 1, 2023 by Vagos

[Holykael]

Everything is an hallucination. I'm hallucinating this post. You don't exist.

[r0ckyreed]

39 minutes ago, Holykael said:

Everything is an hallucination. I'm hallucinating this post. You don't exist.

OP makes a good point and is asking good questions. If everything is a hallucination that would mean hallucinations are also a hallucination which makes everything real. 

Hallucinations are occurring in existence/reality.

Edited June 1, 2023 by r0ckyreed

[Moksha]

Hallucination is the absolute imagining differences, directions, densities, and durations. There are hallucinations within hallucinations within hallucinations.

Lucidity is the absolute realizing its seamless, intransient, weightless, timeless essence. There can be lucidity both within and beyond hallucinations. 

[Hojo]

Its a hallucination but your job is to find meaning in the hallucination.

You areactually asking if there can be meaning to the hallucination

This is done by worshipping God and seeing God in everything

Edited June 1, 2023 by Hojo

[Porphyry Fedotov]

I think the concept of hallucination in itself is an interesting thing which reflects how people tend to view reality. It makes sense if you use 'others' as a criteria for what is real and what isn't. For example when you see a pink elephant, but the rest of the people don't, they would call it a hallucination

When you stop doing that - hallucinations are no more. When you use only your own experience such as sight, sound, smell, taste, touch to determine what real or what isn't, everything is real, otherwise it wouldn't be in your field of perception

[_Archangel_]

@Vagos you are conflating mundane and spiritual frameworks here:
commonly speaking an allucination is a personal perception that doesn't appear in the "outer world" for others to see it.
Spiritually we can say tha either everything is an hallucitation or nothing is, because every fenomena truly hasn't a location nor a "possessor", both  Mental constructs.

[Vagos]

Let me rephrase the question because a lot of people are trying to answer using a different type of framework. What I'm actually asking is if what is traditionally considered as a hallucination (example: psychedelic visions) is AS real AS ordinary sober reality, no matter what that means. Maybe ordinary reality can also be regarded as a hallucination, but that is not the point of my question here. The question is if every first hand direct experience is real by definition, as there isn't any rule structure, no matter how logical or mathematical, that can be more fundamental than direct experience in order to disprove it or render it "false"

[Carl-Richard]

If you see something that other people don't usually see, it can be labelled as a hallucination. Essentially, society dictates what is a hallucination or not.

[Moksha]

1 hour ago, Vagos said:

The question is if every first hand direct experience is real by definition, as there isn't any rule structure, no matter how logical or mathematical, that can be more fundamental than direct experience in order to disprove it or render it "false"

What experience beyond awakening is direct? Every sensation and perception is indirectly received, processed, and presented internally in a contrived form that inevitably misrepresents whatever is being observed. Setting aside the reality of the cosmos, how could this highly refined form be real? Your image of a rose is nothing like whatever is creating the qualia of its form.

Every experience is unreal by definition. On your specific question, if other people confirm seeing a rose, it wouldn't be a hallucination in the traditional sense. Whether the image in their head resembles in any way the image in your own head is impossible to say.

 

[_Archangel_]

@Vagos of course the answer, again, is yes. Whatever is present right now in your experience is ultimatly real.

The point is though, the dicotomy real/unreal have been framed by our materialistic society cause it needed a category to discard al phenomena considered unuseful or even threatning to our survival. That's where your question is coming from.

 

[gettoefl]

what surrounds me is energy ... my mind assembles that into holographic objects that i term world

[Leo Gura]

A "hallucination" in ordinary, common parlance is ultimately determined relative to your own self. A serious hallucination would involve you seeing a ghost, for example, but you yourself realize, "Oh, that wasn't really a ghost, that was some malfunction in my perception, because right now I don't see that ghost I thought was there."

So it's not about consenus with others, it's about agreement with yourself across time. Hallucinations are usually temporary, flakey sorts of perceptions, while non-hallucinations are so stable they are always reliably present.

The difference between a hallucinated ghost and a real ghost is that the real one is persistently there. It doesn't fade in and out existence and it doesn't disappear if you take some medication or change your mood.

So yes, there can be relative hallucinations, especially if you have some mental disorder or brain disorder. These would be relative hallucinations which normal people do not have.

It is important to understand the difference between relative vs absolute hallucinations. And to be clear which one you are speaking of. The whole world is an absolute hallucination, but that should not be confused with the relative hallucinations of psychotic people.

Edited June 3, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Razard86]

On 6/1/2023 at 2:06 PM, r0ckyreed said:

OP makes a good point and is asking good questions. If everything is a hallucination that would mean hallucinations are also a hallucination which makes everything real. 

Hallucinations are occurring in existence/reality.

....That logic doesn't fly. What determines what is real, depends on what you define as real. If you define real eternity then the universe is not real because the Universe is Impermanent. The only thing permanent is God. 

So what is your definition of real?

[LSD-Rumi]

@Leo Gura I asked you about this before, but do you think that alien mouse you experience is a stable hallucination? or the kind of hallucination a psychedelic could generate but it is not really a stable state?

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

So it's not about consenus with others, it's about agreement with yourself across time. Hallucinations are usually temporary, flakey sorts of perceptions, while non-hallucinations are so stable they are always reliably present.

The difference between a hallucinated ghost and a real ghost is that the real one is persistently there. It doesn't fade in and out existence and it doesn't disappear if you take some medication or change your mood.

Are DMT realms relative or absolute hallucinations?

Edited June 3, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Moksha]

7 minutes ago, Benton said:

In the moment its being experienced its real as it is experienced 

Every experience is surreal. They only vary in dilution. Imagining a monster under your bed is only slightly more surreal than so-called living.

[Leo Gura]

On 6/3/2023 at 2:02 AM, LSD-Rumi said:

@Leo Gura I asked you about this before, but do you think that alien mouse you experience is a stable hallucination? or the kind of hallucination a psychedelic could generate but it is not really a stable state?

It is not stable for a human.

The issue is that being humans IS an epic hallucination, and being an alien a different epic hallucination. And it's hard to combine or mix the two. It's like trying to play two VR games at once. One VR reality undermines the other. To pick a reality.

Edited June 6, 2023 by Leo Gura