Fist and Faith wrote:Vraith wrote:Fist and Faith wrote: Is it possible that the altered state of consciousness...is it possible that it is the illusion?
No, I don't think that is possible. The state of consciousness is what it is, even if what it is conscious OF isn't.
Yes, I worded that poorly. Z said the routine, habit, convention, and social roles are illusions.
It seems that we're all wording things poorly, I guess. I should have said "fictions" rather than illusions. But even illusions are real, in the sense that they are phenomena of which we're aware. The illusory part comes in how we frame the phenomenon, understand it, explain it, etc. That wavy watery looking patch on the distant pavement may not be a pool of water, but it's a real effect of heat/air/light.
Social roles are fictions. In some sense, they are valid fictions, relative to certain goals. But we can lose sight of our larger humanity if we think of ourselves as primarily what we do for a living, or who we have married, or what expensive car we drive, etc. In the end, we're all worm food and none of that will matter.
I think the "higher consciousness" that allows one to think of children being tortured and murdered in front of their parents without resentment, aversion, or displeasure is illusory in the same sense.
I feel like you're stretching my point into territory I didn't mean, in order to squeeze a negative out of it. If you saw children being tortured while tripping you'd probably freak the fuck out. But at the same time, our aversion to seeing violence is a biological, evolutionary survival mechanism. The anger it evokes can control us, if we let it. The same "higher" that allows parents of murdered children to forgive the murderer--for their own peace--is what I'm talking about here. It doesn't mean they like it, they simply make peace with it so it doesn't tear them apart inside. The capacity for forgiveness can be applied to all of reality ... it's like forgiving Existence itself for being shitty sometimes. The alternative is to be bitter, to think all humans evil, and to give up on the world because it's not perfect ... which then leads people into the inauthenticity of seeking their meaning in a world beyond this one where they can imagine it actually is perfect.
I understand doubting something you've never experienced. But you should also realize that you're in no position to make a claim about it one way or the other, for the same reason: you haven't experienced it.
For me, the experience was overwhelmingly real. Forget about the visuals, the euphoria, or the other things I've discussed so far. Consider this this instead--we all go through times (daily) when we forget about our existence as existence itself. When we're making breakfast, getting the kids ready for school, we're not pondering the existential crisis, or how amazing it is that we exist at all when a billion little events could have happened differently to lead to us not existing. And there are other times when our awareness of our own Being increases dramatically, sometimes even uncomfortably. So, without a doubt, this kind of awareness moves on a spectrum of intensity, i.e. more or less. If we can agree on that, than consider the possibility that even in your highest awareness of yourself, it could have gone higher. That's what this experience was for me, the most intense awareness of my own Being that I've ever had. All the ways that we typically distract ourselves and lose ourselves dropped away. And since I am not a hallucination, I can say with confidence that an increased awareness of my own Being is indeed a higher awareness.
Joe Biden … putting the Dem in dementia since (at least) 2020.