As I mentioned in another topic there are quite a few people who think about origins. Origins of the unoverse that is and how it came to be. Often it seems to have a beginning. This beginning is often described as the absolute zero, a nothingness sitiuation before anything existed.

It amazes me how people seem to arrive as a same conclusion.

I wonder if this has anything to do with what they read studying literature and religion and philosophies. I guess I was influenced by the concept of a beginning. After all, whether you have a scientific mind and were taught in school about the Big Bang or read the Books of Dzyan, we seek origins and those streams of try to provide one.

Personally I have concluded that beginnings are irrelevant. The Big Bang theory, well, McKenna was clear on that, they want you to believe in one miracle and from that point on they can explain just about everything that happens after. What is important is that it does not give a true beginning. I think I solved that problem.

So to describe the idea of a state wherein there is no matter, no energy, no time or space and to imagine that is very difficult. We are all something, therefore we focus through the act of perception on the positive. Think of the negative of a photo. Or think Castaneda, when Don Juan focused his attention on the silence between the sounds or the space between the leafs of a tree.

So such a state is hard to picture.

To me this state is one that exists only virtually in the sense that if you look at a circle, which is an endless loop. and you want to trace it, you have to pick a point on the line and then trace it 380 degrees around. Any point will do and acts only as an arbitrary or random starting point.

So once this situation has evolved, it no longer has much relevance. To me this has to do with my own personal cosmology.

In any case, this situation I would describe as Potential. If you consider this word, it does not describe any object or lack thereof. It is an undefined state with infinite possibilities and anything may come out of it. Since there s no guiding principle to select what could come out of it, anything that comes out of it is random.

This is an important realization to me. It reminds me of what McKenna talked about when he wondered what the mechanism was for something to undergo the formality of occurring. Well, since in this peculiar state there s no guiding principle or universal law yet, by default whatever occurs out of Potential is random in whatever format it results in.

So this situation, this state has no energy, therefore no matter, there is no space or time which I think is needed for casuistry and matter.

Language, as McKenna talked about ( I refer to him often because he is basically my God at the moment...) is the limitation of the progression or evolution of culture. There is no word to describe this state as you can see, all we do is summ up what is not there.

There is only Potential, which is basically nothing. It is an abstraction and it implies nothing. So maybe Potential is the best word for it.

So for anything to occur there must be the potential for it to occur. And apparently, since I am here, thinking, existing, something occurred alright. What happened was that Awareness occurred.

Awareness, to me, is the only thing that exists. And it created all we know. But how that worked, that is for another post. And there I will try to explain my cosmogenesis and why this state of nothingness becomes irrelevant.

So how do you define "random" in such a scenario?

Whatever comes out of it could be anything. It turns out, Awareness energy arose out of Potential. But it could have been something completely different. That means that awareness as sentient self-reflective humans know it, might not have existed. But then we wouldn't have known about it as we would never have occurred.

So the fact that we are here proves that a model came to exist in which there later on became a self-reflecting species called humans. So the shape and size of the multiverse is something out of myriad possibilities.

i remember once while i was in a very deep state i came up with the definition of potential as being,
"the possibility of ability"

You may not know who "Osho" is. He's some spiritual guru I know little about, but who has irritated me greatly. However I have a quote from him I like which you may find pertinent:

"Buddha has chosen one of the really very potential words - shunyata. The English word, the English equivalent, nothingness, is not such a beautiful word. That's why I would like to make it no-thingness - because the nothing is not just nothing, it is all. It is vibrant with all possibilities. It is potential, absolute potential. It is still unmanifest, but it contains all. In the beginning is nature, in the end is nature, so why do you make so much fuss in the middle? Why become so worried in the middle, so anxious, so ambitious - why create such despair? Nothingness to nothingness is the whole journey."

Beautiful

It never seizes to amaze me how so often someone mentions a guru or whatever talking about the same thing that I independently figured out. There must be an innate mechanism or sensitivity or some antenna of some sort that allows humans to reach similar conclusions. A sort of 'mold of man' in Castanedian terms I suppose, causing us to come to the same conclusions within different frameworks or models.

This is a pattern then. It is my goal in life to detect such patterns. They hint to a way of reasoning that is truly transcendental. It is not about the model, but the applied method of conceiving of it that is enlightenment.

You mention Castaneda. For me, more than any other philosophy/story/path, it is the powerful, visceral insights that Castaneda provided that has really "connected the dots", and propelled me into the unknown. I don't care if the stories are "true" or not, there is much wisdom in them.

Sorry to go a little off topic, but I just wanted to share that.

You perspective on Potential is similar to David Bohm's "Implicate Order". Great minds must think alike!

http://www.theosophy-nw....snw/science/prat-boh.htm

In the 1960s Bohm began to take a closer look at the notion of order. One day he saw a device on a television program that immediately fired his imagination. It consisted of two concentric glass cylinders, the space between them being filled with glycerin, a highly viscous fluid. If a droplet of ink is placed in the fluid and the outer cylinder is turned, the droplet is drawn out into a thread that eventually becomes so thin that it disappears from view; the ink particles are enfolded into the glycerin. But if the cylinder is then turned in the opposite direction, the thread-form reappears and rebecomes a droplet; the droplet is unfolded again. Bohm realized that when the ink was diffused through the glycerin it was not a state of "disorder" but possessed a hidden, or nonmanifest, order.

In Bohm's view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary "subtotalities" derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogy of a flowing stream:

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.

(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)

We must learn to view everything as part of "Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement." (Ibid., p. 11.)

Another metaphor Bohm uses to illustrate the implicate order is that of the hologram. To make a hologram a laser light is split into two beams, one of which is reflected off an object onto a photographic plate where it interferes with the second beam. The complex swirls of the interference pattern recorded on the photographic plate appear meaningless and disordered to the naked eye. But like the ink drop dispersed in the glycerin, the pattern possesses a hidden or enfolded order, for when illuminated with laser light it produces a three-dimensional image of the original object, which can be viewed from any angle. A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if a holographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image of the whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image. Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are encoded within each region of the photographic record.

Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing.

The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretation corresponds to the implicate order. But Bohm suggests that the quantum potential is itself organized and guided by a superquantum potential, representing a second implicate order, or superimplicate order. Indeed he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or "generative) orders, some of which form relatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher.

Bohm believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly "inanimate" matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a "protointelligence" in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain "could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. The separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. The ground is always one." (Quoted in Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, HarperCollins, New York, 1991, p. 271.)

It could well be the quantum domain where we will find...ours-elves.

..potential = nothing
possibility = infinity

also, i believe Godel showed that it can never be proved that a sequence of numbers is truly random..

I think science has no bearing on the psychedelic experience. Nor on metaphysics.

Science is just another side to the same coin. It may not be as inclusive as many scientists like to believe it is, but it has much to do with the psychedelic experience. It's up to you to make the connections.

I don't see how science can get a grip on what I experience during my mushroom trips. It can measure my heartbeat and blood chemistry, or even put me in an MRI scanner. But what does that mean anyway. They won't see the tendrils and other shapes nor give any sort of explanation about them as to why we see such things.

To me the science (in the sense you are speaking of) strictly means the study of cause and effect. In this case the cause being the mushrooms and the visuals are the effect. Sure science maybe can't explain WHY you see that stuff and maybe it could, psychology is a science too. They can tell you how, and that is just half of understanding. To me the psychedelic is almost purely scientific in a spiritual sense. The best way for me to get meaning out of a trip is to almost approach it from an almost pragmatic standpoint. This to me is science, the cause is the trip and the effect is what I make out of it.

You cannot deny the existence of the physical world, it holds many meanings. Even if you might not like what it has to say. Measuring your blood chemistry and sticking you in a MRI scanner might actually help you understand your trip better if you are aware of what happening to your body. See if certain physical reactions correspond with moments in your trip.

I can see where you are coming from, but I do not think science should be so easily blown off in the face of spiritual and psychedelic experiences.

Visty wrote: ..this is essentially philosophy (metaphysics) except the use of the word random, which is mathematical..

philosophy = (potential = nothing) ... godel = mathematics (not science)

Visty wrote:

being totally spiritual, to me, means just having 'faith'..even philosophy or metaphysics has no bearing on the experience from this POV...

Well said, man. You pretty much covered everything I was thinking about as a response.

One thing I find interesting is many people claim "science can't explain" this or that. Sure fine, it may not be able to, it doesn't mean our lack of understanding or lack of ability to be able to use the scientific method and effectively apply it to certain problems, makes these problems "special" or divine. It's quite possible something we can't understand can turn out to be quite mundane.

Actually it is not. We speak of theories of mind, not facts of mind. Algebra, arithmetic, physics, chemistry, such things are science. There is no proof that anything any psychiatrist or psychologist ever said has a factual basis. Of course you can use statistics, also very factual, about how many patients have this or that. But that is not psychology in itself.




Be that as it may, you will be able only to deal with the surface. If it doesn't go much deeper than cause and effect, that is, I take a substance and as a consequence I see things, then the science stops rather soon. Making classifications on entities might be considered a scientific approach, it is pragmatic at least, but these entities can only be described anecdotally. And science spits on that. Look at the UFO phenomenon. If someone sees something that cannot be repeated, they dismiss it.



I can. But not to make things overly complex I'll let it go. Just for the sake of discussion mind you!



I don't need to understand such things to get some meaningful insights from a trip. That could be different for you.

But to me the psychedelic experience belong more to the paranormal/intuitive/spiritual phenomenon than to science. I mentioned how I find it strange that people who deal with the intuitive/paranormal/spiritual things that slide in front of our senses ride the leg of science like horny dogs for approval. You can use science all you like but the scientific community won't be impressed and they would sooner say it is fringe science or junk science.



I believe strongly, in an intuitive way, that science can never and will never be able to predict any outcome from the content of the trip. It is by default, by default, escaping its methodology.

We are talking about consciousness here, which is unmeasurable.

McKenna talked about how cartesian thinking was about how science would speak of primary and secondary attributes. Secondary were things like color and feeling.

In the exact same way it is vice versa. Science can never describe the content in a meaningful way. If feeling is secondary to science, then logic is secondary to the trip.

The only way is to go alchemical on it. But I think that would work mostly for larger structures, like cosmology. Not an individual, emotional consciousness altering experience. Science shatters in the trip. You try take 50 grams dried shrooms and do methodological sampling of what you see.

Similarly, it is folly to do a scientific research using psychedelic art to predict the outcome of a test.

Trips are to tied to consciousness to take conclusions from to apply to more people in terms of content and its meaning. They can only do what Strassman did, that is, classify and categorize similar experiences from the anecdotal stories of the participants in the study. Which are only second hand materials. The people are the source but they speak of a subjective experience translated in terms so that a scientist can write them down. So it is not direct contact or observation with the content. So, in a way, Strassman did a secondary attribute research.

Now let's say Strassman would do DMT himself. To directly observe, in a scientific way...but that cannot be done, cause as soon as he would break through, science would be blown to bits. Many people say you should not control the DMT trip cause it might bite you in the ass. Science however is about control. You control the conditions of an experiment, to standardize it so results can be checked to that standard. In a trip, there is no such option.

So even if Strassman would have done a direct approach, dust in the wind my friend.

Science is not the tool to understand content. You can only use it to research the secondary attributes of trips.

Let me explain how I see this. I think you can apply logic always. There are situations where your mileage varies, like in a trip, remaining very logical is hard. But outside the trip logic works better. This is a dualistic thing that we have going about us. I think duality, as discussed so much in so many philosophies and schools of thought, is actually a representation of the fractal mind.
Within logic there is intuition in which there is logic.

The duality here is inside of a trip and outside of a trip. Even on 5 gram of dried psilocybin I have a certain level of logic going on where I analyze my condition. But it is much more fleeting than as I am now. And sometimes, at the height, I do not exist anymore as I am now, so all logic is gone for that period of time.

Faith is not a word I really like. It has religious connotations. And I am very much anti-religion. My ideas are intuition and logic based, but a system of logic that is not the scientific definition of it. My logic system is derived from intuition in a fractal way, like I just explained. So I start from a diametrically opposed position. I would not call that faith. I use a fractal perspective or alchemical perspective and I find that it works. In my experience it is logical and intuitive and they embrace each other fractionally so to say. It is the dual view that is totally 50%-50%. It makes it hard for me to communicate with others on fora such as this.

Most people go from logic-intuition-logic-intuition etc.

I go more like intuition-logic-intuition. When someone is logic, I talk intuition. SO I always seem to oppose others.

And then I go like:

|Intulogic-loguition-intulogic|_|Loguition-Intulogic-Loguition_
\/
/\
|Loguition-Intulogic-Loguition|-|Intulogic-loguition-intulogic-

This last thing is my view on reality in some way described. I am a very strange man.

I developed for myself methods to discuss things with people. I'll make a post of that.

If you trace round from your starting point by 380 degrees, correct me if Im wrong, won't you surely be 20 degrees away from the starting point??:idea: