[quote]What you're looking for is within you, you could take an Entheogen 50, 100, 500 times and still not find the Light if you're not doing it right....[/quote]

I've had the experience you are describing on various substances in various forms in various settings. I agree with you that these are internal experiences and your right you shouldn't expect to 'trip balls' and see god / aliens from some outside realm. But I think its all in your head. I don't see any reason to think I'm tapping into some sacred internal dimension or anything like that. That doesn't really make sense to me I guess. Even though words like sacred, divine, etc are often used that goes back to difficulty with language in describing experience.

[quote]But why are we having this discussion? There are questions that we will never have the answer to. Mankind has existed for over 5 million years without ever realy knowing whether there is a god or not. There is no such knowledge, nor will there ever be any. We simply CANNOT know.
So why would it matter then? How COULD it matter, even?[/quote]

5 million years ago people knew a lot less about the world then we do now. It does matter when you think about the impact of religion on society and history. These days we are seeing a regression back to religious nationalism and I think its an awful trend. I'd rather have people doing psychedelics and having less dogmatic spiritual beliefs then dogmatic religions running the show.

"But I think its all in your head. I don't see any reason to think I'm tapping into some sacred internal dimension or anything like that. That doesn't really make sense to me I guess."

If you truly pursue the Entheogenic/Aya path, it will make sense. I took the stuff daily/near daily for 4 years, i learned a lot, to say the least. I'm not discounting your previous experiences, but there's stuff here man, it's real, it's not wacky, it's pretty easily understandable once you really dive into it.

All i'm saying is, don't deny the possibility, dive back in within yourself, listen to some good music and let things within you unlock and come to the surface. There's some serious shit within ourselves and with these Entheogens, make no mistake, these things aren't mere drugs, they're keys.

[quote] 5 million years ago people knew a lot less about the world then we do now [/quote]

Yet we live afar from the "world" and have affirmatively been very efficient at destroying said "world".

So I would tend to say knowledge is a very relative thing, because the tribes of grown man and woman running in circle naked praying for the rain certainly had a much healthier relationship with their environment, said "world".

They used to see themselves united with all living things - which is more than a serious, live and meaningful application of the usual catchphrase of the wanna be scientist "Man is but a speck of dust in the Universe", which he often likes to unsheathe to slay the great Ego and anthropocentric tendency he thinks (to reason?) he sees in the thinking promoted by various religious traditions.

Again, I'm very suspicious, skeptical one might say, about the relationship of said quest for knowledge to said clear suicidal tendencies of our species that have been feeding each other over the course of the last centuries. Maybe it's not related, we'll never have proof surely. It is all so dazzlingly complex!

I agree about psychedelic for bringing less dogmatic religious belief, live experience is what we need, but who knows what our "heads" are, what's inside of them? Another mantra of the wannabe scientist is "The first thing I know is I know nothing", which again, if applied to one's live, would surely lead to great differences in the way they interact with reality - maybe, say, like letting spooky signs from nature taking important decisions for the life of the community? Or letting mysterious signs invite you in the mysteries of the forest, the force of the spirit drive you to a quest you know nothing? (It's the primitive version of the more serious modern anthem "Man Taking Destiny Into Its Own Hands". Pas and Future are really not so different, so afar)

Letting go is such a drag.

[quote]If you truly pursue the Entheogenic/Aya path, it will make sense. I took the stuff daily/near daily for 4 years, i learned a lot, to say the least. I'm not discounting your previous experiences, but there's stuff here man, it's real, it's not wacky, it's pretty easily understandable once you really dive into it.

All i'm saying is, don't deny the possibility, dive back in within yourself, listen to some good music and let things within you unlock and come to the surface. There's some serious shit within ourselves and with these Entheogens, make no mistake, these things aren't mere drugs, they're keys. [/quote]

That is a lot of ayahuasca! More then I'll probably ever do in my lifetime. Either way I'm not closing my mind off with regards to possibilities I haven't thought of yet. I guess I don't see why what your talking about contradicts atheism. It sounds to me like you aren't really describing a belief in god but more internal realms of understanding?

[quote]Yet we live afar from the "world" and have affirmatively been very efficient at destroying said "world".[/quote]

Sure humans are destroying the world. I'm not saying what humans do now is good. But humans in the past were pretty bad (to each other) as well. But that is a separate conversation.

I think your point is that in the past people were more connected to nature and psychedelics are a way for modern people to get back in touch with nature? If so I agree. But again I see no reason to attach any spiritual or supernatural beliefs to that. I am in awe of nature and reverence of nature is a way of being part of something bigger without having to believe in stuff that has no evidence / isn't true like a god(s).

[quote]still there are some questions like: what evolutionary reason can there be to have receptors that, when triggered, let one have spiritual expiriences?
...this feeling of connected ness, a feeling of something like a shared subconciousness seems to be something many psychonauts have expirienced.[/quote]

Modern neuroscience about psychedelics is helping illuminate these questions. I would recommend checking out latest studies. A great book describing this issue in a lot of good detail is Michael Pollans new book about psychedelics (How to Change your mind).

"That is a lot of ayahuasca! More then I'll probably ever do in my lifetime. Either way I'm not closing my mind off with regards to possibilities I haven't thought of yet. I guess I don't see why what your talking about contradicts atheism. It sounds to me like you aren't really describing a belief in god but more internal realms of understanding?"

It is a lot lol, but practice makes perfect, it's a path, practice, art, craft, it's something you've really gotta commit to, as much as you would meditation or yoga or anything like that, the Entheogenic path unfolds as you go along, “as you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”

But yeah it's good to be skeptical and scientifically minded, but it's also good to be open minded and receptive, open to higher understanding. But yeah i'm not necessarily advocating for a belief in god, just a higher and seemingly real spiritual dimension of reality that exists within the Human being and projects outwards, not outwards projecting in. So yeah i'm basically describing internal realms/dimensions of understanding, experience, vision, insight, gnosis and wisdom, etc. It's not that it contradicts Atheism, it's just that Atheists tend to be absorbed into mainstream science and think things like ESP, precognition, spiritual dimensions of reality, higher understanding and a lot of this spiritual stuff is impossible because science says so, when really, we hardly know anything about the brain and body or reality in general compared to what there is to know.

So yeah this is an internal thing, not an external thing, but i assure you, if you pursue this path and really scientifically experiment around, you'll stumble upon some very interesting ideas/understandings of things.

[quote] Sure humans are destroying the world. I'm not saying what humans do now is good. But humans in the past were pretty bad (to each other) as well. But that is a separate conversation.

I think your point is that in the past people were more connected to nature and psychedelics are a way for modern people to get back in touch with nature? If so I agree. But again I see no reason to attach any spiritual or supernatural beliefs to that. I am in awe of nature and reverence of nature is a way of being part of something bigger without having to believe in stuff that has no evidence / isn't true like a god(s).

[/quote]

Let's use our imagination.

How much time do you spend outside in a year? Outside in nature in a year? Outside in nature naked in a year?

If you spend a week walking five hours a day in nature, naked - or at least barefoot and chest out so that your whole body can breathe - you will reach some interesting ego dissolution. The trees will come alive, the wind will be infused with a special character when he touches your skin, different each time.

This level of being in the world is hard for us. It has become hard to be so much in the world.

Often when people (as I have observed in my self and others) appreciate nature, they do so in the distance. They contemplate by sight mostly. As I believed they have been taught in movies and classrooms, by what are clothes and houses. They don't TOUCH it.

But it's a sexual thing. Being One is like being in LOVE. And who would be in love and not touch?

Now when you make love it is magical. Sensory overload of blurred emotions and raw feeling, the flesh is speaking through the primal ritual of the universe. The core rhythm.

Now use your imagination and see if you can picture (but not only with your eyes) what living for your whole life, so deeply in touch with the world, so deeply in love, how would it transform you? Why is there that all our ancestors, who lived this way, all bathed in the realm of the spirits? Why is it that rise of excess in rational thinking, as it has muted our connection with the dreams, ridiculed it, is paralleled with exodus to the city, far from our family?

...


How do Shaman heal? They provoke ecstasy. And what ecstasy and transcendental experiences do? They take you beyond atheism and profanity.

It's an amusing thing: when one is a child, he is told the monster under the bed isn't real. That's it's okay to turn off the light but YET, in the cities, ALL the lights never go out. We have satellite images of how drastically we have "lighten up" the night. So is the monster so unreal when it shapes how he take action in the world and therefor shape it?

If you see a leaf falling from a tree, dancing in the air, swirled by the wind in a unfathomable expertise of movement that spark the symphonies of the myriad of universe in motion, and the emotion that arises in you kissed by the fading light of the horizon ... It is magical.

When one is healed of his deepest wounds through a DMT experience, did he understand what happens? Does he have evidence of how the happening happened? Does he even need them?

And the healing was magic.

To heal the heart and the mind, you need to speak to the child. And the child, his thinking is magical. Is it non-nonsensical? Is it unreal? Is it not who you are the most, in our most primitive form, deep down?

The reason why tribal culture see no separation between the outside world and the inner one, the magical and the rational, the spirit and the body, is because they are healthy. Undivided on every level. They ego is constantly in touch with the subconscious material. They are constantly in the process. Things are always seen as a whole. What is repressed is always interacted with. The mind is alive - and strangely the world they live in is so much more alive!

(I think with some attention it becomes rather evident that scientific thinking can be extremely dualistic, and that the tendency of our society to strive for all that is "good", and remove all the "bad" (sickness, viruses, etc) is a consequences to that. Why seek paradise so extremely?)

Whatever man does he will always live in a dream. Trying to escape that reality, that is the nature of his mind, can only lead to greater suffering and being (pretty) bad to each other (and I can include the whole world in this Other for the man of modernity). It is about accepting uncertainty, the vagueness of emotions and the symbols that lies deep within ourselves. We may have no evidence that we exist, but it surely is a wonder to be alive. Quite surreal actually.

In dreams, everything is magical, everything is supernatural, and somehow it flows like the river to the sea. Boundlessly.

[quote=burnt]
[quote]But why are we having this discussion? There are questions that we will never have the answer to. Mankind has existed for over 5 million years without ever realy knowing whether there is a god or not. There is no such knowledge, nor will there ever be any. We simply CANNOT know.
So why would it matter then? How COULD it matter, even?[/quote]

5 million years ago people knew a lot less about the world then we do now. It does matter when you think about the impact of religion on society and history. These days we are seeing a regression back to religious nationalism and I think its an awful trend. I'd rather have people doing psychedelics and having less dogmatic spiritual beliefs then dogmatic religions running the show.





[/quote]
But that's the whole point: if there's no way of telling whether or not some idea we have is true, and if this idea often seems to be at odds with common sense even, then to base imortant decissions on it that do not just affect our own lives but also the lives of others, is madness. There is no justification. It literally is gambling with other peoples lives.

Actually, it's worse. If you cannot know 1-whether or not there is a god and 2-whether or not he wants you to mutilate babies, then to mutulate babies because you believe that there is a god who wants you to do this is an act of violence that is based on nothing but a totally unfounded idea.
It might just as well be the case that your supposed prophet didn't hear it right when this supposed god was whispering in his ear, and that this supposed god actually meant to say that you should NOT, ever, mutulate babies.

How could a benign god expect us to act like that? How could a benign god expect us to go against common sense, or even our own conscience?

If you cannot know if some dogma is true, and it is not even plausible, or it even contradicts common sense, then common sense should prevail over dogma.

The combination of common sense and instinct should be enough to guide us in life. We don't need religious dogmas to give our lives direction. It is not an improvement in any way.
It is fine if you want to believe in something, but the moment it starts to override common sense it becomes a burden, rather than a bliss. And not just to yourself.

[quote=AikyO]I am very wary of "right" and "wrong", mostly because I don't believe we have control over our lives. If you believe you have control over your life you are creating a comforting illusion and satisfying a need for control which will eventually grow and ripple in different aspect of your life. I guess it implies I don't really believe in identity either, in some ways.

I don't think I can judge someone because they are an ensemble of circumstance entirely that is itself but a tiny bit of a mechanic so complex it would boggle us forever - something in the lines of death by astonishment maybe. I don't see antagonist state as having value, they are just separated by time but are entirely similar and connected intricately by change.

But I am compelled to act a certain way and I know this way is True somehow. Like, complete would be the right word. Healthy too. You are totally in tune with what you're meant to be, there is no illusion ... But it goes on and on forever, there's no definite answer. It's a dead end.

(I don't mean you can't make decision that have value and an impact on you life and the life of overs, but I wouldn't call it control)

EDIT: consider this too:

The subconcious. We are unconciousvly treating information that would otherwise overwhelm us.

So it is not you - not the conscious you - but still makesYou. You don't consider it a person, a benevolent entity keeping you in check, yet you consider yourself a person and that thing is inherent to your sens of identity (we could even say she creates it)

So we have weird forces in the back of our minds that keep things working, that we fail to identity as living thing (fear of identification?) and that surely influences us on scale we cannot comprehend because we judt don't know.

You can call that GOD too. I guess.

[/quote]
But ofcourse there is "right" and "wrong". If you want to simplify it, then i would put it like this: you have said so yourself that we need to belong to something greater than ourselves, and that we are lost without it even. So, let's take your family as an example. Could you reasonably expect your family to love you, if the way you treat them would be such, that you would certainly not be able to love them if they treated you that way?

And doesn't that logic apply to all other people, or conscious beings even?

And wouldn't it be weird if we would not demand of people, to behave in accordance with this principle?

I'm not talking about right or wrong as some sort of divine command. What i mean is: wouldn't it be weird if we would allow murder, rape, or other forms of violence, in our midst?

And isn't it true that we don't need a god, to tell us that? Isn't that just common sense?

I'm just saying the nature of the world is change and even if you choose to do good it will have consequences that are outside of your hands, that will most likely create suffering and will go beyond your expectations or good intentions. We can't know the true implication of our actions and what we thought as good is so extremely entangled to what we think as bad, like day turns into night, and fall into spring.

I think this is especially true in our times, where we live above our needs and we can't really escape the chains that have been built and are only ripples since the dawn of time. That's why I don't think there can be judgement. We don't truly have control over our lives, everything is intertwined. So I don't see myself as separated from the murderer and the rapist, even the politicians or the lousy parent, the hijacked millennial or the drug addict.

The limit of self awareness if the realization of how restricting it is to take a point of view, how partial it is and how untrue it is. You just don't know. No one can accept to just live his life like a dream and as if he was dying each instant, so we're on a quest in time. I think it's inevitable too tend toward contradiction if you want to go beyond the partial view, and this partial view, it could be argued, is the thought, the inception, that leads to the greatest suffering we inflict on ourselves and the world.

But can you say the leaf falling from the tree is bad? That the cold, the cold that creates an innate feeling of loneliness and strive for survival in man, that this cold is bad? How can one judge the universe? How can he inflict upon himself such tremendous pressure? Pressure that might, when projected in their glorious forms on the outside world, take the shape of a vengeful and authoritarian God.

EDIT: I remember a scholar speaking about the Chinese Ying and Yang, and he described it as such: "Yang is what becomes Yin, Yin is what becomes Yang". The idea of movement prevail, and movement is the only true nature of reality, the one constant we can be sure of. This way of seeing the world is extremely interesting, it places you always in prevision of what is to come, a relation between future and present, present and past. Take anything: Day is what is becoming Night, Night is what is becoming Day, Hot is what is becoming Cold, Cold is what is becoming Hot, Life is what is becoming Death, Death is what is becoming Life, Light is what is becoming Dark, Dark is what is becoming Light.

Nothing is as it is, it only exist in relation. That's why language creates a separation from the nature of reality when it wants to define things.

But that is not entirely true. You cannot ever completely oversee the consequences of your actions, true. But when you take a more distanced look, you will see that doing the right thing, ON AVERAGE will have far better results.
Yes, an abusive parent can raise the most wonderfull person in the world and a nurturing parent may raise a tyrant instead. But most of the time, it will be the other way round. Most of the time, to be kind and loving, will have a positive result in that it leads to happyness, and being mean and hatefull will do the opposite.

It is not a coincidence that IN VIRTUALLY EVERY culture, hate is seen as a sometimes nessecary, but overall negative emotion, and love is seen as a sometimes inapropriate but overall positive emotion.

It is important to realise that we can fool ourselves in believing that we do not realy care. But it is a mistake to believe that we can ever fully detach ourselves from the world. There are budhist monks who believe this. But soldiers and war photographers believe the same. And time and time again, it turns out that the things they've seen DID affect them. No matter how "professional" they thought they where.

So yes, maybe we should try to understand our enemies instead of demonising them, but to say that no matter what you do, or what others do, it is all the same, is just not that wise after all. We simply cannot allow murder or torture. The chance that it will come back to haunt us and everything that matters to us, is simply too big. And we just cannot detach from what matters to us.

But the fact remains that we do not need religious dogmas to know what's right and wrong. Common sense will do.
And common sense is...that yes, you can kill, steal, rape and torture people. But you cannot do this, and at the same time expect people to like you, to see you as a kind and positive human being, to welcome you in their midst, to embrace your presence and see you as a friend. You cannot expect your parents to be happy with who you turned out to be. And you cannot expect society to let you get away with it.

It is true, sometimes people do get away with terrible things. But the point is that they cannot expect to get away with it. The assumption is weird.

And wouldn't most of us want to be welcomed and seen as positive and kind, rather than negative and unkind? Wouldn't we want to be liked, rather than disliked or hated? So common sense says, you can have all of that, but it doesn't come "free". If you want to be part of something, you have to act accordingly. If man wants to be a part of this planet, then he cannot destroy it.

That is common sense. We realy do not need religious dogmas to tell us that.