God is in your brain. You can tickle him with tryptamines

Early homo-sapiens definitely understood death. They were intelligent and observant enough to understand their fundamental similarity to other animals. At the same time, these people had the human facility to project their abstracting imagination far into the future. Generations into the future.

Spirituality was selected for over millions of generations. A sense of spirituality would certainly be adaptive for an early human hunter/gatherer. It negates the dread of death and it provides a conceptual framework for understanding the natural world that can be transmitted over generations and across geographies. Hunting massive beasts and traveling spectacular distances were both things ancient man engaged in, at great personal peril. The conceptual framework provided a mechanism for organizing observations about nature into a coherent form. This greatly facilitated the transmission of useful information about the natural world.

This is where human evolution can get really interesting. Now spiritual frameworks had been established, perhaps totally independently, in many places on the globe. At this point selection might tend to favor the ability to integrate an arbitrary generational spiritual framework. I see this effect as a feed-back loop. This mechanism operates with all aspects of a culture that transmits through generations. The effect has instilled in humanity a real bona-fide sense of spirituality. This sense is due to specific structural/chemical motifs in the central nervous system. Humans experience this effect with broadly varying intensity. Some people never feel it, or only under the influence of strong drugs. Other people are filled with it continuously.

Ok, there really is a need for a definition of what you mean by 'nature'. I would start to say that 'nature' is everything that follow the rules of causes and effects. Do you think that consciousness belong to that range ?
Consciousness is not what we may call the 'ego', nor the inner thinking process. (quite obvious but I prefer precising it). IMO consciousness do not belong to nature with that definition. What I do not see yet are the links between consciousness and nature.



No affect !!!??? Hah
The closer you go with that 'intuition' (have no better word yet), the more it will affect your daily life. How ones who live with that intuition could start a war, hurt volontary someone else, scam someone, be racist, or just think he know what's good and what's bad ? That intuition is the more transforming thing ones may imagine.
That intuition is a 'knowledge', it is not a memory of something, or a belief, or a thought. It is not something that we can learn. But we can experience it, especially with the great help of some spice

Ha ha, agree. Funny, I meant something similar above but I was writting it at the same time.




I disagree here. Your conclusion about adaptibility and sense of spirituality is quite fast



Yes, but this is not the 'sense of spirtuality' which is involved. It is the ability to simulate scenarios (storytelling, building legends etc..).




Again, spiritual framework and spiritual sense are things totally different. One is a social tool, the other is an individual experience/feeling.



Ha ha, sorry this sounds lacking of scientific evidence

i see no reason why consiousness is not on equal grounds with nature nor that consiousness could exist without nature. before you are conceived you have no brain and no way of being consiouss. your brain is what makes you consiouss. without this natural brain there is a very likely probability that there is no consiousness. i see very little evidence for anything else. with my definition of consiousness though.

by nature i mean everything from the beginning of the universe until now. what happened before the universe is not worth speculating about.

i think another interesting thing to resolve though is what is consiousness? i think we got nature down unless anyone has another definition?

also what is spirituality really? religion involves many people is spirituality strictly a personal thing?

Nature is reality. it's everything that follows the framework of physics (if we think about quantum mechanics, we can see nature even trascending our universe), biology, and logic.



the affect i was talking about comes from a direct interaction from god, as a noun. I was trying to say that this is not possible for god if the concept is thought of as a verb. of course god as verb has an affect on our lives but not the way most religious people think perhaps.



even if god was completely absent from our lives, as a verb, a noun, whatever, I don't think this would inherently means we were amoral heathens walking around killing eachother. on the contrary, we kill eachother in the name of god. more the reason i think to not look at god as a being.

Burnt,



We could say that the brain is the device needed to "deliver" the signal. I do not mean that there is a little homunculus in the brain receiving datas like in a control tower. But that does not mean also that the device is what 'makes' the consciousness.

Usualy we are conscious of 'something' (the objects). That 'something' comes thru the device (nerves, neurons). Can we be conscious when there is 'nothing' ? Better, can we be conscious that we are conscious even when nothing remain.
Consciousness is outside time. Consciousness is a single dot. This can be experienced thru miscelaneous drugs or 'natural' states. For example you are probably perfectly 'conscious' during your dreams. Not remembering your dreams does not means that you were not conscious. So in your normal waken state you may think, "no I am not conscious during dreams". But that normal state is, like the dream state, a single dot on the timeline. The timeline is the illusion of continuity build by the memory. You add a dot to a dot to a dot... and you got an imaginary line.
That line just comes from the memory, it does not "really" exist. It's an habit.
That's why I place consciousness 'beside' (above, outside, well...) nature assuming that nature is included in time (causes and effects).
From the dot "point of view", there is no nature (ouch, what a sentence huh !?). This look likes the concept of Maya (the illusion) in hinduism.



Indeed hard to scientifically proves... Althought it's hard to proves the opposite.



Yes, agree, everything that makes the timeline.



Some scientifics are wondering about this however.



Sure, here is the main issue.



To simplify, yes. Religion is a social structure in which some people can learn to believe about imaginary things.
Spirituality makes reference to 'spirit' which I would translate in a more modern word by 'consciousness'. Yes I know it has many other significations. But I would stay with consciousness as it is something that can only be experienced at a individual level. You can not see, nor touch, nor hear, nor extract, nor anything, someone else consciousness.

Lemonscented,



I missed that previously. Simply ok with you .

we are always conscious of something, that's existence: the perception of objects that are part of the universe. as long as your living, you are perceiving and being conscious. even when we dream and are inside 'unconscious', we are still perceiving. but instead of looking outward (as in our waking lives) we are looking inward towards the subconscious. both planes are just as much part of consciousness as the other.

so can we perceive nothingness? if nothingness can only occur outside of existence and existence by definition means 'to be' how can someone 'be' (exist and be aware of something) and 'not be' (not exist and not be aware of anything) at the same time? I mean, in order perceive nothingness, wouldn't you have to be dead?

Yet suppose something and nothing we're the same thing? In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat tells us that the cat in the box is dead and alive at the same time, but we can only perceive one of those two options. Does this mean that existing and not existing are the same thing but we can only be one or the other?

[quote=Garulfo]

That's OK. The statement is ultimately testable and is therefore a scientific statement. We can think up hundreds of tests for this idea if we wanted to spend the time.
Science doens't preclude the use of human intuition. Indeed, science requires the use of human intuition.

You simply haven't done enough or aren't tuned to having a mystical type/ego death experience.

That's all.

Don't knock it because you aren't experiencing it.

Many of us out there are.

tell that to James Kent, Scotto, and other practical minds who've done DMT extensively. finding spirituality within yourself is one thing, but passing it (DMT) off as some universal spirit standard is, I hate to say, far-fetched pseudo-science. the DMT experience is solely a mental construct, evidence to the contrary is lacking.
I used to be naive about DMT in my early 20's, thought it could be used as a unifying agent of upper consciousness. problem is, not everyone will choose to drop their predisposed notions regarding reality to follow another mystical theory.

normally, I consider some of Dr. Strassman's theories quite intriguing, wishful thinking perhaps, I certainly respect his work..but the theory in your link is really far-fetched, borderline crazy. enzymes don't quite work that way

ive had such an experience numerous times but it didn't make me a believer. don't get me wrong it was very valuable and i enjoy merging with the cosmos.

but i am a crude atheist who doesn't believe in anything except the things science has figured out through extensive experimentation. belief hinders growth and expansion of knowledge. if we stop relying on our beliefs we would be more inclined to figure out what we don't know.

Great. Don't you think that your "beliefs" may be quite different *at this time* ?

if you mean that my beliefs have changed as a result of the psychedelic experience. well yes. maybe i shouldn't use the word belief though...

but what i mean is that although this experience has changed my outlook on life and the universe because it allows the mind to function in a wonderful way that is very condusive to seeing things in new ways and learning new things through the expanded mind and all that. it does not mean that some of the things i saw or have experience under the influence of a psychedelic substance are entirely real. for example entity contact things like this. the emotions and the thought patterns are real but it gets hairy when you try to claim other things as "truth".

for example "i was one with the cosmos". ok yes one felt that way but it could be because your brains sense of self is gone so you have no boundries and hence you lose awareness of your body and feel that you are one with everything. it does give interesting ideas on to what happens if the brain is no longer aware of its boundries which is a fascinating thing to both experience and study. but it does not answer what things would be like if we did not have a brain. that is once roadblock we can run into if you try to look deeper into this experience based on just experience and thought experiments.

i think we have two schools developing on this phenomenon. one that people tend to think this is all a mind construct sort of like dreams seem to be. two that we are actually encountering things existing somewhere outside out normal realm of perception. its hard to say what is true because their isn't enough evidence to say with great certainty what is true. however you can use the information you gather in the realm and the information that science gathers to make a fair estimation on what you think is going on.

what i meant by accepting beliefs is that ok so i have a profound experience see the light god whatever i think i saw while tripping. so then i say "that must have been what people think of as [insert being]" so i can accept this belief as true and go on beleiving it never really looking any deeper to try and prove what really happened. thats what i meant by accepting beliefs. if everyone just accepted that everything we don't yet understand is a result of [insert superpowerful being] then science and technology will stop progressing. Our knowledge will be limited and many of the revolutions in science and technology that we take for granted would have never occured if people just accepted the prevading beliefs of the church or whatever organization claims to have knowledge in this area.

i guess by it didnt make me a believer is that i still dont beleive in god but god is a dirty word filled with misconception.

good stuff, good stuff...
yes, I also contend that these tryptamine compounds have utility in evoking thought, or alternative ways of thinking...not as a conditioning for a belief system. you'd be better off with the former anyway, pursuing the latter may inevitably alienate yourself from others.

i'm not knocking it, all i'm saying is that i'm not buying the spiritualism people attached to d. one can certainly be under the impression that they are having a spiritual experience, it has that affect on people. but that feeling only exists in your head. the entities are a part of your subconscious. thats what I think anyhow..

absolutely, the very nature of the experience is beyond words. i know that when it was initially explained to me i had a hard time contextualizing it, and when i finally experienced it i found it to be completely different. words seem to only detach the experience from its true nature. its like watching a mother kiss her child and expecting to feel the same amount of love that the two feel without actually being involved in the act. indeed, these different ways of thinking in response to d are highly subjectively.