So the past few trips and, indeed, a good portion of the past few months, I have been in "possession" of a strange bit of knowledge. The way I often phrase it is that "I'm just a concept".

It's an attempt to summarize a set of experiences that I've had. Another way to put it is that I feel as though I am just a linguistically constructed entity. Even as I use the word I, I find that there is not really a referent. I can't really say that the totality of the organism typing these words is really the referent of the word I as I think I had tacitly assumed in the past.

What I mean is that you can say my given name and that indeed corresponds to the person you experienced as another object. It makes sense to you as you can know what to expect in terms of behavior and interpersonal interaction. But I have access to this organism's direct experience. I want to say that I am the one who experiences these things, but there is this feeling that "I" am unnecessary.

Indeed, during psychedelic experiences I have been unnecessary. My awareness of my official 'past' had been temporarily impaired and this organism could still function in every other respect. At other times, I have been in states where I could experience myself as having had various memories that I could not recognize before, during, or after the experience. The feeling was as though "I" am just a 'property' of the experience. A property which can be checked on and off almost like you can change a document from "Read Only" to "Read and Write".

But overall, I am conflicted on this. It's definitely possible to feel like you're saying something meaningful without really saying something meaningful. For instance, you can say that the set of all integers is a greater infinity than the set of all positive integers and it can feel intuitively right, but nobody has been able to make a meaningful distinction there. Compare this to the difference between countable and uncountable infinity, a distinction that seems crazy, but can be clearly outlined. So as I say that I feeling a diminished sense of existence, I can't really say what that is with any real precision. Existence is usually construed as a binary whereas I seem to be saying that I am somewhere between existence and nonexistence. I am not really saying that I do not exist. Indeed, I do assert my existence, but only as a linguistically constructed entity. But what is not clear to me is what did I implicitly believe about myself before that to make such a pronouncement feels to me as though I exist to a lesser degree than I thought before. One guess might be that existence as a concept has a lot of other articulable concepts packed into it and that I have unconsciously changed my stance on some of them, but not all of them.

So, this would be the reason why I made the thread. In hopes that somebody else has gone through similar experiences and can suggests some hints on how to solve this apparently paradoxical state of being.

In the grand scheme of things we are all meaningless. None of us matter, all of us are simply expressions of conditioning. At the same time, we can all affect things directly, through our ability to change individual circumstances. Psychedelics have this strange paradoxical effect of showing us how we're nothing but grains of sand tumbling through space and yet at the same time showing us how absolutely unique and incredibly powerful we are.

My suggestion: stop armchair philosophising and get out there and do something. This means making art, this means helping someone with more than a few coins in a donation bucket, this means getting your hands dirty. You absolutely matter and are a gift to the universe, but only so long as you act on that impulse and do something with it other than get stuck in a thought loop.

ehh, behaviorism is bunk

But I agree with the rest of your post..Well said!

"In the grand scheme of things we are all meaningless."

How do you know this?

It is linear, rational, left brain logic that scales things out and then decides that a seemingly small portion of a whole is somehow meaningless. I personally feel like my life, humanity and earth itself is full of meaning, reguardless of the scale. There will always be something bigger than the biggest thing..something smaller than the smallest thing..so what does that even mean and how much can we really extrapolate from such a paradigm?

The temperature scale is not thought to be not a linear sort of line..but more of a loop..where when you hit the coldest point you suddenly jump into the highest point..I think all scales are like that in a sense and I think that something like infinity(maybe beyond the paradigm of "infinity" as we are able to rationalize the term, but something like that) makes more sense..

I guess you are about as meaningless as you choose to believe you are.

My attempt at tongue in cheek.



I certainly don't claim to be an authority on the subject, but all of the evidence has pointed me towards the notion that I'm little more than foam on the sea, dust in the wind. Meaning or importance, from my perspective, is ego's cry for attention.



That's kinda the point of my post...or rather, you're as meaningless as you act you are.

I'm sure to a bubble of foam the nature of the bubble next to it is full of meaning and import, (if for no other reason then they hope it's a sexy bubble ).
Just because us, at our scale, don't see the comparative sexiness of bubbles doesn't mean it's not important to them.

We've got an incredibly narrow perspective on the universe, so narrow we're practically blind. Why assume anything one way or another?

Personally, I tried meaningless nihilism as a teenager and all it did was make me depressed. Even if life is meaningless (which I won't flat-out say it is), it's sure as Hell beautiful. And that's enough for me.

I'm a little amused at everyone's response, as I'm not used to be called the nihilist of the group. Usually I'm the optimistic humanist. I don't see importance and beauty as synonymous, nor do I see meaninglessness and happiness as mutually exclusive. I find life incredibly beautiful, awe inspiring, mind boggling, and flat out fantastic. But I don't see that as a license to consider myself important over the course of the entire history of the universe.

Small things can be very important.

Think about prions. The brain is a hugely complicated structure of networks that deals with massive flows of information but get one prion, one single protein that is bent slightly out of shape, and next thing you know, that brain is full of holes and the poor owner of the brain has Mad Cow Disease.

I'm going to break Nexus convention and quote the Bible.



I would not presume to understand the universal perspective unless you could see with universal eyes and process it with a universal brain.

We are made of the universe. Our bodies are constructed of atoms generated within the crushing explosion of a star. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. What is the cosmos made of? Is it inherently meaningless? Does it have a grand design, and by default a designer? Who knows!?

But this universe, and our minds are unfathomably wonderful, and like it's been said, it's beautiful. Perhaps that is a purpose for our existence or non-existence, or pseudo-existence, to take in the beauty. It doesn't have to be THE purpose, it doesn't have to be an intended purpose, but it certainly is A purpose...and it's good enough for me!

By the way, I have issues with this, and sometimes thoughts about this subject make me feel as though I may spontaneously return to my basic energy state, taking the Earth with me in a poof of gamma rays.