You and I view reality much like a speculator might watch a baseball game through a knothole in the fence - and all he sees is third base. He's got his eye up there and he watches the entire game through third base, and only third base.

If someone asks him to decribe baseball, he says, "Well, there's some guy that stands around kicking the dirt for quite a while, spitting on the ground, and that sort of thing. And all at once a bunch of guys come sliding in and kick the dirt all over and then swear at eachother and almost fight, and pretty soon they all leave and the first guy stands around, kicking the dirt once again. And that's about it. "

And this is America's number one sport!? This is about the way we view reality. We perceive just a little bit of it, and we are so naive to think that's all of it. But that isn't all of it. The truth is that virtually the whole ball game called reality is being played beyond our knothole view...

-Court Holdgrafer


Our senses combined actually perceive less than one millionth of true reality. Our eyes can only receive 3800Ǻ - 7200Ǻ of the electromagnetic world and our ears can only sense 20Hz - 20,000Hz of the sonic world. These are two seperate windows opened up to allow us to sense our environment, yet they are incapable of showing us the whole picture. We can only taste 4 ranges of flavor - sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, just the same as we can't "touch" empty space. By the way, the smell of that rose is just an experience conjured up in your mind - the "rose" really doesn't smell like a "rose". That orange might look orange, but is it?

Our minds are hopelessly incapable of truly understanding our world without the use of scientific interfaces.

I was with you up to the last sentence.

Our job is not so much to understand the world as to create it.

Our senses combined actually perceive less than one millionth of true reality. Our eyes can only receive 3800Ǻ - 7200Ǻ of the electromagnetic world and our ears can only sense 20Hz - 20,000Hz of the sonic world. These are two seperate windows opened up to allow us to sense our environment, yet they are incapable of showing us the whole picture. We can only taste 4 ranges of flavor - sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, just the same as we can't "touch" empty space. By the way, the smell of that rose is just an experience conjured up in your mind - the "rose" really doesn't smell like a "rose". That orange might look orange, but is it?

Our minds are hopelessly incapable of truly understanding our world without the use of scientific interfaces.

Indeed, we can only sense a tiny portion of what is around us.

Would you like a cookie?

At the same time, just because you only perceive a small portion of something, does not necessarily mean there must be something filling the space you can't perceive.

There is no spoon.


All matter in the universe is touching. Every event creates infinite tangent universes, coexisting in a multitude of dimensions. Your brain? No, Your brains. Every time you form a thought/decision, you create tangent brains, similar to the tangent universes, except with no extra dimensions, no extra skulls.

Wrap your brains around that.

There is no spoon.


All matter in the universe is touching. Every event creates infinite tangent universes, coexisting in a multitude of dimensions. Your brain? No, Your brains. Every time you form a thought/decision, you create tangent brains, similar to the tangent universes, except with no extra dimensions, no extra skulls.

Wrap your brains around that.

All a hypothesis. Back to verifiable things now.

All a hypothesis. Back to verifiable things now.You have never dropped acid and studied quantum physics, did you?

You have never dropped acid and studied quantum physics, did you?

Try dropping acid and studying your self:

I would like to go into thought about expectations. I believe expectations to be a detrimental aspect of life - they distract from both creativity and critical thinking by restricting the individual (a hard to define entity in itself) into roles. Expectations, even 'great' ones, are nothing but limitations. If an expectation is your motivation, what are you to do upon success? Until one can operate within the reality of freedom, each success is cast away with the creation of a new expectation, or held to as an errant as if it were the one thing worthwhile in life. Life itself has one unbreakable limitation - death. Aside from that, expectations treat imagined boundaries as real, holding back the limitless potential of the individual to overcome.

Childhood, parenting, trauma, grief, failure...none of these hold us back from being great, what then does hold us back? We torment ourselves with our expectations! A fat child expects to be treated kindly until the spirit is broken; then he accepts that others may be cruel, but unable to let expectations go, then expects only torment and accustoms himself to it, and horribly, even seeks it out! This steadfast nature of expectations creates self imposed limitations that define the path of our life.

Hold no expectations in life: the world owes you absolutely nothing, and you owe it your life...literally. In debt to the reaper, you must utilize reality to the benefit of your self, and if you are so inclined, to the benefit of others and a higher purpose. This may read as my expectation of people, but it is not. I expect nobody to listen; nobody to follow. I tell them this because it is reality. The only sure expectations are life and death; all else must be earned.

Why?

Many have an expectation of purpose: They expect a truth...something unchanging, something certain, something higher, something like a god. Religion, Science, Philosophy...fields once held simply to control, learning, and understanding now sit as dictators of our purpose. One says we must serve God (as they see it, of course); another says we must serve our biological nature (as they define it, of course); another says we must choose from a select number of purposes (as it can be understood by them, of course). Aside from these dictators, Average Joe says our purpose is anything from spirituality, to love, to breeding, to laughing, and so on. It seems as though everyone expects a purpose, and feels obligated to take a guess at what it is. The reality is, however, that when we expect a purpose to be, and then adopt an ideal as our purpose in an attempt to leave no expectation unmet, we restrict our free will in a fashion of ignorance. Have any of us truly known what lays beyond death, or before life? If not, how can purpose be assigned? How can purpose even be expected? To craft a fallacy in our mind and herald it as supreme is to live outside reality, reality being that we have no limitation but birth and death; but I must be careful to not expect you to live within reality. It's merely where I choose to be, because it enabled me to be more free than anywhere else I have lived.

Expectations of self and others, especially when raised as motivations for our self, close off entire avenues of thoughts, feelings, actions, and possibilities. With the absence of expectations...with complete uncertainty...we are free to make any decision, to think any thought, to feel any emotion, to take any action, to explore all possibilities, to discover that thought to be unreal. When we expect nothing of reality, it grows from a small world into an infinite landscape of endless possibilities.

I just reread A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke. He has a scientist near the Moon testing an infrared scanner by pointing it at the Earth and comparing the infrared to the visible light image. Plato's allegory of the cave is also mentioned in the book.

But this also applies to social reality. How much is going on that you don't know but you could easily understand if someone just told you or you found the right book?

How much about reality are you not supposed to know?

DT

Mathematics is something that your senses cannot detect, yet we seem to have a great fascination with the subject. Just as Thomas had doubted Jesus's resurection simply because he could not see Jesus some people will doubt the laws of the universe.

To craft a fallacy in our mind and herald it as supreme is to live outside reality, reality being that we have no limitation but birth and death; but I must be careful to not expect you to live within reality. It's merely where I choose to be, because it enabled me to be more free than anywhere else I have lived....When we expect nothing of reality, it grows from a small world into an infinite landscape of endless possibilities.

I like the way you think.

Let a man once begin to think about the mystery of his life and the links which connect him with the life that fills the world, and he cannot but bring to bear upon his life and all other life that comes within his reach the principal of Reverence for Life....Existence will thereby become harder for him in every respect than it would be if he lived for himself. It will become, instead of mere living, a real experience of life.

-Albert Schweitzer

Expectations of self and others, especially when raised as motivations for our self, close off entire avenues of thoughts, feelings, actions, and possibilities.

This really is true. One night I was standing in my friend's screened in pool area when I spotted a rock fountain diagnaly across the other end of the pool. The fountain captured me and I made it a goal, or a purpose, to get a closer look at it. I began walking over to the fountain with the expectation of seeing it up close, but when I was half way there I realized I had shut everything else out. I stopped and took in my surroundings for a moment, temporarily ditching the purpose of seeing the rock fountain from up close. Up until that point, the walk around the pool was dull and boring - like I was waiting to forefill my goal.

Sometimes you just have to stop and look around.

Our minds are hopelessly incapable of truly understanding our world without the use of scientific interfaces.

yup...why do you think people that do psychedelic drugs have such mind blowing experiences when their "reality" breaks down...its a change in perception of what you are used to.

yup...why do you think people that do psychedelic drugs have such mind blowing experiences when their "reality" breaks down...its a change in perception of what you are used to.

Right, but we're not talking about altered states of consciousness. We're talking about the scaring of evolution that has allowed us to peer into and interact with the world we consciously find ourselves immersed in.

As a conscious being I am involved in a story. The perceiving part of my mind tells me a story of a world around me. The story tells of familiar objects. It tells of colours, sounds, scents belonging to these objects; of boundless space in which they have their existence, and of an ever-rolling stream of time bringing change and incident. It tells of other life than mine busy about its own purposes.

As a scientist I have become mistrustful of this story. In many instances it has become clear that things are not what they seem to be. According to the story teller I have now in front of me a substantial desk; but I have learned from physics that the desk is not at all the continuous substance that it is supposed to be in the story. It is a host of tiny electric charges darting hither and thither with inconceivable velocity. Instead of being solid substance, my desk is more like a swarm of gnats.

So I have come to realise that I must not put overmuch confidence in the story teller who lives in my mind.

-Sir Arthur Eddington

There is no spoon.


All matter in the universe is touching.

The opposite is true, actually, for the most part. When you think you're touching something, you're actually feeling subatomic forces holding the matter apart.

Perspective difference created through re-integration of realization of nondualistic meanings.

Misinterpretation.

An exploration of the unconscious is a conscious choice outlined and defined through actions and behaviour that are only able to be truely interpreted by a non-biased, objective view of subjectivity.


Behaviour and free will are not forces, they are, of themselves, as much a reflection of the outside world as anything could possibly be. Interpreting these is a subjective experience. You can only derive as much understanding as you allow yourself.

The truth can be anything you are willing to believe is true. This is the objective truth of subjectivity. A self governing, self-rationalizing mental state that is really just a form of subjective self-induced hypnosis. This hypnosis refers to how you view the outside world, of course.


You already have an idea of what the world might be like before you are born, before you are even a fully grown fetus. As is my understanding of it, the mother activates certain genes within the fetus through a process of unconscious communication. The fetus, in turn, is then bio-engineered and prepared to live in an environment of the mother's unconscious choice and perception thereof. In itself, this is something profoundly interesting. However, when you take everything else into account, this seems to make sense on a superficial level. This 'superficial' interpretation I speak of are what most people assume to be duality and 'free will'. That genetics and perception are two wholly different things, when in fact they are exactly the same and reflect each other in more ways than we can currently know at this point in time.


I believe that in a way, this reflects Freudian psychoanalysis. It is like presuming that the ego is somehow bad, when really it is just the various processes you use to determine your identity and your place in the world. The problem with this view is that again, it assumes a kind of notion of unrelation, as if psychoanalysis cannot be done as if a mathematical equation. If you are in a reality tunnel, you have no free will. If you are not in a reality tunnel, you're either dead, sleeping, egoless, or aware of your reality tunnel. That leads you to notice your new reality tunnel in relation to the old one. An 'unending' process. Naturally, this seems to be insanity.


Sanity is in insanity, and insanity is in sanity. This is true on so many levels that to think otherwise is insane. What is insanity anyway? What drives a person to behave in a manner so odd that it is only explainable or justified to him or her? What then, is the difference between the sane and the insane? The difference would be subjectivity. A person's ability to subject other people to their interpretation of reality. When you are cut off from this process and only occupy your own head, you block yourself from outside influences. This mirrors an inability to be integrated into society.


Whom are those we view as free? The rebels, the philosophers, the slaves. Freedom is not a god given right, it is a god given ability. Free will is to be free from freedom. If you can understand that there is no such thing as freedom, you can understand what I mean. You couldn't not be yourself, no matter how hard you try or have tried. You will always be you, and only through embracing this seemingly suffocating and nihilistic notion can you truely gain a sense of awareness.


What is freedom? An act? A choice? Or is freedom a trick? To believe in freedom for no apparent logical reason is really just a way to trick yourself to live. It is like saying that counter-productivity is productivite in its own way.

If you are truely free, you do not fear. If you are truely free you have nothing to regret because you have realized that your actions in the past have brought you to freedom. What is it to regret? To regret is to fear death. That you may have gained more enjoyment out of having lived a different way. Another trick, really.

Only your awareness of awareness can bring you closer to truth, the rest is just for fun.



"So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union."
-Alan Watts

"Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I.
And the more you become aware of the unknown self, if you become aware of it,
the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is."
-Alan Watts


Now this is just as fine as it is pretentious, but the real question is how true this is.

I can accept this as true and then become my own slave. You can accept this as false and become a slave. You can find all empirical, rational and provable truth in my statements and become a slave.

Well I suppose this is logical digression because it's assumed that you were already a slave in the first place.

Do we really know enough to say definitively? By god, what is all this!?

^Interesting and thought provoking read. These are exactly the kind of posts I want to see.

Nothing exists except for the conscious mind, and we're all just different aspects, variations, and splits of a single conscious. Matter is just an arrangement of energy, and energy has no mass or volume. 0g + 0L= nothing. There isn't anything, we're just God masturbating the entire universe. There actually is no such thing as objective reality cause we view reality completely subjectively. We can't even prove our own existence for fuck sake. Everything that we feel, smell, taste, see, and hear, is all just created inside our brains. When you go one more step further and you realize that we therefore can't even objectively experience our own bodies, and can't even be sure there is a brain, you realize that every damn thing is simply an illusion within a single conscious energy field. We're all part of God, God is everything. Once everyone understands that everything is an illusion, then we can make this illusion better by just loving each other, and exploring all aspects this single consciousness existence, if you even want to call it that. Kind of makes you wonder why we don't live super simple lives with the only purpose of experiencing love, cause so far it's the only worthwhile thing I've found on this planet.

I've written hundreds of pages on exactly this sort of thing in a couple notebooks... If only I could find them, I'd really like to type them up. Also, has anybody ever read God's Debris? It's one of the greatest, most brain-gasmic books I've ever read. Take a look at it. Google will score you a free .pdf, but I went ahead and bought the book, and I'm glad I did.

Also, has anybody ever read God's Debris? It's one of the greatest, most brain-gasmic books I've ever read. Take a look at it. Google will score you a free .pdf, but I went ahead and bought the book, and I'm glad I did.

I downloaded it and liked reading the first few pages. Has a lot of potenial so I'm going to stick with it.

I downloaded it and liked reading the first few pages. Has a lot of potenial so I'm going to stick with it.

Once you keep reading, you won't have much of a choice but to stick with it, it's phenomenal. It's just amazing how everything in the book falls so eloquently into place...

Once you keep reading, you won't have much of a choice but to stick with it, it's phenomenal. It's just amazing how everything in the book falls so eloquently into place...

Between the fact that the old man claims an omnipotent creator has as much interest in a rock as a human being, and claiming humanity's collective consciousness is the creator starting to become aware after it blew itself up, it starts to sound theoretical and farfecthed. Even though most of what the old man said was complete speculation, it does have some good metaphors and kinda does make you think.

Between the fact that the old man claims an omnipotent creator has as much interest in a rock as a human being, and claiming humanity's collective consciousness is the creator starting to become aware after it blew itself up, it starts to sound theoretical and farfecthed. Even though most of what the old man said was complete speculation, it does have some good metaphors and kinda does make you think.

Why wouldn't an omnipotent creator have equal interests in humans and rocks? I think your viewpoint may be biased because you're a human. Way too promote self-interest, jerk! :p

What? No, I do believe the creator of this world we all wake up in has equal interest in all things. The fact is he made two outlandishly conflicting claims.

Try dropping acid and studying your self:

I would like to go into thought about expectations. I believe expectations to be a detrimental aspect of life - they distract from both creativity and critical thinking by restricting the individual (a hard to define entity in itself) into roles. Expectations, even 'great' ones, are nothing but limitations. If an expectation is your motivation, what are you to do upon success? Until one can operate within the reality of freedom, each success is cast away with the creation of a new expectation, or held to as an errant as if it were the one thing worthwhile in life. Life itself has one unbreakable limitation - death. Aside from that, expectations treat imagined boundaries as real, holding back the limitless potential of the individual to overcome.

Childhood, parenting, trauma, grief, failure...none of these hold us back from being great, what then does hold us back? We torment ourselves with our expectations! A fat child expects to be treated kindly until the spirit is broken; then he accepts that others may be cruel, but unable to let expectations go, then expects only torment and accustoms himself to it, and horribly, even seeks it out! This steadfast nature of expectations creates self imposed limitations that define the path of our life.

Hold no expectations in life: the world owes you absolutely nothing, and you owe it your life...literally. In debt to the reaper, you must utilize reality to the benefit of your self, and if you are so inclined, to the benefit of others and a higher purpose. This may read as my expectation of people, but it is not. I expect nobody to listen; nobody to follow. I tell them this because it is reality. The only sure expectations are life and death; all else must be earned.

Why?

Many have an expectation of purpose: They expect a truth...something unchanging, something certain, something higher, something like a god. Religion, Science, Philosophy...fields once held simply to control, learning, and understanding now sit as dictators of our purpose. One says we must serve God (as they see it, of course); another says we must serve our biological nature (as they define it, of course); another says we must choose from a select number of purposes (as it can be understood by them, of course). Aside from these dictators, Average Joe says our purpose is anything from spirituality, to love, to breeding, to laughing, and so on. It seems as though everyone expects a purpose, and feels obligated to take a guess at what it is. The reality is, however, that when we expect a purpose to be, and then adopt an ideal as our purpose in an attempt to leave no expectation unmet, we restrict our free will in a fashion of ignorance. Have any of us truly known what lays beyond death, or before life? If not, how can purpose be assigned? How can purpose even be expected? To craft a fallacy in our mind and herald it as supreme is to live outside reality, reality being that we have no limitation but birth and death; but I must be careful to not expect you to live within reality. It's merely where I choose to be, because it enabled me to be more free than anywhere else I have lived.

Expectations of self and others, especially when raised as motivations for our self, close off entire avenues of thoughts, feelings, actions, and possibilities. With the absence of expectations...with complete uncertainty...we are free to make any decision, to think any thought, to feel any emotion, to take any action, to explore all possibilities, to discover that thought to be unreal. When we expect nothing of reality, it grows from a small world into an infinite landscape of endless possibilities.

best ideas so far.
i have yet to drop acid.
but i really feel sad for people who believe in religion.
i am actually kind of sad i live in the era where people still believe in religion. but whatever
to me i see what i see, i feel what i feel.
yes sometimes i expect things, and it does not come.
but im a zen minded person who hears nothing but music and sees nothing but nature and feels nothing except bass at a rave and speed from a car.
i like adrenaline i like crazy yet i discipline myself to get through work and college.

i need to drop acid!

Reality is very much subjective. My reality is completely different from your reality. Reality can be viewed in the same way as ethics can be: everyone is always right in their own mind. Of course there's all this interesting talk of parallell universes, 10 dimensions,and alternate realities, but what really gets me is when people are momentarily enlightened somehow--whether it be through meditation or astral projection or drug use--what is it that we are experiencing? Is THAT true reality, or even a higher level of reality--or is that just neurotransmitters sending strange messages to our brain and body?

To anyone questioning the validity of human sensory perception: No, it's not flawless. But here's a quick test. Go place a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of Draino on your kitchen counter. Now, use a method other than your senses to figure out which is safe to drink.

all people perceive the world differently. We don't need to see the rest of the world, our eyes and ears are efficient. I usually just ask myself, things like "what color was this grass before light hit it?". As you may or may not know, all objects absorb some light, and reflect some light, that gives us color, ever heard of a color prism? The grass will absorb all colors of the prism except green, and the green gets deflected away which goes into your pupils and your brain turns that into an image. but what if no color rays hit the grass? it wouldn't just be invisible, but it wouldn't just be black because black things absorb every color to turn black. my theory is that it may be white, because white deflects all colors of the prism anyways, so without colors, it would be a "true" white, the whitest anything could possibly be. But it can't be white because for something to be white, it has to deflect every color of the prism, and with no colors to deflect, it wouldn't be putting out and color?!?!? My eyes didn't tell me that, but who would go through life needing to see the other 99.9% of reality? mankind has gone on pretty good so far with what we have, and it's working great.

all people perceive the world differently. We don't need to see the rest of the world, our eyes and ears are efficient. I usually just ask myself, things like "what color was this grass before light hit it?". As you may or may not know, all objects absorb some light, and reflect some light, that gives us color, ever heard of a color prism? The grass will absorb all colors of the prism except green, and the green gets deflected away which goes into your pupils and your brain turns that into an image. but what if no color rays hit the grass? it wouldn't just be invisible, but it wouldn't just be black because black things absorb every color to turn black. my theory is that it may be white, because white deflects all colors of the prism anyways, so without colors, it would be a "true" white, the whitest anything could possibly be. But it can't be white because for something to be white, it has to deflect every color of the prism, and with no colors to deflect, it wouldn't be putting out and color?!?!? My eyes didn't tell me that, but who would go through life needing to see the other 99.9% of reality? mankind has gone on pretty good so far with what we have, and it's working great.

A grass blade not exposed to any electromagnetic radiation would appear black, since black represents the complete absence of light. However it would be impossible for our eyes to detect this, since they require light to "see".

Now lets look at a warm-blooded organism. If the same circumstances applied, we could not visually detect an animal in complete darkness with our limited eyesight. But if we had infrared vision, we could detect heat energy being emitted by the creature and know where it is. What a natural ability to perceive the world this way might look like, I don't know, but some species of snake have it and are damn good at detecting and ambushing rodents.

It's a mindfuck to think about all the different sort of sensory perception used by the enormous variety of species on this watery rock. Each one living out its daily routine the only way it knows how - according to its sensory input. Who's to say we are in any way different and somehow special? Our world is a delusion based on the only thing we know how to do. Survive. We live in the reality we find ourselves in because sometime, long ago, one of our ancestors used a newfound change in perception and consciousness to evade being lunch for some prehistoric predator, and went on to pass its favorable genetic mutation on. This happened countless times before our minds became what they have been for the past 5000 years or so. Each favorable view of true reality being one step closer to present day perception.

Would you rather perceive the world any way you could, or experience nothing and be void? Obviously there's something to "existence" if everything strives to withhold it.

A grass blade not exposed to any electromagnetic radiation would appear black, since black represents the complete absence of light. However it would be impossible for our eyes to detect this, since they require light to "see".

Now lets look at a warm-blooded organism. If the same circumstances applied, we could not visually detect an animal in complete darkness with our limited eyesight. But if we had infrared vision, we could detect heat energy being emitted by the creature and know where it is. What a natural ability to perceive the world this way might look like, I don't know, but some species of snake have it and are damn good at detecting and ambushing rodents.

It's a mindfuck to think about all the different sort of sensory perception used by the enormous variety of species on this watery rock. Each one living out its daily routine the only way it knows how - according to its sensory input. Who's to say we are in any way different and somehow special? Our world is a delusion based on the only thing we know how to do. Survive. We live in the reality we find ourselves in because sometime, long ago, one of our ancestors used a newfound change in perception and consciousness to evade being lunch for some prehistoric predator, and went on to pass its favorable genetic mutation on. This happened countless times before our minds became what they have been for the past 5000 years or so. Each favorable view of true reality being one step closer to present day perception.

Would you rather perceive the world any way you could, or experience nothing and be void? Obviously there's something to "existence" if everything strives to withhold it.

Wow, I've always wanted to talk to somebody who understands my point of view on things. Everybody I know is a simple minded robot just waiting for something interesting to happen in their life. We should meet up, get high, and have some very interesting conversations lol. I guarantee we would both get fucked up headaches

Wow, I've always wanted to talk to somebody who understands my point of view on things. Everybody I know is a simple minded robot just waiting for something interesting to happen in their life. We should meet up, get high, and have some very interesting conversations lol. I guarantee we would both get fucked up headaches

Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Mortalum? It appears quite black.