Consciousness and the Paranormal

[Soupie]

I'll probably get shouted down, but I've always considered the muse, the wellspring of creativity, to simply be the raw unconscious. At times it is blocked, at other times it is unfettered. It is unfettered when the ego/self/I is put to the side, and our unconscious - with all its knowledge, experience, and generative power - is allowed to run wild.

As @Burnt State says, there are moments/circumstances that allow/cause the unconscious to become unfettered: drugs, meditation, trauma, bewilderment, flow, fight/flight response, freestyling, ritual, trance, etc.

While the self experiences this as a mystical/supernatural event, I don't look to the para/supernatural to explain it. When the ego - the "thought police" - is set aside, the unconscious comes out to play.

Greg Proops and Joe Rogan describe this process well, I think. (The first 3:30 minutes.)

 

[smcder]

"seems entirely different to how I view my relationship and response to the ultimate (I am calling this religion)"

Where does this "relationship" and response come from? From you or from the outside? I'm pretty sure it comes from you (the individual). It is your creation. Your ideas about "the ultimate" (whatever that is) are either borrowed and adapted from other humans and their notions of these things, or they are created by yourself through the facility of artistic creation. The gods (however you wish to interpret that) do not sit in the temples revealing their natures to us. No, we dictate what the ultimate must be.

I have had innumerable "religious experiences" some absolutely hair-raising. Some I still cannot fully explain, but that doesn't give any validity to any given framework I care to drop them into.

The Truth is simply this. We live in a hostile and aggressive universe that we neither have the perspective or the capacity to understand beyond our limited experience of it. Sweetness and light are wonderful distractions from this fact, and we rightfully look for them wherever we can, even if we have to make them up, so to speak.

I have had innumerable "religious experiences" some absolutely hair-raising. Some I still cannot fully explain, but that doesn't give any validity to any given framework I care to drop them into.

I know you have - that's why I spoke to you in this way - as a fellow traveller. I don't think that it's that I trust my experience any more than you - it's that I simply can't dismiss it - it's too powerful, it's not even my experience - it's the way things seem to me to be, it's in corners of every perception and at the end of every thought . . . perhaps, as Nietzsche and other psychologists have put it - it's a certain type of person:

The Idiot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and evolution, in her wisdom or her randomness produces some of each type . . . all I can say is that this sense has persisted even though I have read all of Nietzsche's books and perhaps that proves it.

I guess, in the end - validity is an interest of mine, but not an over-riding concern. Neither is certainty. I can't ultimately have it, after all - so why give up everything else I can have to pursue it exclusively? Again, your unscratchable itch and my schadenfreude . . . there but for the grace of Nietzsche go I.

Where does this "relationship" and response come from? From you or from the outside? I'm pretty sure it comes from you (the individual). It is your creation.

Where this kind of certainty comes from

I'm pretty sure it comes from you (the individual). It is your creation.

. . . you'll have noticed, does interest me. I think Ian McGilchrist in his study of hemisphericity has some interesting things to say about it - there are a number of summaries freely available on the web.

Your ideas about "the ultimate" (whatever that is) are either borrowed and adapted from other humans and their notions of these things, or they are created by yourself through the facility of artistic creation. The gods (however you wish to interpret that) do not sit in the temples revealing their natures to us. No, we dictate what the ultimate must be.

Your certainty, I suspect, comes from similar sources. However, I have no doubt this is partially true - obviously true, even (partially) - but I have a hard time believing anything is entirely true . . . don't you?

And I have never seen a god sitting in a temple and I honestly have no satisfactory definition for the word "God" - but's still the only word in the language for it - any other word for it, is another word for it . . . whatever else I think about it, it seems to me to be a basic idea that we all cluster around. Nobody has rid us of it, yet.

The Truth is simply this. We live in a hostile and aggressive universe that we neither have the perspective or the capacity to understand beyond our limited experience of it. Sweetness and light are wonderful distractions from this fact, and we rightfully look for them wherever we can, even if we have to make them up, so to speak.

HP Lovecraft again! . . . your asceticism is showing . . . and your reductionism . . . and your certainty. The three men you seem to admire most . . . but I deeply distrust them. I doubt them. I suspect you do too from time to time.

 

[smcder]

I scratch my head and I think ..."What is the divine?" "What is this thing people call God?"

My inner-man groans and gives me the face-palm.

You actually seem to spend way more time thinking about it than I do! ;-)

 

[trainedobserver]

And I have never seen a god sitting in a temple and I honestly have no satisfactory definition for the word "God" - but's still the only word in the language for it - any other word for it, is another word for it . . . whatever else I think about it, it seems to me to be a basic idea that we all cluster around. Nobody has rid us of it, yet.

Then what is that basic idea?

 

[smcder]

I'll probably get shouted down, but I've always considered the muse, the wellspring of creativity, to simply be the raw unconscious. At times it is blocked, at other times it is unfettered. It is unfettered when the ego/self/I is put to the side, and our unconscious - with all its knowledge, experience, and generative power - is allowed to run wild.

As @Burnt State says, there are moments/circumstances that allow/cause the unconscious to become unfettered: drugs, meditation, trauma, bewilderment, flow, fight/flight response, freestyling, ritual, trance, etc.

While the self experiences this as a mystical/supernatural event, I don't look to the para/supernatural to explain it. When the ego - the "thought police" - is set aside, the unconscious comes out to play.

Greg Proops and Joe Rogan describe this process well, I think. (The first 3:30 minutes.)

No shouting down!

But . . . some questions:

"simply the raw unconscious" - at this point, how can it be any one thing without all of us being wrong? What is this drive to reduction? At the very least, even materialistically - you have to say things are so arranged that there is such a thing as creativity - and that takes you a level up. See EO Wilson on Consilience for a hard-science version of this . . .

And what is the unconscious? What is its natural history - the paleontology of it? It's fossil record? (I don't mean literally - I mean it's deep history but more importantly, its why? God, I have been ruined by Nietsche! ;-) Since we don't know what consciousness is and we can well imagine all the functions of a human without it (unless you are with that percentage of professional philosophers who think zombies are metaphysical impossibilities) - then what is the un-conscious?

I wish my internet connection were fast enough to watch movies smoothly - I'm sorry but it's the agony of streaming . . . perhaps it answers the questions above.

 

[smcder]

Then what is that basic idea?

That is a damn good question, but the more important point is that you seem to want to know very badly! I think you think I am saying more than I am. Let me turn it around, you can have only one word, or phrase to substitute for "God" any where you can find it in the English language - what is that word or phrase?

 

[smcder]

Seven alerts in as many minutes . . . geez, you bring up one little word . . .

 

[trainedobserver]

HP Lovecraft again! . . . your asceticism is showing . . . and your reductionism . . . and your certainty. The three men you seem to admire most . . . but I deeply distrust them. I doubt them. I suspect you do too from time to time.

They've left for the coast.

I am fairly certain that any "god concept" imagined by human beings is an untruth. The reason? These concepts are supposed to be representing the superset that human experience is only a subset of and are therefore logical impossibilities. You cannot describe the entire alphabet using only the first five letters of it for example. These metaphysical notions of divinity, gods, and absolutes (or ultimates) are similarly doomed by these very real and insurmountable resource limitations.

 

[trainedobserver]

That is a damn good question, but the more important point is that you seem to want to know very badly! I think you think I am saying more than I am. Let me turn it around, you can have only one word, or phrase to substitute for "God" any where you can find it in the English language - what is that word or phrase?

You are looking for "source" or perhaps "mother" I think.

 

[smcder]

They've left for the coast.

I am fairly certain that any "god concept" imagined by human beings is an untruth. The reason? These concepts are supposed to be representing the superset that human experience is only a subset of and are therefore logical impossibilities. You cannot describe the entire alphabet using only the first five letters of it for example. These metaphysical notions of divinity, gods, and absolutes (or ultimates) are similarly doomed by these very real and insurmountable resource limitations.

I am fairly certain - that's much better!

I wondered who was going to bring logic into it . . . resource limitations assumes a finite universe and no multi-verses . . . and I'm OK with that, let's roll with it but let's keep not leave our assumptions hanging out.

I also have a healthy suspicion about logic after Godel got through with it . . . but this is the paradox I'm speaking of - do we allow language to have a grammar of paradox in order to talk about things? If you talk about the ultimate, you can't (without paradox) speak of your relationship to it . . . and so, with Wittgenstein, you pass over it in silence.

Only, Wittgenstein later changed his mind.

 

[trainedobserver]

You actually seem to spend way more time thinking about it than I do! ;-)

When people say something, I try to understand what they are saying. What are they talking about? Do they even know?

 

[smcder]

When people say something, I try to understand what they are saying. What are they talking about? Do they even know?

I think you have to have faith in other people.

 

[trainedobserver]

I wondered who was going to bring logic into it . . . resource limitations assumes a finite universe and no multi-verses . . . and I'm OK with that, let's roll with it but let's keep not leave our assumptions hanging out.

The only assumption that makes is the assumption of human experience. Our experience is very finite, limited by space and time. Who can deny that? The artful mystic?

 

[trainedobserver]

I think you have to have faith in other people.

Like I said, you're a hopeless romantic.

I have yet to meet anyone who can articulate who and what they think God is with any clarity whatsoever.

 

[smcder]

You are looking for "source" or perhaps "mother" I think.

I'll try that out for about a week.

Here's what I can't do about the word God - to forestall foreseeable questions:

I can't prove anything logically (that has to operate in a closed system)

I can't give you any empirical data - I could point to some kind of God module that lights up every time we say the word, but I don't think that really panned out.

I can't make any claims for my experience that compels you - Underhill in the very beginning of her book Mysticism went as far with that demand as I think anyone politely should go . . .

I can't even point to universal history or culture - although English is a pretty good ingathering of words from all over, so if there were some kind of replacement, we might have found it by now?

The other explanations you have access to . . .

 

[smcder]

Like I said, you're a hopeless romantic.

I have yet to meet anyone who can articulate who and what they think God is with any clarity whatsoever.

Like I said, you're a hopeless romantic.

I thought I had refuted that charge in a previous post? And, were you not paying attention to my cordyceps example? You're the one who claims to be cheerful! For mothers's-sake! (see - I'm trying . . .)

I have yet to meet anyone who can articulate who and what they think God is with any clarity whatsoever.

Well! I wish you had told me that in the beginning, it would have saved some time . . . ;-)

Actually, I don't think I ever claimed to be able to and I will add I am deeply suspicious of anyone who can . . . Romantic indeed!

When I think about "God"/god/source/mother - when I experience "God"/god/source/mother - I don't use the word "God" in my head . . .

 

[smcder]

The only assumption that makes is the assumption of human experience. Our experience is very finite, limited by space and time. Who can deny that? The artful mystic?

No, only the artful dodger.

 

[trainedobserver]

I'll try that out for about a week.

Here's what I can't do about the word God - to forestall foreseeable questions:

I can't prove anything logically (that has to operate in a closed system)

I can't give you any empirical data - I could point to some kind of God module that lights up every time we say the word, but I don't think that really panned out.

I can't make any claims for my experience that compels you - Underhill in the very beginning of her book Mysticism went as far with that demand as I think anyone politely should go . . .

I can't even point to universal history or culture - although English is a pretty good ingathering of words from all over, so if there were some kind of replacement, we might have found it by now?

The other explanations you have access to . . .

Sounds like Bigfoot.

 

[smcder]

Like I said, you're a hopeless romantic.

I have yet to meet anyone who can articulate who and what they think God is with any clarity whatsoever.

I'll go further than that and actively encourage you to scrutinize anything I have said about this - as far as I can see, I will actually benefit from such scrutiny.

 

[smcder]

Sounds like Bigfoot.

lol and the Tooth Fairy!