Reality
I love hearing and reading about these 'experiences' but am yet to have one of my own, something that i couldn't explain away or put down to some ailmet/tiredness/drug pipes or whatever.....As soon as someone says, 'i was asleep' or 'i woke up to see', or even, 'i was in bed', i usually dismiss it immediately. Dreams can be so real, vivid and solid, that anything that remotely hints at being asleep is more than likely just that...you had fallen asleep and didn't even realise it...a very non-spooky example of this is many times i have been waiting on a parcel to arrive, or someone coming round or even more crucially, a giro...i have woken up, checked the time then went back to sleep only then to have a dream that the parcel has arrived, friend has come round, giro is safe. I am SO convinced of this, even opening the door for the postman, signing for item etc, that i even have a look around just to see if it did arrive...it never has, cause i dreamt it....but it was soooooo real. But thats the power of the mind, i could go onto say that everyday reality is merely a by product of conciousness and in fact we dream up everything we see, feel, experience, none of it actually happens anywhere else than inside our own heads. That in fact we, everyone of us, are individual universes. Individual, yet mere instances of the same thing, the same conciousness.

So in fact when people say they say a ghost or dry humped a spectre they did, but it didnt occur in the 'real' world as such, but occured in their head. But then, if the individual universe thing is true, then there is NO real world, merely a series of very complex, interacting, hallucinations.

A nice analogy is that if you were on the beach of a great ocean and you took a jar and filled it with ocean water and put it on the sand, what would be in the jar? The Ocean is in the jar, or an aspect of it, a tiny percentage. Does the jar of water consider itself to be an individual, does it KNOW that the bigger picture is merely feet away and that it is capable of so much more. We are the jars of water, ego obsessed, never pausing to consider that we are part , an insignificant part, but crucial nonetheless.

When we die, the jar is emptied back into the ocean and we are aware of the vastness of the 'real' world, so to speak and have no recollection of our time in the jar.




Look, its a slow day at work..............
(Cancer Joy was short lived, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 15:53, 6 replies)

...
I was with you until your claim that reality is a product of consciousness... and then the panpsychism started... and then... gah...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 15:56, closed)

yeah, I agree.
One thought I have quite often is that all of us see the world completely differently. For example, the colour blue may seem like blue to you, but a completely different colour to someone else even though they know that colour as blue.

We all see the universe in our own way, but everything we know and see in our daily lives can all be described by everyone in the same way, even though we may have different perceptions of them...this is the reason that none of know we all see things and live our lifes with a different perception.

crazy innit.
(scotsbloke, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 15:58, closed)

sorry mate
..in my universe we are ALL jam jars, the ones wif de golliwogs on.


..the thing is, i have kinda always felt and had these thoughts, but struggled to put them into any sort of context....or maybe just couldn't be bothered trying to explain it anyone. Then i discovered psychedelic drugs, shrooms, salvia etc and the previous embryonic theories blossomed into a very plausible take on 'reality' etc. Reality being a product of conciousness, or 'i think therefore i am' and all that jazz

I have to add plausible because when it boils down to it, no one, not one of us knows for sure what it's all about. Thats half the fun, we can ALL hypothesis, and what works for you, then thats good, what works for me, then thats good as well. But for me to keep an open mind, it has to be plausible. Creationism for example is a load of shite, as far as i am concerned anyway, but once again, one mans meat, is another mans plaything, etc
(Cancer Joy was short lived, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 16:14, closed)

Solipsism
is a singularly self-defeating philosophy.
( Kroney, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 17:04, closed)

^^^^^
Thank you. So there is a word for it. I will wiki myself into a foamy sweat later
(Cancer Joy was short lived, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 17:21, closed)

It started well
but fuck me, if the ending went any deeper we'd be up to our nuts in guts :-s

*goes to lie down for a bit*
( chart cat has an itch, Mon 7 Jul 2008, 18:28, closed)