[Ganoderma]

anyone read The Dancing Wu Li Masters?

I wont pretend to understand a lot of the theory behind these types of study, but this book i like cause its easier to understand for the common idiot like myself.

anyone read The cosmic serpent?

i wont get into these 2 books very much, everyone should read them.


now lets move to perspective. in front of our eyes we see what we believe to be. the 2 books above have interesting twists on what else may.


now reading these 2 books, then experimenting with something drastic, totally out of the ordinary for you. be it some kind of super meditation/spirit quest, an ordeal, psychedelics or some other kind of foreign, mind blowing situation. doing this, then going somewhere where people appear to have super natural powers. be it some monks in a far off land, shamans who can fly, martial artists who can literally scale smooth walls whatever.

and we are left thinking what my eyes saw are not my my brain accepts.

now what?

Using hallucinogens as an example (as that is what i have devoted my studies to that last few years), one takes something like DMT and sees all kinds of wierd and different things that would just not normally be thought of. one comes back to "reality" and dismisses it as a fun time, bad trip or whatever. what some believe is that when "intoxicated" one is simply just viewing reality in a different way, a way that is not normally seen.

this goes beyond fluorescent snakes and pink flying elephants. Into spirit worlds that people quite strongly believe to be real and western science tends to think is some form of insanity.

now i have lost myself, and can't really think of a main point. i dont believe in gods/spirits and the like, but as life moves on i see more and more possibilities that things may be more than they seem, and realness is what we make of it.

surely i never new a person could balance on a knife tip with all their weight, until i saw it. i never though a person, 87 years old to boot, could take a full on punch to the face from a master belt in karate, until i saw it. so many "impossible" things becomming possible, and science fails to answer much of it. and traditional ways fail to explain in a way a "westerner" can comprehend.

sorcery, witchcraft, fantasy etc etc....maybe just another type of perspective?

[Jman8564]

Ganoderma, on 02 August 2010 - 10:00 PM, said:

sorcery, witchcraft, fantasy etc etc....maybe just another type of perspective?

Perhaps, but are they perspectives which you yourself would like to assume? Psychedelics really do mess with your pattern-recognitions, just it's far to easy to go superstitious and paranoid over anything on them.

The whole point of having an imagination is to help you to participate in the world, not to disapear into other dimensions / fantasies.

My older brother is a severely affected paranoid schizophreonic, and it's absolutely horrible, he's a prisoner to his own delusions who has to live in a hospital, and only ever talks about imaginary relatives, angels, demons who rape everybody, and various lesser delusions as well.

You should be extremely careful with what you allow your mind to believe, it's not a light topic.

[Qfwfq]

Ganoderma, on 02 August 2010 - 10:00 PM, said:

what some believe is that when "intoxicated" one is simply just viewing reality in a different way, a way that is not normally seen.

This is ovbious. We see the same reality, but we see it different because of the alteration to the neuorlogical system. A TV repair technician could play a prank and put a customer's set all out of adjustment in such a way that one sees the images and hears the sounds but they are unlike they'd be with the usual adjustments; this doesn't mean anything has changed in the programme that is broadcast.

So, the drug doesn't change reality, it only changes your perception of it. Which do you presume is more reliable? Would you imagine the drug is improving your perception of reality?

[modest]

Jman8564, on 30 August 2010 - 01:05 PM, said:

Perhaps, but are they perspectives which you yourself would like to assume? Psychedelics really do mess with your pattern-recognitions, just it's far to easy to go superstitious and paranoid over anything on them.

The whole point of having an imagination is to help you to participate in the world, not to disapear into other dimensions / fantasies.

My older brother is a severely affected paranoid schizophreonic, and it's absolutely horrible, he's a prisoner to his own delusions who has to live in a hospital, and only ever talks about imaginary relatives, angels, demons who rape everybody, and various lesser delusions as well.

You should be extremely careful with what you allow your mind to believe, it's not a light topic.

That's terrible to hear. I'm a firm believer that mental disorders are under-funded. If we can cure polio then why not schizophrenia or autism. Frustrating.

Any road, you compare schizophrenia to psychedelics. I think the analogy is very good, and I read an article some time ago making a detailed and rather interesting comparison between the two—thought I'd offer: My 12 hours as a madman
~modest