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Blacking Out.

^I agree Sol. The white-out is different from the black-out. During a black-out on downers (such as zolpidem) you can't remember anything because you are totally blotto, your brainwaves are slow, and nothing much is recording. Or if it is, it's on the deepest subconscious level. During a white-out on psychedelics, you remember everything, but it's like it wasn't you (but it was, sort of), it was your soul. That's because you literally were out, except for the tiny umbilical connection to your physical body through (as Dwayne would put it) the reptilian brain.
 
I strongly suggest that blackouts are NOT the same as ego-death. A blackout is a term for anterograde amnesia: it is not possible to form new memories beyond a certain point.

With ego-death this is also true but there is a lot more happening, there is a suspension of the self beyond normal perception and this mostly has fargoing consequences for your mobility and ability to interact with the world. Even if you are not laying or sitting down people in an ego death are absent and at the most act erratic but not doing a lot of stuff on autopilot.

If you take zolpidem in high doses and resist sleep you will get anterograde amnesia but not really ego-death. The terms blackout or sleep walking are more appropriate. People on zolpidem have been reported to do advanced tasks like even drive a car (though getting in accidents a lot of times). There is still something active, a subconscious with access to operational memory etc.

Perhaps some people would disagree with me that there is a distinction, and this is all pretty much terminological debate but while some states of consciousness we have names for appear to be similar or identical others have to considered separately in my opinion, at the very least to prevent confusion and to keep in mind the important differences in aspects or symptoms.

But, on my last trip, I remember for about an hour words like "who am I", "who are you?" "lose yourself". And I litterilly lost myself. Saw my arm dissapearing. I would call it ego death cause I didn't know who I was or where I was.
 
I don't see any conflicting information, your description reads like ego death. Not a blackout... It sounds pretty much like dissolution of ego and proprioception. No clear signs of amnesia, you don't mention doing a lot of things that you do not remember doing later on.

That is not a common effect of psychedelic use either, blackouts / amnesia. It is more like what you get from drinking copious amounts of alcohol or doing benzo's. I have lost no less than 3 days when I took alprazolam (a benzo) on LSD, it had nothing to do with ego loss - that was a blackout. And there were little differences between that and the blackouts I have had on alcohol.

One extra sign that points to a blackout is disinhibited behavior. People having ego deaths usually show very little (if any) behavior.

There is a sort of common ground that can make this confusing and that is that riding an ego death up and down is also 'vague' and there is an absence of the rational, there is no linear timeline where events are really registered. But the major difference between a blackout and ego death is that with ego death there is a central core of remaining consciousness. People experience the connectedness of the world, boundaries dissolving, etc...

For the record I have had multiple ego deaths, whiteouts and blackouts. On my most complete ego death I laid on my bed for hours and had forgotten my life was 'real', that I was still me and still had an individuality (something people will still argue of course :D ) but during that time I did believe that there was unity, that I was the godhead i.e. the dream that dreams itself. If it had been a blackout then I would have 'woken up' at some point not remembering at all what had happened. Like with those 3 days I lost.
 
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Ego-death isn't forgetting who you are, it's a breakdown of boundaries between the self and the outside world; the recognition that the subject/object distinction is as arbitrary as a line on a map, that everything is actually "you". You can experience ego-death and still be completely lucid.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with amnesia (i.e. "blackouts").
 
You're probably right but even if they have nothing to do with each other the language used to describe these states can be similar because they sounds something like feeling 'not-you'. In that respect people think they are talking about the same thing while like you say they are almost polar opposites (blackout and whiteout, sounds pretty polar)
 
... but during that time I did believe that there was unity, that I was the godhead i.e. the dream that dreams itself. If it had been a blackout then I would have 'woken up' at some point not remembering at all what had happened. Like with those 3 days I lost.

Brilliant and beautiful post Solipsis... THANK YOU. Yes, I am utterly convinced that our reality is in fact some sort of Dream That Dreams Itself (did you make up that phrase or encounter it somewhere? IF SO WHERE, PLEASE?)

Based on my own psychedelic experiences: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showpost.php?p=9301610&postcount=16

Based on Philosopher David Chalmers' theories about "Consciousness" that all physicalistic explanations end up being circular definitions when you examine them and that there fore consciousness MUST be some BASIC property of our reality like Mass, Space, Time, Energy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualiaand sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. However, he rejects Cartesian-style interactive dualism in which the mind has the power to alter the behavior of the brain, suggesting instead that the physical world is "causally closed" so that physical events only have physical causes, so that for example human behavior could be explained entirely in terms of the functions of the physical brain. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Though Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries.​

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

"Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", David Chalmers, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3), 1995, pp. 200–219.
http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

Based on the Kabalistic concepts that detail out the process of creation of the physical unviverse from a beginning of pure thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
Kabbalists believed that all things are linked to God through these emanations, making all levels in Creation part of one great, gradually descending chain of being. Through this any lower creation reflects its particular characteristics in Supernal Divinity. These descriptions reached their synthesis in 16th century CE Cordoveran Kabbalah. This metaphysical explanation gave cosmic significance to the deeds of man, as the downward flow of the Divine "Light" that creates our reality, is opened or restricted according to the merits of each individual. Divine substenance in Creation is dependent on the traditional mitzvah observances of Judaism. Subsequent Kabbalah of Isaac Luria describes a radical origin to this depiction, where Creation unfolds from transcendent imbalance in Godliness, and the purpose of life is the Messianic rectification of Divinity by man. Once each person has completed their part of the rectification, the Messianic Era begins. In this, the mitzvot redeem the supernal Divine Sparks in existence. Later interpretations in Hasidism, such as by Schneur Zalman of Liadi, extend this radicalism by holding that God is all that really exists, all else being completely undifferentiated from God's perspective. This view can be defined as monistic panentheism. According to this philosophy, God's existence is higher than anything that this world can express, yet He includes all things of this world within His Divine reality in perfect unity, so that the Creation effected no change in Him at all. This paradox is dealt with at length in Habad texts.[14]

The Sefirot (סְפִירוֹת — singular Sefirah סְפִירָה) are the ten emanations and attributes of God with which He continually sustains the universe in existence. The word "sefirah" literally means "counting", but early Kabbalists presented a number of other etymological possibilities...

Ten Sephirot as process of Creation
According to Lurianic cosmology, the Sephirot correspond to various levels of creation (ten sephirot in each of the Four Worlds, and four worlds within each of the larger four worlds, each containing ten sephirot, which themselves contain ten sephirot, to an infinite number of possibilities),[16] and are emanated from the Creator for the purpose of creating the universe. The Sephirot are considered revelations of the Creator's will (ratzon),[17] and they should not be understood as ten different "gods" but as ten different ways the one God reveals his will through the Emanations. It is not God who changes but the ability to perceive God that changes.

According to Kabbalists, humans cannot yet understand the infinity of God. Rather, there is God as revealed to humans (corresponding to Zeir Anpin), and the rest of the infinity of God as remaining hidden from human experience (corresponding to Arich Anpin).[28] One reading of this theology is monotheistic, similar to panentheism; another reading of the same theology is that it is dualistic


And of course based on that most mischievous of literary mystics, Mark Twain, who wrote in the very conclusion of his final novel The Mysterious Stranger, THIS most exquisite depiction of "The Dream That Dreams Itself" as you so eloquently phrased it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger
"In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!"

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities."

"Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short . . .

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier."

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"
 
It's funny, because I was thinking about this yesterday. I was ruminating over something Ganja God had said in another thread, something about archetypes and symbols. Going deep in to a thought-trip surrounding the ideas he had expressed, I suddenly came up on an idea, of which I felt completely comfortable, and that was that we are the dreamed, and the dreamer. Then I came on bluelight, and after a little while I saw that Solipsis posted that reply in this thread, and it blew me away.

Some good thoughts there Dwayne. I highly disagree with David Chalmers there though. I think he's got it all backwards with regards to the physical and the mind. I don't see why or how anyone could conclude that consciousness is independent of the physical world. That just makes no sense at all, however you look at it. The way I see it, the shape of the physical realm is completely dependent upon consciousness, and vise-versa. If this wasn't the case, then "we" woldn't perceive the physical realm, we would be entirely indifferent to it, and so "we" wouldn't even be discussing it. Rather, we would be the disembodied consciousness of the one universal mind.
 
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I dont see Chalmers as saying that consciousness is independent of the physical world. Sort of the opposite, I think: he's saying that it must be some sort of intrinsic fundamental property (albeit of a very basic and undifferentiated sort) of the physical world like mass and space and time and energy, which our physical brains evolved to harness and utilize as a survival mechanism, just as eyes and the visual system evolved to utilize photons to "see'... DNA did not "invent" light, just learned to USE it, it was already there to begin with.

Just because you can mess with the settings on a TV set and cause the picture and sound to go all screwey does NOT mean that the programming content is somehow manufactured by the contents of the TV's circuitry. The TV s only a receiver, a focuser, a fine-tuner, a transformer and displayer of a signal that exists independent of the TV. Just because the box has a profound impact on what is displayed does not prove that it generated the programs.

I dont think Chalmers' thinking can be so easily dismissed. He is quite a distinguished and accomplished professional philosopher, professor, author, Phd, etc. who has written quite a lot of highly technical papers on the topic, many of which would probably be quite beyond my laymans ability to comprehend. Doesn't make him correct of course, but he's not just some pie in the sky hippie blatherer or something either.

Have you actually carefully read his original treatise defining "the hard problem" - "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"? Also one of his recent books is a compendium of many other professional philosophers' very technical criticisms of his ideas, of course followed by his detailed rebuttals. It's all definitely not the pat, cut and dried conclusive thing that many thinking along simplistic "obvious" lines believe that it is.

I mean, look, if the brain is somehow manufacturing our subjective inner stream of awareness in the entirety, then WHAT EXACTLY IS IT that is then PERCIEVING that "signal" that the brain "creates", and is "experiencing" it? If you just say "the brain" you are totally avoiding the question and just giving the question back as its own answer, which is totally meaningless and proves nothing. WHY should a set of electrical and chemical processes have ANY "inner" sensation and "experience" about what it is "like" to be it? There is NO proper explanation for this. Chalmers has shown in detail that every attempt to "answer" this conundrum, just ends up being some sort of circular definition that is just a way of trying to define the question out of existence, which ends up explaining nothing.
 
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Yes. Donn't drink and drank with all those bars. It makes you a zombie
 
dwayne said:

Eh, consciousness is overrated. Those theories just strike me as a psychological cop-out, afterlife and if not anthropomorphism it's zoomorphism at least. We needn't resort to consciousness when recognizing the Is-ness of the Universe. All things, or the all-thing, can flow just as naturally in Silence. Aum and all that jazz.
 
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