Trippyness of Life...

[.xbuzzybeex.]

and i no its a bit of a stupid question, but which way is up? i mean ino where it is on earth, but when you get out to space...wtf rite?

buzz xxx

 

[TheAppleCore]

I used to lament the fact that the world would never be as cools as the books I read, or the movies I watched.

Then I started thinking about it. I looked outside and saw people sitting in machines, taking themselves places in a few minutes that used to take hours. I looked up and saw great winged tubes of steel, weighing tons, defying gravity and soaring through the air.

I looked at the skyline, and saw the natural, ragged coastline punctuated by huge towers of steel and glass, reflecting the world around them and housing thousands of people. Then I pulled out my phone, smaller than my hand, and I searched through a space that doesn't exist physically and picked a specific piece of information out of uncountable masses of other information to learn everything about that building.

Life is a science fiction trip.

Nice post. I can definitely relate!

 

[hjj]

The other thing that spooked me as a kid is the idea that there is infinite space in the universe.

there isn't infinite space in the universe.

and i no its a bit of a stupid question, but which way is up? i mean ino where it is on earth, but when you get out to space...wtf rite?

buzz xxx

up is relative, if you are spinning aorund in space, then up is constantly a different direction as it is here on earth, just don't notice since gravitymakes us feel still.


________________________________

I got rid of my cellphonetelephone the other week, I hated it. during my first acid trip, coming down after being at this wonderful river and the the sarounding woods, walking on a sidewalk felt wrong. all the identical houses were terrible, I think it brought a tear to my eye.


sorcretes?.. said ''I think, therefore I am.'' And I disagree with that being more of a believer of bhuddism where your soul is supposed to be this transparent nothingness. and you are simply one with the universe.

 

[RhythmSpring]

Wow, I didn't realize so many people went through the "imagine if the universe just decided not to exist" phase. I also imagined it as a white space. A cold, cold white space. It's so jarring to the brain. I prefer not to go there these days.

Is life trippy? Or is "trippy" life?

 

[lolbob]

Then I started thinking about it. I looked outside and saw people sitting in machines, taking themselves places in a few minutes that used to take hours. I looked up and saw great winged tubes of steel, weighing tons, defying gravity and soaring through the air.

I looked at the skyline, and saw the natural, ragged coastline punctuated by huge towers of steel and glass, reflecting the world around them and housing thousands of people. Then I pulled out my phone, smaller than my hand, and I searched through a space that doesn't exist physically and picked a specific piece of information out of uncountable masses of other information to learn everything about that building.

Life is a science fiction trip.

This is exactly the way i think as well. We are in the future right now. Of course it is all relative, but you know what i mean.

there isn't infinite space in the universe.

Well infinite potential space. You could keep going in one direction for ever. But how could you? There would have to be some kind of boundary. But how could there be a boundary?, because of course what is on the other side of the boundary. Unless of course we live in a closed universe (in terms of the shape of the universe) but that doesn't make it any less mind blowing lol.

 

[nearjat]

Consciousness could feel completely different for every person on earth, and there's no way to know it.

 

[grimble crumble]

kind of off topic but has anyone ever gotten shit scared in the middle of the night of the concept of the eternity of heaven and what if there really was one. I mean think about, forever means forever. literally billions upon billions of years. I dunno about you but I would get tired of "forever", so whats the other option? End of the soul, a nothingness, well thats not too comferting either now is it.

I use to have these thoughts until I realized they would only occur when I was unhappy with my life. still a trippy thought though

I pretty much had the exact same realization on my first acid trip...I took everything out of my pockets and looked at it, confused, wondering why I called it my own. I looked at my phone, Ipod, wallet, and I thought, "Why am I keeping track of this stuff?". I compared these seemingly unnecessary physical possessions to unnecessary mental clutter, such as worries, past memories, harbored negative emotions, etc...I think it's an important parallel to make because most thoughts/ideas that you may choose to hold on to are no more than "stuff" themselves, only cluttering your mental headspace until you choose to release them, and thus release the burden. This acid trip also seemed to provide me with an infinite range of comparisons/similarities between the mental and the physical...For example, I realized that cleaning your room is for your physical space, what meditating is for your mental space. And towards the end of the acid trip, I deduced that the trip was an enormously beneficial cleansing/shower for my soul (I actually realized this in the shower).

great post man, your going to fit in well here at bluelight

 

[masta.spliffz]

When I was a kid, I remember thinking about what gave the government the right to control an entire nation, as if they know what's better for us. What about prisons? They decide what we can and cannot do, based on their biases and opinions, and have the right to put us in a tiny cell for years, and we all let them do it. Are they not human? How do we actually let them control us?

This thought really got me as a kid. I guess you could say I was an existential thinker.

 

[porkstock]

i've thought about a lot of this stuff already posted..
space - the sheer vastness of it all, and how small it makes us. the near impossibility that this planet is the only one with life.
time - the moments passing, now...now...now. "time" is constantly going by, and the way we tell time is arbitrary, but there is a very real component to time. the moments that are constantly lost to the "past." and like one dude said...how would i really know if this passage of time stopped.

but something new...imagine living life as another animal. what would you choose. i asked this to a group of semi drunk friends. i said a shark (the sense magnetic fields..i think that'd be crazy) or a dominant bird (to experience flight). my buddy though took it another way. he said a bacteria or a yeast cell. imagine if "you" as a yeast had a consciousness. you'd experience mitosis...you would bud a daughter cell that is genetically identical copy (+ mutations). but MAYBE you're consciousness would divide as well, and "you" would experience life as 1 yeast, then 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc etc until you mutated sufficiently to be a different yeast strain. and even though a generation time is like 2 or 3 hours instead of 80 years...maybe it'd seem like a full lifetime. maybe there is conscious life that lives for thousands of years, making a human lifetime seem shockingly short.


oh my other favorite one - that everyone experiences consciousness (or the five senses) differently. someone already said this
imagine if "red" looks different to every human. but you only know to call it red, cuz your parents or teachers told you.


IMAGINe if we could perceive the entire electromagnetic spectrum. or that tripping allows us to see different wavelengths. what we can see is only a sliver.

 

[psood0nym]

imagine if "you" as a yeast had a consciousness. you'd experience mitosis...you would bud a daughter cell that is genetically identical copy (+ mutations). but MAYBE you're consciousness would divide as well, and "you" would experience life as 1 yeast, then 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc etc until you mutated sufficiently to be a different yeast strain.

You might find a book by philosopher Derek Parfit called "Reasons and Persons" interesting.

In it, he uses actual cases of corpus collostomies--where the two hemispheres of the brain are, essentially, disconnected--to argue that we have no selves. Behavioral tests of the operation subjects show that their consciousness is, in fact, divided. One hemisphere is unaware of what the other hemisphere is experiencing.

There are actual cases of people who have had massive strokes that destroyed half their brain, yet in some cases of survival both they and their friends say they are essentially unchanged. It's not entirely implausible to imagine the other half of their brain could've been destroyed with the same results. So, in a hypothetical case where each hemisphere is symmetrical (has no specialized functions--and there are actual cases that approximate such a condition), both sides of the brain contain a person's essential self.

In a technologically advanced society it's not implausible to imagine that half of one of these person's brains could be removed and put into a physical duplicate body. The same essential self would be in the same essential physical body, yet would be unaware of the life of the other. Now imagine that in 50 years, after each hemisphere leads very different lives, the hemispheres are reconnected into one body using the preserved corpus collosum. Viola, the re-integrated subject has experientially lived 50 extra years in an extra body. Are, or were, any of these subjects the real "self," or "soul"?

 

[dread]

^ wow, that had both halves of my brain spinning for a while.

 

[jamaica0535]

i took part in a zombie walk of about 500 or so people through atlanta today....

i overheard something from this girl who was a zombie raver kandi kid....

"wouldn't it suck if you just decided to trip and wander through the city today and you saw a giant crowd of zombies comming down the street?"

 

[swilow]

We are watched over by a council of demi-god extraterrestrials (ie. greys), who calcualte our karma using a giant stellar calculator. Jesus was one of them; and upon realising the karmic-calcualations for sin was too great for humanity, he/it decided to lose his own eternal life to assuage our karmic debt. It didn't work, and so the gods/aliens gave up on us, and put elves in place as temporary guardians until we ourselves evolve into aliens on a council.

Oh yeah, and the aliens are watched over by a council of aliens who are watched over by a council of aliens and so on....

 

[porkstock]

You might find a book by philosopher Derek Parfit called "Reasons and Persons" interesting.

In it, he uses actual cases of corpus collostomies--where the two hemispheres of the brain are, essentially, disconnected--to argue that we have no selves. Behavioral tests of the operation subjects show that their consciousness is, in fact, divided. One hemisphere is unaware of what the other hemisphere is experiencing.

There are actual cases of people who have had massive strokes that destroyed half their brain, yet in some cases of survival both they and their friends say they are essentially unchanged. It's not entirely implausible to imagine the other half of their brain could've been destroyed with the same results. So, in a hypothetical case where each hemisphere is symmetrical (has no specialized functions--and there are actual cases that approximate such a condition), both sides of the brain contain a person's essential self.

In a technologically advanced society it's not implausible to imagine that half of one of these person's brains could be removed and put into a physical duplicate body. The same essential self would be in the same essential physical body, yet would be unaware of the life of the other. Now imagine that in 50 years, after each hemisphere leads very different lives, the hemispheres are reconnected into one body using the preserved corpus collosum. Viola, the re-integrated subject has experientially lived 50 extra years in an extra body. Are, or were, any of these subjects the real "self," or "soul"?

nice!
maybe i'll check out that book

 

[Raw Evil]

Consciousness could feel completely different for every person on earth, and there's no way to know it.

In my experience dealing with and speaking to neurotypicals (I have Asperger Syndrome), I'm already convinced that that is in fact the case.

The notion of subjective colour has interested me since I was a child. It always confused me that nobody had an answer.

 

[killo]

In my experience dealing with and speaking to neurotypicals (I have Asperger Syndrome), I'm already convinced that that is in fact the case.

The notion of subjective color has interested me since I was a child. It always confused me that nobody had an answer.

Since life is subjective there's no doubt we experience consciousness(even if we're talking about the universal collective consciousness and oneness) subjectivity.

Even Buddhist monks who try to achieve nirvana probably all experience the state of bliss subjectively.

Is it experiencing everything at once or experiencing nothingness?

It's interesting and it would seem true to people with aspergers notice this more often than neurotypicals because people with aspergers are less effective by cultural norms and "learned norms" because they operate with a significantly different brain structure(or whatever it is that causes them to be aspies).

 

[Trilobite]

When I was a youngen I used to get shitscared trying to understand why I was me.

My experience might be different from yours, but I think I experienced something similar, probably starting when I was around 10. I felt like I came so close to understanding, but lack of ability to focus made it slip away. What's interesting is that I now realize that I was trying to "realize the self", to put it into Buddhist/Hindu(ish) terms. I even came to realize that my method of doing this had a name; I was using a crude mantra that I would repeat in my head: "I am me. I am me. I am me. I am me. ..." with each repetition peeling off a layer of my being, to get closer to the centre of my core existence.

That was kind of freaky, not only because I could bring myself into a different state of consciousness like that, but because when I stopped... I felt like something was lacking, slightly empty. As though I had returned to a more shallow, superficial existence.

I'm not sure how common this sort of experience is, but I wonder if it's more likely to occur spontaneously in children, because as we get older we become more concerned with coping with the physical world, and getting through day to day life. I can replicate it now when I think about it, and if I'm of sufficiently quiet mind, but it seems more difficult now.

 

[psood0nym]

The notion of subjective colour has interested me since I was a child. It always confused me that nobody had an answer.

I think most non-colorblind neurotypicals probably experience color in roughly the same way. There are strange correlations and consistent perceptual tests that are difficult to reconcile if it's not about the same. For example, if asked to order primary and secondary colors from darkest to brightest, most people pick roughly the same ordering from dark to bright. Brightness and darkness are less subjective than color, as darkness tends to occlude and brightness reveal (which can be tested behaviorally), yet colors are consistently ordered in similar ways along this dimension. Yes, we can contrive all sorts of situations to make exceptions to these rules, but these tendencies will remain. Also, if asked to assign a color a musical tone, the bright colors are usually assigned high frequency tones and the dark, low frequency--again, suggesting a deeper integration of the senses where correlations arise that are difficult to reconcile if our perceptual experiences aren't roughly the same.

However, a really fascinating case is that of synesthetes who report seeing "alien" photisms (color auras that are not of a color they've ever experienced in the environment). Color-grapheme synesthetes see colors around various types of symbols like letters and numbers. If the font of the grapheme is changed the color stays about the same, indicating that it is the concept of the grapheme that induces the color photism (for example, the aura around the Roman numeral IV will sometimes shift between a synesthete's color photism for '4,' for 'I,' and 'V,' depending on how they think of it (like a Necker cube's orientation)).

It is suggested that the alien colors exist because the neurological pathway they travel to conscious perception is distinctly different from the one that environmental color perception--and color memory--travels. It's fascinating to think that a dimension of perceptual experience as fundamental as color can be added to without any direct input from the environment. It reminds me of hyperspatial perception during certain drug experiences, where spatial extension is given an extra dimension despite the fact that the tripper never experienced extraspatial dimensions in the 3D physical world.

 

[Pharcyde]

Ive been to Trippy Creek in Indiana..........I stayed by it and had a smoke and a good good laugh

 

[iNguyen]

kind of off topic but has anyone ever gotten shit scared in the middle of the night of the concept of the eternity of heaven and what if there really was one. I mean think about, forever means forever. literally billions upon billions of years. I dunno about you but I would get tired of "forever", so whats the other option? End of the soul, a nothingness, well thats not too comferting either now is it.

I use to have these thoughts until I realized they would only occur when I was unhappy with my life. still a trippy thought though



great post man, your going to fit in well here at bluelight

grimble - i get those thoughts too x.x do u ever get that thought that is like where would my mind be if it wasnt here? man goood thread