Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Are psychedelic experiences transcendent or not?

#11
Syne Offline
^^ The laughter of the delusional.
Reply
#12
Ostronomos Offline
(Feb 28, 2023 01:06 AM)Syne Wrote: ^^ The laughter of the delusional.

I hate you.
Reply
#13
Syne Offline
Of course you do. Delusional people often hate those who won't play into their delusions. It causes you too much cognitive dissonance.
Reply
#14
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:Why do you think transcendence must be "induced?" If your transcendent experience is the result of your mind being the effect of something, that says a lot about the quality of that experience. Real transcendence is causal.

The state of transcendence doesn't happen spontaneously or by itself. It is the mind's response to a profound or transcendent event. This may be anything from nature to music to philosophy to even religion. We are enthralled by something that is transcendent. We are provoked into awe or mystical wonder by the Sublime.
Reply
#15
Syne Offline
No, it's not necessarily a response to any external stimuli. I can experience it at will, just by postulating/visualizing certain things. So much so that I can lose my awareness of sight, with my eyes open. And I believe I've already tried to dissuade you from conflating transcendence and mere awe.
Reply
#16
Yazata Offline
(Feb 22, 2023 02:12 AM)C C Wrote: Are psychedelic experiences transcendent or not?

That depends of what "transcendent" means.

I don't actively believe that psychedelic experiences reveal another heavenly reality, the divine, or anything like that. So in that sense I don't really think that psychedelic experiences are "transcendent". That being said, I do have a great deal of interest in religious experience of various sorts.

But I do think that psychedelics are very good at generating non-conceptual experiential content that might arguably allow one to transcend the world of things, ideas and concepts. At stronger doses, even the subject-object distinction seems to break down in ways often described a "non-dual" in Indian religious philosophy.

There's a notable strand in Indian Buddhist philosophy that argues that the true nature of reality is very different than how we perceive conventional reality to be. This true reality (for Dignaga, pure particulars) is obscured by our hypostasizing linguistic/conceptualizing consciousness that falsifies what lies beneath (for Dignaga, by entangling it in a net of conceptual universals) such that it appears to us to be persisting objects and essences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dign%C4%81ga

So in that sense, I'm convinced that psychedelic experiences can indeed be called "transcendent". It's not a matter of perceiving a different world, so much as perceiving this single world in a very different way.
Reply
#17
Yazata Offline
(Feb 27, 2023 09:05 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: HAHAHAHA, I become a supreme genius while high. Everyone except you knows it.

Not everyone
Reply
#18
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:I can experience it at will, just by postulating/visualizing certain things.

We can also experience and visualize amazing things by taking hallucinogenics. So what's the difference.? They're both self-stimulating the experience of transcendence.
Reply
#19
Syne Offline
One is you being the effect of drugs. Doesn't sound too lofty or transcendent to me, and I speak from having done so. The other is actually self-derived.
Making yourself an effect of something is not transcendent, as that makes you lesser than rather than more expansive...no matter how the drugs may make you feel otherwise.

But perhaps the only real way for anyone to know such things is if they actually manage to do both. Can't really describe the color red to someone born without sight.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article The moral imperative to learn from diverse phenomenal experiences C C 1 148 Dec 17, 2023 09:28 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  The Geometric Model Of The Psychedelic Experience C C 0 518 Dec 15, 2015 07:04 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)