Hello. I signed up because someone on a different forum linked to a thread I was interested in (Informational Entities, Opticus and others - Open Discussion - Welcome to the DMT-Nexus), and have a couple of thoughts I'd like to add. I've never used DMT so I don't anticipate becoming a long term active member. I'm interested in sharing on this particular topic though, so if anyone finds my comments to be of interest they could post a link to this. You can also respond to me here or at the other forum if you want to (Subconscious talking to you).
I experience a muse or daemon that exhibits most of the characteristics of the opti/valis spirit that others describe. The primary thing I wish to point out is the extent to which its characteristics are selected by the nature of the person experiencing it. In particular, the reality-consuming brutality that many describe reflects an aspect of one's own thinking and behavior, rather than being fundamental. It also reflects the minds of other people that we're psychically related to. As we change ourselves, and our thinking and behavior that is metaphorically like what we experience from the god-like demon, then those experiences change. Such has been my experience anyway.
I think that body-identification can be thought of as a kind of involuntary pseudo-empathy. It produces fear, such as being afraid of injury, sickness, or death. But it also drives people to take care of their bodies, which is good because of the essential place that bodies and brains have in the overall scheme of things. To the extent that people will care for their bodies without the exclusive I-am-the-body thought, they can become aware of spirit beyond individual bodies. But the temptation is to try to flee into the not-a-body awareness, to avoid facing the physical discomforts that manifest from who we are. At some point there's no more room to flee, and events are driven home to us in ways we can't escape. I think its better to learn to face things squarely even while we have the freedom not to.
Generally speaking, I think that if something appears to be 'wrong' from a standpoint of body identification, its also wrong in an absolute sense. Not because it violates a moral rule imposed from the outside, but because the value of something is inherent in what it is. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' means that the recognition of beauty is internal and our capacity for it is qualified by who we are, but it doesn't mean that its arbitrary. The behaviors of world-eating aliens or soul-eating gods remain wrong even after you abandon the place of identity from which you can see the wrongness of it. And those behaviors are really not so alien anyway, they reflect our own predatory natures, even while we avoid seeing ourselves in that way. For example, our factory farms or our stupefying sources of entertainment are not all that different, even though we avoid fully seeing and feeling them that way.
Of course there is a deeper rightness to things, even to 'wrong' things: there is beauty in everything. And when we perceive the appalling wrongness of something, we're usually missing that underlying harmony and justice. But I think that like identification with the body, the limited perspective is still of value, because it shows us something real that needs attending to, and which we might be tempted to blow off if we could see more of the underlying beauty. Its kind of a chicken-egg problem, because you need the transcendent awareness of perfection to see the shadow of ugliness, but if you see either too strongly without the other its counterproductive. Generally speaking, I think the awareness that a person has is the best that's possible given who they are, and that in the long run the most effective way to deepen or expand that awareness is to understand and attend to what life puts in front of us. In my experience, the cosmic, fractal-like spirit that we glimpse in our minds is really, really good at helping us with this, particularly as we start consciously cooperating with it. And its good at that even when we're not consciously aware of it, so we don't have to worry about awareness of it slipping away, as if the multi-verse ceases to exist when our eyes are covered up. In my experience, it remains true to us and to this no matter what turns and tunnels it takes us through.
I experience a muse or daemon that exhibits most of the characteristics of the opti/valis spirit that others describe. The primary thing I wish to point out is the extent to which its characteristics are selected by the nature of the person experiencing it. In particular, the reality-consuming brutality that many describe reflects an aspect of one's own thinking and behavior, rather than being fundamental. It also reflects the minds of other people that we're psychically related to. As we change ourselves, and our thinking and behavior that is metaphorically like what we experience from the god-like demon, then those experiences change. Such has been my experience anyway.
I think that body-identification can be thought of as a kind of involuntary pseudo-empathy. It produces fear, such as being afraid of injury, sickness, or death. But it also drives people to take care of their bodies, which is good because of the essential place that bodies and brains have in the overall scheme of things. To the extent that people will care for their bodies without the exclusive I-am-the-body thought, they can become aware of spirit beyond individual bodies. But the temptation is to try to flee into the not-a-body awareness, to avoid facing the physical discomforts that manifest from who we are. At some point there's no more room to flee, and events are driven home to us in ways we can't escape. I think its better to learn to face things squarely even while we have the freedom not to.
Generally speaking, I think that if something appears to be 'wrong' from a standpoint of body identification, its also wrong in an absolute sense. Not because it violates a moral rule imposed from the outside, but because the value of something is inherent in what it is. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' means that the recognition of beauty is internal and our capacity for it is qualified by who we are, but it doesn't mean that its arbitrary. The behaviors of world-eating aliens or soul-eating gods remain wrong even after you abandon the place of identity from which you can see the wrongness of it. And those behaviors are really not so alien anyway, they reflect our own predatory natures, even while we avoid seeing ourselves in that way. For example, our factory farms or our stupefying sources of entertainment are not all that different, even though we avoid fully seeing and feeling them that way.
Of course there is a deeper rightness to things, even to 'wrong' things: there is beauty in everything. And when we perceive the appalling wrongness of something, we're usually missing that underlying harmony and justice. But I think that like identification with the body, the limited perspective is still of value, because it shows us something real that needs attending to, and which we might be tempted to blow off if we could see more of the underlying beauty. Its kind of a chicken-egg problem, because you need the transcendent awareness of perfection to see the shadow of ugliness, but if you see either too strongly without the other its counterproductive. Generally speaking, I think the awareness that a person has is the best that's possible given who they are, and that in the long run the most effective way to deepen or expand that awareness is to understand and attend to what life puts in front of us. In my experience, the cosmic, fractal-like spirit that we glimpse in our minds is really, really good at helping us with this, particularly as we start consciously cooperating with it. And its good at that even when we're not consciously aware of it, so we don't have to worry about awareness of it slipping away, as if the multi-verse ceases to exist when our eyes are covered up. In my experience, it remains true to us and to this no matter what turns and tunnels it takes us through.