Real vs not real: a false distinction?

[Guyomech]

So as any Nexians with more than a few weeks of interaction here know by now, there are certain topics which seem to come up again and again, usually from newer members who haven't seen older posts on these topics. One of the biggies- perhaps the single biggest debate- is the real vs not real debate. It usually boils down to a question of whether or not the entities are real, or if the hyperspace experience is happening inside your head or if it is truly entering other dimensions. And although this seems like something that should be answerable, no amount of discussion seems to bring the topic any closer to a satisfying conclusion. In fact, in surveys it seems that participants are fairly evenly divided between two camps: the materialists, who see it all as being high bandwidth brain fireworks, and the spiritualists, who believe they are encountering real entities and interacting with them.

One thing I notice a lot in these debates is that both camps tend to have very clear ideas behind what they believe, and can offer very compelling explanations. For instance, I generally think of myself as a rationalist, but then Eliyahu, who is very much in the "real" camp, posts experiences that I personally find powerful, compelling and full of truth. Neither side of the divide is clearly more articulate with their side of the story, so at some level it seems that both sides have a point. I've always avoided taking sides because neither seems to give a complete picture. I hate being on the fence when there's an important issue- seems weak.

So now I'm taking a side. But it's not either of the existing sides of the debate- I'm proposing a third side to the story- the "real vs not real is a false distinction" side. That may sound like wishy washy fence-sitting, so please let me clarify for a moment.

We are enormously complex beings, and parts of us are vast and ancient. We contain the history of the Earth in our DNA. Although we experience a single conscious self in our waking life, we in fact are conglomerations of living systems, each with some level of consciousness or another. For some aspect of your much deeper self to embody during a trip as an entity whom you can interact with is not too much of a stretch, when you think about it... And these beings are truly aliens, in that they are not an obvious part of your everyday waking self.

So how is that not just a part of your own mind? Because its coming from something deeper and far more ancient than the adult child you see in the mirror. These beings are a way for Nature to hold a conversation between its own ancient spirit and our everyday waking self. I think it's very possible that all the visual content and linguistic expression that we experience is all something cobbled together by the brain, which has astounding imaging capabilities. But the deep realms that we tap into that fuel these experiences do not come from within our own set of memories. So in that sense, it is a legitimate conversation with The Other.

I'm sure that the blurring of the lines between real/not real goes much deeper than that... But you get the idea.

Here's a post from Vodsel that I thought was a great articulation of all this:

"As Guyomech pointed out, this has been debated in the Nexus more times than I can count, and seems that we are still far away from any possible consensus. Not just nexians, but humans in general. But to reply to your question and contribute to the (controversy-free) statistics...

I haven't had so far any type of entity contact using DMT. That said, I have encountered presences with other substances. And my views on this would require a third way, or better than that, reformulating the question.

Eliyahu wrote:
I personally believe they are real aliens. I see no reason to "pretend" that it's just all in my mind, to me this is a form of hiding. of course this is only my opinion. Nothing more.


Eliyahu's experience and the words he uses come straight to my point, since it's in words like "real", or in expressions like "just in our mind" where the trap lies IMO.

We have grown in a strongly dualistic cultural frame. Plato the greek opened fire his cave myth, where he suggests we only see shadows, reflections of a superior, unattainable reality. Ideas are perfect, the material world is imperfect. Also adopted by christianity, Descartes spoke a lot about the separation of material body and immaterial soul (funny, though, how he believed body and soul interacted in the pineal gland). He was the father or western philosophy.

I think we have to transcend that frame of mind. And when people say that something is less real because it "only happens in the mind", they actually imply that the mind is a secondary actor, something contingent, a byproduct of our circuitry, and that only consensual facts are to be considered "real". As soon as you question that point of view, you also are starting to question the classic "real vs. non-real" debate.

The concern behind "are DMT aliens real?" seems to be rather "should I consider them as facts in my daily life?" or "should I re-make my map of the world because of my experience?". And to both I'd answer a big YES. And that YES is independent from the consensual reality of one particular experience you had on DMT. Look at it this way: Whether you are somehow witnessing a distant, trans-dimensional reality that you cannot access with your physical eyes, or your circuitry is constructing this amazing reality, providing it with qualities and sensations that go beyond anything you could imagine so far, the implications are equally mind-blowing. And we try to fit psychedelic experiences inside of our coherence-constructing cultural device, but if there's anything psychedelics show us is the social straight jacket that device can be.

Is the Universe the mystery, or is it your mind?

I do not need to pick. Since I don't even know if they are different from each other."


Anyway... Great words Vodsel, I couldn't have said it better myself.

In my opinion, the real vs not real debate is destined to go nowhere. Forever. Only by working past this false distinction can this conversation make any real progress.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

See Also: A pragmatic approach: What is "real", and when is it actually useful to ask this?


Good post Guyo...we may never "get" anywhere with this seemingly endless discussion, but at the risk of sounding like a burned out hippie...It's about the journey, not the destination...and I feel that the idea exchange that can take place in this category of threads is fascinating and illuminating (or at least entertaining, if nothing else).

 

[Eliyahu]

Guyomech wrote:

For instance, I generally think of myself as a rationalist, but then Eliyahu, who is very much in the "real" camp, posts experiences that I personally find powerful, compelling and full of truth.

Thanks...

I really like your post here. I think as long one takes responsibility for working towards the self correction, behavioral modifications and attitude changes that the "Entities" demand from us then there is no problem viewing the entities as an extension of your own living awareness. Due to the laws of inter-connectivity it is of course true that the "entities" are a part of us whether they exist independently or not.

 

[Vodsel]

Thank you for the new thread, Guyomech. I totally agree that the traditional debate often seems exhausted, and I think the idea of breaking through the dualist paradigm, even if we do it only as an exploration exercise, is worth the effort.

Absolute knowledge, non-relativized knowledge, seems out of our reach. Perhaps because it is an abstraction, a postulate we use, similar as the perfect circle we image before drawing with a compass and obtaining a circle that is obviously flawed.

A pragmatic approach can be more interesting. We want to find out about the "reality" and the "validity" of our experiences, so we can apply them in our life. From that point of view, the frontier between objectively real and subjectively real is not only something pretty elastic and diffuse, it also becomes a mostly irrelevant consideration. The only potential conflict I can think of has to do with ethics, and how/to which extent we can implement our experiences in our life and the lives of people around us, but that's a different debate.

I think it's very possible that all the visual content and linguistic expression that we experience is all something cobbled together by the brain, which has astounding imaging capabilities. But the deep realms that we tap into that fuel these experiences do not come from within our own set of memories. So in that sense, it is a legitimate conversation with The Other.

I resonate with this. Also with your comments about the scale or types of consciousness.

Like gibran2 aptly says, we are trapped. But not only trapped in consciousness. We are trapped in a sub-set of consciousness. Consciousness is not a black or white attribute, and it seems to be qualitative, rather than quantitative, in all its degrees and manifestations around us. So we are trapped in (or severely conditioned by) a specific cultural expression of consciousness (as usual, heavily distorted by anthropocentrism), and inside of that, we have the tremendous filter of our own ego-construct as a result of our adaptation to the environment since we were born.

Now - how many factors intervening in the output of our conscious processes can we alter using chemicals, among many other techniques? If you allow me the strong AI metaphor, How many switches in the computer can we turn on and off, how many configurations can we experience?

In every single of those experiences, we can encounter completely different things - but all of them are an expression of reality. Archetypal reality, molecular reality, self realities. All of them dynamic enough to have to two-way interaction with our biology. No matter how strong in comparison is the presence in our lives of matter > mind influences, we have enough facts on the table to keep mind > matter influences in serious consideration, from cognitive dissonance to placebo effect.

Now, these are layers and layers of reality. I think that if we start by giving these layers of reality a qualitative outlook, by allowing ourselves to complicate the picture as it obviously deserves, we are doing ourselves a favor. And the answers we may find will be undoubtedly more meaningful, more useful and more satisfying.

Anyway... Great words Vodsel, I couldn't have said it better myself.

In my opinion, the real vs not real debate is destined to go nowhere. Forever. Only by working past this false distinction can this conversation make any real progress.

Thank you and agreed again.

EDIT: I just saw Snozzleberry's post about "A Pragmatic approach" by Entropymancer, and that thread was one of my favorite Nexus readings ever. It should become more than an approach, it should be a starting ground. Must read.

 

[hixidom]

To add another representation of Guyomech's idea, I would like to point out that the distinction of real vs not real is merely a figure-ground problem. There is a metaphysical boundary between all that we think exists and all that we think does not exist, but this boundary does not avail itself of an "inside" and an "outside". The fact that one side exists requires that the other side exists in a certain way. So, it could very well be that I am on the side of "nonexistence", but that's really an inappropriate label, at this point, because which side is "real" is just a matter of perspective.

In the image, some will say that the vase is "real", some will say that the faces are "real", but the truth is that one cannot exist without the other.

 

[jamie]

The only objective conclusion we can really come to is that reality in all times and places seems to be subjective.

"Real" and "unreal" are unlikely abstractions. How can something even be "unreal"? If something is "unreal" we still find it worthy enough to discuss and give it this name..so that makes little sense.

If the univers dreams(and if you follow the holographic theory it should, because we do) than which dream is "real"? The dream within the dream or the one that dreamed up that first dream?

If the universe is analagous to us on some level than it goes to say that on some level it has aspects analagous to the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind. The metaphores of the subconscious dreaming mind are so abstract that 2 completely unrelated things can come together to create greater cohesion, little glimmers of meaning in seemingly meaningless connections. A dark storm cloud within the mind of the dreamer can really represent latent fear of the unkown or dispair over a lost loved one. Nothing about it is "rational". These are the archetypes of the dreaming mind.

..and so as we move through the drama of the universal mind we sometimes find ourselved suddenly aware within the greater dream..the archetypes of the universal mind bearing their great light upon our lives in majestic symphonies of coherance we call syncronicity.

What is "real" and what is "unreal" sounds to be an almost caveman distinction at this point. Im not hung up on that. Being lucid and coherant within the dream of your life is more to the point. If you get too lost in the archetypes you loose the focus of your dream and end up sort of coherant. Dreaming is real in the sense that dreaming is real. We all do it. If you can dream with coherance you will find that the world is far more magickal than we know ..Im building a dream ship.

 

[Guyomech]

Beautiful post Jamie.

Although life itself is not metaphorical per se, our interpretation of it, the storyline that we live and believe in, is built almost entirely of metaphor. Living life in an inherently interpretive act. So in this sense it's not about what's real vs nonreal, so much as it is about what kind of metaphorical space you inhabit. I come from a rationalist background, I read science journals and am very interested in all fields of scientific pursuit. I've also tripped a lot, including a period where I regularly took heroic doses of LSD and shrooms, so a linear rationalist model doesn't fit. I'm always attempting to reconcile the two- in my first post here is an example, where I invoke ancient DNA coding as a means of having real communication with universal entities. I don't think my model is at all inconsistent with, for example, Eliyahu's viewpoint, and in fact if you took our two models and put them side by side you'll find them loaded with equivalencies. What is most different is our choice of metaphor- we explain the world to ourselves in language that fits our personalities. That doesn't make some people right and others wrong (although there are a lot of fundamentalist spiritual traditions that are so personally stifling that I tend to think of them as manifestly wrong).

 

[pandom]

I also believe the answer is much more complex and way more simple than the question.
Or it could just be this: Even if they're just voices in my head, of some detached / forgotten me, wouldn't the information be as importent as in any other way around it? May as well ask each of them how they'd like to be reffered to, who cares what these run-away lunatics wanna be called?

As I think was already pointed out, I totally agree that the concequences of each paradigm should be considered with individual taste in morality and so.

I wanna add this too:

The Light of consciousness
The one that gives
Like that, a time and space
To these,
And others not.

Sometimes even the consciosness
Is blinded by it's halo