Ripheus23
Rising Star
Okay, so I have a confession to make that I just made to myself: when I read about DMT hyperspace, I instantly believed that everyone who honestly says they actually made their way there, that it's a real place and not just an arbitrary fiction, are telling the truth. Why? Because I think transcendental idealism can be used to prove that there is a plane of existence defined by the following attributes:
(1) Its relationship with the human world is creative (if the world was created, then this is what created it).
(2) It creates (if it does) through something like musical language fused with moral power.
(3) Because vows, promises, covenants, etc. are foundational concepts in Kantian ethics along the lines of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, the entities that would live in the world that creates ours would all be keen on covenanting with anyone they interacted with.
(4) The geometry of the structures on this plane of existence would be the kind of kaleidoscopic glory attributed to DMT during and after a user's breakthrough into DMT hyperspace.
(5) If there is transcendent life after death, it would be here.
(6) Being here would involve an intense sense of having "come home" even if you had never been in this place before.
(7) This plane of existence has an extremely important connection to dreaming/imagination.
I want to stress the iffyness of (1)-(7). I'm not saying that I know that the world was created by these deal-brokers from heaven by virtue of an infinite song expressing the ultimate passion of virtue and grace, a song that by synaesthetic divinity assumes the form of geometric rhapsody. I'm saying that it's possible for this to be the case.
According to Kant, to prove that something is possible, you can't just *imagine* it. By saying this, he distanced himself from almost every other philosopher who wrote about the role of conceivability and imagination in our knowledge of possibilities. For these were mostly ready to grant that if you could just conceive something, even if you couldn't clearly visualize or otherwise concretely render the conception, then that thing could exist in the world of substances outside of thought. But Kant says that there are only these ways available for us to show what can exist in objective fact:
A. You show that the object does exist, then apply the rule, "If something is actual, then it is possible, for if it were impossible, then its negation would be necessary."
B. You show that the object coheres with other objects we know about.
C. You show that the object coheres with what we know about how we can perceive objects.
D. You show that the object should exist, and apply the rule, "If something ought to be case, then it's possible for it to be the case."
From (D), though, you can get a lot more than you might expect. Anselm of Canterbury used it to come up with the most influential theory of the Incarnation that any Christian theologian has ever come up with. One of his basic points was that if sin demands amends, then any sinner ought to make up for his sins. But humans are not powerful enough all on their own to make amends for the infinite evil of all sin. Only God has that kind of power. So if humanity ought to redeem the world, and if only God can redeem the world, then God had to become a man (or a woman, although Anselm himself goes to some lengths to try to prove that the Second Person of the Trinity was liable only to Incarnate as a man). And if He had to, then He was able to; and, as far as Anselm was concerned, He did in the person of Christ.
Kant uses (D) to license rational hope for the immortality of personal consciousness, among other things. The weakest and therefore paradoxically the strongest way to put the idea is like this: if we ought to do things that absolute death would make impossible for us, then there is some way for us to endure death. Whether this means reincarnation, resurrection, becoming a ghost, or something else, pure reason doesn't say. It just says that maybe, just maybe, however hopeless things appear, there might be an escape.
If DMT hyperspace is objectively valid, might it be as a maximum exercise of our ability to know what is possible? That is, does DMT cause our minds to process possibility at an extreme rate, making use of our capacity for working with transfinite numbers to dilate our apprehension of this dynamic to produce bursts of infinite content? That abyss of crystal fractals might be our objective knowledge of all geometrical potential inherent in pure space, rapidly cycling through our mind's eyes. This would explain some of the sense of, "This is all real, this is the way things are, where they come from," that many users have reported, without an admission that the DMT entities are to be considered along the lines of an alien civilization with which users have made peculiar contact.
And the moral sources of possibilities would appear under the categories that are morally clear for us: living personalities (like seraphim and the children of Oberon, to wax way, way too poetically), beauty, truth, light (a central shining, even). Kant says that ethics is defined in part by an ideal of a perfected reality, the Form of the Good after a fashion, and this ideal is not a random desire but determined as to its specifics by facts about the rules of right and wrong. All entities encountered in the sea of infinite possibility would carry within them this aura of factual determination, so that they were experienced not as sheer hallucinations but the truth.
I have a lot more to say than this to account for all of (1)-(7). That the actual world depends greatly on the possible one is easy enough to accept, but this is not to accept that actuality is directly generated by possibility (and let's not even get into combinations like "actual possibilities" and "possible possibilities"). The DMT trip reports of objects being created by musical language can be accounted for by a deeper application of the theory I've gone over so far in this post, but I will leave those depths for another day or night.
(1) Its relationship with the human world is creative (if the world was created, then this is what created it).
(2) It creates (if it does) through something like musical language fused with moral power.
(3) Because vows, promises, covenants, etc. are foundational concepts in Kantian ethics along the lines of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, the entities that would live in the world that creates ours would all be keen on covenanting with anyone they interacted with.
(4) The geometry of the structures on this plane of existence would be the kind of kaleidoscopic glory attributed to DMT during and after a user's breakthrough into DMT hyperspace.
(5) If there is transcendent life after death, it would be here.
(6) Being here would involve an intense sense of having "come home" even if you had never been in this place before.
(7) This plane of existence has an extremely important connection to dreaming/imagination.
I want to stress the iffyness of (1)-(7). I'm not saying that I know that the world was created by these deal-brokers from heaven by virtue of an infinite song expressing the ultimate passion of virtue and grace, a song that by synaesthetic divinity assumes the form of geometric rhapsody. I'm saying that it's possible for this to be the case.
According to Kant, to prove that something is possible, you can't just *imagine* it. By saying this, he distanced himself from almost every other philosopher who wrote about the role of conceivability and imagination in our knowledge of possibilities. For these were mostly ready to grant that if you could just conceive something, even if you couldn't clearly visualize or otherwise concretely render the conception, then that thing could exist in the world of substances outside of thought. But Kant says that there are only these ways available for us to show what can exist in objective fact:
A. You show that the object does exist, then apply the rule, "If something is actual, then it is possible, for if it were impossible, then its negation would be necessary."
B. You show that the object coheres with other objects we know about.
C. You show that the object coheres with what we know about how we can perceive objects.
D. You show that the object should exist, and apply the rule, "If something ought to be case, then it's possible for it to be the case."
From (D), though, you can get a lot more than you might expect. Anselm of Canterbury used it to come up with the most influential theory of the Incarnation that any Christian theologian has ever come up with. One of his basic points was that if sin demands amends, then any sinner ought to make up for his sins. But humans are not powerful enough all on their own to make amends for the infinite evil of all sin. Only God has that kind of power. So if humanity ought to redeem the world, and if only God can redeem the world, then God had to become a man (or a woman, although Anselm himself goes to some lengths to try to prove that the Second Person of the Trinity was liable only to Incarnate as a man). And if He had to, then He was able to; and, as far as Anselm was concerned, He did in the person of Christ.
Kant uses (D) to license rational hope for the immortality of personal consciousness, among other things. The weakest and therefore paradoxically the strongest way to put the idea is like this: if we ought to do things that absolute death would make impossible for us, then there is some way for us to endure death. Whether this means reincarnation, resurrection, becoming a ghost, or something else, pure reason doesn't say. It just says that maybe, just maybe, however hopeless things appear, there might be an escape.
If DMT hyperspace is objectively valid, might it be as a maximum exercise of our ability to know what is possible? That is, does DMT cause our minds to process possibility at an extreme rate, making use of our capacity for working with transfinite numbers to dilate our apprehension of this dynamic to produce bursts of infinite content? That abyss of crystal fractals might be our objective knowledge of all geometrical potential inherent in pure space, rapidly cycling through our mind's eyes. This would explain some of the sense of, "This is all real, this is the way things are, where they come from," that many users have reported, without an admission that the DMT entities are to be considered along the lines of an alien civilization with which users have made peculiar contact.
And the moral sources of possibilities would appear under the categories that are morally clear for us: living personalities (like seraphim and the children of Oberon, to wax way, way too poetically), beauty, truth, light (a central shining, even). Kant says that ethics is defined in part by an ideal of a perfected reality, the Form of the Good after a fashion, and this ideal is not a random desire but determined as to its specifics by facts about the rules of right and wrong. All entities encountered in the sea of infinite possibility would carry within them this aura of factual determination, so that they were experienced not as sheer hallucinations but the truth.
I have a lot more to say than this to account for all of (1)-(7). That the actual world depends greatly on the possible one is easy enough to accept, but this is not to accept that actuality is directly generated by possibility (and let's not even get into combinations like "actual possibilities" and "possible possibilities"). The DMT trip reports of objects being created by musical language can be accounted for by a deeper application of the theory I've gone over so far in this post, but I will leave those depths for another day or night.