What is reality?

[chutney1]

Hey all,

I'm brand new here and first and foremost would like to simply say THANK YOU for this priceless repository of information, experimental data, and community involvement. While this may not be a super active forum, quality over quantity has always been my mantra and the DMT-Nexus has quality in spades. I mean the level of intelligent discussion, scientific discourse, analysis etc on here is staggering and I've long thought that these sort of intelligent discussion groups with a cohesive community vibe have all but disappeared from the internet so it's a breath of fresh air when I browse through the forums of this community.

Anyways I am a psychedelic user and have been for about 9-10 years. However unlike most psychedelic users I trip VERY rarely.. sometimes once or twice a year. I used to partake a lot more often in my youth, but these days I have such respect for it and frankly I'm just a chicken shit when it comes to dosing. For the past several years I've only been doing high dose trips, but as I said, only very rarely. I have no experience with DMT, though I have purchased and read every single published book I could find on it (which unfortunately ain't much). I'm currently pursuing my first extraction tek and thus I want to become a member of this community and learn as much as I possibly can from you all.

Personally I am of a philosophical bent. I'm a thinker and a reader through and through. I read all non-fiction, pop-science, cosmology, biology, trip lit (psychedelic literature), philosophy, metaphysics etc. So I wanted to start with a question- and it's a doozy, especially for a first post!

The question is; what do you make of it all? What on Earth is going on? What is reality? Now granted everyone sees and perceives reality different, and thus I understand it is a subjective question. However even though we may experience and interpret reality differently, there is clearly (or at least appears to be) an objective reality we are all existing in. What do you make of it? What do you think it is? Is it somehow imbued with purpose/direction/telos? Or is it just a random walk, a random collision of processes, forces and events occurring in some sort of chaos? If our universe emerged from nothingness, what "tells" this void that it morph into a universe? Somehow this "void" must convert itself into the plenum of existence, therefore there must be some sort of "laws" written into this "void," no?

Essentially, what do you make of it all? What do you think reality is?

And I'd just like to say I'm happy to be here and thanks for keeping such an awesome community alive!

 

[boogerz]

Welcome to the nexus and thank you for the introduction.

I personally would find life rather dull if I knew the answers.
In my humble opinion follow your heart and blaze your own trail.

Take care and hope to see you around

 

[Global]

Reality is a concept someone made up, and it's most likely relative to the observer.

 

[Jox]

I think your question is what is the essence of all, as you put two terms: nothingness and void. Where do you reference them from? Is it the physics or Buddhist thought? If you clarify this it may be easier to understand your question.

I think we can agree that the reality is perceived with five senses and it is shared by others, this could be a basic working term.

The mind as a computer processes the language, and thus it is not reality, but conceptualisation, like math, obviously based on reality. If you are in chemical lab you may get burned by a solvent, and if you go the the doc he may give you some treatment. If you work on math problem and goes wrong you will not get burned, and nobody can see that it went wrong.

But when our mind is on plants, then what? Is that your question?

It is a good one.

To me I see plants that heal our mind and we function better,,far better. This comes odd that our brain is not stand alone utility, as animal brain, or even wild animal brain, domestic animals get out of line with humans, as I see in TVShows of dog training.

It seems we can't detox our mind through the dreaming process, and the plants "dream out" what we can't do in normal sleep dream., and that's why we need so many other techniques to fell better, therapy, meditation, yoga you name it.

I think our software is eating up our hardware which is actually the reality.

What do you think
Jox

 

[Yoho]

Welcome!

Alas, being a skeptic at heart I feel the answers to your questions are unknowable to us lowly mortals. Do I think the Universe is just random chaos? Not really. Things seem to follow some underlying physical laws even if we cannot determine exactly what those laws are. But then the question arises: why would reality follow one set of laws instead of some other set? Maybe it's for the same reason that water and electricity always prefer the path of least resistance. The Universe works the way it does simply because that's the easiest way for it to work. Or maybe I'm talking out my ass

Ultimately reality is whatever you make of it, right?

 

[Silo233]

I don't know what reality is. I guess that's what leads me to DMT and other spiritual perspectives. I like Buddhism because skepticism is encouraged both by the Dalai Lama and the Buddha himself.

 

[Bo]

Welcome, I'd say the void of which you speak is the phase-cancelled totality of all infinity. It's a quantum infinity, imagine 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9...... going off into infinity. Now imagine each number in that sequence can occupie one of 3 states. For instance 1 can be +1,-1 or + and - 1 simultaneously what we would call 0. the best way to sum it up is if you had a guitar with infinite strings feeding back into and amp with infinite headroom but one speaker. You pluck the lowest note, the the guitar starts to feed back, more and more harmonics start the other strings ringing in sympathy, until all the strings are ringing at the same time. Ones this occurs you have infinite harmonic content being played through a signal diaphragm and this phase cancels to 0.
In our perception of the universe our amp and speaker are the singularity and the guitar strings are light. Sound stays as the element thats starts the process though. If you have such a singularity (the phase-cancelled totality of all infinity) you need something to brake the equilibrium, so the singularity will discharge into an existence. That trigger has to travel faster than the speed of light as to escape the infinite gravity of the singularity. The only thing we have that can travel faster than the speed of light to my mind is sound. Sound's speed is variable, it travels faster in more dense mediums. So if you have the singularity (all of infinity happening simultaneously condensed into 1) then you have an infinitely dense medium. So in the singularity sound can travel infinitely fast. The spin of the singularity or its ESR creates the sound and the first note of the feedback loop. This is what the true Om is.
Imaging you have a still bowl of water, this represents existence in it's phase-cancelled state. If you play a sound wave into the water a geometry will manifest. Sound is consciousness and the water is light. The Flower of life geometry its the geometry of the singularity, a perfectly phase canceled fractal matrix.
So the long and short of it is; Awareness is an infinite singularity and consciousness dictates the geometry of possible discharge.

1 = ∞ = 0

X

 

[MadPlanter]

Very interesting stuff there. However I believe sound is much much slower than light. It might travel faster in certain mediums possibly but if I remember correctly light travels at 1000m/sec and sound travels at about 700 mph. Have you ever saw videos of military jet riding the break of the sound barrier? When this happens a cloud of I guess steam/condensation in mid air forms around the aircraft. I could be totally wrong but no matter what medium regardless of density light will always be faster as its initially faster by a long shot.

Anyways the other day I watched a documentary on the existence of God by Stephen Hawking. He basically came to the conclusion there is no God. Its sad that is how he feels. He uses some big science to prove his agenda but to me that only proves more to me that there is a Creator. Ultimately he sums it up to before the big bang there was no "time" so therefore there wasn't "time" for a Creator to create the big bang. Yes nexians that's a good chuckle feel free to lol on that. "Time" that's only IMO what we called it after the big bang. Wasn't there a perpetual nothingness before to big bang from the backside of the infinity curve? What's that called? I would prefer to call it "per material time" maybe but "time" seems to fit right by itself either way IMO lol. But Hawking must not feel that way. He believed the big bang just spontaneously happened as a result of the fact it could I guess???

Otherwise his science backing the rest is totally true he just cheapened out that its just forces with no overall control other than their own existence and interaction with the other forces of "reality". To me that idea is asinine but that's my opinion. I believe its much more deeply complex than Hawking believes and there's no way as we currently exist to actually understand it all. I feel this way based on my own experiences in life not that I'm a renown physicist.

I think reality is "guided" but not "controlled" that's the whole free will thing. Regardless of our free will there still comes a guided destination reality will come to as it was supposed to all along. Whether that's the imploding of the current universe we live in only to be "big banged" out again or whatever. Its all a recycling process which I believe is also a fact most leading science agrees upon. Just my 2 cents

Peace

 

[MadPlanter]

On a side note its very sad Hawking put that documentary out there. Its pretty well explained I guess but IMO not really. The part I feel is sad is that seemingly educated individuals will watch that and consider all that true science and just take his opinion as fact. They'll end up just going, "Oh I guess that explains that there must not be a Creator". That IMO is a very dangerous notion. I believe personally beyond Hawking himself the powers that be wanted a renown smart guy like him to back such a notion. Most like I said "seemingly" educated individuals will just accept his words as fact as is no matter what just because we have this underlying pre-planted notion Hawking is one of the smartest guys around. I see between the lines that that documentary was produced for just such a thing...a crushing blow to people trying to figure out everything and throw them off a spirituality path. No reason to be on the path if there's nothing after death and there's only this small ride we call our lives to live. Kinda promotes a hedonistic view of life and therefore a greater risk that more people will create more negativity just just because they believe there isn't any reason not too meaning an afterlife or a continuation to become a higher being. I see an attack on spiritual purposes on purpose by the release of that documentary but that might be just me...

 

[chutney1]

I think your question is what is the essence of all, as you put two terms: nothingness and void. Where do you reference them from? Is it the physics or Buddhist thought? If you clarify this it may be easier to understand your question.

I think we can agree that the reality is perceived with five senses and it is shared by others, this could be a basic working term.

The mind as a computer processes the language, and thus it is not reality, but conceptualisation, like math, obviously based on reality. If you are in chemical lab you may get burned by a solvent, and if you go the the doc he may give you some treatment. If you work on math problem and goes wrong you will not get burned, and nobody can see that it went wrong.

But when our mind is on plants, then what? Is that your question?

It is a good one.

To me I see plants that heal our mind and we function better,,far better. This comes odd that our brain is not stand alone utility, as animal brain, or even wild animal brain, domestic animals get out of line with humans, as I see in TVShows of dog training.

It seems we can't detox our mind through the dreaming process, and the plants "dream out" what we can't do in normal sleep dream., and that's why we need so many other techniques to fell better, therapy, meditation, yoga you name it.

I think our software is eating up our hardware which is actually the reality.

What do you think
Jox

Hey Jox,

Yes I completely agree that all one can ever know is hallucination. "Reality" (in true Matrix style) is merely sensory input from the external world (whatever that may be, probably unknowable) coming at us, entering our retinas, being channeled up the brainstem, distributed into neural networks across various brain regions and from there these electrochemical impulses sort of "reconstruct" a reality... all in real time, no less.

So at the end of the day I think you hit a wall and must agree that true objective reality is unknowable... all we ever get is the signals from the external world which are transcoded into signals which hit our brain in real time, and the brain basically then goes about "unpacking" those signals and reconstructing a reality for you to perceive... however there is no way to determine how accurate a representation of actual reality gets reconstructed in our heads.

So essentially what I'm asking is; what do you think the universe is? Why do you think it began? Do you think that things are moving toward some kind of goal or telos? Or do you think random processes simply fell together in such a way that the birth of a universe was a result of that? Do you think life continues after death? Ultimately my question is; after a lifetime of thinking about these deep philosophical questions, after a lifetime of talking about it, after reading about it, after a lifetime of psychedelic voyaging, what are your conclusions? What do you make of it all? What does it mean to be "thrown into Being", if it means anything at all? Essentially what do you think of this entire project of Being? The universe, natural law, biology, matter, and so on... what are your conclusions?

Again I am not asking this to ridicule or pick apart peoples beliefs/ideas/conclusions. I am only asking from a genuine curiosity, a genuine desire to learn from everyone else's beliefs and conclusions. I constantly ponder what it means (if it means anything) to be incarnate in a human body, as I sit on this beautiful sphere which is itself flying around the Sun, which is itself embedded in a galaxy and that is embedded within a universe... what on Earth is this all about? What IS this thing we are embedded in, and why is it this way as opposed to some other way? Bear with me here, cause it's hard for me to language this sort of thing. So please don't feel like you have to "prove" anything... I'm just curious. I think if certain members of the psychedelic community (the scientists, physicists, artists, philosophers, theoreticians, engineers, etc) were given research budgets comparable to even a quarter of our current defense/military spending, then these people would be able to actually make some REAL progress on the question of just what on Earth is going on here.

I think we need to start dumping some actual money and some actual resources into exploring the question of; what does this all mean? Or is it utterly meaningless and thus foolish to get caught up in such folly? While these may seem insurmountable questions in our present day, I'm not so sure they are destined to stay that way. I think it's possible that we are here to crack the puzzle of reality. We are here TO understand it. But that's just a musing and a conversation for another day.

When I speak of "void" I am speaking of it in the sense a physicist would... or at least how I THINK a physicist would speak of the "void." Essentially I'm trying to provide a linguistic construct for what came before the Big Bang... which is hard to do because I don't know that the human mind is capable of conceptualizing a true "void" or true "non-entity". We always think in terms of darkness, space, etc. How can one conceive of utter nothingness? Well I don't know but when I speak of the "void" which came before the Big Bang, this is the context in which I am speaking. What I was trying to get at, is if the entire universe sprouted from utter nothingness, somewhere in that nothingness there had to be a "law" (or a construct of some sort) which tells this nothingness that its about to change state and become pregnant with a potential universe. I mean how can pure nothingness convert itself into the entire plenum of existence without SOMETHING being present in it?

I don't know if all this makes sense. I'll try to lay it out a little clearer tomorrow. I just got off a 15 hour work day so my mind is pretty much mush right now! But thanks everyone for the responses and for the warm welcome!

 

[Ouroboros777]

Testing ground. Every thought, emotion, action is recorded, and our choices in the moment lead us to situations which give us a choice of how we react, which is the only thing we truly have control over. Much like a video game, if you pass one level you will go to the next, and the next, and the next. Sometimes we are pushed beyond what our minds and bodies can take to test our limits, to see what happens when we max out. Some people cry. Some people expel negative, chaotic, angry energetic vibrations to innocent children and animals. Some others strengthen their internal core and use it for meditation and grounding. When it is time to die, I firmly believe the actions we took while on this earth will give us a sense of peace or loss when our soul makes the final departure from our body. This is what matters. The energetic state we are in when our soul leaves our body for the final time. This is the entire point. What other point is there that is the most definitive moment in life? Death. One way to increase the chances of a peaceful exit, is how we act and exist in the present. The rest.. samsara.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

Required Reading from The Nexus (to start to address the OP)

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

The Improbability of Hyperspace

The Improbability of Hyperspace, Part II

 

[steppa]

what do you make of it all? What on Earth is going on? What is reality?

It doesn't make sense to tear reality in parts. One will only find smaller parts. Tear them apart too, and you'll find even smaller ones...etc. You'll end up with many parts ordered and sorted into big piles. But by tearing apart the things, they won't make sense.

An excerpt from Just a Wee Bit More About DMT

"We create our reality. We are all individually responsible to ourselves for the
reality we create, whether we are miserable or joyous, this is our choice—our
design. We are not alone; we exist as an integral part of all life, breathing, pulsating,
vibrating, giving off plant food, absorbing animal food, in a multi-level
fabric of incredibly beautiful designs and patterns.

Consciousness is very flexible. Like a gas, it will fill any container in the form of
that container. It is as ubiquitous as the universe, subsuming and interweaving
with the fabric of nothingness, matter, and energy. This fabric is a naturally
evolving pattern out of which we and the cosmos are woven."

 

[Kenshi.Bardo]

Questions of reality always make me think of the double-slit experiment.

Essentially, a researcher was shooting matter through two slits.
While watching, everything worked as you'd expect.
While it was not being observed, the patterns formed on the other sides of the slits were different.

In my eyes, this proves that reality is aware of itself.

I believe we're sensors for this "reality".

What do I think reality is?

Imagine you're an infinite mass that is aware.
It would not be hard to know everything.
Wonder if you got bored?

Maybe you'd create different worlds and beings with which you could kind of "play a game".

What is reality? A way for the universe to entertain itself.

Who really knows.