This post is part of a series where I hope to share some of what I've learned about a woefully overlooked connection between rationality and mysticism. Many people have a deep intuition that there's something unspeakably magical about life and existence, but struggle to fit it into a rationalist framework....
Hi all! First time poster. I'll be honest: I'm feeling a bit nervous posting this here. I want to share some thoughts about consciousness and the nature of reality. The basic idea is that reality is, in fact, a dream, and this can be discovered for oneself beyond any reasonable...
To put it in other terms: the straw rationalist becomes cognitively fused with their worldview, and the postrationalist does not. Even when one believes that one is not fused with a worldview, there is almost always a cognitive fusion with one's metaphysics going on. It's what gives rise to one's very experience of reality in the first place.
Thanks for the feedback! I moved it to the intro and added some stuff.
Here's a sort of amalgamation: imagine if it were somehow literally the case that the ground of being were pure infinite love, and its job was to birth entire realities into existence, to give it a way to know itself from infinitely many perspectives. Now imagine rediscovering this truth, from the perspective of that primordial, atemporal being-ness, and watching that process evolve into the experience you normally think of as "being me."
The "climate crisis," aka the destruction of the biosphere.
This post is part of a series where I hope to share some of what I've learned about a woefully overlooked connection between rationality and mysticism.
Many people have a deep intuition that there's something unspeakably magical about life and existence, but struggle to fit it into a rationalist framework. Deep down, we "know" that this intuition can be nothing more than rogue neurotransmitters, presumably serving some mindless evolutionary purpose.
In my experience, there is more to the story. And it turns out that rationality, if followed meticulously to its logical conclusion, can help offer a glimpse into the experiential source of that intuition.
Your entire life unfolds entirely within your mind. Yet it is... (read 969 more words →)
By itself it should not convince you that you're dreaming. I don't know if you've ever had a lucid dream, but often they are triggered by an oddity that you (for some reason) decide to take seriously in a particular way. A green dragon may prompt you to introspect in that way, but only if you don't accept the mind's trick offering. At that point it does become possible to know that you are dreaming.
Oops -- that was an accidental inclusion of part of a draft. I'll remove it. Still, let me try to explain where it was going.
Various things can happen in your dream that might spur you to consider that you are dreaming. A green dragon may fly through the sky, or a dream character may tell you "you're dreaming!" In either case, the mind can quickly generate a very convincing explanation: "duh, green dragons always come on Tuesdays."
If you had your daytime rationality available, you could see through this deception. But you don't, and similarly, in our normal waking state, we lack the cognitive ability that would reveal the dreamlike nature of this reality. "Yes, I have no reason to believe in a past, but duh, it's true anyway because ...."
Thanks for commenting!
Hi all! First time poster. I'll be honest: I'm feeling a bit nervous posting this here.
I want to share some thoughts about consciousness and the nature of reality. The basic idea is that reality is, in fact, a dream, and this can be discovered for oneself beyond any reasonable doubt. Roughly, the method is to grok the fact that your metaphysical assumptions are not rationally grounded in the way you normally assume.
The main obstacle to its discovery is a subtle cognitive process that continually reinforces our metaphysics. I demonstrate how these beliefs (such as those regarding the nature of time) are not based in reason, contrary to intuition. Yet even if one... (read more)
He's very clear about metaphysics just being "mind-stuff" and irrelevant to genuine awakening. He doesn't talk about the stuff that might be considered "unscientific" (e.g., that would fall under the category of psi) because he realizes that it would distract people from awakening (some of them by being too interested in it, and others averse).