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Through meditative and other techniques, I have learned that-- at least for myself-- that "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call

Through meditative and other techniques, I have learned that-- at least for myself-- that "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities, personalities, archetypal emotions, drives, and other things I am not yet able to classify. My consciousness-- the surface most of us have access to, tries to make sense of these conversations and form them into a cohesive illusion/narrative in which I am a single "thing" of which I am in control. A few times I've reached states where I can connect or disconnect these entities for a few minutes, or have a conversation with them directly.

unfunco 9y ago
Have you experimented with dimethyltryptamine before? I would be interested to know if a commitment to meditation could induce similar effects. What you have described sounds similar to common effects from chemicals such as N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Alternatively, could those effects be reached more easily through sensory deprivation?
- escherplex 9y ago
  > "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities Prior to attending a week-long ayahuasca retreat in Peru, a psychiatrist friend decided to use ketamine to induce a controlled state of dissociative identity in which one detached aspect of her psyche could observe the machinations of another. Curiously, after returning from Peru following a mentored DMT regimen she reported experiences similar to those reported by oceanghost. Buddhist mystic types contend that one's psychology is a function of 'atmanah' (some sort of co-minds) interacting with a individual's 'prajnatma' (one's self) [Dhammapada text]. Interesting. IF valid (BIG IF) then nobody would be what they seem.
  - monk_e_boy 9y ago
    I kitesurf, there are some tricks that I find very scary, I both want to try them and find them too scary to do. Sometimes its easier to hand off control to my monkey brain, I'm not sure who it is inside me, but they find it easier to ignore the fear that holds human me back. I feel like there is Mr Low-level (maybe lizard brain?) who takes over when I'm super sleepy or driving or walking and listening to podcasts. There is monkey brain who is reckless and doesn't mind what happens to the physical self. Then there is me, I'm usually in charge. The interactions are more complex and nuanced than I can write here.
    - escherplex 9y ago
      Fun. With kite-surfing you have to be two people at once, legs and upper body having co-operating minds of their own. If you get down to Oz you may want to try cloud-surfing. When you have an occluded weather front the leading edge clouds have a strong updraft, with a strong downdraft at the trailing end; effect is like a suspended horizontal wind tube. That was demonstrated to me during a private-IFR lesson where (under hood) I heard a loud whooshing sound and the vertical speed indicator shot up. Concerned, the CFI explained what was happening. Interesting! Wonder if you could cloud surf? Turned out that was an activity in Queensland, Australia where they have a spring phenomena called the 'Morning Glory' with long tubular cloud formations and lots of glider pilots. If you try it make sure you know where you want to land since the back country there is full of nasty bugs and snakes and the Gulf of Carpentaria has more than it's fair share of box jellyfish. Nice place to visit ... Instead of lizard / monkey / the 'me' try physicalistic / vitalistic / mentalistic
- stanfordkid 9y ago
  I've taken high doses of LSD and definitely experienced very similar entities ... Normally there are many types of forces and drives that are each "speaking to us" constantly... we just never perceive them as personifiable or distinct -- it's just "our inner voice". My thought is that the brain stores something analagous to a kind of a big fuzzy hierarchical hash table between sensory inputs and nervous system response (pleasure/pain). LSD/DMT allow us to traverse these hashtables in ways that are not usually possible. (DMT especially...)
- oceanghost 9y ago
  I have but I don't like psychs in general. I've had the best luck personally with arylcyclohexylamines. A friend of mine who did meditation seriously told me he had heard of this as an "advanced technique", but I really don't know. :)
- posterboy 9y ago
  if the body produces dmt (precursors or sumsuch), then yes.
john_woo954 9y ago
Ontological expansion has become something of interest to me recently. Would you like to share what else you've been practicing, apart from meditation? Fascinating viewpoint by the way!
armitron 9y ago
Carl Jung has written extensively about these "parts" of the mind. His process of "individuation", which is modeled on the alchemical spagyric -- take apart and reintegrate -- process, can be used by people today in order to achieve similar results. Moreover, what you describe can also be found in western mystery schools and traditions that go back hundreds of years. Terms such as "knowledge and conversation with the holy guardian angel", "crossing the abyss", "ego death", "ascending the Tree of Life" refer to profound, iconoclastic experiences that can forever shatter one's assumption of being a monad in space-time. Realizing that in one's mind exist various superintelligences, normally inaccessible, with their own motives and goals, can be quite distressing to say the least.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  I've not read Jung, I will, thank you.
blueprint 9y ago
That sounds pretty scary, oceanghost. It sounds like you haven't actually confirmed yet what you come to know through your practice of meditation and how you are changed by it. There is a huge, polar gap between the process and results of the meditation taught in modern spiritual practices (such as Zen Buddhism) and what Gautama Buddha taught to his students.
internetman55 9y ago
I don't know why people experiment with bizarre techniques and experimental drugs. Western Europeans could just follow the Christian tradition to achieve better results more safely. People have been studying this stuff for millennia. Unfortunately we're so confused nowadays that people are gonna think of Jesus Camp and jumping around and shouting when they think of Christianity.
- danjc 9y ago
  Because we assume we are objective observers. Which we aren't. Rom 1:18b
- malmsteen 9y ago
  There is 0 reason not to experiment though. And Christianity is just one religion amongst 10 major other religions so there's no reason to think it has all the answers (especially considering the many mistakes it has done in the assessment of various scientific facts..)
  - internetman55 9y ago
    Assuming that I'm speaking to someone of Western European descent, I see no reason to jettison the tradition that your ancestors (i.e. people with similar genetic, cultural, and temperamental factors) slowly developed over time in order to experiment with random things unless you are specifically anti-Christian. The truth is that spirituality can be quite dangerous if you do the wrong things, and if you're gonna start pulling things out of random traditions or the pharmacy with no cultural context for them, I think you're gonna be taking very unnecessary risks. For whatever reason, foreign religious figures such as the Dalai Lama have more cachet than Christian figures in the minds of many modern people, and from what I understand he has stated the same thing: "Whenever I give a large teaching, I always make clear that it is safer to follow your own traditions, rather than change to another tradition," he said. "There's less confusion. Here in the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessons over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself." Some folks get so tied up to their anti-Christian sentiment that they'll try to join foreign religions they have no understanding of instead of just reading what the doctors of the Church have to say about the interior life, and admitting that maybe they were a bit hasty in writing off such a complex and beautiful tradition.
somberi 9y ago
"Prayer is merely the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view" - Emerson.

unfunco 9y ago

Have you experimented with dimethyltryptamine before? I would be interested to know if a commitment to meditation could induce similar effects. What you have described sounds similar to common effects from chemicals such as N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Alternatively, could those effects be reached more easily through sensory deprivation?

escherplex 9y ago
> "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities Prior to attending a week-long ayahuasca retreat in Peru, a psychiatrist friend decided to use ketamine to induce a controlled state of dissociative identity in which one detached aspect of her psyche could observe the machinations of another. Curiously, after returning from Peru following a mentored DMT regimen she reported experiences similar to those reported by oceanghost. Buddhist mystic types contend that one's psychology is a function of 'atmanah' (some sort of co-minds) interacting with a individual's 'prajnatma' (one's self) [Dhammapada text]. Interesting. IF valid (BIG IF) then nobody would be what they seem.
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  I kitesurf, there are some tricks that I find very scary, I both want to try them and find them too scary to do. Sometimes its easier to hand off control to my monkey brain, I'm not sure who it is inside me, but they find it easier to ignore the fear that holds human me back. I feel like there is Mr Low-level (maybe lizard brain?) who takes over when I'm super sleepy or driving or walking and listening to podcasts. There is monkey brain who is reckless and doesn't mind what happens to the physical self. Then there is me, I'm usually in charge. The interactions are more complex and nuanced than I can write here.
  - escherplex 9y ago
    Fun. With kite-surfing you have to be two people at once, legs and upper body having co-operating minds of their own. If you get down to Oz you may want to try cloud-surfing. When you have an occluded weather front the leading edge clouds have a strong updraft, with a strong downdraft at the trailing end; effect is like a suspended horizontal wind tube. That was demonstrated to me during a private-IFR lesson where (under hood) I heard a loud whooshing sound and the vertical speed indicator shot up. Concerned, the CFI explained what was happening. Interesting! Wonder if you could cloud surf? Turned out that was an activity in Queensland, Australia where they have a spring phenomena called the 'Morning Glory' with long tubular cloud formations and lots of glider pilots. If you try it make sure you know where you want to land since the back country there is full of nasty bugs and snakes and the Gulf of Carpentaria has more than it's fair share of box jellyfish. Nice place to visit ... Instead of lizard / monkey / the 'me' try physicalistic / vitalistic / mentalistic
stanfordkid 9y ago
I've taken high doses of LSD and definitely experienced very similar entities ... Normally there are many types of forces and drives that are each "speaking to us" constantly... we just never perceive them as personifiable or distinct -- it's just "our inner voice". My thought is that the brain stores something analagous to a kind of a big fuzzy hierarchical hash table between sensory inputs and nervous system response (pleasure/pain). LSD/DMT allow us to traverse these hashtables in ways that are not usually possible. (DMT especially...)
oceanghost 9y ago
I have but I don't like psychs in general. I've had the best luck personally with arylcyclohexylamines. A friend of mine who did meditation seriously told me he had heard of this as an "advanced technique", but I really don't know. :)
posterboy 9y ago
if the body produces dmt (precursors or sumsuch), then yes.

john_woo954 9y ago

Ontological expansion has become something of interest to me recently. Would you like to share what else you've been practicing, apart from meditation? Fascinating viewpoint by the way!

armitron 9y ago

Carl Jung has written extensively about these "parts" of the mind. His process of "individuation", which is modeled on the alchemical spagyric -- take apart and reintegrate -- process, can be used by people today in order to achieve similar results. Moreover, what you describe can also be found in western mystery schools and traditions that go back hundreds of years. Terms such as "knowledge and conversation with the holy guardian angel", "crossing the abyss", "ego death", "ascending the Tree of Life" refer to profound, iconoclastic experiences that can forever shatter one's assumption of being a monad in space-time. Realizing that in one's mind exist various superintelligences, normally inaccessible, with their own motives and goals, can be quite distressing to say the least.

oceanghost 9y ago
I've not read Jung, I will, thank you.

blueprint 9y ago

That sounds pretty scary, oceanghost. It sounds like you haven't actually confirmed yet what you come to know through your practice of meditation and how you are changed by it. There is a huge, polar gap between the process and results of the meditation taught in modern spiritual practices (such as Zen Buddhism) and what Gautama Buddha taught to his students.

internetman55 9y ago

I don't know why people experiment with bizarre techniques and experimental drugs. Western Europeans could just follow the Christian tradition to achieve better results more safely. People have been studying this stuff for millennia. Unfortunately we're so confused nowadays that people are gonna think of Jesus Camp and jumping around and shouting when they think of Christianity.

danjc 9y ago
Because we assume we are objective observers. Which we aren't. Rom 1:18b
malmsteen 9y ago
There is 0 reason not to experiment though. And Christianity is just one religion amongst 10 major other religions so there's no reason to think it has all the answers (especially considering the many mistakes it has done in the assessment of various scientific facts..)
- internetman55 9y ago
  Assuming that I'm speaking to someone of Western European descent, I see no reason to jettison the tradition that your ancestors (i.e. people with similar genetic, cultural, and temperamental factors) slowly developed over time in order to experiment with random things unless you are specifically anti-Christian. The truth is that spirituality can be quite dangerous if you do the wrong things, and if you're gonna start pulling things out of random traditions or the pharmacy with no cultural context for them, I think you're gonna be taking very unnecessary risks. For whatever reason, foreign religious figures such as the Dalai Lama have more cachet than Christian figures in the minds of many modern people, and from what I understand he has stated the same thing: "Whenever I give a large teaching, I always make clear that it is safer to follow your own traditions, rather than change to another tradition," he said. "There's less confusion. Here in the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessons over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself." Some folks get so tied up to their anti-Christian sentiment that they'll try to join foreign religions they have no understanding of instead of just reading what the doctors of the Church have to say about the interior life, and admitting that maybe they were a bit hasty in writing off such a complex and beautiful tradition.

somberi 9y ago

"Prayer is merely the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view" - Emerson.