Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "Joe Rogan Experience #360 - Graham Hancock" video.
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Personally I have nothing against the psychedelic family of recreational molecules.
However for Graham to believe that having an "experience" that is brought about by the ingestion of one or another plant alkaloid, or other external substance, is having a "direct experience" is laughable.
It's obvious from all his hedging about the relative value of drug induced, versus actual experience, that he is deeply confused. Probably because he has never had an actual experience of awakening.
That is the only way that someone could equate a psychedelic experience with higher consciousness brought on through the ignition of natural but latent neural/hormonal systems.
That is the only way that real growth is brought about. If your higher states of consciousness are not accessible to you without a drug, or even the need for another person, then the truth is that you know nothing real or useful about the higher experiences that you are pursuing. So you have to look in all the places that you have been conditioned to look: like ancient civilizations, religions, and drugs and what not. In other words all the wrong places.
Your experiences with DMT though shattering and extremely charged are subjective and meaningless.
The comparison of the natural ignition of these higher human potentials and an experience that is the result of the ingestion of a recreational molecule is tenuous at best. The reality of an actual physical, metabolic awakening, has about the same relationship to drug use as it does to religion or some other spiritual practice. Not quite none, it is true, but the vast majority of comparisons between the two are of no real value and only serve to muddy the situation still further.
Though it is an actual physical substance that is needed to activate an expanded awareness, or if you prefer the imagrery, that is the key to the kingdom: you can only grow that plant in the interface between the repurposing of ancient genetic potenials and the desire to look directly at things, and the love of euphoria, bliss, consciousness, and intelligence. That is why it is necessary to grow in a balanced manner that incorporates both mental, and physical, as well as the so-called emotions and higher emotions.
As Joe mentioned, yoga wouldn't hurt, it would be far more efficacious to find someone who actually can, activate these higher systems within themselves, and interact with them. That may be kind of hard to do. For instance though I have met dozens of highly respected and sometimes worshiped yoga masters and instructors I have never met one that was awake, or that even knew what direction real awakening lies in.
Good luck with that. I can only tell you that waking up naturally is a lot more fun than the advocates of psychedelics like Terence McKenna would have you believe.
While most everything that presents itself as a means to awaken is worse than bullshit, it is actually a waste of time: the inner means of doing so are as fresh as the day they were layed down, in fact in most everyone that remain virginal right onto death.
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I know that the unenlightened have a bunch of rules that they have made up regarding how someone who has awakened should behave.
Since there is no chance that anyone will come to know who I am, I am unconcerned with these "guidelines".
I did not say that psychedelic drugs can never be of any benefit to an individual. They may, They may not.
I simply said that psychedelic experiences are not the same as a true awakening. They simply are not. I have experienced plenty of psycho active drugs back in the sixties and seventies especially, and I would have believed that an experience of awakening would be similar, in fact I did believe that for a decade or so, until I found out in quite spectacular fashion that they are not nearly the same thing. Not even close, not even in the same world.
Of course as to whether or not I knowist of whence I speak, that is something that will be determined in the mind of the reader of this little note. If you like what I am saying you will believe it, if not you won't. The human mind is really as simple as that in regards to such matters.
But rather than going on about my own experience in such matters, which I can bring about without drugs, now very easily and which resemble psychedelic experiences only in the degree to which they are different than the stupor that is commonly referred to as waking consciousness, rather than that I will simply quote one of my favorite authors on the subject -- Carlos Dwa
Of Molecules and Men
As is evident to anyone who has the feel for what has gone on in the so to say “new-age” movement – (for want of a better moniker) for what was largely the fall-out from a tidal influx of psychedelic availability to college and high-school students, eventually resulted in a glut of seekers of one stripe or another. People who were convinced that there was something beyond the consensus parallax of the herd, of the rigidly controlled national mass media (admittedly there were many more independent and mom and pop newspapers and radio stations compared to today, where clear channel and other corporations, like Fox and GE own almost all the significant media venues, but such is not the topic under scrutiny just now.)
For the first time in the history of mankind, that is recorded, we had large numbers of persons with little or no pertinent frame of reference, or preparation, and sometimes not even a salubrious setting in which to undertake such a voyage into the unknown, blasting themselves (ready or not) into intense psychedelic experiences. Of course there was the corporate media's disinformation about the whole scene: sort of an unholy melange of predatory capitalism and psychotic projection of the unconscious fear of seeing oneself without all the comfy civilized buffers they had erected. And there was a social reaction that was out of all proportion to the danger posed by such psychoactive substances. Or as Leary observed, “LSD is a psychoactive compound capable of causing psychotic reactions in persons who have never taken it.” Of course mankind had traditionally used recreational molecules for more serious purposes, no need to get into the living ethnobotanical information systems to be found in the mosaic of brujos and their apprentices, or the mystics and their secret rites and mystery schools, sometimes something real for their respective culture was to be found in them, sometimes not.
Many of the people who's lives were impacted by the consumption of the psychedelics, realized at some point, that though they did indicate latent potentials within man, they were in themselves a dead-end, other than for intermittent recreational use. But many people continued to believe that the states offered by various psychotropic compounds reflected unused potentials within the human organism.
There are many different informed opinions, such as that of Alexander Shulgin the rediscovered of Ecstasy and a former lead chemist for Dow who has had a decades long study and has tested hundreds of different psychoactive compounds legally on human subjects, his theory is that: since the metabolic pathways that these molecules activate are present, but the substances themselves are for the most part missing (of course DMT has been found in all body tissues, but in very low doses, well below the threshold of notice) Alexander contends that these compounds are something that humans used to be able to produce but they have lost the capacity and are no longer able to make them.
There are other views on why this is the case, my view is that we are still able to produce them, under the right conditions, with the requisite intention and know-how (a very peculiar kind of know-how since there are no words or thoughts involved in either the knowing or the practical application of what is “known”.
But even this, is not our stop on this gorgeous Saturday afternoon.
But I almost spoke too soon, because here is our stop now. We are wondering, well some of us are, just what is the relationship between some of the stronger, more archetypical psychedelics, and the living expression of enhanced consciousness that arrives without the use of external molecules?
I mean there must be something there right? (this is a rhetorical question, not an affirmation).
Thousands of people have written about the similarities of psychedelic experiences and the classic descriptions of the enlightened mind (forgive the apparent oxymoron).
I could say something like, “I suggest to you. . .” to sound more politically correct. It hardly seems worth it, and for those for whom this description is anything more than an amusing novelty, it is totally unnecessary. What are the similarities of mescaline and an expansion that comes about without the use of psychedelic molecules? What is the comparison of it to LSD, DMT,psilocybin, etc.?
I will admit that there is something that a natural awakening has in common with all of the aforementioned substances: It is as totally different from habitual, consensus, herd-awareness, as is the peak of, not some watered down x or some other post-historic mini dose like are now common in the rave and disco scene, but a full blown, psychedelic experience from a full dose of the respective hallucinogen. Natural awakening is AS different from pedestrian forms of consciousness as a 300microgram LSD trip is from watching the news on TV.
But that is the only thing they have in common.
I am gonna repeat that, so that any reader will realize that I mean exactly what is written. There is nothing else similar about them. Some people will be drawn toward philosophical contemplation on these drugs, that is related also, but only in a secondary ancillary manner, and a person on these drugs may not feel like that at all. On the other hand a natural awakening will move a person into the very center of, not thoughts and words of contemplation, one couldn't say a word or have a thought if one's life depended on it, but one is moved by a luscious luminous torrent: expanded into the cool living flame of contemplation without words or thoughts. This is NOT the booby prize (where enlightenment is the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment.) Oh, no, not even close.
OK, I do admit that realizing that there is no such thing as enlightenment is a large step closer to it than believing that any ideas or thoughts you have about it as a subject have anything to do with the reality of it at all. So in that sense, realizing that what you have been striving for and sucking up disinformation about, is an illusion, is clearer than not knowing it is illusion, but knowing this, is no closer to the reality of this thing, it's just less far away.
© 2012 Carlos Dwa
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By the way, for your information, yoga is not the original means of natural awakening. And further, if you are referring to yoga as it is known in the west, as postures etc. as opposed to the tantric traditions, it has nothing to do with it at all. But then neither does anything else. No one can magically enlighten someone else. No one is permanently enlightened, it is something you have to do every day. After you wake up, you have to wake up again. No one can tell you anything about it that is accurate. This is one of the only things it has in common with intense psychedelic experiences: it is truly indescribable, but it is not confused at all. It fits humans perfectly, unlike experiences brought about by various poisons used as drugs. In fact there is something slimy and hideous about tripping on drugs in comparison. But if you don't really have that comparison, you cannot know this, or in what sense it is true. When you actually have the physical choice of "Why would I want to do this? (drugs of the psychedelic variety) When I can do this. (awaken to a higher cosmic intelligence and consciousness without poisoning myself) then you also would agree with what you now disagree with. It's only your mind holding you back -- forget about it.
Every thought you think you are having about it is wrong, and not just a little -- as totally incorrect as is possible, because every thought that anyone has ever had or will ever have about it is wrong, it cannot be a subject.
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righthatter4life
I did happen to mention that someone's best chance is to find someone who can actually activate the system I refer to and interact with them. But I think that there is slim chance that that is a possibility. That may seem a bit unfair, but what is fair about millions of sperm dying so that one can make it to the egg? What is unfair about thousands of sea turtles dying so that one or two can make it to adulthood? What is fair about the fact that so few people actually understand quantum mechanics even though much of our present technology is based upon it? What is unfair about these things? . . . Nothing. Fairness is a concept of the mind and human culture, awakening is not, it is purely physical -- purely primal.
There is no one on earth and there never has been who can tell you what you want to know in the way that you want to know it. No one can tell someone else how to awaken, simply because anything that is said about it is misleading and incorrect. That is because, it is entirely beyond the mind, your questions are wrong, in the same sense as is pointed to in the Zen koan in which a master (someone who has had the grande experience and hasn't gone nutz or started a church or something, and has made some inroads into actually understanding what happened and how to increase their ability to remain in this functional mode and bring it about in themselves) is asked if a dog has the Buddha nature. His answer was mu -- which meant "Your question is wrong." Another example of a wrong question would be for you to demand I tell you if the elephant in my room is orange or madras.
You could go into a gym and use a forklift to pick up the weights. It doesn't matter how many times you do this or how strange and impressive it may seem, a person will never develop the muscles necessary to lift the weight if they don't use the system that can respond and adapt to this end.
Among those lost in what they believe to be their minds, their opinion, their concepts and thoughts, sarcasm and irony can pinch-hit for intelligence.
Thanks for the well-wishing, I didn't anticipate that you would like what I had to say, but then again it wasn't really said in response to you, but in response to the slim possibility that someone with not only the potential, but the passion to awaken would come across this sometime. Personally I have nothing to sell, and there is nothing that I want from anyone, other than what is necessary for physical existence. That is why I come right out and say things that those who have never in their lives been outside of their mechanical automatic functioning, and don't even realize it, have established in their wisdom, is unbecoming for an enlightened one to do or say. The whole concept of an "enlightened one" is total bull. No matter how awake someone is capable of being in a cosmic sense, they are just a blond one away from being as ordinary as any Joe Shmoe, at every moment. All they have to do is start thinking again, or writing, or talking, or believing and identifying with the thoughts that automatically flow through them.
I know for instance that when I was in the depth of my own psychonaut activities with regard to these molecules, it would have cleared a lot of things up for me if I had run into someone like I now am. Sorry you don't like the facts about my experience, most who claim some knowledge about such matters will immediately be compelled to disagree with me -- to the same extent to which they are firmly in the arms of their automatic mental functioning, and firmly believing that they are the thoughts that run through them.
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ctually that is a typo it should read "What chance would he have of anything real anyway?"
> What do you mean by real?
If ones aim is to awaken, then language can be precise because everthing is realtive to this one aim. In this sense real is what a person is able to do. Can one modify their conscious experience in such a manner as to evoke insight and ecstasy?
A person who is dependent on external recreational molecules to alter their real-time experience cannot do this. If they could, quite simply, they would not be taking drugs -- excepts possibly for fun on occasion -- or real physical pain. The experiences provided by the phsychadelic family of drugs provide a distorted reflection of what a real activation of these capacities is like, but it is extremely distorted and anyone who has experience the perfectly apt nature of real awakening would not waste their time on such dead-ends. Go on over to one of the web sites that is centered on drug experiences: confusion reigns: people are ripe to believe any nonsense about "entities" and whatever that someone is ready to spue. They are confused because what they experiences has extreme impact with no comprehension of the territory, and the territory was seen through a lense with fatal disorting qualities.
Remember: this is all relative to awakening, and fatal means the end of this possibility -- at least until they wise up.
So in this sense real means something one can really DO.
>I know you know that most people are insanely stupid. If you are stupid, then you are going to be bored with your mind.
What was written was that people are insanely bored with their own minds. Which is quite a different thing than what you are talking about. The more intelligent a person, the more chance that they are bored with their mind and so it is diverted endlessly, but it matters not a bit if it is diverted by sudying Synthetic Biology or watching two guys cause future brain injury to each other in UFC. Remember it matters not a bit with regard to awakening, not some imagined absolute value. Just as it matters not one bit if someone spends their lives taking drugs everyday, to the matter of awakening, it awakening is not thier goal. If it is however, everything changes, then it matters.
It is real and physical, and chemical, no doubt, but it is not just taking these molecules, it is the act of producing them internally endogenously, which is the key, because each breakthrough is the resutlt of a fundamental insight into the nature of one's existence, and life in general. It seems there is a process of evolving, and the process is delightful, until one actually awakens and finds that nothing, including the process of awakening, and anything ever said or thought about it by anyone including the worlds first ranked spiritual heros, has anything at all to do with it. Except in a negative sense that one can say, what it is not, or what detracts or keeps people unaware.
> I get the feeling that you who onto the belief that every human mind is capable of real enlightenment. I happen to disagree.
Your feeling is incorrect. No human mind is capable of enlightenment, and as long as the process which is regarded as the mind, in our culture, is active, awakening is impossible. That is, as long as what Dwa refers to as the "thought-centric-mind is identified with, awakening is impossible.
>You've done these drugs and didn't have a great experience.
Where did you get the idea that anyone didn't have a great experience? Just sort of assumed it? At the time I thought LSD, shrooms, dmt, STP, and expecially peyote were great, and was quite an advocate of them.
> Why are you so confident in your beliefs?
Is you ability to reach out and grab something with your hand a belief? Surely even though concepts and word are used to describe the ability one may have to grab something with their hand, you realize that the act of grabbing is in no way dependent on the ability to explain the act in words. Though these expressions are conceptual and wordy the act of awakening has nothing to do with beliefs, or words, or any half-assed explanation that anyone may give about it.
So it seems that everyone of your statements and questions were not based on anything that was actually written or implied. Keep this in mind if you have any further statements or questions that do not receive a response.
It's rater simple really. This is your situation:
It is as if you are in a roadside dinner late at night perhaps a Waffle House. You are sitting at the counter minding your own business but you can't help overhearing the person further down the counter who is extolling the virtues of his new Corvette to the world at large. Holding forth on its superior qualities.
There is a flash of headlights in the windows as a car pulls into the Waffle House parking lot, and a stranger enters and sits between you and the Corvette man, whom is still holding forth on the qualities of his ride.
This goes on for another half cup of coffee or so until the Corvette man says, "The corvette is the equal of any supercar on the market. There is virtually no difference between a Corvette and a Bugatti Veron Super Sport.
At which point the stranger that entered says, "I used to own the exact model of Corvette that you are talking about, and I also own a Veron Super Sport and I assure you the only thing similar about them is they both have four wheels."
Now the decision that you have, is to decide whether or not you believe the stranger. Maybe if you like what he said you will believe him, if not you won't. But the woman sitting at a booth by the window believes him because her view into the parking lot is not obscured by her own reflection in the windows like yours is, and she can see the Veron parked outside.
In this metaphor windows equals words.
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@Daniel
If you would consider an auto-mechanic who was telling someone that a particular bolt had reverse threads and that by attempting to loosen it you were actually tightening it judgmental? Then I am certainly judgmental. But not in the same sense as when someone refers to someones else as a troll or something like that. Actually that word used to mean something back when there were only newsgroups on line and the WWW consisted of only a couple dozen sites that resembled today's web.
You have mistaken what I have been referring to with some idea about healing oneself from some apparent ill, or programming, or perhaps some organic aliment of one type or another. It isn't. What I am expressing has nothing to do with fixing oneself. Not in any guise or by any measure.
If you actually followed this thread you should know that I fully concurred when asked if I thought that psychotropic molecules could have a desirable therapeutic effect. My only issue is that, if one's only experience of higher forms of consciousness is derived from drugs, you should not confuse yourself and others with the idea that drug experiences are similar to "spontaneous" awakening. I am simply stating that if someone has experience with both, they know that they are not at all similar except in how intensely distinct they are from the normal walking around state of sleep that people refer to as waking-consciousness. If you had bothered to comprehend my posts, they state this quite clearly, over and over.
If you simply think I am lying, then you were correct in you initial assessment, you should not have responded. What's the point. I don't care how I "come off" I am just stating which way the threads on a bolt run. And I say this because this is an area were people can actually tell when they don't know something. Unlike your, childish attempt at pop-psychology. A world of misguided souls and such -- which is actually kind of self-fullfilling, because if you believe that, then it is true, for you. You do realize that if I used the term "awaken spirituality" as you seem to quote, that it must have had inverted quotes around the term to indicate that there is something inherently dubious about it. When men refer to "spirituality", they are actually referring to the profound complexity and capacity to produce ecstasy of their own endocrine and limbic systems.
It's as simple as this: if a person knows someone who has developed a certain capacity, lets say playing a piano, and they are writing to him about fixing their piano so that it is not cacophonous when they attempt to play it, but his piano works fine and he has no interest in "fixing" it. Nothing he has written in the past had anything to do with fixing any piano, his own or his friends.
Then because he did not realize that the other fella's piano is not out of tune or in need of some repair, he calls him an egoist because the man has been talking about the actual experience of making music and the other guy has never been able to make music other than by turning his stereo on. The guy with the broken piano should at least be able to realize that the fact that his polyphonic friend CAN sit down and play quite well, and had been able to do so for a good number of decades: he should be able to realize that the guys ability to actually play supersedes any impression he may have that the other guys piano is in need of repair like his own.
Then the guy who thinks his piano is broken accuses the musician of claiming to be able to play with no hands, and says that someone who can actually play without using their hands, or using their body in any way would never say the words that he has said.
. . . himself failing to remember that the guy with a working piano had previously told him that the whole idea of playing a broken piano with no hands was ridiculous. He had obviously forgotten the time the guy with the good piano had taken to explain how people who could not play the piano for one reason or another often made up ridiculous rules by which they imagined that someone who could play would follow and that as it was understood by those with no understanding at all of the reality of this matter, his behavior was inappropriate for a no-handed player with a broken piano.
With this he could almost agree, since they were talking about two different things: except for one little matter: that being: that the guy with the broken piano's piano was not broken, but as long as be believed there was something that needs to be fixed he will enjoy nothing but absolutely cacophonous sounds coming from his piano as he went at it with his little kit of concepts and explanations, his pop psychology hammer, and his wanna-be mystic saw.
The guy who knew his piano was as intact and in tune as it ever needed to be in order to play, also knew that despite his resort to symbolism there was practically zero chance that the difference between playing and thinking about playing would be able to be realized by those who believed something was wrong with their pianos when there wasn't. And they would never be able to play as long as they believed they had to fix their piano first.
For no particular reason I am adding the following for the children who believe that everyone else is hobbled as they are. Being that being hobbled comprises the whole of their earthly experience this is certainly understandable.
Most people who know anything about what is being referred to by my blabbing, realize whether they are themselves capable of it or not, that a person of any authentic experience in such matters, who has entered a realm of enhanced consciousness, knows full-well that one of the characteristics of such a quantum leap of consciousness is an end to the perpetual flow of association, of one thought leading to another, even if one is not intentionally thinking about something. Really there is no need to say much further about it. If you have real experience of a quantum leap in consciousness, that is, not brought about by external drugs, but by the endopharmic action that results from breakthrough realizations, which are actually not two different things. That is: if it is something that you can bring about by active consideration and insights it is always attended by the absence of the automatic flow of associative thoughts which most people refer to as "I" or consider their "I" to be the source of "their thoughts".
If you have actually read my posts and gave it your best to understand them, you may remember that I stated that it is impossible to describe the grande experience of awakening directly, anything you say about it will be misleading at best, and this with people who are ready and dying to awaken, people who have striven to awaken without real success, perhaps for years or decades. Which is not uncommon at all in traditional religious or so-called spiritual groups of one kind or another.
Well the fact remains that even someone who is awake in a cosmic sense , still cannot tell another person anything much about it, the state itself that is. And they definately cannot tell you how to awaken, or some information that will give you the understanding of how to awaken. Because being able to do it yourself is imperative. No one can do it for you, and words, though they can be entertaining, even delightful if someone with a real passion just happens to run into someone who can himself do what they seek.
Though no one can tell you how to bring about these ultimate forms of supra conscious experience, they definitely can tell you things that can save you decades, if such is your goal.
I am not talking about vague advice here, or something that really can't be done as explained, and then the failure to achieve such a state falls upon the student, when actually such things could never be done as presented by any number of the various wanna-be mystics and cult leaders who present themselves to the public as someone who can walk the walk, when in truth they can't eve really talk the talk in any manner that originated with their own insight or awakening, because even their talk is borrowed and not really their own.
Bearing this in mind, I would just like to mention, that I could tell someone how to stop their thoughts. Not for a second or two, but stop them: for as long as they desire or is appropriate in their situation, and then again, whenever they want for as long as they want, if they have fallen asleep again (not bed sleep you understand: waking sleep) that their active mentation devolves into a mechanical procession of associative images which amounts to waking sleep, or your continual need to be distracted from their tedium of mechanical thought-centric consciousness by seeking entertainment or some sort of diverting stimulus. Of course if they are sound enough asleep this waking-sleep of the mechanical flow of association will not bother them at all. They can't even see it for what it is. See it or be it.
Instead of this state of distraction, I can tell you how to enter a state of bliss, with absolutely no thoughts at all. And for all practical purposes it is effortless. From within this silence, the storied grande experience of awakening or enlightenment is far more assessable to those with such an intent.
There are the type of people who will be bothered by such a statement and automatically react with some childish expression of hostility, but there are also the type who think something along the lines of "If this guy's not full of shit, this is the luckiest day of my life."
Which is not really true. It could have been the luckiest day of their life, if. . .
Then again, the net if anything, if full to the brim with second chances in the form of aliases. So. . . as the blind man said, "We shall see."
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There is much in what you wrote.
The very best comedians are the back-door men/women of the ah ha experience in our culture. They often can build a career on pointing out the unexamined obvious, or even the fact that every "thought" that arises in human consciousness is paired at birth with its' own opposite. Louie CK does a quite entertaining job in this.
I made these comments quite some time ago, and to be honest, they never had anything to do with whoever it was that was on Rogan's show -- personally. It was about exactly what you tuned in to.
Since I have, so to say, "experienced" both the states brought on by various psychedelic recreational molecules, and what others have referred to as "enlightenment", I thought I would share my surprise that they were so totally different. I would even say that the natural awakening is as different from something like LSD or peyote as a full-blown trip is from the normal state of sleep-walking, that we refer to as waking consciousness.
Their main similarity is in their intensity, and perhaps in the total inability to communicate anything about them in words, even by means of metaphor.
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