Advertisement
Hey yall', :)
here is one of the best articles I have read in a long time.
www.hplusmagazine.com/article...umanists
Here is a couple of excerpts.
"Psychedelic drugs can briefly give us a tiny insight into how “blind” we normally are; but we soon lapse into ignorance again. Such is the state-dependence of memory. If I’d never tried psychedelics, then I fear I would be scornful of their significance because of the incoherence of most users’ descriptions of their effects. But using the blindness analogy again, someone congenitally blind who is surgically guaranteed the gift of sight can take years before they can make sense of the visual world... at first they are overwhelmed and confused by visual stimuli."
"Pesce: My first experience of virtual reality happened in 1990 and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25. And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected I would find in this virtual world, wasn’t an artificial Tron-like environment. It wasn’t something that was entirely artificial. What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet, as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship. And I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t to escape into another dimension, but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can’t always see, because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us.
Where we’re going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry. And we don’t have any tools of mind. Western culture, which is based on this objective external reality — it’s not hard, it’s all become very soft, and it’s all flowing together. So we need to now start to find ways of describing what’s going on. And so what we need to do — I found in my own investigations — is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically, that understand that perception shapes what you are, and you shape what you see. And that they’re not separate areas, they’re not separate domains, and you have to consider them as a whole.
My own explorations had led me to understand that in fact, in a world where anything you want is true, the only way to deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will. Dealing with will is what magic has, in all cultures, always been about. This is why the shaman doesn’t go insane when the world just disappears — they’re ready for it. Because they understand that where they are isn’t bound up in their idea of the world. "
here is one of the best articles I have read in a long time.
www.hplusmagazine.com/article...umanists
Here is a couple of excerpts.
"Psychedelic drugs can briefly give us a tiny insight into how “blind” we normally are; but we soon lapse into ignorance again. Such is the state-dependence of memory. If I’d never tried psychedelics, then I fear I would be scornful of their significance because of the incoherence of most users’ descriptions of their effects. But using the blindness analogy again, someone congenitally blind who is surgically guaranteed the gift of sight can take years before they can make sense of the visual world... at first they are overwhelmed and confused by visual stimuli."
"Pesce: My first experience of virtual reality happened in 1990 and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25. And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected I would find in this virtual world, wasn’t an artificial Tron-like environment. It wasn’t something that was entirely artificial. What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet, as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship. And I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t to escape into another dimension, but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can’t always see, because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us.
Where we’re going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry. And we don’t have any tools of mind. Western culture, which is based on this objective external reality — it’s not hard, it’s all become very soft, and it’s all flowing together. So we need to now start to find ways of describing what’s going on. And so what we need to do — I found in my own investigations — is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically, that understand that perception shapes what you are, and you shape what you see. And that they’re not separate areas, they’re not separate domains, and you have to consider them as a whole.
My own explorations had led me to understand that in fact, in a world where anything you want is true, the only way to deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will. Dealing with will is what magic has, in all cultures, always been about. This is why the shaman doesn’t go insane when the world just disappears — they’re ready for it. Because they understand that where they are isn’t bound up in their idea of the world. "
posted by:
|
Houston
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
