Why does anything exist?

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No, IMO.

Your (IMO) faulty assumption is that when you die, your perceptive processes cease.

I'm guessing you've never communicated with the Spirit World, with the soul of someone who's left this Earth - ?

I Have. So I Know.

There is more to us and our existence than we know in the flesh. Typically, it's only those who've passed on that Know this. But then there are people like EzraS who so vividly recalls his Near Death Experience and shared it on the forums - which was similar to others' accounts. And people like myself who have had a Very Real experience communicating with a friend from Beyond. And then others that have consumed DMT and essentially experienced a psychedelic induced synthetic death process to Know what happens when we die - a bit of an eternal cheat code.

I've yet to do DMT, and not for lack of opportunity - just.. respecting it. Right time right place I'll join the club of many people I know who have. Only One regrets finding out while living and feels it should wait until death, but on the flip side the experience saved his life (broke his severe drug addiction) and changed him for the better. (feels he must live a very righteous Good life to live up to the secrets that were revealed; to be deserving of the knowledge that was bestowed upon him & deserving of the afterlife that awaits.)

I get that seeing/experiencing is believing, though.. and you'll believe it when you see it. And that you probably won't be blasting off on DMT and won't Know for yourself until you've left this Earth. But, I'm tellin' ya.. whether the Spirit World or the Christian Heaven; we carry on after this & so does our ability to perceive - perhaps even far more than we ever could when limited to the sensory organs of our human selves.

I am sorry, Goldie, but this is where our opinions diverge.  All of the alleged contacts with disembodied spirits of deceased people that I have experienced have turned out to be either hallucinations (i.e., fever dreams or drug-related), self-delusions (e.g., wishful thinking and sleep-dreams), or outright fakes by other people.

If there is an afterlife (for which I hope), then from my experience and perspective there is no communication between that realm and this.  While I really would like to "hear" from the Dearly Departed, I know of no event in my life that I could claim as a definitive example of spiritual necromancy.

If this situation changes for me, you will be one of the first people I inform.

I've only had one - but it was Real enough to Know For Sure.

Our opinions Also differ on another related topic:

"Drug induced," vs. "Medicine," known by the ancients to facilitate communication with the Spirit World & the knowledge passed along generation after generation so that we can continue having connections to the ancestral plane.

But whatever, we'll have eternity for me to tell you I was right someday.

Yes, our opinion differs on this aspect as well, and for similar reasons: You have an experience that convinces you that what these "ancients" claimed is true, while I have experiences that convince me that drugs/medicine merely induce hallucinogenic states in which subjective imagery may take on an intensity comparable to those of real physical perceptions.  Neither of us can convince the other that either experience is the more valid one.If it happens, it happens.  The more important issue is what we do in the here-and-now of our existence.

One of the much more common touch-points people have is synchronicity. For example looking at a clock in your office and seeing 11:11 probably doesn't mean much but being in a state of life emergency and praying all evening, going to sleep and waking up bolt-upright, having your head autonomically turn to the alarm clock, and seeing that it's 3:33 AM OTOH is an unusual experience.

A lot of this if taken at face value seems to point toward something like neutral or dual-action monism. It's a bit like the physical and mental sides seem brightly defined and rarely bleed over into one another but when they do the quirks have an unusual, even absurd, quality to them.

Except my experience was 99% non-visual nor imagery at all. Pure connection to a spirit in the ether - telepathic communication of sorts; a full on conversation.

Of course, the here and now will always matter.. until such a time when perhaps time is no longer relevant - IF we then get to exist in an infinite possibility of "times," simultaneously, that is. I dunno, just saying.. without physical ageing bodies, perhaps we're not in the here & now in the afterlife.. but the everywhere & always.

Glitches in The Matrix.

I like Escher's 'hand that draws itself' perhaps a bit better. Seems like there's less evidence of design and more evidence that we're in an equilibrium system where we don't know all of its qualities yet.

Does that mean that the universe didn't exist until something with enough sentience to perceive it came into being? If the universe didn't already exist, how did the series of events that led the creation of said sentient being occur?



I cannot know for certain that my perception will cease when I die. But I do know with certainty that I didn't perceive anything prior to my conception. And reality clearly exited before then.



And I'm willing to bet my arm that you haven't either, regardless of whether you believe you have.



Or these experiences could've been nothing more than DMT induced hallucinations. Hallucinations are indistinguishable from reality to the person experiencing them.

I'm curious to know how you can distinguish an actual out of body experience from a hallucination of an out of body experience?

I view the religious explanations as being illogical, crude and unbelievable.

The scientific ones, whilst I kind of grasp some of the basic components end up leaving me baffled.

The one bad thing about religious explanations for the origin of the universe is that they are so damned certain.That is the beauty of science as opposed to religion -- it does not try to fill the gaps with improvable claims.

For the internet and feigned outrage...

Dunno, but there are valid arguments for theories that suggest that the universe itself is sentient.. one giant mycelial web of neuro structures.

Doesn’t matter what you think I believe. I said I Know.

And like I said earlier in this thread, I’ve never done DMT. Other lighter duty substances of the same classification, Yes, but not DMT. Yet.

They don't, though. They only know about what has happened since.


Yes (sort of...), but most importantly, when I die and my perceptive processes cease, your existence and the rest of the universe will end.

But seriously, this is actually kind of how my personal metaphysics goes.

"Why am I me? How am I me? I am me, but what does this even mean? What am I? How come I'm not you or something else instead? What sorcery is this? What is going on?" I have been asking these questions since as early as I can remember anything, and the best "explanation" (or maybe "illustration" would be a better word? I don't know) that I've ever come up with is: "Because I am the only consciousness in the universe. I am the universe. There is nothing but me. — Or so it is in this n-dimensional path. The universe as I experience it to exist is defined by all the nearly-infinite conditions that result in my continued existence. It's what defines existence itself, not just "my" existence. Everything else is a side effect. Everything."

I find this "explanation" satisfying because it resolves the issue of me and my point of view (which are arguably the same thing) being so monumentally special and unique for no apparent reason. If the only thing that makes me special that way is that the universe I inhabit is defined by my existence, then there's no reason to believe that there aren't countless other universes, each one defined by the continued existence of another consciousness. So I'm not special. I find this thought relieving. It takes away the absurdity. And, I don't know, maybe those different universes are not entirely parallel, and actually intersect with each other, why not. Mathematically speaking each one is just a path in n-dimensional space after all. A curve/surface/hypersurface.

This doesn't explain in any way whatsoever (doesn't even try, really) where this universe (or possibly infinite set of universes within an ultimate meta-universe of an unknown/indefinite number of dimensions) comes from, or "why" it ever came to exist. But somehow I don't find that question to be nearly as important. It would be interesting to know, if it were possible to know, but that's about it. A bearded old man in the confusingly-yet-to-be-created sky may as well have started the Big Bang for all I know.

Last edited by toadsnail on 18 Feb 2021, 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

An argument can be valid but still not be sound. "All reptiles lay eggs. Cows are reptiles. Therefore cows lay eggs." is an example of an argument that is valid because the conclusion follows logically from the premises, but is not sound because one of the premises is factually incorrect.

To demonstrate that the universe is sentient you need to produce empirical evidence to support that claim.

DMT is not the only thing that can cause hallucinations. They could also be caused by mental illness, physical trauma, fatigue and migraines, or the "other lighter duty substances of the same classification" you mentioned.

As I said before, hallucinations are indistinguishable from reality to the people experiencing them. Hence why people always insist that they "know" what they experienced. I'd still like to know why you believe that you can distinguish a real out of body experience from a hallucination.

I think that statement misses the point, actually. To produce empirical evidence to support the claim that the universe is sentient, you first need to define "sentience" objectively. I don't think that's doable.