Prescott: Is Reality Hostile or Nurturing Toward Us?

Paraphrasing him in the title, but that was the gist I got out of two of his interesting posts:

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Given this list of positives, our previously listed negatives can be put into a new perspective. The pain of earthly life (which, by the way, is normally balanced to some extent by pleasure) can be seen as a small part of a larger plan and as serving a useful purpose in promoting spiritual growth. Lower-level entities and realms may be marginal at best, involving only a small segment of reality, most of which is far more benevolent. The terrifying visions brought on by psychogenic drugs may reflect a malfunction of the brain, a flood of subconscious imagery, or (if we insist that users are encountering another plane of reality) temporary access to some low-level spiritual realm – precisely the sort of murky, menacing region that the uninitiated are warned to avoid. (Hence the frequent cautions against fooling around with Ouija boards and violating other taboos.)

In short, while either of the two positions is defensible, I think the hypothesis of a basically friendly reality covers more of the available evidence. This is not to downplay the undoubted negatives that psychic explorers have encountered. But on balance, the negatives seem outweighed by the positives. The scale, I think, tips ultimately in favor of a benevolent reality (with a dark side), rather than a grim, despairing reality (with occasional deceptive glimmers of light).

Personally I think he too quickly rules out Neutrality, perhaps b/c he isn't familiar with the Alignment System of D&D.

Edit: Sorry, the other post:

Sally forth

Doing research for a novel, I read up recently on salvia divinorum, a psychoactive plant that is usually smoked or chewed. Known more commonly as salvia or just Sally, the plant is legal in some jurisdictions and has a long history of use in traditional societies. It can be quite dangerous, though. While I don't think it's been directly linked to any deaths, it can bring on terrifying hallucinations with lasting psychological consequences.

Salvia operates on different neural pathways than other hallucinogens and tends to produce chaotic thoughts, visual and tactile synesthesia (you "see" things with your skin), and a profoundly depressing or deeply frightening sense of dissociation.

The nature of these hallucinatory experiences is interesting. What follows are quotes from some people who had bad trips on salvia (as well as a few who found the experience more enlightening than scary).

Going to post one of the comments that offers a contrasting perspective:

IMO, we are a microcosm of the universe/reality. Whatever we contain, as individuals and, collectively as a species, mirrors what the *knowable* universe contains.

There may very well be a reality beyond what is knowable to humans, but we can't talk about it because...well....we can't know about it. Imagine a radio that can pick up stations within the bandwidth it is designed to be attuned to. There are bandwidths beyond what the tuner can be set to. However, you will never hear those stations. In fact, their existence is pure speculation.
I'm not just talking about the brain as filter/receiver, but also to what is perceptually possible beyond the physical brain - i.e. what spectrum of reality available to the human spirit/aura/consciousness when disembodied.

It is a lock and key type relationship between human awareness and reality. Or, to use your model, the information processor can only read certain types of files; not all files that are out there.

Therefore, there is nothing out there - that we can perceive - that isn't already in us and vice versa.
What is in us? Well, we see that every day. Indeed, good, bad, ugly, beautiful, triumphant, capricious, tragic.....the myths of the ages have been laying it all out since the first the first story was written.

Of course mostly the myths deal with reality as experienced by flesh and blood humans. However, the religions and spiritual traditions attempt to address what can be known about reality beyond flesh and blood. Jesus talks about it. The Tibetan Book of the Dead attempts to address this directly. The Hindu religion has some great personifications of the forces that are within us and the world. There are many others.

Most people in western society - from which almost all the NDE accounts, etc come from - are basically striving to be nice people. They are trained to be polite, social and rather mundane in their conformity to basic Christian ethics. In their lives they seek comfort. Sure, somewhere inside they feel negative forces and desires, but they are good at suppressing those for the most part. So they are attuned to a rather Summerland type existence. No surprise that that is what they get post mortem! That's their vibe. Lock and key.

Some of the best evidence that the NDE experience that we always read about is culturally determined comes from the voodoo religions and cults. Much paranormal happens in those societies. They describe an afterlife that is far darker than what we have in the west. IMO, voodoo/voodun is a must study that is deliberately overlooked because it is disturbing to the western mind.
Now, pet peeve time... if one takes LSD one is NOT going to see Homer Simpson. One might be compelled to contemplate the archetype of Homer (for what reason I can't imagine) and one might get so into that contemplation that one begins to have a conversation (mentally) with the archetype, but if someone is seeing Homer and thinks he's real, that is not a result of LSD. LSD and psilocybin are less neurotoxic than orange juice. That's a scientific fact. Visions of Homer Simpson and dead brain cells are the figments of Hollywood's and the media's imagination.

Another good comment:

Michael, a very good exposition of the positive, optimist view. For myself, unfortunately, I still have doubts and suspicions that the cosmic system of love and light reported by most NDEers is not the true reality. I have long had these suspicions, mainly due to some very early very negative OBE-like experiences.

Michael: "The terrifying visions brought on by psychogenic drugs may reflect a malfunction of the brain, a flood of subconscious imagery, or (if we insist that users are encountering another plane of reality) temporary access to some low-level spiritual realm – precisely the sort of murky, menacing region that the uninitiated are warned to avoid."

But, why should Salvia just happen to induce the particular kinds of experiences you gave examples of in your last post, almost calculated to appeal to and fit in with the beliefs of those who suspect that reality is a sort of vast conspiracy and is ultimately very hostile, whereas just the other kinds of brain traumas caused by cardiac arrest and other conditions and injuries produce true experiences of a good ultimate reality?

How are we to know what is the true ultimate reality? All these experiences, the true (positive) NDEs and the "cosmic consciousness" experiences, and the drug-induced experiences and "hellish" NDEs, are cases of profoundly altered consciousness but with very different causative mechanisms. Mostly, we go with the love and light version, the apparent ultimate reality that is brought back by the great majority of NDEers, because it makes us feel good and we therefore much prefer it. But why should just one class of altered consciousness (positive NDEs and "cosmic consciousness" experiences), be glimpses of the true reality, while experiences with Salvia and DMT and magic mushrooms, hellish NDEs, etc. are all false and hallucinatory?
This is to believe that the negative stuff is all just due to particular drugs messing up neural processing in very particular ways, perhaps uncovering particular kinds of deep subconscious paranoid tendencies. That would seem kind of convenient, a rather contrived hypothesis.

Actually, the realms of the possible (given our very limited knowledge) includes the one that actually, the Salvia entities are "behind the curtain" even in NDEs. Our reality is seen to be a fake scenario created by certain beings for their own purposes. We are here for those purposes not our own.

Or it is possible that the explanation is along the lines that there are many different other realities, and which one is reached depends on the particular form of brain impairment during OBE. That is, the brain is just being messed with in different ways in these different types of experiences. The way it is adversely affected in cardiac arrest and other traumatic "natural" events isn't the only way brain function can be degraded. The brain, in enabling the spirit to manifest in the physical, acts as a "filter" to exclude all these other "frequencies". In these experiences of other realities the brain is just "tuning into" utterly different, alien, not normally accessed channels (and thereby becoming vulnerable to alien, hostile beings). Just an undoubtedly oversimplified analogy for what might really be going on.

I think I would prefer this to the notion that the Salvia universe is the only "ultimately real" reality.

I guess best of all (if you can do it) is to dismiss all this other negative stuff as illusory and the true reality is the love and light reported by most NDEers. At least, the reality of NDEs is bolstered by the existence of a large body of empirical evidence from the veridical features in many NDE accounts (as documented , for instance, in Titus Rivas's The Self Does Not Die). I don't think there is anything comparable for the hallucinatory drug experiences. I think I will go with the NDEer view of reality for now, while unfortunately having to maintain a certain level of doubt or cognitive dissonance in the background.

For my part I just quoted Calvino because it suggests that what we think we're seeing "Beyond the Veil" is possibly the Veil-as-Mirror:

"In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city's true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia's confusion, the mules' braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.

[i]It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet's immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.

An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects -- the oracle replied -- has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness."

Nice post, Sciborg.

Salvia probably isn't the best choice, because it's a dissociative. The likes of DMT, Psilocybin, Iboga, Ayahuasca and San Pedro are far better choices, because they're psychedelics, entheogens, with thousands of years of spiritual traditions surrounding them. The Shamans of the Amazon and of Mexico were major users of Ayahuasca and Psilocybin mushrooms respectively, which helped them tune into the higher realms. Of course, their strong traditions guided them in using them properly and safely. Other Shamanic cultures didn't use psychedelics.

Nice post, Sciborg.

Salvia probably isn't the best choice, because it's a dissociative. The likes of DMT, Psilocybin, Iboga, Ayahuasca and San Pedro are far better choices, because they're psychedelics, entheogens, with thousands of years of spiritual traditions surrounding them. The Shamans of the Amazon and of Mexico were major users of Ayahuasca and Psilocybin mushrooms respectively, which helped them tune into the higher realms. Of course, their strong traditions guided them in using them properly and safely. Other Shamanic cultures didn't use psychedelics.

Yeah, those who I know that have had positive experiences from psychedelics had a rigorous training method. It wasn't necessarily traditional but it also wasn't just taking double the recommended dosage of LSD like the person who almost beat my face in during college did.

I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness

 ~Werner Herzog

Is Reality Hostile or Nurturing Toward Us?

It depends on your brain chemistry.

I do not consider this to be a logical proposition. The answer is not objectively one or the other. You can't prove it by logical analysis and you shouldn't look for an answer in logic. If you want the universe to be nurturing, you should try to alter your brain chemistry. Studying spirituality can sometimes alter your brain chemistry (see "Notes" here). but a direct approach to  hacking your brain chemistry can also be effective.

The reason I say this is because people do not make decisions or choose beliefs based on logic. They do so for other reasons. They can be persuaded but they are not persuaded by logic they are persuaded by other means. We use reason only after the fact to defend our beliefs and decisions.

In an interview on FoxNews@Night with Shannon Bream on March 19, 2018, Scott Adams explained that people don't use logic to make decisions even though we think we do. (2:59: https://youtu.be/vLhcrbtbCEg?t=2m59s):

We humans ignore facts but we think we don't. The great illusion of life is that we're rational beings making rational decisions most of the time. But when you become a hypnotist, the first thing you learn is that that's backwards and that mostly we're deciding based on our team, our feelings, our emotions, irrational reasons, we make our decision and then we rationalize it no matter how tortured that rationalization is."

University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt expressed similar views in his book The righteous Mind. He wrote that people don't use reason to form their beliefs, they use reason to justify their beliefs which they form for emotional reasons. William Saletan described Haidt's views in the Sunday Book Review:

Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt By WILLIAM SALETAN SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW MARCH 23, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/...haidt.html

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.

[Laird]

People do not make decisions or choose beliefs based on logic. They do so for other reasons. They can be persuaded but they are not persuaded by logic they are persuaded by other means. We use reason after the fact to defend our beliefs and decisions.

Jim, are you trying to persuade us with illogic that we can only be persuaded by illogic, or...? ;-)

[Laird]

Paraphrasing him in the title, but that was the gist I got out of two of his interesting posts

Interesting posts, thanks, Sci (and Michael Prescott). Also interesting would be an explanation as to why, if reality is on balance nurturing, at least some of us experience hostility from it at least some of the time.