Life and " Reality ". Making Do
 

So I really think a lot about stuff like this. I had a psychedelic experience once and it changed everything about how I look at life.

One thing that I realized was that everything and everyone is connected. I remember seeing myself through my friends eyes in the room with me, I remember feeling love for everyone in this world, absolute love.

I have been thinking...Lately about reality....Life just seems to be this thing that we have fallen into, an event composed of constant transitions. We seem to be (and I am trying to find ways of explaining this in my limited and simplistic human vocabulary and understanding) making do with what has been presented to us. Who has presented this " reality " or existance to us? or what? We do not know.

Let me explain further on " making do ". We came into this world and we were taught how to live life and to get by, we learned consistancies that our ancestors passed on to us to help us get by. But do we really understand......anything?....Do we really know anything about what the **** is going on? Why we are here? No.

Now don't relate what I am about to say next with the last paragraph. As I have mentioned before, I am a human so I really don't know what the **** I am talking about. Is this reality? Or is everything you are experiencing a subjective reality based on the collective human subconscious? Maybe this is not reality, maybe " reality " does not really exist, maybe reality is whatever we think is real.

I know one thing for sure, what we see, physically with our very eyes, isn't what that physicality actually looks like. There is FAR more going on in the world than we give credit to.

Anyway, I probably sound mad. I genuinely believe that all people and animals and well...Everything is connected. Just wanted to spill all that ranty ****e out at ye and see what people have to say.

Bill Hicks.

I don't really have the eloquence to go too deeply into the philosophical side of your ponderings but when it comes to vision apparently our eyes only see maybe 10% of what's in our field of view at any time. The rest of the details are kind of inferred and filled in by our brains. I guess part of the psychedelic experience is probably the brain being a bit befuddled and just making some pretty random guesses about what it is seeing.

Yeah, I dunno about our brain filling in the spaces, I think we just see more of what is actually there to be honest.

i think about what you said in the OP all the time

when i think too much about it, i get a disengaged and discombobulated feeling

i then try to pierce my own "consciousness" and end up feeling totally alienated from my own senses, and what i perceive as everybody's "reality" ( or "consensual hallucination")

we're just building the world according to our own limitations and sensory perceptions

nobody ever thinks out of the box

Every last one of us is truly a special unique snowflake. I really do mean that, no patronizing sarcasm.

Problem is, we're all special unique snowflakes within a big mother****ing blizzard

Also it's impossible to read Po's intro post and not have this pop into my head... sing it with me people!

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide...
No escape from reality...

I think we do and I could explain why - and have probably done so many times here in the past as similar topics have sprung up over the years .. but I don't think you'd buy it! :p:

edit :

I often feel like people will accept f.ex quantum mechanics helping us make orbiting satellites or computers and they'll accept that one can use a knowledge of chemistry to synthesize various substances for example. But, if you use disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology to explain why we're here, you're suddenly touching ground where people get spiritual and stuff and then they suddenly don't like explanations that seem "factual" anymore.

Or, possibly, they don't understand them when they hear them.

My opinion? It's just a bunch of regurgitated hippie nonsense. When you ingest drugs you are not ingesting ideas or insight - at most it will allow you to recontextualize your currently existing knowledge and emotions.

While I think you can make a "working hypothesis" based on science, there are still limitations to its application. The problem with science in relation to philosophy is that science won't say we know anything until we have hard evidence pointing to whatever it is we are curious about. While you and I could probably go back and forth on very specific details and how that relates to life in the bigger picture, it still doesn't answer a lot of the philosophical questions people have. One day, maybe will be have advanced science enough to be able to provide these answers, but for now there is a limit. This is why people aren't satisfied with a scientific answer when they are asking a philosophical question.

This.