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On communication

Daelach

Setian
I found out something quite interesting last weekend. I had a conversation with my wife, and we disagreed about how good a certain book was. She was absolutely astonished at my arguments why I didn't like the book because she had understood it very differently, it seemed.

It took us quite some minutes of discussion to discover that we were talking about DIFFERENT books! When she understood what book I meant, she agreed with my opinion. The reason was that she had only stated the author because we both knew only had exactly one book by him, but I erroneously thought that this book was a different one.

Now we wondered what had happened if BOTH books concerning a rather similar topic (consciousness development technics) had been either good or bad in both our opinion. In this case, I would have agreed to her initial comment, and we would have thought that we had communicated and understood each other. After all, there would not have been a further discussion.

This lead us to the question of how often misunderstandings might go unnoticed, whether we ever could be certain that what we have communicated is being understood as we meant it.

Our conclusion was rather pessimistic. Actually, when there is no possibility to certainly even detect communication errors, there is no possibility either to correct or prevent them. Because in order to prevent something, you must know that it is there. Learning from trial and error is only possible if there is an error feedback.

When it is this way already among humans, it will apply even more when communicating with discarnate beings (if one assumes, while communicating, that there are such). The problem is not insufficient knowledge about the communication partner which could be remedied by getting to know him better, but it is a principal one.

The problem lies in the fact that words or other symbols are only placeholders for the meaning, not the meaning itself. They are maps, not the actual territory. It is not by accident that this is touching constructivism again. We could regard communication as a special case of the basic epistemologic agnostics which applies to actually everything. We only can know for sure what is already in our mind.

Mind is informationally open, but operationally closed, as Luhmann had written.

I would also like to connect this posting to the Aeonic-Words-thread by ahanit (however, this here still is distinct enough to justify a topic of its own).

I'd also like to add in something concerning contacts to discarnate beings; Set can also be ragarded as such (among many other possibilities). With those, there is the possibility to unify with them, at least for the duration of the communication. This is a classical invocation, in fact. Doing it this way, communication can be much more complex than what words could bear.

For example, in one LHP trip, I had contact to something best described as a perfect intelligence. Normal communication in our sense would have been impossible because our communication heavily depends upon TIME - we must sort our words and sentences by time. But this intelligence was atemporal. Learning was a concept completely alien to that intelligence. For us, perfection is something we try to aquire by learning while perfection, for this intelligence, was something inherent by design. It did not BECOME perfect from an imperfect state of being - perfection was its NATURE. I experienced this being as a kind of crystal, at least that is what my consciousness made from what I was experiencing. It was so completely different that further communication was not possible.

However, with discarnate beings, we have another big problem. Since I don't believe in realism, even less with such beings, "true" or "false" are no valid categories to judge a model by. The only thing we can tell is whether a model is working or not. But that it is working tells us nothing in the category of right or wrong. Even contradictory models may work. So while I can invocate a discarnate being, I also could interpret the process as communicating with something inside my own consciousness. Which would make the whole model of discarnate beings superfluous. And also this model, communicating with parts of my own consciousness, would explain the experiences.

An interesting sidemark here is the unification of two humans. In another LHP trip, I reached this state with my wife, it felt like not being two different beings anymore, but one being. The level of understanding then is much deeper. Then again, this also could be a deception.

We never can know for sure.. nothing.
 
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Eschatas

Member
That's what I figured...

Take your insights with a grain of salt and keep a copy of The Varieties of the Psychedelic Experience by Masters and Houston on hand.

It's always helpful to remind yourself that some experiences are simply common side effects of certain ingestibles and shouldn't be taken any more (or less) seriously than the nausea that goes with some perscription drugs.
 

Daelach

Setian
Actually, your advice of taking things with a grain of salt is a good one - but I would extend it to the rest of life and existence. As I hold a very sceptical position on epistemology, I think there is only very little we actually can know for sure. It is always only dealing with maps, never with the territory.

So you are right, I do regard the experiences with a sceptical eye, but not because of substances. They only help me to generate different models of reality. Those models are just other maps, and some of them give inspiring new thoughts. But just as the bus which has taken me home today is only a model in my thoughts (its objective existence cannot be proven nor unproven), so is any experience e.g. with Set.

The Buddhists have grasped this concept, they call it Maya.

Communication between two is not really possible because the boundaries of their selves stand between them like walls. The only way to understand something is to become one with it. In RHP schools, this state would be reached by meditation about the object in question, but the results are the same. And the point is: it is one's very self with its boundaries (which are defining it!) that will prevent one from truly understanding anything outside it. So the self must be widened until it eventually comprises all, and then, since each thing only makes sense in contrast to things it is not, there will be no self anymore. That is when RHP and LHP cross each other again. The aim is the same, the difference is only in the means.
 
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