Anton Rogachevski

@UnbornTao Yep so accurate 🤣

I'm very excited to present an official edition of the essay, though I'm sure I'll keep working and refining it even further, it's pretty solid as it is. Enjoy, and I would love to hear your thoughts on how to improve it further!

@MightyMind Thank you dear reader, I would love to hear what you think. How could I improve it more?

@UnbornTao By the look of it, we agree on most things I do love to contemplate very much to reach a state of strong doubt that is similar to the one a Zen practice is aiming for. Besides, I can't just throw it all away, it's too much fun! Ps- My new theory is finally ready as a first official edition. yay!

A very powerful enlightenment experience disrupts the ability to doubt. The intensity is convincing the brain and the “enlightened” is so convinced that now he has it all figured out, as it was all directly experienced by him. For this reason I suggest to be very careful with powerful psychedelics. In non-dual experience, the usual sense of separation between self and world dissolves, revealing a direct feeling of infinite unity and boundlessness. This experience feels profoundly vast, timeless, and all-encompassing – qualities traditionally associated with divinity. Because the mind naturally interprets unfamiliar experiences through familiar concepts, it often labels this unity as “God.” The intense emotional impact of such states further reinforces the sense of encountering something sacred or ultimate. From a meta-phenomenological perspective, this does not confirm an external God’s existence, but rather situates “God” as the felt substance of experience itself – an infinite, divine-like reality encountered within consciousness. This view honors the power of the experience while maintaining humility about its ontological meaning. There’s a subtle fallacy in the yearning for something beyond the ordinary – a belief that true reality must be more mystical, more profound, than what appears mundane. So when someone has a mystical experience, it often feels like confirmation: Ah, this is what reality really is! But this leap is psychological, not evidential. The extraordinary feel of the experience seduces the mind into projecting that extraordinariness onto the fabric of existence itself. The intensity or beauty of an experience does not determine its ontological status. The mind is evolutionarily tuned to treat powerful sensations as meaningful, but this is a heuristic – not a reliable truth-detection mechanism. Mystical experiences are vivid, coherent, and emotionally overwhelming, but this doesn’t mean they describe an ultimate reality. They may reveal something about the nature of experience, not what exists outside of it. Example: A psychedelic user sees a fractal entity that feels “more real than real.” The brain, overwhelmed by coherence and novelty, infers: This must be the real world, and my everyday life is the illusion. But this is emotional inference, not careful epistemology.

I'm very skeptical about the ability of a breakthrough to get you accurate knowledge of theses subjects. Here's a new little addition to the theory that might clarify things: Dualism is essential to this framework because it requires us to see the world through two lenses at once, each valid within its own domain. From the perspective of the inferred, noumenal world, it is true that there exists a biological body, and that this body is the seat of consciousness. Yet phenomenologically, the body is not a thing in itself but an experience, and alongside it there exists only the idea of “body” and the idea of “consciousness.” Physically, it is true that the body is mortal and will one day die. Phenomenologically, however, “death” and “birth” are themselves ideas, while the body remains only one element within the broader field of experience, never the whole of it. This illustrates the gap between physical facts and experiential appearances. Noumenally, no experience could arise without a body; phenomenologically, experience is boundless, and the body plays only a minor role within it. Seen this way, experience proves to be an unreliable guide to physical reality. It carries a mystical quality, for the experiencer encounters everything as mysterious. From this ground we must begin: our only genuine access to the world is inferential, drawn from within an enigmatic field of experience that can never be fully studied from the outside, objectively. Such a situation should instill a deep humility in all claims to knowledge. ------- Mysticism is about a profound unknowing, so if you are looking for knowledge of things, it's not for you.

Dualism is essential to this framework because it requires us to see the world through two lenses at once, each valid within its own domain. From the perspective of the inferred, noumenal world, it is true that there exists a biological body, and that this body is the seat of consciousness. Yet phenomenologically, the body is not a thing in itself but an experience, and alongside it there exists only the idea of “body” and the idea of “consciousness.” Physically, it is true that the body is mortal and will one day die. Phenomenologically, however, “death” and “birth” are themselves ideas, while the body remains only one element within the broader field of experience, never the whole of it. This illustrates the gap between physical facts and experiential appearances. Noumenally, no experience could arise without a body; phenomenologically, experience is boundless, and the body plays only a minor role within it. Seen this way, experience proves to be an unreliable guide to physical reality. It carries a mystical quality, for the experiencer encounters everything as mysterious. From this ground we must begin: our only genuine access to the world is inferential, drawn from within an enigmatic field of experience that can never be fully studied from the outside, objectively. Such a situation should instill a deep humility in all claims to knowledge.

@UnbornTao Dear friend, Would you be offended if I said that your cup is still full? So to speak. You are not yet ready to let go of your imaginary ideas about an "objective reality" and "the brain perceiving" and that's ok. When you see through them finally as imaginary and hallucinatory you will start to see what I mean by the basic phenomenal epistemic ground, the empty mind that is free of believing in imaginary things. Through such a mind you can see clearly the nature of experience and to really know that you don't know. This profound unknowing is the mystical in a nutshell.

There is no "perception" nor a "perceiver" besides as concepts phenomenologically speaking just pure experience. ("Out there outside somewhere", maybe, but that's also a thought) It's hard to understand what is happening to you. It seems you don't want to get it. Do you by any chance think. "This can't be it, it must feel amazing and extraordinary, but this is just normal." How good are you at simply stopping thoughts? Can you reach a "no mind" state easily?

Yes a "rock" is Experience, everything is. You can't look anywhere without finding it. And it is you! You don't need to keep walking around in circles around it, it's accessible to you here and now. There's no process Phenomenologically speaking. The "process" is a story.

It's inference. Try to see when you infer things and when you actually look.

When in "time" will you know? In the "future"? This obsession with breakthroughs is not healthy in my opinion and misses the point. I'm not saying it's not gonna be cool. There are cool ways in which experience may dance, but everything is already in front you right now, staring you in the face, as you stare in it's face. There's nothing but You to find within an infinite You. You are it, being, experience, everything forever and ever.

Wow thank you friend, To even be compared to such an elite intellectual is a huge compliment. I do my best

@UnbornTao For the experiencer, from his phenomenological perspective nothing exists but experience. I don't have theories, I don't need them anymore, only direct consciousness. Funny coming from someone who is working so hard to develop a theory of epistemology right? I think that there is some purpose for a theory as an instrument to keep pointing back to raw experience. That is why I want a theory of epistemology that is based in a basic phenomenological ground. Very simple, like a rock. "experience is not existential" What do you mean by that? You can't experience anything that isn't an experience.

@DocWatts You ability to go deep on a subject is incredible. This is the stuff books are made from. If what you wrote is truly understood it will certainly help with building a new healthy and aware perspective.