The Nature of Realness and of Psychosis

[Scholar]

If you inspect in your own experience what "Realness" is, the sense that something is real, it essentially boils down to how impactful it is on your ego.

When I had my first psychedelic trip using LSD, I tripped alone and had a panic attack before the trip even started. Throughout the trip, I was holding onto sanity.

I quickly noticed as the trip intensified that my thoughts became terrifying. Each thought I have appeared to influence my entire reality, they came "too real". The thoughts themselves became profoundly intense, the only real thing at the time. I was terrified of a horror trip, so to avoid ending up in a hospital I tried to trip-sit myself by writing words down on a paper that would prevent me from drifting into a negative state. Each word I wrote completely consumed me, it became reality itself.

 

Looking back at this experience, the question becomes, what exactly does it mean for something to become "more real", or "reality itself". It is very clear to me now that any sense of realness is something that is essentially illusiory. What realness actually is, what is "reality", simply means how influential an object of consciousness (any given experience, such as a thought, sense-impression and so forth) is to the ego. What is real essentially just means what is important to the ego, what influences it, what it focuses on, what consumes it.

To understand this more deeply you can look at the nature of psychosis. The first time I heard it explained this way was by Dr K. Basically, Psychosis simply means that a mind takes it's thoughts to be real.

What is the difference between a psychotic paranoia and a regular person? It's not actually the thoughts that fill the psychotic person. A regular person might walk across the street, and a thought might occur in their mind "What if this person wants to rob me?". The regulated person knows that this is just a thought, that there is a distinction between reality and that thought. They might not react to it at all, or get some anxiety, but eventually they realize "Well, I'm just being paranoid, it's just a thought.".

To the psychotic person, the thought they have immediately becomes their reality. They do not recognize it as a thought, to the ego, it becomes total reality. 

So essentially, psychosis is a spectrum: The more you believe your own thoughts to be real, the more psychotic you are. If you recognize the unrealness of all thoughts, you would be totally free of psychosis.

 

This is why ego death reveals that reality is an illusion, a dream. The word illusion in this sense is meaningless in and of itself, it simply means that the content of consciousness has no impact on the ego, because the ego no longer exists. It is as unreal as a dream, not because it loses it's Isness, but simply because it isn't important to the ego. A dream is an experience which holds no importance to the ego once it realizes it had no relevancy to it's survival. Dream just means "It's not relevant to my survival.". Redness doesn't stop to exist, or be any less real than it was before, it just means there is no ego to take it seriously, to prioritize it, to assert it to be part of itself. I invite you to truly inspect this idea of Reality, or "Realness". How does it make sense for something to be more or less real? And truly, if you inspect your sense of "realness", within your own experience, what is it truly?

If you take psychedelics and have an impactful experience, it is no accident that the most real thing you will end up asserting to exist happens to also be the most meaningful thing that exists for the ego. Meaningfulness just means something drives the ego, something is essential to the function of the ego. 

In this way, psychedelics induce psychosis in all those who consume it. If you end up with an ego at the end of that experience, you will have just amplified it's psychotic attachments to various thoughts and contents within itself.

This is why psychotic people are indistinguishable from long term psychedelic users. If you trip, and you have the thought "I am an alien", that becomes your reality, your psychosis. And because consciousness can take on infinite forms, your ego can get psychotically attached to it in infinite ways.

 

Notice that essentially, the meaningfulness of an experience is equal to the realness of an experience. I could put an electrode in your brain, stimulate the neural network that is responsible for attributing a sense of meaning to an object of consciousness, and you would come out of that experience saying "This thing is more real than anything I have ever experienced!".

That just means it's more important to your ego than anything you ever experienced. That's why you start shitting and crying, because it overstimulates your egoic structures.

Isness itself doesn't have degrees of reality to it. Isness just is, every other assertion is just more evidence of your psychosis.

 

 

Edited 23 hours ago by Scholar

[Joseph Maynor]

Respectfully, what about the ego being attached to what you wrote?

[Scholar]

9 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Respectfully, what about the ego being attached to what you wrote?

This is the confusion that plagues these sorts of communities. You don't have to be without ego to realize what is happening within your own experience. I am aware of what my ego is doing, to the degree necessary to assert the claims I did.

Being egoless will not fundamentally shift the awareness of what I speak of, it would just change the quality of this experience.

[Hojo]

Ego also isn't just thinking. Its resistance to doing things. Ie not wanting to go into cold shower. Setting limitations on how much you can lift or how much you can stretch in yoga. Or how far you can run is all ego.

There is physical ego. If you constantly push against your limitations you will destroy your ego.

Edited 22 hours ago by Hojo

[Joseph Maynor]

5 minutes ago, Scholar said:

This is the confusion that plagues these sorts of communities. You don't have to be without ego to realize what is happening within your own experience. I am aware of what my ego is doing, to the degree necessary to assert the claims I did.

Being egoless will not fundamentally shift the awareness of what I speak of, it would just change the quality of this experience.

Why does the confusion you identified "plague" these sorts of communities?

[Scholar]

9 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Why does the confusion you identified "plague" these sorts of communities?

I don't know how the narrative emerged, but people tend to confuse awareness with egolessness. Both concepts are connected, but a being can be without ego can lack self-awareness, and a self-aware being can still have ego.

An enlightened teacher can still act ignorantly even if he has attained a cessation of ego. 

 

10 minutes ago, Hojo said:

Ego also isn't just thinking. Its resistance to doing things. Ie not wanting to go into cold shower. Setting limitations on how much you can lift or how much you can stretch in yoga. Or how far you can run is all ego.

Sure it's basically the survival apparatus of the mind, although when I talk about ego I refer specifically to the identity-forming parts of the mind. Really, it's just models to communicate the ideas, when I look in my own direct experience it becomes too complex to accurately describe.

Edited 22 hours ago by Scholar

[Joseph Maynor]

Ego is a tricky term on the path I find.

[Breakingthewall]

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

This is why ego death reveals that reality is an illusion, a dream. The word illusion in this sense is meaningless in and of itself, it simply means that the content of consciousness has no impact on the ego, because the ego no longer exists. It is as unreal as a dream, not because it loses it's Isness, but simply because it isn't important to the ego. A dream is an experience which holds no importance to the ego once it realizes it had no relevancy to it's survival. Dream just means "It's not relevant to my survival.". Redness doesn't stop to exist, or be any less real than it was before, it just means there is no ego to take it seriously, to prioritize it, to assert it to be part of itself. I invite you to truly inspect this idea of Reality, or "Realness". How does it make sense for something to be more or less real? And truly, if you inspect your sense of "realness", within your own experience, what is it truly?

What you call ego is a psychological structure, software generated by hardware created over 4 billion years of biological evolution that creates an experience and gives it meaning.

"Reality" is two rocks colliding in space and also the experience of fear you had with LSD. There isn't an ego on one side and reality on the other; rather, the ego is reality in ego mode.

Fear or suffering are the emotional burdens that give experience an absolute vector toward survival. If you operate on your brain and eliminate the circuits that make something important, nothing will matter, and that will be reality.

Now, with those circuits, the reality is that it's important not to be eaten by lions. Reality is what it is, period.

[Inliytened1]

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

If you inspect in your own experience what "Realness" is, the sense that something is real, it essentially boils down to how impactful it is on your ego.

 

Everything that has meaning must be first given that by you. If you don't give something meaning or realness, not only does it mean nothing, it ceases to exist.  This is one of the most profound realizations one can have.  And it is quite startling. 

Edited 21 hours ago by Inliytened1

[Breakingthewall]

54 minutes ago, Scholar said:

don't know how the narrative emerged, but people tend to confuse awareness with egolessness. Both concepts are connected, but a being can be without ego can lack self-awareness, and a self-aware being can still have ego.

An enlightened teacher can still act ignorantly even if he has attained a cessation of ego. 

 

Cessation of ego has to relationship is a myth and it wouldn't mean enlightenment,are different planes or dimensions. It's common to confuse both and thinking that enlightenment means having no preferences. It's bit more nuanced, it's placed yourself in a level where there are no differences, for a while. In the plane where only being is. Just to align your ego and be form perceiving the unlimited

Edited 21 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[Inliytened1]

@Breakingthewall this includes pain. As amazing as that sounds.

[Scholar]

27 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

Everything that has meaning must be first given that by you. If you don't give something meaning or realness, not only does it mean nothing, it ceases to exist.  This is one of the most profound realizations one can have.  And it is quite startling. 

This is the opposite of true. Realness is a sensation that exists completely outside of the Isness of things.

It's not a profound realization at all, it is psychosis.

 

There is no you to give anything meaning and realness in the first place.

Edited 21 hours ago by Scholar

[Joseph Maynor]

2 minutes ago, Scholar said:

There is no you to give anything meaning and realness in the first place.

How do you know this?

[Breakingthewall]

30 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

Everything that has meaning must be first given that by you. If you don't give something meaning or realness, not only does it mean nothing, it ceases to exist.  This is one of the most profound realizations one can have.  And it is quite startling. 

Yes but "you" giving meaning means a relationship of causality that comes from the big bang, then the first cells, the complex organisms, brains, consciousness, until the feeling of a kick in your balls that appears as "bad". Even you are god, god gives that meaning due a relationship of causality, so it could be said that things happen, nothing else

[Inliytened1]

27 minutes ago, Scholar said:

This is the opposite of true. Realness is a sensation that exists completely outside of the Isness of things.

It's not a profound realization at all, it is psychosis.

 

There is no you to give anything meaning and realness in the first place.

It is precisely because isness is all there is that any other realness is illusory, dreamed up, or THOUGHT up, by you.  And of course there is no you in terms of who you are as a human being.   That is also though up. There is just Isness. Otherwise known as Consciousness. Isness is synonymous with Being which is synonymous with Consciousness.  Empty Consciousness. 

Edited 21 hours ago by Inliytened1

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

precisely because isness is all there is that any other realness is illusory, dreamed up, or THOUGHT up, by you. 

If you really want to get enlightened moments every day that you want, just meditating 10 minutes, you should change that mental frame, you are not creating the reality, that's a closure. You are the reality happening.

It's totally absolutely different, could seems that this is irrelevant, that what anyone should do is meditate and let the ego go. Mistake. The mental frame closes, and can allow openess. At least can make it possible. But anyway, your choice 

Edited 18 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[LordFall]

Yes, I agree that it's extremely important to talk about psychosis and delusions more on this forum. Otherwise it can lead to a lot of wasted time at best and danger to yourself and others at worse. 

Aberrant salience is also an important concept to understand because when you do psychedelics and enlightenment work your pattern recognition will go haywire and lead you straight to psychosis by overthinking synchronicities. I was tripped out by the color red for a while considering it a bad omen and the angel numbers gave me comfort at first and then anxiety and paranoia for example. Those were my triggers but you guys will encounter your own. 

I think it's ironic that Leo has been railling against Science so much recently because really the scientific method is the best tool I've found to ground myself and test theories I've received from insight on psychedelics or even during actual psychosis. Plenty of interesting thoughts could translate to actual reality but if you can't make them happen or reproduce your ideas sober then they were not real or not useful to your life at the moment. 

I think a lot of people here and in spiritual circles fear materialism so much because of a simple 10x rule. If you know something it's still 10x harder than you thought to build it. So you can trip on psychedelics and feel at one with the world but reality is fortunately very solid and coherent and thus hard to manipulate and so if you want to build an awesome life you're right back to good ol capitalism like the rest of us. 

Edited 16 hours ago by LordFall

[Inliytened1]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

If you really want to get enlightened moments every day that you want, just meditating 10 minutes, you should change that mental frame, you are not creating the reality, that's a closure. You are the reality happening.

It's totally absolutely different, could seems that this is irrelevant, that what anyone should do is meditate and let the ego go. Mistake. The mental frame closes, and can allow openess. At least can make it possible. But anyway, your choice 

You have to realize that there is no distinction there and then you will realize God.  God is both. You still have a distinction created for there being Absolute Will.  Its so open that it can be willed by God while also appearing that it isn't.   If reality is an Infinite Mind it must have a Will being Infinite and free of any restrictions.  It simply can't be restricted to not having it.

Edited 16 hours ago by Inliytened1

[OBEler]

Interesting, so these manifesting practices where you must believe certain thoughts that they become real is some kind of self trained psychosis?