A little mindwork based on Paulo Coelho

[tryptonaut]

I couldn't find an English translation of Coelho's philosophical poem so I had to translate it myself - I hope well enough so you can enjoy it as much as I did!


The master said:
Close your eyes
or leave them open if you like
and imagine a swarm of flying birds

(Do it! Picture a swarm of birds! Then read on)


And now tell me:
How many birds are you seeing?
Five? Eleven? Sixteen?
Whatever your answer may be,
nobody will be able to tell exactly
how many birds they have seen.

This little experiment shows one thing.
You can imagine a swarm of birds
but how many birds you see
is out of your control
even the picture is clear,
detailed and precise.

Another question will give you the answer.
Who determined
how many birds are going to be
in the picture you imagined?
It certainly wasn't you.

 

[Nitroman]

you know what i think,

i think that ammount of birds came from your sub consiousness, its like a very deep view into yourself, like a inner eye, yeaah thats what I think if the eye would be better it could see deeper even beyond your ego i think

 

[Cyproxicus]

...

 

[forest]

what u say is a subconsious. all the impressions we get are in our subconsious, whatever you put into a computer is what u are gonna get out

 

[tryptonaut]

Cyproxicus, what you say is absolutely right. I have read quite some stuff about speech theory and the concept of "world knowledge" (the concept of a flock of birds which is stored in our brains is part of our individual world knowledge).
The concept is clear, but it's still so complex that even scientists still find it amazing and don't have a solution yet on how we could transport that kind of world knowledge into a computer (which would be necessary for a computer to understand language).

What I think is amazing is that there are so many pictures and concepts stored in my brain - how and why does my subconscious select one special one in a certain moment? When I imagined the birds, they were black birds against a grey sky. Why wasn't it white birds against a sunny sky (a picture I have also stored in my mind)? I think that's also the core of Coelho's question: Why did you see in that moment ~20 black birds and not ~10 white birds? Just coincidence? A decision of your subconscious? But a decision on what basis?

 

[forest]

simpel, we are creatures of habit.

everything we do is based on habits we created in our life. we think we make choices but we already made the choice the day we made that habit.

so the picture you've seen the most is the strongest habit in a way and that's the one you're going te visualize.

 

[Siq]

Yeah totally agree with this all. It's very easy to add undeterminable concepts of collective unconscience, but I think the way it's stated here, now, makes more sence.

True, it remains hard to scientificly explain how this terminology works in the brain.

 

[HeartCore]

This is all very interesting and such but what is a real mind fuck to me, is where do all those grandiose, alien landscapes and planets come from that I regularly see while on psilocybin? These vista's are so weird and complex that I find it very hard, even impossible, to think that I 'just made those up' for my entertainment

One instance I remember very clear, this was 14 years back. I had collected an amount of liberty caps in nature and ate them all. Then I found myself floating above an alien planet for at least half an hour, just scrolling by, amazing scenery, never saw anything remotely like that before.

 

[Cyproxicus]

...

 

[forest]

what u are saying isn't completely right.

u know once there was an expriment with kittens and the first year of theys life they were put in a 2 dimensional world. after that year they were put in the normal world. but they couldn't see 3 dimensional and walked against everything because they couldn't see a lot of things.

but what u say means that if we come in a completely new environment that we can't see it?

I believe that hundreds of worlds sre ''inside'' us. with mushrooms we can see some. we've not been in them this livetime, but we can see them if we go explore

 

[forest]

but I also believe that with shrooms most of the time it are just mixed memorries and chemical processes in the brains that produce these stuff.

the art is in recognising what is real and what is not

 

[Cyproxicus]

...

 

[forest]

yes I agree we should stay sober and should keep the thinking logical.

but most of the things you named if people would think well, are pure logic and facts. people are just so blind (not talking of you, know you are openminded)

 

[alice]

whatever!!



i saw ducks, like 5 or 7, they're so cool, those dutch ducks that are brown and green and can fly really high!!

Alice

 

[tryptonaut]

but if you've never seen it before, how can you know its an alien planet?

I think what HC meant is that the landscape doesn't look like anything he has ever seen before, not in reality and not on tv, not even in fictional movies. Now something like that, something totally unknown, is by definition called "alien".

I have also seen some stuff during tripping before my minds eye that I am pretty sure did not originate from my memories. It were new pictures, new forms, new ideas that suddenly sprung up. You'll notice something like this pretty quickly because you get very upset as soon as something like that happens to you. Your conscious mind realizes very quickly that this impression you just had was new, but still it didn't come from an outside perception.
As to where something like that comes from, I don't know. Maybe just some electrons running the wrong ways in your brain resulting in a new impression. However during tripping it feels magical 8)

 

[Forkbender]

Yeah, I agree with tryptonaut. It is fuzzy logic to say that all the impressions you get from imagination or a trip would be constituted by past memories. I have seen all sorts of colours in my life and all sorts of shapes, would it mean that if I see something new, that it is not entirely new? You should not try to divide an image into pieces, since it is only the whole that makes it unique. I therefore also think that we should not separate the state of mind from the picture imagined. Every experience is in this way unique, since no two experiences have both the same content and intent. If you are imagining something, it is not very different from perceiving it, actually the same parts of the brain are activated. Habit is formed as an interpretation that is applied to differing experiences and is the truly unconscious model of our experience. It is my opinion that we should get rid of habit, so that we can freely enjoy the moment, which is something like the child-like interest in your surroundings that you can experience in your trips (I had this in my early psychedelic experiences, later on, the joy of change remained)...
Sorry for the condensed form of expression, I just had too many ideas at once to put words in between...

 

[Cyproxicus]

...

 

[Forkbender]

What I meant was not just separating the mind from the picture. This is something that can hardly be done. What can be done however and what is usually done a lot in these kind of thought-experiments is that we forget that our emotional state is not taken together with the image of perception or imagination. The purely visual experience (if such a thing would exist) is altered by this emotional state and therefore the experience as a whole is a complex of both these types (there can be more parts of it, but these are probably the two main ones if one demands to make a distinction). Imagine the following: looking at a flock of birds in an angry state and looking at a flock of birds in a peaceful state. I reckon these two are distinct experiences that cannot be conflated. I think that the tendency to abstract images from the perceiver is something false: it will inevitably pose the wrong kinds of questions, because it starts out with an illusory division. I do not know if you intentionally separate mind/feeling from image, but it is important to question the distinctions you make in your premises about the human mind. If not, you'll end up going the way that was set out by your own premises without getting into the matter more deeply. (This is not to you personally, Cyproxicus, but is my warning in general.)

 

[tryptonaut]

Well, I guess "the unknown" is just a hard subject to argue about because everybody's right and everybody's not at the same time

I usually like the logical approach, but then I also get convinced by the mystical pretty often (during tripping mostly). Whatever explanation I come up with, as long as nobody can prove it, every one of them is equally right or wrong...

Maybe there is no difference between the logical and the mystical theories at all. As an example let's take the theory of telepathy. Nowadays it sounds like new-age mysticism, but what if a scientist can one day prove that there are certain waves emanating from brains and he could decipher their content? Then telepathy would become a known fact of physics and neuroscience, people would laugh about our age where this fact was thought to be non-existent.
As long as there is no proof for or against something, everything could be true - and if it always followed the narrow path of our logic, then nobody would have ever discovered quarks or dark matter!

 

[Forkbender]

Maybe there is no difference between the logical and the mystical theories at all. As an example let's take the theory of telepathy. Nowadays it sounds like new-age mysticism, but what if a scientist can one day prove that there are certain waves emanating from brains and he could decipher their content? Then telepathy would become a known fact of physics and neuroscience, people would laugh about our age where this fact was thought to be non-existent.

The first part (brains emitting waves) is already fact, not fiction. Since our brains can decipher our own brainwaves, why not someone else?