Thoughts on Buddhism

[Angrboda]

The more I read and hear Alan Watts speak the more I fall in love with the man. WATT a great intellect! I read an essay called "Alchemy' that addressed his experimentation with LSD in the 60's. I have some experience with psychadelics and with entering the mind into transcendenatal mysticism. the drug actually strips away layers of conditioning and bio-defenses that allow for more "real" vision. I was wondering if anybody tried DMT? I haven't but I hope to someday.

Human consciousness is a mysterious thing. Even if "god" exists or not, the human mind and body combination is a miracle I don't care what all the naysayers and cynical atheists say. I don't think many of them have a very good imagination. They think too literally. I am sure they are good people, but they may restrict themselves to logic and computation too much, which is a relatively new social condition. Buddhism is counter-cultural just like John Lennon and Yoko Ono was. They said "Screw the government, Bring down the establishment!" WHY? because it is all an illusion.

You might be interested in the following documentary, available on Netflix, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

A recent discussion of psychedelics on another forum prompted one observer to suggest that "they're right on the edge of releasing something inside us that wants to get out." Which prompted me to reply that, "If the documentary on the psychedelic DMT I just watched is any indication, that something waiting to get out is a bunch of unsubstantiated metaphysical twaddle, baseless speculation, and just general bad thinking."

The real poverty of imagination here is in those who think that their inability to conceive of naturalistic explanations for consciousness tells us anything useful about the problem itself. That's just an argument from ignorance. That's mistaking your confusion for its profundity.

On the whole, I don't find consciousness particularly mysterious as I see solutions where other people see baffling mysteries. There is only one aspect of consciousness which still gives me some pause. However, having pushed through the fogs where others have stalled in dumbfounded wonder, I have every reason to expect that aspect to be naturalistically soluble. There's a reason why people "restrict themselves to logic and computation," because several centuries of productive science as a result of doing so has yielded more useful truths than several millennia of navel gazing.