Home | Community | Message Board


This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: PhytoExtractum Maeng Da Thai Kratom Leaf Powder   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
Invisiblehelix
Idealist Thinker Musician Lover
Male User Gallery


Registered: 09/13/10
Posts: 409
Language, art, psychedelics and conception of death, in relation to finding order out of chaos
    #15304565 - 10/31/11 04:24 PM (12 years, 2 months ago)

Warning this is LONG. Much thanks to anyone who has the time and attention to read this and comment or correct. I'm developing a working theory here and not sure what the point of it is, but just need to get my thoughts somewhere that houses people who are interested in this kind of stuff:

So our intellectual development and enlargement of our brain capacities is perhaps our biggest evolutionary advantage we have over other species. We could use that intellect to create complex languages - uniform systems of symbols related to meanings, forming an infinite number of possible utternaces that we could then use to communicate experience with one another and thus convey shared intentionality, learning to work together to survive, accomplish goals, build things, create communities and societies, combine resources, etc.

However, our intellectual capacities also provided us the ability to ponder about why we were doing these things. This is NOT evolutionarily helpful because if someone's sitting around pondering the meaning of his or her existence while a lion is rushing at them they will promptly be eaten. There's also the biggest signifier of our ultimate meaningless in the span of the cosmos - death. That we could cease to exist and our lives would be a blip in the history of the world makes one seriously question what's the point of living at all.

So every human is faced with the task of answering this question and relieving this crisis of meaning as a result of their intellectual capacities by creating belief systems, individualist narratives about oneself and immortality projects for ourselves - things that give our lives meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence (see Denial of Death, which some people on this forum are pretty gung-ho about. I haven't read it but would love to)

It makes sense to me that nature would demand that we develop this ability over time because even within nature, order exists within chaos. We are instruments of nature inasmuch as we create order within chaos by making meaning. "meaning making machines." Indeed, the development of language that prompted our evolution is an instance of creating order within chaos.

The problem with language though is that it cannot accurately convey experience. It is only a representation. There is no escape from this. Those with a stronger grasp of language or more developed critical capacities are capable of flexing and representing essence of something more accurately, and by finding like-minded people and cultures you can relate more easily because of similar meanings for words or an overlap of belief systems amongst others around you, but even if you can find the best linguistic tools to represent something perfectly as you experienced it, it still is only a substitute for the experience itself (which includes all of the associations of emotion, past experiences which are unique to the individual, interpretations that cannot be linguistically portrayed by the reciever due to a lack of linguistic skills or different language usage/symbolization, etc)

So no matter how much we yearn to communicate in order to establish consensus (connection) and thus a stronger harmony/order, there is always the problem of the signifier never being able to capture the signified and thus we are constantly faced with gaps in our systems of meaning-maintenance. When faced with those gaps we are driven to further cling to our belief systems, our compulsions, our biases - in a stronger grasp for order. But since the only way others can experience something is through representation, there always is a lingering chink in our belief systems that are constructed to maintain our illusions of order in the face of meaninglessness existence, unless we kill the destroying belief systems. The dual nature of the mind necessitates that we are either wrong or right.

All this pondering is driven by my attempt to understand art, psychedelics and mental disorder so I'll finally get to that.

I think depression develops in an individual when they feel a gap between their true immortality project/meaning and their actions. This is usually because of immortality projects that they've committed to as a result of needing to compromise due to the limits of their particular time, place, society, culture, language, skills, exposure to certain ways of life and perspectives and having investment in those for their survival/well-being, etc.

I also think this explains why psychedelics have shown the ability to temporarily cure OCD in everyone - by seeing everything as one (as it really is), our psyche experiences cosmic order and thus our need for control is eased.

Their ability to relieve Death anxiety in cancer patients is similar: death loses its associations with meaninglessness since we are given a direct experience of the fallibility of our attempts to create order and meaning in the first place, the failure of representations and the dual nature of the mind.

They can effectively deconstruct belief systems because they are breaking down the most fundamental need in our psyche as placed by nature - our attempts for control. This allows us to really get a view of what we personally want from life separate from the given structures and memes that are created out of the same need.

Finally there is their ability inspire art and creativity, which cements that all art is a response to the tension between representation and reality. Representation fails to capture experience and so the artist must try to create an experience - he is driven, compulsed, to make art. To organize matter into an experience itself that captures things more effectively and in essence than language (of course this too, is an impossible task because as soon as someone else looks at the art piece it is experienced from his or her lens and thus interpreted differently, but still, the power of art for the maker has transcendent qualities in the moment)

Ultimately the only thing that can truly solve this tension is Death itself - a release from the impossible need to represent oneself with tools that can never accurately represent. This gives death not the conontation of fear, but a conontation of beauty - a final escape from the fundamental conflict of every human experience

or something like that.


Edited by helix (10/31/11 08:23 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: PhytoExtractum Maeng Da Thai Kratom Leaf Powder   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Explaining why life after death exists
( 1 2 3 4 5 all )
dumlovesyou 7,327 92 04/05/03 12:36 PM
by buttonion
* The nature of language in dreams Noviseer 896 7 11/19/03 09:59 PM
by strangebrew
* Birth and the psychedelic experience Xlea321 1,166 4 02/16/02 04:32 AM
by Asante
* Near-death experiences
( 1 2 3 all )
shroom_muncher 5,332 43 02/09/04 04:37 AM
by SkorpivoMusterion
* Athiest Death Theory
( 1 2 all )
LiquidSmoke 4,756 36 09/09/02 06:25 PM
by jayson
* Death
( 1 2 all )
ekomstop 2,057 29 05/25/04 07:24 PM
by Panoramix
* ESSAY:Psychedelic induced mystical experiences by Alan Watts tekramrepus 2,908 6 03/21/03 11:43 AM
by pattern
* Limitations of Language silversoul7 2,236 17 07/11/03 07:08 PM
by Strumpling

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Middleman, DividedQuantum
239 topic views. 1 members, 12 guests and 8 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.02 seconds spending 0.007 seconds on 13 queries.