Quote Originally Posted by Oneironaut View Post
That actually makes a lot of sense. Whether or not this connection has ever actually been made (in terms of humans experiencing a truly transcendental perspective) is, of course, open to debate - victim to uncertainty - but I definitely hold no serious doubt to the idea. The flip side, though, is that perhaps the "transcendental" perspectives which are experienced are byproducts of the human brain attempting to create a convincing experience (akin to the battle between people believing OOBEs are actual extra-physical experiences, or simply dreams that feel like extra-physical experiences). But, again, by posing the conflicting concepts, I'm not trying to spin it either way.
Hahaha, absolutely. I'm sure that once we gain a much deeper and intuitive understanding of the brain and what it's capable of, we may seriously be able to tell if these experiences are legitimate or not. Just bear in mind that consciousness by itself isn't even dependent on the brain, as was demonstrated roughly one hundred years ago by the famous Bengali scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, and more recently by Cleve Backster with respect to their studies of consciousness in plants. I believe there's more information on Backster today, so a quick google search should bring up plenty of results. If we as humans can have conscious experience of something without the aid of the brain, then that, my friend, says a great deal about everything we're talking about. That certainly doesn't mean that these "mystical experiences" can't be fabrications of the brain though, as I'm sure our hallucinogenic abilities are quite potent. And even if trancendental experience was proven to a fault, we might have a hard time differentiating them from the "realistic dreams" as it were.

Considering the nature of consciousness as demonstrated through plant studies thus far, my current standpoint on the subject is that we are fully capable of trancendental experience (that it is in fact real). Or maybe saying "I believe it's real" would be more appropriate. Ugh, that brings to mind the famous Morpheus quote that they even played in the video, "What is real?". I think it's time for another Matrix marathon.....

Quote Originally Posted by The Cusp
Ok, I'm really drunk right now and got distracted from my intended topic, to again throw out the idea that wave form probabilities = schemata.
I'd just like to point out that you do a remarkable job of expressing yourself clearly as a drunk person. I never would have guessed.

In your picture I see an early morning in the Amazon.