Blog Archive

Friday, 22 February 2019


It is a peculiar characteristic of altered states of consciousness which understand themselves as 'higher' that they tend to dissolve the distinction between self and other. One has the strong conviction that whatever alteration in the angle of view is in effect it is necessarily an accessible possibility for everyone else, and that they are separated from it only by a screen of thoughts - and since thoughts have no ultimate reality, by nothing at all. This is the same kind of thing, but far stronger, as the sensus communis of that lends universality to aesthetic judgments. The apprehension is achieved via the very structure of consciousness without explicitly awareness of how that structure could be objectively described. Again it like the dim opening of another sense altogether, one which would make a radical transformation of the 'topology' of experience utterly self-evident. Or perhaps a better way of saying is that it reveals the much vaster extent of the invisibly self-evident that underlies all experience and that is simply presumed in every interaction. In ordinary circumstances this is so much in the background that we are left focusing only on the derived and abstracted mental debris, the half-thought-out half-maps of reality that so sharply distinguish us from each other that we uncritically build our ontologies on the basis of intractable difference and separation. From the altered point of view even the perverse investment in pursuing such a strategy takes on a wholly comic character.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.