We are constantly hallucinating most of the time

a facebook post from my kung fu teacher/freind i thought i would share with you guys:

"Consider this quote from Kant: "It is therefore quite right to say, that the senses never err, not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all."

Now compare it with this one from the Buddhist philosophy scholar Ed...ward Conze: "Reification ([hypostatisation]...) is the tendency of natural man to superimpose on the concrete flux of conditions, activities, sense data, by abstraction a superstructure of relatively independent 'things'."

In other words, things or objects are conceptual abstractions from the raw data of experience. No such thing as a "thing" is ever present in the stream of our experience unless and until we objectify that experience via confusing it with a whole set of concepts (such as external origin and independent existence, just for starters) that *are never given* in experience itself, but instead, are merely posited a priori.

Consider an example: If I were looking at a glass on a table and it suddenly morphed into a chicken and flew away, that could reasonably be called a hallucination. Yet notice that the experience qua experience--in other words, the raw sensory data, would undoubtedly be a real *experience*, which is simply to say that the sensations themselves were indeed witnessed.

If I had observed that same flow of visual information without hypostatization or reification--without attributing objecthood to regions of that flow of sensory data--there would be no false conceptual judgment involved, because there would be no conceptual judgment of any kind involved. I would not have thought I had seen something that wasn't there because I would not have posited the idea that something was there at all. I would not have been hallucinating; I would have been having the real experience of a stream of phenomena, none of which I considered either real or unreal as "things" in themselves.

Now, consider the example of just observing a glass on a table, without the occurrence of any unusual visual phenomena. Do I think I actually see a "glass," or am I just observing the forms arising within the visual field, without objectifying its contents? If I think I see a glass, I am attributing ideas of separateness, boundary, stasis, independence, externality, spatial and temporal relationships, and all sorts of related concepts, to a stream of sensory data that clearly contains nothing of the sort. Whether or not I judge and infer correctly with regard to such ideas (and there are strong arguments that I do not), in any case, I am superposing conceptual abstractions on the visual experience that are not actually present within it--and in so doing, confusing the two. In other words, I am seeing something that is not there; I am hallucinating.

What is the essential difference? It is not in the raw data of experience itself; it is in our judgments upon it. When we objectify, we are hallucinating. When we clearly distinguish concepts from percepts without superposing the former on the latter, we are not. The habit of objectification, hence routine hallucination, is so widespread and deeply conditioned that it is difficult even to communicate the idea that there is a distinction between percept and concept. The irony is that only a minority have learned to experience without any such confusion, while the vast majority of persons spend nearly their entire adult lives uncritically immersed in nearly constant hallucination."

 

Yeah I see, it's called a gestalt in the world of psyche. We associate everything into a category, the categories of information are what we take in from the senses, and the category itself would be for example, chair. We know a chair has four legs, and a back, thus we can associate anything that fits that description into what we percieve as a chair, we can further define what a chair is by learning other qualities they can posess. and they get sorted into our fields of experience. I'm getting off track lol, but basically everything that comes in through our senses is filtered through our conciouss, our councious awarenss is our perception, perception is biased based upon the gestalts we have constructed our world in, psychedelic experiences remove the filter so more can be percieved, but if they can be MORE percieved that does not mean they are hallucinations, because if we can percieve something, then it does exist in that way, we just can't see it in that way in our normal experience. In a trip, our gestalts are given more specifactions, now our chair can be defined even more, because we have exposed ourselves to further awareness. We have widened our perception so that we can take in more stimuli from the sense, and as a result, we learn from the experience. So yes, you are right, the senses never err, the associated sensory organs are just tools, the mind is what allows us to see what they see, our minds don't choose to see all of what our eye sees because it would be mind blowing, and it is when we can fool our minds so that it can!

 

And of course under the influence of an entheogen, our minds are stimulated so that we see what really shouldnt be seen. Because the brain is what analyzes the data the eye for example would see. So if you directly stimulated the occipital lobe (where the stimuli from our eye is analayzed) you would see something even if you were blind. Same goes for any sense. And yes, I basically use this description as a reason to stay high all day, because any drug effects the brain in a STIMULATING way, that means we are just furthering our world experience under the influence. For the most part, if the drugs you use don't damage neurons lol, of course, entheogens and mj dont =)

 

^ or if the benefits of the stimulation outway the damage to your neurons