There's got to be a way to find out.

[songbirdg7 (deleted)]

I remember growing up with a friend that's extremely religious. She was constantly trying to convince me that God is real. Despite all of my arguments about proof, she would always tell me that it had nothing to do with proof. That it was faith-based. I can't accept that. Her meaning of life thoughts revolved around her truth that if we lead a good life we'll go to heaven. I asked her once where God came from. If He had parents. If those parents had parents. She looked irritated with me and went back to insisting that I should just have faith. I had someone else share an interesting theory with me. I don't buy it, but it's interesting. He said there really is no purpose for human life because we're all a collective virus. His point was that if you think about it, viruses invade a host and either spread until the host is killed (similar to what we're doing to the Earth) or is killed by medicine. We're at the top of the food chain. So far, no malady has been unsuccessful enough to wipe us out as a whole. But what if this guy is right? What if we're nothing more than an evolving, biological, accidental, virus? Kinda puts a damper on optimism. A third person told me that the meaning of life is finding something you yourself can identify with and believe in whole-heartedly. I guess that's my problem. I haven't found an idea or theory that makes perfect sense to me to the point that I can believe it completely. I need proof. It angers me that I may never have it. If there's nothing after death, then is the point of life just to live every day the best we can? I always feel so lost and I'm just sick to death of Christians telling me it's because I need to "find God" and let Jesus into my life. R...i...g...h...t. No thanks. When I think about the hours that a typical person spends in church praising a deity that may not even exit, it makes me sick. I often wonder if these people wake up one day and think, "OMG, there is no God and I've waisted 1/27 of my life away!". Probably not, but unless I have proof, I have other things to do with my time. I also get intensely angry when I lose someone I love. It's the only time in my life that I can actually say I feel hate and rage. The way I see it, someone/thing/nature messed up. Why give us sentient thought and allow us to love if we have to experience the unbearable grief of losing those we love? This makes me wonder if really there is no point to life like my previous friend suggested. Yet another person told me that the meaning of life is to live for today because there's nothing after death and we never know when our time is up. Okay, I'd rather live my life to the fullest than wish I had later. I asked this person about origin theory. This person was a Big Bang fanatic. Okay... So two particles crashed together to create the big bang. Where did the first two particles come from then? If there was nothing there before the big bang, how do particles just appear to crash together? Oh and this one's my favorite. The argument that we're not advanced enough to truly understand our true origins. Give me a break. Any theory or explanation can be "dumbed down". I'm sure there's at least one explanation that's close to the truth that our feeble little human minds can handle. Whenever I think about these topics, I just get frustrated and irritated. This is usually followed by depression over the fact that I may never (probably will never) know. I still don't know the meaning of life or our actual origin. I guess I am left with nothing more to do than sit back and wait...

Songbird

[physiqueper4 (deleted)]

`wait.....that is the solution.A magic word,it made us finally sure we can fly, it broke the deates betueen scientists and philosofers all over history.so, yes wait is a solution, but what kind of wait? is it giving time to our researches? that means we must kep collecting kews and evidences, making theories and checking evry time.in the mean while either we find out or we spend thosand of years searching to find finally that our brains developped and get the picture,, so yes let us wait, untill the work is finish. On personal level it seems to me more that you my freind songbirdg7 are looking to things in the historic abondonned way . That look which made church trial Galilée because only the fact that earth orbits the sun made for them non sense" why are'nt we the center of existence as it is made for us?".The same thing that makes religion leadersconsider animals ''without a soul"" because they r meant to be serving us "" they say; sheep or cow does'nt fight us when slying it because it is created for that purpose while slying a cut or dog or wolf is very much harder becasue it is not "" Of course if one day they descover --- searching their holly books -- that animals do have souls, they wil ask the same thing "" why are'nt they meant to serve us?"" That happened to Islam religion leadres in some age . I want to say it is making you finding it strange the fact that you consider yourself, your kind, your place, ...as the center of existence ''"which = univers for us,at least for now "". If we do want to study this universe we must fre our minds from any backround, religious ,politic but also our humanitarian one, let not see the univers by our eyes,let see it by the eyes of reality that means I do not care if those people living on that microscopic point which is very hard to indetify in the corner of the spiral of MilkyWay which it self appears like a point in the universe,I care about reality regardless what it means for humans or for UFO -if they exist-. this reminds me of the first cosmology princible "there is no specific direction " .you are assuming that ther mustbe a direction infavour of the human beign.

[kafei]

`I used to be an empirical agnostic, I suppose, that is prior to a psychedelic experience I had when I was 22 under the sway of Terence McKenna. Now, that eventually led me to develop a kind of Alan Watts' take on these sort of questions.

Alan Watts believed the basis of such religious notions as the soul, God, spirituality, etc. had their basis in mystical experience, and he believed that these experiences could come about in many ways, and that they aren't thoroughly understood even by contemporary neuroscience. They could happen spontaneously, in a near-death-experience, through meditation, through the imbibing of entheogens, a stroke can cause this experience to occur, as in the case of Jill Bolte Taylor, etc.

Now, Terence McKenna believed, on the other hand, that these experiences were exclusive to the use of shamanic plants or fungi, that is plants containing tryptamine alkaloids, i.e. the constituent plants used in the ayahuasca brew in Brazil, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, LSD, morning glory seeds, etc.

Now, I pursued this myself out of curiosity for what it would be like to hallucinate, I didn't think it'd have religious or philosophical implications, despite its many other implications. It's an experience not easily described, but to get to the point here, since I was influenced by McKenna, I took what he called a "heroic dose" of psilocybin mushrooms, but simply because this was supposed to be a "full spectrum" dose, and that's basically the message I got from Terence McKenna, everything else I heard in his lectures sort of went past my ears, that is until...

That is until I had the experience for myself. I won't go into that here, but what I will go into is that after having the experience, I spent the rest of my time mulling it over, for months and months, even to this day, and after having this experience and coming back to listen to McKenna's lectures, certain portions started to STAND OUT a little more, and I started to piece together more of what he said, and I'll get to those main points here:

What Terence McKenna felt he was doing was pointing people to a phenomenon in consciousness, and the reason he advocated the "effective dose" was because he felt it is a NECESSARY amount to elicit this phenomenon, and that anything less, meaning a subthreshold dose, would only be "missing the point" or "brushing the edges" of a phenomenon in which he called an "encounter with the Gaian mind," a sort of metaphor in attempt to describe this titanic altered state, but I believe it has had many names over the centuries; nirvana, satori, cosmic consciousness, religious experience, ego death, samadhi, God, Brahman, so on and so forth. Essentially, an overmind of some sort. Here's a clip of Terence speaking on the phenomena:

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Now, I don't think I could convince anyone who has no familiarity with these substances here that this is truly something looking into, there is a lot of criticism about psychedelics, and most commonly, you'll hear that that this state is simply a malfunctioning, that you're simply short-circuiting your brain, but if you pay any attention, the only people saying that are those without first-hand experience. So, I believe this is merely prejudice at work, for you can't really know what it does until you've experienced it for yourself especially when pursued at the dose ranges Terence McKenna recommended. So, I could only do basically what McKenna is doing, and that is "pointing to a phenomenon in consciousness."

Now, it was McKenna's belief that it was this phenomena that laid the basis for all these religious notions, the experience is truly that profound. If you're religious, you might say you met God at the height of the experience. If you're atheist, you might reach for a more mathematical diction, as in, "I glimpsed a higher dimension." In either case, something transcendental and interconnected is intuitively felt by the individual.

If anyone's interested, I'll post McKenna's method here as it will go over the medical aspect, what a typical "full-spectrum" experience is like, what you should be cautious of and how to take precaution, how "dangerous" they really are, the "myths" about them, etc...

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songbirdg7 also mentioned the "Big Bang." Here's a video of a Hindu's take on that, that sort of put me to rest with conflict with that notion that songbirdg7 seems to tangled up in:

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If you click other links of talks given by Ramesh, you'll find he's a proponent of fatalism or "hard determinism" which is another issue people find cognitive dissonance in. I'll post a little something here that helped pacify my mind concerning that topic:

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I like that Ramesh video there where he discusses "The Big Bang," because it sort of goes over that this concept of "meaning" is one that we create, so that would sum up its definition right there, if you're paying attention. However, we usually don't see that, so we get caught up in duality, that is to say, if we cannot find meaning, then we start believing its opposite, that life is "meaningless," without realizing we've created that, too! So, then we fall into a kind of emptiness, an existential crisis, a yearning that in this perspective, can never be satiated. In Taoism, this duality is transcended. The taoists will say that life is "purposeless," but that's not said in the fashion of something condescending, but rather a compliment. That in its lack of necessity, it is neither "meaningful" nor "meaningless," it simply is. And as Alan Watts once wisely said, "You only go on if the game is worth the candle."

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All right, this post is running way too long! Now, to end it, I'll post another lecture given by Alan Watts concerning his take on religion and mystical experiences which I've adopted, and have come to agree with:

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