Sublime

But what both deep meditation and psychedelic experiences teach us is the ability to see how much of that self—that ego—is constructed.

We like to think of ourselves as consistent, rational beings, possessing certain attributes and not others. Yet a person who is completely consistent, who possesses no contradictions, comes across as less real. Wooden. Plastic. The most truthful and irrational aspects of ourselves are often hidden, and our access to them lies through the creation o

Generally our explanations are guesses. These vague hypotheticals become fixed in our minds as fact. We are interpretation machines, and this process of labeling and detaching is efficient but not accurate. We are the unreliable narrators of our own experience.

“Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

IIT accounts for subjective experience via five axioms of phenomenal existence. These axioms are indubitably true for any and all human experiences, are consistent with but independent of each other, and are complete; that is, there are no other axioms that hold universally true for all experiences.

To put it less poetically–human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals. Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate “themselves” from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is some

To feel oneself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, locked up inside a bag of skin, is in the view of the East a hallucination. You are not a stranger on the earth who has come into this world as the result of a fluke of nature, or as a spirit from somewhere outside natur