this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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This. So...much...this.
Our egos are a frequency, a perspective...but we are part of something much larger than we are capable of understanding.
We are all just a radio station, broadcasting into infinity, into a receiver capable of receiving infinite frequencies.
We are the bacteria on our own fingernails, but we are everything...all at the same time.
The universe is as old as it takes for us to be everything.
I am he
As you are he
As you are me
And we are all together
I remember when I believed this. How I wish it were true
That's the neat thing, you can choose to believe both to be true at the same time, but never reconcile them. Just as there most likely wouldn't be pleasure without pain.
As a species, we really should learn to live in and with perpetual ambiguity. There is no fixed point and no achieving bliss. Only permanent struggle towards the "right" path, whatever that shapes up to be.
Woah. That was... Deep
I'm kind of split on that :>
OP should watch "Look Outside" lore videos
"Did I stutter?"
It's amazing how popular this ancient philosophical metaphysical perspective is. Even Stephen Colbert, a devout Catholic, responded with a similar concept when asked in his questionnaire what happens when we die?
Moksha (Hinduism), Nirvana (Buddhism), returning to the Tao (Taoism), Neoplatonism (ancient Greece), Fanaa (Sufism/Mystical Islam) - over millenia, so many traditions have been captivated by the idea of rejoining with "the One".
Within Hinduism is the nonthestic framework promoted by Adi Shankara known as Advaita Vedanta which is Sanskrit for nonduality. This takes the concept even further, positing that we are one eternally and that individuality / self are spiritual Maya or illusion.
So the universe hates itself. This explains a lot.
Growing pains of an emerging consciousness.
Not looking forward to it's teenage years
It's amazing how popular this ancient philosophical metaphysical perspective is. Even Stephen Colbert, a devout Catholic, in his final episode responded with a similar concept when asked in his questionnaire what happens when we die?
Moksha (Hinduism), Nirvana (Buddhism), returning to the Tao (Taoism), Neoplatonism (ancient Greece), Fanaa (Sufism/Mystical Islam) - over millenia, so many traditions have been captivated by the idea of rejoining with "the One".
Within Hinduism is the nonthestic framework promoted by Adi Shankara known as Advaita Vedanta which is Sanskrit for nonduality. This takes the concept even further, positing that we are one eternally and that individuality / self are spiritual Maya or illusion.
Advaita vedanta ftw
Cool. WTF though.
I love this kind of philosophy. I wish it were possible to access it on a tangible level, but sadly it seems consciousness is local phenomena
eh you can still walk around and talk to other people
Meditation but it would take a while to get there. It is fun to work towards it though.
Yeah meditation is cool. Would be interesting to try doing it more
I've heard if you take certain hallucinogens you can...
There's actually a shocking variety that induce this, as an amateur psychonaut. Personally, I enjoy LSA for a "lite" version. One can brew it from a particular yellow flower native to the Southwest, but particularly called "mormon tea".
shrooms can make you more empathetic, but in my case it also unlocked a new kind of depression in realizing that so many who need a change of perspective to see things that way, even for but a glimpse, never will. I felt such love and empathy for others in that moment, and such sorrow that it would never be felt nor returned by the vast majority of others; I understood perfectly in that moment what Edgar Mitchell meant by an "instant global consciousness", and how we would likely never achieve this state of enlightenment among enough individuals to matter.
I understood perfectly in that moment what Edgar Mitchell meant by an “instant global consciousness”, and how we would likely never achieve this state of enlightenment among enough individuals to matter.
consciousness is like a river, it becomes turbulent when things start flowing quickly enough. the abrasive property of living in a society full of change is ironically what makes it difficult to relate to other people's experience, as it is quite difficult to see the actions in another train's wagons when the relative movement is too great.
And then there’s people like Joe Rogan who take all the psychedelics but apparently don’t realize a fucking thing.
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Yeah they can make you feel that way especially if you do them with a tight friend, but in reality you're still locked into your own perspective.
Maybe if more people believed we could kind of willingly feel it by proxy. Kind of like how mirror neurons let you simulate the other on your own equipment.
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Yeah, but being able to conceive of it is a pretty cool consolation prize at least.
It is :)
You could just work on "first shift", or what in Buddhism is called Fetters 1 and 2. Seeing through the self delusion. No woo-woo required and it's the first stepping stone. But a big one.Just realizing there is no "me" here, and never has been, helps a lot.
The Universe (big thing) pretending to be individuals (small thing)
vs
Atoms (small thing) pretending to be individuals (big thing)
Do you ever just realize that everyone is in space right now? Like, sure, there's an atmosphere, but other than that you're basically out there. The air around you is sky. The vacuum around you is universe. When you take a closer look, there are universes within universes, whole worlds of microbes, like the ones on the very surface of the keyboard I type this on - on the larger scale, ecosystems of stars, being born, evolving and dying - like in a cosmic "firework show". But they don't tend to affect each other, I think. They're so far away...
And then, there's us. We're so small yet so big. Does that make us special or just mediocre? To an ant we are giants, to a star we don't exist. Why does consciousness as we know it only exist in the middle of sizes? Maybe because it's "as we know it", and of course we only really know what things are like at our scale? Maybe sapience is subtle, and it can only be detected when you spend every moment dealing with it. Perhaps atoms are kind of conscious, and brains are the shape they make such that their consciousness field constructively interferes. Idk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth
the article is shit sadly
Spaceship Earth (or Spacecraft Earth or Spaceship Planet Earth) is a worldview encouraging everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.
nah
it's just saying that there's no absolute ground, no absolute physical coordinate system. (relativity)
My thought recently has been:
-
The universe is physical, ie made of material stuff. There is just stuff and the forces between stuff
-
Stuff is governed by physical laws
-
The interractions between things are relatively simple, but get much more complex and seemingly ramdom the more stuff you add
-
This seeming randomness is not true randomness because the interractions between things are governed by predictable rules
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We are made of stuff, down to the neurons in our brains
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Our actions and thoughts are ultimately directly caused by neuronal activity that is (in theory) predictable and governed by laws
-
Free will and individuality aren't "real" in the way people typically mean. Our actions are determined entirely by the particles in our system interracting with the constituent parts of other systems.
My conclusion: this doesn't matter on a practical level. We still experience free will and individuality. But those things are illusions caused by the interractions of many complex systems.
what if you live in a computer simulation, and you just see chemicals because that's part of the simulation, but there are actually none?
Spoiler
This is called "determinism"
Take a look at this and it gives some room for flexibility (from a movie called Waking Life): https://youtu.be/4arOKZvuZK4
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WOAH the universe is Gluttony from Fullmetal Alchemist??
Ouroboros is ouroboros.
FTFY
Hey guys! I found the giant asshole who is behind both Elon Musk and Donald Trump!
Makes dying a lot more comfortable when one realizes its another illusion.
Sort of but not really. Consciousness is intrinsic to a living brain. So while the basic components that we're made out of will continue on until the end of the universe, our time as unique individuals and our experience of it will come to an end. Which is a bummer for us, but that's a natural aversion that all life necessarily shares.
Well that would be the physicalism/materialism hypothesis. Truth is we don't know. That's why it's called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness"
The scientific and philosophical communities are split into a few major camps:
Physicalism / Materialism: They believe consciousness is an emergent property of complex biological computation. Just like "wetness" emerges when you put hydrogen and oxygen together, consciousness emerges when you network enough neurons. (Though critics argue wetness is still just physical behavior, while consciousness is a whole new dimension).
Idealism / Non-Dual Perspectives: This flips the script entirely. Instead of consciousness being a product of the brain, the brain (and the whole physical world) is an appearance within consciousness. In this view, you don't have a conscious brain; the brain is a conceptual map appearing in the wide-open space of prior awareness.
Panpsychism: The view that consciousness is a fundamental building block of the universe, like mass or electrical charge, and complex brains simply channel or organize it rather than creating it from scratch.
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"And I am you
And what I see is me..."
Pink Floyd, Echoes
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