What is real?

[atreestump]

Yeah, the point was that at the time of my bad experience, it actually revealed a truth about the people I was involved with - we were outgrowing each other and the acid seemed to make that impossible for me (and them) to ignore. The Greeks had a word for truth, aleithea which means something like 'revealed, disclosure, unforgettable and unavoidable'.
[hr]
While this all sounds negative and not very spiritual, it was the dawn of a new phase of my life that would lead to better things, I take the good with the bad.

[kFoyauextlH]

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in pain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand
I dream of fire
These dreams are tied to a horse that will never tire
And in the flames
Her shadows play in the shape of a man's desire
This desert rose
Each of her veils, a secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this
And as she turns
This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams
This fire burns
I realise that nothing's as it seems
I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in pain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand
I dream of rain
I lift my gaze to empty skies above
I close my eyes, this rare perfume
Is the sweet intoxication of her love
I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in pain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand
Sweet desert rose
Each of her veils, a secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this
Sweet desert rose
This memory of Eden haunts us all
This desert flower, this rare perfume
Is the sweet intoxication of the fall
Songwriters: Gordon Sumner / Mohammed Khelifati
[hr]
I think it does sound spiritual and that drugs are part of the spiritual stories of many people throughout the ages, usually as only a part of the adventure rather than the end of it where the conclusion is a life of medication.

I have actually never heard a drug story which didn't end up with some sort of changes involved, usually negative seeming things surrounding but leading to positive improvements, not dissimilar from stories of hauntings or possession.

My posts were about and leading inton"the religious experience" as both "the experience of being religious" and an implied description of The Fall, then I was inspired to post that song which I had no idea actually said what it did and perfectly fit my writing and implications and the whole set of themes I was driving at. It is really quite cool, though likely gets missed. I had positioned myself as the lamenting author or "religious person undergoing the experience of being religious while describing the experience of being religious" as the serpent figure.
[hr]
Speaking of roses, here is some Fragrance, referring to Spinning:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wk1E7LT-ZjM

[kFoyauextlH]

I'll hopefully come back to this, but people are not able to react with things directly very much or very often or in very many ways, their interaction with information is always limited and it completely skews just about everything. Some of the worlds people think they are living in are not apparently real at all, but they are wholly convinced of their reality, and then other groups aldo try to push ideas about what is real and not real, others beyond that even outright lie.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/259571/ame ... ation.aspx

Some people think they are living in a very gay world, but I scarcely ever interact with or see any gay people or gay material even. Part of what seems to have also made it less common seeming is how many not apparently gay immigrants and foreigners there are here, straight from other countries where these things are not expressed as much, or as openly, or commonly.

I was reading about people also just assuming everyone else is similar to themselves, even when they are in a minority themselves. Even I think that my assessment is better and that more people think like me in many regards, like about basic things, than they do like some others who seem to assume people have the same weird tastes they do. I may be wrong in thinking more people are more similar to me than others in their opinions and thinking, but I think that I'm basing it on much more than others are basing their ideas and understandings about worlds and realities they live in which don't exist "really", anywhere, except roughly shared in the imaginations of certain people.

Added in 25 minutes 31 seconds:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https% ... cfruf1.png

[Whisper]

About Schizophrenia: I don\'t hallucinate things that aren\'t there. I see MORE DIMENSION within that which already exists

[kFoyauextlH]

Yeah, I'm not even sure all the various specific mental things that go on with all the various people are the same or similar enough really, but they get pushed all together.

[atreestump]

@@thetrizzard

[kFoyauextlH]

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way ... ican-slave

Lol, this seemed a bit much too.

Added in 2 minutes 29 seconds:
Also his mom's first name is Stanley, which is extremely rare for females around the time she was born, I'm pretty sure.

Added in 29 seconds:
Just about everything seems like fake garbage.

[thetrizzard]

Is this an old post reposted? To begin to tackle this question, I suppose we need to first have some kind of criteria for what could count as an experience that we could actually call spiritual. As you say, these experiences are subjective, so when examining people’s accounts, there must be commonalities between them, ones that maybe ‘transcend’ regional and cultural differences over time. I think that your question about the use of psychedelics as something that can be used to see beyond our everyday profane experience of reality implies that, to get to something we call spiritual entails blurring the boundary between self and other, even between what we deem to be inside / outside, subjective and objective. So a good place to start would be to ask what is the self

[Whisper]

I've studied the astral plane for seven years.

It can be accessed with psychedelics or kundalini meditation sure. But does the practitioner does not even know what look for? Like what meaning can you derive without knowing who you are speaking to???

it is important to access it without psychedelics. You will never be able to say "my experience is real" and also nobody will believe you because they will say "you were just high". The same with going off your meds (not targeting any of you here).

The astral plane is a less fixed plane of existence, which is within and underneath everything.

Not everything is of mind. Understanding is beyond the mind. Western society has abandoned the heart for the mind. These societies have become heartless motherfuckers.

So what is real? That which is felt. What is it that feels you and knows you? That is up to you to figure out.

[kFoyauextlH]

This song came up on its own, I wasn't looking for anything related to it.

I don't know how much it matters explaining anything to people, even as it seems communication is becoming more difficult and people are mutually becoming less intelligible or relatable thanks to some kind of weird Tower Of Babel effect from the internet and so many non-native language speakers using languages they aren't trained in in the same ways as well as having different understandings of words and having translations done online too, so it seems like there isn't as much of a sense of anyone knowing what anyone else is actually saying or meaning, besides there also being a lack of facial gestures and tones involved in text. Also, who is there to communicate to and what would it even matter? It seems to me that a lot of communication is an attempt to manipulate and control another person to be cooperative and sharing in some understanding or worldview, but these days it appears mostly worthless to even try to organize people at all, just the way that the powers that be would probably prefer things, totally broken and everyone living in their own world with their own little language, unable to make anything big happen so that the way remains clear for them to wield their resources and monopolies over just about everything under the sun, whereas we can't even communicate the most basic things anymore without being obnoxiously interrupted or corrected or even insulted by any goblin out of the woodworks, not even knowing if they represent a genuine sentiment from a real person at all, as bots have also inundated modern communication markets and spaces and their goal in many cases is to simply appear passable as people.

Also, what is considered real and most real these days seems to be very new and nothing like what people considered real even in the recent past, as we go back in time it appears that people may have had much more mystical and spiritual and symbolic and ironic ways of interpreting reality than do the hyper-literal, earnest, materialist types of views which have come to be considered the current "real" and "most real". There has been a thorough and forceful "debunking" of just about everything, taking the ghost out of just about everything and denying everything else as well. Even those who consider themselves spiritual tend to insist on material literality and also seem to not really have any strong idea or basis to insist upon whatever they claim to believe but functionally ignore when they are living through their day. This could be how it actually always was, but there seemed to be a lot of denial that implies it probably wasn't as mainstream as it is now to view things in the modern way, where a door is "just a" door, things aren't symbols or don't mean much to people, it is "just a fox", "just a cow", and very little can be made of these things, and people are quick to say that something sounds crazy or unbelievable, meanwhile people are also fully lying shamelessly for various reasons as well as being able to get away with it without as much consequence or fanfare.

Added in 21 minutes 47 seconds:
Another interesting approach is to think about, in writing or imagining something, what would be considered "realistic", to get an inkling of what it might be that people are now biased to consider more real or less real and surreal.

https://classicrpgrealms.blogspot.com/2 ... w.html?m=1

"
Old School Sensibility: Okay, I struggled with this one. HM is old school. It takes as it's inspiration AD&D from the 80's to about '00. But the designers dug deep into what they loved about old school and write a rule set that highlighted those aspects of play. Lots of things which were introduced into the late '80s and through to today in terms of character customization, options, combat focus, high starting hit points, tweaking ability scores and all that without losing the extreme deadly feel that pervaded old school gaming. This, of course, began in HM 4 (the first version), but was done in a classic sort of "broken" style. Advanced HM is something else entirely. I mean it has enough to satisfy the most character focused players (those that have flocked to 4e, Pathfinder and now 5e) to customize, tailor and optimize your character to your heart's content. But it has done so in a way that is directly applicable to realistic game play. One of the conversations that came up after our session was by the player who had played the Mage. He had chosen to cast a scorch spell that incapacitated two of the kobolds (but also happened to traumatize the party's thief). Since both were out of commission he then was not engaged and so stepped up to the first fallen kobold to attack it while it lay there helplessly writhing in pain and desperately trying to put out it's burning loincloth. He hit it once, ineffectively, but then smashed it into lizard-dog pate' the next second with his second blow. He thought his luck seemed a little excessive, like he did too much during the fight where one or two others were locked in a back and forth melee. As we talked though, we thought that a lot of HM is understanding the reality of combat and using strategy both in weapon, armor, spell selection and the like in addition to your action choices in combat. (Of course it turned out that I had ruled incorrectly on weapon speed with helpless opponents and he should have waited like 5 seconds (his weapon speed) before attacking the fallen kobold a second time). But this very fact--that making and customizing your character with an eye not towards becoming some sort of superman, but of becoming a better more efficient more deadly fighter, a more effective and strategic mage, a more useful and sneaky thief--in short of dealing with the real world in a real way. It has an amazing appeal to me that few other games have ever captured. It in fact is what I have wanted from so many rules light games, but had to enforce simply by dint of DM fiat. "It's hard because I say it is!" Instead of a ruleset that captures the world I want to play in within it's own ruleset. For these reasons, I give Hackmaster a full four stars here as well. I didn't really expect to, truth to tell. I mean there are old school games with more crunch than say OD&D. So rules alone doesn't make or break old school. It's really int he way they play. I expected the apparent complexity of the rules to get in the way of me achieving the style of play I like. I was beginning to think that old school might only be rules light for me. I am so glad my group agreed to test HM out. It was something I always "felt" playing the game, but really wanted to experience before I judged. The experience made a convert of me. And better yet, I always wanted a game where the rules themselves enforced the feel and the tone, not just my "preferences" which could be taken by anyone who chose to as "biased". With HM it's not just "my way of playing" it's the way the game is played. Old School? Yes! Full Bore! My kind of old school in a way I never could have hoped for.

Conclusion

I recall reading once, in a forum online, as a HM advocate was trying to explain HM combat to an interested third party. The querent was concerned that the combat seemed bulky and too crunchy, maybe it would run too slow. After testifying that these weren't really valid concerns, because x, y and etc. The advocate finally said, you'd just have to try it to understand what I mean. I have a lot of sympathy for both of these gamers. I too had concerns of exactly the same nature. I suppose those who have a high degree of game design mindset can see how a rule will play within a game, most of the rest of us actually have to get down into it and roll some dice and playtest the thing. That's what it ultimately took for me. It even scares me that I almost bowed out of trying HM at all with my new group because I was worried about those very issues. Fortunately the gamers in my group are good people and open minded. It didn't hurt either that they had quite a bit of interest, had downloaded the free rules, read the 4e rules and really wanted to give it a go. What it took for me, a convert in every way but reality, to truly become impressed with HM completely and totally. This review was about HM combat, but that was as much for me as for any other reason. I just hope now that I put this out there, others who might have similar concerns can read this and have some of their fears assuaged. Download the basic rules and give HM a test drive--you will not be displeased. On the contrary, you will find just about every gamer nerve in your system very well pleased.
"

Many people seem to think days and life are tedious, boring, bland, colorless, totally uneventful slogs, with little stimulation or entertainment available or accessible, that the world is dim, dark, ugly. They even make films and call them "realistic" and they are full of dirt and are often very desaturated and everything brought up in them is serious and sad, lol, what the hell world is that?