Weitiko

I really enjoyed this episode
Reflects a lot of what I've been going through in recent years

I enjoyed the episode and I think that Paul's approach has a lot of therapeutic value.

But -- and I think Greg poked at this a little bit but backed off -- I'm not very convinced that the "reality is like a big dream" is actually all that accurate, at least as Paul seems to mean it.

He seems to take for granted Freud's understanding of dreams as mere reflection of individual unconscious ideas, and expand that to interpreting our experienced reality as a reflection of our unconscious ideas on a bigger scale in the same way, with a lot of fuzziness as to what this "us/me" is (which is what Greg poked at).

While as I said I do think that thinking about it that way has a therapeutic value (which makes sense since Freud more-or-less founded psychotherapy as we understand it), and both our dreams and our everyday experiences are certainly colored and influenced by repressed, unconscious thoughts, I think that in both dream and waking states there is much more going on than a Freudian reduction or near-reduction can explain. Like Greg, I encounter people in my life that I cannot reasonably interpret as manifestations of my own unconsious (the multi-masked Karens), but I also admit I encounter many experiences/personalities in my dreams that cannot be reasonably interpreted as merely manifestations of my unconscious mind either.

tl;dr while treating the figures we see in both dreams and waking reality as manifestations of our unconscious parts can be therapeutically useful for examining just how much of what we are experiencing is something that we so-to-say "bring to the table" ourselves. I don't think that either dreams or waking reality is primarily constituted by such a reflection-of-our-unconscious-dynamic. I think there's much more there there, than that implies.

jh1517 wrote:
I enjoyed the episode and I think that Paul's approach has a lot of therapeutic value.

But -- and I think Greg poked at this a little bit but backed off -- I'm not very convinced that the "reality is like a big dream" is actually all that accurate, at least as Paul seems to mean it.

He seems to take for granted Freud's understanding of dreams as mere reflection of individual unconscious ideas, and expand that to interpreting our experienced reality as a reflection of our unconscious ideas on a bigger scale in the same way, with a lot of fuzziness as to what this "us/me" is (which is what Greg poked at).

While as I said I do think that thinking about it that way has a therapeutic value (which makes sense since Freud more-or-less founded psychotherapy as we understand it), and both our dreams and our everyday experiences are certainly colored and influenced by repressed, unconscious thoughts, I think that in both dream and waking states there is much more going on than a Freudian reduction or near-reduction can explain. Like Greg, I encounter people in my life that I cannot reasonably interpret as manifestations of my own unconsious (the multi-masked Karens), but I also admit I encounter many experiences/personalities in my dreams that cannot be reasonably interpreted as merely manifestations of my unconscious mind either.

tl;dr while treating the figures we see in both dreams and waking reality as manifestations of our unconscious parts can be therapeutically useful for examining just how much of what we are experiencing is something that we so-to-say "bring to the table" ourselves. I don't think that either dreams or waking reality is primarily constituted by such a reflection-of-our-unconscious-dynamic. I think there's much more there there, than that implies.

I'm involved in ayahuasca houses down here in south america. I can promise you, none of this is real. Look around you, the room you're in, the chair you're sitting in, the computer screen you're looking at, the house you live in, the people you know....it's all just a dream of sorts. But like how Paul said, in a dream you understand the characters you may meet are just manifestations of yourself, in the 'real' world all the people you meet are just manifestations of yourself as well....but not because they're projections of yourself, but because we're all just avatars of one giant thing. Everything is you, you are everything. The purpose of this reality is to be able to experience things from the perspective of individuation. the 'rules' of this game are predicated on everyone forgetting/pretending that we don't know who we really are and don't know what this really is. In our souls, we all know none of this is real. You know none of this is real. Whoever is reading this, you know none of this is real too. But what fun is a game if you're not invested in it? When I learned none of this is real, it for sure fucked up the game for me in huge ways for a while.

We're all just one thing, the infinite cosmic roleplaying as individuals like a little kid makes up elaborate stories and personalities and interactions with their toys.

Dreams exist as one of the many clues the universe is constantly dropping to try and wake us up to the truth that we're living in a dream. "Know how you just had that dream, and it felt super real? Like as real as it feels when you're awake? But then you woke up and it was just a dream???" We're hammered with these clues our whole lives but we never see them as the universe trying to tip us off to the true nature of reality.

Funny you're talking about Freud in 2021. Ever studied Lacan? I think Freud made some important discoveries back in the day, but there are others who have taken the meat from his work, shaved off the fat, and applied the conceptual ideas and taken them to much greater heights.

thizzwardo wrote:
I'm involved in ayahuasca houses down here in south america. I can promise you, none of this is real. Look around you, the room you're in, the chair you're sitting in, the computer screen you're looking at, the house you live in, the people you know....it's all just a dream of sorts. But like how Paul said, in a dream you understand the characters you may meet are just manifestations of yourself, in the 'real' world all the people you meet are just manifestations of yourself as well....but not because they're projections of yourself, but because we're all just avatars of one giant thing. Everything is you, you are everything. Dreams exist as one of the many clues the universe is constantly dropping to try and wake us up to the truth that we're living in a dream. "Know how you just had that dream, and it felt super real? Like as real as it feels when you're awake? But then you woke up and it was just a dream???" We're hammered with these clues our whole lives but we never see them as the universe trying to tip us off to the true nature of reality.

We're all just one thing, the infinite cosmic roleplaying as individuals like a little kid makes up elaborate stories and personalities and interactions with their toys.

But that awareness comes to people when it's supposed to.

Funny you're talking about Freud in 2021. Ever studied Lacan? I think Freud made some important discoveries back in the day, but there are others who have taken the meat from his work, shaved off the fat, and applied the conceptual ideas and taken them to much greater heights.

I can very much get with the whole "there is a higher reality which is to your day to day reality what your day to day reality is to a dream", and "we are all one" at the highest level thing, that's not really what my issue is. So much is probably true, but in practical terms its a bit like being on a dingy in a storm tossed around at sea and saying "well, eventually it will be calm again". True, but there's not a lot to wring out of that fact, practically.

The contemporary Western common-sense one derived from or at least explicated in Freud is that real life is real life, and dreams are some projection of the unconscious parts of our mind, which get interpreted symbolically. I agree that this can be a useful basis for therapy (as can Tarot, or the I-Ching, or Astrology), and I think he's positing a useful therapeutic technique in trying to apply the same methods Freud or Jung did to dreams to your day-to-day life.

But I think that ontologically, he's got it a bit backwards in that analogy -- it's not that life is only a dream, but that dreams aren't really that different of things from life. The common-sense Freud "it's all in your head" is no more true of dreams than it is of life. Some of the stuff we encounter in life is colored and perceived mostly through our own baggage and projections, but a lot isn't a lot has nothing much to do with oneself at all -- it goes on its own whether you're around or not, it ain't rendered real time like a computer game. I think, and my experience has been that we are mostly in the same situation with our dreams. The people, places, and events of our dream lives are real, and do have some kind of strange relationship with our waking lives that is not simple one of hallucination/imagination/projection.

From the cosmic oneness perspective, maybe this doesn't make a difference, but while we are here playing the game I think it is just part of the rules--there are other entities that are separate from you, including those you encounter at the grocery store or in your dreams. It surely can be healthy to examine your experience of them through a symbolic, personal lens, but there's a great deal more to them than that.

My man, why do you keep referring to what Freud thought? Freud is irrelevent and outdated. Ditch him. Read Jung if you're into dreams and symbology and stuff....or read the Corpus Hermeticum if you want to learn where Jung got his ideas from (red book specifically).

Like I said, this understanding comes to people when they're ready to receive it, but this is all just a dream and none of this is real. Our power in this dream is to create, so I can build a house or a Wittgenstein-style logic system. The more you become emotionally connected to or believe in a construct of this dream, the more difficult it is to break away and see things for what they are. We have a sort of Plato's cave-tesserect thing going on with out 4th estate media today....a reality is shown to ppl on television that doesn't exist but they believe it, and even if it's proven wrong they're so invested they continue to believe it.

Not to say viewing the world through a Freudian lens will have ever proven you wrong. I think it's useful to understand how personality and ego is developed....in lacanian psych you try to identify/understand the lattice of signifiing chains that lead to the formation of the unconscious. As soon as we're born, we experience life and those experiences create emotional reactions which become tags that create the foundation and architecture of our personalities. An exploration into that is great, and can be therpeutic, and I don't deign to dismiss it.

But that process neglects to account for spirit, and it also refuses to acknowledge the existence of spirit. Once you acknowledge spirit and start to explore the unseen world it unlocks, shit gets crazy. Once you realize that's real you try to figure out wtf is going on there....are there rules here, what are these things? The fact Weitiko is being discussed openly on a podcast like higherside honestly has me a little spooked. But it's not just an abstract manifestation of the subconscious or whatever freud would say it is....it's an actual real thing, but it's existence has been rejected by western empiricism/materialism, so they had to come up with all this sophistry to explain why something we've been connected with forever can't be what it is.

I think rather than seeing the mask wearing tripple vaxxed pedo as an aspect of yourself...in the concept of the principle of oneness as explained above, we can see that there is a connection between you and that person. There is something that universally connects us all (we can call it humanity) and when we are able to see the humanity in eachother it allows us to move forward

thizzwardo wrote:
My man, why do you keep referring to what Freud thought? Freud is irrelevent and outdated. Ditch him. Read Jung if you're into dreams and symbology and stuff....or read the Corpus Hermeticum if you want to learn where Jung got his ideas from (red book specifically).

Like I said, this understanding comes to people when they're ready to receive it, but this is all just a dream and none of this is real. Our power in this dream is to create, so I can build a house or a Wittgenstein-style logic system. The more you become emotionally connected to or believe in a construct of this dream, the more difficult it is to break away and see things for what they are. We have a sort of Plato's cave-tesserect thing going on with out 4th estate media today....a reality is shown to ppl on television that doesn't exist but they believe it, and even if it's proven wrong they're so invested they continue to believe it.

Not to say viewing the world through a Freudian lens will have ever proven you wrong. I think it's useful to understand how personality and ego is developed....in lacanian psych you try to identify/understand the lattice of signifiing chains that lead to the formation of the unconscious. As soon as we're born, we experience life and those experiences create emotional reactions which become tags that create the foundation and architecture of our personalities. An exploration into that is great, and can be therpeutic, and I don't deign to dismiss it.

But that process neglects to account for spirit, and it also refuses to acknowledge the existence of spirit. Once you acknowledge spirit and start to explore the unseen world it unlocks, shit gets crazy. Once you realize that's real you try to figure out wtf is going on there....are there rules here, what are these things? The fact Weitiko is being discussed openly on a podcast like higherside honestly has me a little spooked. But it's not just an abstract manifestation of the subconscious or whatever freud would say it is....it's an actual real thing, but it's existence has been rejected by western empiricism/materialism, so they had to come up with all this sophistry to explain why something we've been connected with forever can't be what it is.

I don't think we disagree at all in substance here. In fact exactly what I'm trying to say (not very well I guess) is that the Freudian understanding of dreams is incomplete and wrong if overextended, and that is my (minor) issue with some of Paul's language in communicating his ideas in the cast, because it seems to presuppose that view.

The reason I mention Freud so much is not that I'm some Orthodox Freudian (far from it) but because the kernel of the Freudian view of dreams is our current "common sense" one in the West -- i.e. dreams are a product of the individual imagination manifesting unconscious elements. "Common sense" can sometimes be pejorative or carry baggage, so I like to think of this as the "Bug's Bunny" view, since it's the kind of stuff kids pick up from cartoons/the general culture without ever having it explicitly taught to them. This view is that basically dreams are like day-dreams or conscious fantasies -- where I might fantasize about or imagine myself dating a pretty acquaintance or buying a nice watch or car, and produce images in my mind manifesting my conscious desire for her or the watch or car-- but the only difference is that dreams governed by unconscious, repressed wishes as opposed to conscious ones. And at least in the context of a free-form podcast, Paul's analogies between dreams and reality could be interpreted as "life is like a dream [as Freud/common-sense/bug's bunny cartoons understand dreams]".

That isn't the view of dreams in many other cultures, nor the "common sense" one in the West prior to Freud. It can be useful, but I don't think that actually is what dreams are. It can't account for what you experience in dreams if investigated rigorously (clear example: prophetic dreams, which are real and not easily explainable in that framework -- I had a dream where I predicted the final two rounds of 2009 NHL playoffs, I don't even follow hockey and didn't even know two of the teams I predicted even existed!).

So, my nit-to-pick is that if someone does have the naive Freudian-kernel/"common sense" view of dreams and simply extends that incomplete view to the real world, it could cause problems (e.g. the whole drug induced megalomania breakdown thing that I'm sure most THCers have at least second or third hand experience seeing). I even think it causes some problems if people adopt that view to strongly with regard to their dreams as it is (neglect of the content of the dream considered non-symbolically, for example, offending dream entities or neglecting prophecy).

I don't think this contradict what Paul is saying and I bet he would agree if I were able to effectively communicate my concern. To an extent, it is picking a nit and just a minor point, but I've seen some confusion with people on this point in my own life

I found out recently about how deep a full on Jungian complex can be.
Firstly it is usually state dependant - for example brakes grip if your anxiety or stress hormones go over a limit the complex takes hold and can keep you in that biochemical state & thus maintaining its existence.
These complexes are like being subtly possessed, even to effect the unconscious they reflect upon & their dreams
That's what I see with these hyper vigilant mask wearer, they are in a permanent complex of fear & it governs their behaviour as long as it is socially acceptable they aren't going to get core shame for doing it.

As for this is a illusion, and people are projections.
We all have as many identies that are projected upon us, your partner sees you different to how your boss would describe your unique personality,
So as you walk around, your consciousness feild reaches out and is either reflected positively or negatively by the person you meet. Soon as you're gone the person you just judged as a xxxyyyzzx mask wearering cuk. becomes the best husband in the world to his devouring wife!

nickzeptepi wrote:
I found out recently about how deep a full on Jungian complex can be.
Firstly it is usually state dependant - for example brakes grip if your anxiety or stress hormones go over a limit the complex takes hold and can keep you in that biochemical state & thus maintaining its existence.
These complexes are like being subtly possessed, even to effect the unconscious they reflect upon & their dreams
That's what I see with these hyper vigilant mask wearer, they are in a permanent complex of fear & it governs their behaviour as long as it is socially acceptable they aren't going to get core shame for doing it.

As for this is a illusion, and people are projections.
We all have as many identies that are projected upon us, your partner sees you different to how your boss would describe your unique personality,
So as you walk around, your consciousness feild reaches out and is either reflected positively or negatively by the person you meet. Soon as you're gone the person you just judged as a xxxyyyzzx mask wearering cuk. becomes the best husband in the world to his devouring wife!

I love that observation!

This is a great episode and rings highly true to me. I love the discussion,

I also work as an attorney for a Psychedelic group in Minneapolis, and my experiences also lead me to agree with Thizz.
There is a great irony about professing that you believe in the dreamworld oneness concept, as if your opinion matters to anyone!

I will say this, Greg had just shared a quote that Gordon White had shared from the Gospel of St. Thomas saying, "

If you bring forth what is within you it will heal you, if you don't it will destroy you"
This is exactly what I hear in the Wetiko analysis, I was surprised Greg didn't recognize the similarity of this quote from Gordon's show and Wetiko material.