| > I interact with other characters whose motivation I cannot understand and whose actions I cannot fully anticipate. It feels like there's a foreign entity acting as DM. My head canon on this phenomenon is that we are not quite as integrated (or isolated) as our conscious 'self' would have us believe. Neuroscience and Buddhism alike seem to back this up... The concept of 'anatta' [0] has held up strongly for thousands of years (how could it not?). As far as I can tell, neuroscience is also increasingly clear that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon - and strange things happen when this is disrupted. Most who have experienced psychedelics will agree that our brains are capable of providing utterly novel, previously unimaginable experiences; stranger even than most dreams. For example, DMT users across a wide range of cultural backgrounds describe seeing 'machine elves' [1]; "People describe these entities as distinct, autonomous beings that typically present with some kind of message." Then, look at people who 'hear voices'; a phenomenon which is quite scary in our culture, and quite normal or respected in other, older cultures. The voices can say things which surprise us even in our waking lives, sometimes even offering powerful insight, without any ingestion of substances. So... There are these ways to experience surprising characters made by our own brains - dreams, drugs, and other oddities. My personal view is that these are always active, mostly doing their thing in the background; something like flora and fauna in the sea of our sub/consciousness. Sleep can reveal them, as can 'altered' states of mind.. As if the light of consciousness dazzles us, and we can't see the gloriously intricate machinery in the dark. 0 - https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/25302 1 - https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-... |