Yeah I've never understood why people say that hallucinations are real, and even "more real" and the "actual reality". The very definition of a hallucination is that it's not real, it's false. What am I missing here?
But there's another way to look at things which is prevalent in other circles, and if someday you decide to learn to meditate, I'm confident you'll get it.
How do you know the "real world" exists? Maybe you're a brain inside a jar "in the machine", and all the things you experience are being generated by the machine. In that case, how is an hallucination any different from any other experience you have? It isn't, it's exactly the same, it's just another experience. How you interpret it may be different, if you realize it's an hallucination, but the process itself is the same.
When you look at a tree, you can't just see the tree, you can only see the model that your mind creates of that tree, from the light that reaches your eyes, the sound, maybe touch etc - this is true for everything you experience.
Obviously the first perspective is very useful, it's science. But the second perspective is also very very useful, if you want to know why I can elaborate : )
My theory is that the pattern was always there, it just took acid to let me really notice it for the first time. Something about the way that the concrete dries, or maybe an artifact of whatever they do to freshly poured concrete to make it grippy.
Could also be pure delusion, so, grain of salt. But I think there is something to the idea that a new / different frame of reference and attention can show you things you may otherwise not have noticed.
Also, there is a distinction between the words that we use to conceptualize and communicate about reality, but consciousness (presumably due to evolution) tends to filter such things out.
> Yeah normal consciousness is normal, of course. That's not an assumption that I make, that just a basic fact.
To me, this is fascinating: I clearly compared normal consciousness to base reality but you decided(?) to reply as if I had said "normal consciousness is normal". To me, this is an excellent demonstration of the very thing I am talking about...both the phenomenon itself, but also this part: "...which is what it can be revealed to be with a relatively small amount of investigation" - more precisely: compare how people describe (their) reality, to the objective, shared reality that is literally printed on this web page.
Unfortunately, it is child's play for the subconscious to filter this sort of thing out before it reaches the "conscious awareness" stage of the pipeline (and then it still has to contend with ego, pride, cultural norms, post-hoc rationalization, etc) which may make this local maximum extremely difficult for humanity to break out of.