13 Reader Responses

1. J. Puma Says:
   August 17th, 2005 at 7:02 pm

   sort of goes along with that other famous koan: what would the universe look like without humans to observe it?

2. james Says:
   August 17th, 2005 at 7:54 pm

   I know some people who smoke DMT, and they all agree on one thing: whenever they do the stuff (which lasts about ten minutes) they see aliens and gnomes. Not just objects that appear to be aliens and gnomes, but actual creatures that interact with them. Then, the trip is over and it is as if the DMT user had never been high at all.

   Their experiences are different from those whom I’ve spoken with who claim to have been abducted and probed. The DMT users have no interest in convincing others that they see aliens under the influence. Their attitude is: “Don’t believe me? Try some DMT yourself. You don’t wanna try it? Good, that leaves more for me.”

   The alleged abductees, however, are OBSESSED with validating their experiences by having others believe them.

   I haven’t done DMT, so I can’t confirm this aspect of it. And as for aliens, I tell people that UFOs are real (Unidentified Flying Objects, that is) and that it is possible for the universe to be populated with other life forms, or that once (millions of years ago) a planet like Mars may have hosted life. But because I haven’t experienced it myself, I am loathe to take a stand either way.

3. carlos Says:
   August 17th, 2005 at 9:03 pm

   apart from my body and my actions in the world, i am pretty much just the sum of my experiences. so if i experience something to be real, and someone says it isn’t, i feel like a little piece of me just dropped off and died, or maybe i’m fading away like that kid in back to the future.

   if you say that someone’s experience doesn’t exist, you’re saying that they don’t exist, and that’s hurtful. no wonder abductees are obsessed with validation, they’re fighting for their very existence.

   what would the universe look like without humans to observe it?

   better?

4. Tim Boucher Says:
   August 17th, 2005 at 9:24 pm

   Yeah, it’s funny and stupid, but sometimes even when people don’t understand what I’m talking about, I feel bad. Nevermind if somebody tried to tell me that what I experienced wasn’t real, that I’d been fooled, or that it was “just” neurochemistry. I can totally see how people would go ballistic over this. Perfectly understandable.

   Well shit, now I get why you can’t just go around trying to “wake up” the “normals” into seeing that their beliefs, etc are weird or invalid (like religious fundamentalists or scientific materialists, or whoever). Because it hurts them (and me too) when somebody says that what they think and what they feel and what they’ve experienced isn’t valid.

   No wonder we all have such big fucking problems communicating. I’m feeling like this is another one of those places where I’m going to have to plant a belief-flag in the ground:

   I believe in trusting people’s experiences.

   This brings up a lot of potential problems though, like: what if they are lying? Well, really, a lie is just as much a type of experience as anything else, isn’t it? And more important than that, all communication is - in a sense - a lie. Because as soon as you put something into words, you define it artificially and impose limitations, form and sequence upon it which it didn’t have to begin with.

   Also there’s a distinction to be made between trusting people’s experience, and trusting their interpretation of it… HMM!

   Anyway, I have more to say about all this, I think. It’s one of the big puzzles I’ve been trying to crack. If somebody has more pieces of it or just wants to kick the ball around, give it your best shot.

5. carlos Says:
   August 18th, 2005 at 12:17 am

   at uni i had to do a paper on the purpose of communication, and all the theories i could find had the same old “shared meaning” and “meaningful dialogue” stuff. That’s all good, but i was into conspiracy and psyops at the time and i thought it was amazing that nobody considered that the purpose of communication could be deliberate deception.

   i had to ask myself, what is the most fundamental purpose of communication that includes both its honest and dishonest forms?

   i was watching my dog playing with other dogs at the beach when it hit me: the purpose of communication is to provoke a response.

   and since you can’t know (in full at least, you can have a best guess) what the response will be, then all communication is a question.

   it really works as a practical theory. it shifts one’s focus to the intended outcome of communication, and all one needs to consider regarding the communication itself is how effectively it serves that intent.

   so when you communicate you say “what response am i trying to provoke?” and when someone communicates to you, you ask yourself “what do they want from me?” and you get to choose how you respond.

   so, someone says: dick cheney raped me on the bridge deck of the starship enterprise.

   you say: so?

   they might say: i want you to believe me.

   you say: ok, i do. so now what?

   they might say: buy my book, it’s really good.

   what if they are lying?

   remember to ask yourself: what response do they intend to provoke from me?

   see, if all communication is a question, then how can a question lie or tell the truth? communication is a sense, like feeling your way around a dark room. communication is then a lie only in the zen sense that all sensation is illusory.

   so to determine if you are being lied to becomes a matter of asking yourself “what is their true intent?”

   and since we can’t even be sure of our own intentions, you have no choice but to weigh up the evidence and pass the ball to your intuition, same as always.

   and if it turns out they had you believing in santa claus, and acting like a fool, well it wouldn’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last. shit happens. rip your “santa” belief-flag out of the ground and move on.

   remember that how you respond is completely up to you.

   and please don’t think that my intent in this (overlong) communication is to have the last word in any way. tim said to kick the ball around and i chose too, that’s all. please come play.

   (btw i really like your “belief-flag” idea, it has much more potential than the “stop-sign” idea)

6. Tim Boucher Says:
   August 18th, 2005 at 12:26 am

   Yeah, the belief-flag sort of says: I’m an explorer, and this is a spot that I’m claiming for myself because I really like it here. If you want to come over and visit, you’re welcome to. There are lots of neat places we can go from here.

   Carlos, you have a real way of tossing in just the exact right mental hand grenade when I need it. Don’t know how you do it, but that whole thing about the purpose of communication being simply to evoke a response is nothing short of brilliant in it’s simplicity. I’m probably gonna pop that into it’s own post for posterity.

   It fits right into something else I’ve been thinking about recently. When communicating, it seems like the burden is hugely on the receiver rather than the transmitter. No matter what’s being transmitted, if the receiver isn’t equipped to interpret it, you’re done.

7. alistair Says:
   August 18th, 2005 at 12:39 am

   the effectiveness of the communication is in the response. the onus is squareley on the speaker to be understood. it all comes down to survival. if we are incomprehensible then we eventually threaten our existance.
   and about lying.it`s immaterial that someone is lying to you unless you either want or need something from them.

8. Tim Boucher » The Purpose of Communication Says:
   August 18th, 2005 at 12:42 am

   […] whatever it is, I want some of it. Carlos just knocked another one out of the park in the comments to a previous post: at uni i had to do a paper on the purpos […]

9. Tim Boucher Says:
   August 18th, 2005 at 12:46 am

   the effectiveness of the communication is in the response.

   Yeah, I guess that’s what I was trying to say, except all backwards. Your’s is much more to the point. In the newer post I just put together, this would fall probably into step three, evaluating the success of their response/action.

   it`s immaterial that someone is lying to you unless you either want or need something from them.

   Yes, oh god yes. We’re definitely getting somewhere good here.

10. carlos Says:
    August 18th, 2005 at 2:00 am

    cheers, mate. i was just trying to make up for the nazi-meme debacle. but the credit should go to my dog, my patient teacher. his name is bud.

    what am i smoking?

    everything

11. carlos Says:
    August 18th, 2005 at 11:56 am

    doubting aliens is doubting yourself.

    …how can we trust our own experience? (How do we know what we’re really hearing is the sound of the tree falling?)

    all you can know about the world is your perception of it. all you can know about your self is how the projection of your intent upon the world changes what you perceive, which in turn affects what you expect to perceive. so it’s a continual dialogue between you and the world, and as such, each are simply trying to provoke a response from the “other”.

    it has something to do with the power of attention, which I haven’t fleshed out yet.

    regardless, if your experience of the world is a reflection of your intent, then to determine the “truth” of your experience becomes a matter of asking yourself “what is my true intent?”

    know thyself. to illustrate, a story about things meeting expectations…

    i once was told to expect some ufo activity on a certain night, and went out to look at the sky (really clear moonless night). not really knowing what to expect, just looking at the stars, my only intent was to look for something. with no expectation to drive the experience, the simplest thing happened: one of the stars blinked out.

    i thought nothing of it so it did the next simplest thing: blinked back on again, and off, and on several times at sort of random intervals. i still had no expectation at all of what it was doing so it started to move around the sky in that typical “that couldn’t possibly be a plane” manner. ok, so what? so then another one turns up and they start buzzing each other, like the stars were playful or something, like two dogs on a beach.

    i thought to myself “what’s the fucking point of all this?” instantly i felt its (despite there being 2 objects it was only one thing) attention on me, like a kind of pale red sensation, so i asked it “what do you want?”

    blow me down if it didn’t answer back as clear as a bell “what do you want?”

    i had no idea, no intent, and no expectation (i was feeling pretty drained that night), so after a minute or so we both lost interest and the phenomenon simply ended. no, i wasn’t smoking anything, maybe if i had been i would’ve thought to engage it further, but this was a long time ago and i simply didn’t know what i wanted out of life, let alone what i wanted from a freaking ufo!

    so… you project your intent upon the world and the world reflects it back at you in a way that meets your expectations. i think that’s the path of least resistance. what to expect? expect what you intend.

    the only way to know the truth of your experience is to know the truth of your own intent.

    frank herbert’s maxim is turned inward: understand nothing. only ask “now what am I doing?

    and of course, that is a very personal thing so this is where the theory ends. now it’s up to you.

    i hope i’ve not “alienated” too many by sharing this (rather tame) tale. my only intent is to share what i’ve experienced, simply because certain forces don’t want us to share our personal experiences of the fundamental nature of reality. they’re trying to force-feed us their own reality for their own reasons. those certain forces are us, and by us I mean the world and everything in it.

    intent, expectation, perception, attention. whatever power these ultraterrestrials have, we have it too.

    so if you see an alien, ask yourself “what response am i trying to provoke from myself?”

    oh, I should add that once you have projected your intent upon the world, let it go. it can’t do shit with you breathing down its neck.

12. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 18th, 2005 at 12:25 pm

    “what response am i trying to provoke from myself?”

    Yeah that’s precisely what I came to on that other post. When you communicate, you aren’t just seeking a response from somebody else, but from yourself as well. Communication becomes a sort of ritual act designed to elicit or enhance a certain inner state in both the transmitter and the receiver. In an idealized sense, communication might be about trying to elicit the same inner state in both the transmitter and the receiver. Maybe we could call that “authentic” communication… although that seems a bit hoity-toity and presumptive. But in just as many cases, that is really not the case at all, nor is it necessarily bad or negative to want to create another kind of response in someone.

    In any event, I really like the UFO thing and the greater message, because I find myself struggling very much right now with figuring out what it is that I really want. If a UFO came and asked me that today, I don’t know if I could really articulate it, or else just sort of project a kind of emotional picture of it.

13. alistair Says:
    August 18th, 2005 at 11:40 pm

    authentic communication is, to me, being unattached to needing responses and being confident in stating my case in a way that can be understood. a purity of words and phrases that contain meaning drawing those of like mind together. communion. i talk and then you talk and then it`s the next persons turn if they feel like it, or if they just want to listen then that`s o.k. too. and everyone grows up and out together by understanding.
    i don`t think we ever find out what we want, but sometimes we do get what we need, if just for a fleeting moment. and it`s enough.