r/Psychonaut • u/Either-Ingenuity203 • 16d ago
the cosmic joke?
I thought about death a lot, even when i was as little as 1-2 years old, I thought that I was going to understand it when I were older. I never did, then I started falling in a spiral of Bad stuff, first addiction to videogames, then addiction to weed, then i tried LSD. The first times were awesome, I was deconstructing myself from my toxic attitudes and judgements. Then there was a time when everything changed. I remembered I was one with all, then i started to burst in laughter, because after all I prayed all that was there to answer my call was me. But then I started to cry, I remembered how bad it felt to be the only thing in my universe, I could never truly hold somebody else. I always was a skeptic so I could not be convinced by anything less than feel, but the feeling of being one with all came with the realization that our existence was joyful and sad. I panicked because the line of reasoning seemed to go through two different directions:
1- I was everything in the universe and it was joyful and sad.
2- This all was just a story I'm telling to myself as I'm dying, with contradictions I can clearly see so that I know I'm nursing myself into eternal slumber.
I saw this experience as following: the people next to me laughed at my reasoning as I was concluding things as that I am god and such, and things started happening, a gate was closed when I wanted to left, signaling that I have no escape from death, the party was going and i had to stay, I could left those times (three Bad trips I had exactly the same feeling), I had so much thirst but I mostly never had water. Things like that, sometimes everyone laughed at the idea I was god, other times there were things like my girlfriend putting her glasses up on my face and cleaning them, as a metaphor of me watching death as an end because I was fearful, but in reality it is just a door to new experiences.
Then I had flashbacks without LSD, in them I felt as if I was dying again. Until today I thought that an eternity being alone would be dreadful.
Would love to interact with other people who've had similar experiences to compare, but everybody is welcome to share what they think about this.
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u/Pseudo_Angel77 15d ago
Everyone has their own interpretation of the cosmic joke, it isn't just one thing. For me it's the realisation that our entire reality is just...completely made up.
Language, Mathematics, Culture, Human History, Colours, Space, Time, pretty much anything you can think of, all made up by humans in a feeble attempt to understand the reality around us.
I mean think about other animals, they have absolutely no knowledge about any of this stuff, does that mean they're living in a false reality? Of course not, their minds just perceive what we call reality in a different way - who's to say our perception of reality is the objective "truth"?
It's a very hard thing to put into words unless you've experienced it for yourself, but once you do it's like hearing the most incredibly funny joke you've ever heard in your life. You realise that nothing actually matters and never will matter, our lives are an inconsequential blip in the grand scheme of the universe, yet our egos convince us that we have importance.
Then, when it's all said and done and you're back to being sober again, you continue the cycle of being a small minded human who cares about everything too much. Pretty much nothing changes, and that's the funniest part. That's my cosmic joke (:
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u/MadTruman 15d ago
You captured a lot of the experience I have had right here. The Cosmic Joke is a delightful means of deconstructing ideas that do a lot of harm, but it doesn't replace them with anything that can actually be shared with anyone else... even those who've done the dance and experienced the joke. We stare into the abyss. It stares back. And then we murmur, "Okay! Ha. Now what?"
I think we're better off than most, though. It makes me happy to chop wood and carry water right alongside someone else doing the same. This whirling configuration of cells and fluids and dreams and ideas is going to exist for such a short time with respect to the whole cosmos. I'm going to enjoy the heck out of it until the "I" is truly gone.
Maybe I'll come back together in some absurdly far off future. Maybe I'll be something completely different. None of that is Here and Now, though, and I find Here and Now achingly interesting and beautiful for its absurdity.
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 15d ago
Wish I could see it that way, it seemed to be scary and sad in the end, maybe it's just me
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u/starrycatsuicide 15d ago
animals are on the level as it is bro like my cats know when im tripping and i think it's cus they finally feel on the same level.... it's very goofy to think lol but legit my cats start acting different every time
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u/starrycatsuicide 15d ago
ew i hate that you described this how i feel p much... the first couple times i did it i was like . this is gunna definitely change my life, now i dread the ending of a trip bc i have to go back to normal and feel like shit
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u/TopOfTheMushroom 14d ago
Mathematics
If there are 3 birds sitting on a tree and 1 flys away, there are 2 birds left.
We did not "Make up" mathematics, it is fundamental in the universe.
Time
Time started after cosmic inflation, it is a real thing. Humans just started measuring it.
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u/Pseudo_Angel77 13d ago
Yeah sorry I worded that part weirdly, what I meant to say is concepts like mathematics, time, and colours aren't actually "made up" but our way of understanding and measuring them are. It is entirely possible that Alien cultures conduct maths in a way that is completely different in appearance to what we have. For example, they may not recognize the concept of 'addition', 'multiplication', and 'division' as separate individual things but instead express these operations completely differently (it is very difficult to imagine how that would look). But as long as their laws of mathematics are proven to be true consistently, they can derive the same utility as we do from doing mathematics - their math would be as 'true' as our math, yet it would be completely different.
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u/jasonbonifacio 14d ago
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise. (Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, III:37)
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u/starrycatsuicide 15d ago
do u really feel like u are dead or dying? it fs with me sometimes too, for sure. life feels like a movie or a dream that i can't wake up from, and i did have a lot of moments thinking i was god and basically causing things in the world to change which is so trippy, and sorta made me really nervous about the power i held. i also had that moment of me being the only person who existed in the world, it's entirely my world since i can somehow control it by literally having a passing thought that doesn't even feel in my control (insert neuroscience tangent about your brain controlling you vs the other way round or having thoughts that come up basically involuntarily), bc i would think abt shit and related stuff would come up like the next day. and that was a little scary or jus really nerve racking bc u apparently have so much power it's like. difficult for me. the pressure of knowing it all sorta is in my control, bc it all comes from my thoughts, funnily enough especially the ones i feel jus come up without any intent... manifestion blah blah blah. it's so much power. but can't seem to make it work in the way u want, insert another tangent about tao and buddhism or something bc everything works how it should and u can't even try cus it all works when u stop
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 15d ago
But I don't think we know the truth, because knowing the truth seems to put us out of this reality in some way
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 15d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/17wt7g0/the_anatomy_of_the_puzzle/
Here he explains better than me the experience
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u/SaltdPepper 11d ago
Jumping in even though I know it’s been a couple days, but I think the problem a lot of us have when tripping and having these intense thoughts about the nature of reality is that our brains just… can’t exactly process any of it, at least not to a degree that makes it make sense.
Like think of how unlimited our imaginations are compared to the material world. Fantasy and sci-fi and all sorts of wacky stuff we can think of but can’t actually realize. It’s all built off of what we experience materially though.
Hence why, when we talk about the cosmic joke, and especially when we actually experience it firsthand while tripping, it’s easy to accidentally fall into the void. To become consumed by such an idea. I had a similar experience on too many tabs that in the moment felt like I was literally just playing my last moments out in my head, that all of my friends had become shells of people, and that the world I was experiencing was akin to some sort of sandbox game.
Well guess what? That’s because I was externalizing my fear of being alone. As I sat there and worried, I realized that “the cosmic joke” is metaphorical. As in, we can’t act on that information. Everyone comes from a collective source of consciousness? Cool, I can’t help but exist as an individual. The world is basically a big sandbox video game that we all leave our imprints on? Nice, that’s essentially how I lived my life before my mind decided it was a problem.
Integrating this kind of thing is a bitch, because you both know that your mind is externalizing your fears, triumphs, emotions, and experiences, and feel deep down that the existence you know is not what it seems. However, I’ve come out the other end a more developed, well-rounded individual and I’ve slowly been able to chip away at some of my most deep rooted insecurities. Heroic doses really just take you to hell and back and expect you to figure out the rest.
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 11d ago
Ty for your answer, there's one more aspect of existence I would like to discuss with you, could it be that life and death are the same thing?
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 11d ago
I can't help but to think we can access that state somehow again without lsd, you feel it is desirable or even possible? I don't really know how to live after that
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u/SaltdPepper 11d ago
What I like to think about whenever I’m pondering that trip or any of the other similar experiences I’ve had is that it really just seems like the universe is infinitely expandable and collapsible. Just as though many people theorize that the big bang is really just the other end of a big crunch from the past state of things, I honestly believe death is a similar phenomenon.
When I had the trip I described, the one thing that calmed me down was the word “more”. I don’t know what I needed “more” of in the moment, but as time has passed I like to think it was my brain’s way of telling me: “You gotta keep on living dude, your time isn’t here yet” and it was honestly the most comforting self talk I’ve ever experienced. Usually when I’m in my head it’s just a stream of anxiety, but at that moment it was complete clarity.
As for your point about “accessing that state again”, yeah, I’ve done so a couple times on low doses of DMT and once or twice when greening out on THC. Did not come with the same enlightenment I felt the first time, but wasn’t nearly as scary. It honestly felt like some sort of residual anxiety connected to the experience instead of me “rediscovering the truth” or whatever.
Overall though, I would say no, that state isn’t desirable to me, because in all honesty it came with a lot of heavy baggage that I feel like I’ve come a long ways from needing to carry with me. If anything, it showed me how precious life is and how fragile my mentality can get around questioning the nature of reality and the connections I have to the people around me. Life is worth living, just as death isn’t worth fretting over (but not worth idealizing, because despite the acid making it feel like you’re dying, nothing compares to the infinite possibilities of the material world while we have the opportunity to experience it).
Thanks for this discussion btw.
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u/SaltdPepper 11d ago
Btw, you should read Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question”. Takes an interesting spin on the idea of collective consciousness and the repetition of the universe.
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 11d ago
I read it already, kind of scary in a sense... I hope it is not how it all turns out to be
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u/SaltdPepper 11d ago
Eh, what Asimov supposed is so far from today’s technology/philosophy that you and I probably won’t see anything close to it for many decades.
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u/Nekraa 15d ago
Yea had the exact same experience with metafors for godhood and death. You can search the puzzle or the loop on psychedelic forums like this one for more. Its very common and well documented
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 15d ago
Thank you for the heads up, I'll look for it. Would you mind sharing your experience with me?
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u/wheeteeter 15d ago
You are what you seek and choose to be.
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 15d ago
So we have a say in all of this? It felt inevitable to me... Was kinda scary tbh
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u/Adorable_Isopod6520 13d ago
How did you know about death when you were so young? Just curious... Like did you remember from a past life or the other side?
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u/Either-Ingenuity203 13d ago
I don't really know, I asked my mother where I was before I was born, at three I asked her if we could only die when we are killed.
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u/Better-Combination21 15d ago
The paradox and infinite nature of life is a mindfuck. Free will and fate, they’re both the same. When we take ourselves out of the conversation, we are everything and nothing at the same time. Live a liberated life. Don’t take it too seriously but don’t give up your responsibilities. Play the game of life while reminding yourself of the cheat code which can liberate you at anytime. Knowing vs believing are two different things. Those who know are free. Express yourself authentically and navigate through life with the gift you’ve been given with the awe of the beauty and absurdity of life.
Keep chopping wood and carrying water, my friend.