Communing with the Gods Versus Paper Plans and Writing

From: here

Shifting states of consciousness is a way to travel among the "worlds". People do this all the time, of course. While you're reading this blog you're in a different mode of consciousness than when you're walking down a sidewalk on a cold and rainy day. When you watch a TV show or browse social media or craigslist, you're in a different mode of consciousness than when you read this blog.

In previous posts, I argued that the network of filters that process sensory information form the basis of "symbolic" representation of the natural world. Those filters and networks coevolved with the natural world over eons and are it's meaty-electrical reflection, so we're connected to the natural world via the matter of our nervous system and the molecular memory of our very matter and bones and the bacteria in our guts, but also to the information and concepts of the universe that are imprinted on everything. (cf Meno's slave)

When we can shift consciousness by an act of will we can move around to different "rooms" of this palace of the universe that's actually in us. We can connect that palace of thought to the real world by various means and share them by various means. Generally these means are low fidelity and low bandwidth, e.g. writing, poetry, and speech. The philosophers who devised the scientific method came up with one technique for creating a formal connection.

The shared hallucination method of things like dungeons and dragons or a church service are actually much higher fidelity. Maybe, just maybe its possible to take a whole rooms full of people into that shared hallucinatory state for the purpose of planning, even for very ordinary day-to-day purposes. With that method, it's not necessary to come up with the paper, symbolic representation of that experience.