Sigmund Freud—the big man himself—always pushed back against using the term "subconscious." The whole idea behind the word "subconscious" makes it sound like there’s just another version of your consciousness tucked away somewhere else, sitting right "underneath" everything.
Freud didn't see it that way, and honestly, neither do I. He preferred talking about "the unconscious," or *The Unconscious*. It's more about certain psychological processes happening outside of our conscious awareness altogether.
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In Fitzcarraldo (1982), there’s this one shot where Kinski is sitting at a table on the boat eating, and right behind him you’ve got this whole group of Indian extras—half-naked, spears in hand, maybe some face paint too. It’s framed centrally; you see little Kinski down in the middle, surrounded by this massive wall of Indians. The look on the Indians' faces? Pure fury and hatred. Kinski? He just looks awkward, insecure, totally quiet.
That wasn't acting.
In a real, solid tribe, you don't have room for ego trips or people making scenes.
Maybe we should start archiving these stories just to get a complete historical picture.
Polanski, who basically ruins young girls. And then he gets his wife brutally murdered later on.
Audrey Hepburn, lying dead in a car in Paris.
Then there's death by car: James Dean, driving a Porsche. Or the great Desmond Llewelyn. Jennifer Gray sitting in a car where the driver kills someone—all because of speed. Rowan Atkinson buys a McLaren and totals it in a heartbeat.
Maria Trintignant, where a friend beats her so badly she dies.
Pasolini, killed by some young guy.
Tarkovsky, dealing with radioactive contamination.
That one German film with several suicides.
Günther Kaufmann kills a woman and ends up in prison, or something like that.
The extras actually offer to finally kill Kinski—you can see it in their faces in the movie.
Who died from booze? Vivien Leigh? Maybe Fassbinder? Who were the junkies? Hopper? Rourke.
Or Eiko Matsuda, who played her part so convincingly she had to flee her home country.
People always claim Chaplin’s *Modern Times* is a silent movie. It isn't. Not really. It’s just built using all that old-school silent framework, but don't call it silent. Take that scene in the restaurant—you can actually hear the music. It's full audio. I guess Chaplin was already getting a little bit old-fashioned back then, maybe clinging to the past.
But look, let's be clear here: *Modern Times* is easily one of my top 20 favorite
Let me be clear: SOME fears are a blessing. Like when you feel that icy chill hit you because you see your kid leaning too far out a window and they might fall. That fear triggers an adrenaline surge from your adrenal glands, and suddenly you're moving like a panther, lunging toward that window to grab them in a split second.
Besides, why should we have to push through every single terrifying experience just to overcome it? Maybe, like I mentioned in my previous post, for certain "mystical" encounters, fear serves a legitimate purpose as a defense mechanism.
Take a woman I know—she had one isolated psychotic break where she completely lost it. She was talking nonsense, screaming, neglecting her hygiene, even trying to fight people close to her. She claimed she met Jesus and realized she was His wife.
Once things calmed down through therapy and medication, she actually became terrified of meditation (TM), which she used to do regularly before the episode. And honestly? She has reason to be afraid. For someone who is mentally fragile—someone with a genetic predisposition or a family history of psychosis and personality disorders—meditation can trigger depersonalization, derealization, or dissociative disorders, and therefore trigger a psychotic episode.
That’s why in Abrahamic traditions, where there are clearly defined archetypes of good and evil, you often see mystics—people whose records suggest they likely achieved enlightenment—who then go on to preach about hellish torments and divine judgment. The most obvious example is Saint Paul in the Christian tradition, who fundamentally steered Christianity.
Microsoft he wasn't self-aware...
It was likely, as neurologists suspect based on the symptom list, an aura from a full grand mal seizure in the temporal lobe.
Auditory hallucinations of divine voices, visions of divine figures, and physical collapse are all common elements of TLE (temporal lobe epilepsy), and they are especially common in documented cases of sudden religious conversion in people with temporal lobe epilepsy.
In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul described another experience, in which he was "caught up to paradise and heard sacred secrets which no human lips can repeat." He also claimed that he was "given a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan to rack me" to prevent him from becoming too prideful about his "wealth of visions." This story gives two important indications that Paul might have suffered from TLE: there is confirmation that he had recurring, if not frequent visions, and he had an awareness or perception of some illness in himself.
Maybe. I don't know.
But honestly, Paul is the ultimate example of someone who could take his visions—wherever they actually originated—and distill them into top-tier, crystal-clear analysis. Whatever he experienced, he processed it into something incredibly sharp and coherent.
There are plenty of people out there dealing with epilepsy, but there’s only ever one Paul.
Yeah, it’s actually pretty wild when you think about how hallucinogens even work. It’s not like they’re handing us some external gift; they just strip back the curtain on what's already inside us, guiding us back to our own center.
Take me, for instance. I wouldn't personally label a single trip as a "spiritual experience"—the trip itself isn't spiritual. I think the technical term is more like "altered states of consciousness," or something along those lines. Think about it: maybe the brain just starts filtering things differently. Usually, half our synapses are busy dampening things down—basically suppressing associations. So, these altered states might just allow for freer, more distant, or looser connections to happen. (Kind of like how social norms act as a trained filter for how we associate ideas.)
The whole "spiritual" side of things only kicks in later, when you start making sense of those associations—when you interpret them and find a connection. It’s a lot like dreaming. These experiences can lead you to discover a new sense of meaning, but that meaning isn't tucked away inside the trip itself; it lives out in the actual world. These moments just point toward the real meaning within ourselves and the world around us. (Which implies you can reach that same meaning without any help at all.)
Maybe that's the divide: some people live in a world of genuine meaning, while others live in a world of strictly trained, filtering conventions.
--- Side note. There was this clinical psychology experiment involving a piece of text. If you slice off the top third of every letter, people can still read it just fine. But if you slice off the top *two-thirds*, regular people are stuck, whereas people on LSD can read it perfectly fluently.
Quick question for the group. Is there any chance I can just drop some vector graphics—you know, raw SVG code—directly into a post? Can I actually write inline <svg ... /svg> here? Let me give it a shot:
A questionable joke, if you ask me. Otherwise, I’d probably be stuck living some predictable life as an engineer. Instead, things turned out a bit messy—but hey, life got a lot more colorful because of it. (Not that I'm actually agreeing with that, by the way.)
Or look at it this way: maybe this movie just opened my eyes to the different textures of life—the aesthetics, the weird dance of meaning and interpretation, the sheer scale of the Atlantic, or just a fresh expression on someone's face... stuff that might have stayed buried under a mountain of spreadsheets in any other version of my life.
That’s a tough one. I keep spotting this weird pattern in certain movies, and honestly, it’s starting to feel like a blueprint for my own life.
Spartacus (1960) Jim and Jules (1962) Easy Rider (1969)
For me, "Jim and Jules" really hits home—it shows how life can climb out of the daily grind and turn into this beautiful harmony, a total rush of images, sounds, emotions, and hope... only to just crash and burn all over again.
I remember being about seven years old when my dad was sitting there reading the paper and suddenly starts getting all hyped up: "Oh! Tarzan! With Weissmuller!" Around one in the morning. I had to spend three hours earlier that evening faking sleep just to pull it off, but then finally, my dad and I are sitting there at 1 AM watching Tarzan. It left this impression on me—that movies were something significant, something precious.
Since then, it’s been nothing but endless TV, tons of old classics, Westerns, Musicals. My old man actually had pretty decent taste; he could spot a good film from a mile away, but since he was an engineer, he could never quite put into words *why* a movie worked. Even back then, I had this quiet ambition to eventually get better at understanding it than he was. Reminds me of those summer nights as a kid, hanging out at the local Open-air surplus events. And occasionally, he’d actually manage to shock me: watching "Catch 22" when I was barely nine.
But I really found myself through cinema while I was at the university engineering labs, basically ruining my studies by obsessing over Truffaut, Bergman, Godard, Kurosawa, and the rest. That was a long time ago, and honestly, I don't regret it for a second. If anything, movies are what saved my life.
If you're living in the spirit, you've got that spiritual strength down.
But if you find yourself having to work extra hard to stay spiritually grounded, it usually means other distractions are pulling at you. You could be physically strong. Or you could just be incredibly good at that "I absolutely have to" mentality.
Maybe I missed the point of this thread. Realists don't go around manufacturing their own reality; they just deal with the one everyone else is living in.
We don't actually "produce" thoughts. It's more like we overhear them. I can wonder about something or toss out a question, but the actual thought only shows up once the answer has had time to simmer. You’ve got to resist that urge to grab quick, cheap answers—you have to stay sensitive enough to let things ripen. We aren't thought-factories.
Words aren't tools to pull something from the outside into ourselves. It's kind of like Meno from Plato: conversation is really just a way to wake up the ideas that were already sitting inside you. Rhetorical debates are useless. You aren't going to learn anything new if the concept isn't already part of you.
Then there's action. Maybe it's just ego driven by stupid impulses. Maybe it's just being tossed around by external forces, that sense of "having to" do something. Or maybe a true decision is the only real expression of freedom—the kind that creates its own necessity. The only thing that matters is what happens when you're acting freely; all that "must do" stuff is irrelevant.
And then there's letting go. There's that whole idea of ontological guilt: every time you make a choice, you're essentially killing off every other option that might have been just as important. Making choices can feel like punching holes in the fabric of the world. It’s much nicer to find some sort of harmony rather than making these hard, jagged decisions. Plus, maybe "letting go" is what Laozi was getting at: just don't mess everything up by overacting, and the good stuff will find its way to you.
As for > how do we create *our own* reality By looking. What we see is simply because we are looking at it. We manifest the world through the touch of our own consciousness.
Michael Gonzalez77 said:Every intense emotional state leaves its mark, obviously. Every illness has a root cause, and for most, that stems from severe stress or heavy emotional burdens—that’s nothing new. Then, the chronic issues and pain that arise from that—both physically and mentally—create a feedback loop. Those states impact your functions, which feeds back into the cycle, causing symptoms to flare up and fade away periodically. Depression absolutely wrecks a person's life, their behavior, their thought patterns, their relationships, and their drive to live.
You're theorizing more than stating facts now, but okay, I get what you mean. Just let's not talk about mental illness in such broad, abstract terms; I was simply offering my opinion to him, not making an absolute claim.
My point in reaching out to the guy is this: I hope he isn't experiencing mania, because when someone goes through a manic episode—whatever kind it may be—they can feel enlightened, like they're Jesus or God. We all know people like that, and there's nothing wrong with it. But afterward, those lower moods tend to follow because the brain functionally and hormonally "burns out." Much like a drug, it exhausts its normal resources and falls into a deficit, leading to states that are just another form of "spending," only much more unpleasant. — Of course, it doesn't have to be intense, and I'm not claiming that's exactly what's happening in his case; in fact, I really hope it isn't.
Yeah, let's drop the wind thing from the debate. I'm with you there.
And my point was more like... actually, let me rephrase: sometimes I just get a bit tired of people who are perfectly content cruising along in this endless loop of shallow success and total mediocrity. I honestly think life only hands out real happiness to those who can push through the fog of a heavy, complicated existence toward something a little brighter. It’s not just about those >> extreme states of 'divine' bliss ... <<, it’s about widening the spectrum of what life can actually be for you. I really hope Drew Gray4 caught onto a sense of freedom he'll never forget, regardless of how he feels when he wakes up tomorrow.
Anyway, it felt a bit like watching someone try to explain away the obvious.
Michael Gonzalez77 said:Actually, you're putting words in my mouth; I never said any of that. 🙂
I'm simply pointing out how much this resembles what he's describing. There isn't really a "spiritual awakening" when you're coming out of severe, crippling anxiety or depression. In those cases, that "awakening" is actually just mania. When deep depression and intense stress wreck your nervous system, you can't hide behind philosophy. That said, I don't think that's what's happening with him, and I truly hope it isn't. People struggle with this their entire lives. Honestly, many just give up because these states swing wildly between feeling "divine" and feeling like you're in literal hell. Psychiatry is mostly just there to manage the symptoms.
People experience these shifts in all sorts of ways, but at the end of the day, they're still just people dealing with real problems.
There are definitely people who would be classified as depressed due to organic medical issues. But the idea that > the depression and stress leading up to it absolutely wrecked your nervous system < is impossible to prove. The notion that depression destroys the nervous system on a hardware level? That's ideology. At best, it's correlation.
What actually matters is a person's life situation. And a situation is made up of facts, interpretations, perspectives, and mood. Plus, you have external demands on how you're supposed to function. You "Must Not Be Depressed." And that’s where the vicious cycles start.
> psychiatry is just quasi-help for the symptoms < Sure, there's some truth to that, but there's also the fact that quick quasi-therapy often just permanently locks you into a low state. How often does one single, heavy-handed label—like, "You Just Have Anxiety-Driven Depression"—create the whole reality? Suddenly, you're forced to interpret, feel, and act based on that label just to defend yourself.
Michael Gonzalez77 said:It can actually last for months and then spiral out of control, almost like a wave pattern. Or it might dip away for a while, only to resurface a year later as a continuation of that manic phase.
You’re talking like Drew Gray4 needs to pop mania pills just to get back to some "pleasant" baseline where he was taking antidepressants.
No. He woke up to the world, to himself—he finally took control in total freedom. Everything gained actual value, color... there's really nothing more to say about it.
Charles Morales10 said:What really bugs me about this whole debate is how people equate Christianity with the religious institution established by Constantine the Great—which was later given its core ideological framework by Augustine of Hippo—with the faith itself. In fact, most people go even further and conflate it with the modern Roman Catholic Church. But Christianity is honestly so much more than just an institution. Regarding the practice of withdrawing from society to gain a clearer perspective—that has always been a core Christian tradition. Figures like Saint Anthony (who supposedly lived to be 105) and others lived out their lives in the middle of desolate wildernesses; some even spent years living as pillar saints—Saint Simeon did so for 37 years. I’m also still struggling to see what connection Christianity actually has with the political Right.😕
Oh sure, love that logic. And honestly, you don't have to lump the Nazarene in with "Christianity" as an institution. From what I gather, back at the very beginning, you had Stoics, Christians, and Gnostics all playing in the same sandbox. Even Paul showed some Gnostic leanings if you look closely at certain phrases in his letters. The whole Catholic movement basically kicked things off by burning almost every single Gnostic book in existence.
Besides, (neo-)liberalism isn't exactly a leftist thing; it's more like semi-right wing. Liberalism actually promotes the preservation of existing structures, which is arguably even worse.
Anyway, I think the whole "new age" argument is just a bit silly because they don't even understand themselves. A "new era" is essentially the conceptual core of the Bible—it's exactly what Paul writes about in his letter to the Romans.