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Comment by toomanydoubts | Hacker News Reader

I've had the same experience. Can't shake the idea that `consciousness == god` and we are all tiny manifestations of this "essence", after some psychedelic trips.

My rational mind always goes back to atheism when sober, but the idea is always there in the back of my mind.

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http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o

I have to admit I might have been influenced by "The Egg" before. I hadn't seen the Alan Watts poem before, but that somehow has just put me to tears. Thanks for sharing.

Alan Watts is an excellent writer and speaker, absolutely worth reading and listening to. I can't help but feeling that the video wraps his speech into a pathos of melancholic, "full of emotions" song married to a meaningless set of disjointed clips.

I'd recommend reading his books, The Way of Zen was excellent.

Perhaps this is self-delusion on my part, but I've had no trouble integrating materialism/atheism with what you're describing — that kind of psychedelic panpsychism. They don't feel like competing claims.

I don't mean the usual anthropomorphic god. It's just that once you accept that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, it's not a big leap to think that it's god(not in the sense of "god, the creator", but in the sense of "god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe").

The big leap is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.

Per your description below ("god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe") I would have pegged you as an idealist (god is and dreams the universe), not a panpsychist.

To be honest, I'm don't know much about philosophy of the mind. From the very little I've read right know, probably my current view is closer to cosmopsychism, maybe?

This is what I just read: "but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe."

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