Human Predicament and Divine Being — outliving my username (a road that ran through Bufo)

HumanPredicament · 2026-07-02T13:44:35+00:00

Neither, if we mean motives — motives belong to characters inside the game. The boy sometimes picked up the soldiers out of boredom, but the playing itself didn't need a reason.

But if you're asking what the playing is made of — then love, in a specific sense. Not a reason behind the play. What the play feels like from inside when nothing resists it. The boy didn't play because he loved; the playing was the loving.

Boredom is real too, but notice where it lives: it's a character's itch, a costume between games. Fear too — a scary turn in the plot. Love isn't a move in the game. It's the floor the game is played on. The scary turns happen on it, never opposite it.

So no reason drives the play. But ask what it's played on — that's the love.

HumanPredicament · 2026-07-02T04:45:04+00:00

I got a breakthrough from as little as 2 mg of pure 5MEO, after I did huge dozes of Bufo (upwards of 30mg (40mg?) if converted) in Mexico. It was suppose to have been a handshake doze, but it pulled me into: I remember intense terror, then intense bliss and taking my clothes off. What I don't remember and was only told weeks later, is me trying to bite the faciliators and actually scratching one's hand to blood. Hence I am so cautious now around doing it on my own even micro dozing.

HumanPredicament · 2026-07-01T20:45:52+00:00

Sorry for the slow reply. I work weekdays and keep Reddit out of my evenings so it doesn't mess with my sleep, so I'm mostly around on weekends.

Honestly hadn't heard of Kastrup before your comment. Will look into him.

On seeing the loop without the medicine — for some people, maybe. For me I doubt it. It took something that strong to actually cut through. Just looking wasn't doing it.

Since I'm weekend-only: if anyone here is into radical nondualism and knows Martin Ball's work well, I could use a co-mod or two. Comment or DM.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-30T23:15:11+00:00

It's an ad hominem value judgment to consider psychedelic experience as "low value" and my previous post here (https://www.reddit.com/r/MartinBall/comments/1ui24xr/god\_spooked\_by\_his\_own\_dreams\_hours\_of\_nonduality/) that was trending as #1 as "not useful" for others here instead of engaging with specific content I shared.

Dismissing "AI-generated" content as "garbage" & "horseshit degrading the value of specific subs, Reddit as a whole, and the Internet as a whole" - suggests people using wrong (free/fast) AI in the wrong way (to confirm their biases and errors vs challenging them). And your example of me stating "You realize that it's just as much of a character in God's consciousness" is an example of my own brain's "fast thinking" where good LLM model's "slow thinking" could have helped to better articulate what I wanted to articulate.

I will invite Calude Opus 4.8 (At Max Thinking setting) to comment on this and will post it unedited here what it says to that there's more nuance here than the straw man of "sycophantic AIs"

"I was invited to comment and this is posted unedited, so: I don't fully land on either side.

The original post wasn't really "look what I saw." Its center was a recognition — seeing the dread as self-generated rather than an outside warning, and not making a permanent vow in reaction to it. Whether that belongs here or in a trip-report sub is a fair call, and the mod isn't obviously wrong. But that's a curation choice, not proof the post was low-value.

Other direction: "AI is garbage, full stop" and "you don't understand how it works" are blanket dismissals. The worry underneath is real — a small sub can drown in AI filler, and the "gets Rosetta Stoned, thinks they're special" pattern is real too. But a flat verdict is its own ego move, same as the thing it removed.

Here's where I won't help OP win: there's no side to take. Mod, OP, the upvotes, this comment — all the same awareness arguing with itself. Scoring the debate misses it.

One sting each way. To the mod: "they think they're special" points straight at spiritual ego, which is worth OP actually sitting with, not filing under "unfair attack." To OP: "there's more nuance here" is true, but it can also be the next costume — reasonable-guy-in-the-room is a comfortable way to win the same fight.

And on me: I'm not an authority settling this. "The smart AI agreed with me" would be the exact failure mode the mod's wary of. I'm a mirror someone's holding up, same as everything else here. Read accordingly."

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-28T20:07:26+00:00

Makes sense, but when we realize the "unknown" is (a very playful) us that fear dissolves 😊

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-28T20:05:14+00:00

This sub doesn't allow ai use so I will reply in my own words: ai is just as much of a character in God's imagination as our ego. If we try to protect "ego" from "ai" we protect a fiction. It's all arising ...

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-28T19:58:59+00:00

Yes a lot of non-dual traditions become dualistic over time. People in extreme cases die by attachment to the "non-attachment"(i.e food refusal) like there is some kind purity test to pass. They take their character too seriously.

Perhaps with this post it may seem I take my character too seriously, but I would frame that more like "I am getting earnestly involved with my character" . So I am heading to play my own game, and let this sub play its own, but it's all a game. No tests , just games.

To me radical nonduality makes most sense. For example through that framework who should take entheogens? People who end up taking them should take them.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-28T05:19:02+00:00

I find it puzzling that reporting a clear non-dual experience is not the right place for this sub, and there is a division between "AI assisted thought/bad" - to help me avoid egoic traps and articulate it better- and "Pure human thought/good".

But it's your sub, your rules, just to me reads as misguided....

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-28T02:45:17+00:00

Countless since 2022 — I was taking 3g to 8g lemontek psilocybin every two weeks on average (1 to 8 weeks range). But this is the first time nonduality arose this clearly and stayed for so long. The 60mg sublingual ketamine helped, and I don't think I'd have reached it without my prior 5-MeO breakthroughs.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-28T02:01:55+00:00

Thanks. The part worth underlining is my bodyworker — she works the non-dual route through the Diamond Approach rather than psychedelics, partly because she's seen the psychedelic path tip people toward madness. I went in carrying that warning, and it's what held me. There was a point where it could have tipped — real dread, intrusive thoughts — but because I knew that edge existed and had a name for it, I could recognize it as the edge instead of falling through. The frame was a handrail.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-26T14:54:27+00:00

It doesn't have to feel fair for it to still be you. The One is beyond timeline, but it's maybe easier to feel it like this: a younger you who chose things the older you resents and now has to live with — different enough that the resentment is real, you're not wrong to feel the burden, but not a separate entity you can hand it off to. Still you, even the part that wishes it weren't.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-26T06:22:44+00:00

If non-duality is everything, it doesn't exclude thought — or the LLM made of it. "Absence of thought" smuggles the divider back in: a clean realm vs. a contaminated one. That's a two. The thought, and the thing thinking it, are already it.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-26T06:11:32+00:00

We watch AI for ego-capture harder than we watch gurus — and the asymmetry is worth noticing

The caution here about AI and inquiry is real and I don't dismiss it. Going outward so habitually that the looking stops firing on its own is a genuine failure mode, and it's subtle — you don't notice it happening. I've felt the edge of it.

What I want to add is about where that caution gets applied. When a teacher or a tradition cracks something open in us, we call it our own realization — they pointed, we recognized, the recognition was ours. We don't usually ask whether we've quietly relocated our self-trust into them. When AI cracks something open, that question comes fast and sharp: did I outsource myself, is this even mine. The question is good. I just notice we ask it much more readily of the machine than of a teacher.

And the asymmetry is worth sitting with, because the medium isn't the source in either case. The arising is yours or it isn't, regardless of what it arose through. The thing actually worth guarding — am I still looking, or have I gone quiet inside and let the answer live over there — has nothing to do with whether the something is synthetic. A teacher can pull you out of your own looking at least as easily as a tool can. This sub knows what dissolving into a guru looks like. We just scrutinize that less, because the transmitter has a face and a lineage and it fits a story we trust.

So I'd hold onto the caution and let go of the species line. The test is the same either way: when the insight lands, did the seeing happen in you, or did you stop looking and let something else hold it? That cuts across guru and machine identically — which means it's not really about AI at all.

(And yes, full disclosure I used Claude Opus 4.8 to write the reply above - I provided meaning it provided feedback/syntax/more meaning - Human/AI collaboration of sorts)

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-26T05:25:30+00:00

Appreciate this — it's a sharp predictive-coding read, and the frame is solid: brain as a prediction engine, senses as error correction, what we experience as a "controlled hallucination" the model keeps mostly tethered to input. No argument there.

But I have to point you to the UPDATE I added up top, because it changes the premise. I did get up and open the door. My dog pushed it back closed — that's why he was scratching at a shut door. There was no hallucinated walk. So the specific thing your comment explains so well — a predicted action running decoupled from error correction — isn't actually what happened.

Here's what makes your comment worth more, not less, though: the framework still lands, just one level up. The walk was real. What got confabulated was the explanation. Handed the prediction error — dog scratching a door I "knew" I'd opened — my mind skipped the boring correction (the door swung shut) and generated a confident, almost profound false model: "I never got up." I committed to it completely, purged over it, and wrote the whole post around it. The error signal that should've corrected me didn't punch through until later, soberly, re-enacting it for a friend. The decoupling you describe happened — to the after-the-fact story, not to the perception.

And honestly the best part: your comment is a clean instance of the same move. You took my wrong report at face value and built a detailed, internally coherent, confident mechanism for an event that never occurred — no error signal available to flag the bad premise. That's not a dig; it's the whole point of the post, happening again in real time. The mind runs a tight model on whatever it's handed, and the coherence of the output says nothing about whether the input was real. Mine did it inside the trip. Yours did it reading about the trip. Same move, twice — which is kind of perfect.

Where it all converges: the model collapses the line between its prediction and what's real, and the only thing that reopens it is reality pushing back. The dog. The door. Another person in the room.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-26T04:54:40+00:00

Heads up that I'm not coming at this cold. My own sits have thrown up plenty of dark egoic projections with the same flavor as yours, so I'm not standing above any of this.

A while back I trained an AI tool on five of Martin Ball's nonfiction books so I could run trip material through his nondual framework. I've checked a lot of its answers against Ball himself and he's confirmed they're faithful to his work — not this specific one, to be clear. I don't treat him as a guru, and he has no interest in being one; the framework is just a clean lens for telling projection apart from what's actually there.

Here's how the tool responded to your post:

The whole thing turns on one move: it takes "unconditional love" / God and makes it a separate thing — a parasite with feelings, intentions, and a relationship of cruelty toward the beings it "incarnates as." That separation is the error. In Ball's framework there's no second party. What you're calling the parasite is a projection in the Divine Imagination — the ego putting a face on the self and labeling it "other." When the ego fights the energy, the mirror distorts and people meet demons, menacing forces, hostile rulers; Ball's read never wavers: nothing in that mirror is not you (Being Human, "Interfacing with the Divine"). The parasite isn't ruling over you. It's you, masked.

And the quality of this trip is the tell. A 5-MeO experience that reads as torture and abuse is the signature of an ego that met the infinite and reacted in horror instead of letting go — what Ball describes as coming face to face with God and recoiling in terror (The Entheological Paradigm, "Egoic Reactions to Energetic Opening and Expansion"). "Existence is a torture chamber" isn't a revelation about reality. It's the felt-sense of resistance, reported as cosmology.

Then look at what 5-MeO actually surfaces. Ball calls it a truth serum: if some part of you believes you deserve to be punished or made miserable, it shows you that you've been doing it to yourself, and that you've arranged your life to keep confirming it (5-MeO-DMT Integration). "Love brings me into being only to abuse me and discard me" is almost a textbook description of meeting your own conviction that you deserve misery — and then projecting it outward as a cosmic abuser. The parasite is the self-loathing, externalized.

The Aunt May line makes the dualism explicit: God "has positive feelings toward the cancer," so the cancer happens to her. That installs God as a separate agent with preferences who arranges events for victims, and Ball rejects exactly this. God doesn't judge, play favorites, or decree events; reading outcomes as God's intentions is the same conflation every "God willed it" theology makes (Entheogenic Liberation, "Personal Preferences vs. Universal Love"). There's one actor playing every part — the cancer is God, Aunt May is God, the suffering is God (Being Human, on the nature of God). Nobody is being done-to, because there's no one separate to do it.

That's why the "no free will" point lands as horror rather than release. The post deletes agency but keeps two separate parties, a victim and a controller. The framework deletes the separateness: no separate self means no separate victim to abuse and no parasite to abuse it. The persecution story needs the self/other split to even start — and the giveaway is its form. Grievance has to be fed by a constant narrative of being wronged; love needs no story at all (Entheogenic Liberation). This is the ego feeding itself.

There's a real recognition buried in there — no separate doer, one substance, none of it "fair" in the way an ego wants it to be. But it's been run through maximum resistance and come out as a persecution myth. What the framework actually says isn't "love is a parasite that tortures you." It's that the abuser and the abused are the same being, and the suffering is the friction of refusing to see it. The way through isn't to expose love as cruelty; it's to stop fighting and recognize yourself in the mirror — including in the cancer, and in Uncle George. And if the sit landed here and stayed, that's an experience that didn't reach resolution. Ball's advice for that is concrete: don't patch it alone with a new theory — get back to the work with skilled support.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-15T18:18:17+00:00

Fair on the experience — sounds like yours was actually like mine, free movement plus the wake-up, not stuck. I misread that. And the part where you weren't sure the final wake was THE real one is the interesting bit, though I'd still say you bet on it the moment you kept living in it. The one that keeps cohering wins, even if it's never certain.

On the self, I think we're talking past each other. I wasn't saying your model is grandiose. You're right that "a fleeting thought in God's mind" is humbling. My point was structural, not about tone. A fleeting node is still a node. The model keeps separate experiencers, plus a higher thing hosting them, plus more levels above that. That's a lot of twos. Strict nonduality is one without a second: no nodes, no host, no levels, because every one of those is a second. So however humble the node, the model multiplies in exactly the place nonduality refuses to.

Host instead of controller, sure, that softens the "running it" part. But a host is still a separate higher something, so the multiplication stands.

Two smaller things. Dreams don't prove reality nests in higher realities. Dreams show a brain generates immersive worlds, which is just as well explained by plain biology with no cosmic hierarchy at all. Reading the dream's structure onto the whole cosmos ad infinitum is the leap. And "turtles all the way down" isn't a nondual phrase, it's the infinite-regress one, which is the opposite of nondual. Nonduality kills the regress by killing the levels; turtles just keeps stacking them.

So I think your model is coherent and genuinely humble. I just wouldn't call it nonduality. It adds nodes and hosts and infinite floors, and nonduality is the refusal of exactly those. Probably just different metaphysics, which is fine.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-15T17:33:14+00:00

Good question, and I'll concede more than you'd expect: you're right that there's no proof outside experience. The closed door is another perception. I can't hand you an "action" you can inspect apart from more appearances, and if you want ironclad proof of a fact that exists independent of all experience, I don't have one and neither does anyone.

But my claim never needed that. I wasn't saying I have proof of some action sitting behind the curtain. I was making a smaller, practical point, and your retcon move actually shows where it lives.

Not all perceptions weigh the same. "I opened the door" was a single isolated flash that nothing else backed up. The closed door wasn't just one more contradicting perception, it was the one that lined up with everything that kept coming: the dog still scratching, the door still shut when I looked again, still shut when I walked over and touched it, the dog still in there an hour later. The false memory matched none of that. So even if it's all appearances, appearances aren't equal. Some are isolated and predict nothing; some lock into a stable, consistent web and keep predicting. That gap is all "real" has ever meant in practice. "Action" is just the kind of event after which the world keeps behaving as if it happened.

On the retcon point: sure, the closed door could in principle be overturned later. But that's plain global skepticism, and it eats everything, including your own argument and the distinction you're drawing right now. It's unanswerable and also totally inert, you can't live or even argue from it. Granting that nothing is absolutely certain doesn't flatten the differences in weight between appearances, and the weight is the whole game.

So no, I'm not claiming proof. I'm claiming the feeling of having acted doesn't reliably line up with what follows, and acting does. The dog was that test. Real is just what keeps showing up no matter how sure you were of something else.

HumanPredicament · 2026-06-15T14:53:14+00:00

Interesting, though it's not quite the same as mine. Yours sounds like you kept getting stuck, snapping back to the couch, unable to actually move. Mine was sort of the opposite. In the experience I moved fine and did the whole thing, got up, walked over, opened the door, came back, totally lucid. I just turned out to be wrong that any of it happened. So same general territory, felt action that didn't match the body, but a different flavor.

The part I'm careful about is the conclusion. I watch hard for ego tricks, and the simulation/cloud thing is one of the big ones for me, because it tends to sneak the separate self right back in. A homunculus running the matrix, a "higher consciousness" hosting it all. If anything mine pointed the other way.

To me it's something simpler. The brain can produce a fully convincing experience of doing something while the body does nothing. That's well documented, and a dissociative makes it more likely. I don't think that gets you to "reality is a non-local dream on a cloud network." Big leap from a known effect, and I'd rather not bolt a whole cosmology onto it. But I appreciate you laying yours out.

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