laughing at the tap tap tapioca analogy, lenore raisin.

the video that zo posted that you pointed to affected me (and later the rest of the family) immensely. i have experienced a similar loss of “me-ness” and an increase of a sense of interconnectedness or connectedness of “all that is” when i took some psilocybian mushrooms a long time ago when i was alone and in my 30s, leading me to think that the mushrooms may somehow shutdown or supress the left hemisphere of the brain. i have never felt the urge to take them again. i think i found out all i need to know. i would not recommend taking mushrooms for fun or to get high. that’s not what they are for.

not everything can be scientifically measured. and to dismiss a theory, that can’t yet be defended within au courant acceptable scientific inquiry / method, as crackpot or pseudo-science is like hopping on that galileo merry-go-round with some creepy pope in a dress at the controls all over again.

Do you believe that there exists (or may exist) a higher consciousness or a great intelligence that is somehow associated with the entirety of the universe?

I answered “yes” because of the weasel wording: “or may exist” and “somehow associated.” These phrases leave room for an awful lot of analytic what-iffery. And while I think Ray Kurzweil is batshit crazy regarding his hopes for eternal life through upload of his consciousness to a machine intelligence following an imminent “singularity,” that doesn’t mean that I dismiss the possibility that some set of imaginary conditions currently beyond the perceptive range of my sensorium and instrumentation may already or someday exist including the freakazoid “higher consciousness.”

(Although, admittedly I think the pervasive “great intelligence” is about as likely as the possibility that the universe comprises a super-saturated solution of tapioca and the next raisin added to the mixture will condense the entire space-time continuum into a vast all encompassing room temperature glob of pudding.)