Funny how different people react so differently to the same experience.
There is also a third option: I can stop my internal dialogue for a few minutes, but to keep it stopped I need to stay vigilant because it tries to restart at random moments. The first time this happened, I was happy that I have succeeded at an experiment, but I didn’t feel anything ecstatic or mystical or scary. It was like doing my first successful pull-up after a few months of exercising: cool, goal accomplished, check, let’s find something else to do. I don’t see any harm in doing so, but I also don’t see any benefit in trying to stop it permanently (and maybe it’s actually useful for something, who knows). It is an interesting experience to see that you don’t need the internal dialog (thoughts apparently can spontaneously pop up in your consciousness fully formed, no need to sculpt them verbally), but it’s not that shocking for someone already familiar with the theories of Julian Jaynes or Peter Watts.
(I guess the normies are simply freaked out whenever they have a weird experience, unless they are accompanied by a high-status person who assures them that it is weird in a good, i.e. high-status way. Gupta had that kind of high-status guru, and a culture that supported him, Scott’s patients did not.)
Funny how different people react so differently to the same experience.
There is also a third option: I can stop my internal dialogue for a few minutes, but to keep it stopped I need to stay vigilant because it tries to restart at random moments. The first time this happened, I was happy that I have succeeded at an experiment, but I didn’t feel anything ecstatic or mystical or scary. It was like doing my first successful pull-up after a few months of exercising: cool, goal accomplished, check, let’s find something else to do. I don’t see any harm in doing so, but I also don’t see any benefit in trying to stop it permanently (and maybe it’s actually useful for something, who knows). It is an interesting experience to see that you don’t need the internal dialog (thoughts apparently can spontaneously pop up in your consciousness fully formed, no need to sculpt them verbally), but it’s not that shocking for someone already familiar with the theories of Julian Jaynes or Peter Watts.
(I guess the normies are simply freaked out whenever they have a weird experience, unless they are accompanied by a high-status person who assures them that it is weird in a good, i.e. high-status way. Gupta had that kind of high-status guru, and a culture that supported him, Scott’s patients did not.)