Experiencing Infinity

[Infinite_Observer]

Do you think it would be possible for the human mind to experience brief understanding of infinity and maintain sanity. I have had several I guess you could say episodes where it seemed like my consciousness was experiencing infinity and trying to make sense of it and it was very unsettling and extremely terrifying. Each time it happens it takes an hour or more for my brain slowly pick up the pieces and reconnect with reality. I hope readers dont think im crazy or something. Other than that I have never had any sort of psychological issues, no depression or anything like that so Im not sure if it is a major problem but is pretty scary when it happens. Just curious on peoples thoughts of what might be happening. My cousin is major psychonaut and he says it is my third eye opening but Im not sure I really believe in all that stuff. Time will tell.

[Don Juan]

Do you think it would be possible for the human mind to experience brief understanding of infinity and maintain sanity. I have had several I guess you could say episodes where it seemed like my consciousness was experiencing infinity and trying to make sense of it and it was very unsettling and extremely terrifying. Each time it happens it takes an hour or more for my brain slowly pick up the pieces and reconnect with reality. I hope readers dont think im crazy or something. Other than that I have never had any sort of psychological issues, no depression or anything like that so Im not sure if it is a major problem but is pretty scary when it happens. Just curious on peoples thoughts of what might be happening. My cousin is major psychonaut and he says it is my third eye opening but Im not sure I really believe in all that stuff. Time will tell.

Would you like to share your episodes of infinity in detail?

[TheVat]

There are areas of the brain that mediate our sense of spatial extension and enable us to imagine a state of unboundedness - I think that unboundedness - an indefinite extension along some dimension - is something we can at least conceptualize. But not literally experience - given that experiencing something infinite would have no endpoint. Your mind would travel forever. And a bit more. :-)

I think our math forum has some threads on infinity that you may find useful. The search function, I can't stress this too strongly, is really your friend.

I would venture the thought that what we conceptualize, when we try to imagine something being infinite, is that no boundary exists that decisively concludes something. We don't actually have any way to grasp, say, an infinitely long object, like a wall. What we do is rather to look down the length of the wall and imagine that it never ends. There is no boundary in that direction. On the surface of a sphere, we get a watered-down sort of infinity, where the wall could go around the world (a world with no oceans in the way, one presumes) and so it has no endpoint, but we just keep going around and around, eventually retracing our steps earlier. Or, in space, we could do the same with a closed universe, a Riemannian manifold, in which space curves so that you can head in a direction and eventually find yourself back at your starting point. One could cycle "infinitely" along a line, in this way, but of course it would take infinite time to do so, because we have a finite speed below the speed of light.

[Infinite_Observer]

The best way I can describe it in all the words language provides is tis....I slip into a state where ot feels like i been there before(i have so its a continued state) and it feels so real. It happens in an isnstant and I feel like i am all people and all people have been me. I feel the universe in two demsensions all flat. If i smoke a cigarette it is attached to the ground and the smoke slides into me not as smoke billows it slides into my body and only because I allow it. Its so hard to explain and I hardly do it justice. My brain goes into a loop that I have always been in this state and reality only distracts us from this fact. The only words human words i can pull from it is this.
.. why aren't we screaming, freaking out. My soul screams that I am dead and never been born. i only act to please others ease my existence. I dunno how to explain it. I feel it every time I trip acid. so i can be like oh that shit is just the acid....but I slip into this before I did any drug as a young kid and it fuuuuucked me up. But taking drugs or being around people who took drugs with me can throw me back into this endless loop where I am all and all is me. There is no experience that I have missed because someone else felt it. We are all clouds of probability and I become that electron in wave function. Which is really not in a place if you observes it but is a cloud of maybe for sure reality if that makes any sense to anyone smarter that me. i admit drugs make this happen for sure. But it happens sober and it scares the living feck out of me that im afraid to think

[Infinite_Observer]

The only way I could describe it is seeing or feeling in other dimensions. Yeah we can kinda understand the tesseract. But can you feel it. It seems like I am dead and am bound by infinity now. Everything is flat. Mars is a touch away if only i dare to reach that far everything is within reach ifbwe only learn how to break thru the human understanding of physics were an electron is one point of highest probability but we are rather searching for a drop of water in am
N ocean
It is not a punctualist picture it is an ocean where we can predict the drop of water will be but by obsering it we turn the ocean into a slim stream flowing from the tap to the center. The nothing...the down

[Dawnscout]

Experiencing Infinity must be like observing quantum mechanics - just that you're doing it, you are also affecting it.

The problem with trying to manifest a symbolical representation of it (whether in your own mind, or placing your symbols about the event under the nose of others), has to do with separating the subjective experience from the objectification or explaining it (whether to self or others).

The minute you try to do it, you fight yourself off from the experience (so you can rationalize it). This seems evident in your explaining - your "going in a loop" - you are having an experience & then jumping out of the experience to produce a symbolic representation of it. In other words, you're taking an infinite experience and rationalizing it with your finite self awareness ... You are making yourself into a "quantum wave form" as you experience, but you become the "particle" of consciousness" as you attempt to express the event.

... but that's okay ... someone did ask you to express what you experienced.

Its probably best to smile in the experience and understand that "those who know can't speak about it & those that speak about it can't know it (as in : "immediately knowing")... In other words : "just go with the flow".

[parsoff]

Do you think it would be possible for the human mind to experience brief understanding of infinity and maintain sanity. I have had several I guess you could say episodes where it seemed like my consciousness was experiencing infinity and trying to make sense of it and it was very unsettling and extremely terrifying. Each time it happens it takes an hour or more for my brain slowly pick up the pieces and reconnect with reality. I hope readers dont think im crazy or something. Other than that I have never had any sort of psychological issues, no depression or anything like that so Im not sure if it is a major problem but is pretty scary when it happens. Just curious on peoples thoughts of what might be happening. My cousin is major psychonaut and he says it is my third eye opening but Im not sure I really believe in all that stuff. Time will tell.

It is the third eye opening. Everyone, that mean you too, has organs and a brain, what makes one body.
That one body is in the universe. Albert Einstein described this universe as one big room. And in that big room there is the solar system where we are born with the planets we know, Earth and Moon and so on. This solar system is also travelling trough space and is not standing still. The humans are going to be living in this solar system for some time. The solar system is moving trough space but not running a way so you don't need to worry that the solar system would be gone one day.