Tolkien is phenomenal at describing divine agency. Eru Iluvatar only occasionally imposes his will on the world, but mostly just lets it run. Where he imposes his will, it's actively needed in order to further his plan. Fantasy is a fantastic vehicle for exploring non-human, non-physically-based intelligent agency. I'm not entirely sure why I went on this tangent, but I'll leave it in instead of deleting it.
Okay now I feel like I have a handle on it. Why we do things and what happens to us makes a kind of sense that transcends the mundane. Imagining that it's God is a perfect metaphor to describe the transcendence. When you describe going down to the base levels of sensation, the reason your particular mysticism dives in that direction has a reason, and that reason will be explainable by pure chance, but it will also be explainable by some deeper element of your life or psyche or whatever. Mysticism wants to dive in and create more reasons and more questions, while materialism wants to stop the process and state that there's nothing further to examine.
If I had to choose between materialism and psychosis, I'd pick psychosis. Luckily I don't have to embrace psychosis to throw away materialism.
Why do you think all of that is "deeper" consciousness?
Also, you say we may never know if you and I see red the same, but we do know. We know that color is simply a reflection of light along certain wavelengths, we can demonstrate this. We know how our eyes receive and interpret this information. We know that there's something missing from the middle and it's all upside down and that our brain corrects for this. We even use this information to create optical illusions.
I know you're thinking "But what if what I see as 'red' you see as what you would consider 'blue' and vice versa". That's meaningless. If I hold a red pen and say "This is a red pen" and you agree that it is a red pen, then we are both perceiving that to be red. Our perceptions are in agreement.
The rest sounds like idle daydreaming. I mean, nothing you've described sounds really all that out there and I have done plenty of that as well. It's a good way to pass the time during my commute.
In terms of seeing red the same. I think you are misinterpreting what I mean by “seeing”, I’m not talking about the chemical process of how our eyes receive light “signals” and input that into your brain. I’m talking about the “images” your mind draws, the mental image that you see. This is an age old philosophy question and a more nuanced than the way you are stating it. Perceptions being in agreement is not the end all of this question. It is also not meaningless. It’s only meaningless if your goal is that two agents can agree that something is red. But that’s definitely not the essence of the question.
As far as me using the word “deeper”, I do think that’s a bit assumptive on my end. I really only know that it’s “more” and “different” than how I normally experience things. I also think the phrase idle day dreaming does not capture what I experience. I know the difference between my mind just wandering when sitting on a bus and when my mind is exploding with intense visuals, patterns, and thoughts.
I've never heard before that Synesthesia can be induced. Did you not have Synesthesia before meditation (assuming meditation is your method)?
For the most part of my life however, I’ve been as most scientists have, locked into the notion that only that of which we can perceive and replicate in the lab is intelligible and thus worth talking about. But it’s also always been a bit frustrating as there is clearly “more” to the nature of the Universe and existence. So I’ve always been a bit bummed that we appear to be trapped in these mental prisons.
The more profound experiences I’ve had have been due to psychedelics, and ultimately now I just mediatate daily and have gotten better at revisiting that mental space. The only thing I could definitively say about the experience is that I “saw” _more_. What was the nature of what I saw? I don’t know. Probably just a trick of the mind. I try not to read into it too much. I am now just happy to have a small view into something other than the everyday “top of the pyramid of consciousness” perspective that we are normally bound to.
I have struggled with this a lot. I can completely understand the notion to discount such experience. My conclusion is that this seemingly can not be "proven" in the traditional sense as it's a construct of the mind and not something external. It's sort of like me trying to prove that the way I see "red" in my mind is the same way you do. It's just not doable. Thus, I think this is something limited to the experiential. This used to bother me, now I just enjoy it.
A few anecdotes from my brain:
I have experienced deeper consciousness where instead of being from my normal 1st person view, it has been from a lower point of view. As metaphor, Imagine you are dreaming and there are 10 people in your dream, including yourself. As normal you are viewing the dream through your eyes and the 10 people seem to be functioning on their own. But then within the dream something happens and I realize the arbitrariness of my perspective and I suddenly become aware that I am actually simultaneously looking into my dream world from all 10 people's perspective at once and a lower level consciousness, which now becomes my conscious perspective, is omni-aware of this fact. It's also very strange as it sort of makes me question which viewpoint is really "me." Particularly when my consciousness shifts between the various perspectives.
I've also had things happen like when I am talking to someone sitting in front of me, I lose my 1st person perspective and my perspective moves to a lower external level where I can now see how my brain is "drawing" both myself and the person I'm speaking to, and the "onion" layers of thought that built those images of us and our environment as well as the sounds of our words.
Even as far as how when we say a sentence of words, I've had perspective where I can see the words expanding to other concepts and deeper meaning of the word. It's usually a very visual and emotional process, but quite interesting. So the words "tasty" "apple" start as two peaks of two mountains, but as the brain unpacks the concept of "tastiness" and "appleness", the thoughts expands outwards, just as the peaks of mountains expand outwards to their base. It's when the bases overlap that I can see the relation of the terms and how they interact with each other. But then imagine that for entire sentences, or stories, or any thought/concept.
When you can shift your consciousness from the peak to the base, it's interesting because you can see these larger concepts. For example, you can "see" taste, or sexuality, or redness, or anything-ness. Very fascinating.
I've also had interesting experiences where starting a an object, say my garage floor, I've been able to see layers of overlapping patterns that my brain seemed to have used to draw the floor. When I see it from the top, I see a floor. But when I move to the side, It's layers of different patterns.
I don't usually shares these on a public forum as I have already spent enough time questioning my own sanity as I rarely hear others talking about this sort of thing. Self diagnosed conclusion: I'm sane. :)