Sorry, Shadowofwind, I managed to miss your previous post. I think my last answer responded, by luck, to most of what you said. Except:

Quote Originally Posted by shadowofwind View Post
Continuing further with an earlier line of thought....When thinking about something, in general we are manipulating a simplified representation of it, with the brain being a sort of a miniature stand-in for our surroundings that we can carry around and do experiments with. I'm thinking that the transcendent experience that we seek is not like this, that its direct. In other words, a transcendent entity thinks about a subject by manipulating it directly, not by manipulating an image of it. The entity also manipulates 'thoughts', because our brains are a part of the reality that it manipulates, but is not limited to that. I think this is why we can be aware of other people's thoughts even though there seems to be no way to reconstruct these from any conventional 'signal'. And it is part of why a 'muse' may prefer to speak in symbolic events and existing thoughts rather than creating new ones. Those are already the muse's thoughts. I don't see how the muse can be decoupled from its mind. So it seems to me that translating the transcendent experience into something physically meaningful is an essential part of what we're after, if not the whole essence of it.
Agreed. It is truly the essence. Unfortunately, by its very nature as you describe above, though it does a better job than straight memory, the "muse" still falls short as a vehicle for understanding transcendental experience. Something more is needed to understand "something more." A new state of consciousness, one that is able to establish, understand, and maintain novel symbols and metaphor. LD'ing, perhaps, may be that state, or at least it may be a sharp nod toward that state. Or not.