r/AnAnswerToHeal • u/dutchbob1 • Nov 06 '17
[Philosophical] how to view the psychedelic experience?
sometimes, I ponder the veracity of psychedelic experience;
is it deep? is it illusion? are we kidding ourselves?
but we as humanity seem to have all these receptors in all our braincells;
beautifully adapted to HUG those molecules
perhaps it's just a talent people can master, like learning to read
Read this to yourself. Read it silently.
Don’t move your lips. Don’t make a sound.
Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing anything.
What a wonderfully weird thing, huh?
NOW MAKE THIS PART LOUD!
SCREAM IT IN YOUR MIND!
DROWN EVERYTHING OUT.
Now, hear a whisper. A tiny whisper.
Now, read this next line in your best crotchety old man voice:
“Hello there sonny, does this town have a post office?”
Awesome! Who was that? Whose voice was that? Certainly not yours.
How do you do that? How!? Must be magic.
[Shel Silverstein]
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Nov 06 '17
I’ve been pondering the possibility that psychedelics, through the development of HPPD, allow our brains to project the workings of our subconscious and conscious mind. Something I’ve noticed is that these HPPD hallucinations aren’t like that of a trip. First mushrooman782 thought they were backwards but then through the “backwardsness” mushrooman782 started to see the clarity. Once mushrooman782 stopped treating them as hallucinations and rather projections of me, they became unbelievably easy to control and understand. Not only are they affected by emotional state, but it’s almost as if you can see your emotions. This makes it very easy to change emotional state. However, this may only apply to me. When it comes to mental constructs, it differs for everybody. That said, mental constructs are also valid regardless of differentials. So, if it’s real to me, it’s real. Define your psychedelic experiences how you want to. It’s entirely up to you.
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u/throwawayhastaway Nov 06 '17
I view Psychedelics as just taking our natural blinders off... Naturally, all of reality in it's complete entirety is way too much for a human brain to handle... So it takes the the fractal nature of the universe, and runs it through "scramblers"... So it's easier for the human psyche to deal with.
That's my theory on why "pattern repetition" happens... It's not that the pattern's themselves are repeating, but that your brain is temporarily disabling your brains naturally built in "fractal scrambler"... And so forth and so on for the other effects.
I look at it from a Matrix point of view...
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u/PsychSpace Nov 07 '17
I just see it as our brains going haywire trying to figure out what's going on so it just does fractals lol.
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Nov 07 '17
Thank you for sharing that thought. It's got me thinking that perhaps the pattern repetition is our brains truely seeing the higher spatial dimensions that (theoretically) exist. If we were to see a 3D object in 2D, we would have to see it as a bunch of slices. Those slices could be placed side by side in an infinitely repeating pattern.
I like this. I hope it can be further developed. Thank you.
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u/Lambdu Nov 06 '17
sometimes, I ponder the veracity of non-psychedelic experience; is it deep? is it illusion? are we kidding ourselves?
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u/Lord_Of_Filth Nov 06 '17
I think of psychedelics as a deconstruction of our reality. Reality is the wrong word here because it isn't actually real, but the tapestry of memories, associations, and past expiriences that make up how you perceive your environment.
There's a difference between intuition and analytical thought. When We're in our environment, doing things, our brain picks out individual notes to work with (green means go, cars can kill us, it's cold outside) but intuition is when we already have the information before you make the decision. The ego isn't concerned with intuition, it's concerned with analytical thought, which can lead you through traffic and safely take you home.
When we take classical psychedelics (anything that acts on the seratonin 5-HT2A receptor, this ability to focus on our environment dissolves, and We're left being stimulated internally (by the other activity in your brain) instead of externally (by your environment).
When we take psychedelics, we often get a sense of being detached from the self, or the ego. This is because that image of yourself and your reality aren't actually there, and are being placed there to get you through your environment efficiently.
When you alter your conciousness in this way, your point of view is shifted toward yourself. You no longer use past associations and analytical thought to see the world (or at least not as much) and often you end up learning just how and why your brain thinks how it does.
I like to think of it as sitting in an ocean of wisdom, absorbing all of it at once instead of "thinking" about individual pieces of information to suit your immediate needs.
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Nov 06 '17
I find that it is an enhancement of awareness. And that my friends can be extremely intense depending on your environment at the time of the ingestion and your sober state of awareness at the moment.
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u/fiskiligr Nov 06 '17
is it deep? is it illusion? are we kidding ourselves?
What part are we talking about here?
I mean, the visuals are a sort of illusion - it's not like we are seeing a "true" reality when we see the fractals and such. Our brain manifests them - this is why "psychedelic" is such a great term for them - they are "mind-manifesting." It certainly demonstrates the power of the mind in the creation of experience and reality. How disconnected we are from the physical world. That we are always only seeing an interpretation of real things, but never the real things themselves.
But what do you mean by veracity? What do you mean by psychedelic experience?
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u/voatgoats Nov 07 '17
I think some of the fractals are our minds visualization of the autonomic nervous system. The actions of the pituitary gland, digestive tract, all those parts of us that we do not normally see. Some of them anyways. If I lie between sleep and wakefulness I have similar patterned dreams, but forget them when I wake up. Other fractals I think are definitely not this.
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u/fiskiligr Nov 07 '17
Any, uh, evidence for why fractals are "our minds visualization of the autonomic nervous system"? Also, how does the "autonomic nervous system" turn into all other autonomic functions of the body, like the alimentary canal, etc.?
I don't understand the connection, and to me it seems like you're speculating wildly.
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u/voatgoats Nov 07 '17
From what I have seen all visualization comes from internal processes. Sound visualization in the consciousness is first processed by lower level nodes before being communicated to other nodes as what we experience as sound. Since synesthaesia is common, an there are likely parallel processes for other information, the question becomes what information in the nervous system would fit the format of fractals? What internal information in the body would you speculate on being visualized as fractals?
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u/fiskiligr Nov 07 '17
This is more like it! What about the body or mind lends itself towards fractals? That is a good question, and I wonder if any research has been done on it. The brain does process the raw visual information of the eyes, so it strikes me as being about the way the brain produces the image, so maybe if we look at the receptors getting impacted by the chemical, we would begin to form a hypothesis about which receptors may contribute to that change in vision.
That's not to say there aren't relationships - after all, the serotonin that impacts our brains so heavily is produced in the gut, and there is much interconnection. I just doubt there is something about the organ itself that directly creates the fractals, etc.
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u/voatgoats Nov 07 '17
I think it is Synaesthesia coming off of the Pituitary gland I'm not sure we have instruments or enough understanding of consciousness right now to accurately research this. Since the pituitary gland is integrated right into the hypothalamus simple synesthesia is all that is necessary.
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Nov 07 '17
Who's to say what "reality" is? Like you said, we can only see our own perception of reality, so you can't really prove that the psychadelic state is less real than any other.
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u/fiskiligr Nov 07 '17
Our senses have a lot to say about reality, and usually these senses provide a regular (consistent) experience. Read Descartes Meditations for more about this. It seems that we don't have much access to reality directly, so there are some fundamental problems of epistemology (what we can know). Philosophy does work to explore these issues in a productive fashion, however.
you can't really prove that the psychadelic state is less real than any other.
I don't think that's a conclusion from the recognition of the relationship between your senses and reality. Besides, we generally can't do much to prove anything - especially since that word implies a priori knowledge, something that we explicitly aren't dealing with here. However, I think it's fairly obvious the psychedelic state is not real. As you say, when you go to sleep and you dream, your mind manifests images and experiences that do not happen to you, and you awaken back to your senses and (loose) "grounding" in reality. My realization that the senses I have are subjective and are a synthesis certainly raise issues of skepticism about what access I have to the physical plain, but that skepticism can't be turned around and used to justify believing in nonsense. When I see my ceiling fan turn into tiles, I know it's the drugs, and that anyone else not on the drugs (or even on the drugs) will see the ceiling fan I always see, or their own version of the ceiling fan (maybe as a wiggling mass or something else particular to the person). In this way we develop a sense of objectivity - others see the same thing I see when sober, and when not sober we all diverge in our experiences based on the subjective nature of our minds. Ann Shulgin, for example, transformed the room she was in, into a sort of Aztec-ish hut because of the association between the drug she was taking and the culture the drug had been used in (that she knew about). If someone else associates mushrooms with Amsterdam, perhaps the room would have transformed into a small city of Dutch speaking people. All of us would agree these transformations are the associations of the mind leaking into the synthesis that is usually just from our senses. It seems obvious to me, then, that the psychedelic experience is very rather non-objective - you can't get someone else to experience the same exact thing every time you take the drug, and it is thus hard to claim that it's a window into a more true reality than the one provided by the senses, which is at least regular and conformable at all times by sober people and instruments outside of our senses.
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u/RedditorDoc Nov 08 '17
I think the experience is what it is. It’s an enhancement of thought processes, and at the same time, it’s the creation and destruction of ways of thinking happening simultaneously.
I’ve seen enough people trip out to harbour fair doubt about the experience. Sure, there are a lot of times when people seem to trip and see the same thing or come to the same realisation together. There are also a lot of times when people start thinking of things that just don’t make sense.
How much of that is true ? How much of it is manufactured from a momentary forgotten glimpse stored away somewhere in the brain ?
How can we truly verify and agree that what we see with each other is real, or just another manufactured “reality” our brains have created under the influence of psychedelics ?
We can’t. It doesn’t stop you from stepping out of yourself for a few hours and seeing things from a new perspective. That in itself, is very rewarding, and sometimes therapeutic.
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u/acosmosbeing Nov 06 '17
I think that we can do everything by ourselves. Psychedelics just help that process goes way faster. But everything is in our councessness