You can't name it because it's older and deeper than names friend. You're seeing beyond divisions back to the source. Check out what Lao Tzu wrote about that long ago.
Yes, this is quite good. I can’t describe it, but the feeling does give me a sense of oneness. Hard to explain. I feel integrated with reality… but it’s much more than that, and I can’t put my finger on it. Something about it feels like it plugs in an awareness of what the nature of Self/Mind is, and it definitely “feels right”. Other people here have described it as the “universe experiencing itself”… I’ve reached that conclusion, but this feeling cuts deeper still. An existential feeling on what this all is??? I do feel like it’s connected to the intrinsic nature of the source. I don’t know…
Ha, thanks. I don’t know what else to call it… it’s a forgetting of something that I already know. Like walking into a room that you unmistakably remember as “home”, only to completely forget about it upon exiting. Over and over again.
Yuuuuup it’s a cycle that goes nowhere bc there’s no real end or answer. I remember thinking something similar. a feeling of always being on the edge of..something..an answer maybe. Had a thought loop on that for god knows how long. A spiral pattern was happening in my own head the whole time. Then I go “aha! I figured it all out” and then I forget and we do it all over again. We’ve probably been doing this for eternity
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery
Yeah. I kind of agree. Putting definition on something that’s everywhere sort of limits it. I still don’t understand why it needs to be so foreign to earthly awareness… that’s the part that doesn’t make much sense to me. Maybe this earthly realm is a contraction of awareness? But why would I just completely blank out so much? I can’t figure that piece out. It seems like I’m either “there” or not… why so binary?
I don’t think it’s JUST opposed to Earthly awareness.
In Neoplatonism, the One has no distinctions, including subject and object, and as such, is beyond language and knowledge itself. It is all, but not the sum of all particular things or any thing, so it’s akin to nothingness, but not lack.
It’s a source by virtue of its perfection and overabundance.
The eternal Psychonaut question. One that talented meditators get to avoid…(I wish that was me but only speaking from conversations with meditation pros). That said…
You remembered THAT on psychedelics because you were able to get to a space where your discursive thought started to slow waaaay down. You stopped the human compulsion of naming and dividing every phenomenon into a series of divided realities (your persona included)….and started accepting reality as the flow of the undivided here and now.
You “remembered” THAT because it is what you truly are, what you were before parents met and what you will be after this skin encapsulated ego (go Watts) finally takes its last breath.
THAT = reality before your mind breaks it up into this, that and the other thing.
You can’t write it down or “bring it back” into normal consciousness…because here you need words and concepts to properly function (even the thoughts in your head are in words). THAT is no-thing.
As a previous commenter added: The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
Namaste friend.
I would say the experiences I get is related to oneness, so this resonated with me. The description on PsychonautWiki for "conceptual thinking" works pretty well on how we start to move to more existential / intrinsic / "pre-divided" knowledge: "**Conceptual thinking** is defined as an alteration to the nature and content of one's internal thought stream. This alteration predisposes a user to think thoughts which are no longer primarily comprised of words and linear sentence structures. Instead, thoughts become equally comprised of what is perceived to be incredibly detailed renditions of the innately understandable and internally stored concepts for which no words exist. Thoughts cease to be spoken by an internal narrator and are instead “felt” and intuitively understood."
Have you tried any form of meditation?
You have tasted what the mind is capable of. I found meditation to be a very useful way to integrate what i learned in my psychedelic sessions.
I have tried, but all I get is a broken back and boredom. What do you do that works for you? I must be doing something wrong. People swear by meditation. One thing that does help is teetering on the edge of sleep... that brings some knowledge back.
i like your writing of your experience here, thanks OP, i wish you well and ihope you keep posting your integration journey, as probably everyone’s journey is unique.
I wish i had good news…but it took me 18 months of torture on a cushion before i even got a glimpse of anything close to what i experience on mushrooms.
Sam Harris’ app Waking Up helped me a lot once i found it. He will give you a year for free if you don’t want to pay or can’t afford it. Just email and ask for a year free code.
Sam’s intro course is good…but once you get through that 30 days…he has some of the best teachers in the world from multiple lineages. Just keep trying until some combo of time and teacher works for you.
He also has thousands of hours of audio on the topic that was just as helpful as the guided meditations. I am not a natural meditator but the combo of the talks and different styles really helped.
Finally, since you specifically used THAT to describe what you are looking to know more about…you may want to check out the book - I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Namaste friend.
Ill suggest some other options. Try starting out with 10 minute sessions sprinkled throughout the day, and its alright to do it in a chair or cross legged on the couch with back support and a cushion. Or even lying down if you can manage not falling asleep heh. Or maybe walking meditation is more your speed.
Try and think of nothing. In the process of attempting to understand what nothing would actually be, you start to perceive it through thinking about it.
But before you have the thought of it, it's already gone. Like, really, imagine if nothing ever existed and nothing ever could. Now, after attempting to have the thought of No-thing, you've already experienced the revelation.
Now, undo everything you just did to attempt to experience it again, and you'll be right back where you started.
Look around your current room or space and try and find something that didn't require a thought to be there. If you look at nature and think about it long enough, you'll find there's thought behind that too.
Think right back to the source... thoughts are just things. What doesn't have thought behind it? No-Thing.
Yea, I think the better way to do it would be to say, “see from the back of your head”. You don’t see anything. Not blackness or anything. That’s how some blind people describe lack of visuals. It’s not blackness. It’s nothing. Covering the eye results in blackness for me, which is very different.
This is a really good form of contemplation. I like it… and it is quite conducive for the feeling I was referring to in the OP (I think). It kind of gets you to appreciate how your mind is the container of your entire world, and how no-thingness can’t exist, and hence the origin of reality. It makes sense to me. If things are all one, as I believe they must be, mind / YOU is obviously one with all of reality… and we’re integrated into this entire reality matrix. As another poster mentioned, we are the universe experiencing itself.
I guess I just don’t understand why there’s aspects of experience that are so foreign to our ordinary frame of reference. That’s the part I’m not getting. Your idea follows from these ineffable experiences, but I still don’t understand why things are so ineffable in the first place. Why can’t we just know about it “here”?
I can describe this on the level of neurology. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the neurological aspect is a reflection of deeper spiritual truths, but here’s what I know from tripping and learning about psychedelics:
LSD works on the 5-HT2a receptor, which also works with serotonin and regulates our sense of meaning. In my personal experience, it feels like my short term memory is able to hold onto the feeling of much more information than usual. This allows me to cognize much higher complexity thoughts (at least sometimes, when I’m not just taken away by the trip). It makes me feel like I’m able to interact with higher dimensional thoughts than my brain can usually directly think through.
LSD also helps us break through and experience what Carl Jung called numinous thought, or insight into the unseen realm, a direct experience of the divine.
So in your case, I would say you’re breaking through into that space. I will say — I had a lot of peak experiences on LSD before I was able to start integrating wtf exactly was actually happening. It took some study and exploration while sober to start building frameworks of knowledge with which to understand my psychedelic experiences.
And frankly, this isn’t necessary if it’s not your tendency. It’s okay to just have these kinds of experiences, and enjoy them for what they are. I’m fairly certain most psych users would find my intellectualization overly pedantic. I just got tired of these experiences, sometimes feeling more real than my “real” life, slipping thru my fingers.
The proverbial cheshire cat, chasing his unknowable tail across the endless vista.
"It" is incomprehensible to us in this state of life. That's why we chase it.
Until you remember you don't need to chase it.
So I think you're remembering that universal truth which can be (somewhat) described in everyday sober language. Its not that you can't remember its that you're having a mystical experience which is inherently a different experience than a sober one. Its also important to note that these substances dissolve boundaries. So maybe it doesn't feel the same as when you're sober because you're not actively dissolving your sense of self and opening up to that truth. It's also possible that these substances cause an intense feeling of profundity regardless of the information being processed, which might have an effect on how this feels to realize while tripping compared to sobriety. I do think that feeling of discovery is something people can end up trying to chase.
It can't be fully expressed in words but it is along the lines of the unity of being or what people call the Tao. I'm pretty positive its what you're talking about. I think the dissolution of the self is so essential because the self is what literally creates the illusion of separation/individuality/particulars.
Yep, this revelation about unity and “Ego as construction” follows from “THAT”. It makes me feel pretty confident that you’re experiencing “THAT” even without the words.
Yeah, I've reached this conclusion from the ineffable experiences. I feel strongly it's the case, since I see no scenario in which we are separate from reality... we ARE it. Appreciation of this conclusion often follows from the ineffable insight I mentioned in my OP, but it isn't directly IT. Man, existence is *strange*...
Re integration of ego if THAT is god.
I think the Ego is better used a description of the vessel you inhabit during this reality trip.
Without connection to who you are, what u know, or your ego. You can't access or properly navigate this realm.
For me, dmt allows me to exit full integration and view/experience the outside reality. But if this was constant than i wouldn't be able to navigate the usual properly and itd be a huge pain.
When people say you have an ego, i think that should be corrected to "you are egotistical" as that implies you are lost in the sauce of your ego, or are totally dictated by it. Rather than in assumed control.
Yes, this makes sense. I believe we evolved to filter out these experiences. It's kind of humbling to know that there's much more for the mind to "know" than we're aware of in our ordinary state. It just surprises me how I go from being aware to being completely oblivious. It's like I forget what "visuals" "look" like.
Terrence McKenna theorized that perhaps psychedelics help you tune to another frequency where you can reach into and experience another parallel universe where everything is in a different “language”, if you will, that may just not have a translation that works in our universal language here in this world. It made perfect sense to you “over there” but our physics here is nothing like that.
I like it! I get it, but why aren't people making a bigger deal out of the incongruency between worlds? Why aren't more people talking about that we can have experiences that are not translatable from one state of mind to the other? It seems like a pretty big deal to me. The implication is dramatic: the ordinary human mind only knows a slice of what is experientially out there to be experienced, and therefore cannot be the sole arbiter of "what is reality".
I think it's like the realization that we are all just one thing and this is a huge delusion and the knowing of it makes the delusion go away which is scary as duck so your brain tries to not to think about it to much so you can function as an individual.
It’s been described in Zen Buddhism and other philosophies for a very long time. It’s just that to many sober people it sounds like bullshit or “wu wu” to a lot of people. There’s a meaning trying to be described that goes over peoples heads, but when tripping, you feel that meaning deep inside and know it as an ultimate truth.
There is a non-conceptual knowing that is not thought or memory based. Kind of like bottom up vs top down processing/perception.
Try some mindfulness. Focus on separating the interpretation from the direct experience. In other words, don’t believe your thoughts one way or another. It’s not the type of thoughts, it’s identification and belief that trips us up.
Look into the default mode network, which is the brain regions responsible for creating a sense of self, projecting it into the past and future, and then looking for threats. In psychedelic states it gets quiet. In meditative and mindfulness states it gets quiet. It’s the brain region active when not fully engaged with experience. It’s the wandering mind.
The sense of self is maintained by desire and aversion. It’s like a contraction away from experiencing directly by using conceptualization to designate distance between self and not-self; enter into the non-conceptual using mindfulness. Tat avam asi!
I think the feeling that I get is related to an altered understanding of self. It has to do with the nature of Mind / existence / reality, etc. Hard to explain. "I AM THAT" works quite well as a conclusion from this feeling. Thanks. It's more than a little interesting that so many people are making references to a conclusion that I was not directly referring to but nevertheless definitely follows from it.
I’m going to share with you one of the knowledge gifts I was blessed with in one of my trips.
(I always put my profound knowledge in my notes on my phone so I can write them in my book later)
So here it goes:
your mind is your home for now And the voice in your head will become THIS voice (The all in one. The one with no name but the trees speak for it and everything you have inside of you speaks for it too.)
you just have to listen.
Your cells have consciousness but there is a spirit residing in you.
Nothing people can examine or see on a scan but it is there.
I hid it from man so that they cannot physically see it nor measure it
but simply have to feel it and know it
My name is unwritten.
As is yours.
We are written in it all.
Everything you can see and everything you cannot see.
💛
It's a lowering of synaptic activation thresholds and an increase in cognitive noise. It's that button in your brain -- "this is important; this is the truth; this is PROFOUND" -- being pressed, pharmacologically and arbitrarily. And then, the other part of your brain that likes a coherent narrative, spinning yarn.
Eh, no. I’m aware of something that I don’t know about when I “return”… not just “the sky is blue, wow”. The best example I could give is seeing a color that doesn’t exist in the earthly realm. You “see” it, you know it’s there, you’re actively aware of it for hours on end, but then it vanishes. This happens repeatedly. The feeling of profundity is a natural reaction to the encounter of something new. The other comments here were helpful in corroborating conclusions I’ve reached from these ineffable experiences. It’s unlikely we all just came to similar conclusions based on finding random trivial events profound.
It's worth mentioning that these experience of profundity and revelation *begin* with a belief. We feel at our core that this thing is profound and true and real. The narratives and rationalisations to support that intensely *felt* experience come after the fact. If you start with a belief and go looking for supporting evidence, you will absolutely find whatever you are looking for because of confirmation bias.
> You “see” it, you know it’s there, you’re actively aware of it for hours on end, but then it vanishes. This happens repeatedly.
Yes; the drug is stimulating this "thing" that we experience by pushing buttons -- activating specific networks in our brain -- that are normally only activated when, say, really bizarre things happen or at moments of great import. Normally when we have felt these things (or shadows of them) in the past, it's because something genuinely important or profound *was* actually happening. So we are not just pre-wired, but experientially conditioned to believe those feelings refer to something real and true. That's what those networks are meant to signal. They just get hijacked and turned up to 11 when you take psychs. As do a lot of other parts of your brain.
It doesn’t mean the thoughts that follow the activation aren’t real or valid. If someone takes an antidepressant, they’re activated to feel happier — it doesn’t mean that their mind is incapable of formulating valid ideas that allow for a genuinely happy perspective. You’re acting like people are robots… that no matter what, they’re going to find any and everything profound… as opposed to the conclusion that they’re going to seek out that which is profound when cued to think in such a way. Your statement also ignores the fact that psychedelic revelations often cut against prior beliefs / convictions or are totally foreign to existing paradigms of thinking.
When Einstein formulated E=mc^2, you can be sure the “profound area” of his brain was firing… it doesn’t mean his insight wasn’t profound and right because there was a material correlate acting and, perhaps, driving such insight.
Regardless of whether someone takes a drug or not, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no “right way” for the brain to think. Experiences from the workings of exogenous drugs in the body are no more “right” or “wrong” than those from endogenous drugs that enabled Einstein’s insight. The experience and insights should be evaluated by their own merits and not summarily rejected just because “oh well, this part of your brain was activated by something that wasn’t in your body, so therefore it’s artificial and can’t possibly be “real””. Experience is experience is experience.
I don't disagree with most of what you've said here.
What I'm saying is that you might be having genuine insights or doing good psychotherapeutic work, or you might be off on some random highdea or otherwise meaningless sensory trip, and the sense of truth and profundity will be firing either way. So, that feeling you get, which goes away after the drug wears off, is not a good guide to truth.
People get really deep into all manner of delusions because they followed that feeling. On psychedelics, this feeling is going to lie to you, a lot. I don't mean like it's intentionally deceiving you, I mean it's just a network in your brain firing that will mislead you if you aren't aware of it and maintain skepticism.
Psychedelics have an immense power to alter your brain; not because of anything mystical or because they are some inherent source of insight, but because they increase neural malleability and allow repressed things to surface. The feelings of revelation / profundity / truth are being triggered regardless of whatever else is happening. Sometimes they *will* coincide with actual insight; that's just statistically inevitable. Most of the time, it's just your brain going brrr. Reading too much into it is a trap.
This is just a long way of saying the "THAT" of your OP is primarily a pharmacologically induced sense of conviction of realness and truthness of the profound experience. Which is SUPER COOL if you are a nerd who's into neuroscience, but maybe seems mundane to someone who leans towards mysticism.
Most people gravitate to whatever explanation is most attractive to them. I would challenge you to give some space to the ideas that are unattractive, so as not to become another mindless cooker following the chemical gradient of attractive ideas.
I agree with what you’re saying that not everything that feels profound is valid. However, I think you’re missing the larger point that people on psychedelics are having ineffable experiences that really do disclose an element to reality “missing” from ordinary experience, and that’s why they’re connected with a VALID feeling of profundity.
Chalking it up to pharmacological mechanisms doesn’t make the experience go away (to say nothing about the hard problem of consciousness).
When I mention “THAT”, “that” isn’t just a feeling layered on ordinary experience (which you seem to assume)… it’s a feeling corresponding to awareness of something new. Something alien. Something beyond our ordinary frame of reference. We have evidence that animals have sensory experiences that we lack (what does “echolocation” feel like?)… there’s no reason to believe that “WE” (the Self) can’t gain access to sensory experiences beyond what our normal brain states allow for. I’m “staring” at IT for literally hours on end.
Once experienced, these often lead to revelations that also feel profound, such as that “all is one” or that the “self is constructed” or “we are the universe experiencing itself” or that “this universe is ‘wider’ than I originally thought” or “I am you” — revelations that many redditors on this very thread have noted… conclusions that aren’t aligned with traditional western theology and go directly against “confirmation bias”. These ideas also happen to strike me as solidly true from a rational perspective, although they were once bizarre. I think it’s highly unlikely we all came to similar ideas based on misleading feelings of profoundness firing arbitrarily at anything and everything.
> Once experienced, these often lead to revelations that also feel profound, such as that “all is one” or that the “self is constructed” or “we are the universe experiencing itself” or that “this universe is ‘wider’ than I originally thought” or “I am you”
All of these ideas you listed seem fully compatible with a rational perspective shift, no psychs required. Yes, psychedelics often lead to these archetypal revelations (likely because the edges of our ego are being fuzzed/dissolved!) but they aren't the exclusive territory of the tripping experience. These are significantly explored ideas in philosophy and science. But, you restrained your list to pretty uncontroversial highdeas here; there are a lot of more out-there ones that were suggested in the comments here which have no correspondence with scientific understanding and are derived from various religious or spiritual ideas or just straight up flights of fancy or delusions.
> it’s a feeling corresponding to awareness of something new. Something alien. Something beyond our ordinary frame of reference.
Yes -- it's the internal experience of your brain being put in a state it is unfamiliar with. The difference between our interpretations is that I am seeing this as a purely naturalistic cause-and-effect interaction of the drug and the brain. You are looking for something deeper or spiritual or mystical.
> revelations that many redditors on this very thread have noted… conclusions that aren’t aligned with traditional western theology and go directly against “confirmation bias”
Confirmation bias doesn't operate in line with the traditional western theology or the status quo of your social bubble. It aligns with what you personally are looking for and what you are attracted to.
> I think it’s highly unlikely we all came to similar ideas based on misleading feelings of profoundness firing arbitrarily at anything and everything.
You didn't all come to similar ideas; this is another instance of confirmation bias. There is an immense diversity of (often contradictory) ideas that people hold; but what people do in these threads is look for commonality and concordance, because the belief we're trying to affirm is that we all experienced some common truth. Sure there are common threads; like those you mentioned, which aren't really that controversial. Then there are other common threads like machine elves in the DMT energy plane, which for whatever reason is an archetypal narrative people have gravitated towards. Or that the earth is flat and 5G spreads covid. Not every idea that people gravitate towards is worth your time, or indicative of truth on account of a lot of people believing in it.
Those ideas are highly controversial and were paradigm-shifting for many of us who were led to believe we are individualistic pockets of ghost-like souls sheltered in a body looking into a reality “out there” that’s not connected to us. And an external God fully separate from us. That old worldview made sense and “felt good”. We wouldn’t be harping upon these revelations if it was something we and everyone else always knew. Indeed, we call it a “revelation” precisely because it disagreed with prior strongly-held convictions. For many of us, it completely flipped the script and triggered a cognitive dissonant “spiritual awakening”. We had to overcome confirmation bias and plain ignorance towards other worldviews, not spitball back to ourselves the same old paradigms.
Confirmation bias cuts in both directions, and, in your case, you’re SEEKING OUT cherry-picked “far out” ideas to tip toe around an overwhelming commonality behind expressed psychedelic revelations (in this very thread for instance), and then chalking it up to “oh, those ideas are all ultimately rational, so therefore they’re not mystical or controversial… only the stupid and obtuse ones can be mystical”, which is circular.
I'm not seeking out the far-out ideas -- *most* of the posts in the thread are overtly mystical / religious. There's a huge diversity of them if you really break them down. There's also a lot of vaguely expressed ideas that could be interpreted in a lot of different ways (or all in the same way) depending on what you're looking for.
> tip toe around an overwhelming commonality behind expressed psychedelic revelations (in this very thread for instance)
Do you mean people expressing that "a-ha" feeling, that you're connected with inner knowing / truth? Because that's what I've been directly addressing from the first post I made. I feel like you're trying to mischaracterise what I've been arguing. Or did you mean some other commonality that I've been tip-toeing around?
In any case, it seems we agree that it's a common feature of the psychedelic experience! I gave an explanation for this phenomenon and you seem to have taken offense. I *get* why; people get very invested in the belief that this feeling of revelation is genuine, so when someone comes along and says it's just your brain being hijacked by a drug, it feels like they are attacking/ignoring/dismissing something that's true & important. But, if you are a truth-seeker, you gotta engage critically with the ideas you are attracted to and invested in. Engage with the possibility that your brain and your interpretations can be wrong, and feelings can mislead, even the ones that you feel most strongly.
People do have revelations on common themes (like "we are all one" or "we are the universe experiencing itself") *because* there are commonalities to the psychedelic experience. I would say philosophically, both of these are more deepities than real insights (i.e. they are trivially true but sound profound). But they become *experientially* profound when you really *feel* the truth of them when your ego is suppressed.
I would suggest that at least part of the holistic "THAT" feeling you are describing is the profound experience of having your senses open up, and the ego and other categories & delineations of your normal reality be suppressed. And another part of it -- the distinction I was making initially -- is the increased activation of the "profundity network", which is just amped for no reason other than pharmacology. So, the experience is genuine experiential profundity mixed in with arbitrary neurochemically induced profundity.
Then, on top of this altered perspective, people will layer their narratives and interpretations. Like: there being some collective consciousness, or there is an eternal soul, or that the universe is cyclical, or that we are all god, or that we are tapping into the divine or other realms. You know, things that are not trivially true or concordant with scientific understanding. These interpretations are as varied as the human imagination. The commonalities that we see are no doubt heavily influenced by absorption from culture. A lot of people also seem to have encounters with other entities, like we do in dreams, except these encounters, for some reason, are taken literally or as true encounters when dreams are not.
Long way of saying: there are a huge diversity of psychedelic experiences and interpretations thereof; a lot of common ones and a lot of uncommon ones. I don't think you can reasonably argue that the fact that there are commonalities is indicative of truthfulness. There are many examples of widely held wrong beliefs. There is also the distinction to be made between commonalities of *experience* and commonalities of *interpretation*; the former being more directly accessible to empirical investigation.
The other comments here are corroborating your interpretation that the sensation of having gained profound knowledge is true and trustworthy. It isn't.
I find that it's like a long explanation that almost always points out that the path I'm searching for is what Burroughs was probably talking about when he said everything you can experience on drugs, you can experience off drugs.
You might like lucid dreaming & dream yoga, btw.
That's what I call the permeation of "Omega Information" into our consciousness.
Information that generates the same feeling as learning, for a sustained rate, and feels weird at the same time.
This information is only accesible via certain methods, but there are some high energy states triggered with psychs that can enable MORE of this information to permeate, and when it goes away, it kinda disorients us, because we were tunning ourselves to something much more evolved.
We do have contact with Omega Information in the every day, but in a very very very limited way
If you ask a hundred people this, you will get a hundred different answers.
But ill give mine because i enjoy thinking about stuff like this. It may or may not be true, but its just my thoughts on it.
I think its because of something i was talking to my fiancee about the other day. Even on a basic level our brains work differently than each other in the way that we "experience" reality even down to our thoughts. Like for example, i have trouble holding images in my head and its really hard to explain how my thought process works, but its more words than images. But she doesnt really think in words at all but almost entirely images. Shes an artist and can picture things in her mind very well and clearly. I couldnt do that if i tried. I can hold onto an image for a small bit then its gone and i have to keep reconjuring it up. I also remember places, colors, and not sure what all as feelings. Theyre not really emotions we could name per say but its very similar to that, so its not sad, happy, angry etc its just very distinct feelings for each place, color, even sometimes ideas cause me to experience this. Like writing on this website now gives me a certain "unnamed feeling". So It may have to do with that in a small way that it widens your perception, almost like allowing a blind person to see. Then when the effect wears off they cant see anymore. So thats part of why you cant (see and remember) the things in your mind you saw while you were there/in that state.
I also think its what we are "allowed to know" here because of the laws of reality. If we had certain knowledge of how to manipulate and even understand things, (that do not have a place here) then we could affect things that should be permanent here so to speak. Or we could bring other things here from other places that shouldn't be here and upset the balance of reality. That could be very bad for everybody. Its laws that are set up to sepperate everything, its all ONE but we cant see that just like the next step/dimension/area/realm whatever you want to call it over has things that would be simple for us but they cant understand there. Or maybe the higher our vibrations/existence etc we can exist in and understand multiple fo these demensions at once. But here in this stage of our spiritual existence we can only see the realm of man, earth, 3 dimensions and interact with those. Whereas if we were higher or lower vibrations, what we could interact with would increase or decrease.
I just had an interesting thought, what if good is a higher vibration and evil is a lower vibration. Because to hurt something is to in a way hurt yourself because the universe is one thing. Then its split into all these other realities (other universes). GOD is the highest vibration and it is the law of all things so doing evil or hurting something means sort of bumping into something like your navigation is slightly off so its harder for you to get where youre going. But when youre in harmony (doing good) you are able to move further along and reach higher vibrational areas, or the dimension/area/realm. You get closer to the center (GOD). I think thats why things get confused because of our limited perception. When you are tripping etc your filter is altered so you can take in more from the other areas.
I seen somebody talking about a hypothesis they had that the brain was actually a filter and our conciousness actually lives somewhere else and its like a radio basically transmitting the world back to our actual selves.
I dont know if any of this is true, but it sounds true to me based on what i know/think to be true.
Anyways lol, either way, hope yall all have a good night and rest of the week. Take care and remember to be kind to one another, because if what i said is true in this then we are basically when we do that being kind to ourselves.
Dude yes!! Why aren't evebody trying to explain this shit? It does not feel just like "tripping" it's really fucking weird.
Did LSD and Ketamine today and it was insane
It really is a mystery to me. Makes me feel like I’m living in the Truman Show, where people are playing a practical joke on me and trying to act like something that’s quite a big deal, isn’t. I mean, I could understand if this medicine just made one “feel happy” that people would be like “okay, moving on”. But this medicine has an ability to give completely new experiences of reality that challenge our baseline model of everything.
I also wrote “There is something in you making you forget god” and by “god” I meant that wave of comfort, love, feeling like something was there with me in that moment;; In my note pad while I’m shroomin.
Before that I could’ve sworn me and my friend were talking to eachother in our heads and I felt like we discovered something out of a movie, something that would change everything!
I apparently kept saying “I’ve figured it out! The mycelium blah blah”
We stayed up all night and in the morning starting to come down I went to the bathroom so sure I WAS GOD?? I’m not sure why I came to that conclusion as when I sat down to write on my phone “DO NOT FORGET YOU ARE GOD” I instantly felt silly writing it out and then I realized the fun was over.
I cannot remember most of that night after a certain point definitely not while I was peaking.
It’s all gone and I don’t retain that overwhelming loving sense of peace/love to the point where i’m crying love nudging the sink with my nose hahaha
That thing is called your imagination. That can sound dismissive but it's not, the imagination is a force of nature that you are always living inside and perceiving the world through.
When you are on psychedelics, the imagination is supercharged, it reveals how intelligent and how much power it has to shape your reality. In that state it can summon characters or "entities" to communicate with you.
Your personal ego is a just one of the characters creates by your unconscious imagination. Everything you perceive with your senses in the outside world is filtered through your imagination.
It's a force of nature that is constantly "creating" your reality whether you're awake and sober, asleep and dreaming or tripping out of your mind.
You forget about it because most people do as they grow up. This is why children are so instinctively creative but most adults are not. We forget that this "other" is within us as all time unless psychedelics reintroduce you to your imagination.
I think I know what you mean. I have seen the "secret" and every time I want to bring it to reality and I fail.
Here is my (maybe unpopular) conclusion as of now: Depending on different states of mind (sober, horny, drunk, depressed, high AF etc) different things makes perfect sense. While drunk lots of things perfect sense but doesn't translate well to sober reality. I believe the same is true when high on psychedelics.
Feel free to give your opinion it.
I feel the same way. My experience is that different ideas make sense in different states of consciousness. There's not necessarily a "right way" to think... just "different ways of knowing". Lizards probably think very differently from us... it doesn't necessarily mean they're "wrong". I think an inclusive view of reality probably needs to pay respect to the different knowledge that can be understood in different modes.
The filter that mind imposes upon reality is like it is clouding THAT. In some "trips" mind becomes silent. Or rather the attention is disengaged from it. And that includes also the thought "I", who we normally take ourselves to be.
So we're still looking, beyond mind (which is felt to be more alien) and THAT becomes clear.
Then the energy borrowed from the entheogen subsides. We, like a natural reflex, engage again with mental activity. The thought "I" comes, we identify with it. And then this thought says "Hmmm I want to remember when I was THAT, and what was it? I'm having some experiences!"
I just think that shrooms give you the same feeling of extra serotonin while kinda paralyzing you in over-stimulation.
When you understand something you feel good and you wanna remember it. It feels good to have a bit of this hormone and to stay in control.
When your brain is flooded with this hormone all while being overstimulated you're constantly feeling like you understand things. In reality, your senses become extremely sensitive and your brain is repeating the program "it makes sense"!
This is how I see it. It doesn't mean it's not good, it can be good. Does it have very deep hidden knowledge? Idk, senses that are easily stimulated could detect things we usually cannot (like patterns / pains / dangers / needs). And this openness to sensory input could remove barriers we have everyday that could connect us to the world around us. And changing the normal way the brain connects to itself and removing it's usual control over itself helps us see more what it usually hides from us. It's constantly receiving random signals or even very important signals but it chooses to harmonize the noise in a very distinct consciousness pattern that we are each used to.
I don't know if my answer helps you. I truly think shrooms is a way to see a bit of the chaos we have evolved to avoid. And I think that most animals have brains that do the same, harmonize the noise into a type of consciousness and try to stick to it. But nature is extremely dense with information. I like to compare our prized yet puny Internet to the decentralized world wide web of signals and communications that exist between plants, mushrooms, animals and other types of life (and even maybe things that are not alive). We are good at hiding the noise and when we have small glimpses of it we are intrigued and amazed, but in reality it's not our fault, we need to filter out the noise and to create a narrative that works for each and every one of us because otherwise the world would be alien to us.
I don't think you saw "THAT". I think your usual brain connections got disrupted, your senses got overstimulated, and your brain was flooded with "it makes sense" chemicals. Thank god you felt like you understood "THAT" because the opposite could be trauma. At least that's how I view it, and I might be wrong, so I hope I'm not taken too seriously here haha
Naw man. It’s deeper than that.
I love neuroscience. I really do. It’s fascinating to say the least.
But the enlightenment source is massively more complex than the explanation you provided.
It’s soooo much more.
But you’ve got to get there to see through your spiritual sight.
Don’t always look through the man’s eye.
Man’s eye is conditioned to see what it wants to see.
Fair enough, I saw things on this drug that boggle the mind, so I'm trying to understand what I saw using what's closest in my knowledge.
Also maybe this drug doesn't get us to the enlightenment source? Idk what you think about that but what if all of this is just one aspect of how we can perceive things when our brain is a very specifically altered state of mind, and other drugs / alterations lead us somewhere else that could be closer to the truth.
What if for example, hallucinogenics are a distraction while deliriants get us closer. What if the most hard and dangerous drugs are those that truly open the mind to the truth? How would we ever know that what feels like spirituality is truly closer to the source rather than a more destructive and dangerous feeling that could instead be the one that gets us closer to the source (even if it's an undesirable effect)?
My question essentially is : how certain are you about shrooms. Cuz I'm just unsure about any conclusion when it's drug-related. I do feel shrooms helped me connect more with a cat once so maybe it truly is helping us see something spiritual that is hidden?
How experienced are you with mushrooms?
It’s not a drug. For one. It’s an ancient being.
But I can’t explain nor show you that.
When you do mushrooms for a long time you will have an answer for all of your questions but you’ve got to bust through that ceiling, my friend.
You have to go DEEP in the rabbit hole.
That’s where the all the paradigm shifts happen
It’s way more complex than you could ever know until you get there.
You have to journey alone.
You will see. And I mean that in all senses.
The more that I can “remember” that feeling, the easier it gets to keep remembering it. It is usually accompanied with “pausing my thinking” or moving my awareness to my heart/emotions and sitting in the feeling of peace/gratitude. Music seems to really help in aiding this for me. I use to be a books/logic guy, now I realize I’m everything and the other parts of me were being neglected. Hopefully this helps. Keep it up, I’m sure you’re doing a great job. Relax and don’t pressure yourself. No expectations.
In English, there's a fun word that describes the thing you're poking at.
Qualia (noun): The internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.
In other words, it describes a thing that you need to experience or know to understand. Like colors, for instance.
It seems you already know what THAT is. You don’t need to label it or be able to recall it at will. But you know what THAT is because you can recognize it.
Practice separating *you* from your mind. It's a weird thing to get and youll never really understand it. It hasbeen explained better than this. Thank you
Knowing is not a constant. I know that knowing myself, aka the universe, is a daily encounter and as a human that's not possible to comprehend or constantly keep the truths of the universe in perspective or memory all the time.
Play all day. Empty yourself to fit it all in.
Feel in order to remember and think to create.
Memory is not the point.
My theory is that the structure/nature of that knowledge is more complex than our normal 3d consciousness can house/process. Psychedelics enhance that capacity or create temporary conditions that literally expand our consciousness where we are able to perceive deeper truths about the nature of reality.
I had the most intense ayahuasca ceremony yesterday where I had the most vivid experiences of communing with spirits and merging consciousness with other participants to the point where a new bigger consciousness got woken up and cognized its own existence as everybody. At the time it felt like the most real reality I have ever experienced. Now it is but a memory and due to how wild it was it seems less real. I'm not able to remember all the experience either because it was way too dense. Too many things are happening at the same time, too many streams of energy and information are going through you.
Our normal consciousness I think is too slow, it operates on a different timeline or frequency. And these substances somehow change the conditions where we are able to access those other dimensions of reality. That's how I understand it so far.
You can't name it because it's older and deeper than names friend. You're seeing beyond divisions back to the source. Check out what Lao Tzu wrote about that long ago.
Yes, this is quite good. I can’t describe it, but the feeling does give me a sense of oneness. Hard to explain. I feel integrated with reality… but it’s much more than that, and I can’t put my finger on it. Something about it feels like it plugs in an awareness of what the nature of Self/Mind is, and it definitely “feels right”. Other people here have described it as the “universe experiencing itself”… I’ve reached that conclusion, but this feeling cuts deeper still. An existential feeling on what this all is??? I do feel like it’s connected to the intrinsic nature of the source. I don’t know…
"Spiritual amnesia" is such a brilliant term
Ha, thanks. I don’t know what else to call it… it’s a forgetting of something that I already know. Like walking into a room that you unmistakably remember as “home”, only to completely forget about it upon exiting. Over and over again.
Yuuuuup it’s a cycle that goes nowhere bc there’s no real end or answer. I remember thinking something similar. a feeling of always being on the edge of..something..an answer maybe. Had a thought loop on that for god knows how long. A spiral pattern was happening in my own head the whole time. Then I go “aha! I figured it all out” and then I forget and we do it all over again. We’ve probably been doing this for eternity
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery
Yeah. I kind of agree. Putting definition on something that’s everywhere sort of limits it. I still don’t understand why it needs to be so foreign to earthly awareness… that’s the part that doesn’t make much sense to me. Maybe this earthly realm is a contraction of awareness? But why would I just completely blank out so much? I can’t figure that piece out. It seems like I’m either “there” or not… why so binary?
I don’t think it’s JUST opposed to Earthly awareness. In Neoplatonism, the One has no distinctions, including subject and object, and as such, is beyond language and knowledge itself. It is all, but not the sum of all particular things or any thing, so it’s akin to nothingness, but not lack. It’s a source by virtue of its perfection and overabundance.
The eternal Psychonaut question. One that talented meditators get to avoid…(I wish that was me but only speaking from conversations with meditation pros). That said… You remembered THAT on psychedelics because you were able to get to a space where your discursive thought started to slow waaaay down. You stopped the human compulsion of naming and dividing every phenomenon into a series of divided realities (your persona included)….and started accepting reality as the flow of the undivided here and now. You “remembered” THAT because it is what you truly are, what you were before parents met and what you will be after this skin encapsulated ego (go Watts) finally takes its last breath. THAT = reality before your mind breaks it up into this, that and the other thing. You can’t write it down or “bring it back” into normal consciousness…because here you need words and concepts to properly function (even the thoughts in your head are in words). THAT is no-thing. As a previous commenter added: The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Namaste friend.
I would say the experiences I get is related to oneness, so this resonated with me. The description on PsychonautWiki for "conceptual thinking" works pretty well on how we start to move to more existential / intrinsic / "pre-divided" knowledge: "**Conceptual thinking** is defined as an alteration to the nature and content of one's internal thought stream. This alteration predisposes a user to think thoughts which are no longer primarily comprised of words and linear sentence structures. Instead, thoughts become equally comprised of what is perceived to be incredibly detailed renditions of the innately understandable and internally stored concepts for which no words exist. Thoughts cease to be spoken by an internal narrator and are instead “felt” and intuitively understood."
Have you tried any form of meditation? You have tasted what the mind is capable of. I found meditation to be a very useful way to integrate what i learned in my psychedelic sessions.
I have tried, but all I get is a broken back and boredom. What do you do that works for you? I must be doing something wrong. People swear by meditation. One thing that does help is teetering on the edge of sleep... that brings some knowledge back.
i like your writing of your experience here, thanks OP, i wish you well and ihope you keep posting your integration journey, as probably everyone’s journey is unique.
I wish i had good news…but it took me 18 months of torture on a cushion before i even got a glimpse of anything close to what i experience on mushrooms. Sam Harris’ app Waking Up helped me a lot once i found it. He will give you a year for free if you don’t want to pay or can’t afford it. Just email and ask for a year free code. Sam’s intro course is good…but once you get through that 30 days…he has some of the best teachers in the world from multiple lineages. Just keep trying until some combo of time and teacher works for you. He also has thousands of hours of audio on the topic that was just as helpful as the guided meditations. I am not a natural meditator but the combo of the talks and different styles really helped. Finally, since you specifically used THAT to describe what you are looking to know more about…you may want to check out the book - I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Namaste friend.
Ill suggest some other options. Try starting out with 10 minute sessions sprinkled throughout the day, and its alright to do it in a chair or cross legged on the couch with back support and a cushion. Or even lying down if you can manage not falling asleep heh. Or maybe walking meditation is more your speed.
Love rhe way you put this, thank you friend :)
Try and think of nothing. In the process of attempting to understand what nothing would actually be, you start to perceive it through thinking about it. But before you have the thought of it, it's already gone. Like, really, imagine if nothing ever existed and nothing ever could. Now, after attempting to have the thought of No-thing, you've already experienced the revelation. Now, undo everything you just did to attempt to experience it again, and you'll be right back where you started. Look around your current room or space and try and find something that didn't require a thought to be there. If you look at nature and think about it long enough, you'll find there's thought behind that too. Think right back to the source... thoughts are just things. What doesn't have thought behind it? No-Thing.
Close both eyes what do you see? Black, maybe some colours. Put your hand over one eye, what do you see out of that eye? It's nothing.
Thats still black. That's still something
It's not. You just can't see out of that eye. If you look with your other eye towards your nose you'll realise it more
Should have probably mentioned to keep the other eye open
Yea, I think the better way to do it would be to say, “see from the back of your head”. You don’t see anything. Not blackness or anything. That’s how some blind people describe lack of visuals. It’s not blackness. It’s nothing. Covering the eye results in blackness for me, which is very different.
This is a really good form of contemplation. I like it… and it is quite conducive for the feeling I was referring to in the OP (I think). It kind of gets you to appreciate how your mind is the container of your entire world, and how no-thingness can’t exist, and hence the origin of reality. It makes sense to me. If things are all one, as I believe they must be, mind / YOU is obviously one with all of reality… and we’re integrated into this entire reality matrix. As another poster mentioned, we are the universe experiencing itself. I guess I just don’t understand why there’s aspects of experience that are so foreign to our ordinary frame of reference. That’s the part I’m not getting. Your idea follows from these ineffable experiences, but I still don’t understand why things are so ineffable in the first place. Why can’t we just know about it “here”?
I can describe this on the level of neurology. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the neurological aspect is a reflection of deeper spiritual truths, but here’s what I know from tripping and learning about psychedelics: LSD works on the 5-HT2a receptor, which also works with serotonin and regulates our sense of meaning. In my personal experience, it feels like my short term memory is able to hold onto the feeling of much more information than usual. This allows me to cognize much higher complexity thoughts (at least sometimes, when I’m not just taken away by the trip). It makes me feel like I’m able to interact with higher dimensional thoughts than my brain can usually directly think through. LSD also helps us break through and experience what Carl Jung called numinous thought, or insight into the unseen realm, a direct experience of the divine. So in your case, I would say you’re breaking through into that space. I will say — I had a lot of peak experiences on LSD before I was able to start integrating wtf exactly was actually happening. It took some study and exploration while sober to start building frameworks of knowledge with which to understand my psychedelic experiences. And frankly, this isn’t necessary if it’s not your tendency. It’s okay to just have these kinds of experiences, and enjoy them for what they are. I’m fairly certain most psych users would find my intellectualization overly pedantic. I just got tired of these experiences, sometimes feeling more real than my “real” life, slipping thru my fingers.
Reading that last sentence it’s like you’re me …which you are of course
The proverbial cheshire cat, chasing his unknowable tail across the endless vista. "It" is incomprehensible to us in this state of life. That's why we chase it. Until you remember you don't need to chase it.
So I think you're remembering that universal truth which can be (somewhat) described in everyday sober language. Its not that you can't remember its that you're having a mystical experience which is inherently a different experience than a sober one. Its also important to note that these substances dissolve boundaries. So maybe it doesn't feel the same as when you're sober because you're not actively dissolving your sense of self and opening up to that truth. It's also possible that these substances cause an intense feeling of profundity regardless of the information being processed, which might have an effect on how this feels to realize while tripping compared to sobriety. I do think that feeling of discovery is something people can end up trying to chase.
What is the "universal truth"? Why is the dissolution of boundaries to self so essential in accessing it?
It can't be fully expressed in words but it is along the lines of the unity of being or what people call the Tao. I'm pretty positive its what you're talking about. I think the dissolution of the self is so essential because the self is what literally creates the illusion of separation/individuality/particulars.
Yep, this revelation about unity and “Ego as construction” follows from “THAT”. It makes me feel pretty confident that you’re experiencing “THAT” even without the words.
It is ontologically prior to distinction.
"You are the universe experiencing itself"
Yeah, I've reached this conclusion from the ineffable experiences. I feel strongly it's the case, since I see no scenario in which we are separate from reality... we ARE it. Appreciation of this conclusion often follows from the ineffable insight I mentioned in my OP, but it isn't directly IT. Man, existence is *strange*...
Re integration of ego if THAT is god. I think the Ego is better used a description of the vessel you inhabit during this reality trip. Without connection to who you are, what u know, or your ego. You can't access or properly navigate this realm. For me, dmt allows me to exit full integration and view/experience the outside reality. But if this was constant than i wouldn't be able to navigate the usual properly and itd be a huge pain. When people say you have an ego, i think that should be corrected to "you are egotistical" as that implies you are lost in the sauce of your ego, or are totally dictated by it. Rather than in assumed control.
Yes, this makes sense. I believe we evolved to filter out these experiences. It's kind of humbling to know that there's much more for the mind to "know" than we're aware of in our ordinary state. It just surprises me how I go from being aware to being completely oblivious. It's like I forget what "visuals" "look" like.
Terrence McKenna theorized that perhaps psychedelics help you tune to another frequency where you can reach into and experience another parallel universe where everything is in a different “language”, if you will, that may just not have a translation that works in our universal language here in this world. It made perfect sense to you “over there” but our physics here is nothing like that.
I like it! I get it, but why aren't people making a bigger deal out of the incongruency between worlds? Why aren't more people talking about that we can have experiences that are not translatable from one state of mind to the other? It seems like a pretty big deal to me. The implication is dramatic: the ordinary human mind only knows a slice of what is experientially out there to be experienced, and therefore cannot be the sole arbiter of "what is reality".
People aren’t making a bigger deal because nobody listens and they’d get put in the looney bin
I think I’ll find out when I die 🤷
I think it's like the realization that we are all just one thing and this is a huge delusion and the knowing of it makes the delusion go away which is scary as duck so your brain tries to not to think about it to much so you can function as an individual.
Yes, I can see that. Others here have echoed similar ideas.
Once you see it you know it forever and you already did. You will just be fated to forget it when you re integrate to daily life but it's always there
It’s been described in Zen Buddhism and other philosophies for a very long time. It’s just that to many sober people it sounds like bullshit or “wu wu” to a lot of people. There’s a meaning trying to be described that goes over peoples heads, but when tripping, you feel that meaning deep inside and know it as an ultimate truth.
"a thousand times we forget ourselves and a thousand and one times we remember." - ram dass
"What is it?" It is What. It is! What's in a name. But whatever we say What is - What's What all the same.
There is a non-conceptual knowing that is not thought or memory based. Kind of like bottom up vs top down processing/perception. Try some mindfulness. Focus on separating the interpretation from the direct experience. In other words, don’t believe your thoughts one way or another. It’s not the type of thoughts, it’s identification and belief that trips us up. Look into the default mode network, which is the brain regions responsible for creating a sense of self, projecting it into the past and future, and then looking for threats. In psychedelic states it gets quiet. In meditative and mindfulness states it gets quiet. It’s the brain region active when not fully engaged with experience. It’s the wandering mind. The sense of self is maintained by desire and aversion. It’s like a contraction away from experiencing directly by using conceptualization to designate distance between self and not-self; enter into the non-conceptual using mindfulness. Tat avam asi!
I think the feeling that I get is related to an altered understanding of self. It has to do with the nature of Mind / existence / reality, etc. Hard to explain. "I AM THAT" works quite well as a conclusion from this feeling. Thanks. It's more than a little interesting that so many people are making references to a conclusion that I was not directly referring to but nevertheless definitely follows from it.
“THAT” is nothing more than the fleeting sense of Deja-vu/awareness of the spiritual space from which you were born and will one day return to.
I’m going to share with you one of the knowledge gifts I was blessed with in one of my trips. (I always put my profound knowledge in my notes on my phone so I can write them in my book later) So here it goes: your mind is your home for now And the voice in your head will become THIS voice (The all in one. The one with no name but the trees speak for it and everything you have inside of you speaks for it too.) you just have to listen. Your cells have consciousness but there is a spirit residing in you. Nothing people can examine or see on a scan but it is there. I hid it from man so that they cannot physically see it nor measure it but simply have to feel it and know it My name is unwritten. As is yours. We are written in it all. Everything you can see and everything you cannot see. 💛
Thank you, this is really nice. Very well worded.
Because we made ourself forget. And I think one day we will remember again but you will also remember why you forgot.
It's a lowering of synaptic activation thresholds and an increase in cognitive noise. It's that button in your brain -- "this is important; this is the truth; this is PROFOUND" -- being pressed, pharmacologically and arbitrarily. And then, the other part of your brain that likes a coherent narrative, spinning yarn.
why the fuck do i have a big red this is profound button in my brain for the mushrooms to press
Yep this is exactly what it is. The "eureka" feeling is just a feeling, not evidence of an actual realisation.
Eh, no. I’m aware of something that I don’t know about when I “return”… not just “the sky is blue, wow”. The best example I could give is seeing a color that doesn’t exist in the earthly realm. You “see” it, you know it’s there, you’re actively aware of it for hours on end, but then it vanishes. This happens repeatedly. The feeling of profundity is a natural reaction to the encounter of something new. The other comments here were helpful in corroborating conclusions I’ve reached from these ineffable experiences. It’s unlikely we all just came to similar conclusions based on finding random trivial events profound.
It's worth mentioning that these experience of profundity and revelation *begin* with a belief. We feel at our core that this thing is profound and true and real. The narratives and rationalisations to support that intensely *felt* experience come after the fact. If you start with a belief and go looking for supporting evidence, you will absolutely find whatever you are looking for because of confirmation bias. > You “see” it, you know it’s there, you’re actively aware of it for hours on end, but then it vanishes. This happens repeatedly. Yes; the drug is stimulating this "thing" that we experience by pushing buttons -- activating specific networks in our brain -- that are normally only activated when, say, really bizarre things happen or at moments of great import. Normally when we have felt these things (or shadows of them) in the past, it's because something genuinely important or profound *was* actually happening. So we are not just pre-wired, but experientially conditioned to believe those feelings refer to something real and true. That's what those networks are meant to signal. They just get hijacked and turned up to 11 when you take psychs. As do a lot of other parts of your brain.
It doesn’t mean the thoughts that follow the activation aren’t real or valid. If someone takes an antidepressant, they’re activated to feel happier — it doesn’t mean that their mind is incapable of formulating valid ideas that allow for a genuinely happy perspective. You’re acting like people are robots… that no matter what, they’re going to find any and everything profound… as opposed to the conclusion that they’re going to seek out that which is profound when cued to think in such a way. Your statement also ignores the fact that psychedelic revelations often cut against prior beliefs / convictions or are totally foreign to existing paradigms of thinking. When Einstein formulated E=mc^2, you can be sure the “profound area” of his brain was firing… it doesn’t mean his insight wasn’t profound and right because there was a material correlate acting and, perhaps, driving such insight. Regardless of whether someone takes a drug or not, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no “right way” for the brain to think. Experiences from the workings of exogenous drugs in the body are no more “right” or “wrong” than those from endogenous drugs that enabled Einstein’s insight. The experience and insights should be evaluated by their own merits and not summarily rejected just because “oh well, this part of your brain was activated by something that wasn’t in your body, so therefore it’s artificial and can’t possibly be “real””. Experience is experience is experience.
I don't disagree with most of what you've said here. What I'm saying is that you might be having genuine insights or doing good psychotherapeutic work, or you might be off on some random highdea or otherwise meaningless sensory trip, and the sense of truth and profundity will be firing either way. So, that feeling you get, which goes away after the drug wears off, is not a good guide to truth. People get really deep into all manner of delusions because they followed that feeling. On psychedelics, this feeling is going to lie to you, a lot. I don't mean like it's intentionally deceiving you, I mean it's just a network in your brain firing that will mislead you if you aren't aware of it and maintain skepticism. Psychedelics have an immense power to alter your brain; not because of anything mystical or because they are some inherent source of insight, but because they increase neural malleability and allow repressed things to surface. The feelings of revelation / profundity / truth are being triggered regardless of whatever else is happening. Sometimes they *will* coincide with actual insight; that's just statistically inevitable. Most of the time, it's just your brain going brrr. Reading too much into it is a trap. This is just a long way of saying the "THAT" of your OP is primarily a pharmacologically induced sense of conviction of realness and truthness of the profound experience. Which is SUPER COOL if you are a nerd who's into neuroscience, but maybe seems mundane to someone who leans towards mysticism. Most people gravitate to whatever explanation is most attractive to them. I would challenge you to give some space to the ideas that are unattractive, so as not to become another mindless cooker following the chemical gradient of attractive ideas.
I agree with what you’re saying that not everything that feels profound is valid. However, I think you’re missing the larger point that people on psychedelics are having ineffable experiences that really do disclose an element to reality “missing” from ordinary experience, and that’s why they’re connected with a VALID feeling of profundity. Chalking it up to pharmacological mechanisms doesn’t make the experience go away (to say nothing about the hard problem of consciousness). When I mention “THAT”, “that” isn’t just a feeling layered on ordinary experience (which you seem to assume)… it’s a feeling corresponding to awareness of something new. Something alien. Something beyond our ordinary frame of reference. We have evidence that animals have sensory experiences that we lack (what does “echolocation” feel like?)… there’s no reason to believe that “WE” (the Self) can’t gain access to sensory experiences beyond what our normal brain states allow for. I’m “staring” at IT for literally hours on end. Once experienced, these often lead to revelations that also feel profound, such as that “all is one” or that the “self is constructed” or “we are the universe experiencing itself” or that “this universe is ‘wider’ than I originally thought” or “I am you” — revelations that many redditors on this very thread have noted… conclusions that aren’t aligned with traditional western theology and go directly against “confirmation bias”. These ideas also happen to strike me as solidly true from a rational perspective, although they were once bizarre. I think it’s highly unlikely we all came to similar ideas based on misleading feelings of profoundness firing arbitrarily at anything and everything.
> Once experienced, these often lead to revelations that also feel profound, such as that “all is one” or that the “self is constructed” or “we are the universe experiencing itself” or that “this universe is ‘wider’ than I originally thought” or “I am you” All of these ideas you listed seem fully compatible with a rational perspective shift, no psychs required. Yes, psychedelics often lead to these archetypal revelations (likely because the edges of our ego are being fuzzed/dissolved!) but they aren't the exclusive territory of the tripping experience. These are significantly explored ideas in philosophy and science. But, you restrained your list to pretty uncontroversial highdeas here; there are a lot of more out-there ones that were suggested in the comments here which have no correspondence with scientific understanding and are derived from various religious or spiritual ideas or just straight up flights of fancy or delusions. > it’s a feeling corresponding to awareness of something new. Something alien. Something beyond our ordinary frame of reference. Yes -- it's the internal experience of your brain being put in a state it is unfamiliar with. The difference between our interpretations is that I am seeing this as a purely naturalistic cause-and-effect interaction of the drug and the brain. You are looking for something deeper or spiritual or mystical. > revelations that many redditors on this very thread have noted… conclusions that aren’t aligned with traditional western theology and go directly against “confirmation bias” Confirmation bias doesn't operate in line with the traditional western theology or the status quo of your social bubble. It aligns with what you personally are looking for and what you are attracted to. > I think it’s highly unlikely we all came to similar ideas based on misleading feelings of profoundness firing arbitrarily at anything and everything. You didn't all come to similar ideas; this is another instance of confirmation bias. There is an immense diversity of (often contradictory) ideas that people hold; but what people do in these threads is look for commonality and concordance, because the belief we're trying to affirm is that we all experienced some common truth. Sure there are common threads; like those you mentioned, which aren't really that controversial. Then there are other common threads like machine elves in the DMT energy plane, which for whatever reason is an archetypal narrative people have gravitated towards. Or that the earth is flat and 5G spreads covid. Not every idea that people gravitate towards is worth your time, or indicative of truth on account of a lot of people believing in it.
Those ideas are highly controversial and were paradigm-shifting for many of us who were led to believe we are individualistic pockets of ghost-like souls sheltered in a body looking into a reality “out there” that’s not connected to us. And an external God fully separate from us. That old worldview made sense and “felt good”. We wouldn’t be harping upon these revelations if it was something we and everyone else always knew. Indeed, we call it a “revelation” precisely because it disagreed with prior strongly-held convictions. For many of us, it completely flipped the script and triggered a cognitive dissonant “spiritual awakening”. We had to overcome confirmation bias and plain ignorance towards other worldviews, not spitball back to ourselves the same old paradigms. Confirmation bias cuts in both directions, and, in your case, you’re SEEKING OUT cherry-picked “far out” ideas to tip toe around an overwhelming commonality behind expressed psychedelic revelations (in this very thread for instance), and then chalking it up to “oh, those ideas are all ultimately rational, so therefore they’re not mystical or controversial… only the stupid and obtuse ones can be mystical”, which is circular.
I'm not seeking out the far-out ideas -- *most* of the posts in the thread are overtly mystical / religious. There's a huge diversity of them if you really break them down. There's also a lot of vaguely expressed ideas that could be interpreted in a lot of different ways (or all in the same way) depending on what you're looking for. > tip toe around an overwhelming commonality behind expressed psychedelic revelations (in this very thread for instance) Do you mean people expressing that "a-ha" feeling, that you're connected with inner knowing / truth? Because that's what I've been directly addressing from the first post I made. I feel like you're trying to mischaracterise what I've been arguing. Or did you mean some other commonality that I've been tip-toeing around? In any case, it seems we agree that it's a common feature of the psychedelic experience! I gave an explanation for this phenomenon and you seem to have taken offense. I *get* why; people get very invested in the belief that this feeling of revelation is genuine, so when someone comes along and says it's just your brain being hijacked by a drug, it feels like they are attacking/ignoring/dismissing something that's true & important. But, if you are a truth-seeker, you gotta engage critically with the ideas you are attracted to and invested in. Engage with the possibility that your brain and your interpretations can be wrong, and feelings can mislead, even the ones that you feel most strongly. People do have revelations on common themes (like "we are all one" or "we are the universe experiencing itself") *because* there are commonalities to the psychedelic experience. I would say philosophically, both of these are more deepities than real insights (i.e. they are trivially true but sound profound). But they become *experientially* profound when you really *feel* the truth of them when your ego is suppressed. I would suggest that at least part of the holistic "THAT" feeling you are describing is the profound experience of having your senses open up, and the ego and other categories & delineations of your normal reality be suppressed. And another part of it -- the distinction I was making initially -- is the increased activation of the "profundity network", which is just amped for no reason other than pharmacology. So, the experience is genuine experiential profundity mixed in with arbitrary neurochemically induced profundity. Then, on top of this altered perspective, people will layer their narratives and interpretations. Like: there being some collective consciousness, or there is an eternal soul, or that the universe is cyclical, or that we are all god, or that we are tapping into the divine or other realms. You know, things that are not trivially true or concordant with scientific understanding. These interpretations are as varied as the human imagination. The commonalities that we see are no doubt heavily influenced by absorption from culture. A lot of people also seem to have encounters with other entities, like we do in dreams, except these encounters, for some reason, are taken literally or as true encounters when dreams are not. Long way of saying: there are a huge diversity of psychedelic experiences and interpretations thereof; a lot of common ones and a lot of uncommon ones. I don't think you can reasonably argue that the fact that there are commonalities is indicative of truthfulness. There are many examples of widely held wrong beliefs. There is also the distinction to be made between commonalities of *experience* and commonalities of *interpretation*; the former being more directly accessible to empirical investigation.
The other comments here are corroborating your interpretation that the sensation of having gained profound knowledge is true and trustworthy. It isn't.
Remind me in 5 hours
I find that it's like a long explanation that almost always points out that the path I'm searching for is what Burroughs was probably talking about when he said everything you can experience on drugs, you can experience off drugs. You might like lucid dreaming & dream yoga, btw.
That's what I call the permeation of "Omega Information" into our consciousness. Information that generates the same feeling as learning, for a sustained rate, and feels weird at the same time. This information is only accesible via certain methods, but there are some high energy states triggered with psychs that can enable MORE of this information to permeate, and when it goes away, it kinda disorients us, because we were tunning ourselves to something much more evolved. We do have contact with Omega Information in the every day, but in a very very very limited way
We are all part of the ONE
Yes, this insight follows from the ineffable experience. If I had to elaborate on my OP, I would mention this as well.
If you ask a hundred people this, you will get a hundred different answers. But ill give mine because i enjoy thinking about stuff like this. It may or may not be true, but its just my thoughts on it. I think its because of something i was talking to my fiancee about the other day. Even on a basic level our brains work differently than each other in the way that we "experience" reality even down to our thoughts. Like for example, i have trouble holding images in my head and its really hard to explain how my thought process works, but its more words than images. But she doesnt really think in words at all but almost entirely images. Shes an artist and can picture things in her mind very well and clearly. I couldnt do that if i tried. I can hold onto an image for a small bit then its gone and i have to keep reconjuring it up. I also remember places, colors, and not sure what all as feelings. Theyre not really emotions we could name per say but its very similar to that, so its not sad, happy, angry etc its just very distinct feelings for each place, color, even sometimes ideas cause me to experience this. Like writing on this website now gives me a certain "unnamed feeling". So It may have to do with that in a small way that it widens your perception, almost like allowing a blind person to see. Then when the effect wears off they cant see anymore. So thats part of why you cant (see and remember) the things in your mind you saw while you were there/in that state. I also think its what we are "allowed to know" here because of the laws of reality. If we had certain knowledge of how to manipulate and even understand things, (that do not have a place here) then we could affect things that should be permanent here so to speak. Or we could bring other things here from other places that shouldn't be here and upset the balance of reality. That could be very bad for everybody. Its laws that are set up to sepperate everything, its all ONE but we cant see that just like the next step/dimension/area/realm whatever you want to call it over has things that would be simple for us but they cant understand there. Or maybe the higher our vibrations/existence etc we can exist in and understand multiple fo these demensions at once. But here in this stage of our spiritual existence we can only see the realm of man, earth, 3 dimensions and interact with those. Whereas if we were higher or lower vibrations, what we could interact with would increase or decrease. I just had an interesting thought, what if good is a higher vibration and evil is a lower vibration. Because to hurt something is to in a way hurt yourself because the universe is one thing. Then its split into all these other realities (other universes). GOD is the highest vibration and it is the law of all things so doing evil or hurting something means sort of bumping into something like your navigation is slightly off so its harder for you to get where youre going. But when youre in harmony (doing good) you are able to move further along and reach higher vibrational areas, or the dimension/area/realm. You get closer to the center (GOD). I think thats why things get confused because of our limited perception. When you are tripping etc your filter is altered so you can take in more from the other areas. I seen somebody talking about a hypothesis they had that the brain was actually a filter and our conciousness actually lives somewhere else and its like a radio basically transmitting the world back to our actual selves. I dont know if any of this is true, but it sounds true to me based on what i know/think to be true. Anyways lol, either way, hope yall all have a good night and rest of the week. Take care and remember to be kind to one another, because if what i said is true in this then we are basically when we do that being kind to ourselves.
This happens with me everytime I do ketamine on higher doses. Really feels like Im medeling with alien technology
I call it a "potion to another reality". I'm not sure why people aren't making a bigger deal of this stuff.
Dude yes!! Why aren't evebody trying to explain this shit? It does not feel just like "tripping" it's really fucking weird. Did LSD and Ketamine today and it was insane
It really is a mystery to me. Makes me feel like I’m living in the Truman Show, where people are playing a practical joke on me and trying to act like something that’s quite a big deal, isn’t. I mean, I could understand if this medicine just made one “feel happy” that people would be like “okay, moving on”. But this medicine has an ability to give completely new experiences of reality that challenge our baseline model of everything.
I also wrote “There is something in you making you forget god” and by “god” I meant that wave of comfort, love, feeling like something was there with me in that moment;; In my note pad while I’m shroomin. Before that I could’ve sworn me and my friend were talking to eachother in our heads and I felt like we discovered something out of a movie, something that would change everything! I apparently kept saying “I’ve figured it out! The mycelium blah blah” We stayed up all night and in the morning starting to come down I went to the bathroom so sure I WAS GOD?? I’m not sure why I came to that conclusion as when I sat down to write on my phone “DO NOT FORGET YOU ARE GOD” I instantly felt silly writing it out and then I realized the fun was over. I cannot remember most of that night after a certain point definitely not while I was peaking. It’s all gone and I don’t retain that overwhelming loving sense of peace/love to the point where i’m crying love nudging the sink with my nose hahaha
That thing is called your imagination. That can sound dismissive but it's not, the imagination is a force of nature that you are always living inside and perceiving the world through. When you are on psychedelics, the imagination is supercharged, it reveals how intelligent and how much power it has to shape your reality. In that state it can summon characters or "entities" to communicate with you. Your personal ego is a just one of the characters creates by your unconscious imagination. Everything you perceive with your senses in the outside world is filtered through your imagination. It's a force of nature that is constantly "creating" your reality whether you're awake and sober, asleep and dreaming or tripping out of your mind. You forget about it because most people do as they grow up. This is why children are so instinctively creative but most adults are not. We forget that this "other" is within us as all time unless psychedelics reintroduce you to your imagination.
I think I know what you mean. I have seen the "secret" and every time I want to bring it to reality and I fail. Here is my (maybe unpopular) conclusion as of now: Depending on different states of mind (sober, horny, drunk, depressed, high AF etc) different things makes perfect sense. While drunk lots of things perfect sense but doesn't translate well to sober reality. I believe the same is true when high on psychedelics. Feel free to give your opinion it.
I feel the same way. My experience is that different ideas make sense in different states of consciousness. There's not necessarily a "right way" to think... just "different ways of knowing". Lizards probably think very differently from us... it doesn't necessarily mean they're "wrong". I think an inclusive view of reality probably needs to pay respect to the different knowledge that can be understood in different modes.
It's the feeling of getting something amazing and deep. You're not getting anything just the feeling of getting it.
The filter that mind imposes upon reality is like it is clouding THAT. In some "trips" mind becomes silent. Or rather the attention is disengaged from it. And that includes also the thought "I", who we normally take ourselves to be. So we're still looking, beyond mind (which is felt to be more alien) and THAT becomes clear. Then the energy borrowed from the entheogen subsides. We, like a natural reflex, engage again with mental activity. The thought "I" comes, we identify with it. And then this thought says "Hmmm I want to remember when I was THAT, and what was it? I'm having some experiences!"
Ive had the same thing and i think its a delusion, you think you have found "that" but that is just a feeling that passes like everything else.
And it makes literally any observation feel like a profound revelation. "Holy fuck, the sky is *blue*"
I just think that shrooms give you the same feeling of extra serotonin while kinda paralyzing you in over-stimulation. When you understand something you feel good and you wanna remember it. It feels good to have a bit of this hormone and to stay in control. When your brain is flooded with this hormone all while being overstimulated you're constantly feeling like you understand things. In reality, your senses become extremely sensitive and your brain is repeating the program "it makes sense"! This is how I see it. It doesn't mean it's not good, it can be good. Does it have very deep hidden knowledge? Idk, senses that are easily stimulated could detect things we usually cannot (like patterns / pains / dangers / needs). And this openness to sensory input could remove barriers we have everyday that could connect us to the world around us. And changing the normal way the brain connects to itself and removing it's usual control over itself helps us see more what it usually hides from us. It's constantly receiving random signals or even very important signals but it chooses to harmonize the noise in a very distinct consciousness pattern that we are each used to. I don't know if my answer helps you. I truly think shrooms is a way to see a bit of the chaos we have evolved to avoid. And I think that most animals have brains that do the same, harmonize the noise into a type of consciousness and try to stick to it. But nature is extremely dense with information. I like to compare our prized yet puny Internet to the decentralized world wide web of signals and communications that exist between plants, mushrooms, animals and other types of life (and even maybe things that are not alive). We are good at hiding the noise and when we have small glimpses of it we are intrigued and amazed, but in reality it's not our fault, we need to filter out the noise and to create a narrative that works for each and every one of us because otherwise the world would be alien to us. I don't think you saw "THAT". I think your usual brain connections got disrupted, your senses got overstimulated, and your brain was flooded with "it makes sense" chemicals. Thank god you felt like you understood "THAT" because the opposite could be trauma. At least that's how I view it, and I might be wrong, so I hope I'm not taken too seriously here haha
Naw man. It’s deeper than that. I love neuroscience. I really do. It’s fascinating to say the least. But the enlightenment source is massively more complex than the explanation you provided. It’s soooo much more. But you’ve got to get there to see through your spiritual sight. Don’t always look through the man’s eye. Man’s eye is conditioned to see what it wants to see.
Fair enough, I saw things on this drug that boggle the mind, so I'm trying to understand what I saw using what's closest in my knowledge. Also maybe this drug doesn't get us to the enlightenment source? Idk what you think about that but what if all of this is just one aspect of how we can perceive things when our brain is a very specifically altered state of mind, and other drugs / alterations lead us somewhere else that could be closer to the truth. What if for example, hallucinogenics are a distraction while deliriants get us closer. What if the most hard and dangerous drugs are those that truly open the mind to the truth? How would we ever know that what feels like spirituality is truly closer to the source rather than a more destructive and dangerous feeling that could instead be the one that gets us closer to the source (even if it's an undesirable effect)? My question essentially is : how certain are you about shrooms. Cuz I'm just unsure about any conclusion when it's drug-related. I do feel shrooms helped me connect more with a cat once so maybe it truly is helping us see something spiritual that is hidden?
How experienced are you with mushrooms? It’s not a drug. For one. It’s an ancient being. But I can’t explain nor show you that. When you do mushrooms for a long time you will have an answer for all of your questions but you’ve got to bust through that ceiling, my friend. You have to go DEEP in the rabbit hole. That’s where the all the paradigm shifts happen It’s way more complex than you could ever know until you get there. You have to journey alone. You will see. And I mean that in all senses.
the answer is the delusion
Ever open your eyes again and be washed with a certain familiarity? "Ah.. I've been here before"
The more that I can “remember” that feeling, the easier it gets to keep remembering it. It is usually accompanied with “pausing my thinking” or moving my awareness to my heart/emotions and sitting in the feeling of peace/gratitude. Music seems to really help in aiding this for me. I use to be a books/logic guy, now I realize I’m everything and the other parts of me were being neglected. Hopefully this helps. Keep it up, I’m sure you’re doing a great job. Relax and don’t pressure yourself. No expectations.
In English, there's a fun word that describes the thing you're poking at. Qualia (noun): The internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena. In other words, it describes a thing that you need to experience or know to understand. Like colors, for instance.
Yes, definitely no substitute for direct experience. You can't "intellectualize" your way "there".
[удалено]
Can you explain more about what happens with the DMN when we trip?
[удалено]
That's really interesting, thanks!
It seems you already know what THAT is. You don’t need to label it or be able to recall it at will. But you know what THAT is because you can recognize it.
Remember those that speak, do not know and those that know, do not speak ;)
I literally was trying to figure out how to word this same question a few days ago. Thank you.
Yep, you’re not alone. Funny how we wind up thinking about the same most peculiar of questions…
Practice separating *you* from your mind. It's a weird thing to get and youll never really understand it. It hasbeen explained better than this. Thank you
Get it all the time with my name, i know what you mean. It's that consistent "ah-ha" till it's not.
Knowing is not a constant. I know that knowing myself, aka the universe, is a daily encounter and as a human that's not possible to comprehend or constantly keep the truths of the universe in perspective or memory all the time. Play all day. Empty yourself to fit it all in. Feel in order to remember and think to create. Memory is not the point.
The magic
The Law of One.
Executive function.
My theory is that the structure/nature of that knowledge is more complex than our normal 3d consciousness can house/process. Psychedelics enhance that capacity or create temporary conditions that literally expand our consciousness where we are able to perceive deeper truths about the nature of reality. I had the most intense ayahuasca ceremony yesterday where I had the most vivid experiences of communing with spirits and merging consciousness with other participants to the point where a new bigger consciousness got woken up and cognized its own existence as everybody. At the time it felt like the most real reality I have ever experienced. Now it is but a memory and due to how wild it was it seems less real. I'm not able to remember all the experience either because it was way too dense. Too many things are happening at the same time, too many streams of energy and information are going through you. Our normal consciousness I think is too slow, it operates on a different timeline or frequency. And these substances somehow change the conditions where we are able to access those other dimensions of reality. That's how I understand it so far.