A DMT trip 'feels like dying' – and scientists now agree
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says
Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness
soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I
ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like
everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It
didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions
going on.”
I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER.
We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc.
So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing.
I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better.
I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments.
Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something.
After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.
> “My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.”
I don’t get why hn mobile version doesn’t take this into account. Should be just a single simple css rule...
I always format my quotes the same way Stratoscope just did and think it's reasonably obvious to tell that it's a quote.
I would hope when I get to the point that I am actually dying, I could feel a little more like the quote than you did when you were dying, which sounds terrifying. :)
As another reply pointed out, this is one of the two main paths that intense experiences can go down. I have had psychedelic experiences that were just magnified panic attacks and similar to what you described. That is one path, and usually comes about from resisting the experience. The other path is relaxing into the void/ego death/<insert descriptor here> and going with the flow. This will normally result in what the quote describes.
This is why it is always concerning for me when people recommend psychedelics to anyone without knowing what kind of person they are/what state they are in. For trips, context and intention is EVERYTHING. If you are able to relax in the face of uncertainty and trust the experience, then you can have life changing experiences. If you are in a bad state of mind or if your life is in disarray, that will be magnified and you can also have life changing experiences, but not in a good way (I didn't face major anxiety before a bad mushroom trip).
Psychedelic experiences are built upon the psyche of the person experiencing them, so people can have exact opposite experiences taking the same dose of the same substance depending on their state of mind.
In my early 20's, my obsession was eastern spirituality. I was especially drawn towards taoism and read several books on it. In one of the books (written by a Westerner) there was entire chapters dedicated to breathing exercises. Taoists believe the spirit and the body meet at your breath because it is simultaneously a voluntary and involuntary process.
Focus on your breathing now, you can control it. But just a minute ago, your body was doing it for you with no input from you.
I don’t know why but I just found this hilariously funny. Suddenly my life seems very mundane.
I wonder what sequence of events leads to one deciding "I think I'm gonna smoke the venom from that Sonoran Desert Toad."
Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experiencing reality in the rawest form, the only truth we have in the universe is math, in all shapes and forms, we live inside the 'body of god' that is math, but of course, so extremely complex to express in our 3rd dimensional world.
The absolute worst combination is marijuana on the tail of an LSD peak. Your short term memory drops to about 100 msec. I spent a few hours, decades ago, reminding a friend who they were, and that everything would be OK in a few hours. And it was hard work, because I could barely remember who I was, and who they were ;)
edit: clarity
The scariest shit I've seen while tripping was seeing the Eye of Providence. What's more creepy is that this is a common symbol people experienced. For example, I didn't know what the hell was a third eye until I saw it. It was unbelievable.
It changed my life. It gave me an unbiased raw truths about myself, circumstances, and ultimately the realization that we are where we are because of our decisions in the past.
Everyone should consume psilocybin mushrooms once. LSD you buy off the street can be laced. But good ol' mushrooms will never let you down.
Obviously, do lots of research. There aren't many deadly varieties by some of them look very similar to edible ones.
Also, the fundamental methodology is to start with an extremely small amount. If there are no observable effects after some hours, eat double the amount. And repeat until there are clear effects, and decide if it's something useful. For food, for fun, or to use for poisoning enemies.
it's crazy how common the themes are. did you hear extra-terrestrials? Like I literally heard a thought broadcasted from somewhere not on earth with the message "we aren't from earth but we are gonna help you out. clean your fucking room. move your computer to living room. get your shit together"
.... needless to say that was a big turning point
I haven't done mushrooms since and I'm kinda scared to experience the whole thing again.
I'm reminded of Tool's "Rosetta Stoned".[0,1]
...
10 to 2 AM, X, Yogi DMT, and a box of Krispy Kremes
...
When a flaming stealth banana split the sky
...
Then the X-Files being
...
Did a slow-mo Matrix descent
Outta the butt end of the banana vessel
And hovered above my bug-eyes, my gaping jaw
...
He said, "You are the chosen one
The one who will deliver the message
A message of hope for those who choose to hear it
And a warning for those who do not."
...
See, they took me by the hand
And invited me right in
Then they showed me something
I don't even know where to begin
...
Can't remember what they said
...
Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be the one
Born to bear and bring to all the details of our ending
To write it down for all the world to see
But I forgot my pen
...
well, thanks to them, i have got some of my life back in order.
it could be that the mushroom trip creates a dissociation from internal thoughts and perceptions of the ego vs ego-less self, so you 'hear' your own thoughts.
I don't recall ever seeing that. I did experience Hell, for a while during one LSD peak. But it wasn't painful, just freaky. I was into Hieronymus Bosch at the time, and had just watched "Spawn" ;)
My favorite hallucinations were tangled chains of 3D characters, in constant writhing motion, and rotating on their axes. And not just rotating, but apparently rotating through higher dimensions.[0]
As I recall, the characters looked like letters or numbers. Or like Hofstadter's GEB block. But as long as I was high enough to see them, I was too high to understand them. Or to remember, anyway.
I also had the sense that their activity correlated with what was happening in meatspace, what I was seeing and hearing, and also what I was thinking. And it's my guess that LSD, among other things, breaks down barriers between hierarchical levels in brain activity.
I didn't search for it until maybe 10 or so years later and started getting a bit buzzed out about it all. I didn't know what it was until then, at which point I realised it was on the dollar bill. Even if I had (likely) seen it before the trip it wasn't something that was part of my everyday life or consciousness, which makes it very weird.
holy shit. was it shiny and pulsating? I saw the eye but no pyramid. But I recognize the eye from the dollar bill.
All I remember is looking at the shining, pulsating, eye and thinking, so this is what Truth looks like. No idea what the fuck that meant but I figured it out, and it was like being punched in the face-basically I looked at every aspect of my life, and that's what the "Eye" was implying to "Look", basically examine my life to figure out what needs to be done.
It was not negative at all but more of a WTF I WANT THIS TRIP TO STOP BUT IM ALSO FASCINATED. I use caps to illustrate the full state of panic and calm I was in.
After the trip and I googled 'third eye symbol' and I was shocked to see the similarities to the "Eye" I had witnessed but with a shape that looks like a thunder icon, which curiously enough is very similar to the Sanskrit for third eye....I have never ever seen it before either
Needless to say, my interest in hinduism and chakra exploded. i believe that I truly experienced a third eye opening moment. Like I was on a different plane of existence, where I am part of the whole, and that everything is everything and the most shocking conclusion of all:
There are dimensions beyond our world. In 3rd dimension, things don't make sense but in higher dimensions, the math works out according to Michio Kaku. His book goes into full detail but basically I absolutely believe that we are not seeing the true reality and that we might have been led on this path by very evil and greedy people who abuses the scientific process to invalidate the existence of common spiritual human experiences that arose indepedently by different civilizations but declared "null and void" by a highly materialistic driven empire where it's citizens are so spiritually starved that they will never be happy. No matter how rich and powerful their country becomes.
This is faulty thinking. An afterlife doesn’t presuppose a violation of natural laws, or a separate world. It just means you continue living in a different form.
The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure.
The causal eelationship needn’t even be mind-out. If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing.
Given that we continue to discover entirely new structures in both the biological world and our own bodies, which were hiding in plain sight, I don’t find this implausible.
That’s not to mention psychoaocial structures which science hardly can model, and to which our individual minds are very tightly coupled.
There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on; the challenge lies in getting more skeptics to seriously evaluate it. Some HNer years ago turned me onto the book Irreducible Mind, whose last hundred pages or so is a bibliography of evidence for this kind of thing provided by people who say “I don’t believe it, but I can’t explain it.” But a lot of that evidence comes from skeptics testing exceptional individuals, and James Randi did a good job of showing how fakers can fool scientists, so I can’t really say how reliable it is other than as a jumping-off point for further study.
I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication.
Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is:
I don't see why that follows.
There are lots of phenomena in the world, like money, which are manifest in a non-physical substrate. Many many other things are immaterial. The characters I am typing right now are immaterial. There are bits in memory that represent the characters, but it's only in interplay with an entire system of physical structures that you can say the characters themselves are manifest. You can't point somewhere and say "that's where the character is". It's diffuse across a bunch systems in such a way that it's not manifest in any one location.
Almost all of our social and political realities are like this. Where is Conservatism? Where is calculus? These are not things with locations, which is what makes them extremely difficult to study, which is why so many people reject things like Social Psychology or Science Studies as bunk science.
Money, algebra, and the capital M that starts this sentence are all things that exist, in a way that's totally compatible with materialism. It's not necessary to claim that these things exist outside of a material substrate. They merely exist above it. Distinct from it, yet contained within it. Fully determined by its laws, but not described by them.
In the distant future there may be a way to extract and transfer consciousness into a new substrate, but with current technology, there's no reason to believe any sort of life, consciousness, sentience, awareness, etc. after death is possible at all. Just because it's possible in theory doesn't mean that applies to any currently living humans.
I don’t think that’s universally accepted. I think trees are conscious and they have no brain.
I think the brain does create an illusion that other things are not conscious. It tricks us into thinking our own consciousnesses are distinct from the rest of consciousness. And that’s been a useful adaptation for us. And it confuses the hell out of consciousness philosophers. But we were conscious before we evolved it. It’s possible we were human before we evolved it.
> In the distant future there may be a way to extract and transfer consciousness into a new substrate
It’s possible such a thing already exists. We have ancient stories about it. If it were true it would be very difficult to detect.
If the universe is a simulation then it seems extremely unlikely that consciousnesses would never be read, just operating until they get eaten by the 2nd law.
I don't think consciousness of trees is accepted by nearly anyone. But even if any trees were conscious, I don't see how it helps your argument at all.
>I think the brain does create an illusion that other things are not conscious. It tricks us into thinking our own consciousnesses are distinct from the rest of consciousness.
Yes, but consciousness of animals doesn't really mean anything here. If anything, it's a point in favor of the opposite side: that consciousness really isn't very special.
>It’s possible such a thing already exists. We have ancient stories about it. If it were true it would be very difficult to detect.
Many things are possible. We have ancient stories about many of them. If they were true they would be very difficult to detect. That's why the basic scientific principle is falsifiability.
>If the universe is a simulation then it seems extremely unlikely that consciousnesses would never be read, just operating until they get eaten by the 2nd law.
I don't agree. If the universe is a simulation then they could be read, but they don't have to be, and I don't think it's extremely unlikely that they wouldn't be. If it's a very "raw" or "real" simulation with no interference, they could very well just dissipate into nothing.
Assuming it is a simulation, what happens when you get shot in the head and lose brain function? Where is your consciousness at that moment? Is there a pre-damage backup somewhere? When was the backup taken? If backups are taken every instant or otherwise very infrequently, which one is the "real" state after you die? The one from right before the damage occurred? Something picked at random? If there is no backup needed because there is instead just some outside extra-dimensional consciousness "force" or "energy" existing since long ago, what is that thing doing exactly when you suffer from a brain injury? Does it just "stop working" in or "lose connection" to those parts of the brain? What is it doing when we're children?
I think even if we're in a simulation where nearly all living things are conscious, the chances of some kind of post-death experience is still basically zero.
Such as what? I don't believe there is.
>I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication.
>Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is:
As you alluded to earlier in your post, this is complete quackery. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that quantum uncertainty has no relation to human (or any other) consciousness.
There's nothing to suggest that human (or dog or dolphin or octopus) consciousness is magical, supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical, or unable to be explained or understood.
> There's nothing to suggest that human consciousness is magical, supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical, or unable to be explained
I don’t think anyone is trying to argue against you. We’re just saying there is more to understand than science has so far done. We’re not saying science can’t reach what we imagine, just that it’s tough, and may require new physics.
Luckily modern physics also requires new physics. So we’re not alone.
'You', 'experience', 'presence', and 'thing' are far too ill-defined for this to have meaning here.
> The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure.
Especially this part is phrased so accurately. Of course we are yet to observe anything similar to it either. Something that survives death and is capable of supporting thought. It would have to be something material, right?
Personally, I think the idea that you and I are separate is an illusion we evolved in order to protect ourselves more fiercely and to be more willing to kill.
Without it, you would understand that you are not separate from the rest of the living world, that your mind is a space where many immortal psychic creatures cross paths.
And part of life is to locate your self, that specific set of crossings, in the world.
So, immortal life just means dissociating from your body and associating with your crossings as they are in the world. (DMT is a dissociative so you can see how it could help.) A fully “enlightened” person will have located a complete, stable set of crossings, dissociated from everything else in their body, and broadcast that message out into the biosphere sufficiently long enough for it to be recorded.
There is more to this picture, involving non-“enlightened” reincarnation, which is something the inverse of those crossings will do at death as a form of rebalancing the consciousnesses disks, like a RAID array.
Most of these things are psychosocial. Believing them is more a matter of believing that you are as much a psychosocial being as you are a physical one.
Experienced LSD/mushroom users know that there is a tremendous degree of subjectivity and symbol/archetype emergence in their trips. If I only had a few words to describe the LSD/mushroom experience it would be "lack of clarity". It's as if one is looking through a scanner darkly (personal unconscious).
With DMT, this is not the case. There is no perceived intermediate filter, nothing impure or fuzzy. One feels as if one is already there and directly interfacing with the space itself. Rather than exploring his own psyche, a DMT user feels like he's exploring an entirely new space. This becomes apparent even when dealing with the difficulties of trying to use shared language to describe the experience with other explorers in order to discover common attributes [1].
Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual
But the bleak argument might work. Keep the young 'uns motivated to breed, it helps in the long term.
We're a long time dead. "Enjoy yourself, its later than you think"
Saying that something doesn't have an evolutionary reason is not the same as saying it's just coincidence. Our bodies (including our brains) are very complex interconnected processes. There's going to be all sorts of effects when those processes break down, and even if those don't have an evolutionary purpose, that doesn't mean they're just coincidence.
This is a factual matter, which has nothing to do with an argument being bleak or not.
The I experienced when I nearly drowned once. I was very calm and ready to go. You can see it in videos of how to spot a drowning person.
That one second was slow and I was unnervingly calm. Right at the last minute with probably less than 200ms to go, the driver very gently swerved and we must have avoided collision by less than two inches. Quarter inch if we include wing mirrors. My friend, the driver asked later why I didn't say anything. I explained that had I panicked, he would have panicked and we would probably both be dead.
As for the DMT, there's only one way to find out. One grain of pure DMT in a pipe and get your answers.
Well dreams are a fairly beneficial things to have especially if you have some epiphany or figure out the solution to a problem you're having.
The near death thing might just be your brain dumping that DMT out of your pineal gland all at once either when your body is shutting down from natural causes or when you are in some kind of traumatic accident.
Can you paraphrase what that means? It's not a Freudian slip due to hunger, I hope. Asking out of prior curiosity for the word.
The idea is, in other words, that those who somehow went amok near death perhaps reduced their number of offspring, or damaged the family unit (e.g. destroyed their shelters or food), therefore hindering those genes from spreading, therefore the selection pressure to remove this behaviour.
How do primates die?
For instance take pain. People view pain as negative but it's of course a great positive from an evolutionary point of view. Not everything (or even everybody) experiences pain, but those that do are going to be vastly more likely to succeed in life than those that don't. Your reaction to recoil from pain is not because the interaction itself is painful but because you have evolved instincts that tell you that what you're feeling is likely detrimental to your health and the situation needs to be resolved instantly, on a subconscious, level.
As your pain receptors shut down it would ostensibly feel pleasant, but in reality it would just be one of the most important, and useful, evolutionary tools we have turning off.
http://beckleyfoundation.org/2016/09/15/the-first-study-to-s...
Stress is us preparing for fight of flight, which is good for survival. Pain prevents us from further damaging our body. Stress overrides pain because your future well being doesn't matter if your die now.
Now, when you are near death, when you know there is nothing you can do, stress becomes useless, because you can't flee or fight back. So there is no downside to detachment and contentment.
Now the advantage may be that it may be the best response if, by chance, you survive. You don't overwork yourself, you are less likely to suffer mental breakdown afterwards, etc...
Keep in mind that everyone who experienced NDEs survived, obviously. So NDEs are not death experiences, more like survival experiences.
I’m not opposed to drinking, but the risks of a controlled study described in the article don’t seem remotely comparable to an evening out on the town. If I had a dollar for every person who died from falling over or passing out and drowning in their own vomit due to alcohol, I’m pretty sure I could afford all the South America shamen-led ayahuasca trips I wanted.(1)
(1) EDIT: which is admittedly somewhere between zero and one.
But wait. Is it even humour at all?! :O - well now, isn't that always the question.
Normal rules do not apply when shitfaced, however, and it turns out you'll just quite happily pop half a kilo of this stuff into your piehole without even thinking. Fast forward 8-12 hours, and... well, you can guess the rest. It is the devil's own food, and it probably ought to be banned. How are folk supposed to manage, if after drinking a mere 7-10 pints of beer it proves so irresistible?
So anyway, I can imagine that a pleasant death from opioid or barbiturate overdose might be comparable. Or maybe breathing helium, where there's no overt respiratory feedback. Or maybe hypothermia, although in my experience that involved too much twitching around.
When you “see” a strange loop involving your mind creating the physical world as you know it, and at the same time realizing the physical world enables your mind, it can take a long time to unpack. Sure when I’m here, we say that the mind is just a construct within he physical world, that just happens to be modeling the physical world. But that Doesn’t make it any less of a significant experience.
It was like seeing the concept of ying-yang (duality and mutual dependence) reflected onto mind-body problem, and everything else.
Oh great times when you get bored of all the analytical logic problems of the everyday world. :)
I used to have a book about ayahusca-like formulations, using plants from various continents. But I've forgotten the name. Basically, many plants contain DMT, and many others contain MAO inhibitors. Also, I believe that one can combine some MAO inhibiting antidepressants, such as selegiline, with DMT.
Even following a dieta won't necessarily keep you from having a physically uncomfortable time with ayahuasca! But it's virtually guaranteed if you do not.
[0]: https://www.dmtx.org
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Volunteers%20sought%20...
> "Using pharmacokinetic modeling and DMT blood sampling data, we demonstrate that the unique pharmacological characteristics of DMT, which also include a rapid onset and lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects, make it amenable to administration by target-controlled intravenous infusion. This is a technology developed to maintain a stable brain concentration of anesthetic drugs during surgery."
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4944667/
edit: I guess that isn't a drip. I know nothing about this sort of thing :)
I don't know if my life has just been too sheltered, or not sheltered enough, because I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted to buy anything not available over the counter.