19th-century trippers who probed the mind | Hacker News Reader

19th-century trippers who probed the mind

nautil.us

61 pointsrbanffy32 comments

20th Century, but here's a great article on Benny Shanon, perhaps the foremost researcher on DMT:

https://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-t...

One of the reports of his own experiences with the substance was as follows:

>Another pattern of interpreting-as is one I shall characterize as seeing the particular as generic, or rather, seeing the generic in the particular. I have experienced this on a number of occasions. The first, which for me was very striking, occurred during the daytime. It was in a village and I, intoxicated, was sitting on a small verandah overlooking the meadows. A farmer (a real one) was passing by, and I saw The Farmer, the universal prototype of all farmers. Again, as in the previous example, the standard perception and the non-ordinary one are related. After all, I saw The Farmer, not The Fisherman or The King. Yet, while normally I would have seen just a farmer, this time I saw The Farmer. While semantically linked, experientially these two perceptions are totally different. I have heard accounts of the very same phenomenon from my informants.

I've never taken DMT, but I'm curious if people who have can report similar experiences of effectively seeing Platonic forms (or at least, believing they have).

I have seen "The Warrior" while looking at myself through a mirror on shrooms

I may have seen "The Garden of Eden" while sitting on a bench in a park on shrooms

And for what it's worth, I have seen a Tetrahedron on DMT with my eyes closed (and it was the calmest Tetrahedron I've ever experienced)

Yes and this isnt just DMT but probably a feature of all psychedelic drugs

You don’t need to take any DMT (or any other substance for that matter) to explore and experience this subject. The interesting thing about Shanon is how he collected data about Amazonian archetypes unique to ayahuasca. Jeremy Narby and a few others followed up on this, but it is considered the very definition of fringe science and isn’t well understood. Shanon, Narby, and McKenna were convinced that there was informational content within the drug that is passed on from the ingestion of the substance to the user, akin to Neo uploading Kung Fu directly into his brain. Sadly, however, nobody has ever been able to substantiate this claim or support it with the most basic kind of evidence.

But there is something to be said about culture and language and the Platonic forms that are communicated through writing. The domain of art, psychology, philosophy, mythology, religion, comparative literature, and theatre is chock full of it, and has enough material to keep you busy for five separate lifetimes. Archetypes, metaphors, symbols, and images in these disciplines are all different aspects of these so-called Platonic forms. In the theatrical arts in particular, there is a very strange body of literature surrounding the French troubadours that you may want to start with. The lore suggests that they were using poetry, music, and themes about love to spread these kinds of archetypes.

Do you have any book recommendations? Thanks.

Probably best to start with Richard Evans Schultes. The book list is at the bottom of this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Evans_Schultes

This type of thing is relatively common in psychedelic trips, I believe. I've read for example about someone making love to his girlfriend while high, and it felt like he was making love to the essence of womanhood. My guess is that psychedelics brings to the surface abstractions that we normally take for granted.

That’s correct, but each substance itself also has a similar, corresponding description or form. The "essence of womanhood" is often associated with the correct dosage of Salvia, for example, with people actually hearing the voice of a woman (or goddess as it is often described). Mushrooms are often associated with the form of the teacher, while LSD seems to have a highly technological or computing form associated with it. Some people will disagree, with McKenna associating mushrooms with aliens and science fiction, but that might have more to do with his heroic dosages.

I’ve always felt LSD is highly “electric”, whereas psilocybin feels almost aggressively “analog”.

Interesting. Ayahuasca has been described as the archetype of the Amazon jungle, while DMT alone has the archetype of the circus.

What about cannabis?

The interesting question in my mind is how much of that has a neurochemical basis (e.g. psilocybin especially activates brain pathways associated with learning) vs being down to priming (e.g. hearing somewhere that mushrooms will show/teach me something).

There is no evidence for any neurochemical basis, as my follow up post later in the thread explains. It’s purely in the realm of psychedelic lore, anecdotal observation, and weak psychological surveys on testing participants. In other words, it is fringe science. There is simply no way to test for it nor to prove these stories are anything other than stories. The point is that these are examples of the Platonic forms and archetypes found not just in the experiences themselves, but also in the types of substances that are used. You may want to check out Shanon’s book "Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience" which goes to great lengths to document these archetypes. In this instance, Shanon is arguing that ayahuasca has the form of the "jungle", and the user will see snakes, jaguars, vines, etc. as part of this experience. He and others argue that this is embedded into the drug as a form of information, but there’s no way to substantiate this or any other claim using the scientific method. Narby made similar claims, and was widely ridiculed for them. Previously, and many decades before, Leary, Watts, and many others argued that the roots of religious forms and symbols could be found within the drug itself. Watts gives an exceptionally illustrative description of how Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, seemed to be encoded in the experience.

This all came together as something called the entheogenic hypothesis. It is often used to explain the connection between the evolution of religion and the purported sacraments that may have been used in formal rites. The Eleusinian Mysteries is often referenced as an example. Campbell’s formulation of the "Hero’s journey" is very often seen as a general archetype for the user of these substances in its synthesis of comparative literature (which features these forms as archetypes) and mythology which also translates to religion itself. In Campbell’s formulation, the "boon" that is brought back from the hero, is overlayed and represented in the entheogenic hypothesis as the very informational content that the psychonaut is able to retrieve from the experiences. McKenna often interpreted this as the "logos" but in a more secular context. Lilly and others heard distinct voices giving them instructions. Shanon and others revisited the Abrahamic stories and posited that these voices giving people instructions were equivalent to what ancient people imagined as the voice of god. Still others, like Julian Jaynes, interpreted this idea in a secular way, seeing it more as a story that explains our transition from partial to full consciousness. More recently, the writers of Westworld took a lot of these ideas and applied them to AI, in an attempt to explain how consciousness could eventually emerge again as AGI.

> He and others argue that this is embedded into the drug as a form of information, but there’s no way to substantiate this or any other claim using the scientific method.

Is there really no way? I can imagine for example conducting a double-blind trial with various psychedelics and controls, and recording the subjects' verbalised experiences during and after the trip. This would give some strong clues as to which aspects of the experience are inherent/neurochemical, and which are culutrally primed.

You can go even further and test it with people that have never heard of psychedelic drugs, let alone been culturally primed. It would take a lot of funding of course, but in principle it's possible.

I totally accept that we know very little about the brain to have a good mechanistic understanding of subjective experience. But I think we're making great progress! A few years ago I went to a lecture by David Nutt, who researches the potential for psilocybin and ketamine therapies to treat depression. What struck me was that it is already possible to measure and talk scientifically about the mechanistic effects of psychedelic drugs on the brain, and how those measured effects correlate to lived experience.

I accidentally took way too many mushrooms (or perhaps just enough) with a girlfriend at 18 @ Phish’s 99/00 festival. Indeed she became every woman who has ever lived. I saw in her faces of my mother, female friends, etc.

We didn’t speak of it during the trip, but years later when we spoke of the experience, she shared that I became every man she ever knew.

I’ve since had glimpses of that, during soul gazing for example, sober.

I've had quite a lot of this an ur-type experiences on LSD at high dosages.

The worst part is when you come down and you still see the ur-form for everything for extended periods of time. Kind of like being Joseph Campbell, the hero with a thousand faces.

In fact Campbell even went to a Grateful Dead show and hung out with the artists. He is exactly correct that a Dead show (now Phish shows) are Dionysian. One has to wonder if he partook:

What he saw reminded him of the Dionysian festivals, palpable proof of his theory that the ancient myths and rituals he studied still echoed today. “This is more than music,” he told his audience. “It turns something on in here [the heart]. And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids.” Campbell's understanding of Dionysus was far deeper and more nuanced than the popular caricature of the happy, wine-soaked god, but his point was not to rehabilitate that older understanding. “It doesn't matter what the name of the god is, or whether it's a rock group or a clergy,” he concluded. “It's somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all.”

I've definitely had something like this happen.

It's interesting because psychedelics also dissolve boundaries in many ways, so it's surprising that people don't have more Ship of Theseus-type thoughts.

My dentist got rid of Nitrous Oxide after I had only been going there a few years. Too bad. The few times I had it were great.

"Where did the Nitrous go?" I asked finally.

"We got rid of it. Everyone working here were getting too much exposure."

Maybe they know something now that they didn't back then with, (FTA):

> after absorbing as much gas as humanly possible by enclosing himself in an airtight box filled with it for an hour and a quarter

I have been reading Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind.

In the first couple chapters, Pollan is trying to link some of the newer (1960s+) perceptions that we have about drug-induced mystical experiences, to those of earlier investigators. He goes back to the noted 1800s American philosopher William James, who wrote Varieties of Religious Experience.

Turns out James was an experimenter with Nitrous. As I remember Pollan's telling, James used a lot of nitrous, and preferred it strongly to some other substances available at the time (that maybe gave less well-controlled experiences?). According to Pollan, it was not a harmful thing. Wiki has a little more (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James#Philosophy_of_re...).

The Pollan book is quite worthwhile, BTW.

>"We got rid of it. Everyone working here were getting too much exposure."

That’s why they put B12 in energy drinks.

I'm curious, what do you mean by this?

It’s overcomplicated, sorry. Abuse of N20 can cause B12 deficiency. Sometimes B12 supplements are passed around like 5HTP or NAC late at night at parties. A lot of energy drinks include B12 and sometimes it’s a selling point on the can. There’s a joke that they are trying to appeal to people who want to party all night. I was somewhat riffing on that, like if the dentist puts some Monster in the break room, the staff can inhale all the N20 they desire.

As you said you're joking, but N02 causes the loss of the body's ability to uptake B12 for several days afterward. There is no safe way to take it daily in basically any amount that is noticeable, and supplements are only effective beforehand (quite a few hours before so they have time to be absorbed)

Very cool. I’d be very interested in other similar reading material if anyone has some recommendations. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and I stumbled upon Alexander Shulgin and PiKHAL (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL).

I wrote a chapter in the book Trust, Surrender, Receive.

It’s a collection of 1st hand accounts from one of the countries longest running underground MDMA facilitators. “Anne Other”.

Tucker Max published it, and subsequently had a session with Anne.

This was all years before psychedelics were in the mainstream.

I went on to be mentored by Anne and ran an underground clinic for a few years - PBS even featured me in a docuseries “the mysteries of mental illness episode 4” where I allowed them to come in my apt and film me openly sitting for a woman with PTSD.

Are you implying that Anne Other = Ann Shulgin?

Not at all.

Anne Other was a pen name used by the author. It was not Anne Shulgin, although that would have been great to have her mentorship in that way. She is a sweet soul.

I loved when she said “falling in love is the psychedelic everyone has access to in this lifetime… and they’d outlaw that too if they could.”

Book is here: https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Surrender-Receive-Release-Traum...

Thanks for the reply! I was reading too much into things. I'll definitely check out the book!

How can they write an article like this without mentioning Aleister Crowley? Can't go past exoticism-obsessed philosopher-hedonists caretaking cults with ceremonial magic and pornographic poetry.

https://archive.ph/Vclyb

Hooke tooke cannabis?

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