What hallucinogens will make you see
nautil.us
nautil.us
Strong synesthesia between sounds, words, taste, colors, textures: e.g. distinctly "feeling" the word "blueberry" as a taste and color. (Psilocybin)
Spatial reality distortion that's stable over a trip (Psilocybin). Linked with time distortion "literally feels like we've been walking for an eternity where on the previous day it only took 5 minutes"
Coming "closer" to reality and seeing it at a higher "frame rate" (LSD).
Complete disassociation from your normal reality and being projected into a complete different spatial relationship to existence (Ketamine).
This of course may just be my experience
Your last point - complete disassociation from normal reality - is a hallmark of all hallucinogens, in my experience.
Well with those filters removed you don't only see "raw", unprocessed images, you also get all those thoughts back. Some of them can be very scary and lead you into a "bad trip" but some are also incredibly(!) freeing. And it's impossible to explain this feeling of having no mental filters to someone who did not experience it because all those filters are not conscious. You don't even know you had them until they are gone!
Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind" has a good section on it. Curious to learn more.
Food of the Gods - Terence McKenna
Excerpt reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxC2cyg-cTg
Less about psychedelics, but a great accessory read is Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson
Building on this, if someone is scared of the 'psychedelic' part then there is also MDMA which too lifts 'filters' and makes the subject aware of those thoughts and emotions so they can be processed, but takes away the fear and anxiety.
MDMA is not classified as psychedelic and currently studied for treatment of PTSD (among other diagnoses).
Psychonauts found a way to combine those effects: candyflip (a combination of LSD and MDMA) or hippieflip (psilocybin and MDMA).
It’s much more manageable, calmer and reliably positive than psilocybin or LSD
Fun anecdote: When I was finishing my undergrad I had a housemate that was studying synesthesia. One of the tests for number/color synesthesia was a regular sheet of paper filled with typewritten letters and one number (this was pre-printer days). The test was to measure how fast a person could find the number. Synesthetes could spot it in a few hundreds of milliseconds, non-exhibitors took up to 30 seconds or more. It was a fascinating test. I never considered taking it under the influence of psilocybin or other drugs but am now curious, but way past my drug-taking prime.
But a small cadre (I'd have called the people with actual synesthesia) were spectacularly good at some of those tasks.
Another task was doing maths with notes. You got to specify the numbers attached to the sounds.
It'd be like beep-beep-bop and they'd shout 14! Or whatever it was
import os
import random
cols,rows = os.get_terminal_size()
numchars = cols*rows
randletter = lambda: chr(random.randrange(ord('A'), ord('Z')+1))
randnumber = lambda: chr(random.randrange(ord('0'), ord('9')+1))
letters = []
placement = random.randrange(numchars)
for i in range(numchars): letters.append(randnumber()) if i == placement else letters.append(randletter())
for l in letters: print(l,end='')
input()
CEND = '\33[0m'
CSELECTED = '\33[7m'
for i,l in enumerate(letters): print(CSELECTED + l + CEND,end='') if i == placement else print(l,end='')
input()who's selling that? the article simply focuses on that aspect.
It definitely humbles you when you know something such fundamental can change.
i envy your experiences.
The same artist also seems to have won[4] QRI's "psychedelic cryptography" contest[5] for videos conveying information only perceptible by viewers in an altered state of consciousness.
0: https://www.youtube.com/@SymmetricVision/videos
2: https://qri.org/blog/replication-contest
3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG12eK0BcsE
The site overall is quite nice to navigate - for the slightly lazy, https://effectindex.com/effects is an index of the various effects.
https://effectindex.com/effects
Scanning through them, my first impression is that they seem pretty accurate to my own experience, and that the nicer ones all come from lower doses, while the nasty ones are associated with higher doses.
Less is more when it comes to hallucinogens.
It's a good way to monitor your own mental state, if you start seeing horrors that's a reflection that something is bothering you. This is why traditional users of psychedelics would screen people for mental illness before group sessions, and why it was not uncommon in those societies to have a 'mentally ill' person take a large dose of psychedelics while having a half dozen people around them to make sure they didn't hurt themselves.
"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are"
"In a dream, we see only what is reflected by our own thoughts"
Now if you have a state of complete mental equilibrium, you won't see much from taking psychedelics other than an intensification of colors, a sharpening of edges, and an intense interest in everything you're seeing. Some fractal-like visualizations are pretty common, but isn't nature actually fractal?
If anything has peaked your curiosity, consider his books “Alien Information Theory” and “Reality Switch Technologies”
Also, DMTx is undeniably interesting from my point of view. We’ve recently completed a trial involving hour long sessions in extended DMT state
That's fascinating, since that's not something someone could do on their own. One of my biggest questions is whether the "DMT world" really connects you with another part of reality, or whether it's just "what the brain does" when exposed to the chemical.
Have there been any controlled experiments on whether we can pass messages via the DMT elves? That would persuade me that the entities could be real.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI
spoiler: we haven’t done that yet, so far it’s really kinda like “ok well it’s not appearing to be unhealthy, there’s no noticeable tolerance, what’s next”.
Also the linked video is going to have parts way out there for some folks here. Some have much different beliefs, there’s a few mentions of Syncronicities
But this is a newer rabbit hole for me and one thing is certain: I want to know why DMT has our brain building an entirely different world model, almost repeatable, completely throwing ours away. What’s the evolutionary reason even? There’s some theories but none anyone feels great about.
If by control you mean control group, there’s no need for that. If even a single pair of people could pass messages in a way that’s inexplicable except for the DMT realm, having another group bomb the test doesn’t change anything.
I don’t think it’ll ever happen though. I have this belief that something prevents these things getting pinned down by empiricism. Like if you’re caught trying to prove it, the signal gets jammed. Yes, this makes it unfalsifiable. I’ll respect anyone who loses interest for that reason. Unfalsifiable isn’t quite the same as false, though.
Most experiments around actually interacting with entities seem incredibly naive. Like imagine I told you I had a friend who makes the most amazing animal impressions in the world, but he lives in a dangerous neighborhood. One person refuses to go because it’s hazardous, and declares he’s not real. Another walks in, shoves a tape recorder in his face and says “bark like a dog for 10 seconds”. He analyzes the recording and declares it a 0% match. (It was a 100% match for a human saying “piss off” though). But you keep hearing these stories about people who show up, ask nicely, and get to hear the cool animal sounds.
It is a report from scientists worldwide, that calls for opening the field of what is considered "acceptable science" when studying consciousness. They mostly center their arguments around near death experiences and recall of past lives, but I think their arguments apply here.
What I got from them is that there is room to include more first person experiences in scientific research. We might never reach the same degree of certitude and precision as in the material sciences, but thsre is a strong argument to be made that consciousness is likely not just emerging from matter, but might be of a different nature. Continuing research about how could consciousness emerge from material processes is legitimate and important, but it should not be seen as the only possible explanation, and researchers should not be shamed out of making wildly different assumptions (as long as they are rigorous and honest).
I am curious to see what will come out of this DMTx project. I am not yet sure what to think about them from their website, but I will definitely try to remember to check them out again in the future!
He has a free 45 part course - Psychedelics and the Brain Master Course - up on youtube[2], which goes into some detail on the biochemistry and computational aspects of this.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQ...
Last I heard it had taken a pause because of COVID.
Have any published papers come out of this research?
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).
It might be a bit different from the experience described in the citation, but to me that description definitely sounds familiar (in particular the simultaneity of the particular and the universal). The effect of my practice on my daily life and the way I relate to it also sound pretty similar to the way some use psychedelics for spiritual or therapeutical practice. I actually lost quite a lot of my appetite to experiment with psychedelics since I started this kind of practice.
I mostly practice following the teachings of Rob Burbea, but I am also fond of reading texts from mystics of the Abrahamic religions, and this kind of experience is also reported regularly in that context. Mother Theresa for instance, when asked how she could stand being at the contact of so much suffering, said something along the lines of "I look into the eyes of my patient, and what I see is the glaze of my beloved Christ".
If you are curious I definitely recommend checking out rob burbea's talks, e.g. here: https://hermesamara.org/teachings
Hallucinogens generally tend to make concrete thoughts more difficult, and abstract ideas easier. E.g. it is harder to see someone farming as a farmer, and easier to see them as a member or representative of a group united by farming. Sometimes there's even a sort of recursion; that person is a representative of farming, but also more generally a member of the city, and a member of humanity, and a member of animals, and a member of living things, and a member of the universe. The Farmer is prototypical of farmers, but also of life in general.
I think that's the root of the psychedelic idea that all things are interconnected at some higher plane. Every living thing is unified by being prototypical of life, despite knowing that many living things share little in common in the same way that that farmer may share little in common with other farmers beyond profession.
For visuals, there's the subreddit "replications", where the submitters try to match an experience with visuals.
I tell people I went into the substrate of all existence / consciousness.
https://effectindex.com/effects/visual-exposure-to-inner-mec...
when you try to touch it it evaporates
surf, not analyze, the flow
The risk of having one can be reduced with a good Set and setting
Every time ive done dmt, i never thought I did enough. I read other peoples descriptions of their breakthroughs and it always sounds way more intense and wild then what i experience. those visuals are pretty close to what i have gone through though.
people make it seem like they're literally in other 3d worlds walking around and talking with creatures.
the one time I did do more, i actually didnt have fractal like visuals, my vision was over taken by a flat white light, a 2d flat owl floated by and there was a golden city floating in the background. After that I thought there might actually be more to the dmt experience then fractals and faces.
Lying face up, in a quiet dark nothingness, with a spotlight illuminating only you, in a moment of peace from the buzzing, colours and madness preceding, you may come to the realisation that death is peaceful, but the journey to get there is horrific.
I had a more 'fractal' experience of some fine grained detail, apparent motion like zooming into the Mandelbrot set, but in the main, this was a pretty good representation of what i saw. (mushrooms)
I can't recommend anyone to try it since not everyone may be able to handle it. But it was an amazing experience I don't regret at all.