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Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Sacks. While taking large doses of LSD or DMT I had experiences with what felt like otherworldly entities, or a sense that some cosmic revelation was imminent, but once I'd come down I didn't think something had been revealed to me or that I had been in contact with some supernatural plane, I just thought "wow I was really fucking high".

It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.

I am almost pathologically sceptical and I have absolutely zero belief in anything metaphysical. I believe that capability is simply not within me. I can see how other people would believe that there is something beyond though.

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My experience was similar; no direct contact with entities, but the certainty that something was in the room with me and had no ill intent toward me.

I ended up trying DMT a few times, and decided (at least for awhile), that the brain was a "chemical radio," able to be tuned to the different frequencies of reality with these substances. It was a very wispy way of explaining how the brain processes input in an altered state, but worked really well for me at the time.

Is there really any difference between the entities people encounter during a trip and the entities that populate our dreams? Most people don't entertain the idea that their dreams are real experiences. And often in a dream I will be thinking about some idea that seems very profound and important but on waking if I can remember what that idea was it is always absolute nonsense. I suspect it is the same with psychedelic trips.

I've had dreams that were significant. One time I had a nightmare and it became "sentient" and the nightmare started to talk to me and hurt me. I started to meditate and the nightmare couldn't hurt me anymore. I felt pain as it was scarring me all over, but I didn't feel suffering. I woke up realizing that meditation is my safe space.

A month ago, I got a dream where I saw my wife and she passed me a note saying "I love you." I woke up and I realized that even my subconscious mind believed that she loved me. A lovely thing to realize.

To be fair, most dreams don't mean anything to me.

I am skeptical because I had a brush with schizophrenia where I felt _exactly_ like I was always having epiphanies, and it was mental illness. I've never done psychoactives but I know feelings are sometimes just feelings.

I feel this about a lot of the apparent revelations that come out of LSD and other psychedelic use, particularly the revolutionary nature of psychedelics which (if only enough people would take them) would change the world, people would realise we don't need police, armies, governments wielding power over us, we can all get along in peace and harmony and create a new world of love, charity and understanding.

When probing into what this might actually mean, there's never really any substance there. And from what I can tell most of the experiments in actually living these different lives in the 60s and 70s failed because when it comes down to it, communal living requires idealism, commitment and hard graft. Those last two are often missing and the first fades.

I've had my "I am one with the fabric of the universe" moments. I've seen things of great beauty on psychedelics, I've had thoughts twist and turn in impossible ways... but in the end it would take extraordinary evidence to persuade me it's anything other then the subjective experience brought on by a drug twisting my brain. From the article -

> If people say they’ve talked with angels or dead ancestors, should we dismiss them as raving, drug-addled trippers?

No, because that's prejudicial and dismissive, but we probably should think of those experiences in terms of an internal psychedelic journey conjured up by the brain on drugs, rather than some sort of extrinsic interaction with the universe. At least until someone comes up with something other than speculation as evidence.

I believe that theory of pure bliss and self-regulating society was finally disproven at the Altamont Free Concert[1]. Its long ago, so its weird that the message never really landed somewhere...

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

> It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.

I've had trips like that but then I also had trips where I saw things like Pikachu, bees, jesters, machine elves (people-like things). But then the more I did it they got more defined and were just hallucinations of people (some were fictional characters). There was also progression from "feels like you're getting a message" -> "hearing something that's unintelligible" -> "hearing full sentences in English". I'm skeptical of the metaphysical or meaningful interpretations just because the more I did it the more nonsensical it seemed.

That is super interesting and a little scary.

Sounds similar to dreams where you tell an amazing joke or story and people are laughing uncontrollably and you feel like the funniest person in the world, then if you can recall the joke on waking it is total nonsense. Maybe it is more about transferring emotion/feeling than language.

I think people don't know that their entire experience is their brain. Being human you just intrinsically feel that you are this conscious subject who is experiencing/analyzing what this organ called "the brain" presents to you. What's lost is that the conscious subject and the brain are the same thing. The drugs doing funny stuff to the brain is the same as the drug doing funny stuff to the conscious subject.

To put this more succinctly:

If your brain tells you that #2 pencils are sacred universal objects, you will be 100% convinced that it is true. The conscious subject will do an analyses and be as sure as the sky is blue that #2 pencils are sacred.

If you live your entire life worshipping pencils, treat other humans benevolently due to the laws the pencils have passed down, and die clutching a fistful of them with a smile on your face, is that crazy?

I have met people before who were devoted to mystical insights gained through the use of psychedelics. Quasi-religious groups of people who stopped taking psychedelics for fun and started taking them for meaning.

Crazy might be an apt term to describe them, but they weren't dangerous or harmful people. Quiet the opposite actually. However talking to them an listening to them talk to each other, it was clear that they had lost contact with the ground, but they were convinced they were more in touch with it than anyone else. To the point they could feel that they were more in touch than anyone else.

Take a fan and point it at someone's back and they will feel the breeze there. Now cross wires in the brain that replicates the same feeling, even in the absence of the fan. They will be just as convinced that the breeze is there. Now do the same thing but for something that cannot be as simply empirically verified as the presence of a fan. And then short out the wires that would allow one to "step back" and see rethink. Maybe that is crazy, I don't know.

I had lucid dreams in the past, I can understand why people would call this astral projection, but to me it's pretty obviously brain produced experience. I doubt that anyone would believe in this stuff if they had Sack's experience of patients with brain injuries.

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