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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

> the brain dumping DMT

Why do you exclude this hypothesis? It's well known that some drugs such as DMT do cause very similar hallucinations among people, even across cultures (as is the case with NDE).

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Yeah I didn't want to burst anyone's spiritual bubble earlier, but I had a very similar experience one time when I smoked salvia divinorum: there was an eerie and overwhelming purple light, sort of like a "fluorescent" UV bulb, and the Ministers of The Universe pulled my life history in front of me, something something ALL OF SPACE AND TIME WAS-

I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.

No you didn't that's not even what a salvia trip is like why lie about that in HN of all places haha

There is either a spiritual bubble or a materialistic/scientistic bubble, and we shouldn't be afraid to burst either.

I disagree that the materialistic/scientistic view can be characterized as a "bubble". Unlike the spiritual camp, almost no one in that camp wishes it were true or fantasizes about it. I'm personally in the materialistic camp but wish the "spiritual" view was true.

No, us scientific folks shouldn't go around needlessly poking people's spiritual bubbles. It's rude and disrespectful, and it almost never actually matters. Who cares if someone thinks they spoke to Jesus when they had a heart attack? Leave them alone.

Because they aren't very similar in a lot of respects. If someone told you about their DMT/NDE experience you could determine which one it was with far greater than 90% accuracy. For example, in NDEs people express that they are outside of linear time, things happen in parallel (I can't imagine it but one person said they arrived at the bottom of a stair, and the moment he decided to climb it he was at the top, but could remember every single step on the way - that's the best explanation I have got of it) and in NDEs people meet relatives that tell them what is happening in a very pedagogic and honest way. In DMT trips there are foreign machine elves or other entities that accept you but don't really have that much connection to you. In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before. So even though DMT have similarities to NDEs when compared to our normal reality, they are also not that similar. If anything DMT trips are more similar to UFO abductions than NDEs. It's just weirder than I can expect anyone to accept.

Sure, I didn't mean that the brain was releasing literal DMT.

You said what convinced you was how similar NDEs are, but we have evidence that similar experiences can arise from known brain chemistry changes (e.g., DMT-induced hallucinations) without requiring supernatural explanations. Death could simply be another case where a shift in brain chemistry produces consistent hallucinations across humans.

> In NDEs you meet the light a lot and get flooded with love in a way you couldn't imagine before

I've definitely had this exact experience on DMT, as well as the traveling through tunnels experience

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