I do feel like selling the "interesting" part of Hallucinogens as the visuals is hugely under selling the entire experience. Feel like that's the LEAST interesting part. It's the ability to step into a different experience of reality / head space that's simultaneously engaging and terrifying.
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).
I would describe it differently: Psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD deactivate filters in your brain (parts of the default mode network to be precise). These filters are unconscious and do not only block weird visual effects but also thoughts and emotions. Some of the thoughts and emotions they block are scary and we probably installed those filters in our childhood during "traumatic" events but some of these thoughts and emotions were filtered because we were taught to ignore them or that they would be false or we tried things while growing up and always failed with them (not because they were impossible but due to the circumstances, e.g. parents not allowing it).
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!
> Some of the thoughts and emotions they block are scary
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).
Yeah, people with high blood pressure or other cardiovascular issues should be careful using all psychotropic drugs, including psychedelics - some if which are 5HT(2B) receptor agonists, and those receptors are expressed on the heart valve. But MDMA has still more dangerous physical effects than LSD/psilocybin.
As a fully abled person with strong body and ego, what I've taken out of the experiences is the humbling effect of not being able to trust my own senses or conclusions about the world.
It's what I call "Mental Handicap Experience", but with a positive twist where coming out of heavy experiences made me re-evaluate my cognition, surroundings, life choices under a completely different light.
I am not sure everyone would agree with me calling this the famous death of ego. But each of these experiences felt like my previous self has died and a second person came in to my body to reevaluate the state of reality. Even though, in hindsight, I don't think I have changed much in a long term, I recall positively the short term effects on quality of my life.
I've found that the "reborn" person only lasts as long as you put into practice the new relevations. This requires thinking of actionable items, or behaviors to think on, but otherwise it's worked.
Thought inducing observation, where we understand chemistry of our brain as something maluable by exercise and habit creation.
I would have taken a different stab at this idea by proposing that the "new revelations" which appear in hightened state of consciousness, are our prior experiences boosted and unfiltered, allowing for previously weak and seemingly unimportant ideas, to be manifested and actually recombined into actionable items.
Our opinions are verified in a dream-like alternative reality and if they are actually as profound as they seemed in that dream, then we turn them ibto actions even unconciously.
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.
I wrote a script to try it. It's boggling that anyone could do this task in milliseconds.
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()
I was part of a similar project (as a control) the majority of people who claimed synesthesia did not see any kind of benefit compared to those that didn't.
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
I would say that math with notes is more likely to be a case of absolute pitch: some people is capable of recognize notes without any reference - no other sense is involved.
As someone who used to have a shade of number color synesthesia, I don't think psychedelics would temporarily induce this in a person. Someone on psychedelics however might find themselves better at this task for different reasons though! My guess is it's depend heavily on the dose and even the substance though...
Psychadelics seem to mean a lot of different things to differwnt people because for me none of what you mentioned was that profound or interesting about taking psychedelics. For me it was the 5 or 6 hour come down window after all the above stops where i seem to have perfect clarity on what is wrong in my life and the steps I need to take to fix those things. I try to go to Amsterdam and pop a box of their strongest magic truffles once every couple years just for that window. The self criticism and self correction that has come out of that has been utterly life changing for the better for me.
Right. I think they're a good metaphor too. See how warped and weird the visuals are? Imagine that kind of process being applied to everything. Sound, touch, even thought itself, or the experience of the passage of time. Its all warped.
I don’t know. I find all that pretty boring with LSD in particular for the simple fact that I can’t share the experience with anyone. It’s masturbatory.
All your examples involve visuals though. Given our visual system is such a critical part of how we experience and interpret the world, I wouldn't say focusing on the visuals is "hugely underselling" hallucinogens.
Your last point - complete disassociation from normal reality - is a hallmark of all hallucinogens, in my experience.
"Symmetric Vision"[0] - one of the more prominent contributors to the featured video compilation - just won QRI[1]'s Psychedelic Replication Contest[2] with a short video representing "that moment when your senses start blending together and you realize that it wasn’t a microdose.”[3]
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.
wow, the not a microdose video is a pretty accurate representation. about half way in i could almost feel that anxious like feeling rush through my body.
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.
They'll make you see the state of your own mind. Literally, they throw noise into the normal visual system and cause memory and emotional state to bleed over into the visual field.
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?
> 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.
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.
I’ve looked a bit and haven’t seen any experiments at all.
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.
Regarding the possibility to do "experiments" or the usefulness of standard materialist epistemology to study consciousness, I recommend reading the galileo report: https://galileocommission.org/report/
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!
Gallimore's theory of psychedelic action, based on the predictive processing model[1] of brain function - very roughly that normal "sensory experience" is substantially the output of the brain's predictive model of reality and that when psychedelics "perturb" the model (a bit like skewing the weights in a software NN) users experience the effects of the brain scrambling to recover predictive efficacy - is fascinating to me!
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.
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 actually have that kind of experiences (mostly on a subtle level, but sometimes more intense, to the point that tears might well up) regularly as a result of my meditation/spiritual practice. For me it is more "seeing the divine expressing itself through the person" or feeling a particular kind of universal personhood in a tree, as if that particular tree stood outside of time, representing all of life. It can also happen with my own emotions: sometimes I will feel sad or angry, and the feeling will transform from "my anger" to "an expression of cosmic anger" or "the Divine expressing itself through me as Anger".
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".
Addendum: I now read the article from which the citation comes, and the similarities with "imaginal meditation" and "soulmaking dharma", both in terms of experience and in terms of insight are striking. Pretty much every paragraph I thought "yes, I experienced that". Obviously, the experiences one gets by meditating 30 minutes a day are far from being as dramatic as what one gets under the influence of ayahuasca, but by getting them almost daily, I am not sure that the long term effect is lower. It might even be greater, because by meditating one trains to cultivate those ways of perceiving, rather than being "forced" to experience them.
I have, though not on DMT (I find it a little too mind-shattering for that level of conscious thought).
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.
I can’t take an article like this seriously if they don’t mention Erowid or the Shulgin Scale. Josie Kin’s research is wonderful, but this article does neither her nor the pre-existing research and resources justice. Kinda surprising for a Nautilus article IMO. Barely any content and what is there is arbitrarily cherry-picked from Josie’s website, borderline irrelevant images.
Over the past 12 years, Kins has compiled a list of 233 effects people experience under the influence of psychedelic drugs, drawn from online accounts and her own experience[...]
I'm a bit worried how well it's being updated still.
I looked for an entry for 3-MMC, which is currently experiencing a rise in popularity, and couldn't find any.
I remember being worried for them for quite some years, but in the end they persevered. I read the site first 20 years ago now. I hope they manage to go on, I had a good time reading all the stuff, and it seems to be compiled with the best intentions.
I had closed eye visuals on 2C-E where I saw microscopic fractal machinery that made up the universe. This was over a decade ago, so don't really remember the details. Should have wrote a trip report.
2C-E (back when it was legal) gave me the most intense open eye visuals I've ever seen. Tracers, breathing walls, shifting patterns, almost like animated posters. It got to be so much that I got motion sick.
I went through several "challenging" (I prefer this to "Bad", you still learn something from them) trips in my 20s, some I felt like I'd conquered or come to terms with a part of my psyche, others threw me into a deep depression unable to talk to friends and family easily for up to two weeks.
is that video actually what other peoples dmt breakthroughs are like?
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.
People experience things differently, partly because we are literally wired differently. Marijuana for example works well for many, but there's a significant minority of people who only experience paranoia and other negative feelings.
I find it interesting that some of the hallucinations look like generated imagery from earlier layers of a neural network. There are recognizable patterns, but they look weird and unfinished - and the colors are all over the place.
Science emulating nature I guess; it's like how computer-optimized structures seem to emulate nature (e.g. the internals of a bird's bones), or the most effective robotic grippers being the ones that look like human hands.
i wonder why someone would register a domain dedicated specifically to this fantasy. the text is also a bit of all over the place mentally. but somewhat interesting nonetheless. i visited that place after taking a little bit too much 4-aco-dmt. that was a hell of a trip. still not sure what to make of it and how it impacted me in the long term.
I have one particular experience seared into my mind. I was lying in bed after taking 300mcg of LSD and I leaned up onto my elbows and looked over the edge of my bed and witnessed a flowing river of blood filled with human body parts. The most interesting part of the whole experience was it was in no way disturbing or frightening. I'll never forget it.
This is the first reasonably close approximation to what I saw in my visual field, and I am very impressed they managed to capture the spirit of the artifacts.
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've done many hallucinogens and have seen great things but "unspeakable horrors" too. It was a legitimately terrifying experience but I came out of it feeling mentally strong and stable.
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.
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).
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.
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
Food of the Gods - Terence McKenna
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
This of course may just be my experience
https://effectindex.com/effects/ego-death
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
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.
Your last point - complete disassociation from normal reality - is a hallmark of all hallucinogens, in my experience.
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
1: https://qri.org/
2: https://qri.org/blog/replication-contest
3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG12eK0BcsE
4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4nV0CMkBI
5: https://qri.org/blog/psycrypto-contest
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?
https://youtu.be/ba5pAjM8HZM
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.