How "real" do you consider psychedelic experiences?

Discussion in 'Psychedelics' started by powerquest, May 28, 2014.

  1. Bud D

    Bud D Member

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    If the reality experienced is negative, it's not very real. Everything is positive and that is real.
     
  2. Irminsul

    Irminsul Valkyrie

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    If people in fact have them, I consider them real.
     
  3. Bud D

    Bud D Member

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    If something happened and existed it's real. But people can be delusional, experience the unreal. it can be scary for someone to see things and take those as real.
     
  4. powerquest

    powerquest Member

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    I asked this a while ago and in hindsight i think it was poorly worded. What i was driving at wasn't so much "is the experience real?" (of course it is, just like sex, eating cereal, being drunk, and driving to work are real). The question I meant to ask was whether or not drug-induced insights and experiences can teach you anything about the nature of external reality (in addition to insights it can give into the workings of one own self).

    Person X experiences what he believes to be God/aliens/elves/angels/extradimensional beings/[insert entity here] on DMT.
    Person Y takes shrooms and becomes convinced that inanimate objects like rocks have a form of consciousness.
    Person Z drops acid and telepathically communicates with his dog.

    Do you think that the experiences have any existence outside of the tripper's own head (not necessarily in an absolute way, but in some form)?

    I'm still agnostic about the issue, but i suppose that it's possible. I do take psychedelic experiences seriously but I haven't had anything convince me of it yet.
     
  5. guerillabedlam

    guerillabedlam _|=|-|=|_

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    Here was part of my response...

    Dmt and Salvia in particular have left open the notion of psychedelic experiences having some sort of free standing reality to me. I can kind of rationalize away a lot of the slower developing, "less intense", oral psychedelic trips of the phenomena of Mushrooms or LSD in bringing subconscious material to the surface and distortions of external reality and what not. However even with those trips, I think an experience such as synesthesia, (crossing sense I.e. seeing music, tasting colors) which is a condition that some people naturally have and many experience on psychedelics, suggest to us that these experiences can induce states which our beyond the homeostatic processing of reality we work with in normal consciousness.

    The dimensions I've experienced on DMT and Salvia feel highly sophisticated though, so I get the impression of them being almost like holographs or projections of those dimensions rather than anything we could materially interact with beyond the pharmalogical interaction.
     
  6. porkstock41

    porkstock41 Every time across from me...not there!

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    i think tripping can "teach you about external reality." but it doesn't always have to.

    what i think psychedelics have taught me about reality is that we may never know the TRUE, ULTIMATE reality. we can only know what we can perceive, and we can only perceive what our brain and body allow us to. yet, we have a decent amount of control over how we perceive things, in the way that we react to situations, whether or not we 'look on the bright side of things,' etc.

    if simply ingesting a chemical can change your perception so strongly, just think what is within your own power!
     
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  7. Mr.Writer

    Mr.Writer Senior Member

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    There is a continuum of experiences with, at one end, things being fairly straightforward ("Oh, would you look at that, it turns out that love is very important for human relations"), and on the other end pure delusions ("Me and my friend had a psychic link for 6 hours and knew each others every thought"). Every experience is a microcosm, and every experience is different. They cannot all be judged on the same level. There are people who smoke weed and conclude that aliens are trying to take over their mind . . . and there are people who can take heroic doses of psychedelics and not conclude a single fact that is not derivable from sober experience.

    The thing is to always value evidence and reasoning. The further away from those two things a proposition is, the larger the amount of salt that needs to be taken with it.

    I'll give you an example. One of the most mystical, spiritual realizations I've had on psychedelics is that I am everything, everything is me; I am god; the universe exists as play; etc. However, I have no real evidence for these propositions. If I told them to someone, and they replied "Oh, interesting that you think that, here is actual proof that you are mistaken", my reply would be "Thank you, I was mistaken. It was an interesting and beautiful delusion, and I'm glad that you cleared that up for me". If I can't back it up in some way beyond the tautology of "it was true for ME" then I just don't take it too seriously, knowing that I could be completely mistaken.

    There's also a difference between statements that are at least potentially testable and those that are not. Consider these two statements:

    1) Multi-dimensional machine elves exist and can be contacted through intoxication of DMT

    2) I am God, and so are you

    The first statement is at least potentially testable and falsifiable. One way it could be falsified, is if every single person in history had smoked dmt (even for every moment of their lives) and not once were machine elves contacted. Another way is if we conducted a more sophisticated experiment to show that the machine elf contact experiences were all suspiciously tied to the personal mental characteristics of the person tripping (Ie, an archeologist smokes DMT and all the elves are very interested in angles and spaces, and a musician smokes DMT and all the elves are suddenly all about rhythm and harmony). Etc. You can at least conceive of countless experiments which would tug your judgement of this statement either towards "true" or towards "false".

    The second statement is not testable. There is no experiment or observation you could imagine which would show it to be either true or false; always an excuse can be made, given the slipperiness of the "god" concept. In science, we would say that this statement is "not even wrong"; it has not even developed the level of sophistication and connection with reality to permit it to be either true or false. It has not even risen to the level of being graced with the potential to be incorrect. In some ways it is meaningless, like saying "Everything is up".

    So even though this thought was the most powerful and soul shaking thought I've ever had on psychedelics, I am careful to put it over here, on the table, in the pile marked "not even wrong".

    Pretty, yes, inspiring, yes, but not to be fought over :)
     
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  8. MeatyMushroom

    MeatyMushroom Juggle Tings Proppuh

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    For myself I've found that they haven't so much taught me about external reality, but more about my personal relationship with it which, in turn, has given me more perspective on the way others relate to it.


    I do think these experiences exist. They're as real as any thought. There's very little evidence that you can show that can legitimise a claim that you thought anything at all, but through a process of persistence and refinement I believe it to be possible to condense a series of musings into some form of tangible and coherent information. I think it's not the individual notes that a person leaves behind, but rather the entire passage through the complex symphony of life.


    Psychedelics plunge us into the strangest states of mind, and although there may not actually be Machine Elves, the emotional significance and the perspective that comes with such and experience is undeniable, as we return swimming in the most fundamental aspect of life.. mystery.

    What the individual does from there is their solution.

    Cue meditative practises. Mastery comes from placidity.

    Know your form by giving it space. There's some things psychedelics can't teach you because "it's just a drug". The fantastical merges with the literal and it's hard to separate the two, whereas the peculiarity present in sobriety is.. present.




    But to add: the whole rock's have consciousness thing? I think the rock itself has no consciousness but the perception OF the rock is consciousness itself. Similar thing with the dog. The supernatural is quite natural, subtle "ontological semantics". But, who knows...
     
  9. BlackBillBlake

    BlackBillBlake resigned HipForums Supporter

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    There seem to be levels where inside and outside are indistinguishable.

    Where do 'I' end and where does the world begin?
     
  10. MeatyMushroom

    MeatyMushroom Juggle Tings Proppuh

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    I say everything that inhabits an individual's consciousness is their "self". The world they live in, the body they occupy. Anything that can be perceived is the result of a unique and individual organic processor. Hardware and software will vary, but we all draw power from the same source.

    We literally blossom from beneath the undergrowth, only ever knowing the scent of our own flower.


    *puke*


    But there are few ways to put that.
     
  11. porkstock41

    porkstock41 Every time across from me...not there!

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    "i know it's hard
    sometimes for you to tell
    where you end
    and where. the world. begins."

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P1rUmRKt6I
     
  12. MeatyMushroom

    MeatyMushroom Juggle Tings Proppuh

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    Extra thought in relation to my previous 2 posts..

    The universe is fractal in nature i.e. self similar; arrangements of matter, weather patterns, economics, biology(even our pulse, with all it's fluctuations, has been shown to produce fractal patterns). Recognising aspects of our own "shape", quirks, features, interests, memories and what Jung deemed "synchronicities" can potentially lead to a greater recognition of self. The most subtle of phenomena(recognised by unique perception, the product of an organic fractal architecture) could potentially be clues to ourselves, meaning a sense of demystification.

    Just a musing. No idea where to put it unfortunately, so figured I'd stick it here for now :p

    Please crit, I'd like to keep tabs on my sanity ;D


    https://youtu.be/wkI0y43EqHI



    Edit: McKenna, Sheldrake and Abraham, together, by finding a mean between conflicting opinions, proposed that the current state of fractal mathematics is not advanced enough to be able to accurately simulate the processes of nature. Current fractal geometry can only comprehend a static shape, whereas nature is obviously in a perpetual state of flux.

    I'd hazard a guess at combining the principle of fractals with the principle of the fibonacci sequence(which seems to me to describe the mean of infinity). There could be parallels between that, the strange attractor and complex dynamical systems.
     
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  13. porkstock41

    porkstock41 Every time across from me...not there!

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    no criticisms here. makes sense to me.


    i'm no math wiz, but maybe combing integral or derivatives (over time?) with fractal geometry could get closer to simulating the perpetual flux of nature.
     
  14. AceK

    AceK Scientia Potentia Est

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    reality is an infinitely recursive algorithm...
     
  15. KSWEEZY

    KSWEEZY Members

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    I usually just feel pretty dirty and tiered after I do acid and I can't even put together what I was thinking on it.
     

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