Mckenna described it being difficult to bring back any memories because there's nothing to reflect the experience to, that is when one has never experienced anything of such nature, the brain has no way of coding it and "writing a memory" of the experience. I don't wonder why I usually remember only fractions of my experiences. Even if there would be a jester rolling by 1 meter next to me like a normal person would(but quickly), I still find hard to make any "memory image" of it.

See this is something I call the DMT effect.

Comparing DMT to bufotenine as an example here. On bufotenine I've seen some very intricate visual arrangements and have reflected upon them thusly : "s'alright"

Whereas with DMT, I can see mere simple shapes and have my mind completely blown because of the effect the substance has on me emotionally. This effect is what I often attribute to peoples reports of being in the presence of god or even being god themselves. Feeling holy.



In my experience disorientation is possible... so there

Also if you come back from an experience unable to explain it I think this has suggestions that you were only under the illusion that you thought you understood it for what it was in the first place.



I know that's just an example to show a concept, but I strongly believe if you saw in monochrome, you would not experience colour in hyperspace. Though I do understand fully what you are saying here.



I'm curious how you think words like "maybe" represent insistence. I don't insist.

I suggest

Also where did I give the impression that I had "easily explained" anything? And why do you have this offended like use of language?

I'm not claiming to be correct here. I'm guessing, just like you are. The difference between us is I haven't just labelled the experience as unexplainable. In my experience, things that seem complex are often a lot more simple than you may think.

Does this mean I'm getting less out of the experience?

Certainly not

I agree SF that sometimes it can have incredibly strong emotional effect! And sometimes none... That's part of the D, it's never the same, at least for me!

Yes, I have felt the “emotional connection” as well. But what I’m describing isn’t that. It isn’t a “feeling” about objects, but rather a very specific visual property which is quite obvious. I’m able to recognize the visual property when I see it, and I’m not able to explain it because it doesn’t exist in consensus reality.


This is a cop-out answer. Even if we take a purely materialistic stance, DMT almost certainly “re-wires” areas of the brain during an experience, and those neural pathways are then restored as the effects wane. It’s not possible to articulate or remember sensory experiences if the “circuitry” responsible for the experiences no longer exists.

I once read an account (I think by V. S. Ramachandran) about a stroke patient who had suffered damage to a section of the visual cortex. The result was that he could no longer see color (this story is why I used color in my previous example). And interestingly, he could no longer remember color. Even past visual memories were now absent color. He of course could remember the names of colors, and the colors associated with various objects, but he could not visualize colors. The reason for this is simple – the brain region responsible for processing color no longer functioned.

Your answer also suggests that if we can’t explain or remember something, then it probably didn’t happen. There are many everyday examples which prove this false. Witness testimony is one example. Another: Imagine sitting in on a complex lecture in a subject with which you are completely unfamiliar and filled with unfamiliar technical jargon given by a very fast-talking presenter. Several minutes after the lecture, I ask you to explain what was said. Although you would clearly remember attending the lecture, the appearance of the presenter, the sound of his voice, etc., you’d only be able to offer up fragments of the content, and you wouldn’t be able to explain any of it. According to your reasoning, since you can’t remember or explain the content of the lecture, then the lecture probably didn’t actually occur, or what occurred wasn’t actually a lecture – “you were only under the illusion that you thought you understood it for what it was in the first place.”


When you throw out a single word, like “disorientation” without any explanation (you still haven’t explained anything) I see that as an attempt to brush off complex phenomena. Complex phenomena seem simple when you don’t really think about them at all.

I’m not making any claims about the “reality” of my experiences. I’m simply reporting them and pointing out that your explanations are not sufficient to explain them. Considering the fact that science is unable to explain how neural activity gives rise to conscious perception, I find it interesting that you consider psychedelic experiences to be both explainable and “more simple than you may think”.

Yes, this is a big problem in neuroscience. But the lack of a thorough explanation does not legitimize the belief that what you see or where you go is something outside of your own mind, or something real in the usual sense of the word. This is the case I have been trying to make all along, because many here seem to be under the firm belief, only based on their own subjective experiences, that they talk to real entities, go to real places, uncover universal secrets, discover a deeper level of reality and so on. This is fine in and on itself, but the problem is that these beliefs stand on no firm ground at all, making them not much different than believing in Santa Claus, the gnome in the shed, God or any other religious propositions.

It is just so extremely unlikely that, with a drug and this very spesific drug, you visit other realities. Can't people see that this sounds like complete nonsense, unless they have been extremely colored by their own experience and thus unable to take some distance from it and apply some critical thinking?

The essential question in all of this to everyone is this:
What reasons do you have to assume your DMT experiences are anything more than very peculiar neurological mechanisms that distorts our perception of reality and/or creates other ones that are not really there in the brains attempt to process information? When walls are melting, this is obviously not happening for real, but suddenly when you talk to entities in some huge strange hallucination it is real? When your friend gets some tools in the shed totally sober and meets a gnome, you would doubt his mental health, but if he ingested DMT you would go "Oh, very interesting, this gnome/entity/whatever must be real because DMT showed him to you". This is a completely arbitrary line for what you consider to be real and not, likely because of some strong emotional response to the DMT experience and the emotional "comfort" it brings to accept it as real instead of trying to think critically about it. I was like this before too, but incredible claims require incredible evidence. The universe is mysterious enough as it is without hidden realms you can only visit if you take a drug.

It's just superstition, and none of you are able to provide any sort of evidence for the likelihood of your experiences except for the fact that you have experienced it - which is not any evidence at all. DMT is weird, it's fantastic, it's great fun, but it is extremely unlikely that this molecule is a door to another reality alltogether.

The brain can hallucinate, no doubt, and DMT is a powerful hallucinogenic. So why are DMT realms real when gnomes in the shed are not, when the hallucination of the talking table in the schizofrenic mind is not, when melting walls are not and a number of other things are not? Why is DMT such an exception?

(Gibran2, since you don't make total claims about the reality of your experiences, this is not spesifically addressed to you, even though I quoted a part of your post. Just wanted to make that clear).

In regards to "metlting" or wavering walls, how do you know that they are in fact not wavering? It's like light being bent through time-space but from a relative perspective it appears to be straight. You could think, "since I reach out to grab this object, and it didn't move away from my hand, that explains that it must be stable and sessile in reality," but if the object is wavering in time-space, then your hand is relatively wavering proportionately and your mind creates an illusion of a stable reality. It's really taking a best-guess as to how things really are.



If you read my earlier post, I make the argument for the point that DMT may be an exception because of it's vast array of effects that operate with practically different rules in different scenarios. When you take most chemicals into your system, they behave in a particularly regular and consistent manner. It's practically like you're working with different chemicals when you take DMT a number of times. Low-level experiences may easily be explained away by light after-images and your brain's ability to work with them whereas this clearly can't stand as an explanation for more complex experiences. There can be so much tension in the debate because of extremist viewpoints of either it's 100% real or it's 100% hallucination, but I see it as more likely to be somewhere in the middle where the brain is filtering external and internal information (as it does in consensual reality), but whether you're noticing more of the filter or the external information itself is a function of certain kinds of experiences. Not all DMT experiences should be lumped into the same ontological category.

extremely unlikely != impossible

If my experiences on psychedelics were just colorful - and sometimes bizarre - mashups built from the vocabulary of my senses (thought and feeling included), then I probably wouldn't use psychedelics. I'm not interested in pink elephants, spirals, mandalas, buddhas, Gods or any visual hallucinations.

My interest lies in the novelty, those aspects of the experience which are extra-dimensional, which step out from the usual frameworks. Those which let me realize that I have senses and abilities and knowings which I've always had - they were lying dormant in me - but I couldn't discover them with my earthly mind, I needed psychedelics as a key to get access to them. It brings me infinite delight when I realize that what I experience cannot be understood (with the mind), but I can still perceive its truth and logic with a higher sense which I'm not yet aware of in the everyday world. 360 degrees vision is another example of such a framework-disrupting phenomenon: we can't even begin to fathom how that would work without directly experiencing it.

Yes - that's clear.

I actually agree with much of what you say, but there are some finer points that you’ve missed.

First, I must say that you seem to have a very strong materialist bias. I have no objection toward someone who chooses to believe in the materialist paradigm. I personally believe that the “primacy of consciousness” paradigm or something similar is more likely. What many materialists fail to recognize is that materialism itself is a belief-system. There is no scientific experiment or objective observation that can be made to prove the materialist paradigm represents the way “reality” actually is.

So why does it seem so unlikely and sound “like complete nonsense” that there are other realms, just as “real” as the realm we ordinarily occupy, and that we are somehow connected to these other realms?

It’s funny that you mention critical thinking – I just made a post in a critical thinking thread where I quoted examples of uncritical thinking that (I think) could apply to some of the arguments you’ve made:


You ask why people view the DMT experience differently from other psychedelic experiences and from hallucinations caused by schizophrenia and other disorders. One answer might be simply that DMT is different. And in reality, there are many other things that lead people convincingly to other realms, such as near-death experiences.

As I’ve said, I agree with most of your points: We can’t know if DMT realms are “real”, and it’s reasonable to assume that the DMT experience is not necessarily what it appears to be. I agree that there’s no way to prove the “reality” of DMT realms, and that insisting they’re “real” is not rational.

But here’s what I wonder: Why are you so certain that consensus reality is “real” and that we can measure all of our experiences against the “standard” of consensus reality? You correctly assert that our subjective experiences are insufficient to prove that something is “real”, but doesn’t it logically follow that, since all we can experience are subjective experiences, we cannot prove that consensus reality is “real”?

It seems to me that all of the arguments you’ve made against the reality of DMT realms could just as easily be applied mostly unchanged to the realm of consensus reality. Do you see this?

Now don't take this wrong, but you seem to be under a firm belief that your own subjective experiences of chatting at the nexus, talking to people at the store, and other daily interactions are real. Please explain to me how you can rationalize that your current brain state (which is on drugs) is more/less real than the brain state on DMT? Finish reading before answering though.

I haven't met many people that claim point blank that they fully 100% believe hyperspace is real. Some, like me, have had experiences that have forced a complete reevaluation of what real is.

Your serotonin levels drop and you get a dark, gloomy, sometimes suicidal outlook on life. Take a dose of cappi and in a few hours you feel normal again. Which of those two states is real. The raw brain running on reduced serotonin, or the drugged up brain on caapi?

Is DMT real? Probably not any more or any less real than anything else.

I guess my biggest point here is that you shouldn't assume that we all 'believe' hyperspace is real. I think I speak for a lot of people here when I say our beliefs have moved far past a binary system of real and not real to the point of fundamentally questioning what it means to be real.

Peace.

Splendid replies, people. I got some stuff to do and I will get back.

Peace

Science logic etc. blah blah blah, time to get real and smoke more!

I think it's endless: What is real and what is not. What is reality etc. Blah blah... We're lucky to be on such beautiful planet, I think that's enough.

Eerr... time to get real and smoke less perhaps?

LOL. I mean this is a DMT forum, not a science forum. And this is GENERAL DMT section of the forum, so come on, I think it's enough of this arguments of what is real and what is not. Or at least take it to hyperspace tavern/science section.

And what is real one cannot define IMO. That is, WHAT is REAL!

This is a DMT forum that emphasizes scientific methodologies and approaches to those things that science is equipped to investigate...perhaps re-read the attitude and other stickied threads where this is made apparent.

As for the forum location...this falls into "General DMT" quite readily; if DMT doesn't make you question the definition of "real" you probably need to take some time to integrate

We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast...

It's way more than chemistry. It's math, physics, physiology, and genetics too. DMT binding to 5-ht receptors isn't very interesting unless it causes some downstream cellular event. The almighty wiki says 5-ht agonization alters cAMP levels, and there are plenty of biomolecules that are affected by cAMP (like PKA and CREB). It would be interesting to culture different neural cells and investigate the changes in mRNA expression in response to different levels of 5-ht activation. Although this experiment may have been performed already.

Thank you for so many very interesting views. I was not expecting so many replies but please keep posting your thoughts about this matter it is very important to me and I am sure to many others out there.

It is very difficult to just say this is real and this is not. As was pointed out , all that is happening in our body is chemistry but that is when we talk about flash and bones but what about our consciousness ? where is that coming from ? Is the realization that WE ARE just a chemistry ?

OR how is it done the transformation from chemistry into the spiritual realm ? where is the connection ? where is the border between body and mind if you wish ?

So endless argument of what is real and what is not is what we should talk about, OK then...
I don't think our science can even begin saying anything with 100% certainty about reality.

Sure, the walls are really "wavering", but at an atomic level. The wall consists of countless of little twisting, dancing, wiggling atoms in perpetual motion - but as you know, we can't see them and they are ordered together in a very solid and spesific (or unspesific) structure making countless of these atoms lumped together pretty darn still in a macroscopic perspective. So what we see is not really wrong, because our universe behaves like this on the large scale, but if we could see the atoms we would see the jiggling. Anyway, I was just trying to make a point with the melting walls thingy, because when you see walls melt while pretty high on hallucinogens the walls aren't really melting. If they did, that would mean the walls underwent a pretty clear physical process that anyone else would be able to see and detect.

I agree that the more complex DMT experiences can't be explained so easily, which is pretty obvious too, because we don't have good answers yet. We can't even thoroughly and satisfactory describe how consciousness arises in the brain, though we have some pretty clear correlations between the workings of the brain and our minds. I also agree that DMT experiences have a lot more variety than that do most other drugs, but the physiological processes DMT creates is always the same. The problem really is that DMT affects consciousness so radically, and we have pretty individual mental setups that also changes from day to day, and thus the experiences must vary from person to person and from day to day. Kinda like your dreams vary.

But I don't see this as an exception that implies DMT-experiences to be something more than disturbed brains, just like dreams aren't an exception that implies where you go and what you do in your dreams are happening outside your own mind. However, many DMT experiences do share some similarities.

Yes, I readily admit I have a strong materialistic bias (probably because I study physics), and I readily acknowledge that I might be wrong with this assumption. I also know that it is a belief, an assumption, because as you've pointed out we can't ultimately prove that we are or that we are not just a "brain in the vat" or inside a simulation etc.


This is not unlikely in itself, but the problem is that if we are somehow connected to these other realms, we are causually linked to them. This means we should be able to demonstrate this relationship through the scientific method pretty easily, as science study and demonstrate causal relationships. So far, DMT realms have evaded this. This idea is totally independent and untouched by solipsism or similar considerations in just the same way the casual relationship between for example temperature and the energy of a system is totally independent and untouched.


I don't see myself fitting into any of these points, if that's what you were insinuating.
I don't draw conclusions first and then find evidence after. I draw conclusions, or at least base my assumptions, in available evidence. I do not stay in comfort of what I already believe, because there is a lot more emotional comfort for me to believe in DMT-realms. To scientifically and rationally challenge beliefs in these things is harder than just believing imo. I do not consider comforting beliefs to automaticalle be correct. I do not refute things that can't be explained. I do not consider uncertainty to be painful, in fact it is the very thing I enjoy while I study physics. The world is not simple at all, it is incredibly complex, but the laws governing a lot of phenomena can be considered to be relatively simple. And when it comes to workings of the universe, it is either right or wrong.

I hope I didn't misunderstand you, because if I did then what written above was unecessary.

I am not at all certain consensus reality is ultimately real, because we cannot know and this I acknowledge. However, considering consensus reality as a big illusion, "brain in a vat", a computer simulation etc has no practical significance, and either you visit "real" DMT realms or you don't. Using the metaphysical ideas mentioned above as a basic axiom won't lead us anywhere me thinks. However, if we just accept that we are here now, in this universe/reality, not taking into account solipsism or simulation considerations etc we can allow ourselves to say pretty much about our reality. We can have three basic axioms, or propositions of faith:

* There is an external world that exists independently of our minds.
* There are quantifiable natural laws that describe how things happen in this world, and we can attempt to understand them.
* These natural laws won’t change when we’re not looking; the universe isn’t totally chaotic.

So far this faith is very well founded, and accepting these, or at least working out of these, have led us to have an exponential growth of knowledge and understanding. What used to be explained with religion, myths and fairy tales are now explained more correctly through science. Empirical evidence that lies in the heart of the scientific methodology, or the naturalistic methodology if you wish, is not simply one type of evidence, but rather it is the only evidence that we can rely on, because it is reproducible.

And again, the "brain in a vat" argument is not an argument at all, because we in principle can't know anything about what could or could not lie outside of all that is for us. DMT does not lie outside of all that is for us, because we take the drug and have these experiences. It falls within our reality somehow, either as real events relative to all that is for us, or as hallucinations. I have argued again and again that your "you can't prove consensus reality ultimately is real because of metaphysical consideration x, y and z" is actually not an argument at all in this discussion, but a whole different one with a different meaning.

The concept of reality is only about what we perceive to be consistent. This is simply as real as it gets for us in this universe.

Of course not, this is impossible. However:

We live in a universe. We are here now. This universe can in principle be totally chaotic and inconsistent, it can be completely consistent and follow certain rules or of course anything in between. When we make measurements and observations, they imply that the universe until now is consistent in its behaviour and that it is bound to certain rules, or as Richard Feynman said "the rules of the game". For every observation and measurement we make that confirm this to be the case, the probability for a chaotic and inconsistent universe drops, and the probability that the universe is consistent in its workings is raised accordingly. From this we build theoretical models, often based in mathematical formalism, and we try to make these theories match how the universe appears to be. For every rule or consistent theory that is added, and for every hypotheses that are disputed because they fail to represent the universe, the difference between the rules we find and the rules the universe follows must become less and less - science converges towards the universe itself with ever increasing accuracy.