“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says
Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness
soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I
ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like
everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It
didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions
going on.”
I'm not exactly sure how close I came to dying, but I had the exact opposite experience in the ER one night.
I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER.
We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc.
So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing.
I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better.
I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments.
Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something.
After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.
> “My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.”
It's because people often quote things by putting a number of spaces between the text on each line, but hacker news interprets that as a code block, not as a quote. It's reasonable to not wrap code blocks; the real problem is that HN doesn't have formatting options for quotes.
I would say that you were very much alive, and in the moment :) ... reminds me of one of Laurie Anderson's monologues where she describes being carried down off a mountain by a fellow hiker because she was about to die (from altitude sickness I think), and the hiker told her stories the whole way down in order to give her something to focus on...
what you're describing sounds exactly like an anxiety/panic attack (I dealt with them for years). You become hyper aware of your body and every sensation.
As another reply pointed out, this is one of the two main paths that intense experiences can go down. I have had psychedelic experiences that were just magnified panic attacks and similar to what you described. That is one path, and usually comes about from resisting the experience. The other path is relaxing into the void/ego death/<insert descriptor here> and going with the flow. This will normally result in what the quote describes.
This is why it is always concerning for me when people recommend psychedelics to anyone without knowing what kind of person they are/what state they are in. For trips, context and intention is EVERYTHING. If you are able to relax in the face of uncertainty and trust the experience, then you can have life changing experiences. If you are in a bad state of mind or if your life is in disarray, that will be magnified and you can also have life changing experiences, but not in a good way (I didn't face major anxiety before a bad mushroom trip).
Psychedelic experiences are built upon the psyche of the person experiencing them, so people can have exact opposite experiences taking the same dose of the same substance depending on their state of mind.
I had a similar experience from a bad trip on acid. I felt like I had had a stroke while trying to leave my body, and got pulled hard back into the physical realm. All I could feel was my flesh, tongue, teeth, skin, breath, heartbeat, etc. Everything was physical machinery, and had lost all meaning and purpose. It was the most horrific experience I've ever went through by far.
In my early 20's, my obsession was eastern spirituality. I was especially drawn towards taoism and read several books on it. In one of the books (written by a Westerner) there was entire chapters dedicated to breathing exercises. Taoists believe the spirit and the body meet at your breath because it is simultaneously a voluntary and involuntary process.
Focus on your breathing now, you can control it. But just a minute ago, your body was doing it for you with no input from you.
I think there's a difference between dying and being OK with it and the opposite.
I would hope when I get to the point that I am actually dying, I could feel a little more like the quote than you did when you were dying, which sounds terrifying. :)
On the other hand, 5-Meo-DMT (5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), comes in the form of an organic lab-produced extract, or the Bufo Alvarius venom, takes it to a completely different level of non-duality and complete and utter shattering of your ego (temporarily of course, for about 20 minutes). Someone named Albert Most discovered this bizarre compound a few decades back by smoking the venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert toad somewhere in New Mexico if I recall correctly. I haven't tried it myself but going down a rabbit hole of reports and practitioners on YouTube is in and of itself a profound trip: https://youtu.be/PQctOMSmBuk . EDIT: Here is the piece Vice did on Albert Most: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jbzI4bcUw
It seems mundane when you live in NM. But I spent a decade in LV, NV. I’m very grateful to be back in NM. This place even had a Burning Man celebration before California afaik.
he was literally trying different things and seeing what they do to him. he says so in the interview with Hamilton Morris in an episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia on Viceland.
I think it's important to stress the fact that DMT does not feel like being thrown in a meat-grinder, or being impaled in a car accident, or any other grisly way to die. Really, it might be more correct to say "Death might feel like a DMT trip" because many have experienced a DMT trip, but it's not every day you get to experience death. Of course, it makes for a less interesting title.
People experience death (and psychoactives) in a variety of ways, and its metaphorical usage reflects that. The meat-grinder sense maps better to stimulants (ie., caffeine, amphetamine, etc) whereas the exhausting, perhaps harrowing and enlightening sense of death is what we tend to experience with the psychedelics.
back in the day I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms and experienced what is called 'ego death'. basically, you lose a sense of self and identity. You are literally a blank slate. It was a surreal experience and I felt panicky like 'oh shit i think im dead but im still concious'.
Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experiencing reality in the rawest form, the only truth we have in the universe is math, in all shapes and forms, we live inside the 'body of god' that is math, but of course, so extremely complex to express in our 3rd dimensional world.
Yeah, that can be a frightening state. And yet, it was my favorite part, during the peak of the peak. To some degree, the rest of the trip was just something to be endured. Although I eventually learned to go dancing or bike riding or whatever.
The absolute worst combination is marijuana on the tail of an LSD peak. Your short term memory drops to about 100 msec. I spent a few hours, decades ago, reminding a friend who they were, and that everything would be OK in a few hours. And it was hard work, because I could barely remember who I was, and who they were ;)
yes I should clarify that after the experience, it felt like I had been in a sauna for the psyche. Basically, I had lingering sense of peace and wellness.
The scariest shit I've seen while tripping was seeing the Eye of Providence. What's more creepy is that this is a common symbol people experienced. For example, I didn't know what the hell was a third eye until I saw it. It was unbelievable.
It changed my life. It gave me an unbiased raw truths about myself, circumstances, and ultimately the realization that we are where we are because of our decisions in the past.
Everyone should consume psilocybin mushrooms once. LSD you buy off the street can be laced. But good ol' mushrooms will never let you down.
That's so weird. I experienced the same thing the first time I took mushrooms as a teenager. I had no idea what a trip was. There were a few notable things in the trip but one thing that stood out was the eye of providence. I can't for the life of me think why that appeared since it's not something I can really associate with anything in my life up to that point. I'm not a religious person and not very spiritual but this is one of the things that has always stuck with me. It is pretty weird and spooky what it symbolises. To be honest, that was a profound turning point in my life.
Can you describe more what you meant by seeing eye of providence? What was the context around it? What exactly did you see, where, and what was happening? I’m just curious... did you search for the meaning after the fact? I take it you didn’t know it was called the eye of providence prior to that?
I had my eyes closed and was just watching stuff like silvery reflections and fractal like patterns and waves. At some point it just appeared as a triangle with an eye in it. It was a bit mysterious and may have had a slight glow to it. It wasn't a negative thing for me. I can't remember exactly but I think it probably was at the top of a pyramid.
I didn't search for it until maybe 10 or so years later and started getting a bit buzzed out about it all. I didn't know what it was until then, at which point I realised it was on the dollar bill. Even if I had (likely) seen it before the trip it wasn't something that was part of my everyday life or consciousness, which makes it very weird.
holy shit. was it shiny and pulsating? I saw the eye but no pyramid. But I recognize the eye from the dollar bill.
All I remember is looking at the shining, pulsating, eye and thinking, so this is what Truth looks like. No idea what the fuck that meant but I figured it out, and it was like being punched in the face-basically I looked at every aspect of my life, and that's what the "Eye" was implying to "Look", basically examine my life to figure out what needs to be done.
It was not negative at all but more of a WTF I WANT THIS TRIP TO STOP BUT IM ALSO FASCINATED. I use caps to illustrate the full state of panic and calm I was in.
After the trip and I googled 'third eye symbol' and I was shocked to see the similarities to the "Eye" I had witnessed but with a shape that looks like a thunder icon, which curiously enough is very similar to the Sanskrit for third eye....I have never ever seen it before either
Needless to say, my interest in hinduism and chakra exploded. i believe that I truly experienced a third eye opening moment. Like I was on a different plane of existence, where I am part of the whole, and that everything is everything and the most shocking conclusion of all:
There are dimensions beyond our world. In 3rd dimension, things don't make sense but in higher dimensions, the math works out according to Michio Kaku. His book goes into full detail but basically I absolutely believe that we are not seeing the true reality and that we might have been led on this path by very evil and greedy people who abuses the scientific process to invalidate the existence of common spiritual human experiences that arose indepedently by different civilizations but declared "null and void" by a highly materialistic driven empire where it's citizens are so spiritually starved that they will never be happy. No matter how rich and powerful their country becomes.
It's the eye of God, in a triangle. The one on $1 bills. That is, God is provident aka watching us, watching out for us, and providing guidance and stuff.
I don't recall ever seeing that. I did experience Hell, for a while during one LSD peak. But it wasn't painful, just freaky. I was into Hieronymus Bosch at the time, and had just watched "Spawn" ;)
My favorite hallucinations were tangled chains of 3D characters, in constant writhing motion, and rotating on their axes. And not just rotating, but apparently rotating through higher dimensions.[0]
As I recall, the characters looked like letters or numbers. Or like Hofstadter's GEB block. But as long as I was high enough to see them, I was too high to understand them. Or to remember, anyway.
I also had the sense that their activity correlated with what was happening in meatspace, what I was seeing and hearing, and also what I was thinking. And it's my guess that LSD, among other things, breaks down barriers between hierarchical levels in brain activity.
that's whats fucked up about it. I am not religious at all. Yet, what I experienced was on a spiritual level with real changes.
it's crazy how common the themes are. did you hear extra-terrestrials? Like I literally heard a thought broadcasted from somewhere not on earth with the message "we aren't from earth but we are gonna help you out. clean your fucking room. move your computer to living room. get your shit together"
.... needless to say that was a big turning point
I haven't done mushrooms since and I'm kinda scared to experience the whole thing again.
People joke about fatuous "meaning of life" insights. But in my experience, you often do see "the big picture" of your life, and of everything. However, it's hard to remember stuff like that. And it fades pretty quickly, back into the slog of day-to-day life. I also got that from doing work with est/Landmark, NLP, Tony Robbins, etc. Not that they encourage the use of psychedelics ;)
I'm reminded of Tool's "Rosetta Stoned".[0,1]
...
10 to 2 AM, X, Yogi DMT, and a box of Krispy Kremes
...
When a flaming stealth banana split the sky
...
Then the X-Files being
...
Did a slow-mo Matrix descent
Outta the butt end of the banana vessel
And hovered above my bug-eyes, my gaping jaw
...
He said, "You are the chosen one
The one who will deliver the message
A message of hope for those who choose to hear it
And a warning for those who do not."
...
See, they took me by the hand
And invited me right in
Then they showed me something
I don't even know where to begin
...
Can't remember what they said
...
Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be the one
Born to bear and bring to all the details of our ending
To write it down for all the world to see
But I forgot my pen
...
Nope, I didn't hear voices. I had some auditory hallucinations though. It was mostly overwhelmingly positive and very spiritual to the point of making me cry.
well, thanks to them, i have got some of my life back in order.
it could be that the mushroom trip creates a dissociation from internal thoughts and perceptions of the ego vs ego-less self, so you 'hear' your own thoughts.
I'm really interested in trying it out, but I live in mainland China right now. Have no idea who I could even contact about getting some, even in places like Taiwan or Thailand.
Also, the fundamental methodology is to start with an extremely small amount. If there are no observable effects after some hours, eat double the amount. And repeat until there are clear effects, and decide if it's something useful. For food, for fun, or to use for poisoning enemies.
There are many species that contain psilocybin. I don't know China at all, but I'd be surprised if some weren't endemic. So you'd need to do some research. I my experience, they tend to grow on cow shit. And they're somewhat unusual, in that they turn blue when bruised.
In Indonesia they're legal, you can buy mushroom shakes at the beach. In general there are endemic psilocybin mushrooms most everywhere, though it might be illegal just to pick them, like in my home country Norway.
This mirrors dozens of my own ego death experiences as well. Like, exactly. It's so hard to grapple with and explain to people who have never experienced it. This was a good description
> “There is nothing here to begin to enable us to propose that on DMT, you literally transcend the laws of this universe and do actually go to another world,” he says.
This is faulty thinking. An afterlife doesn’t presuppose a violation of natural laws, or a separate world. It just means you continue living in a different form.
The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure.
The causal eelationship needn’t even be mind-out. If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing.
Given that we continue to discover entirely new structures in both the biological world and our own bodies, which were hiding in plain sight, I don’t find this implausible.
That’s not to mention psychoaocial structures which science hardly can model, and to which our individual minds are very tightly coupled.
Thank you for sharing. I think too often we assume the concept of an "afterlife" implies some kind of supernatural or religious phenomenon. Since we don't have proof of it I can't say I definitely believe such a thing exists, but I certainly believe it's possible. If there is an "afterlife" I believe it fits into our natural laws and can be explained and observed scientifically - we just haven't discovered all of the information we need yet.
It’s tricky, because the kinds of natural laws that are necessary for the existence of an afterlife are the same kinds of natural laws that invalidate the principle of physicalism or materialism, which is the consensus view of the scientific establishment today. So if you decide to investigate something easier to test for than “the afterlife” which could also plausibly exist with these expanded natural laws—like remote viewing, or the effects that consciousness has on physical systems—your research will be generally dismissed as quackery. Not many folks will try to replicate your results, or even spend the effort to examine them deeply for flaws, because the assumption is “we already know that cannot happen, so you’ve done something wrong in your setup or you’re lying.”
There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on; the challenge lies in getting more skeptics to seriously evaluate it. Some HNer years ago turned me onto the book Irreducible Mind, whose last hundred pages or so is a bibliography of evidence for this kind of thing provided by people who say “I don’t believe it, but I can’t explain it.” But a lot of that evidence comes from skeptics testing exceptional individuals, and James Randi did a good job of showing how fakers can fool scientists, so I can’t really say how reliable it is other than as a jumping-off point for further study.
I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication.
Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is:
> the existence of an afterlife are the same kinds of natural laws that invalidate the principle of physicalism or materialism
I don't see why that follows.
There are lots of phenomena in the world, like money, which are manifest in a non-physical substrate. Many many other things are immaterial. The characters I am typing right now are immaterial. There are bits in memory that represent the characters, but it's only in interplay with an entire system of physical structures that you can say the characters themselves are manifest. You can't point somewhere and say "that's where the character is". It's diffuse across a bunch systems in such a way that it's not manifest in any one location.
Almost all of our social and political realities are like this. Where is Conservatism? Where is calculus? These are not things with locations, which is what makes them extremely difficult to study, which is why so many people reject things like Social Psychology or Science Studies as bunk science.
Money, algebra, and the capital M that starts this sentence are all things that exist, in a way that's totally compatible with materialism. It's not necessary to claim that these things exist outside of a material substrate. They merely exist above it. Distinct from it, yet contained within it. Fully determined by its laws, but not described by them.
Consciousness is an abstract, non-physical structure and concept, but everything we know suggests it is inextricably tied to and an emergent phenomenon of the brain.
In the distant future there may be a way to extract and transfer consciousness into a new substrate, but with current technology, there's no reason to believe any sort of life, consciousness, sentience, awareness, etc. after death is possible at all. Just because it's possible in theory doesn't mean that applies to any currently living humans.
> everything we know suggests it is inextricably tied to and an emergent phenomenon of the brain
I don’t think that’s universally accepted. I think trees are conscious and they have no brain.
I think the brain does create an illusion that other things are not conscious. It tricks us into thinking our own consciousnesses are distinct from the rest of consciousness. And that’s been a useful adaptation for us. And it confuses the hell out of consciousness philosophers. But we were conscious before we evolved it. It’s possible we were human before we evolved it.
> In the distant future there may be a way to extract and transfer consciousness into a new substrate
It’s possible such a thing already exists. We have ancient stories about it. If it were true it would be very difficult to detect.
If the universe is a simulation then it seems extremely unlikely that consciousnesses would never be read, just operating until they get eaten by the 2nd law.
>I don’t think that’s universally accepted. I think trees are conscious and they have no brain.
I don't think consciousness of trees is accepted by nearly anyone. But even if any trees were conscious, I don't see how it helps your argument at all.
>I think the brain does create an illusion that other things are not conscious. It tricks us into thinking our own consciousnesses are distinct from the rest of consciousness.
Yes, but consciousness of animals doesn't really mean anything here. If anything, it's a point in favor of the opposite side: that consciousness really isn't very special.
>It’s possible such a thing already exists. We have ancient stories about it. If it were true it would be very difficult to detect.
Many things are possible. We have ancient stories about many of them. If they were true they would be very difficult to detect. That's why the basic scientific principle is falsifiability.
>If the universe is a simulation then it seems extremely unlikely that consciousnesses would never be read, just operating until they get eaten by the 2nd law.
I don't agree. If the universe is a simulation then they could be read, but they don't have to be, and I don't think it's extremely unlikely that they wouldn't be. If it's a very "raw" or "real" simulation with no interference, they could very well just dissipate into nothing.
Assuming it is a simulation, what happens when you get shot in the head and lose brain function? Where is your consciousness at that moment? Is there a pre-damage backup somewhere? When was the backup taken? If backups are taken every instant or otherwise very infrequently, which one is the "real" state after you die? The one from right before the damage occurred? Something picked at random? If there is no backup needed because there is instead just some outside extra-dimensional consciousness "force" or "energy" existing since long ago, what is that thing doing exactly when you suffer from a brain injury? Does it just "stop working" in or "lose connection" to those parts of the brain? What is it doing when we're children?
I think even if we're in a simulation where nearly all living things are conscious, the chances of some kind of post-death experience is still basically zero.
>There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on
Such as what? I don't believe there is.
>I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication.
>Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is:
As you alluded to earlier in your post, this is complete quackery. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that quantum uncertainty has no relation to human (or any other) consciousness.
There's nothing to suggest that human (or dog or dolphin or octopus) consciousness is magical, supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical, or unable to be explained or understood.
Can you link the replication study or analysis that reveals the flaw in the original?
> There's nothing to suggest that human consciousness is magical, supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical, or unable to be explained
I don’t think anyone is trying to argue against you. We’re just saying there is more to understand than science has so far done. We’re not saying science can’t reach what we imagine, just that it’s tough, and may require new physics.
Luckily modern physics also requires new physics. So we’re not alone.
https://medium.com/@roblea_63049/the-double-slit-experiment-... is one of many examples of double slit "woo" debunking. In short, the issue is that any attempt at measuring the particle's position necessarily causes the wave function to collapse. This measuring has no relation to consciousness.
> If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing.
'You', 'experience', 'presence', and 'thing' are far too ill-defined for this to have meaning here.
Very well put. Not taking a stance, but rather just analyzing the constraints on possible conclusions.
> The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure.
Especially this part is phrased so accurately. Of course we are yet to observe anything similar to it either. Something that survives death and is capable of supporting thought. It would have to be something material, right?
Material yes. Not necessarily atomic though. Probably electrical since consciousness seems fairly electrical for humans.
Personally, I think the idea that you and I are separate is an illusion we evolved in order to protect ourselves more fiercely and to be more willing to kill.
Without it, you would understand that you are not separate from the rest of the living world,
that your mind is a space where many immortal psychic creatures cross paths.
And part of life is to locate your self, that specific set of crossings, in the world.
So, immortal life just means dissociating from your body and associating with your crossings as they are in the world. (DMT is a dissociative so you can see how it could help.) A fully “enlightened” person will have located a complete, stable set of crossings, dissociated from everything else in their body, and broadcast that message out into the biosphere sufficiently long enough for it to be recorded.
There is more to this picture, involving non-“enlightened” reincarnation, which is something the inverse of those crossings will do at death as a form of rebalancing the consciousnesses disks, like a RAID array.
Most of these things are psychosocial. Believing them is more a matter of believing that you are as much a psychosocial being as you are a physical one.
The feature that sets DMT apart from other psychedelics such as LSD or mushrooms is the persistent environment called "hyperspace". In short, various psychonauts over the years have discovered an environment - for lack of a better word - they named hyperspace, which consists of surprisingly similar perceived attributes _over many different observers_.
Experienced LSD/mushroom users know that there is a tremendous degree of subjectivity and symbol/archetype emergence in their trips. If I only had a few words to describe the LSD/mushroom experience it would be "lack of clarity". It's as if one is looking through a scanner darkly (personal unconscious).
With DMT, this is not the case. There is no perceived intermediate filter, nothing impure or fuzzy. One feels as if one is already there and directly interfacing with the space itself. Rather than exploring his own psyche, a DMT user feels like he's exploring an entirely new space. This becomes apparent even when dealing with the difficulties of trying to use shared language to describe the experience with other explorers in order to discover common attributes [1].
This is often my experience too - DMT is like being in VR. The geometry is simplified - lots of smooth curves and sharp angles, mostly flat textures or gradients. And it's populated by barely intelligent entities made of the same stuff.
Can anyone give a reason in darwinian terms, for why brains would evolve a feeling of detachment and contentment near death? I can't project a selfish-gene reason.
Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual
That's not entirely true. If it impacts your direct descendents or even distant relatives, there'll still be an impact assuming you share the genes in question.
If you consider taking a role of "grandparenting" to be a potentially positive role in "your ability to reproduce", then both you and mjg59 are kind of agreeing there.
You don't have to copulate in order to express "your ability to reproduce". Keep in mind that your family also has your genes so if you just provide resources for them to reproduce, a part of you reproduces as well. This could be a mechanism to combat fear of death, which perhaps was making people less likely to have sex?
It could be social. Imagine the family surrounding the deathbed of an elder, dying relative. It's probably the case that the relative is observed closely while 'crossing over,' and depending on the relatives' interpretation of what's happening to their dying loved one, they may be left at peace or in turmoil. So maybe DMT has to do with creating the desired appearance to communicate to loved ones at the deathbed.
Maybe the human (or generally any conscious nervous system) existence is such an anxious experience that finally realizing it was all a trip that is ending is such a giant relief that the imminent death feels like a warm home? Not to sound too bleak but it would explain the contentment
I'm reaching, but since family units stuck together to hunt and for protection, and children were likely near their parents when death came, so perhaps it is a mechanism to avoid potentially destroying/harming (directly or indirectly) any offspring in a final flash of agony-fueled irrational violent rage.
The idea is, in other words, that those who somehow went amok near death perhaps reduced their number of offspring, or damaged the family unit (e.g. destroyed their shelters or food), therefore hindering those genes from spreading, therefore the selection pressure to remove this behaviour.
You can think of it another way: why do we feel stressed in dangerous situation and pain when we are wounded?
Stress is us preparing for fight of flight, which is good for survival. Pain prevents us from further damaging our body. Stress overrides pain because your future well being doesn't matter if your die now.
Now, when you are near death, when you know there is nothing you can do, stress becomes useless, because you can't flee or fight back. So there is no downside to detachment and contentment.
Now the advantage may be that it may be the best response if, by chance, you survive. You don't overwork yourself, you are less likely to suffer mental breakdown afterwards, etc...
Keep in mind that everyone who experienced NDEs survived, obviously. So NDEs are not death experiences, more like survival experiences.
Sometimes there is no reason. That might just be symptoms of gradual neuronal failure. It’s unlikely that the sensation of dying significantly increases or decreases the likelihood of passing on one’s lineage, except maybe imparting a peaceful impression on family around you.
A lot of the folk-lore "there is no reason" stuff, turns out to be less clear. Appendix has a function in prior lineage, its remnant. Tonsils? well.. turns out kids who have 'em removed suffer life long consequence. So whilst I too am tempted to the 'there is no reason, its just happenstance' it worries me that an awful lot of things about the body, turn out to be less happenstance than we thought. Like.. altriusm or even the discovery gay behaviour is normal in lots of species. Arguing 'its just coincidence' feels pretty weak.
But the bleak argument might work. Keep the young 'uns motivated to breed, it helps in the long term.
We're a long time dead. "Enjoy yourself, its later than you think"
For their to be an evolutionary reason for it, it has to increase fitness in some fashion. Roughly speaking, it has to increase the chances of propagating your genes. It seems very unlikely that the character of "near death experiences" could have an impact upon fitness.
Saying that something doesn't have an evolutionary reason is not the same as saying it's just coincidence. Our bodies (including our brains) are very complex interconnected processes. There's going to be all sorts of effects when those processes break down, and even if those don't have an evolutionary purpose, that doesn't mean they're just coincidence.
This is a factual matter, which has nothing to do with an argument being bleak or not.
We can go the other way and this feeling of detachment and contentment might be what we evolved away from, but as our systems and cognitive functioning deteriorate we return to this state.
For instance take pain. People view pain as negative but it's of course a great positive from an evolutionary point of view. Not everything (or even everybody) experiences pain, but those that do are going to be vastly more likely to succeed in life than those that don't. Your reaction to recoil from pain is not because the interaction itself is painful but because you have evolved instincts that tell you that what you're feeling is likely detrimental to your health and the situation needs to be resolved instantly, on a subconscious, level.
As your pain receptors shut down it would ostensibly feel pleasant, but in reality it would just be one of the most important, and useful, evolutionary tools we have turning off.
Well we don't really understand the nature of "feelings", so the answers are going to be very speculative. But a better question might be: why do we feel contentment at all? Why isn't it all just fear and rage all the time, with certain things lessening the fear and rage, like eating, pooping, and copulating? After all, if we avoid death and reproduce, the genes get passed on - evolution doesn't care about feelings. This entirely sidesteps discussion about the epiphenomenalality of conscious experience and how/whether it can be "causal" in any sense.
"I don't want to die" has a pretty strong biological determinancy to it. It helps, mostly in adverse situations. Flipping over to "meh, who needs bodies" is inexplicable (to me)
I am an anxious person. About a decade ago I was a passenger and at one point I was within about one second of almost certain contact with a vertical box section on a very slow moving vehicle. There was no way that my friend, and inexperienced driver, could brake in time.
That one second was slow and I was unnervingly calm. Right at the last minute with probably less than 200ms to go, the driver very gently swerved and we must have avoided collision by less than two inches. Quarter inch if we include wing mirrors. My friend, the driver asked later why I didn't say anything. I explained that had I panicked, he would have panicked and we would probably both be dead.
I was driving 60 the speed limit on a rainy day in southern Cali when a truck appeared out of nowhere, spinning into my path. I had a very brief ‘oh shit, this could be the end of me and my wife ‘ moment and then I calmly swerved to the left into oncoming lane that was empty at the time. The back of my car clipped the spinning vehicle at probably full speed perhaps slower If I slowed down (I can’t remember if I did) and we spun a complete rotation and a half to end up on the oppoite side of the road facing the opposite direction. My wife went into full panic mode while I was as calm as I’d ever been for reasons unknown to me. I realized later had I panicked and waited a second longer to take action, we’d likely both be dead now. I don’t know if t all happened too fast or if my mind decided to stay chill instead of panicking, but I’m glad i did what I did and that there were no cars in the other lane.
Could be that once you've reproduced and sufficiently cared for your offspring, it's preferable that you don't waste resources on yourself. Contentment and even apathy could be beneficial (from an evolutionary perspective) at that point.
I have a vague recollection of someone suggesting small bits of DMT might be released while we sleep and that our dreams are like snack low key trips.
Well dreams are a fairly beneficial things to have especially if you have some epiphany or figure out the solution to a problem you're having.
The near death thing might just be your brain dumping that DMT out of your pineal gland all at once either when your body is shutting down from natural causes or when you are in some kind of traumatic accident.
Because life is a prison of constant struggle and suffering, the experience of ego death is that of shedding one's attachments that one struggles for, and the last chains keeping them from freedom are that of their identity, consciousness, and ultimately of life itself. The less the past, present, future, and you there is to care about, the more blissfully free whatever remains of you becomes.
My theory is that it's not so much our brain creating a feeling of detachment and Contentment but rather the brain reverting back to its initial state.
Darwinism is the least likely explanation of evolution. Randomness? Take a look at how some species evolved in parallel to similar organisms; one was extremely unlikely, two or more is impossible. Darwin was quite foolish, but he had friends in the right places. Just another flat-earth belief.
As for the DMT, there's only one way to find out. One grain of pure DMT in a pipe and get your answers.
I don’t live in the US so I don’t have the opportunity to meet up with you guys, but I just wanted to say that your mention of “a HN friend” piqued my interest. Is that to say you guys met through HN? Does that happen often, that people meet through HN?
If it's near death experiences you want, no need to push the boat out - just skip dinner, go to the pub, drink 7 pints of beer, have a kebab (you'll probably be hungry by then), go home, drink the 2 bottles of beer you found in the fridge, that and eat the pork pie, then sleep for 6 hours, then wake up.
The article says the administered dose is well short of toxic and merely simulates a near death experience. People can and frequently do experience actual actual death while engaging in alchoholic revelry.
I’m not opposed to drinking, but the risks of a controlled study described in the article don’t seem remotely comparable to an evening out on the town. If I had a dollar for every person who died from falling over or passing out and drowning in their own vomit due to alcohol, I’m pretty sure I could afford all the South America shamen-led ayahuasca trips I wanted.(1)
(1) EDIT: which is admittedly somewhere between zero and one.
I'm not sure what British pork pie is like, but one of my ex girlfriends used to make pork pies. They were delicious, but as dense as neutronium and difficult to digest even under ideal conditions.
Yes, quite so, and British pork pies are exactly the same. Very nice - tasty pig meat, tasty jelly, and a tasty lard casing :D - but extremely dense. Normally you'd have a small slice, appreciate it for what it is, then put it back in the fridge and ignore it until at least the next day.
Normal rules do not apply when shitfaced, however, and it turns out you'll just quite happily pop half a kilo of this stuff into your piehole without even thinking. Fast forward 8-12 hours, and... well, you can guess the rest. It is the devil's own food, and it probably ought to be banned. How are folk supposed to manage, if after drinking a mere 7-10 pints of beer it proves so irresistible?
The key distinction here is between dying and all of the unpleasant stuff that normally comes with it. I've experienced loss of body awareness with LSD, psilocybin and DMT. But what didn't come with it was pain, cardiopulmonary stress, cramping, and so on. So it was easy to relax, and let go of body and consciousness. With just naked virtual awareness left.
So anyway, I can imagine that a pleasant death from opioid or barbiturate overdose might be comparable. Or maybe breathing helium, where there's no overt respiratory feedback. Or maybe hypothermia, although in my experience that involved too much twitching around.
Ive done DMT probably 10-15 times in my life so far but quit all recreational drugs ~3 years ago. My last trip being the most intense; me and a friend used a dabbing rig and poured about a gram of dmt onto the heated metal nail - for 20 minutes but what seemed like eternity I Observed the birth, life, and death of myself multiple times over until I finally came back down to the ‘real world’.
This. I spent a solid year reflecting and trying to understand everything that happened during my first LSD experience. The whole thing simply transcends anything you have ever experienced.
When you “see” a strange loop involving your mind creating the physical world as you know it, and at the same time realizing the physical world enables your mind, it can take a long time to unpack. Sure when I’m here, we say that the mind is just a construct within he physical world, that just happens to be modeling the physical world. But that Doesn’t make it any less of a significant experience.
It was like seeing the concept of ying-yang (duality and mutual dependence) reflected onto mind-body problem, and everything else.
Oh great times when you get bored of all the analytical logic problems of the everyday world. :)
I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.
You probably know this but for the benefit of others: Monoamine oxidase inhibitors will make you feel pretty awful without paying close attention to diet for several days.
Even following a dieta won't necessarily keep you from having a physically uncomfortable time with ayahuasca! But it's virtually guaranteed if you do not.
Yes. And the article didn't make that clear enough. The biological lifetime of DMT is very short, because there are enzymes (monoamine oxidase aka MAO) in many tissues. So the effects last 15-30 minutes. But ayahuasca includes MAO inhibitors, so the effects can last for many hours. And it's mainly the MAO inhibitors that make users feel ill.
I used to have a book about ayahusca-like formulations, using plants from various continents. But I've forgotten the name. Basically, many plants contain DMT, and many others contain MAO inhibitors. Also, I believe that one can combine some MAO inhibiting antidepressants, such as selegiline, with DMT.
I had the understanding beforehand — but the pain completely overwhelmed the amount of curiosity I had for the experience — brain said don’t drink more - and after that it was just sitting in a painful body until recovery ...
One thing people talk about is the short-lived effects of DMT, and how they would like more time in the the DMT space. But as I understand it, your body doesn't build up a resistance to it. The DMTx [0] project is seeking to exploit this property and created extended-state DMT experiences using some basic medical techniques. Also, they are looking for volunteers.
That sounds awesome. I wish I could pay to lie in a hospital bed and have a medical professional administer intravenous DMT just for a short period (at least initially). Hopefully this work will bring us closer to a world where supervised DMT voyages are available to the public.
Adding hamalas a rima Will prolong the experience to around 1 hour if smoked. Using hamalas eg putting it under your toungue first Can prolong it to several hours. The changa trip is Also much more benefitial and feels nicer.
> "Using pharmacokinetic modeling and DMT blood sampling data, we demonstrate that the unique pharmacological characteristics of DMT, which also include a rapid onset and lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects, make it amenable to administration by target-controlled intravenous infusion. This is a technology developed to maintain a stable brain concentration of anesthetic drugs during surgery."
IV drip doesn’t have the amount of fine regulation and monitoring necessary to keep someone in the DMT state. Last I heard they were planning to get a dialysis machine to do it.
I feel at some point we changed what an NDE was really categorized as. When Rick Strassman did his research in the 90's and wrote DMT the spirit molecule he stated that classical NDEs were distinct from alien encounters and that in his trials alien encounters were far more common than NDE. Now it seems that alien encounters are also considered NDEs.
It feels like having sex with the Universe. Pure dmt is more “cold” experience. With hamalas (changa/rima) its a more warm prolonged loving experience that happens more gradually Where the pure is more a fast blast into space. Its medicine and Works sonders for the mind. It saved marriges, lifes, jobs among my friends.
Once when taking mushrooms I saw myself go into countless pieces in something that resembled a starburst. It was beautiful. I felt completely at ease. Then a profound realisation came to me; This is death. Then I connected the two.
Being neither an experienced drug user nor American, I misread that similarly (Department of Motor Transport?) before remembering that DMT is a drug because I saw it in the title of a documentary on Netflix.
I don't know if my life has just been too sheltered, or not sheltered enough, because I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted to buy anything not available over the counter.
I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER.
We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc.
So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing.
I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better.
I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments.
Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something.
After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.
Mobile-readable quote:
> “My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.”
Thanks.
I don’t get why hn mobile version doesn’t take this into account. Should be just a single simple css rule...
It's because people often quote things by putting a number of spaces between the text on each line, but hacker news interprets that as a code block, not as a quote. It's reasonable to not wrap code blocks; the real problem is that HN doesn't have formatting options for quotes.
> "the real problem is that HN doesn't have formatting options for quotes."
I always format my quotes the same way Stratoscope just did and think it's reasonably obvious to tell that it's a quote.
I would say that you were very much alive, and in the moment :) ... reminds me of one of Laurie Anderson's monologues where she describes being carried down off a mountain by a fellow hiker because she was about to die (from altitude sickness I think), and the hiker told her stories the whole way down in order to give her something to focus on...
what you're describing sounds exactly like an anxiety/panic attack (I dealt with them for years). You become hyper aware of your body and every sensation.
As another reply pointed out, this is one of the two main paths that intense experiences can go down. I have had psychedelic experiences that were just magnified panic attacks and similar to what you described. That is one path, and usually comes about from resisting the experience. The other path is relaxing into the void/ego death/<insert descriptor here> and going with the flow. This will normally result in what the quote describes.
This is why it is always concerning for me when people recommend psychedelics to anyone without knowing what kind of person they are/what state they are in. For trips, context and intention is EVERYTHING. If you are able to relax in the face of uncertainty and trust the experience, then you can have life changing experiences. If you are in a bad state of mind or if your life is in disarray, that will be magnified and you can also have life changing experiences, but not in a good way (I didn't face major anxiety before a bad mushroom trip).
Psychedelic experiences are built upon the psyche of the person experiencing them, so people can have exact opposite experiences taking the same dose of the same substance depending on their state of mind.
I had a similar experience from a bad trip on acid. I felt like I had had a stroke while trying to leave my body, and got pulled hard back into the physical realm. All I could feel was my flesh, tongue, teeth, skin, breath, heartbeat, etc. Everything was physical machinery, and had lost all meaning and purpose. It was the most horrific experience I've ever went through by far.
Are you talking about the comment, or the article? Your description does not sound anything like what the comment says.
I'm not sure that was very good acid.
Wow something I can contribute to!
In my early 20's, my obsession was eastern spirituality. I was especially drawn towards taoism and read several books on it. In one of the books (written by a Westerner) there was entire chapters dedicated to breathing exercises. Taoists believe the spirit and the body meet at your breath because it is simultaneously a voluntary and involuntary process.
Focus on your breathing now, you can control it. But just a minute ago, your body was doing it for you with no input from you.
I think there's a difference between dying and being OK with it and the opposite.
I would hope when I get to the point that I am actually dying, I could feel a little more like the quote than you did when you were dying, which sounds terrifying. :)
On the other hand, 5-Meo-DMT (5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), comes in the form of an organic lab-produced extract, or the Bufo Alvarius venom, takes it to a completely different level of non-duality and complete and utter shattering of your ego (temporarily of course, for about 20 minutes). Someone named Albert Most discovered this bizarre compound a few decades back by smoking the venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert toad somewhere in New Mexico if I recall correctly. I haven't tried it myself but going down a rabbit hole of reports and practitioners on YouTube is in and of itself a profound trip: https://youtu.be/PQctOMSmBuk . EDIT: Here is the piece Vice did on Albert Most: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jbzI4bcUw
> Smoking venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert Toad somewhere in New Mexico
I don’t know why but I just found this hilariously funny. Suddenly my life seems very mundane.
Have you lived or been to new mexico? Mundane life is what results in actions like that. Boredom breeds strange creativity.
It seems mundane when you live in NM. But I spent a decade in LV, NV. I’m very grateful to be back in NM. This place even had a Burning Man celebration before California afaik.
Burning Man is in Nevada, 100 miles north-northeast of Reno.
Grew up in Arkansas, I can confirm this phenomenon.
> Albert Most discovered this bizarre compound a few decades back by smoking the venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert toad...
I wonder what sequence of events leads to one deciding "I think I'm gonna smoke the venom from that Sonoran Desert Toad."
he was literally trying different things and seeing what they do to him. he says so in the interview with Hamilton Morris in an episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia on Viceland.
I think it's important to stress the fact that DMT does not feel like being thrown in a meat-grinder, or being impaled in a car accident, or any other grisly way to die. Really, it might be more correct to say "Death might feel like a DMT trip" because many have experienced a DMT trip, but it's not every day you get to experience death. Of course, it makes for a less interesting title.
People experience death (and psychoactives) in a variety of ways, and its metaphorical usage reflects that. The meat-grinder sense maps better to stimulants (ie., caffeine, amphetamine, etc) whereas the exhausting, perhaps harrowing and enlightening sense of death is what we tend to experience with the psychedelics.
back in the day I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms and experienced what is called 'ego death'. basically, you lose a sense of self and identity. You are literally a blank slate. It was a surreal experience and I felt panicky like 'oh shit i think im dead but im still concious'.
Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experiencing reality in the rawest form, the only truth we have in the universe is math, in all shapes and forms, we live inside the 'body of god' that is math, but of course, so extremely complex to express in our 3rd dimensional world.
Yeah, that can be a frightening state. And yet, it was my favorite part, during the peak of the peak. To some degree, the rest of the trip was just something to be endured. Although I eventually learned to go dancing or bike riding or whatever.
The absolute worst combination is marijuana on the tail of an LSD peak. Your short term memory drops to about 100 msec. I spent a few hours, decades ago, reminding a friend who they were, and that everything would be OK in a few hours. And it was hard work, because I could barely remember who I was, and who they were ;)
edit: clarity
yes I should clarify that after the experience, it felt like I had been in a sauna for the psyche. Basically, I had lingering sense of peace and wellness.
The scariest shit I've seen while tripping was seeing the Eye of Providence. What's more creepy is that this is a common symbol people experienced. For example, I didn't know what the hell was a third eye until I saw it. It was unbelievable.
It changed my life. It gave me an unbiased raw truths about myself, circumstances, and ultimately the realization that we are where we are because of our decisions in the past.
Everyone should consume psilocybin mushrooms once. LSD you buy off the street can be laced. But good ol' mushrooms will never let you down.
That's so weird. I experienced the same thing the first time I took mushrooms as a teenager. I had no idea what a trip was. There were a few notable things in the trip but one thing that stood out was the eye of providence. I can't for the life of me think why that appeared since it's not something I can really associate with anything in my life up to that point. I'm not a religious person and not very spiritual but this is one of the things that has always stuck with me. It is pretty weird and spooky what it symbolises. To be honest, that was a profound turning point in my life.
Can you describe more what you meant by seeing eye of providence? What was the context around it? What exactly did you see, where, and what was happening? I’m just curious... did you search for the meaning after the fact? I take it you didn’t know it was called the eye of providence prior to that?
I had my eyes closed and was just watching stuff like silvery reflections and fractal like patterns and waves. At some point it just appeared as a triangle with an eye in it. It was a bit mysterious and may have had a slight glow to it. It wasn't a negative thing for me. I can't remember exactly but I think it probably was at the top of a pyramid.
I didn't search for it until maybe 10 or so years later and started getting a bit buzzed out about it all. I didn't know what it was until then, at which point I realised it was on the dollar bill. Even if I had (likely) seen it before the trip it wasn't something that was part of my everyday life or consciousness, which makes it very weird.
> silvery reflections
holy shit. was it shiny and pulsating? I saw the eye but no pyramid. But I recognize the eye from the dollar bill.
All I remember is looking at the shining, pulsating, eye and thinking, so this is what Truth looks like. No idea what the fuck that meant but I figured it out, and it was like being punched in the face-basically I looked at every aspect of my life, and that's what the "Eye" was implying to "Look", basically examine my life to figure out what needs to be done.
It was not negative at all but more of a WTF I WANT THIS TRIP TO STOP BUT IM ALSO FASCINATED. I use caps to illustrate the full state of panic and calm I was in.
After the trip and I googled 'third eye symbol' and I was shocked to see the similarities to the "Eye" I had witnessed but with a shape that looks like a thunder icon, which curiously enough is very similar to the Sanskrit for third eye....I have never ever seen it before either
Needless to say, my interest in hinduism and chakra exploded. i believe that I truly experienced a third eye opening moment. Like I was on a different plane of existence, where I am part of the whole, and that everything is everything and the most shocking conclusion of all:
There are dimensions beyond our world. In 3rd dimension, things don't make sense but in higher dimensions, the math works out according to Michio Kaku. His book goes into full detail but basically I absolutely believe that we are not seeing the true reality and that we might have been led on this path by very evil and greedy people who abuses the scientific process to invalidate the existence of common spiritual human experiences that arose indepedently by different civilizations but declared "null and void" by a highly materialistic driven empire where it's citizens are so spiritually starved that they will never be happy. No matter how rich and powerful their country becomes.
It's the eye of God, in a triangle. The one on $1 bills. That is, God is provident aka watching us, watching out for us, and providing guidance and stuff.
I don't recall ever seeing that. I did experience Hell, for a while during one LSD peak. But it wasn't painful, just freaky. I was into Hieronymus Bosch at the time, and had just watched "Spawn" ;)
My favorite hallucinations were tangled chains of 3D characters, in constant writhing motion, and rotating on their axes. And not just rotating, but apparently rotating through higher dimensions.[0]
As I recall, the characters looked like letters or numbers. Or like Hofstadter's GEB block. But as long as I was high enough to see them, I was too high to understand them. Or to remember, anyway.
I also had the sense that their activity correlated with what was happening in meatspace, what I was seeing and hearing, and also what I was thinking. And it's my guess that LSD, among other things, breaks down barriers between hierarchical levels in brain activity.
0) https://goo.gl/images/TbuUcj
that's whats fucked up about it. I am not religious at all. Yet, what I experienced was on a spiritual level with real changes.
it's crazy how common the themes are. did you hear extra-terrestrials? Like I literally heard a thought broadcasted from somewhere not on earth with the message "we aren't from earth but we are gonna help you out. clean your fucking room. move your computer to living room. get your shit together"
.... needless to say that was a big turning point
I haven't done mushrooms since and I'm kinda scared to experience the whole thing again.
People joke about fatuous "meaning of life" insights. But in my experience, you often do see "the big picture" of your life, and of everything. However, it's hard to remember stuff like that. And it fades pretty quickly, back into the slog of day-to-day life. I also got that from doing work with est/Landmark, NLP, Tony Robbins, etc. Not that they encourage the use of psychedelics ;)
I'm reminded of Tool's "Rosetta Stoned".[0,1]
0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZXJLQntCP01) https://genius.com/Tool-rosetta-stoned-lyrics
Nope, I didn't hear voices. I had some auditory hallucinations though. It was mostly overwhelmingly positive and very spiritual to the point of making me cry.
yeah they were auditory hallucinations.
well, thanks to them, i have got some of my life back in order.
it could be that the mushroom trip creates a dissociation from internal thoughts and perceptions of the ego vs ego-less self, so you 'hear' your own thoughts.
I'm really interested in trying it out, but I live in mainland China right now. Have no idea who I could even contact about getting some, even in places like Taiwan or Thailand.
Houby hunting, then PF Tek.
Obviously, do lots of research. There aren't many deadly varieties by some of them look very similar to edible ones.
I wonder how many trial and error and generations of humans it took to realize which mushrooms were safe to eat. It's fascinating stuff.
Look for ones that turn blue when bruised.
Also, the fundamental methodology is to start with an extremely small amount. If there are no observable effects after some hours, eat double the amount. And repeat until there are clear effects, and decide if it's something useful. For food, for fun, or to use for poisoning enemies.
There are many species that contain psilocybin. I don't know China at all, but I'd be surprised if some weren't endemic. So you'd need to do some research. I my experience, they tend to grow on cow shit. And they're somewhat unusual, in that they turn blue when bruised.
In Indonesia they're legal, you can buy mushroom shakes at the beach. In general there are endemic psilocybin mushrooms most everywhere, though it might be illegal just to pick them, like in my home country Norway.
Do you consider yourself to be successful overall?
This mirrors dozens of my own ego death experiences as well. Like, exactly. It's so hard to grapple with and explain to people who have never experienced it. This was a good description
> “There is nothing here to begin to enable us to propose that on DMT, you literally transcend the laws of this universe and do actually go to another world,” he says.
This is faulty thinking. An afterlife doesn’t presuppose a violation of natural laws, or a separate world. It just means you continue living in a different form.
The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure.
The causal eelationship needn’t even be mind-out. If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing.
Given that we continue to discover entirely new structures in both the biological world and our own bodies, which were hiding in plain sight, I don’t find this implausible.
That’s not to mention psychoaocial structures which science hardly can model, and to which our individual minds are very tightly coupled.
Thank you for sharing. I think too often we assume the concept of an "afterlife" implies some kind of supernatural or religious phenomenon. Since we don't have proof of it I can't say I definitely believe such a thing exists, but I certainly believe it's possible. If there is an "afterlife" I believe it fits into our natural laws and can be explained and observed scientifically - we just haven't discovered all of the information we need yet.
It’s tricky, because the kinds of natural laws that are necessary for the existence of an afterlife are the same kinds of natural laws that invalidate the principle of physicalism or materialism, which is the consensus view of the scientific establishment today. So if you decide to investigate something easier to test for than “the afterlife” which could also plausibly exist with these expanded natural laws—like remote viewing, or the effects that consciousness has on physical systems—your research will be generally dismissed as quackery. Not many folks will try to replicate your results, or even spend the effort to examine them deeply for flaws, because the assumption is “we already know that cannot happen, so you’ve done something wrong in your setup or you’re lying.”
There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on; the challenge lies in getting more skeptics to seriously evaluate it. Some HNer years ago turned me onto the book Irreducible Mind, whose last hundred pages or so is a bibliography of evidence for this kind of thing provided by people who say “I don’t believe it, but I can’t explain it.” But a lot of that evidence comes from skeptics testing exceptional individuals, and James Randi did a good job of showing how fakers can fool scientists, so I can’t really say how reliable it is other than as a jumping-off point for further study.
I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication.
Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is:
https://youtu.be/nRSBaq3vAeY
> the existence of an afterlife are the same kinds of natural laws that invalidate the principle of physicalism or materialism
I don't see why that follows.
There are lots of phenomena in the world, like money, which are manifest in a non-physical substrate. Many many other things are immaterial. The characters I am typing right now are immaterial. There are bits in memory that represent the characters, but it's only in interplay with an entire system of physical structures that you can say the characters themselves are manifest. You can't point somewhere and say "that's where the character is". It's diffuse across a bunch systems in such a way that it's not manifest in any one location.
Almost all of our social and political realities are like this. Where is Conservatism? Where is calculus? These are not things with locations, which is what makes them extremely difficult to study, which is why so many people reject things like Social Psychology or Science Studies as bunk science.
Money, algebra, and the capital M that starts this sentence are all things that exist, in a way that's totally compatible with materialism. It's not necessary to claim that these things exist outside of a material substrate. They merely exist above it. Distinct from it, yet contained within it. Fully determined by its laws, but not described by them.
Consciousness is an abstract, non-physical structure and concept, but everything we know suggests it is inextricably tied to and an emergent phenomenon of the brain.
In the distant future there may be a way to extract and transfer consciousness into a new substrate, but with current technology, there's no reason to believe any sort of life, consciousness, sentience, awareness, etc. after death is possible at all. Just because it's possible in theory doesn't mean that applies to any currently living humans.
> everything we know suggests it is inextricably tied to and an emergent phenomenon of the brain
I don’t think that’s universally accepted. I think trees are conscious and they have no brain.
I think the brain does create an illusion that other things are not conscious. It tricks us into thinking our own consciousnesses are distinct from the rest of consciousness. And that’s been a useful adaptation for us. And it confuses the hell out of consciousness philosophers. But we were conscious before we evolved it. It’s possible we were human before we evolved it.
> In the distant future there may be a way to extract and transfer consciousness into a new substrate
It’s possible such a thing already exists. We have ancient stories about it. If it were true it would be very difficult to detect.
If the universe is a simulation then it seems extremely unlikely that consciousnesses would never be read, just operating until they get eaten by the 2nd law.
>I don’t think that’s universally accepted. I think trees are conscious and they have no brain.
I don't think consciousness of trees is accepted by nearly anyone. But even if any trees were conscious, I don't see how it helps your argument at all.
>I think the brain does create an illusion that other things are not conscious. It tricks us into thinking our own consciousnesses are distinct from the rest of consciousness.
Yes, but consciousness of animals doesn't really mean anything here. If anything, it's a point in favor of the opposite side: that consciousness really isn't very special.
>It’s possible such a thing already exists. We have ancient stories about it. If it were true it would be very difficult to detect.
Many things are possible. We have ancient stories about many of them. If they were true they would be very difficult to detect. That's why the basic scientific principle is falsifiability.
>If the universe is a simulation then it seems extremely unlikely that consciousnesses would never be read, just operating until they get eaten by the 2nd law.
I don't agree. If the universe is a simulation then they could be read, but they don't have to be, and I don't think it's extremely unlikely that they wouldn't be. If it's a very "raw" or "real" simulation with no interference, they could very well just dissipate into nothing.
Assuming it is a simulation, what happens when you get shot in the head and lose brain function? Where is your consciousness at that moment? Is there a pre-damage backup somewhere? When was the backup taken? If backups are taken every instant or otherwise very infrequently, which one is the "real" state after you die? The one from right before the damage occurred? Something picked at random? If there is no backup needed because there is instead just some outside extra-dimensional consciousness "force" or "energy" existing since long ago, what is that thing doing exactly when you suffer from a brain injury? Does it just "stop working" in or "lose connection" to those parts of the brain? What is it doing when we're children?
I think even if we're in a simulation where nearly all living things are conscious, the chances of some kind of post-death experience is still basically zero.
>There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on
Such as what? I don't believe there is.
>I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication.
>Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is:
>https://youtu.be/nRSBaq3vAeY
As you alluded to earlier in your post, this is complete quackery. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that quantum uncertainty has no relation to human (or any other) consciousness.
There's nothing to suggest that human (or dog or dolphin or octopus) consciousness is magical, supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical, or unable to be explained or understood.
Can you link the replication study or analysis that reveals the flaw in the original?
> There's nothing to suggest that human consciousness is magical, supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical, or unable to be explained
I don’t think anyone is trying to argue against you. We’re just saying there is more to understand than science has so far done. We’re not saying science can’t reach what we imagine, just that it’s tough, and may require new physics.
Luckily modern physics also requires new physics. So we’re not alone.
https://medium.com/@roblea_63049/the-double-slit-experiment-... is one of many examples of double slit "woo" debunking. In short, the issue is that any attempt at measuring the particle's position necessarily causes the wave function to collapse. This measuring has no relation to consciousness.
> If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing.
'You', 'experience', 'presence', and 'thing' are far too ill-defined for this to have meaning here.
Very well put. Not taking a stance, but rather just analyzing the constraints on possible conclusions.
> The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure.
Especially this part is phrased so accurately. Of course we are yet to observe anything similar to it either. Something that survives death and is capable of supporting thought. It would have to be something material, right?
Material yes. Not necessarily atomic though. Probably electrical since consciousness seems fairly electrical for humans.
Personally, I think the idea that you and I are separate is an illusion we evolved in order to protect ourselves more fiercely and to be more willing to kill.
Without it, you would understand that you are not separate from the rest of the living world, that your mind is a space where many immortal psychic creatures cross paths.
And part of life is to locate your self, that specific set of crossings, in the world.
So, immortal life just means dissociating from your body and associating with your crossings as they are in the world. (DMT is a dissociative so you can see how it could help.) A fully “enlightened” person will have located a complete, stable set of crossings, dissociated from everything else in their body, and broadcast that message out into the biosphere sufficiently long enough for it to be recorded.
There is more to this picture, involving non-“enlightened” reincarnation, which is something the inverse of those crossings will do at death as a form of rebalancing the consciousnesses disks, like a RAID array.
Most of these things are psychosocial. Believing them is more a matter of believing that you are as much a psychosocial being as you are a physical one.
Thanks for sharing that, it really helped me unlock some mental pathways for me.
The feature that sets DMT apart from other psychedelics such as LSD or mushrooms is the persistent environment called "hyperspace". In short, various psychonauts over the years have discovered an environment - for lack of a better word - they named hyperspace, which consists of surprisingly similar perceived attributes _over many different observers_.
Experienced LSD/mushroom users know that there is a tremendous degree of subjectivity and symbol/archetype emergence in their trips. If I only had a few words to describe the LSD/mushroom experience it would be "lack of clarity". It's as if one is looking through a scanner darkly (personal unconscious).
With DMT, this is not the case. There is no perceived intermediate filter, nothing impure or fuzzy. One feels as if one is already there and directly interfacing with the space itself. Rather than exploring his own psyche, a DMT user feels like he's exploring an entirely new space. This becomes apparent even when dealing with the difficulties of trying to use shared language to describe the experience with other explorers in order to discover common attributes [1].
[1] https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon
This is often my experience too - DMT is like being in VR. The geometry is simplified - lots of smooth curves and sharp angles, mostly flat textures or gradients. And it's populated by barely intelligent entities made of the same stuff.
Can anyone give a reason in darwinian terms, for why brains would evolve a feeling of detachment and contentment near death? I can't project a selfish-gene reason.
Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual
Unless it has an impact on your ability to reproduce, there's no reason at all. Lots of biology is just a consequence of implementation details.
That's not entirely true. If it impacts your direct descendents or even distant relatives, there'll still be an impact assuming you share the genes in question.
If you consider taking a role of "grandparenting" to be a potentially positive role in "your ability to reproduce", then both you and mjg59 are kind of agreeing there.
You don't have to copulate in order to express "your ability to reproduce". Keep in mind that your family also has your genes so if you just provide resources for them to reproduce, a part of you reproduces as well. This could be a mechanism to combat fear of death, which perhaps was making people less likely to have sex?
It could be social. Imagine the family surrounding the deathbed of an elder, dying relative. It's probably the case that the relative is observed closely while 'crossing over,' and depending on the relatives' interpretation of what's happening to their dying loved one, they may be left at peace or in turmoil. So maybe DMT has to do with creating the desired appearance to communicate to loved ones at the deathbed.
The standard cocktail was morphine, cocaine and ethanol. Now they usually just do "inadvertent" opioid overdoses.
Maybe the human (or generally any conscious nervous system) existence is such an anxious experience that finally realizing it was all a trip that is ending is such a giant relief that the imminent death feels like a warm home? Not to sound too bleak but it would explain the contentment
That seems right. The KeepAlive muscle finally gets to relax.
I'm reaching, but since family units stuck together to hunt and for protection, and children were likely near their parents when death came, so perhaps it is a mechanism to avoid potentially destroying/harming (directly or indirectly) any offspring in a final flash of agony-fueled irrational violent rage.
The idea is, in other words, that those who somehow went amok near death perhaps reduced their number of offspring, or damaged the family unit (e.g. destroyed their shelters or food), therefore hindering those genes from spreading, therefore the selection pressure to remove this behaviour.
How do primates die?
You can think of it another way: why do we feel stressed in dangerous situation and pain when we are wounded?
Stress is us preparing for fight of flight, which is good for survival. Pain prevents us from further damaging our body. Stress overrides pain because your future well being doesn't matter if your die now.
Now, when you are near death, when you know there is nothing you can do, stress becomes useless, because you can't flee or fight back. So there is no downside to detachment and contentment.
Now the advantage may be that it may be the best response if, by chance, you survive. You don't overwork yourself, you are less likely to suffer mental breakdown afterwards, etc...
Keep in mind that everyone who experienced NDEs survived, obviously. So NDEs are not death experiences, more like survival experiences.
Sometimes there is no reason. That might just be symptoms of gradual neuronal failure. It’s unlikely that the sensation of dying significantly increases or decreases the likelihood of passing on one’s lineage, except maybe imparting a peaceful impression on family around you.
A lot of the folk-lore "there is no reason" stuff, turns out to be less clear. Appendix has a function in prior lineage, its remnant. Tonsils? well.. turns out kids who have 'em removed suffer life long consequence. So whilst I too am tempted to the 'there is no reason, its just happenstance' it worries me that an awful lot of things about the body, turn out to be less happenstance than we thought. Like.. altriusm or even the discovery gay behaviour is normal in lots of species. Arguing 'its just coincidence' feels pretty weak.
But the bleak argument might work. Keep the young 'uns motivated to breed, it helps in the long term.
We're a long time dead. "Enjoy yourself, its later than you think"
For their to be an evolutionary reason for it, it has to increase fitness in some fashion. Roughly speaking, it has to increase the chances of propagating your genes. It seems very unlikely that the character of "near death experiences" could have an impact upon fitness.
Saying that something doesn't have an evolutionary reason is not the same as saying it's just coincidence. Our bodies (including our brains) are very complex interconnected processes. There's going to be all sorts of effects when those processes break down, and even if those don't have an evolutionary purpose, that doesn't mean they're just coincidence.
This is a factual matter, which has nothing to do with an argument being bleak or not.
I have read recently it helps protect your brain cells from damage due to lack of oxygen. One article I can find now:
http://beckleyfoundation.org/2016/09/15/the-first-study-to-s...
We can go the other way and this feeling of detachment and contentment might be what we evolved away from, but as our systems and cognitive functioning deteriorate we return to this state.
For instance take pain. People view pain as negative but it's of course a great positive from an evolutionary point of view. Not everything (or even everybody) experiences pain, but those that do are going to be vastly more likely to succeed in life than those that don't. Your reaction to recoil from pain is not because the interaction itself is painful but because you have evolved instincts that tell you that what you're feeling is likely detrimental to your health and the situation needs to be resolved instantly, on a subconscious, level.
As your pain receptors shut down it would ostensibly feel pleasant, but in reality it would just be one of the most important, and useful, evolutionary tools we have turning off.
Well we don't really understand the nature of "feelings", so the answers are going to be very speculative. But a better question might be: why do we feel contentment at all? Why isn't it all just fear and rage all the time, with certain things lessening the fear and rage, like eating, pooping, and copulating? After all, if we avoid death and reproduce, the genes get passed on - evolution doesn't care about feelings. This entirely sidesteps discussion about the epiphenomenalality of conscious experience and how/whether it can be "causal" in any sense.
"I don't want to die" has a pretty strong biological determinancy to it. It helps, mostly in adverse situations. Flipping over to "meh, who needs bodies" is inexplicable (to me)
There’s a moment where your brain switches from “fight for your life” to “I’m fucked, don’t bother trying to save me”.
The I experienced when I nearly drowned once. I was very calm and ready to go. You can see it in videos of how to spot a drowning person.
I am an anxious person. About a decade ago I was a passenger and at one point I was within about one second of almost certain contact with a vertical box section on a very slow moving vehicle. There was no way that my friend, and inexperienced driver, could brake in time.
That one second was slow and I was unnervingly calm. Right at the last minute with probably less than 200ms to go, the driver very gently swerved and we must have avoided collision by less than two inches. Quarter inch if we include wing mirrors. My friend, the driver asked later why I didn't say anything. I explained that had I panicked, he would have panicked and we would probably both be dead.
I was driving 60 the speed limit on a rainy day in southern Cali when a truck appeared out of nowhere, spinning into my path. I had a very brief ‘oh shit, this could be the end of me and my wife ‘ moment and then I calmly swerved to the left into oncoming lane that was empty at the time. The back of my car clipped the spinning vehicle at probably full speed perhaps slower If I slowed down (I can’t remember if I did) and we spun a complete rotation and a half to end up on the oppoite side of the road facing the opposite direction. My wife went into full panic mode while I was as calm as I’d ever been for reasons unknown to me. I realized later had I panicked and waited a second longer to take action, we’d likely both be dead now. I don’t know if t all happened too fast or if my mind decided to stay chill instead of panicking, but I’m glad i did what I did and that there were no cars in the other lane.
Could be that once you've reproduced and sufficiently cared for your offspring, it's preferable that you don't waste resources on yourself. Contentment and even apathy could be beneficial (from an evolutionary perspective) at that point.
Contentment could just be the way that your physiology signals that your needs are met, and that there is no current need to expend energy.
If you were always enraged that wouldn’t bode well for raising an infant to a self-sustaining age would it?
I have a vague recollection of someone suggesting small bits of DMT might be released while we sleep and that our dreams are like snack low key trips.
Well dreams are a fairly beneficial things to have especially if you have some epiphany or figure out the solution to a problem you're having.
The near death thing might just be your brain dumping that DMT out of your pineal gland all at once either when your body is shutting down from natural causes or when you are in some kind of traumatic accident.
> snack
Can you paraphrase what that means? It's not a Freudian slip due to hunger, I hope. Asking out of prior curiosity for the word.
Because life is a prison of constant struggle and suffering, the experience of ego death is that of shedding one's attachments that one struggles for, and the last chains keeping them from freedom are that of their identity, consciousness, and ultimately of life itself. The less the past, present, future, and you there is to care about, the more blissfully free whatever remains of you becomes.
My theory is that it's not so much our brain creating a feeling of detachment and Contentment but rather the brain reverting back to its initial state.
Darwinism is the least likely explanation of evolution. Randomness? Take a look at how some species evolved in parallel to similar organisms; one was extremely unlikely, two or more is impossible. Darwin was quite foolish, but he had friends in the right places. Just another flat-earth belief.
As for the DMT, there's only one way to find out. One grain of pure DMT in a pipe and get your answers.
If anyone is in NYC this week, this conference on DMT has a ridiculously stacked speaker list:
https://events.theassemblage.com/dmtdialogues
A HN friend and I are going to this. Email in bio if anyone attending is interested in meeting up.
I don’t live in the US so I don’t have the opportunity to meet up with you guys, but I just wanted to say that your mention of “a HN friend” piqued my interest. Is that to say you guys met through HN? Does that happen often, that people meet through HN?
Most likely a friend who is also a HN user. But who knows — he is calling for people to meet up after all.
I’m looking into it for at least part of the day.
If they had Cliff Pickover I would consider making the trip from LA.
If it's near death experiences you want, no need to push the boat out - just skip dinner, go to the pub, drink 7 pints of beer, have a kebab (you'll probably be hungry by then), go home, drink the 2 bottles of beer you found in the fridge, that and eat the pork pie, then sleep for 6 hours, then wake up.
The article says the administered dose is well short of toxic and merely simulates a near death experience. People can and frequently do experience actual actual death while engaging in alchoholic revelry.
I’m not opposed to drinking, but the risks of a controlled study described in the article don’t seem remotely comparable to an evening out on the town. If I had a dollar for every person who died from falling over or passing out and drowning in their own vomit due to alcohol, I’m pretty sure I could afford all the South America shamen-led ayahuasca trips I wanted.(1)
(1) EDIT: which is admittedly somewhere between zero and one.
Hash tag british humour.
But wait. Is it even humour at all?! :O - well now, isn't that always the question.
Every comedian needs a straight man as a foil, no? ;-)
FWIW DMT is far more pleasant and far less of a hangover than the experience you're describing.
I'm not sure what British pork pie is like, but one of my ex girlfriends used to make pork pies. They were delicious, but as dense as neutronium and difficult to digest even under ideal conditions.
Yes, quite so, and British pork pies are exactly the same. Very nice - tasty pig meat, tasty jelly, and a tasty lard casing :D - but extremely dense. Normally you'd have a small slice, appreciate it for what it is, then put it back in the fridge and ignore it until at least the next day.
Normal rules do not apply when shitfaced, however, and it turns out you'll just quite happily pop half a kilo of this stuff into your piehole without even thinking. Fast forward 8-12 hours, and... well, you can guess the rest. It is the devil's own food, and it probably ought to be banned. How are folk supposed to manage, if after drinking a mere 7-10 pints of beer it proves so irresistible?
So most Thursdays and a few Sundays then.
The key distinction here is between dying and all of the unpleasant stuff that normally comes with it. I've experienced loss of body awareness with LSD, psilocybin and DMT. But what didn't come with it was pain, cardiopulmonary stress, cramping, and so on. So it was easy to relax, and let go of body and consciousness. With just naked virtual awareness left.
So anyway, I can imagine that a pleasant death from opioid or barbiturate overdose might be comparable. Or maybe breathing helium, where there's no overt respiratory feedback. Or maybe hypothermia, although in my experience that involved too much twitching around.
Ive done DMT probably 10-15 times in my life so far but quit all recreational drugs ~3 years ago. My last trip being the most intense; me and a friend used a dabbing rig and poured about a gram of dmt onto the heated metal nail - for 20 minutes but what seemed like eternity I Observed the birth, life, and death of myself multiple times over until I finally came back down to the ‘real world’.
did you regret that last one? how much of a DMT trip can you actually remember?
In general it doesn't seem like memory is affected; the main difficulty is making sense of what you experienced.
This. I spent a solid year reflecting and trying to understand everything that happened during my first LSD experience. The whole thing simply transcends anything you have ever experienced.
When you “see” a strange loop involving your mind creating the physical world as you know it, and at the same time realizing the physical world enables your mind, it can take a long time to unpack. Sure when I’m here, we say that the mind is just a construct within he physical world, that just happens to be modeling the physical world. But that Doesn’t make it any less of a significant experience.
It was like seeing the concept of ying-yang (duality and mutual dependence) reflected onto mind-body problem, and everything else.
Oh great times when you get bored of all the analytical logic problems of the everyday world. :)
The subhead is a much better title: "A new scientific study suggests strong similarities between near death experiences and [DMT]"
I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.
You probably know this but for the benefit of others: Monoamine oxidase inhibitors will make you feel pretty awful without paying close attention to diet for several days.
Even following a dieta won't necessarily keep you from having a physically uncomfortable time with ayahuasca! But it's virtually guaranteed if you do not.
ayuasca and smoked DMT are too very different experiences.
Yes. And the article didn't make that clear enough. The biological lifetime of DMT is very short, because there are enzymes (monoamine oxidase aka MAO) in many tissues. So the effects last 15-30 minutes. But ayahuasca includes MAO inhibitors, so the effects can last for many hours. And it's mainly the MAO inhibitors that make users feel ill.
Changa includes rima (hamalas from b.capii) and lasts around an hour if good. And No nausia or effect from food.
Hey, thanks for that!
I used to have a book about ayahusca-like formulations, using plants from various continents. But I've forgotten the name. Basically, many plants contain DMT, and many others contain MAO inhibitors. Also, I believe that one can combine some MAO inhibiting antidepressants, such as selegiline, with DMT.
Did you not expect that going in? Or it was worse than anticipated?
I had the understanding beforehand — but the pain completely overwhelmed the amount of curiosity I had for the experience — brain said don’t drink more - and after that it was just sitting in a painful body until recovery ...
Try changa/ smoke dmt. Its without the nausia, shorter and more intense.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795900
Can we hear this "specially commissioned ambient soundtrack" somewhere?
One thing people talk about is the short-lived effects of DMT, and how they would like more time in the the DMT space. But as I understand it, your body doesn't build up a resistance to it. The DMTx [0] project is seeking to exploit this property and created extended-state DMT experiences using some basic medical techniques. Also, they are looking for volunteers.
[0]: https://www.dmtx.org
That sounds awesome. I wish I could pay to lie in a hospital bed and have a medical professional administer intravenous DMT just for a short period (at least initially). Hopefully this work will bring us closer to a world where supervised DMT voyages are available to the public.
They're looking for volunteers in the UK for psilocybin experiments:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Volunteers%20sought%20...
Make your own changa its quite easy and pure dmt you dont need to inject... too much you wont Remember What happend anyway.
Adding hamalas a rima Will prolong the experience to around 1 hour if smoked. Using hamalas eg putting it under your toungue first Can prolong it to several hours. The changa trip is Also much more benefitial and feels nicer.
Why can't they just use an intravenous drip?
I think they are [0]:
> "Using pharmacokinetic modeling and DMT blood sampling data, we demonstrate that the unique pharmacological characteristics of DMT, which also include a rapid onset and lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects, make it amenable to administration by target-controlled intravenous infusion. This is a technology developed to maintain a stable brain concentration of anesthetic drugs during surgery."
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4944667/
edit: I guess that isn't a drip. I know nothing about this sort of thing :)
IV drip doesn’t have the amount of fine regulation and monitoring necessary to keep someone in the DMT state. Last I heard they were planning to get a dialysis machine to do it.
I feel at some point we changed what an NDE was really categorized as. When Rick Strassman did his research in the 90's and wrote DMT the spirit molecule he stated that classical NDEs were distinct from alien encounters and that in his trials alien encounters were far more common than NDE. Now it seems that alien encounters are also considered NDEs.
It feels like having sex with the Universe. Pure dmt is more “cold” experience. With hamalas (changa/rima) its a more warm prolonged loving experience that happens more gradually Where the pure is more a fast blast into space. Its medicine and Works sonders for the mind. It saved marriges, lifes, jobs among my friends.
Once when taking mushrooms I saw myself go into countless pieces in something that resembled a starburst. It was beautiful. I felt completely at ease. Then a profound realisation came to me; This is death. Then I connected the two.
I wonder if "beta thanatine" from Altered Carbon was based on DMT...
Am I the only one who read this as "A trip to the DMV feels like dying - and scientists now agree" ?
Being neither an experienced drug user nor American, I misread that similarly (Department of Motor Transport?) before remembering that DMT is a drug because I saw it in the title of a documentary on Netflix.
I don't know if my life has just been too sheltered, or not sheltered enough, because I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted to buy anything not available over the counter.
Nope. The world briefly made sense, and now it doesn't again.
I died in a dream. Does that count?