Psychedelic Enlightment?
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Lots of people I know or have talked to apply some sort of revelatory capability to hallucinogens. Personally, I have a bit of a hard time taking this sort of thing at face value - unless said person has been able to use some other means (like sober meditation) to verify the experience.
I had a conversation-with-myself experience once not unlike the nature of that the OP had, though it wasn't a positive one. It was more of a paranoid, multiple personalities situation where I was discussing with myself having to "hide it" (your guess as to what "it" was is as good as mine) from my my friend whose bed I was rolling around on going nuts while he was watching Princess Mononoke. During the whole escapade I was talking to myself and was able to "see" from both my point of view (as the person who was talking to myself, "seeing" from both selves points of view) while also seeing from a bird's eye view, so to speak. Certainly eye-opening as far as perspective is concerned, but I'm still skeptical as to the revelatory nature of such experiences.
Part of the reason I find such experiences to be positive and growth-oriented is because of the opportunity to reevaluate and redefine our perspective on pretty much anything.
Another, very positive experience I had involved - amongst other things - myself simply thinking about the fact I was thinking. This created a sort of infinite loop, if you will, in which I was thinking, then viewing myself (from behind my eyes, if you take my meaning) thinking, then viewing myself viewing myself thinking ad infinitum (lasted for a bit, but not sure how long for obvious reasons).
This second experience I was able to "verify" with meditation while using a mantra (over a year later, my system was completely clean). In the overall best meditative experience I've ever had I was able to slip into a state I had and have since glimpsed quite a bit - a sort of compression of perspective and time. During this meditation, which was basically just a good, relaxed time at first, I had a few moments of seeing my life as a single picture - metaphorically speaking - without the limits of time and my personal perspective.
In conclusion (hoping this post has been at least somewhat useful), I personally just worry about the possibility for random gunk that hallucinogens (with or without meditation at the time) bring about - no doubt anyone who has used them has experienced some "crazy shit" of some sort, though it sounds like the white/black differentiation in your experience is an excellent realization and I'm glad you shared it.
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"Random gunk" is about right for most of it.
The brain seems to work by "generate and test". A thought is the precipitate of a mini-evolution inside the brain, as it runs through a lot of possibilities for "What this is in front of me". Normally, there's a "test" part, that discards possibilities for incoherence, lack of correspondence with other knowledge (held, for the moment, to be true).
It looks like what happens with LSD and other hallucinogens is that the "generate" part of the mind goes into overdrive, while the "test" part takes a back seat. Hence, you believe all sorts of shit undiscrimininatingly, it all seems true and real. (This makes sense because LSD is a simple chemical, so what it's doing must be lowering some sort of overall threshold, just turning one switch.)
This process does occasionally throw up genuine insights though; however, they can only be discovered to be genuine (or not) in the sober light of day (with full testing faculties intact). Wasn't it the Vikings who said something like "make decisions twice - once when drunk and once when sober"?
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"The principle of causal indifference is this: If X has an alleged mystical experience P1 and Y has an alleged mystical experience P2, and if the phenomenological characteristics of P1 entirely resemble the phenomenological characteristics of P2 so far as can be ascertained from the descriptions given by X and Y, then the two experiences cannot be regarded as being of two different kinds â for example, it cannot be said that one is a "genuine" mystical experience while the other is not â merely because they arise from dissimilar causal conditions.
The principle seems logically self-evident. At present it is perhaps not very important and may have no wide application to established facts. But it might become important in the future. It is introduced here because it is sometimes asserted that mystical experiences can be induced by drugs, such as mescalin, lysergic acid, etc. On the other hand those who have achieved mystical states as a result of long and arduous spiritual exercises, fasting and prayer, or great moral efforts, possibly spread over many years, are inclined to deny that a drug can induce a "genuine" mystical experience or at least to look askance at such practices and such a claim. Our principle says that if the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences are indistinguishable, so far as can be ascertained, then it cannot be denied that if one is a genuine mystical experience the other is also. This will follow notwithstanding the lowly antecedents of one of them, and in spite of the understandable annoyance of an ascetic, a saint, or a spiritual hero, who is told that his careless and worldly neighbour, who never did anything to deserve it, has attained to mystical consciousness by swallowing a pill."
-W.T. Stace in "Mysticism and Philosophy" (available in full online)93 93/93
IAO131 -
I found that my strong desire not to be duped manifest itself in the LSD intoxication as a realization than my mind was being easily convinced of anything and I had no discrimination faculty, on I decided to apply the "Nothing is TRUE, everything is permissible" formula to every random ideal than appeared in my mind to claim its absolute profound truth to me.
I simply refused to accept it, I said since my perception are obviously wrong and my thought and ideas can't seem to get their act together, I will greet every thought with a passing wink and a nod, but nothing more. Everything is a possible perceptual illusion a glamor of the senses and a frazzled spark on the mind, but nothing has any deep meaning or substance to it. Like you can string letters and sounds together to make truth, lies and noise, well let us assume you can't know the difference, and you take every sound you hear as noise, admit that it may have contextual meaning, but no real meaning. Thus you treat the buzz of a bee the same as a fiends request, as just noise. If you thing the bees buzzing is a happy song, you kill that idea, say "Nothing is true" but it sounds happy "that is a permissible interpretation' but not TURE" do the same with you friends words' it sounds like he wants me to stoke convulsing on the floor and wake up, yes than may be one interpertataion, it is permissible, but nothing is TRUE.
This includes all perceptions and all thoughts, dismiss them all as interpretations with no validity. And let your mind wonder as it may trying to interpret and convince you this or that is TRUE, but do not let it convince you. "NOTHING IN TRUE" that means all is false, NO, as False is just validating the opposite truth. if "it is raining" is false that means "It is not raining" is TRUE but NOTHING IS TRUE.
The harder my semantic mind tried to push of an Idea as the final real one great truth, the harder I resisted, and any illusion can be killed with Nothing is TRUE as your soldier, where as any illusion can be entertained as an illusion with "Everything is permissible" as your hunchback.
The wand invites and the sword destroys. This is the way we clear the mind away.
In this method of course you tend to throw the baby out with the bath water. The baby in this case being your entire Ego.
Yet the higher self, the one wielding the sword and the wand, the one crating and destroying the illusions, is unlike the Ego not an illusion, it is not contained in the mind's eye. Rather this higher self, is the mind, it has no name, and can not know itself. It can not be thought of or contained in the inner sphere of the mind. It is that which creates and destroys every aspect of the than inner sphere.One might say it is the eye of shiva that blinks the universe into and out of existence. Try as you might, you can't doubt it away. This was Descartes resting place. (I doubt this proves spirit-matter duality, if it does little ego is spirit an image in the mind, and the higher self is the material brain. This swaps traditional mysticism and turns the tree of life on its head, spirit arises from matter. Is the Basis for a Transcendental materialism.)
You don't need LSD for this meditation, just really really focused WILL power and a determination to destroy every thought that enters your mind. But not getting caught up in the fragments of broken thoughts and meanings. The ego Will shatter and if you stay with that lower self you will shatter too, and be pray to all the illusions of the inner mind.
Find the Self than does rather than the self than is.
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@Froclown said
"little ego is spirit an image in the mind, and the higher self is the material brain. This swaps traditional mysticism and turns the tree of life on its head, spirit arises from matter. Is the Basis for a Transcendental materialism."
Sounds like you just tried to establish a truth.
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I have always, in spite of my own experiences, been very wary of "psuchedelic" enlightenment. However, having just read "The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Consciousness" by Jeremy Narby, a very serious academic, I've changed my mind. It is worth noting, though, that LSD and Psilocybin are not true hallucinogens. The true experiences seem to involve DMT, which I've never tried. So, more good stuff to look forward to!
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@sethur said
"I have always, in spite of my own experiences, been very wary of "psuchedelic" enlightenment. However, having just read "The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Consciousness" by Jeremy Narby, a very serious academic, I've changed my mind. It is worth noting, though, that LSD and Psilocybin are not true hallucinogens. The true experiences seem to involve DMT, which I've never tried. So, more good stuff to look forward to!"
How are they not 'true'? Sounds like one author's strange opinion to me...
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Since I am here by way of psychedelics and have been a rabid skeptic and materialist before encountering them, let me share a bit of my own experiences. You guys can decide whether and to what extent it was authentic, but I think it pretty much speaks for itself.
The first time that I ever tripped off shrooms (a much smaller dose than I've taken since) I spent hours laying in bed and having a schizophrenic conversation similar to the one described by the OP. Here are two features of the experience that stand out most:
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Unusually high organization of the mind. Synaesthesia is common with psychedelics in general, but it is rarely a coherent process that has a definite goal. I was not simply having synaesthetic reactions to random stimuli. Instead, there was the sense that many distinct sensory modalities came together in the service of what normally might be called ideation or abstract thought. I was "thinking" and having "ideas" but I was thinking with the visual cortex; I was hearing these ideas, and feeling them in in my body. There was an impression of unusual coherence, as though all the parts of the brain were aligned together in the service of a specific cognitive task.
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Encounter with a transcendental Other. At one point I had a clear sense of being visited by something alien. It is hard to explain exactly what I mean by "visited". In a sense, I found it with (but not "in") my brain in much the same way that one finds physical objects in physical space with eyesight. This was a sort of abstract object that existed in an abstract space that I could perceive through cognition. I might just as easily call it an "idea", but it was not in any sense an idea that "I" was having. This was an idea that had a life of its own, and once it got a foothold in the brain it exercised more control over the organism than its own egoic self-concept.
This thing, whatever it was, infected me with a level of understanding that seemed completely superhuman. I appreciated that all of the things that most bothered me or occupied the most of my attention were basically trivial, childish, and hallucinatory. There were artifacts of a fundamentally deluded way of looking at the world. This insight came along with a profound feeling of lucidity, serenity, and sanity. It also brought a recognition of the basically ignorant and hypnotized nature of my ordinary way of being in the world.
At one point I asked the Other if it was God, in some kind of naive Judaeo-Christian patriarchal sense (the only idea of God that I could conjure at the time), and it laughed. Later I asked it if it was me. This was closer to the mark but not quite correct. Yes and no was the answer.
I should mention also that there was a sense of being tested by this Other. The test was a series of metacognitive puzzles that were solved always by understanding the nature of one's own mental processes. I remember solving two or three of these, and when I finally failed to understand the last, the sense of alien presence departed (with a vibe of disappointment) although the trip went on.
Finally, let me add that when I ate more shrooms on other occasions, this entire Self vs Other dynamic gave way to something totally different. Instead of experiencing this Other as a foreign entity that was giving me information, I began to experience myself becoming it. This experience felt at once like possession and like self-remembering, as though the thing by which I was possessed was more myself than I ever had been. There was the same sense of extreme internal coherence, lucidity and sanity. But there was also the sense that I had woken up to discover myself as a kind of "meta-self" that had been hypnotized by its own thought process.
I think the parallels between this sort of experience and what is talked about in the mystical traditions do not need spelling out. In fact, it is only as a consequence of having this experience that I was able to understand that there is anything to religion and mysticism at all. Before the shrooms I was adamant that it was all superstitious nonsense.
The real problem with "psychedelic enlightenment" is that it is almost always conditional on the psychedelics. The experiences described above were so far out of my normal range of consciousness that I had simply no way to integrate them into my life. I had neither the willpower nor the trained concentration required to make them stick. (The feeling of manifesting or being the meta-self and then dissipating back into relative disorganization is particularly sickening. It feels rather like death - not the good death in which the maladaptive organization pattern falls apart to make way for the better one, but the failure to make the new pattern survive). I tried all kinds of chemical cocktails in an effort to anchor the sane state but nothing worked consistently. I've now turned to meditation and it's been giving me brief glimpses of the previous experiences, but nothing nearly as intense.
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Another way of approaching the topic that may be of some interest (at least to me):
Does anyone have any scientific research material on states in the brain during "enlightenment" moments?
Does anyone have any scientific research material on states in the brain during "psychedelic" moments that seem similar enough to the "enlightenment" moments?
Does anyone have any scientific research material on states in the brain during "psychedelic" moments of non-enlightenment versus enlightenment? I'd be interested in peak vs non-peak moments (which some drugs seem to be partial to)?
The Scientist wants physical evidence for enlightenment moments based on the foundational assumption that with the right tool, we can measure everything. The Skeptic is not so sure that is possible, but for the time being I've bound and gagged him.
The Scientist found this interesting which led to his questions:
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@Tinman said
"Another way of approaching the topic that may be of some interest (at least to me):
Does anyone have any scientific research material on states in the brain during "enlightenment" moments?
Does anyone have any scientific research material on states in the brain during "psychedelic" moments that seem similar enough to the "enlightenment" moments?
Does anyone have any scientific research material on states in the brain during "psychedelic" moments of non-enlightenment versus enlightenment? I'd be interested in peak vs non-peak moments (which some drugs seem to be partial to)?
The Scientist wants physical evidence for enlightenment moments based on the foundational assumption that with the right tool, we can measure everything. The Skeptic is not so sure that is possible, but for the time being I've bound and gagged him.
The Scientist found this interesting which led to his questions:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFMtq5g8N4"
Look up Andrew Newberg and James H. Austin.
Ken Wilber is a new age philosopher, not a scientist.
93 93/93
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The Herb Dangerous essays in the Equinox are among the best I have seen regarding magickal use of weed, particularlt part 2. Part 1 is a pharmaceutical study, useful for dosage, extraction, etc. While sometimes hash and other chemicals can help you get to the frequency you need, I believe one should always strive to achieve them naturally at some point. Natural changes in consciousness are more potent, last longer, and have less noise/side effects than chemically assisted. Its the getting there without herbs and gasses and doses thats the hard work.
A PHARMACEUTICAL STUDY
www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no1/eqi01015.htmlTHE PSYCHOLOGY OF HASHISH
www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no2/eqi02004.html -
I like topics like these
, but at the moment on this new laptop i dont have any links to scientific study's at the moment till i get them back, but i have seen a couple like they took a couple yogi's and hook up some stuff to them so they can see kinda what go on in the brain during meditation, and from what is showed, its almost as if the whole brain lights up. Also another one is you give lsd to a laymen and he trips ofcourse, but giving one to a yogi wont realy do anything, because they worked for decades on achieving that state of mind. I have a couple friends who went to a Native American tribe and smoked some peyote with the cheif to "find their path" which is a very spiritual experience that would be lovely to partake.but when it comes to study's and experiments on psychedelics/entheogens/hallucinogen and the affects they have on the mind reffering to spiritual experiences, theres alot of info on <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.psychonaut.com">www.psychonaut.com</a><!-- w -->
psychonaut = one who is on the path of mastering substence to aid and acheive spiritual enlightenment and expanding ones consciousness.
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@sethur said
"I have always, in spite of my own experiences, been very wary of "psuchedelic" enlightenment. However, having just read "The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Consciousness" by Jeremy Narby, a very serious academic, I've changed my mind. It is worth noting, though, that LSD and Psilocybin are not true hallucinogens. The true experiences seem to involve DMT, which I've never tried."
LSD and Psilocybin are 'true' hallucinogens, they just don't usually cause 'true hallucinations'.
'True hallucinations' are mistaken for actual reality, 'pseudo-hallucinations' happen in the 'mind's eye' superimposed over normal vision yet they're still 'true' experiences.Psilocybin is 4-hydroxylated DMT and can cause 'true hallucinations' in high doses.
Narby's theory of pseudo-hallucinations being UV light projected by DNA and percieved by the pineal is interesting.
@Aum418 said
"Ken Wilber is a new age philosopher, not a scientist."
Ken Wiber is an integral philosopher and layman transpersonal psychologist. He's not an academic but he's very scientific and is critical of the 'new age' movement.
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Anyone have an opinion on salvia divinorum?
I notice this is legal and sold in smoke shops. No clue as to its safety or "mystical" effects.
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It's quite powerful, and not the sort of thing that lends itself to frequent abuse.
It's a brief but powerful trip. If one stays conscious, then the effects can include synesthesia, giggling, glossolalia. Often, though, once one has reached a threshold dosage, they will go catatonic, and have a dissociative trip lasting 5-15 minutes.
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@AvshalomBinyamin said
"It's quite powerful, and not the sort of thing that lends itself to frequent abuse.
It's a brief but powerful trip. If one stays conscious, then the effects can include synesthesia, giggling, glossolalia. Often, though, once one has reached a threshold dosage, they will go catatonic, and have a dissociative trip lasting 5-15 minutes."
Thanks. I read it can produce OBEs... any opinion on that?
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Salvia is a very, very strong drug. I don't know about getting OBEs with it, since Salvia affects the proprioceptory modality and often has an extremely weird and uncomfortable body load, but the uber strong hallucinogens like Salvia and DMT have a distinct "breakthrough" stage which it is pointless to describe (though many accounts are available online if you want to look) except to say that to compare it to an OBE does it no justice.
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@Escarabaj said
"Anyone have an opinion on salvia divinorum?
I notice this is legal and sold in smoke shops. No clue as to its safety or "mystical" effects."
Salvia Divinorum is sold in a variety of preparations; each has its own variety of potency and effect. As far as the "psychedelic experience" is concerned, Salvia induces a state somewhat similar to that of DMT: there is an instant "changing of the planes," and some degree of hallucination is usually present. The difference is this, however: the influence of Salvia produces a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, and is much more intoxicating. DMT produces a blissful, integrated realization: the revelations of Salvia are distant, obscure, and altogether piecemeal.
Some have likened such revelations to the state called Samadhi. The simple fact is this: there is no royal road to wisdom. Any who seek to realize an Arcanum, without the necessary preparations and discipline, is like a child playing with fire, and is often burned.
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@v0rtex666 said
"The Herb Dangerous essays in the Equinox are among the best I have seen regarding magical use of weed, particularlt part 2. Part 1 is a pharmaceutical study, useful for dosage, extraction, etc. While sometimes hash and other chemicals can help you get to the frequency you need, I believe one should always strive to achieve them naturally at some point. Natural changes in consciousness are more potent, last longer, and have less noise/side effects than chemically assisted. Its the getting there without herbs and gasses and doses thats the hard work.
A PHARMACEUTICAL STUDY
www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no1/eqi01015.htmlTHE PSYCHOLOGY OF HASHISH
www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no2/eqi02004.html"Agreed on all points. As a former herb fancier, I can attest the fact that while it may help the beginner to open their conciousness, and to break down spiritual barriers, habitual use tends to cause apathy and burn-out. This isn't to say that marijuana is evil--indeed, every intoxicant has some sort of value--but in the end such things are more hindrance than help when used merely for their pleasurable affects.
Crowley's treatment of hashish is brilliant, by the way. His words on absinthe and cocaine are also excellent. Crowley was greatly responsible for the psychedelic explosion in the west, if I am correct. Is it true that he introduced Aldous Huxley to peyote? Or is that just hearsay? (Huxley's book "Doors of Perception" is a must-read for any student of the subject. It is here that he likens the mescaline trance to Samadhi. )
I also reccomend the section on the "sacred grass of the arabs" in Liber Aleph.