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Im a stable, sane, not depressed or anything person. I once took LSD (mixed with other things aswell...) and had a trip during which I spoke to God, Satan and v

by Jedi72 8y ago

Im a stable, sane, not depressed or anything person. I once took LSD (mixed with other things aswell...) and had a trip during which I spoke to God, Satan and various other imaginary beings. It was not a fun experience - I'm a man of science, but the feeling/perception was so real, my entire world view was shattered. It stuck with me for months after. I've gone from someone who 100% believed in evolution and a material universe, to someone who deep down thinks there may be a God, and I may actually have to face some kind of hell for some kind of sins I may unknowingly commit in this life. I don't consider this a spiritual awakening or something profound - it's more like I put a crack in my sanity that I can never completely fix. These drugs are extremely powerful. They can potentially destroy healthy minds. I support more research and even, in time, legalisation - but I am sharing the story so others may take away the point that when you start hacking with your brains firmware, you should be EXTREMELY careful you dont accidentally brick it. EDIT: For clarity purposes, this wasn't my first time doing LSD and it wasn't a huge dose. Nobody understands exactly how these drugs work, maybe this was a 1/1000 event. But it happened - and I don't do drugs any more.

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dominotw 8y ago
i just had giggles and tummy ache.
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inteleng 8y ago
This is apparently not an uncommon reaction. It's usually called an ego death.
- ajryan 8y ago
  What the parent describes is not ego death - that is meant much more literally - loss of a sense of self and dissolution of the barrier between one's identity and the rest of existence.
state_less 8y ago
These are the stories we tell ourselves. Be they scientific or otherwise. The science is nice, it helps us get around in the world. But when stories become overwhelming, maybe it’s time for a change (of mind). “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.” ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest
- Rzor 8y ago
  Odd, I just read that a few hours ago in Alan Watts' Wisdom of Insecurity.
  - state_less 8y ago
    Alan's buried next to a large boulder on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco. There is a nice tree there that you can sit in the crook of and spend some time with him. You can get there by walking through the Marin headlands. Give the Green Gulch folks a smile as you pass through. Have a good one :)
tasty_freeze 8y ago
Pollan makes the point that he isn't advocating that people score some mushrooms or tabs of acid then charge ahead. He says what he did, and what was done back in the 50s and 60s before it became illegal, was to have an experienced therapist check his mental health, describe what was likely to happen, and give him guidance on how to deal with what he experienced. He then took the substance(s) and was guided by this professional while he had his experience. Then there was a debriefing where they went over what he experienced. No doubt a lot of recreational users get away with just dropping acid without forethought, but some don't fare well.
- rublev 8y ago
  God that sounds mental.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  > He says what he did, and what was done back in the 50s and 60s before it became illegal, was to have an experienced therapist check his mental health, describe what was likely to happen, and give him guidance on how to deal with what he experienced. He then took the substance(s) and was guided by this professional while he had his experience. Then there was a debriefing where they went over what he experienced. I cannot in any way see how prohibition creates more safety compared to this. The substances are available to anyone with persistence and a few dollars. The guidance, knowledge, and systematic approach to navigating the space they provide is gone. I don’t see how this is helpful.
  - komali2 8y ago
    It's not helpful, if you want I guess we can start talking about Nixon and the drug wars and Iran contra and if we really wanna get into it light a joint cause before you know it I'll be ranting about the CIA selling coke in the streets and the American government's war on black people. Fucking bullshit war on drugs man. Why doesn't our government have room for rationality?
    - andrei_says_ 8y ago
monetus 8y ago
I highly suggest reading 'Why god won't go away' by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. IIRC, the posterior superior parietal lobe essentially orients your body within your consciousness. When people have religious experiences this part of the brain has extra activity. If that activity was blocking that part of the brain from properly orienting your body, wouldn't a feeling of 'oneness' make a lot of sense? I imagine that if you combine that with strange, new temporal lobe activity and you have a divine consciousness communicating with yours. The people who I've seen talk about about that took very high doses, usually of dmt or ayuhuasca.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  Your comment took me quite a while to parse, but it's actually incredible. I had never considered that somewhere deep down I have a sensation of "being" inside my body, which I guess some part of the brain is responsible for. Our senses can be fooled as we all know - if this sense became confused, it seems plausible that one could experience the sensation of "being" - in the sense of, their phyisical geometric location in space - somewhere else, other than between their ears. If this could happen then the experience could possibly manifest itself in a few ways. In the larger discussion thread, many are talking about having an experience where somebody feels they are at one with the universe, so their sense of being is that they feel like they are everywhere. Another possibility that occured to me is, consider that we percieve the world from the position of inside our head - which also happens to be the default calibration for our sense of geometrical "being". We also experience vision from this perspective, so it seems completely normal to assume that our brains process raw eye-signals. However, consider the possibility that our experience which we call vision is actually not the raw data feed, but actually is calculated/derived from both the raw data feed and our internal sense of geometrical viewpoint. If this were the case, then someone who had their sense of geometrical viewpoint displaced (but was still taking in raw data from their eyes, which do have a fixed real-world location) would experience a sense of vision, from the viewpoint inside the world wherever their sense of geometrical viewpoint has been displaced to. This seems a plausible explanation for how people (who are often experiencing medical trauma) could have a legitimate out of body experience - their sense of geometrical location was displaced, but their brain continued to process vision, so it projected a viewpoint from location X using the data it was receiving from positiom Y and what it already knew of the world.
danvayn 8y ago
I experienced ego death and it brought me out of my very depressed state. I felt so centered and driven afterwards and that feeling lasted for months. It might've been a gamble but I'm absolutely glad that I took it.
- dgzl 8y ago
  After reading your term 'ego death', I'm reminded of a particular time that I used LSD, and am starting to wonder if that's what brought me out of my depressive state. About three months later I graduated undergrad and started a new job, which transformed my life for the better.
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    I think it’s certainly possible that it brought you out of your depressive state. LSD-25 will show you certain truths within yourself and your subconscious; these truths can be negative or positive in nature. It took me months to fully integrate the experience, though. I’d argue the integration period after the trip is as important as the trip itself.
- itronitron 8y ago
  I've only experienced that ego-death through meditation (twice while I was in high school.) Just wanted to mention that it can be achieved without psychedelics. The easier to describe experience consisted of 'me' as a tiny speck of dust floating in a featureless, dimensionless void. As I tried to grasp a frame of reference I snapped back to my normal reality. I did not meditate much after that, mostly because I felt I had accomplished something.
  - some_account 8y ago
    Ego death and then you felt good that you accomplished something? That is the ego being satisfied. There is no ego death. It's part of us.
    - King-Aaron 8y ago
Pimpus 8y ago
> I've gone from someone who 100% believed in evolution and a material universe, to someone who deep down thinks there may be a God, and I may actually have to face some kind of hell for some kind of sins I may unknowingly commit in this life. Well, it sounds like you went from being an atheist to an agnostic. That certainly is a more rational and less dogmatic position to take, based on what we know. As for the Hell thing, well, it's a possibility. Even Buddhism has hell realms. Had something similar happen to me. I was a staunch atheist before psychedelics, now the notion of a purely material universe seems naive. Anyway, I wanted to share with you an excerpt from a blog post I'm working on. Might be a bit rough still. > There's no easy path to enlightenment, but we do have some astounding tools and methods at our disposal. There is the humble magic mushroom, which, along with LSD and other psychedelics, breaks down the substrate of reality for a brief period of time. After witnessing the day-to-day patterns of conditioned behavior, and reality itself, melt away, it's a bit easier to disattach from falsehood. But it's also tempting to take the psychedelic experience for truth, when it itself is a distorted presentation of reality. I personally think that psychedelics increase communication between the rational mind and the rest of the brain, and that psychedelic visions are the rational mind's interpretations of subconscious activity. Mostly these are just wrong interpretations; the two sides of the mind don't communicate often and can't understand each other very well. We have to resist taking the experience at face value and dig deeper to find the kernels of truth.
- xcvbxzas 8y ago
  >Well, it sounds like you went from being an atheist to an agnostic. That certainly is a more rational and less dogmatic position to take, based on what we know. I'm not sure why this argument shows so often (and it's not even limited to religion), but it's an incredibly bad one. The positions here are not a ternary matter. The options are not limited to 100% one way, 100% the other, or right in the middle. The 'most rational' position lies somewhere in that continuum. When converting to the usual trinary labels, one extreme or the other may end up being the most rational position. The center is not automatically best. > I was a staunch atheist before psychedelics, now the notion of a purely material universe seems naive. Continuing to try to avoid the religion topic directly, I'd caution you against reading too much into your trips, which your excerpt oddly points out as well. Our brains are rather questionable devices for perceiving the world as it really is even when they are functioning properly. There is no reason to believe intentionally screwing with it's functioning would somehow increase it's ability to perceive the world truthfully. I can see potential value in using trips to improve lateral thinking, and perhaps even for insight into yourself, but in terms of exposing hidden secrets of the universe... There's no rational basis for that, and the most likely explanation seems to be the combination of the intentional misfiring and the usual imperfect operation of our brains.
GuiA 8y ago
> I once took LSD (mixed with other things aswell...) You should disclose all the substances you took for your comment to have any validity as anecdata. Your story is very different whether the “other substances” were “marijuana and theine” or “datura and cocaine”.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  They were other recreational drugs - N2O and Marijuana
  - bfuller 8y ago
    Ok your comment is EXTREMELY misleading. Taking nitrous while on LSD is a COMPLETELY different ballgame than LSD on its own. And your comment is just railing against LSD. Ridiculous. You have no place to be telling people about psychedelics.
    - Jedi72 8y ago
      Ok, sure. Let my advice of "be careful" be stricken from the record. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - krageon 8y ago
        There's nothing wrong with telling people to be careful, however it is important that you give them a full picture of what went wrong with you so they can avoid it. Otherwise you're just appropriating a past experience to further an agenda.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  Wow, you and I should get together and go bowling sometime!
lpcrealmadrid 8y ago
I find it more interesting to view it as a Chaos Monkey for the symbolic system that is the mind. The ways in which we organize and make sense of the world calcify with the repetition of certain memes. The idea at least is that psychedelics add entropy to this habituation. Perhaps this itself causes a lot of trouble for people (like myself) who think they have this world figured out in a significant way, only to start seeing God/Satan/Hades and throw that all up in the air. Going on that journey without an experienced guide would be the dangerous part methinks (Pollan discusses this in another podcast he was a guest on recently)
dahart 8y ago
> I'm a man of science, but the feeling/perception was so real, my entire world view was shattered. Something maybe similar happened to me after being with my grandfather while he died peacefully at home. It doesn’t take drugs to change a personal narrative that might be stuck in certainty, life can do that too, nor is it necessarily a bad thing in my mind.
- ssvss 8y ago
  Is it related to feeling your grandfather's presence, when he was about to die. I have heard 2 of my friends saying they experienced this.
  - dahart 8y ago
    Yes, that would be a way of describing it. I don’t know what I felt, and I can’t say there weren’t physical signs and just a rush of emotion being mistaken as something spiritual, but it seemed to happen out of the blue and my brother who was there later asked me tentatively if something weird had happened to me too. In my dogmatic past I’ve mentally dismissed other people’s stories like this as improbable or exaggerated or superstitious. But it was unmistakably strong and I’ve lost my surety.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      I've probably not had that exact same experience but I've certainly had other experiences. As someone who likes science and have an analytic approach I guess I would probably have ended up as an atheist if it wasn't for a number of events that would be really hard to fit into an atheist worldview. Furthermore I've also come to realize that this position has been really good and useful for me, -and the rest of the world. It has helped me go from an angry boy from a poor family to a reasonable man who's not only able to feed my family but also actually able to help others. So, for what I know free will and God might be an illusion (I don't think that), but in that case I'd say it's a really useful illusion.
tayo42 8y ago
This experience was just induced by drugs though. A chemical that changes how receptors work in your brain. Its up to you to make it significant or just accept it was a few hours of your head not working how it normally does.
- tuespetre 8y ago
  These things can change how you think permanently, for better or for worse.
obelix_ 8y ago
The West is over obsessed with over loading their senses. These kind of descriptions of "experience" you can also see in New York hipster yelp reviews of the 'most amazing' sushi joint or the latest game of thrones episode or whatever bullshit.
ajryan 8y ago
As a scary anecdote, that's not very scary.
ghostcluster 8y ago
Like Pollan says, the magic mushroom and its psylocibin is a happy medium of the psychadelic effect. I had a trip years ago, and the insights and shift out of everyday thinking was so valuable that I still treasure the experience, and would recommend it to anyone. Steve Jobs on psychedelics: > "Throughout that period of time [1972-1974] I used the LSD approximately ten to fifteen times," Jobs said. "I would ingest the LSD on a sugar cube or in a hard form of gelatin. I would usually take the LSD when I was by myself. I have no words to explain the effect the LSD had on me, although, I can say it was a positive life-changing experience for me and I am glad I went through that experience." On another occasion, he found some more words to describe the impact: > "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."
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taneq 8y ago
I find this very interesting because I had precisely the opposite reaction once when I tried psylocibin. Despite being pretty solidly materialist and agnostic, I'd always held a bit of a soft spot for Cartesian duelism and a bit of a "but it'd be cool if..." What I didn't expect was that the effects wouldn't just "feel real" or "be convincing", they were real. Subjectively, it wasn't inside my head, it was the actual world that changed. The fact that a small amount of psychoactive substance could fundamentally alter my perceived reality put the final nail in the coffin for any possibility that my mind was generated by something outside my own skull.
- therein 8y ago
  Yup, when I consumed some `golden teacher` and started perceiving the people around me in `The Simpsons Cartoon Style` rendered in realtime with perfect realism replacing my reality, I was sold on that being a very real possibility as well. And music... It takes a whole other dimension. Calling it `high def` doesn't do it any justice. Experiencing music aside, it feels as though you live the music you are hearing. It is hard to explain. It also becomes your reality.
- Lewton 8y ago
  LSD made me go from your run of the mill nihilist to being convinced that even consciousness is a complete illusion and all philosophy is built on this ridiculous lie. It's like solipsism taken one step further, no I'm not the only thing that exists because -I- don't really exist in any meaningful way either. We're all just P-zombies. Qualia is nonsense If you thought relating to normal people as a nihilist was hard.....
  - alexmat 8y ago
    Post-solopsism? Fck me dude, I mean say want you will about nihilism, at least it doesn't attempt to invalidate the experience of qualia.
    - Lewton 8y ago
      It's just materialism taken to its logical conclusion. We're just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other in a way that fools ourselves into believing that we're a cohesive entity. Ever been tired and run on autopilot? Our experience of ourselves vary in strength all the time. If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time
some_account 8y ago
You got it all backwards. What you think is a crack in sanity is actually a crack in the illusion that the physical world is all there is. But to each their own.
- deleted 8y ago
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- JackFr 8y ago
  Indeed. Dogmatic materialism is the real mind-virus.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    It's not even scientific. Quantum mechanics seems to be how our world works and the only realist versions of it are very exotic, like predicting an infinite multiverse.
  - tgamba 8y ago
    Yes. Sticking only to the realm of hard science, the frontiers keep expanding (e.g. dark matter and energy). When it comes to our subjective perceptions and how the the brain assembles them into consciousness, we've barely a clue. Scientific apparatuses have allowed us to "see" the complete elecromagnetic spectrum, the cell, the quasar... psychedelics may be an apparatus allowing us to see dimensions of reality heretofore unquantified.
    - JackFr 8y ago
      There are frequencies we can't hear -- impossible with the physical equipment nature has provided in our ears. But science and engineering have a means for both proving to us they really exist, and mangling them (with a kind of fidelity) into some sort of analogous experience. Similarly there are frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot see. And microscopes, and telescopes and MRI's, and all the other wonders of our day take, which take a world that is impossible for use to sense directly and transform it into an analog we can sense. So why do we cavalierly assume that our brains are physically capable of understanding all true things? What does a machine which transforms ideas which are literally inconceivable to our physical brains look like? What do the crude analogs of these inconceivable thoughts look like? (I realize I've drifted far afield from the OP -- I don't mean to say that psychedelics are a window into true mysteries. But these discussions always seem to lead me down this path...)
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colordrops 8y ago
Perhaps you should introspect and explore your subconscious further. Sometimes things like this follow a J curve - at first you regress and suffer before seeing benefit, like exercise. The experience on hallucinogens are a reflection of yourself, so this could be an opportunity to work through previously subconscious issues.
djur 8y ago
I had a series of psychotic episodes in my late teens where I experienced things like my food tasting like it was contaminated with bleach or gasoline, maggots writhing under my skin, spiders swarming out of the walls and biting me, and news anchors threatening sexual violence against my family members. It absolutely demolished my belief in a spiritual or supernatural world, because I became aware of just how powerful and convincing the mind can be in creating false experiences.
nugga 8y ago
When you became more aware of how what you do affects other people you can take note, step up your game and improve. I'd hope you aren't judged as harshly for things you may have done when you were in the dark so to speak.
heracles 8y ago
Can't you see it as a indication of the opposite of what we typically call God? That instead of there being an external entity outside our universe interacting with you, you talked to something God-like inside yourself. This might be what you share with every person in history that ever have received divine inspiration. That same experience motivated them. Just like we can share experience with other people when we are happy, tired of drunk. But this one requires a more complicated key to access, which could be elaborate practices or a drug. I might be wrong, but I find these psilocybin experiments extremely enlightening as to why we as humans struggle so much with religious experience. Did my suggestion make sense? I tried to word it as plainly as possible, but these are things we aren't used to discuss...
- ianai 8y ago
  I understood you. It’s a neat concept.
- bfuller 8y ago
  This person was unwilling or unable to assimilate their experience and now they are blaming LSD. Funny enough, if he kept taking LSD and exploring his spirituality he could deal with the feelings of believing in science but being shaken by the possibility of the supernatural. That's actually pretty straightforward. But he is choosing to close the book on it, and now is blaming the drug when really its himself. An act of ego if I've ever seen one.
  - collyw 8y ago
    I was thinking something similar.
  - enkephalin 8y ago
    my first thought was about the same; "shouldn't have stopped there". and really, their experience fundamentally sounds like a good thing. a new way of looking at, or experiencing the world was opened to them. yeah, it can be frightening, and that's why you need to put more work in, to accommodate it in your life.
  - 8y ago
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>These drugs are extremely powerful. They can potentially destroy healthy minds. As someone who has also done LSD, I'd agree with this. However, I'd also suggest that shattering a sense of "certainty" and introducing doubt into the mind of someone who previously had certainty isn't necessarily "destroying a healthy mind". What you characterize as a, "crack in my sanity that I can never completely fix", could also be characterized as expanding your awareness. It can be frightening and permanently altering to tear away the facades our psyches have created, since birth, to process and "understand" reality as we perceive it (even temporarily). That's what LSD does. While I also don't consider this a spiritual experience, I do consider it extremely profound. Certainly anyone considering doing LSD should be understand that they are in for an extremely intense and potentially life-changing experience.
postr 8y ago
Sounds silly in retrospect, but I once made the very bad the decision of watching a horror film while on LSD. I only got a few minutes in before it occurred to me that my brain wasn't very much capable of recognizing the difference between film and reality. I could almost feel the adrenaline pumping inside my brain. I felt the immediate urge to sit in the safe corner of my apartment, with a clear view of my surroundings. My brain was clearly anticipating an attacker. It felt primal. It took me a while to calm down. What's really interesting is what proceeded to happen over the next few months. Basically, at a subconscious level, my apartment was marked. Especially the front door area which I remember being most afraid of - every time I'd walk by, I'd become scared, as if I anticipated somebody to jump at me. At other times, I'd catch myself looking around to make sure I'm alone. I had absolutely no way to control this - it's as if every fiber of my being KNEW I was in danger, even though I was consciously aware it was nonsense. I became acutely aware of how separate our conscious and unconscious decision-making is. At the beginning, I would sleep with the lights on. For a while I considered moving to a different apartment. Instead, with some effort, I've mostly trained those reactions away over a period of 2-3 months. I still feel a bit jumpier than usual when alone in the dark, but mostly back to normality. This is one of the most valuable experiences of my life, but also one that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.
bfuller 8y ago
This has everything to do with you personally and nothing to do with LSD.
collyw 8y ago
Lots of things can potentially destroy healthy minds (relationships for example). According to David Nutts study psylocibin is regarded as one of the least harmful drugs. I have also seen a study showing that use of psychedelics was associated with lower rates of mental health issues later in life. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063972 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... Sounds to me like it put a crack in your ego rather than a crack in your sanity.
- gepi79 8y ago
  Sounds to me like it put a crack in your ego rather than a crack in your sanity. This is what many so called psychonauts do not understand. A bad trip can be traumatic and can revive other traumatic experiences. https://www.verywellmind.com/ptsd-triggers-and-coping-strategies-2797557 https://www.verywellmind.com/ptsd-triggers-and-coping-strate... https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/630i1g/trauma_from_bad_trips/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/630i1g/trauma_from_bad... Psychedelics can lead to decreased wellbeing, decreased psychological and emotional stability and decreased strength and robustness to deal with further stress and unpleasant challenges. Medical experts use psychedelics because of their strong destabilizing effects. Nothing is gained and much is lost if this uncomfortable weak unstable state remains.
  - simplemts 8y ago
    I have never, ever met a psychonaut that doesn't advocate "set and setting".
    - gepi79 8y ago
      The main point was that bad reactions and bad trips should not be underestimated and down played as silly ego problems or rare personal weakness. Set and setting is important. Do not try psychedelics to solve problems. But set and setting is not everyting. A bad trip might happen anyway. Who knows about its genetic, biological and psychological constitution and reaction before the trip ? That is why a medical expert as trip sitter is so important.
dolzenko 8y ago
Have you just called all the (millions) of religions people insane?
- enkephalin 8y ago
  well, technically the only thing stopping the medical world from calling a very religious person delusional, is the fact that religious people are specifically exempt from receiving that diagnosis, for no medical reason whatsoever.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    I very highly doubt that is the only thing. Belief in religion is a normal part of the human experience, even though the beliefs differ and some folks don't have them. These beliefs are generally harmless at best and for some, they help folks have community, a purpose, and all of these other positive things. Sure, some negatives, but that's life. Normalcy plus lack of the belief causing life problems. Doesn't sound like general sickness to me. Naturally there are grey areas and exceptions and cults and all this sort of thing, but it doesn't take religion to produce them. I should at this point mention that I'm atheist.
    - enkephalin 8y ago
      yeah, i'm having trouble sourcing my statement, although i definitely read about it in some publication that i can't seem to find now. i was also sure it was part of the official DCM or ICD criteria. hmpf.
  - didibus 8y ago
    I think medically, most mental disorders are characterised by a kind of normal functioning and quality of life metric. So you're only delusional if it impairs your ability to function normally within the context of your society. Or if it negatively affect your quality of life, like, say it prevents you from sleeping, makes you overly anxious, etc. In that sense, I think most common believer of a religion aren't affected in their normal functioning within society, and don't feel negatively affected by their beliefs. But some are, and those could be called out as having mental disorders.
tmaly 8y ago
Open up any nursing drug handbook, there are tons of prescription drugs in there where the method of action is unknown
dennisgorelik 8y ago
> I spoke to God, Satan and various other imaginary beings Do you still vividly remember these "meetings"? Would you be able to describe how these God/Satan/etc. look like?
sizzle 8y ago
Maybe it's worth trying a different hallucinogenic before you throw in the towel?

by Jedi72 8y ago

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dominotw 8y ago

i just had giggles and tummy ache.

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inteleng 8y ago

This is apparently not an uncommon reaction. It's usually called an ego death.

ajryan 8y ago
What the parent describes is not ego death - that is meant much more literally - loss of a sense of self and dissolution of the barrier between one's identity and the rest of existence.

state_less 8y ago

These are the stories we tell ourselves. Be they scientific or otherwise. The science is nice, it helps us get around in the world. But when stories become overwhelming, maybe it’s time for a change (of mind). “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.” ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Rzor 8y ago
Odd, I just read that a few hours ago in Alan Watts' Wisdom of Insecurity.
- state_less 8y ago
  Alan's buried next to a large boulder on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco. There is a nice tree there that you can sit in the crook of and spend some time with him. You can get there by walking through the Marin headlands. Give the Green Gulch folks a smile as you pass through. Have a good one :)

tasty_freeze 8y ago

Pollan makes the point that he isn't advocating that people score some mushrooms or tabs of acid then charge ahead. He says what he did, and what was done back in the 50s and 60s before it became illegal, was to have an experienced therapist check his mental health, describe what was likely to happen, and give him guidance on how to deal with what he experienced. He then took the substance(s) and was guided by this professional while he had his experience. Then there was a debriefing where they went over what he experienced. No doubt a lot of recreational users get away with just dropping acid without forethought, but some don't fare well.

rublev 8y ago
God that sounds mental.
andrei_says_ 8y ago
> He says what he did, and what was done back in the 50s and 60s before it became illegal, was to have an experienced therapist check his mental health, describe what was likely to happen, and give him guidance on how to deal with what he experienced. He then took the substance(s) and was guided by this professional while he had his experience. Then there was a debriefing where they went over what he experienced. I cannot in any way see how prohibition creates more safety compared to this. The substances are available to anyone with persistence and a few dollars. The guidance, knowledge, and systematic approach to navigating the space they provide is gone. I don’t see how this is helpful.
- komali2 8y ago
  It's not helpful, if you want I guess we can start talking about Nixon and the drug wars and Iran contra and if we really wanna get into it light a joint cause before you know it I'll be ranting about the CIA selling coke in the streets and the American government's war on black people. Fucking bullshit war on drugs man. Why doesn't our government have room for rationality?
  - andrei_says_ 8y ago

monetus 8y ago

I highly suggest reading 'Why god won't go away' by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. IIRC, the posterior superior parietal lobe essentially orients your body within your consciousness. When people have religious experiences this part of the brain has extra activity. If that activity was blocking that part of the brain from properly orienting your body, wouldn't a feeling of 'oneness' make a lot of sense? I imagine that if you combine that with strange, new temporal lobe activity and you have a divine consciousness communicating with yours. The people who I've seen talk about about that took very high doses, usually of dmt or ayuhuasca.

Jedi72 8y ago
Your comment took me quite a while to parse, but it's actually incredible. I had never considered that somewhere deep down I have a sensation of "being" inside my body, which I guess some part of the brain is responsible for. Our senses can be fooled as we all know - if this sense became confused, it seems plausible that one could experience the sensation of "being" - in the sense of, their phyisical geometric location in space - somewhere else, other than between their ears. If this could happen then the experience could possibly manifest itself in a few ways. In the larger discussion thread, many are talking about having an experience where somebody feels they are at one with the universe, so their sense of being is that they feel like they are everywhere. Another possibility that occured to me is, consider that we percieve the world from the position of inside our head - which also happens to be the default calibration for our sense of geometrical "being". We also experience vision from this perspective, so it seems completely normal to assume that our brains process raw eye-signals. However, consider the possibility that our experience which we call vision is actually not the raw data feed, but actually is calculated/derived from both the raw data feed and our internal sense of geometrical viewpoint. If this were the case, then someone who had their sense of geometrical viewpoint displaced (but was still taking in raw data from their eyes, which do have a fixed real-world location) would experience a sense of vision, from the viewpoint inside the world wherever their sense of geometrical viewpoint has been displaced to. This seems a plausible explanation for how people (who are often experiencing medical trauma) could have a legitimate out of body experience - their sense of geometrical location was displaced, but their brain continued to process vision, so it projected a viewpoint from location X using the data it was receiving from positiom Y and what it already knew of the world.

danvayn 8y ago

I experienced ego death and it brought me out of my very depressed state. I felt so centered and driven afterwards and that feeling lasted for months. It might've been a gamble but I'm absolutely glad that I took it.

dgzl 8y ago
After reading your term 'ego death', I'm reminded of a particular time that I used LSD, and am starting to wonder if that's what brought me out of my depressive state. About three months later I graduated undergrad and started a new job, which transformed my life for the better.
- ShabbosGoy 8y ago
  I think it’s certainly possible that it brought you out of your depressive state. LSD-25 will show you certain truths within yourself and your subconscious; these truths can be negative or positive in nature. It took me months to fully integrate the experience, though. I’d argue the integration period after the trip is as important as the trip itself.
itronitron 8y ago
I've only experienced that ego-death through meditation (twice while I was in high school.) Just wanted to mention that it can be achieved without psychedelics. The easier to describe experience consisted of 'me' as a tiny speck of dust floating in a featureless, dimensionless void. As I tried to grasp a frame of reference I snapped back to my normal reality. I did not meditate much after that, mostly because I felt I had accomplished something.
- some_account 8y ago
  Ego death and then you felt good that you accomplished something? That is the ego being satisfied. There is no ego death. It's part of us.
  - King-Aaron 8y ago

Pimpus 8y ago

> I've gone from someone who 100% believed in evolution and a material universe, to someone who deep down thinks there may be a God, and I may actually have to face some kind of hell for some kind of sins I may unknowingly commit in this life. Well, it sounds like you went from being an atheist to an agnostic. That certainly is a more rational and less dogmatic position to take, based on what we know. As for the Hell thing, well, it's a possibility. Even Buddhism has hell realms. Had something similar happen to me. I was a staunch atheist before psychedelics, now the notion of a purely material universe seems naive. Anyway, I wanted to share with you an excerpt from a blog post I'm working on. Might be a bit rough still. > There's no easy path to enlightenment, but we do have some astounding tools and methods at our disposal. There is the humble magic mushroom, which, along with LSD and other psychedelics, breaks down the substrate of reality for a brief period of time. After witnessing the day-to-day patterns of conditioned behavior, and reality itself, melt away, it's a bit easier to disattach from falsehood. But it's also tempting to take the psychedelic experience for truth, when it itself is a distorted presentation of reality. I personally think that psychedelics increase communication between the rational mind and the rest of the brain, and that psychedelic visions are the rational mind's interpretations of subconscious activity. Mostly these are just wrong interpretations; the two sides of the mind don't communicate often and can't understand each other very well. We have to resist taking the experience at face value and dig deeper to find the kernels of truth.

xcvbxzas 8y ago
>Well, it sounds like you went from being an atheist to an agnostic. That certainly is a more rational and less dogmatic position to take, based on what we know. I'm not sure why this argument shows so often (and it's not even limited to religion), but it's an incredibly bad one. The positions here are not a ternary matter. The options are not limited to 100% one way, 100% the other, or right in the middle. The 'most rational' position lies somewhere in that continuum. When converting to the usual trinary labels, one extreme or the other may end up being the most rational position. The center is not automatically best. > I was a staunch atheist before psychedelics, now the notion of a purely material universe seems naive. Continuing to try to avoid the religion topic directly, I'd caution you against reading too much into your trips, which your excerpt oddly points out as well. Our brains are rather questionable devices for perceiving the world as it really is even when they are functioning properly. There is no reason to believe intentionally screwing with it's functioning would somehow increase it's ability to perceive the world truthfully. I can see potential value in using trips to improve lateral thinking, and perhaps even for insight into yourself, but in terms of exposing hidden secrets of the universe... There's no rational basis for that, and the most likely explanation seems to be the combination of the intentional misfiring and the usual imperfect operation of our brains.

GuiA 8y ago

> I once took LSD (mixed with other things aswell...) You should disclose all the substances you took for your comment to have any validity as anecdata. Your story is very different whether the “other substances” were “marijuana and theine” or “datura and cocaine”.

Jedi72 8y ago
They were other recreational drugs - N2O and Marijuana
- bfuller 8y ago
  Ok your comment is EXTREMELY misleading. Taking nitrous while on LSD is a COMPLETELY different ballgame than LSD on its own. And your comment is just railing against LSD. Ridiculous. You have no place to be telling people about psychedelics.
  - Jedi72 8y ago
    Ok, sure. Let my advice of "be careful" be stricken from the record. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - krageon 8y ago
      There's nothing wrong with telling people to be careful, however it is important that you give them a full picture of what went wrong with you so they can avoid it. Otherwise you're just appropriating a past experience to further an agenda.
fapjacks 8y ago
Wow, you and I should get together and go bowling sometime!

lpcrealmadrid 8y ago

I find it more interesting to view it as a Chaos Monkey for the symbolic system that is the mind. The ways in which we organize and make sense of the world calcify with the repetition of certain memes. The idea at least is that psychedelics add entropy to this habituation. Perhaps this itself causes a lot of trouble for people (like myself) who think they have this world figured out in a significant way, only to start seeing God/Satan/Hades and throw that all up in the air. Going on that journey without an experienced guide would be the dangerous part methinks (Pollan discusses this in another podcast he was a guest on recently)

dahart 8y ago

> I'm a man of science, but the feeling/perception was so real, my entire world view was shattered. Something maybe similar happened to me after being with my grandfather while he died peacefully at home. It doesn’t take drugs to change a personal narrative that might be stuck in certainty, life can do that too, nor is it necessarily a bad thing in my mind.

ssvss 8y ago
Is it related to feeling your grandfather's presence, when he was about to die. I have heard 2 of my friends saying they experienced this.
- dahart 8y ago
  Yes, that would be a way of describing it. I don’t know what I felt, and I can’t say there weren’t physical signs and just a rush of emotion being mistaken as something spiritual, but it seemed to happen out of the blue and my brother who was there later asked me tentatively if something weird had happened to me too. In my dogmatic past I’ve mentally dismissed other people’s stories like this as improbable or exaggerated or superstitious. But it was unmistakably strong and I’ve lost my surety.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    I've probably not had that exact same experience but I've certainly had other experiences. As someone who likes science and have an analytic approach I guess I would probably have ended up as an atheist if it wasn't for a number of events that would be really hard to fit into an atheist worldview. Furthermore I've also come to realize that this position has been really good and useful for me, -and the rest of the world. It has helped me go from an angry boy from a poor family to a reasonable man who's not only able to feed my family but also actually able to help others. So, for what I know free will and God might be an illusion (I don't think that), but in that case I'd say it's a really useful illusion.

tayo42 8y ago

This experience was just induced by drugs though. A chemical that changes how receptors work in your brain. Its up to you to make it significant or just accept it was a few hours of your head not working how it normally does.

tuespetre 8y ago
These things can change how you think permanently, for better or for worse.

obelix_ 8y ago

The West is over obsessed with over loading their senses. These kind of descriptions of "experience" you can also see in New York hipster yelp reviews of the 'most amazing' sushi joint or the latest game of thrones episode or whatever bullshit.

ajryan 8y ago

As a scary anecdote, that's not very scary.

ghostcluster 8y ago

Like Pollan says, the magic mushroom and its psylocibin is a happy medium of the psychadelic effect. I had a trip years ago, and the insights and shift out of everyday thinking was so valuable that I still treasure the experience, and would recommend it to anyone. Steve Jobs on psychedelics: > "Throughout that period of time [1972-1974] I used the LSD approximately ten to fifteen times," Jobs said. "I would ingest the LSD on a sugar cube or in a hard form of gelatin. I would usually take the LSD when I was by myself. I have no words to explain the effect the LSD had on me, although, I can say it was a positive life-changing experience for me and I am glad I went through that experience." On another occasion, he found some more words to describe the impact: > "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."

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taneq 8y ago

I find this very interesting because I had precisely the opposite reaction once when I tried psylocibin. Despite being pretty solidly materialist and agnostic, I'd always held a bit of a soft spot for Cartesian duelism and a bit of a "but it'd be cool if..." What I didn't expect was that the effects wouldn't just "feel real" or "be convincing", they were real. Subjectively, it wasn't inside my head, it was the actual world that changed. The fact that a small amount of psychoactive substance could fundamentally alter my perceived reality put the final nail in the coffin for any possibility that my mind was generated by something outside my own skull.

therein 8y ago
Yup, when I consumed some `golden teacher` and started perceiving the people around me in `The Simpsons Cartoon Style` rendered in realtime with perfect realism replacing my reality, I was sold on that being a very real possibility as well. And music... It takes a whole other dimension. Calling it `high def` doesn't do it any justice. Experiencing music aside, it feels as though you live the music you are hearing. It is hard to explain. It also becomes your reality.
Lewton 8y ago
LSD made me go from your run of the mill nihilist to being convinced that even consciousness is a complete illusion and all philosophy is built on this ridiculous lie. It's like solipsism taken one step further, no I'm not the only thing that exists because -I- don't really exist in any meaningful way either. We're all just P-zombies. Qualia is nonsense If you thought relating to normal people as a nihilist was hard.....
- alexmat 8y ago
  Post-solopsism? Fck me dude, I mean say want you will about nihilism, at least it doesn't attempt to invalidate the experience of qualia.
  - Lewton 8y ago
    It's just materialism taken to its logical conclusion. We're just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other in a way that fools ourselves into believing that we're a cohesive entity. Ever been tired and run on autopilot? Our experience of ourselves vary in strength all the time. If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time

some_account 8y ago

You got it all backwards. What you think is a crack in sanity is actually a crack in the illusion that the physical world is all there is. But to each their own.

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JackFr 8y ago
Indeed. Dogmatic materialism is the real mind-virus.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  It's not even scientific. Quantum mechanics seems to be how our world works and the only realist versions of it are very exotic, like predicting an infinite multiverse.
- tgamba 8y ago
  Yes. Sticking only to the realm of hard science, the frontiers keep expanding (e.g. dark matter and energy). When it comes to our subjective perceptions and how the the brain assembles them into consciousness, we've barely a clue. Scientific apparatuses have allowed us to "see" the complete elecromagnetic spectrum, the cell, the quasar... psychedelics may be an apparatus allowing us to see dimensions of reality heretofore unquantified.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    There are frequencies we can't hear -- impossible with the physical equipment nature has provided in our ears. But science and engineering have a means for both proving to us they really exist, and mangling them (with a kind of fidelity) into some sort of analogous experience. Similarly there are frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot see. And microscopes, and telescopes and MRI's, and all the other wonders of our day take, which take a world that is impossible for use to sense directly and transform it into an analog we can sense. So why do we cavalierly assume that our brains are physically capable of understanding all true things? What does a machine which transforms ideas which are literally inconceivable to our physical brains look like? What do the crude analogs of these inconceivable thoughts look like? (I realize I've drifted far afield from the OP -- I don't mean to say that psychedelics are a window into true mysteries. But these discussions always seem to lead me down this path...)

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colordrops 8y ago

Perhaps you should introspect and explore your subconscious further. Sometimes things like this follow a J curve - at first you regress and suffer before seeing benefit, like exercise. The experience on hallucinogens are a reflection of yourself, so this could be an opportunity to work through previously subconscious issues.

djur 8y ago

I had a series of psychotic episodes in my late teens where I experienced things like my food tasting like it was contaminated with bleach or gasoline, maggots writhing under my skin, spiders swarming out of the walls and biting me, and news anchors threatening sexual violence against my family members. It absolutely demolished my belief in a spiritual or supernatural world, because I became aware of just how powerful and convincing the mind can be in creating false experiences.

nugga 8y ago

When you became more aware of how what you do affects other people you can take note, step up your game and improve. I'd hope you aren't judged as harshly for things you may have done when you were in the dark so to speak.

heracles 8y ago

Can't you see it as a indication of the opposite of what we typically call God? That instead of there being an external entity outside our universe interacting with you, you talked to something God-like inside yourself. This might be what you share with every person in history that ever have received divine inspiration. That same experience motivated them. Just like we can share experience with other people when we are happy, tired of drunk. But this one requires a more complicated key to access, which could be elaborate practices or a drug. I might be wrong, but I find these psilocybin experiments extremely enlightening as to why we as humans struggle so much with religious experience. Did my suggestion make sense? I tried to word it as plainly as possible, but these are things we aren't used to discuss...

ianai 8y ago
I understood you. It’s a neat concept.
bfuller 8y ago
This person was unwilling or unable to assimilate their experience and now they are blaming LSD. Funny enough, if he kept taking LSD and exploring his spirituality he could deal with the feelings of believing in science but being shaken by the possibility of the supernatural. That's actually pretty straightforward. But he is choosing to close the book on it, and now is blaming the drug when really its himself. An act of ego if I've ever seen one.
- collyw 8y ago
  I was thinking something similar.
- enkephalin 8y ago
  my first thought was about the same; "shouldn't have stopped there". and really, their experience fundamentally sounds like a good thing. a new way of looking at, or experiencing the world was opened to them. yeah, it can be frightening, and that's why you need to put more work in, to accommodate it in your life.
- 8y ago

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

>These drugs are extremely powerful. They can potentially destroy healthy minds. As someone who has also done LSD, I'd agree with this. However, I'd also suggest that shattering a sense of "certainty" and introducing doubt into the mind of someone who previously had certainty isn't necessarily "destroying a healthy mind". What you characterize as a, "crack in my sanity that I can never completely fix", could also be characterized as expanding your awareness. It can be frightening and permanently altering to tear away the facades our psyches have created, since birth, to process and "understand" reality as we perceive it (even temporarily). That's what LSD does. While I also don't consider this a spiritual experience, I do consider it extremely profound. Certainly anyone considering doing LSD should be understand that they are in for an extremely intense and potentially life-changing experience.

postr 8y ago

Sounds silly in retrospect, but I once made the very bad the decision of watching a horror film while on LSD. I only got a few minutes in before it occurred to me that my brain wasn't very much capable of recognizing the difference between film and reality. I could almost feel the adrenaline pumping inside my brain. I felt the immediate urge to sit in the safe corner of my apartment, with a clear view of my surroundings. My brain was clearly anticipating an attacker. It felt primal. It took me a while to calm down. What's really interesting is what proceeded to happen over the next few months. Basically, at a subconscious level, my apartment was marked. Especially the front door area which I remember being most afraid of - every time I'd walk by, I'd become scared, as if I anticipated somebody to jump at me. At other times, I'd catch myself looking around to make sure I'm alone. I had absolutely no way to control this - it's as if every fiber of my being KNEW I was in danger, even though I was consciously aware it was nonsense. I became acutely aware of how separate our conscious and unconscious decision-making is. At the beginning, I would sleep with the lights on. For a while I considered moving to a different apartment. Instead, with some effort, I've mostly trained those reactions away over a period of 2-3 months. I still feel a bit jumpier than usual when alone in the dark, but mostly back to normality. This is one of the most valuable experiences of my life, but also one that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

bfuller 8y ago

This has everything to do with you personally and nothing to do with LSD.

collyw 8y ago

Lots of things can potentially destroy healthy minds (relationships for example). According to David Nutts study psylocibin is regarded as one of the least harmful drugs. I have also seen a study showing that use of psychedelics was associated with lower rates of mental health issues later in life. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063972 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... Sounds to me like it put a crack in your ego rather than a crack in your sanity.

gepi79 8y ago
Sounds to me like it put a crack in your ego rather than a crack in your sanity. This is what many so called psychonauts do not understand. A bad trip can be traumatic and can revive other traumatic experiences. https://www.verywellmind.com/ptsd-triggers-and-coping-strategies-2797557 https://www.verywellmind.com/ptsd-triggers-and-coping-strate... https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/630i1g/trauma_from_bad_trips/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/630i1g/trauma_from_bad... Psychedelics can lead to decreased wellbeing, decreased psychological and emotional stability and decreased strength and robustness to deal with further stress and unpleasant challenges. Medical experts use psychedelics because of their strong destabilizing effects. Nothing is gained and much is lost if this uncomfortable weak unstable state remains.
- simplemts 8y ago
  I have never, ever met a psychonaut that doesn't advocate "set and setting".
  - gepi79 8y ago
    The main point was that bad reactions and bad trips should not be underestimated and down played as silly ego problems or rare personal weakness. Set and setting is important. Do not try psychedelics to solve problems. But set and setting is not everyting. A bad trip might happen anyway. Who knows about its genetic, biological and psychological constitution and reaction before the trip ? That is why a medical expert as trip sitter is so important.

dolzenko 8y ago

Have you just called all the (millions) of religions people insane?

enkephalin 8y ago
well, technically the only thing stopping the medical world from calling a very religious person delusional, is the fact that religious people are specifically exempt from receiving that diagnosis, for no medical reason whatsoever.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  I very highly doubt that is the only thing. Belief in religion is a normal part of the human experience, even though the beliefs differ and some folks don't have them. These beliefs are generally harmless at best and for some, they help folks have community, a purpose, and all of these other positive things. Sure, some negatives, but that's life. Normalcy plus lack of the belief causing life problems. Doesn't sound like general sickness to me. Naturally there are grey areas and exceptions and cults and all this sort of thing, but it doesn't take religion to produce them. I should at this point mention that I'm atheist.
  - enkephalin 8y ago
    yeah, i'm having trouble sourcing my statement, although i definitely read about it in some publication that i can't seem to find now. i was also sure it was part of the official DCM or ICD criteria. hmpf.
- didibus 8y ago
  I think medically, most mental disorders are characterised by a kind of normal functioning and quality of life metric. So you're only delusional if it impairs your ability to function normally within the context of your society. Or if it negatively affect your quality of life, like, say it prevents you from sleeping, makes you overly anxious, etc. In that sense, I think most common believer of a religion aren't affected in their normal functioning within society, and don't feel negatively affected by their beliefs. But some are, and those could be called out as having mental disorders.

tmaly 8y ago

Open up any nursing drug handbook, there are tons of prescription drugs in there where the method of action is unknown

dennisgorelik 8y ago

> I spoke to God, Satan and various other imaginary beings Do you still vividly remember these "meetings"? Would you be able to describe how these God/Satan/etc. look like?

sizzle 8y ago

Maybe it's worth trying a different hallucinogenic before you throw in the towel?