36 ms·

Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

128 points by monktastic1 5y ago

c00lguy420 5y ago
That's so based.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I used to be a pretty frequent psychedelic user. These results sound right to me. I would've considered panpsychism to be totally absurd before I discovered LSD, for instance. Now it's my daily driver.
- ffwacom 5y ago
  Same. A trip answered all my questions.
- toomanydoubts 5y ago
  I've had the same experience. Can't shake the idea that `consciousness == god` and we are all tiny manifestations of this "essence", after some psychedelic trips. My rational mind always goes back to atheism when sober, but the idea is always there in the back of my mind.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      I have to admit I might have been influenced by "The Egg" before. I hadn't seen the Alan Watts poem before, but that somehow has just put me to tears. Thanks for sharing.
    - BossingAround 5y ago
      Alan Watts is an excellent writer and speaker, absolutely worth reading and listening to. I can't help but feeling that the video wraps his speech into a pathos of melancholic, "full of emotions" song married to a meaningless set of disjointed clips. I'd recommend reading his books, The Way of Zen was excellent.
  - sethaurus 5y ago
    Perhaps this is self-delusion on my part, but I've had no trouble integrating materialism/atheism with what you're describing — that kind of psychedelic panpsychism. They don't feel like competing claims.
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      I don't mean the usual anthropomorphic god. It's just that once you accept that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, it's not a big leap to think that it's god(not in the sense of "god, the creator", but in the sense of "god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe").
      - circlemaker 5y ago
        The big leap is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.
  - monktastic1 5y ago
    Per your description below ("god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe") I would have pegged you as an idealist (god is and dreams the universe), not a panpsychist.
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      To be honest, I'm don't know much about philosophy of the mind. From the very little I've read right know, probably my current view is closer to cosmopsychism, maybe? This is what I just read: "but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe."
- tayo42 5y ago
  I think panpsychism just needs to be explained well and probably most people would be onboard with the idea or at least comfortable accepting it. I thought it was a little wild at first but after reading "Galileo's Error" by Phillip Goff it seems ok. Panspychism it self covers so many theories too. In my personal experience psychedelic use seemed to almost solidify materialism for me. The idea that reality, your self and soul is nothing but an illusion is uncomfortable but I think tripping can reinforce that idea.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    how does it reinforce/solidity materialism for you?
    - tayo42 5y ago
      During my first lsd trip, I was sitting on a rock in the park, and I'm not sure what happened or why, but suddenly my entire reality fell apart, disintegrated into a bright light and small pieces, and I became intensely aware of how we are seemingly are just built up from particles that came together. I think those pieces were the atoms and molecules that came together to create my experience of the world. Less about the psychedelic experience itself. I also think that the existence of these drugs show that someone's reality is constructed from chemicals and cells doing what they do. Psychedelics are like throwing a wrench in a machine. The chemicals and mechanics are working differently now and the conscious experience changes with it. Depending on the drug introduced the perception changes, or consider some drugs like anesthetics where you can be awake and responsive but not have any personal awareness of whats going on. On DMT trips I felt abstract thought fall apart along with the idea of my self(Ego death maybe?). I couldn't form ideas, and there was no longer an idea of self. "I" didn't exist. But this happens because a chemical is introduced into a system that is generating a conscious experience and it changes because of it. A typical brain creates these abstract ideas, your self identity, interprets senses in a certain way. That's the illusion created. Since drugs being introduced into the system can turn off that sense of self, I, your soul(anesthesia, ego death) I don't think dualism is really applicable, the mind seems to be generated by the brain/body and its chemicals. Hope i explained my self alright, not a topic I get to talk or think about much
- kaycebasques 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on panpsychism being your daily driver? Wikipedia article suggests it has something to do with minds being present throughout the universe. Are we talking animals? Rocks? Everything? Computers?
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    This might sound strangely obvious, but some report that somehow they obtain much deeper insight into motivations and intent of others. a different, fresh point of view, a heightened sense of empathy?
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    Sure. I once wrote a paper for epistemology class (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master/YAH/YAH.pdf https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master...). In it I argue that there is a category of propositions that are knowably unknowable. These are things that we know that we will never be able to know. One example of such a proposition is: > We're living in a simulation that's too complete for us to escape You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it, and neither stance is more rational than the other. Beliefs in such a space can't be motivated by evidence, so they have to be motivated by something else--like whether they cause you to live the kind of life that you want to be living, or maybe you just think it's fun. My beliefs re: panpsychism are like this. I don't anticipate ever being able to prove them, nor do I expect to run into evidence that disproves them. They go something like this: I like to imagine that there is more than one temporal dimension. When we humans have cause to believe that a certain part of the universe has a mind, it's because that part of the universe is doing something that creates an arrow of time that is parallel to our own. Its future is also our future. This lets us communicate with it (maybe). By contrast, when we encounter a rock or a lightning bolt or something that you'd generally call dead. Well, whatever machinations that part of the universe is having towards supporting its experience--they create an arrow of time that is orthogonal to ours, so we can't communicate with them. It's not so much that each rock is alive, or each lightning bolt, but that the whole universe is alive. The part of the universe that I get go call myself has come up with names for the other parts, but those names are just part of the story that I tell myself. Other perspectives might group things into entities worth naming in other ways. Maybe what I call "my" behavior is functioning like a neuron in something... else. I like to mess with people who are having arguments about abortion: I believe that life begins not at conception, not at birth, but at the big bang. There are very few ways that this belief affects my life, but it does occasionally motivate me to meditate. If I can get my own thoughts to settle down for a while I feel like I can tap into a bigger awareness. It's not having any thoughts that I can decipher, but it feels nice anyhow.
bluSCALE4 5y ago
My experience has been that just as fast as the walls come down, the mind builds them back up.
- nicolashahn 5y ago
  sometimes, you can build different walls
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    and sometimes, when the walls came down, so did the roof, which ripped out the electrical supply, destroyed the plumbing and ruined all the floors. you don't have a house anymore, just a pile of disorganized raw material and you realize you don't know anything about house construction.
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      That was intense.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Those can take a while to come back from, and are not always comfortable, but I've never regretted having gone through the exercise.
- monktastic1 5y ago
  Reminds me of this section from a fantastic trip report: "My hardcore materialist atheism was beginning to be challenged. But my identity was so solidly based on my materialist atheism that I soon attributed the entire experience to merely a "drug trip" with no meaning for my life! Perhaps the greatest lesson here is that. No matter what you experience, your identity can write it off as unreal if it conflicts with who you think you are." http://tafkajestdr.blogspot.com/2013/01/intro-to-tafka-jestdrs-journey.html http://tafkajestdr.blogspot.com/2013/01/intro-to-tafka-jestd...
  - 5y ago
monktastic1 5y ago
The overall result does not surprise me, but two things in particular did: 1. That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias. 2. That idealism didn't enjoy a bigger bump than it did. I predict that dose size would correlate with increase in idealist views, as larger doses are more frequently nondual, and nondual experiences tend to inspire idealist beliefs. I myself think there are various strong reasons to believe in idealism. I've written about them here: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/reading/on-the-self-validating-nature-of-idealism/ https://www.essentiafoundation.org/reading/on-the-self-valid...
- User23 5y ago
  > That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias The overwhelming majority of human beings both now and historically are dualists, so this isn't surprising to me at all. Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs.
  - guythedudebro 5y ago
    > Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs This seems pretty bad faith, I'd imagine you're getting lost for other reasons. For one, inanimate matter probably needs to be animate before it can think. Secondly, perhaps the difficulty in explaining the mechanism comes from the fact that materialists are honest about the uncertainties of this (extremely difficult) problem and are burdened with an epistemology that requires evidence from the actual world, unlike other approaches.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There is no "mechanism for how [ ... ] emergence occurs". Emergence is the mechanism. This is even more true of qualia, which are definitionally subjective, and thus do not exist as phenomena in the world. We could talk a bit about the mechanism behind the process where aggregating sufficient water molecules creates a liquid. But we can't talk at all about how that same process could ever be responsible for the experience of "wet", because the experience of wet is wholly subjective. Similarly, even if we were to be able to fully describe the materialist processes taking place in a system that has qualia, nothing in the description can ever explain the experience of having experiences, beyond saying "well look here - see all this stuff going on? that's how qualia are possible", which is not tautological, but not a mechanism for qualia. Speaking of "thinking" more generally is even worse than focusing on qualia. It's not hard to agree on what qualia are - that it is like something to be something, in Nagel's words - but agreeing on what would count as "thinking" and what wouldn't is not likely to see any agreement at all.
cipheredStones 5y ago
Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  If astronauts can have their worldview changed by going to space why can't a psychedelic experience do the same. Both are just a new perspective.
  - Elof 5y ago
    100%. To abstract it even further, I have some defining moments from my teens that are monumental to me and uneventful at best to everyone else. Gaining perspective is largely an individual experience, it's just that some things seem to have more influence in sparking a change in perspective than others
- westoncb 5y ago
  There is some interesting research[1] accounting for this via analogy to annealing: essentially that while using psychedelics (or a variety of other situations), a kind of disordering occurs that opens up an alternate phase of neural behavior where it's more possible to change course; then, after the trip (or whatever caused you to enter this more disordered state where free energy is higher), there is a "cooling" phase and some new order is arrived at. [1] https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealing https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealin...
- swayvil 5y ago
  We don't qualify experiences by consistency with convention so much as intensity. Call it unreasonable but there you go. So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.
swayvil 5y ago
Beliefs are derived from experiences (ideally...more or less...) Psychedelics deliver strange experiences. Thus psychedelics affect your beliefs, make them strange or whatever. Seems perfectly reasonable.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  It's quite a bit more than that. Loss of ego and a sense of interconnectedness are some of the main effects from mushrooms and MDMA... Meditation does the same. There's a lot of evidence, if you look around, that us WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) are rather estranged from the base state of humanity (which psychonauts and meditators explore). There's a lot of evidence, if you care to accept it, that psychedelics can dramatically help us to better realign with ourselves, and even with fundamental reality. In short, these strange experiences can actually reduce our own strangeness, while increasing our well-being, in quite specific and important ways.
sebow 5y ago
Firstly, it's based on an online survey,so take that however you want... i can't say that i can take it very highly. Secondly...I don't think beliefs(as in the proper sense) themselves are that easily altered by psychedelics.Psychedelics can and more often than not do induce a very profound spiritual & metaphysical experience, but beliefs are deeper than that,more glued to the "gut" & unconscious: they're constructed in combination to previous experiences usually not by the "self".I guess this study's conclusion comes as a result of the fact that spirituality and belief is still probably at the lowest levels in the west.Thus you have such "conclusions" where people think they believe in something in a spiritual and metaphysical manner just because of stronger trips.From what i recall upon studying this subject, granted about 10 years ago(though that was still when the biggest boom of research about brain & cognition happened), belief is even deeper than cognition, so that's why i'm reluctant to this theory: i think it's universally true that we're aware when we take psychedelics, it affects our unconscious as far as in the cognition we do during the trip triggers it mainly as a way to either glue memories or as a defense mechanism. Then again i'm probably in the minority to say that belief is in big part mostly unconscious,and predates cognition in the "traditional" sense: i.e thoughts of the usual self. I base this on the fact that memory "indexing & glueing" happens unconsciously, and also that for me anecdotally psychedelics (and very rarely nootropics) usually either reinforced a belief or completed a belief through a new experience.
whalesalad 5y ago
Psilocybin has been a profound catalyst for change in my life. Macro + micro dosing both offer distinct benefits. Can’t imagine life without it now. I feel enlightened and awakened. Alive for the first time in a long time.
- willhinsa 5y ago
  How has microdosing helped? Or I should say, what benefits does microdosing confer that macrodosing doesn't?
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    I was surprised by this - but microdosing has had a more profound effect on my daily life than macrodosing. After a very long and arduous journey with therapist(s), psychiatrist(s), counseling, etc… I finally decided to trust myself and take my own well-being into my own hands: cultivating my own medicine at home. During the entire process I was convinced macrodosing would be the most helpful and microdosing would just be a nice fun thing to try. I was wrong. Microdosing helps me every day in my everyday encounters - I don’t have a negative voice in my mind, I can think about things from a more logical vantage point versus getting caught up in emotions or triggers. Macrodosing to me can best be describes as getting a UART debug port to your brain. It’s also helped me develop (or perhaps in my case: expose/identify/become aware of) my mind-body connection. Sometimes for an entire trip I’ll just foam roll, meditate and try and unwind years of abuse and trauma on my body. I got into a lot of accidents in my youth and my conditioning led me to ignore the needs of my body to recover properly. One downside to macrodosing (for me) has been the vasoconstrictive effect of psilocybin. Long story short, I’m particularly susceptible to this and it can crush me. A big 5g Terrence McKenna ego-death dose can basically put me right to sleep due to the way my neck and muscles will get so tight that I can’t breath and essentially chokehold myself. Benadryl has been a helpful tool in this scenario. All this being said - I haven’t measured this stuff scientifically so who really knows. But I do feel more compassion for everyone and I am able to observe things in others that used to bother me tremendously from a place of non-judgement. I see the journey that I am on, and I can see the journey that everyone else is on too. I can hold those in my mind without judgement, and it gives me strength where before I would have been perturbed. If anyone has questions please don’t hesitate to email me privately. This medicine can and will change the world.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
At the risk of being "that guy", it has to be said that this kind of study is unreliable. Posting a bunch of messages to r/drugs and r/psychedelics to come take their survey is going to suffer from all sorts of statistical biases. It is still better than the lowest for the study, the sample size of one: "Well this is what I experienced". Yet here I go. I have always been a materialist, and I've also never done drugs (I'm in my 50s). A few years back I bought some lysergamides and tryptamines online, and over the course of two years did between 20 and 30 experiments, though never of high doses (at most, 200 ug LSD). I found the LSD to be quite interesting, but not the least bit spiritual. The first time I did 4-aco-dmt (aka psilacetin), a very close relative to psilocybin, was a different story. It was a 25mg-ish dose, taken orally. It was far more intense, and dreamy, and soporific than LSD (for me), and it gave me a glimpse of what something I was hoping to experience: spirituality. It was unfortunately fleeting -- I was lost in "the light" but then became aware that I was actually lying in a bed, and without thinking, opened my eyes for a moment to confirm. I closed my eyes but that moment in the light was gone for good. I've tried a few more times, but it has mostly been uncomfortable and confusing way to spend a couple hours. Anyway, I came away from those experiments even more of a materialist than I was before. If a hundred micrograms or a few milligrams of small molecule can so disrupt one's mind, if it can profoundly change your perceptions, if it can induce a feeling of being in a divine presence, it confirmed to me that the brain is all just chemistry.
- mostertoaster 5y ago
  You should try going to an Orthodox Church and see how weird it is. It definitely makes you think of the spiritual meaning of things. THC alone makes me all spiritual feeling, and often in a good way. I think psychedelics would just take me to a scary spiritual place, not a euphoric one.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Imagine how powerful it would be to be able to alter the setting so bad trips depict hell and good trips depict heaven. Almost like they could be utilized in a way to provide a religious fervor for your adherents.
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LNSY 5y ago
Slightly off topic, but: Jesus turning water into wine makes a lot more sense when he has access to some kind of potent hallucinogen. It also might explain everything else that went on back in Palestine 2000 years ago.
- BossingAround 5y ago
  I don't think you need a strong hallucinogen for it. People were extremely superstitious; I wouldn't be surprised if we could explain some events with something like second-hand cannabis smoke and a strong drive to believe.
wdroz 5y ago
Why some people are so eager to alter their mind/brain?
- toomanydoubts 5y ago
  Because people like enjoyable experiences.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Imaging you're depressed. Or suffering from PTSD/CPTSD. Generally unhappy. Have deep echoes of misery to wade through as the background of your daily life. And then, there's a chance that taking a drug might just shake things up a bit. Maybe you'll get a new start. Worst case, you'll have a little fun. How long has it been since that happened? That is how people become eager to alter their mind. Their minds are a sucky place to be. If it were a house it would be condemned.
Borrible 5y ago
Maybe, but on the other hand drug induced psychosis may end in heaven, hell or elsewhere, depending on what the sweet, demanding or commanding voice from the beautiful light whispered, howled or growled. And how deep it burned itself into the brain chemistry.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Psychedelics and the absurdity of the possibility life itself alter metaphysical beliefs.
johnisgood 5y ago
It may alter beliefs in general. Just like anything else. Nothing to see here, really. I started looking into Alan Watts and Terence McKenna because of psychedelics, and I did not even consume psychedelics. They may alter metaphysical beliefs without consumption, too! :)
stared 5y ago
“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences" by William A. Richards (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28121728-sacred-knowledge https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28121728-sacred-knowledg...), yet I find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific research on psychedelics and religion. We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious" people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try if it weren't for legal, scientific research)? And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hinduists? How do monks and priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their religious background? Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading this book.
foxyv 5y ago
I get the impression that there is some moral lesson to come from this. Something about the non-existence of self and the impermanence of even our most deeply held beliefs. This reminds me of "Waking Up" by Sam Harris where he talks about split brains, brain trauma, and other acute changes to people's personalities.
Epiphany21 5y ago
Psychedelics have been extremely beneficial to me but none of my experiences with them have really changed my beliefs about the metaphysical. I am open to the possibility but I'm also not moved by drug-induced hallucinations alone. That being said, why wouldn't a conscious god or simulation developer include cool easter eggs for their creations to find and play with? Why be a responsible higher power when you could instead throw hallucinogenic mushrooms into the monkey enclosure and watch them freak out?
srcreigh 5y ago
I know of three spiritual teachers who describe psychedelics as a door to the spiritual world. Ram Dass the Jewish Psychology Professor at Harvard/Hippie/Hindu. See his famous book Be Here Now. [1] He passed away last year Fr. Stephen De Young and Fr. Stephen Damick (PhD), Eastern Orthodox Christian priests. Psychedelics are mentioned near the end of episode 2 of their podcast. [2] [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41580312-be-here-now https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41580312-be-here-now [2]: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  I found a copy of Be Here Now for sale at a thrift store and bought it as a curio. A few days later I opened it to read it and a dried, pressed cannabis leaf (not the flower) fell out. The book did not disappoint, but it was definitely odd.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Many physicists I know are not materialists— closer to Pythagorean-Platonism, where math is more real than “stuff“

128 points by monktastic1 5y ago

That's so based.

I used to be a pretty frequent psychedelic user. These results sound right to me. I would've considered panpsychism to be totally absurd before I discovered LSD, for instance. Now it's my daily driver.

ffwacom 5y ago
Same. A trip answered all my questions.
toomanydoubts 5y ago
I've had the same experience. Can't shake the idea that `consciousness == god` and we are all tiny manifestations of this "essence", after some psychedelic trips. My rational mind always goes back to atheism when sober, but the idea is always there in the back of my mind.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    I have to admit I might have been influenced by "The Egg" before. I hadn't seen the Alan Watts poem before, but that somehow has just put me to tears. Thanks for sharing.
  - BossingAround 5y ago
    Alan Watts is an excellent writer and speaker, absolutely worth reading and listening to. I can't help but feeling that the video wraps his speech into a pathos of melancholic, "full of emotions" song married to a meaningless set of disjointed clips. I'd recommend reading his books, The Way of Zen was excellent.
- sethaurus 5y ago
  Perhaps this is self-delusion on my part, but I've had no trouble integrating materialism/atheism with what you're describing — that kind of psychedelic panpsychism. They don't feel like competing claims.
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    I don't mean the usual anthropomorphic god. It's just that once you accept that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, it's not a big leap to think that it's god(not in the sense of "god, the creator", but in the sense of "god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe").
    - circlemaker 5y ago
      The big leap is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.
- monktastic1 5y ago
  Per your description below ("god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe") I would have pegged you as an idealist (god is and dreams the universe), not a panpsychist.
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    To be honest, I'm don't know much about philosophy of the mind. From the very little I've read right know, probably my current view is closer to cosmopsychism, maybe? This is what I just read: "but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe."
tayo42 5y ago
I think panpsychism just needs to be explained well and probably most people would be onboard with the idea or at least comfortable accepting it. I thought it was a little wild at first but after reading "Galileo's Error" by Phillip Goff it seems ok. Panspychism it self covers so many theories too. In my personal experience psychedelic use seemed to almost solidify materialism for me. The idea that reality, your self and soul is nothing but an illusion is uncomfortable but I think tripping can reinforce that idea.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  how does it reinforce/solidity materialism for you?
  - tayo42 5y ago
    During my first lsd trip, I was sitting on a rock in the park, and I'm not sure what happened or why, but suddenly my entire reality fell apart, disintegrated into a bright light and small pieces, and I became intensely aware of how we are seemingly are just built up from particles that came together. I think those pieces were the atoms and molecules that came together to create my experience of the world. Less about the psychedelic experience itself. I also think that the existence of these drugs show that someone's reality is constructed from chemicals and cells doing what they do. Psychedelics are like throwing a wrench in a machine. The chemicals and mechanics are working differently now and the conscious experience changes with it. Depending on the drug introduced the perception changes, or consider some drugs like anesthetics where you can be awake and responsive but not have any personal awareness of whats going on. On DMT trips I felt abstract thought fall apart along with the idea of my self(Ego death maybe?). I couldn't form ideas, and there was no longer an idea of self. "I" didn't exist. But this happens because a chemical is introduced into a system that is generating a conscious experience and it changes because of it. A typical brain creates these abstract ideas, your self identity, interprets senses in a certain way. That's the illusion created. Since drugs being introduced into the system can turn off that sense of self, I, your soul(anesthesia, ego death) I don't think dualism is really applicable, the mind seems to be generated by the brain/body and its chemicals. Hope i explained my self alright, not a topic I get to talk or think about much
kaycebasques 5y ago
Can you elaborate on panpsychism being your daily driver? Wikipedia article suggests it has something to do with minds being present throughout the universe. Are we talking animals? Rocks? Everything? Computers?
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  This might sound strangely obvious, but some report that somehow they obtain much deeper insight into motivations and intent of others. a different, fresh point of view, a heightened sense of empathy?
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Sure. I once wrote a paper for epistemology class (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master/YAH/YAH.pdf https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master...). In it I argue that there is a category of propositions that are knowably unknowable. These are things that we know that we will never be able to know. One example of such a proposition is: > We're living in a simulation that's too complete for us to escape You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it, and neither stance is more rational than the other. Beliefs in such a space can't be motivated by evidence, so they have to be motivated by something else--like whether they cause you to live the kind of life that you want to be living, or maybe you just think it's fun. My beliefs re: panpsychism are like this. I don't anticipate ever being able to prove them, nor do I expect to run into evidence that disproves them. They go something like this: I like to imagine that there is more than one temporal dimension. When we humans have cause to believe that a certain part of the universe has a mind, it's because that part of the universe is doing something that creates an arrow of time that is parallel to our own. Its future is also our future. This lets us communicate with it (maybe). By contrast, when we encounter a rock or a lightning bolt or something that you'd generally call dead. Well, whatever machinations that part of the universe is having towards supporting its experience--they create an arrow of time that is orthogonal to ours, so we can't communicate with them. It's not so much that each rock is alive, or each lightning bolt, but that the whole universe is alive. The part of the universe that I get go call myself has come up with names for the other parts, but those names are just part of the story that I tell myself. Other perspectives might group things into entities worth naming in other ways. Maybe what I call "my" behavior is functioning like a neuron in something... else. I like to mess with people who are having arguments about abortion: I believe that life begins not at conception, not at birth, but at the big bang. There are very few ways that this belief affects my life, but it does occasionally motivate me to meditate. If I can get my own thoughts to settle down for a while I feel like I can tap into a bigger awareness. It's not having any thoughts that I can decipher, but it feels nice anyhow.

bluSCALE4 5y ago

My experience has been that just as fast as the walls come down, the mind builds them back up.

nicolashahn 5y ago
sometimes, you can build different walls
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  and sometimes, when the walls came down, so did the roof, which ripped out the electrical supply, destroyed the plumbing and ruined all the floors. you don't have a house anymore, just a pile of disorganized raw material and you realize you don't know anything about house construction.
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    That was intense.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    Those can take a while to come back from, and are not always comfortable, but I've never regretted having gone through the exercise.
monktastic1 5y ago
Reminds me of this section from a fantastic trip report: "My hardcore materialist atheism was beginning to be challenged. But my identity was so solidly based on my materialist atheism that I soon attributed the entire experience to merely a "drug trip" with no meaning for my life! Perhaps the greatest lesson here is that. No matter what you experience, your identity can write it off as unreal if it conflicts with who you think you are." http://tafkajestdr.blogspot.com/2013/01/intro-to-tafka-jestdrs-journey.html http://tafkajestdr.blogspot.com/2013/01/intro-to-tafka-jestd...
- 5y ago

monktastic1 5y ago

The overall result does not surprise me, but two things in particular did: 1. That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias. 2. That idealism didn't enjoy a bigger bump than it did. I predict that dose size would correlate with increase in idealist views, as larger doses are more frequently nondual, and nondual experiences tend to inspire idealist beliefs. I myself think there are various strong reasons to believe in idealism. I've written about them here: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/reading/on-the-self-validating-nature-of-idealism/ https://www.essentiafoundation.org/reading/on-the-self-valid...

User23 5y ago
> That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias The overwhelming majority of human beings both now and historically are dualists, so this isn't surprising to me at all. Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs.
- guythedudebro 5y ago
  > Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs This seems pretty bad faith, I'd imagine you're getting lost for other reasons. For one, inanimate matter probably needs to be animate before it can think. Secondly, perhaps the difficulty in explaining the mechanism comes from the fact that materialists are honest about the uncertainties of this (extremely difficult) problem and are burdened with an epistemology that requires evidence from the actual world, unlike other approaches.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  There is no "mechanism for how [ ... ] emergence occurs". Emergence is the mechanism. This is even more true of qualia, which are definitionally subjective, and thus do not exist as phenomena in the world. We could talk a bit about the mechanism behind the process where aggregating sufficient water molecules creates a liquid. But we can't talk at all about how that same process could ever be responsible for the experience of "wet", because the experience of wet is wholly subjective. Similarly, even if we were to be able to fully describe the materialist processes taking place in a system that has qualia, nothing in the description can ever explain the experience of having experiences, beyond saying "well look here - see all this stuff going on? that's how qualia are possible", which is not tautological, but not a mechanism for qualia. Speaking of "thinking" more generally is even worse than focusing on qualia. It's not hard to agree on what qualia are - that it is like something to be something, in Nagel's words - but agreeing on what would count as "thinking" and what wouldn't is not likely to see any agreement at all.

cipheredStones 5y ago

Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.

aunty_helen 5y ago
If astronauts can have their worldview changed by going to space why can't a psychedelic experience do the same. Both are just a new perspective.
- Elof 5y ago
  100%. To abstract it even further, I have some defining moments from my teens that are monumental to me and uneventful at best to everyone else. Gaining perspective is largely an individual experience, it's just that some things seem to have more influence in sparking a change in perspective than others
westoncb 5y ago
There is some interesting research[1] accounting for this via analogy to annealing: essentially that while using psychedelics (or a variety of other situations), a kind of disordering occurs that opens up an alternate phase of neural behavior where it's more possible to change course; then, after the trip (or whatever caused you to enter this more disordered state where free energy is higher), there is a "cooling" phase and some new order is arrived at. [1] https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealing https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealin...
swayvil 5y ago
We don't qualify experiences by consistency with convention so much as intensity. Call it unreasonable but there you go. So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.

swayvil 5y ago

Beliefs are derived from experiences (ideally...more or less...) Psychedelics deliver strange experiences. Thus psychedelics affect your beliefs, make them strange or whatever. Seems perfectly reasonable.

mandmandam 5y ago
It's quite a bit more than that. Loss of ego and a sense of interconnectedness are some of the main effects from mushrooms and MDMA... Meditation does the same. There's a lot of evidence, if you look around, that us WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) are rather estranged from the base state of humanity (which psychonauts and meditators explore). There's a lot of evidence, if you care to accept it, that psychedelics can dramatically help us to better realign with ourselves, and even with fundamental reality. In short, these strange experiences can actually reduce our own strangeness, while increasing our well-being, in quite specific and important ways.

sebow 5y ago

Firstly, it's based on an online survey,so take that however you want... i can't say that i can take it very highly. Secondly...I don't think beliefs(as in the proper sense) themselves are that easily altered by psychedelics.Psychedelics can and more often than not do induce a very profound spiritual & metaphysical experience, but beliefs are deeper than that,more glued to the "gut" & unconscious: they're constructed in combination to previous experiences usually not by the "self".I guess this study's conclusion comes as a result of the fact that spirituality and belief is still probably at the lowest levels in the west.Thus you have such "conclusions" where people think they believe in something in a spiritual and metaphysical manner just because of stronger trips.From what i recall upon studying this subject, granted about 10 years ago(though that was still when the biggest boom of research about brain & cognition happened), belief is even deeper than cognition, so that's why i'm reluctant to this theory: i think it's universally true that we're aware when we take psychedelics, it affects our unconscious as far as in the cognition we do during the trip triggers it mainly as a way to either glue memories or as a defense mechanism. Then again i'm probably in the minority to say that belief is in big part mostly unconscious,and predates cognition in the "traditional" sense: i.e thoughts of the usual self. I base this on the fact that memory "indexing & glueing" happens unconsciously, and also that for me anecdotally psychedelics (and very rarely nootropics) usually either reinforced a belief or completed a belief through a new experience.

whalesalad 5y ago

Psilocybin has been a profound catalyst for change in my life. Macro + micro dosing both offer distinct benefits. Can’t imagine life without it now. I feel enlightened and awakened. Alive for the first time in a long time.

willhinsa 5y ago
How has microdosing helped? Or I should say, what benefits does microdosing confer that macrodosing doesn't?
- whalesalad 5y ago
  I was surprised by this - but microdosing has had a more profound effect on my daily life than macrodosing. After a very long and arduous journey with therapist(s), psychiatrist(s), counseling, etc… I finally decided to trust myself and take my own well-being into my own hands: cultivating my own medicine at home. During the entire process I was convinced macrodosing would be the most helpful and microdosing would just be a nice fun thing to try. I was wrong. Microdosing helps me every day in my everyday encounters - I don’t have a negative voice in my mind, I can think about things from a more logical vantage point versus getting caught up in emotions or triggers. Macrodosing to me can best be describes as getting a UART debug port to your brain. It’s also helped me develop (or perhaps in my case: expose/identify/become aware of) my mind-body connection. Sometimes for an entire trip I’ll just foam roll, meditate and try and unwind years of abuse and trauma on my body. I got into a lot of accidents in my youth and my conditioning led me to ignore the needs of my body to recover properly. One downside to macrodosing (for me) has been the vasoconstrictive effect of psilocybin. Long story short, I’m particularly susceptible to this and it can crush me. A big 5g Terrence McKenna ego-death dose can basically put me right to sleep due to the way my neck and muscles will get so tight that I can’t breath and essentially chokehold myself. Benadryl has been a helpful tool in this scenario. All this being said - I haven’t measured this stuff scientifically so who really knows. But I do feel more compassion for everyone and I am able to observe things in others that used to bother me tremendously from a place of non-judgement. I see the journey that I am on, and I can see the journey that everyone else is on too. I can hold those in my mind without judgement, and it gives me strength where before I would have been perturbed. If anyone has questions please don’t hesitate to email me privately. This medicine can and will change the world.

tasty_freeze 5y ago

At the risk of being "that guy", it has to be said that this kind of study is unreliable. Posting a bunch of messages to r/drugs and r/psychedelics to come take their survey is going to suffer from all sorts of statistical biases. It is still better than the lowest for the study, the sample size of one: "Well this is what I experienced". Yet here I go. I have always been a materialist, and I've also never done drugs (I'm in my 50s). A few years back I bought some lysergamides and tryptamines online, and over the course of two years did between 20 and 30 experiments, though never of high doses (at most, 200 ug LSD). I found the LSD to be quite interesting, but not the least bit spiritual. The first time I did 4-aco-dmt (aka psilacetin), a very close relative to psilocybin, was a different story. It was a 25mg-ish dose, taken orally. It was far more intense, and dreamy, and soporific than LSD (for me), and it gave me a glimpse of what something I was hoping to experience: spirituality. It was unfortunately fleeting -- I was lost in "the light" but then became aware that I was actually lying in a bed, and without thinking, opened my eyes for a moment to confirm. I closed my eyes but that moment in the light was gone for good. I've tried a few more times, but it has mostly been uncomfortable and confusing way to spend a couple hours. Anyway, I came away from those experiments even more of a materialist than I was before. If a hundred micrograms or a few milligrams of small molecule can so disrupt one's mind, if it can profoundly change your perceptions, if it can induce a feeling of being in a divine presence, it confirmed to me that the brain is all just chemistry.

mostertoaster 5y ago
You should try going to an Orthodox Church and see how weird it is. It definitely makes you think of the spiritual meaning of things. THC alone makes me all spiritual feeling, and often in a good way. I think psychedelics would just take me to a scary spiritual place, not a euphoric one.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Imagine how powerful it would be to be able to alter the setting so bad trips depict hell and good trips depict heaven. Almost like they could be utilized in a way to provide a religious fervor for your adherents.

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LNSY 5y ago

Slightly off topic, but: Jesus turning water into wine makes a lot more sense when he has access to some kind of potent hallucinogen. It also might explain everything else that went on back in Palestine 2000 years ago.

BossingAround 5y ago
I don't think you need a strong hallucinogen for it. People were extremely superstitious; I wouldn't be surprised if we could explain some events with something like second-hand cannabis smoke and a strong drive to believe.

wdroz 5y ago

Why some people are so eager to alter their mind/brain?

toomanydoubts 5y ago
Because people like enjoyable experiences.
BizarroLand 5y ago
Imaging you're depressed. Or suffering from PTSD/CPTSD. Generally unhappy. Have deep echoes of misery to wade through as the background of your daily life. And then, there's a chance that taking a drug might just shake things up a bit. Maybe you'll get a new start. Worst case, you'll have a little fun. How long has it been since that happened? That is how people become eager to alter their mind. Their minds are a sucky place to be. If it were a house it would be condemned.

Borrible 5y ago

Maybe, but on the other hand drug induced psychosis may end in heaven, hell or elsewhere, depending on what the sweet, demanding or commanding voice from the beautiful light whispered, howled or growled. And how deep it burned itself into the brain chemistry.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Psychedelics and the absurdity of the possibility life itself alter metaphysical beliefs.

johnisgood 5y ago

It may alter beliefs in general. Just like anything else. Nothing to see here, really. I started looking into Alan Watts and Terence McKenna because of psychedelics, and I did not even consume psychedelics. They may alter metaphysical beliefs without consumption, too! :)

stared 5y ago

“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences" by William A. Richards (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28121728-sacred-knowledge https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28121728-sacred-knowledg...), yet I find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific research on psychedelics and religion. We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious" people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try if it weren't for legal, scientific research)? And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hinduists? How do monks and priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their religious background? Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading this book.

foxyv 5y ago

I get the impression that there is some moral lesson to come from this. Something about the non-existence of self and the impermanence of even our most deeply held beliefs. This reminds me of "Waking Up" by Sam Harris where he talks about split brains, brain trauma, and other acute changes to people's personalities.

Epiphany21 5y ago

Psychedelics have been extremely beneficial to me but none of my experiences with them have really changed my beliefs about the metaphysical. I am open to the possibility but I'm also not moved by drug-induced hallucinations alone. That being said, why wouldn't a conscious god or simulation developer include cool easter eggs for their creations to find and play with? Why be a responsible higher power when you could instead throw hallucinogenic mushrooms into the monkey enclosure and watch them freak out?

srcreigh 5y ago

I know of three spiritual teachers who describe psychedelics as a door to the spiritual world. Ram Dass the Jewish Psychology Professor at Harvard/Hippie/Hindu. See his famous book Be Here Now. [1] He passed away last year Fr. Stephen De Young and Fr. Stephen Damick (PhD), Eastern Orthodox Christian priests. Psychedelics are mentioned near the end of episode 2 of their podcast. [2] [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41580312-be-here-now https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41580312-be-here-now [2]: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits

BizarroLand 5y ago
I found a copy of Be Here Now for sale at a thrift store and bought it as a curio. A few days later I opened it to read it and a dried, pressed cannabis leaf (not the flower) fell out. The book did not disappoint, but it was definitely odd.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Many physicists I know are not materialists— closer to Pythagorean-Platonism, where math is more real than “stuff“