11 ms·

LSD was expected to be the holy grail of mental health treatment in the 40s and 50s before it was made illegal by the U.S. and the rest old the world following

LSD was expected to be the holy grail of mental health treatment in the 40s and 50s before it was made illegal by the U.S. and the rest old the world following in the united states foot steps. I’m very grateful that we are starting to see research really pick up steam and public companies like MindMed pushing for FDA approval with MM120. It’s bittersweet though because it also is proof of how much progress we lost over those decades. Not to discredit PTSD and Mental Health research, but just to expand on how much we don’t know about our mind and what these chemicals really are… DMTx had its first round of clinical trials, where participants have extended experiences in DMT hyperspace and all share common hallucinations (i.e talking to other lifeforms). What’s interesting is that these experiments are showing us how our brain models the world. Unlike freebase N,N-DMT which is a short lived rocky experince. These patient reported and the data showed that after the first few minutes on DMTx things started to normalize (the brain started modeling their world better) One of Strassmans patients years ago said on DMT that these entities could share more with us if we learn to make extended contact. Albert Hoffman the inventor of LSD also said he had contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings) and said that it told him that they chose him to discover LSD for the sake of humanity. The DMTx participants all reported that these entities knew about their life and their traumas and helped them process these all in different ways. They all reported that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external. Psychedelics are 100% challenging the gold standard. Whatever the that is lol.

r2_pilot 2y ago
And people experiencing DTs from alcohol withdrawal say nonexistent entities are present too. The brain is merely capable of processing its inputs based on the laws of physics, and considering the complexity of a functioning mind, we shouldn't be too surprised when abnormal inputs cause abnormal outputs, nor should we necessarily hold much stock in the matter. Certainly, though, the tales are interesting if nothing else.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  We don’t have any way of determining whether these experiences are purely generated by the brain, and it’s not smart to claim it’s one way or the other without further evidence.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > it’s not smart to claim it’s one way or the other without further evidence It's perfectly smart to claim Hoffman did not make "contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings)" with zero evidence because the status quo is not having conversations with eyeballs with wings. Herego, the burden of proof is on the eyballs-with-wings guy.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Anyone who makes a claim has a burden of proof. If I'm on The Truman Show, could someone please spill the beans?
      - deepvibrations 2y ago
        Yet we still work on the assumption that consciousness arises within space-time... Disappointing the burden of proof is not deemed necessary in this case!
        r2_pilot 2y ago
        For what it's worth, I don't have evidence that you are conscious (and I never can; your qualia of the concept of the color red and your other internal world-state representations are solely yours, assuming you are not a P-zombie). For the record, I also do not make magic claims of free will nor assume there are laws outside known physics. If you wish to call in dark matter as a potential agent of causal change, then you can propose your theories backed by evidence and we'll continue as the evidence leads. But as far as my own existence, well, cogito ergo sum and all
        mistermann 2y ago
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  So, I think that is too dismissive, while I think the psychedelic proponents are too exuberant Basically, I don't think the categorization matters. Like are these entities things always here and perceived if we access a certain plane, or are these mere configurations and figments of our brain that can be repeated. To me, thats not important. Its important if the reconfiguration of the brain is useful, therapeutic, repeatable, what side effects are there, whats going on with people predisposed to schizophrenia that psychedelics seem to exacerbate permanently. What’s going on with floaters/HPPD. Can LSD be refined for the parts that are useful for us, or do we simply slap fine print about potential side effects for those with a family history of schizophrenia on it like …. every other FDA approved drug. I think fawning over something in the 1950s is juvenile, when there probably are advances possible since then to that substance. But I would like it to at least reach parity with Big Pharma’s designer drugs with clinical trials and listed side effects, instead of just anecdotes percolating rave communities.
  - s4mw1se 2y ago
    Rave communities? This is from research and patient panel interview that was hosted after the publication. Minus the hoffman stuff. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37897244/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37897244/ https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI?si=qnJ8UhOztRjshEkf https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI?si=qnJ8UhOztRjshEkf
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      I was replying to r2 about the path they had taken the discussion, which was no longer about the article but you knew that. consider reading it again with that interpretation if you didn’t know that.
- mbesto 2y ago
  > we shouldn't be too surprised when abnormal inputs cause abnormal outputs, nor should we necessarily hold much stock in the matter. While my scientific mind wants to agree with you, that same scientific mind can't help but wonder...why similar experiences are being triggered on totally unrelated people.[0] [0]- https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-elves.htm https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - r2_pilot 2y ago
    Here's a simpler explanation that fits the facts. Humans are practically genetically identical, are raised in roughly similar cultures with similar expectations of reality, and are being dosed with drugs generally assumed to be chemically similar (in this case) paired with the experiences that are reported. So while it's imperative to keep an open mind, it's also important to keep it closed enough that your brains don't leak out.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    Mass media tends to follow a lot of common themes and often they are proxies for other general societal attitudes? Many of us grew up reading at least some books in common? Interplanetary aliens always being more developed than us (and usually hostile) is a direct proxy for xenophobia to people from other countries. Ever wonder why there's so much hand-waving about immigrants stealin' our jerbs?
  - nuc1e0n 2y ago
    Totally unrelated is relative (ha ha). We are all the same species after all. Why wouldn't we respond similarly to similar inputs? Especally with something very different to our everyday experiences.
- chiefgeek 2y ago
  Just curious if you've tried psychedelics?
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    Not OC, and I've never tried psychedelics, but even a strong fever will make you hallucinate, and I've had a couple of those. You mind closes up into itself, and the world it creates, while extremely simplistic, feels very real.
  - r2_pilot 2y ago
    SWIM may or may not have confided to me experiences with a variety of compounds purported to induce a wide range of subjective internal experiences upon their various methods of consumption. At any rate, I've certainly read (and donated to) Erowid.
    - cmilton 2y ago
      Did any of your subjective internal experiences create objective results?
- tweezy 2y ago
  I will say prior to experiencing this myself I felt 100% certain that what you said is the truth. It just makes sense. Now that I've had these experiences, I'm more like 90% certain that what you said is true. These experiences add a certain humility to the way I experience the world. So in all likelihood, molecules like dmt will bind to certain serotonin receptors in the brain that cause strong and repeatable distortions in the visual field (even with eyes closed). The human mind is great at picking out patterns and assigning meaning to them based on our experiences. So that shifting pattern in my visual space kinda looks like a face, I'm going to assign trickster machine elf to that visual pattern. More likely than not that's what's going on. But there is probably some value in experiencing that. Having said all that, the subjective experience of living that is very different. This feels incredibly real. As crazy as it sounds, it genuinely feels like blasting into a hyper-dimensional space and encountering a population of sentient entities. That feeling is so real, that it leaves just the tiniest gap of "hmm, maybe I don't know everything after all. Maybe there's more to this story than I could've previously comprehended". All to say is that while you're most likely right, I think it could be healthy to acknowledge that you're not definitely right. And leaving some room for uncertainty and exploration could prove beneficial, even for the skeptics among us.
- cthalupa 2y ago
  I've done DMT a handful of times, and experienced the "entities" in several of them. After the trips ended I did not have any particular feeling that these entities were real, though the experiences were strange in a way that was quite wonderful. One trip lacked any of these entities, but the time dilation is something that I still contemplate today, a decade or so later. It literally felt like hundreds or thousands of years had passed, with clear memory of all sorts of mundane days, etc., along with more memorable ones, particularly in the days following the trip. It had a pretty profound impact on my worldview, particularly in the few months following it, though those memories faded faster than real memories would. Feeling like I had lived for so long did make a lot of my day-to-day worries seem far less significant. Also not anything I ascribe to any sort of mystical or extra-planar root-cause, but the ability for the brain to invent such a huge quantity of information over a ~15 minute trip is crazy to me, in the "man brains are weird" sense.
colechristensen 2y ago
Yes hallucinating higher powers making contact with plans for the subject to make the world better is… a consistent but rarely encountered feature of the human brain. Go read the descriptions of angels in the Bible and it reads just like somebody tripping. One of the reasons hallucinogens are dangerous is that there’s a risk that users will believe in their hallucinations and try to start cults. Timothy Leary was one of these drug-induced zealots and he among others were the reasons LSD et al got banned in the first place. They wanted to overthrow society and implement a quasi-religion based on the drugs.
- hypertele-Xii 2y ago
  Society has already been overthrown with a quasi-religion based on drugs. They're trying to make experimental gene therapy MANDATORY right now. Even though 3 million people mysteriously died after receiving the previous "vaccine".
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> all reported that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external "Jaynes asserts that consciousness did not arise far back in human evolution but is a learned process based on metaphorical language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues humans operated under a previous mentality he called the bicameral (‘two-chambered’) mind. In the place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions, similar to the command hallucinations experienced by many people who hear voices today. These hallucinations were interpreted as the voices of chiefs, rulers, or the gods" [1]. Basically, the hypothesis that humans as late as the ancient Greeks were sort of schizophrenic [2]. (To be clear, it's a hypothesis, not science.) But it's neat to think of drugs like DMT reverting (converting?) us to that bicameral state. [1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overview/ https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Sorry to see you're being downvoted. Origin of Consciousness is a masterpiece, even if it's wrong.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Origin of Consciousness is a masterpiece, even if it's wrong I read it after it had been debunked, and so parsed it as an alternate history, in a genre akin to Ted Chiang's "Omphalos" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_(story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_(story)
hattmall 2y ago
Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health? I mean yeah, that's what it feels like when you really trip and sometimes it can be really exciting, sometimes it's interesting and feels informative, and sometimes it's completely terrible. The best feeling in the world is when you remember that you took drugs and the people telling you that you are stuck on a foreign planet in cold and darkness away from everyone you know for eternity aren't real, that the sun is in fact coming up and you are just on earth in your friends backyard. I have a really hard time thinking anyone that proposes tripping as a viable solution to true mental health problems is a serious person. There's basically two camps of people in that arena, and it's people that haven't done many drugs, and people that did too many drugs.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health? "External" but really just products of your brain, and yes, I could see how this would be helpful. Taking such drugs seem like giving a whack to the brain to the point you enter a kind of "debug mode"; perhaps some issues that you can't normally untangle are accessible directly in that mode. At the very least, you get to poke at your internal state from angles normally not available to you, so some of your mental blocks could shake loose and fall back into place. (I wouldn't know, I never took anything like it or had any similar experiences, but that's what I gather from reading countless stories and reports of those who did.)
  - joquarky 2y ago
    "Debug mode" is also my favorite way of putting it, and yes it does seem to give me greater access to retrieve memories and discover, re-evaluate, and re-program heuristics I thought were just background constants. I've also read that some who are quite experienced in lucid dreaming can have conversations with their subconscious by embodiment into a character in their dream. I bet there is a lot of potential utility to be discovered there.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
tsimionescu 2y ago
It's quite common, though poorly understood, for the brain to have surprisingly consistent hallucinations in response to a particular substance. Just like seeing the same sort of entities on DMT, people in accute alcohol withdrawal almost all report hallucinations of small-ish vermin (e.g. rats, snakes, mice, cockroaches). It seems pretty clear that these substances each produce their own particular kind of input to the brain that then gets interpreted by the very similar neural circuitry we all have to the same kind of memory/experience. I wonder if this type of thing will actually end up helping neuroscience research as well, seeing as how some of these substances seem to push higher level concepts than what is typically easily induced in an fMRI. If they turn out to be safe for human use, they should be usable in this setting as well. And yes, of course an entity your brain is hallucinating "knows" about your memories. It's you talking to yourself.
- qbxk 2y ago
  it seems like you're a bit too comfortable with thinking that just because the hallucinations are hallucinations they must be useless. alcoholics see snakes and rats and vermin, and that's not very much help to anybody. but all these psychedelic folks are hallucinating higher orders of intelligence that understand their trauma and can help them? hallucination or not, seems like a useful thing to have access to. far more than shadows of snakes, for sure
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    They didn't imply the hallucinations were useless. Rather the opposite in fact.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    As the other commenter pointed out, I'm not at all claiming they are useless. I actually think it's more likely than not that the hallucination itself is what is having the therapeutic effect, that it's not a side effect at all. And even if that's not true, I think it's still very wise for the one experiencing it to engage with the hallucination. All I'm saying is that none of this makes it even slightly remotely possible that it is anything other than a hallucination. And note: they are not hallucinating a higher level of intelligence, they are hallucinating a way to accept their own trauma in the form of an entity that appears more intelligent. Just like when writers create a super-intelligent alien in a movie, they don't actually create something more intelligent than humans. Now, if they were seeing an entity that explained new ways of solving partial differential equations to them, then I would say that the external entity hypothesis merits some investigation.
krzat 2y ago
There is psychological approach called internal family system, it explains personality as collection of entities that cooperate unaware of each other. Perhaps some drugs disturb this to such extend that it feels like there are multiple people in consciousness. If those external entities were real, we wouldn't need to wait for science, some shaman would just go to the spirit realm and get told about bacteria.
- vwoolf 2y ago
  And also the argument that people have demons in them: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-with.... I read some of the guy's book. It's a trip. If those external entities were real, we wouldn't need to wait for science, some shaman would just go to the spirit realm and get told about bacteria. A great point.
- lupire 2y ago
  People with DID and schizophrenia feel this way.
optimalsolver 2y ago
>Albert Hoffman the inventor of LSD also said he had contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings) and said that it told him that they chose him to discover LSD for the sake of humanity When will these entities share something truly useful, like the design for a working cold fusion reactor, or a cure for Alzheimer's? Also, people really need to know that while a psychadelic trip can be healing and mystical, it can also go like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_report/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_r...
- cthalupa 2y ago
  This person did an insanely high dosage of DMT. Most people can hit "breakthrough" levels at 20-30mg, and I rarely hear of even experienced DMT users taking more than 50mg. 100mg for someone on their first real trip isn't something anyone should do - and from their general attitude towards tripping solo when knowing they aren't in a great mental place, it doesn't seem like they're particularly experienced with shrooms or lsd, either. I wouldn't cautious people against social drinking to the point of getting a buzz just because getting blackout drunk is often an unpleasant experience.
- hypertele-Xii 2y ago
  Why is saving the entire world your only idea of usefulness?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
MacsHeadroom 2y ago
> The DMTx participants all reported... that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external. This is not true. I know multiple DMTx participants and many report that the beings are conjurations of their own subconscious, i.e. very much "internal."
ta060424 2y ago
[flagged]
deemster 2y ago
> One of Strassmans patients years ago said on DMT that these entities could share more with us if we learn to make extended contact. If you want to hear some really wild stories read Ayahuasca In My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming. Such as ayahuasca curing a man who received a bushmaster bite or entities revealing an herbal cure for a woman's liver failure.

r2_pilot 2y ago

And people experiencing DTs from alcohol withdrawal say nonexistent entities are present too. The brain is merely capable of processing its inputs based on the laws of physics, and considering the complexity of a functioning mind, we shouldn't be too surprised when abnormal inputs cause abnormal outputs, nor should we necessarily hold much stock in the matter. Certainly, though, the tales are interesting if nothing else.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
We don’t have any way of determining whether these experiences are purely generated by the brain, and it’s not smart to claim it’s one way or the other without further evidence.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > it’s not smart to claim it’s one way or the other without further evidence It's perfectly smart to claim Hoffman did not make "contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings)" with zero evidence because the status quo is not having conversations with eyeballs with wings. Herego, the burden of proof is on the eyballs-with-wings guy.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Anyone who makes a claim has a burden of proof. If I'm on The Truman Show, could someone please spill the beans?
    - deepvibrations 2y ago
      Yet we still work on the assumption that consciousness arises within space-time... Disappointing the burden of proof is not deemed necessary in this case!
      - r2_pilot 2y ago
        For what it's worth, I don't have evidence that you are conscious (and I never can; your qualia of the concept of the color red and your other internal world-state representations are solely yours, assuming you are not a P-zombie). For the record, I also do not make magic claims of free will nor assume there are laws outside known physics. If you wish to call in dark matter as a potential agent of causal change, then you can propose your theories backed by evidence and we'll continue as the evidence leads. But as far as my own existence, well, cogito ergo sum and all
      - mistermann 2y ago
yieldcrv 2y ago
So, I think that is too dismissive, while I think the psychedelic proponents are too exuberant Basically, I don't think the categorization matters. Like are these entities things always here and perceived if we access a certain plane, or are these mere configurations and figments of our brain that can be repeated. To me, thats not important. Its important if the reconfiguration of the brain is useful, therapeutic, repeatable, what side effects are there, whats going on with people predisposed to schizophrenia that psychedelics seem to exacerbate permanently. What’s going on with floaters/HPPD. Can LSD be refined for the parts that are useful for us, or do we simply slap fine print about potential side effects for those with a family history of schizophrenia on it like …. every other FDA approved drug. I think fawning over something in the 1950s is juvenile, when there probably are advances possible since then to that substance. But I would like it to at least reach parity with Big Pharma’s designer drugs with clinical trials and listed side effects, instead of just anecdotes percolating rave communities.
- s4mw1se 2y ago
  Rave communities? This is from research and patient panel interview that was hosted after the publication. Minus the hoffman stuff. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37897244/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37897244/ https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI?si=qnJ8UhOztRjshEkf https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI?si=qnJ8UhOztRjshEkf
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    I was replying to r2 about the path they had taken the discussion, which was no longer about the article but you knew that. consider reading it again with that interpretation if you didn’t know that.
mbesto 2y ago
> we shouldn't be too surprised when abnormal inputs cause abnormal outputs, nor should we necessarily hold much stock in the matter. While my scientific mind wants to agree with you, that same scientific mind can't help but wonder...why similar experiences are being triggered on totally unrelated people.[0] [0]- https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-elves.htm https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- r2_pilot 2y ago
  Here's a simpler explanation that fits the facts. Humans are practically genetically identical, are raised in roughly similar cultures with similar expectations of reality, and are being dosed with drugs generally assumed to be chemically similar (in this case) paired with the experiences that are reported. So while it's imperative to keep an open mind, it's also important to keep it closed enough that your brains don't leak out.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Mass media tends to follow a lot of common themes and often they are proxies for other general societal attitudes? Many of us grew up reading at least some books in common? Interplanetary aliens always being more developed than us (and usually hostile) is a direct proxy for xenophobia to people from other countries. Ever wonder why there's so much hand-waving about immigrants stealin' our jerbs?
- nuc1e0n 2y ago
  Totally unrelated is relative (ha ha). We are all the same species after all. Why wouldn't we respond similarly to similar inputs? Especally with something very different to our everyday experiences.
chiefgeek 2y ago
Just curious if you've tried psychedelics?
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Not OC, and I've never tried psychedelics, but even a strong fever will make you hallucinate, and I've had a couple of those. You mind closes up into itself, and the world it creates, while extremely simplistic, feels very real.
- r2_pilot 2y ago
  SWIM may or may not have confided to me experiences with a variety of compounds purported to induce a wide range of subjective internal experiences upon their various methods of consumption. At any rate, I've certainly read (and donated to) Erowid.
  - cmilton 2y ago
    Did any of your subjective internal experiences create objective results?
tweezy 2y ago
I will say prior to experiencing this myself I felt 100% certain that what you said is the truth. It just makes sense. Now that I've had these experiences, I'm more like 90% certain that what you said is true. These experiences add a certain humility to the way I experience the world. So in all likelihood, molecules like dmt will bind to certain serotonin receptors in the brain that cause strong and repeatable distortions in the visual field (even with eyes closed). The human mind is great at picking out patterns and assigning meaning to them based on our experiences. So that shifting pattern in my visual space kinda looks like a face, I'm going to assign trickster machine elf to that visual pattern. More likely than not that's what's going on. But there is probably some value in experiencing that. Having said all that, the subjective experience of living that is very different. This feels incredibly real. As crazy as it sounds, it genuinely feels like blasting into a hyper-dimensional space and encountering a population of sentient entities. That feeling is so real, that it leaves just the tiniest gap of "hmm, maybe I don't know everything after all. Maybe there's more to this story than I could've previously comprehended". All to say is that while you're most likely right, I think it could be healthy to acknowledge that you're not definitely right. And leaving some room for uncertainty and exploration could prove beneficial, even for the skeptics among us.
cthalupa 2y ago
I've done DMT a handful of times, and experienced the "entities" in several of them. After the trips ended I did not have any particular feeling that these entities were real, though the experiences were strange in a way that was quite wonderful. One trip lacked any of these entities, but the time dilation is something that I still contemplate today, a decade or so later. It literally felt like hundreds or thousands of years had passed, with clear memory of all sorts of mundane days, etc., along with more memorable ones, particularly in the days following the trip. It had a pretty profound impact on my worldview, particularly in the few months following it, though those memories faded faster than real memories would. Feeling like I had lived for so long did make a lot of my day-to-day worries seem far less significant. Also not anything I ascribe to any sort of mystical or extra-planar root-cause, but the ability for the brain to invent such a huge quantity of information over a ~15 minute trip is crazy to me, in the "man brains are weird" sense.

colechristensen 2y ago

Yes hallucinating higher powers making contact with plans for the subject to make the world better is… a consistent but rarely encountered feature of the human brain. Go read the descriptions of angels in the Bible and it reads just like somebody tripping. One of the reasons hallucinogens are dangerous is that there’s a risk that users will believe in their hallucinations and try to start cults. Timothy Leary was one of these drug-induced zealots and he among others were the reasons LSD et al got banned in the first place. They wanted to overthrow society and implement a quasi-religion based on the drugs.

hypertele-Xii 2y ago
Society has already been overthrown with a quasi-religion based on drugs. They're trying to make experimental gene therapy MANDATORY right now. Even though 3 million people mysteriously died after receiving the previous "vaccine".

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> all reported that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external "Jaynes asserts that consciousness did not arise far back in human evolution but is a learned process based on metaphorical language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues humans operated under a previous mentality he called the bicameral (‘two-chambered’) mind. In the place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions, similar to the command hallucinations experienced by many people who hear voices today. These hallucinations were interpreted as the voices of chiefs, rulers, or the gods" [1]. Basically, the hypothesis that humans as late as the ancient Greeks were sort of schizophrenic [2]. (To be clear, it's a hypothesis, not science.) But it's neat to think of drugs like DMT reverting (converting?) us to that bicameral state. [1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overview/ https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

anigbrowl 2y ago
Sorry to see you're being downvoted. Origin of Consciousness is a masterpiece, even if it's wrong.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Origin of Consciousness is a masterpiece, even if it's wrong I read it after it had been debunked, and so parsed it as an alternate history, in a genre akin to Ted Chiang's "Omphalos" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_(story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_(story)

hattmall 2y ago

Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health? I mean yeah, that's what it feels like when you really trip and sometimes it can be really exciting, sometimes it's interesting and feels informative, and sometimes it's completely terrible. The best feeling in the world is when you remember that you took drugs and the people telling you that you are stuck on a foreign planet in cold and darkness away from everyone you know for eternity aren't real, that the sun is in fact coming up and you are just on earth in your friends backyard. I have a really hard time thinking anyone that proposes tripping as a viable solution to true mental health problems is a serious person. There's basically two camps of people in that arena, and it's people that haven't done many drugs, and people that did too many drugs.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health? "External" but really just products of your brain, and yes, I could see how this would be helpful. Taking such drugs seem like giving a whack to the brain to the point you enter a kind of "debug mode"; perhaps some issues that you can't normally untangle are accessible directly in that mode. At the very least, you get to poke at your internal state from angles normally not available to you, so some of your mental blocks could shake loose and fall back into place. (I wouldn't know, I never took anything like it or had any similar experiences, but that's what I gather from reading countless stories and reports of those who did.)
- joquarky 2y ago
  "Debug mode" is also my favorite way of putting it, and yes it does seem to give me greater access to retrieve memories and discover, re-evaluate, and re-program heuristics I thought were just background constants. I've also read that some who are quite experienced in lucid dreaming can have conversations with their subconscious by embodiment into a character in their dream. I bet there is a lot of potential utility to be discovered there.
micromacrofoot 2y ago

tsimionescu 2y ago

It's quite common, though poorly understood, for the brain to have surprisingly consistent hallucinations in response to a particular substance. Just like seeing the same sort of entities on DMT, people in accute alcohol withdrawal almost all report hallucinations of small-ish vermin (e.g. rats, snakes, mice, cockroaches). It seems pretty clear that these substances each produce their own particular kind of input to the brain that then gets interpreted by the very similar neural circuitry we all have to the same kind of memory/experience. I wonder if this type of thing will actually end up helping neuroscience research as well, seeing as how some of these substances seem to push higher level concepts than what is typically easily induced in an fMRI. If they turn out to be safe for human use, they should be usable in this setting as well. And yes, of course an entity your brain is hallucinating "knows" about your memories. It's you talking to yourself.

qbxk 2y ago
it seems like you're a bit too comfortable with thinking that just because the hallucinations are hallucinations they must be useless. alcoholics see snakes and rats and vermin, and that's not very much help to anybody. but all these psychedelic folks are hallucinating higher orders of intelligence that understand their trauma and can help them? hallucination or not, seems like a useful thing to have access to. far more than shadows of snakes, for sure
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  They didn't imply the hallucinations were useless. Rather the opposite in fact.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  As the other commenter pointed out, I'm not at all claiming they are useless. I actually think it's more likely than not that the hallucination itself is what is having the therapeutic effect, that it's not a side effect at all. And even if that's not true, I think it's still very wise for the one experiencing it to engage with the hallucination. All I'm saying is that none of this makes it even slightly remotely possible that it is anything other than a hallucination. And note: they are not hallucinating a higher level of intelligence, they are hallucinating a way to accept their own trauma in the form of an entity that appears more intelligent. Just like when writers create a super-intelligent alien in a movie, they don't actually create something more intelligent than humans. Now, if they were seeing an entity that explained new ways of solving partial differential equations to them, then I would say that the external entity hypothesis merits some investigation.

krzat 2y ago

There is psychological approach called internal family system, it explains personality as collection of entities that cooperate unaware of each other. Perhaps some drugs disturb this to such extend that it feels like there are multiple people in consciousness. If those external entities were real, we wouldn't need to wait for science, some shaman would just go to the spirit realm and get told about bacteria.

vwoolf 2y ago
And also the argument that people have demons in them: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-with.... I read some of the guy's book. It's a trip. If those external entities were real, we wouldn't need to wait for science, some shaman would just go to the spirit realm and get told about bacteria. A great point.
lupire 2y ago
People with DID and schizophrenia feel this way.

optimalsolver 2y ago

>Albert Hoffman the inventor of LSD also said he had contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings) and said that it told him that they chose him to discover LSD for the sake of humanity When will these entities share something truly useful, like the design for a working cold fusion reactor, or a cure for Alzheimer's? Also, people really need to know that while a psychadelic trip can be healing and mystical, it can also go like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_report/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_r...

cthalupa 2y ago
This person did an insanely high dosage of DMT. Most people can hit "breakthrough" levels at 20-30mg, and I rarely hear of even experienced DMT users taking more than 50mg. 100mg for someone on their first real trip isn't something anyone should do - and from their general attitude towards tripping solo when knowing they aren't in a great mental place, it doesn't seem like they're particularly experienced with shrooms or lsd, either. I wouldn't cautious people against social drinking to the point of getting a buzz just because getting blackout drunk is often an unpleasant experience.
hypertele-Xii 2y ago
Why is saving the entire world your only idea of usefulness?

deleted 2y ago

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MacsHeadroom 2y ago

> The DMTx participants all reported... that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external. This is not true. I know multiple DMTx participants and many report that the beings are conjurations of their own subconscious, i.e. very much "internal."

ta060424 2y ago

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deemster 2y ago

> One of Strassmans patients years ago said on DMT that these entities could share more with us if we learn to make extended contact. If you want to hear some really wild stories read Ayahuasca In My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming. Such as ayahuasca curing a man who received a bushmaster bite or entities revealing an herbal cure for a woman's liver failure.