7 ms·

> deep feelings of profound thoughts. I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni. Then I

by raducu 2y ago

> deep feelings of profound thoughts. I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni. Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :). The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently. I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together. But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.

devmor 2y ago
I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight. When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!
- anonym29 2y ago
  I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics. Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life. Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool. PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
  - miles 2y ago
    > I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem... May work for some folks[1]: > A number of subjects had worked for weeks or months on their chosen projects without being able to find a satisfactory solution. Various psychologic tests and tests of creativity were administered before and after the drug sessions, which involved administration of 200 mg mescaline. Participants were prepared by presession interviews and instructions regarding how to approach the drug sessions. The results reported are rather remarkable. Of the 44 problems brought by the subjects, 20 had new avenues opened for further investigation, 1 was a developmental model that received authorization to test the solution, a working model had been completed for 2, 6 had a solution that had been accepted for construction or production, and 10 had partial solutions that were being developed further or being applied in practice. No solution was obtained only for four of the problems. Although lacking detailed specifics as well as a follow-up, this early report does suggest that psychedelics might acutely improve creativity. > ... Another incidence of psychedelic drug–induced creativity from the scientific community comes from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, who is quoted as saying “Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it… I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.” [1] From section IX. Potential Therapeutic Value for Psychedelics, H. Creativity of David Nichols' 2016 article Psychedelics in Pharmacological Reviews https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/#s43 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/#s43
coffeebeqn 2y ago
I had to throw out the notes I had taken while on shrooms because they literally looked like I had lost my mind if someone had seen them
animal_spirits 2y ago
The brain can mimic the _feeling_ of having had an incredible idea when in reality nothing actually incredible or mind opening has been understood. But some people do indeed have deep realizations, while others just deeply feel the feeling of having had a deep realizations, if that makes sense.
- disconcision 2y ago
  the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
  - vasco 2y ago
    Thats why this stuff works the best of very deeply depressed people or people struggling with trauma because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way. It's also why many bros are super confident in whatever crap they believe though, because they thought about it while high and even though they can't explain it, they feel very strongly it has to be true because of the strong feelings felt during.
    - raducu 2y ago
      > because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way. I took my first (RC) benzo when I was 30 (to stop long acting stimulants/panic attacks) and it was a profound experience precisely for this reason. Just carrying a pill in my wallet ended a half-year streak of panic attacks and just knowing you're not at the complete mercy of anxiety eased the anxiety greatly and also pushed me to actively want to change the way I feel by other non-chemical means.
- pineaux 2y ago
  There are also other problems: while on acid once I came to a realisation that really changed how I experienced things later on. My realisation was that most of my perceptions of things were really "coloured" by a layer of society. For example, during that trip I found some husks of dead lobsters, that were sundried and quite rotten and gory. But during the trip they were this amazing structure of iridescent craziness on a dimpled hard and shiny shell, combined with dried out half rotted soft meat on the inside. I knew that I should keep the germs away from my mouth or cuts/wounds and I think I played and analysed it for a bit, being amazed by its structure, textures and colours. After that the trip got a bit stronger and the focus was on other things, however. Some hours after the trip I came by the same place that I had happenstanced the lobster husk. The same lobster was lying there. It was ugly and disgusting. I had washed my hands thoroughly after playing with it but really had an urge to wash my hands again. I laughed at how my amazement of the dead lobster had felt so profound just hours earlier. But. The next day after a nice rest I actually started to see that many things are actually very special and beautiful but our upbringing has destroyed the ability to experience this beauty. Society has teached us that rotten things are ugly. But that is just a layer on your perception. The materiality of things has their intention embedded in them and if their intention is of great beauty, then the materiality tends to be beautiful as well. What I am trying to say is that first order dismissal of "deep insights" might not be warranted. You might have really had a deep insight, but you cannot correctly assess it because the setting has changed.
keepamovin 2y ago
Nice how you had a profound inner experience that you realized was meaningless How did you handle meaning after that?
- raducu 2y ago
  > How did you handle meaning after that? Meaning is real and very important but so is the craving for it and it's a good thing. Like the craving for love/object of love? I've had dreams in my teenage years about an ex loving me back and I can still remember how happy I was and a bit hurt when I woke up. The deep realisations, euphoria and profound happiness -- these are not something the human brain can experience every day, it's in the very nature of the brain's chemistry to downregulate if you feel them too often. Another example -- the first time I took isopropylphenidate, I was staring at this ancient PLSQL stored procedure bug and I realized SqlDevelop had the option to debug the code just like I could debug my java code. My colleagues were basically pulling at me to go to lunch but I was enthralled by how beautiful the SqlDebugger looked and felt, even in UX terms. The same about my 1 years old daughter obsessive playing with water and children's excitement when they discover mundane(to us adults) things. To us adults they seem to be on MDMA, but it's just the nature of the brain to be so excited about new experiences that it deems "profound" because it's the only way they can learn about the world -- you have to be motivated to exercise those neural circuitry to learn about the word, otherwise you become catatonic . Also take for example this experience I had playing Catan board game with my wife and brother in law. It had profound meaning to me :). For once, I discovered how much satisfaction a few pieces of cardboard and plastic can bring to humans. My wife and her brother were highly competitive and I played the broker between them. I would always accept their trade offers. They thought they got the better deal, but just because they gave me 2x of the stuff they didn't want I was far ahead of them in the game. Because they did not want to trade between themselves and only traded with me, it mean I would get 4x the items they could have traded directly between themselves. I would win the game and not tell them, I would just watch them compete and play along with an inner smile. I'm sure life is like this for some people, who have won at the game of life but others just don't realize it. But the very fact that the game had such deep "meaning" (the feeling) to me made me realize the deeper meanings of being together with others, that the human interaction itself has meaning, that money and a lot material possessions are utterly meaningless and we're giving them too much meaning by introducing a lot of negativity in the game of life just to give them meaning, finally that taking life in a light hearted way, helping others (as long as on your terms) and the human ethos are ALWAYS with you (in a Dune "other memory" sort of way) and those are not 0 sum games and can bring a lot of joy into the world. Anyway, I think that "meaning" is something objectively true and real (controversial, I know), but our feelings and "aha!" is not and it should be taken with a huge grain of salt. And if it's true for such a beautiful and positive feeling, how much more so for negative feelings? These experiences made me more flexible, empathetic towards myself and others and more mellow in general to ideas. A lot of rambling to say that the experience of realizing a deep realization of meaning in a dream/hallucination was utter garbage does not disprove meaning itself, but the contrary, that meaning is something very important and true to humans and we crave it deeply, we just have to find the right places to find true meaning to us, very few people can find true meaning in great mathematical ideas, but ALL of us can find it in the "mundane" and if you find it there you'll find that it won't be garbage the next day you wake up, young or old, 10000 BC or 100.000 AD.
nthingtohide 2y ago
There is a poem where the poet realized everything is like turpentine. Woke up next morning to realise the answer to be gibberish. Emotional centers can weigh certain stuff very high
yard2010 2y ago
Are you a person dreaming about being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming about being a person? It's safe to assume that sleep is the default mode of living, since it predated being awake. That one cell living happily in the ocean long time ago probably slept 24/7.
FabHK 2y ago
> wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :) There's this (possibly apocryphal) story about George Orwell in Burma, where he served in the civil service. He had a friend that took Opium occasionally and felt like he deeply understood the universe and all its secrets when he was high, but could never remember it. Orwell asked him to try and write it down. What he wrote down was "The banana is big, but the skin is bigger."...
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  >"The banana is big, but the skin is bigger."... Most profound insights in religion are of a similar league. Example John 8:32: 'Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.' Got to admit that the banana one is more profound that any one in religion that I encountered.

by raducu 2y ago

devmor 2y ago

I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight. When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!

anonym29 2y ago
I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics. Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life. Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool. PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
- miles 2y ago
  > I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem... May work for some folks[1]: > A number of subjects had worked for weeks or months on their chosen projects without being able to find a satisfactory solution. Various psychologic tests and tests of creativity were administered before and after the drug sessions, which involved administration of 200 mg mescaline. Participants were prepared by presession interviews and instructions regarding how to approach the drug sessions. The results reported are rather remarkable. Of the 44 problems brought by the subjects, 20 had new avenues opened for further investigation, 1 was a developmental model that received authorization to test the solution, a working model had been completed for 2, 6 had a solution that had been accepted for construction or production, and 10 had partial solutions that were being developed further or being applied in practice. No solution was obtained only for four of the problems. Although lacking detailed specifics as well as a follow-up, this early report does suggest that psychedelics might acutely improve creativity. > ... Another incidence of psychedelic drug–induced creativity from the scientific community comes from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, who is quoted as saying “Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it… I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.” [1] From section IX. Potential Therapeutic Value for Psychedelics, H. Creativity of David Nichols' 2016 article Psychedelics in Pharmacological Reviews https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/#s43 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/#s43

coffeebeqn 2y ago

I had to throw out the notes I had taken while on shrooms because they literally looked like I had lost my mind if someone had seen them

animal_spirits 2y ago

The brain can mimic the _feeling_ of having had an incredible idea when in reality nothing actually incredible or mind opening has been understood. But some people do indeed have deep realizations, while others just deeply feel the feeling of having had a deep realizations, if that makes sense.

disconcision 2y ago
the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
- vasco 2y ago
  Thats why this stuff works the best of very deeply depressed people or people struggling with trauma because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way. It's also why many bros are super confident in whatever crap they believe though, because they thought about it while high and even though they can't explain it, they feel very strongly it has to be true because of the strong feelings felt during.
  - raducu 2y ago
    > because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way. I took my first (RC) benzo when I was 30 (to stop long acting stimulants/panic attacks) and it was a profound experience precisely for this reason. Just carrying a pill in my wallet ended a half-year streak of panic attacks and just knowing you're not at the complete mercy of anxiety eased the anxiety greatly and also pushed me to actively want to change the way I feel by other non-chemical means.
pineaux 2y ago
There are also other problems: while on acid once I came to a realisation that really changed how I experienced things later on. My realisation was that most of my perceptions of things were really "coloured" by a layer of society. For example, during that trip I found some husks of dead lobsters, that were sundried and quite rotten and gory. But during the trip they were this amazing structure of iridescent craziness on a dimpled hard and shiny shell, combined with dried out half rotted soft meat on the inside. I knew that I should keep the germs away from my mouth or cuts/wounds and I think I played and analysed it for a bit, being amazed by its structure, textures and colours. After that the trip got a bit stronger and the focus was on other things, however. Some hours after the trip I came by the same place that I had happenstanced the lobster husk. The same lobster was lying there. It was ugly and disgusting. I had washed my hands thoroughly after playing with it but really had an urge to wash my hands again. I laughed at how my amazement of the dead lobster had felt so profound just hours earlier. But. The next day after a nice rest I actually started to see that many things are actually very special and beautiful but our upbringing has destroyed the ability to experience this beauty. Society has teached us that rotten things are ugly. But that is just a layer on your perception. The materiality of things has their intention embedded in them and if their intention is of great beauty, then the materiality tends to be beautiful as well. What I am trying to say is that first order dismissal of "deep insights" might not be warranted. You might have really had a deep insight, but you cannot correctly assess it because the setting has changed.

keepamovin 2y ago

Nice how you had a profound inner experience that you realized was meaningless How did you handle meaning after that?

raducu 2y ago
> How did you handle meaning after that? Meaning is real and very important but so is the craving for it and it's a good thing. Like the craving for love/object of love? I've had dreams in my teenage years about an ex loving me back and I can still remember how happy I was and a bit hurt when I woke up. The deep realisations, euphoria and profound happiness -- these are not something the human brain can experience every day, it's in the very nature of the brain's chemistry to downregulate if you feel them too often. Another example -- the first time I took isopropylphenidate, I was staring at this ancient PLSQL stored procedure bug and I realized SqlDevelop had the option to debug the code just like I could debug my java code. My colleagues were basically pulling at me to go to lunch but I was enthralled by how beautiful the SqlDebugger looked and felt, even in UX terms. The same about my 1 years old daughter obsessive playing with water and children's excitement when they discover mundane(to us adults) things. To us adults they seem to be on MDMA, but it's just the nature of the brain to be so excited about new experiences that it deems "profound" because it's the only way they can learn about the world -- you have to be motivated to exercise those neural circuitry to learn about the word, otherwise you become catatonic . Also take for example this experience I had playing Catan board game with my wife and brother in law. It had profound meaning to me :). For once, I discovered how much satisfaction a few pieces of cardboard and plastic can bring to humans. My wife and her brother were highly competitive and I played the broker between them. I would always accept their trade offers. They thought they got the better deal, but just because they gave me 2x of the stuff they didn't want I was far ahead of them in the game. Because they did not want to trade between themselves and only traded with me, it mean I would get 4x the items they could have traded directly between themselves. I would win the game and not tell them, I would just watch them compete and play along with an inner smile. I'm sure life is like this for some people, who have won at the game of life but others just don't realize it. But the very fact that the game had such deep "meaning" (the feeling) to me made me realize the deeper meanings of being together with others, that the human interaction itself has meaning, that money and a lot material possessions are utterly meaningless and we're giving them too much meaning by introducing a lot of negativity in the game of life just to give them meaning, finally that taking life in a light hearted way, helping others (as long as on your terms) and the human ethos are ALWAYS with you (in a Dune "other memory" sort of way) and those are not 0 sum games and can bring a lot of joy into the world. Anyway, I think that "meaning" is something objectively true and real (controversial, I know), but our feelings and "aha!" is not and it should be taken with a huge grain of salt. And if it's true for such a beautiful and positive feeling, how much more so for negative feelings? These experiences made me more flexible, empathetic towards myself and others and more mellow in general to ideas. A lot of rambling to say that the experience of realizing a deep realization of meaning in a dream/hallucination was utter garbage does not disprove meaning itself, but the contrary, that meaning is something very important and true to humans and we crave it deeply, we just have to find the right places to find true meaning to us, very few people can find true meaning in great mathematical ideas, but ALL of us can find it in the "mundane" and if you find it there you'll find that it won't be garbage the next day you wake up, young or old, 10000 BC or 100.000 AD.

nthingtohide 2y ago

There is a poem where the poet realized everything is like turpentine. Woke up next morning to realise the answer to be gibberish. Emotional centers can weigh certain stuff very high

yard2010 2y ago

Are you a person dreaming about being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming about being a person? It's safe to assume that sleep is the default mode of living, since it predated being awake. That one cell living happily in the ocean long time ago probably slept 24/7.

FabHK 2y ago

> wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :) There's this (possibly apocryphal) story about George Orwell in Burma, where he served in the civil service. He had a friend that took Opium occasionally and felt like he deeply understood the universe and all its secrets when he was high, but could never remember it. Orwell asked him to try and write it down. What he wrote down was "The banana is big, but the skin is bigger."...

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>"The banana is big, but the skin is bigger."... Most profound insights in religion are of a similar league. Example John 8:32: 'Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.' Got to admit that the banana one is more profound that any one in religion that I encountered.