I wasn't raised in a religious household either and I don't see Angels and demons while tripping, but I don't see humans either (except on K), nor do I see "aliens". I used the Angels and Demons example because I lacked a better example except maybe the mosaic pattern, which I do see quite often. I am sure that our brain could "Rorschach" an Angel or Demon from the human form, but the universality is the part I don't quite get. And you are right, the mosaic and patterns like it are seen throughout nature and maybe the mosaics seen while tripping are just manifestations of those patterns made by our brains in a heightened state.
So, IYO, what we see while tripping are just the clay from which our minds mold the "trippier" things from?
OK, sounds plausible. So, by that reasoning everything we see tripping is from something we've already seen and that can explain a lot of the art and archetypes through history, but where did the first Angel or Demon come from?
This is my conundrum and I am back to my original query.
Hmm, so, do you still see some form of embodied characters though, like among the mosaics? Even just made of crazy abstract arrangements of shapes and such?
I find it very interesting that you say you do see people on ketamine. If you'll allow me to take a little bit of a detour here, let me explain a bit more of my theories behind this consciousness Rorschach.... Like you say, I do think that basically yes, at its core what we see while tripping is the clay in a sense, and then it is molded from there into the more complex and intricate parts of the psychedelic experience when milked out by higher doses, meditation, or so on. So, obviously I can't say with any level of certainty what the neural mechanisms are behind that, but I do think it's quite interesting that recent studies have found low doses of LSD to dramatically enhance the connectivity between the visual cortex and other areas of the brain, and so far they're saying they think this might be (seems logical enough anyway) responsible for a lot of the visual hallucinations and synesthesia and such. Of course, on a low dose of LSD the visual hallucinations really don't amount to much more than that clay.
On the other hand, I personally have some suspicion that the more complex hallucinations, what that clay is molded into, may have at least some significant relationship to the amount of dopamine flowing through one's brain. This idea makes sense to me given that dopamine is believed to be responsible for dreaming, and that is obviously a complex and lifelike hallucinatory world created by our brains that just bounces from one idea to the next and pulls things into existence whenever they enter consciousness, which can be as simple as noticing the slightest resemblance to them based on something else that's already happening. So, I think it makes sense that if you put yourself in ordinary waking consciousness, hyperconnect your visual cortex to get all kinds of raw sensory data flowing around, and then overstimulate that dream-constructing part of your brain, you would end up with the kinds of abstract but also structured hallucinations people tend to get on full doses of psychedelics.
The reason that I find it particularly interesting that you say that you see people on ketamine then though is because I also have some suspicion that most dissociative hallucinations in general are caused by increasing dopamine release in the specific pathways that cause dreaming, and this also seems to be true from the research of salvinorin A and muscimol despite them working through different mechanisms of action, and I think there might be something related to that going on with my psychedelic visuals as well.... It's worth noting too that most psychedelics also seem to release dopamine here, but I wonder if part of why people generally don't get as many structured hallucinations on them as something like an out-of-body dissociative trip is simply because their other effects are too intense and in your face for most people to easily push that high, as opposed to something like just becoming pleasantly anesthetized as you reach that point on dissociatives. However, I have a feeling that I personally have an overly strong dopamine release to many things.... I don't have any verified scientific proof of that, but without boring you too much, let me just say there are a
lot of signs in my life that honestly extend as far back into my childhood as I can remember, things like random out-of-body experiences when I was younger to a state of near constant hypomania from adolescence onward, strong insomnia due to constantly racing thoughts, odd things like getting easily addicted to normally less habit-forming things but feeling easily weirded out or uncomfortable on things that most people find addictive, like a normal dose of amphetamine already makes me feel more psychotic than manic, etc., etc., etc.
So, when it comes to my psychedelic trips, I get the feeling that part of the reason I see so many people could just be because it is very easy for them to push me to a level of dopaminergic stimulation that is similar to what a lot of people get on dissociatives, which I think is also supported by the way they often make me feel quite manic, they tend to be much more stimulating and sexual than they seem to be for most (possibly all) of the people I've tripped with. Anyway, because of that especially I ask if you see embodied forms starting to emerge out of the mosaic patterns, because I wonder if you are getting the same thing I am getting, but simply that there is so much dopaminergic involvement in my own version that my brain covers up most of the abstract forms by making them more structured, resulting in my images of people simply wearing really trippy and abstract clothes instead. I honestly don't even really get that many geometric forms compared to most people I know, like they're definitely there, but when people describe like extremely intricate fractals and stuff, nah.... If I get that far out I'm usually seeing more like cities or forests or ancient buildings and such in my visuals, with basically any psychedelic, granted that I've mostly used tryptamines so far.
If that is all the case, I think it would be quite intriguing as well because I do think it would tend to support the Rorschach theory; it'd basically just be that everyone is tuned to their own levels of both raw and structured sensory information, and that would just be one of the many reasons why people have such varied responses to the same hallucinogens, with some getting more abstract visuals and others getting more complex ones, but them all generally seeming to work by the same overall mechanisms. That's just my thought on the matter anyway....
As for where the first angel or demon came from, I think you might be SOL with that question.... Whether someone imagined it or hallucinated it first seems pretty much impossible to answer. But, I do think it's worth considering that regardless of which one it came from, it would have been the same systems creating the image... just one on a subtle level, and the other an extremely obvious one. When I start thinking about it that way, I start asking myself things like did they feel they consciously created the idea, like just imagining wings on humans for instance, or did their minds just snap those concepts together, or, significantly, is there really any difference between the two to begin with? Is the same system just snapping ideas together at all times and sometimes we just feel it's more guided than others? And how do you find the right answers to that in retrospect when you end up with the same results anyway?
Questions, man.
