• Psychedelic Drugs Welcome Guest
    View threads about
    Posting RulesBluelight Rules
    PD's Best Threads Index
    Social ThreadSupport Bluelight
    Psychedelic Beginner's FAQ

Out of body experience (salvia; dmt; deep meditation) : Do we have a spirit ? Or not?

4

420psychology

Greenlighter
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
7
Hello Guys,
Im a student doing a master in clinical psychology, when I was in high school I tried almost every drug I knew just to experiment the effects. I currently do only pot. No alcohol, nothing else. Once I started psychology at the university I got the interest to explain those experiences using the tools psychology gives you. In this topic I want to ask your opinion about the meaning of out of body experience (OBT) you can have smoking salvia, dmt or with deep mediation. The first OBT I had wasn't with drugs, instead with deep mediation which is strange to me cuz I ve never practiced meditation. To summarize this experience (cuz I want to speak about salvia) I can say that after about an hour I was lying in bed without moving a muscle, but staying awake, two things happened. The first one is that I wasn't able to feel my body, instead I was feeling (I interpreted so) my nervous system, the core of the energy was in the head and then less energy was perceived as roods into the whole of my body. The image that can describe the shape of this feeling of energy is a jelly fish. After that what happened is that I was conscious that my mind, my thoughts were above my head/pillow, I was thinking out of my body.
The experience with salvia occurred the day after I had magic mushrooms so this implicate that smoking salvia was highly probable that I was going to experience no visual effects. And this is what happened. I smoked two doses of 40x salvia extract at the same time. I was sitting on a bench with a friend. He asked me if I had visuals and I said "no". After that I felt like my mind, my consciousness was expanding, when it happened I said "wow" without being able to dont say it. Then, a second I felt a second expansion but stronger, and I had to say "WOW". Finally a third way stronger expansion occurred and I had to say "WOOOOOOOOOOWWWW". After that something happened in less than a second. I spend few words to explain the sensation I had in that fraction of time. When it happened I gave no words to that sensation, but what I write now is the explanation I gave after the event occurred: it was like I m made of ash, tiny pieces alltogether so finally its possible to see the shape ad features of the body, but it s made of ashes so if there is some wind, puff the ashes fall down and you can't see the body anymore. Well after the third expansion of the mind I had the sensation that the wind just destroyed identity. In the moment that immediately occurred after that feeling, I was seeing things normally, from the perspective of my eyes, like if I hadn't take drugs. What was not normal, but was fucking real, was that my consciousness, my thoughts, my personality, my knowledge was above me on my left. My mind was a drone of my body. I never had bad trips with high amounts of LSD or other hallucinogens but that experience with salvia was somehow not pleasant. I never used terms like "death" in my thoughts during the salvia trip, but the feeling was to be dead cuz I was conscious that I wasn't anymore in my body but that my body was still a living organism and that awareness was terrifying. So I wanted to be back in my body and I closed my eyes and didn't talk to reduce the consciousness that I was out side my body. After a while I was back to reality and my friend told me I was looking fine, like I havent smoked it.
Those experiences lead me to have a new hypothesis, that actually we could have a soul/spirit and somehow it can leave the body, sure after the dead of the body, but also before that event by using some drugs or deep meditation or other medical conditions.
My main hypothesis was / is that we dont have any soul, we are in simple words like a computer and our thoughts are just a combination of words which are highly correlated within them and within a given context. Our experiences through life create those correlations, which are memorized in the brain/computer. Finally according to this hypothesis there isn't a soul/consciousness that own the production of thoughts. The production is given randomly, but somehow not so randomly cuz the words picked up in the production of thoughts are correlated within a context /external stimuli and so it make often sense even if given "randomly".

Both hypothesis could be right, there isn't a scientific explanation yet, but I would be nice if it's true that we have a soul. Maybe there is even something after death.
What are your experiences with that topic ? what do you think is more true according to your experiences?

:)
 
Hello Guys,
Im a student doing a master in clinical psychology, when I was in high school I tried almost every drug I knew just to experiment the effects. I currently do only pot. No alcohol, nothing else. Once I started psychology at the university I got the interest to explain those experiences using the tools psychology gives you. In this topic I want to ask your opinion about the meaning of out of body experience (OBT) you can have smoking salvia, dmt or with deep mediation.

The first OBT I had wasn't with drugs, instead with deep mediation which is strange to me cuz I ve never practiced meditation. To summarize this experience (cuz I want to speak about salvia) I can say that after about an hour I was lying in bed without moving a muscle, but staying awake, two things happened.

The first one is that I wasn't able to feel my body, instead I was feeling (I interpreted so) my nervous system, the core of the energy was in the head and then less energy was perceived as roods into the whole of my body. The image that can describe the shape of this feeling of energy is a jelly fish. After that what happened is that I was conscious that my mind, my thoughts were above my head/pillow, I was thinking out of my body.

The experience with salvia occurred the day after I had magic mushrooms so this implicate that smoking salvia was highly probable that I was going to experience no visual effects. And this is what happened. I smoked two doses of 40x salvia extract at the same time. I was sitting on a bench with a friend. He asked me if I had visuals and I said "no". After that I felt like my mind, my consciousness was expanding, when it happened I said "wow" without being able to dont say it. Then, I felt a second expansion but stronger, and I had to say "WOW". Finally a third way stronger expansion occurred and I had to say "WOOOOOOOOOOWWWW".

After that something happened in less than a second. I spend few words to explain the sensation I had in that fraction of time. When it happened I gave no words to that sensation, but what I write now is the explanation I gave after the event occurred: it was like I m made of ash, tiny pieces alltogether so finally its possible to see the shape ad features of the body, but it s made of ashes so if there is some wind, puff the ashes fall down and you can't see the body anymore.
Well after the third expansion of the mind I had the sensation that the wind just destroyed my identity.

In the moment that immediately occurred after that feeling, I was seeing things normally, from the perspective of my eyes, like if I hadn't take drugs. What was not normal, but was fucking real, was that my consciousness, my thoughts, my personality, my knowledge was above me on my left.

My mind was a drone of my body. I never had bad trips with high amounts of LSD or other hallucinogens but that experience with salvia was somehow not pleasant. I never used terms like "death" in my thoughts during the salvia trip, but the feeling was to be dead cuz I was conscious that I wasn't anymore in my body but that my body was still a living organism and that awareness was terrifying. So I wanted to be back in my body and I closed my eyes and didn't talk to reduce the consciousness that I was out side my body. After a while I was back to reality and my friend told me I was looking fine, like I havent smoked it.

Those experiences lead me to have a new hypothesis, that actually we could have a soul/spirit and somehow it can leave the body, sure after the dead of the body, but also before that event by using some drugs or deep meditation or other medical conditions.
My main hypothesis was that we dont have any soul, we are in simple words like a computer

Both hypothesis could be right, there isn't a scientific explanation yet, but I would be nice if it's true that we have a soul. Maybe there is even something after death.
What are your experiences with that topic ? what do you think is more true according to your experiences?
 
I understand your consideration but don't think that the possibility of a soul is really necessary to explain experiences like the one your had and many other psychedelic / dissociative experiences that beg such questions.

Not that I am such an expert on the following, but what happens in your mind when things like proprioception are distorted (especially acutely - that is even harder to integrate as an experience belonging in your normal body-mind paradigm) can be profound and astounding. Every so often I read of experiments done involving any kind of method to stimulate the brain or toggle mental faculties (like the God helmet) and, just like the books by neurologist Oliver Sacks, they shine a light on the shockingly underestimated implications of minds or brains deviating from 'normal' activity.

Salvia is not very well understood yet, and I'm not quite sure how even the paraesthesia works that often envelop salvia users. It's not that I am not eventually open to the idea of a soul as being something more than the resultant sum of all neurological, endocrine and other bodily systems combined (just like I am fine with the idea of God as long as it's just the name for the multiverse in its entirety), but Occam's razor tells me it's not at all a satisfying answer until the answers that connect to science and empiricism won't do any longer. So some arguments against it:

OOBE's like the one you describe are not unlike remote viewing, where people experience being able to look as if their presence is projected spatially - and this has been tested experimentally but ultimately people were not able to look the moment a corner blocked their view. I think if our senses are tuned out in a way that only leaves the map we have of our body and surroundings (yes we have a mental map, usually in great detail - this is the very same map that enable us to manoeuvre in our surroudings without really having to look, and what bothers people with phantom pains), we see in our minds eye ourselves as if we see it from outside - with our own point of view dropping away dissociated.

In some savantism there are extraordinary feats including people being able to memorize data or their surroundings being able to replicate in great detail. That would be beyond ideitic memory. I've never heard anyone argue that they are doing remote viewing or anything supernatural. So in people who are not used to such experiences, briefly being able to move around in the mental map of their surroundings would feel both dream-like and surreal and as if their spirit were doing it or something like that, they had a word for that in the movie The Matrix: the mental picture you have of yourself.

It's relatively common to have CEVs with psychedelics / dissociatives, sometimes people report seeing the same eyes open or closed. That is probably just an effect on visual retention time, tracers being the minor choppy laggy version of that.

Our stream of consciousness continuously integrates all sensory data into something that still makes sense, and 'desperately' tries to when we distort our minds - the simple reason being that we need our sensory information processed in the best and stable way we can to live.
Sometimes in a trip very novel things can happen: I was once riding a bike tripping, and noticed that I had an increasing retention of what I was seeing first manifesting as tracers creating a sort of warping tunnel vision. But when I was riding around and experiencing this a while later, I started being able to integrate that sensory data to make a hyper-3D map, using what I saw at different times to integrate that into a map I could look around in from different perspectives just how I liked it, mentally. It's not much different from how we integrate our normal 2-eye binocular vision at any one time to yield perception of depth. It's another subjective dimension, asking to be integrated.
I think when we have much more, or different sensory data than we are used to it can be integrated in ways that can blow our minds - drastically decrease or increase being able to function, and make us wonder about all sorts of non-scientific implications.

And finally: what I notice is that when people gradually experience very wild things, they have less inclination to draw 'supernatural' conclusions compared to very acute and immersive effects. If you can gradually get effects and are able to explain them as you go on, there is never that big of a shock. But when there is an acute and big shock, we just don't understand anymore AND doubt that it's normally explainable! But it's still the same realm of chemicals altering the way our brains and minds work, how unreasonable is it to start off explaining effects neurochemically and suddenly departing to the spiritual.

Please keep that in mind. :)

(I still use the word spiritual for trips that feel that way, because what I ultimately believe is the explanation doesn't have to take away from the wonder of experience itself. I think most of these things are amazing enough without supernatural explanations. Often more tbh)
 
Last edited:
Since you're pursuing your Master's in psychology now is a perfect time to search for case studies of people who have experienced severe trauma in the past and have subsequently perceived themselves as if from a perspective outside of their body. Such cases serve as profound testaments to our capacity to defend the ego (I'm far from being a Freudian but he was truly on to something with regard to ego defense mechanisms). It's easy to demonstrate that such people aren't really outside of their bodies. You can simply hold up a few fingers behind their head and ask "how many?" People who claim they have true out of body experiences always fail such simple tests (there are famous examples of hospitals putting unusual objects out of sight directly above operating tables to find out if anybody sees them while "ascending" during near death experiences ... and they haven't yet.)

Salvia is so shockingly alien an experience that it's not that surprising that your brain may simply have concluded it more impossible to be above and outside yourself than inside of your body, and so it made it happen in a desperate bid to make sense. Salvia throws a seriously big wrench in our proprioception (perception of the relative position of our body), and when input from one sense conflicts with another (in your case the sense of sight with proprioception) the brain sometimes forces perception to agree with one sense over the other. Even though people who believe they've experienced seeing from the perspective of their disembodied souls aren't experiencing literal OBEs as far as I'm concerned the truth of the matter is still enormously fascinating since it indicates we have a powerful capacity to generate convincing simulations of our immediate environment from alternative viewpoints.

Two-minds.jpg


You asked about the "soul," and so as a prospective psychologist I encourage you to look into experiments conducted with split-brain patients. The most convincing refutation of the concept of an indivisible immaterial soul I've come across is related in philosopher Derek Parfit's book "Reasons and Persons." He draws on spit-brain and stroke studies that indicate conscious identity can be permanently divided by severing the corpus callosum, such that two distinct "individuals"or "souls" can exist inside one body (which one continues after death or has OBEs?). I summarized some of his arguments previously here if you're interested.
 
If one defines "soul" as you consciousness, the ego, the sense of self, to be precise - the one looking out of your eyes, then I think there's a lot evidence that it is a physical phenomenon. I do think it's wrong to liken it to a computer though, because it's so much more advanced than what we think off, when we say "computer", and we still don't know if some parts of the mind are dependent on things going on, on the quantum level for instance.

The strongest hint of the physical origin of conciousness, lies in how diseases like alzheimer affects us. To me, it points to the consciousness having a physical origin.

[video]https://youtu.be/9Wv9jrk-gXc[/video]

Also, other physical phenomena that can change your personality, memory or "how you think" include things like drugs, poisoning by various chemicals, lobotomy and damages to various parts of the brain, electroshock and so on.

Did you know that lead poisoning, for instance, can make a person shy.

Also, it is obvious in my opinion, that memory and the ability to imagine and invent is a huge evolutionary advantage, and as I see it, it's impossible for conciousness to not result in creatures that develope these faculties. In that sense, I think conciousness could be seen as an evolutionary biproduct of memory.

If one doesn't define "soul" as consciousness or the sense of self, but rather as some impersonal obscure life energy, then I think the whole debate is quite pointless, irrelevant and moot.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top