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Psychedelic Experiences Real or fake?

S

Shaylum

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Apr 27, 2014
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The experiences involved with taking LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT seem to be quite spiritual and perspective changing IMO. I use psychedelics for spiritual experiences and to learn something from the trip. For people with the same experiences, do you think our perspective changing is real? or is it just the fucking up of our brain chemistry. Like are the life changing experiences solely based on the actual experience or are the chemicals just fucking our head up? Have there ever been any studies or anything to "prove" that these psychedelics ruin our brain chemistry or that the experiences are real? Some people think debating over this topic is pointless, but I'm just curious of what others think.
 
There are actually 4 possibilities:
A) Fake fake
B) Fake real
C) Real fake
D) Real real
 
Psychedelic experience demonstrates how the ordinary state of consciousness is unreal. So it's the wrong way round to ask if psychedelic experiencing is real.

Ordinary perception can be likened to to staring at reflections in the surface of a perfectly still pool of water (the mind) where the surface of the pool is invisible. The reflections remain perfectly solid and convincing/realistic so long as the surface of the water/mind is undisturbed, the psychedelic trip-effect is like causing a splash in the water so that the surface is distorted and becomes visible; the reflections then ripple, undulate and fragment, and reveal themselves to be mere reflections as opposed to being the actual things that they reflect.
 
Shaylum said:
The experiences involved with taking LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT seem to be quite spiritual and perspective changing IMO. I use psychedelics for spiritual experiences and to learn something from the trip. For people with the same experiences, do you think our perspective changing is real? or is it just the fucking up of our brain chemistry. Like are the life changing experiences solely based on the actual experience or are the chemicals just fucking our head up? Have there ever been any studies or anything to "prove" that these psychedelics ruin our brain chemistry or that the experiences are real? Some people think debating over this topic is pointless, but I'm just curious of what others think.
Click to expand...
What is real?

I think psychedelic drugs alter our brain chemistry in very specific an repeatable ways. The down chain effects of those alterations, however, are thanks to the wonders of the human brain itself.

Any spiritual experience generated by a psychedelic drug is generated because of the human brain's capacity to have spiritual experiences--with or without a drug.

As for whether or not spiritual experiences are real: I suppose that's something that's up for plenty of discussion. Personally, I believe that spirituality is an artifact of evolution, that has no inherent meaning, except for the meaning I choose to lend it. However, if you believe that legitimate spiritual experiences are possible, I see no reason why a drug-induced experience should be any less real than... Say, a meditation or fasting-induced experience. The drug is a catalyst. It "sets the mood."

Of course, it's setting the mood in a very powerful way. Well, that's my two cents.
 
Do you think the altering of our brain chemistry is permanent? Are they only during the experience? Or does the brain eventually return to normal?
 
max_freakout said:
Ordinary perception can be likened to to staring at reflections in the surface of a perfectly still pool of water (the mind) where the surface of the pool is invisible. The reflections remain perfectly solid and convincing/realistic so long as the surface of the water/mind is undisturbed, the psychedelic trip-effect is like causing a splash in the water so that the surface is distorted and becomes visible; the reflections then ripple, undulate and fragment, and reveal themselves to be mere reflections as opposed to being the actual things that they reflect.
Click to expand...

I love this.
 
InterestingFACT said:
What is real?

I think psychedelic drugs alter our brain chemistry in very specific an repeatable ways. The down chain effects of those alterations, however, are thanks to the wonders of the human brain itself.

Any spiritual experience generated by a psychedelic drug is generated because of the human brain's capacity to have spiritual experiences--with or without a drug.

As for whether or not spiritual experiences are real: I suppose that's something that's up for plenty of discussion. Personally, I believe that spirituality is an artifact of evolution, that has no inherent meaning, except for the meaning I choose to lend it. However, if you believe that legitimate spiritual experiences are possible, I see no reason why a drug-induced experience should be any less real than... Say, a meditation or fasting-induced experience. The drug is a catalyst. It "sets the mood."

Of course, it's setting the mood in a very powerful way. Well, that's my two cents.
Click to expand...
It's not that I disagree with anything you're saying, but I do think it goes deeper. For example, isolating the brain as you do is not entirely illuminating due to problems with the asymmetry of explanation. What if you and I went on a cross-country road trip and I tried to convince you that the car's engine, and that alone, was the reason we were able to have that road trip? Forget about the rest of the car, the seats, the steering wheel, the radio, anything that allowed you to manipulate the engine. Forget about the roads we used, the hotels we stayed in, the crazy people we met, the friendship that transformed a travel into a road trip. But, nah, all that really mattered about that road trip was the car's engine. An account of the engine would suffice for an account of the entire road trip. Do you buy that?
 
transitionsynth said:
It's not that I disagree with anything you're saying, but I do think it goes deeper. For example, isolating the brain as you do is not entirely illuminating due to problems with the asymmetry of explanation. What if you and I went on a cross-country road trip and I tried to convince you that the car's engine, and that alone, was the reason we were able to have that road trip? Forget about the rest of the car, the seats, the steering wheel, the radio, anything that allowed you to manipulate the engine. Forget about the roads we used, the hotels we stayed in, the crazy people we met, the friendship that transformed a travel into a road trip. But, nah, all that really mattered about that road trip was the car's engine. An account of the engine would suffice for an account of the entire road trip. Do you buy that?
Click to expand...
Are you suggesting that psychedelic experiences physically transport you to another place?

I don't believe that. But that's because I believe in "consensus reality." Perhaps one day, if I trip hard enough, I won't anymore. But until then, I choose to believe that our subjective experience can be explained by chemical reactions taking place inside our brains. For example, our vision is possible because of our eyes, our optic nerve, our occipital lobe. Although neuroscience can't yet give a perfect account of the complexities of human vision--although not every single neuronal connection has been mapped--I think that the scientific method provides a much more fundamentally useful approach for explaining the world around us--and even for explaining how and why we come to conclusions about the world around us.

If anything, I think the existence of psychedelic drugs is testament to that fact. If a spiritual experience--a profound moment where the individual believes that he or she is in contact with something higher, or has achieved a higher understanding--can be reliably triggered by introducing a chemical which reacts with the 5ht2a receptor in our brains, that provides about the best evidence I can think of that consciousness is grounded in the concrete activity of our neurons.

And although it doesn't prove this, it also suggests that other spiritual experiences, ones which are not triggered by drugs, might also be rooted in activity at these receptors in our brain.

And yes, all of this data could be "part of the lie." But I find that neuroscience is able to provide a better and more repeatable explanation for the mechanism of spirituality than spirituality is able to provide for neuroscience.

Of course, pardon me if I misinterpreted the point you were trying to make.
 
Shaylum said:
Do you think the altering of our brain chemistry is permanent? Are they only during the experience? Or does the brain eventually return to normal?
Click to expand...

The answer to this question would depend on how exactly you define a drug's alteration of our brain.

The short answer is that the drug has a finite half-life. It binds to receptors while it is present in the body, and stops having a psychedelic action after it leaves our body.

But the down-chain effects of it's binding--for example the networks of neurons involved in storing memories of the experience, or the triggered release of BDNF and NGF which cause new neural connections to grow, or the down-regulation of 5ht receptors in response to the chemical, are all lasting artifacts of it's presence in our brains.

For example, there's been a study that showed that, in drug-naive individuals, a SINGLE mushroom experience could cause lasting changes in the expression of the openness trait on personality tests. These changes were shown to stay true at (I believe) 6 months and 1 year later.

Before I mentioned that a drug-induced spiritual experience could be equally as legitimate as a natural spiritual experience. I think this is where that comes into play. If, for example, you take a trip to a poor country, and are deeply emotionally affected by the destitution and suffering you see around you, the knowledge of that suffering, and the lasting effects of that emotional impact, could be felt much later. Even a year later, after you're comfortable back at home... After your eyes are no longer sending that emotionally displeasing stimulus to your brain, you will be a different person for having experienced it. This is because the neurons involved in your emotional response to the situation, by activating, have created down-stream changes in the connections between other neurons in your brain. You have a painful memory. You have new associations--perhaps, for example, you now associate a certain food or a certain word with your memory of that experience and the emotions it evoked.

So even though it was a temporary experience, it has permanently changed you. I believe the same to be true for psychedelic experiences.
 
Depends on what your definition of reality is. We look through a veil of perception always as the true nature of things and how they are can't really be determined. For instance we observe light from the visible light spectrum but there's a whole band of this spectrum like ultraviolet and infrared. So what we are seeing even with out psychedelics is very subjective. I reality everything you observe is unique to whatever views it.

As to wether you can have real spiritual experiences with psychedelics, I think it's totally possible and with the right kind of mindset, environment and follow up therapy, psychedelic experiences can be very life changing.
 
I believe I've heard of a study involving LSD and a part of the brain related to noticing novel stimuli (I think the locus coeruleus). Essentially under LSD this area is constantly excited, so your brain is constantly saying "Hey! This is new! Look at that funky shit!" even though you're experiencing something very familiar. It is quite possible this is one source of the new perspective. I would say having to re-experience/re-evaluate most of your reality could definitely stick with you/your brain for time to come.

Try not to think of things like this with such ambiguous and stigmatic terms like 'fucked up brain-chemistry'. Your brain is constantly changing physically and chemically. You could say this is related to neuroplasticity; forming new connections between neurons. These are not necessarily permanent.
 
InterestingFACT said:
Are you suggesting that psychedelic experiences physically transport you to another place?

I don't believe that. But that's because I believe in "consensus reality." Perhaps one day, if I trip hard enough, I won't anymore. But until then, I choose to believe that our subjective experience can be explained by chemical reactions taking place inside our brains. For example, our vision is possible because of our eyes, our optic nerve, our occipital lobe. Although neuroscience can't yet give a perfect account of the complexities of human vision--although not every single neuronal connection has been mapped--I think that the scientific method provides a much more fundamentally useful approach for explaining the world around us--and even for explaining how and why we come to conclusions about the world around us.

If anything, I think the existence of psychedelic drugs is testament to that fact. If a spiritual experience--a profound moment where the individual believes that he or she is in contact with something higher, or has achieved a higher understanding--can be reliably triggered by introducing a chemical which reacts with the 5ht2a receptor in our brains, that provides about the best evidence I can think of that consciousness is grounded in the concrete activity of our neurons.

And although it doesn't prove this, it also suggests that other spiritual experiences, ones which are not triggered by drugs, might also be rooted in activity at these receptors in our brain.

And yes, all of this data could be "part of the lie." But I find that neuroscience is able to provide a better and more repeatable explanation for the mechanism of spirituality than spirituality is able to provide for neuroscience.

Of course, pardon me if I misinterpreted the point you were trying to make.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the good natured response! I wasn't trying to say that psychedelic experiences physically transport people to another place. The car trip was a metaphorical analogy, but that's where its usefulness breaks down and the metaphor takes over. I was suggesting that reductive accounts are not particularly illuminating as explanations, since there will always be an unstated assumption as to which direction the explanation works. Think of a tower that casts a 100m long shadow at a particular point in the day when the sun is at a particular angle. We would all agree that the height of the tower explains the length of the shadow, rather than the length of the shadow explaining the height of the tower. On matters that involve emergent or even epiphenomenal features, it's difficult to say which, if any, direction the explanation takes. Neuronal activity takes place within a dynamical system that is not at all limited to the brain, or even to the rest of the body. It is in constant feedback with "the outside world" and so a map of all neuronal connections would be highly illuminating in many very useful ways, but it would not exhaust explanation because the question of which direction the explanation works in doesn't seem well formed when the brain is understood as embedded within complex systems that go beyond it.

EDIT: this problem is exacerbated in the case of the brain since it cannot even be observed outside of the emergent features in which it is involved.
 
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What do you mean by spiritual?

I've had experiences where I've felt very connected, and sure, I guess that's real. You just have to understand that you are not a "free" agent in the skull. We perceive the world in a specific way do to cultural bias. Psychedelics can temporarily transcend that... I think. Also you can get very relaxed, which also alters perception. In the modern world people don't relax that much

I agree with ts btw. Nice post
 
I find it weird that people stick with the "I learned so much while on LSD - it was very spiritual", but they can't articulate what they learned. was it too vague, was it not rememberable?

Then again, the state of mind is so different that you really do learn in the sense of adapting to time operating unpredictably and to mind forms arising inescapably. If you don't adapt you have to succumb.

Much of this adaptive learning does not seem to stick beyond a short after-glow. But I think learning to let go is huge, and you have to keep learning that, fresh, always and again... is this what they mean?
 
is life itself even real? exactly

as to LSD spirituality i can clearly explain what happened to me.

i turned into little atoms and disintegrated, floated to the top of the room, connected with the infinite consciousness and realised that human concepts are often just bollox cos we are a function of our own perceptual limitation.

infinity is the one and with it comes all possibilites and in that sense life is just one of many dreams.

now i can always when feeling excited/emotional connect to that oneness of the universe and i give it love and i get love back.

and that is what real spirituality is about. not putting money in a basket to fund the golden walls of the vatican
 
let's talk about that magical thinking a few years from now.
life is real enough - "real spirituality" is not more real than life unless you have closed up to life?

there is plenty more interesting than cosmic breast love giving comfort from your ceiling.
though that is a fine poetic expression of satisfying the need of a moment, it is also symbolic of a mind that yearns to be a baby again.

we should be able to go past that.
 
OP,

I think real,so I tell myself fake to save time. Ill never know, so I let it go.

There will always be that person who hates themself on the inside so bashes u for having an opinion.
 
@pupnikk

U don't have to describe something for it to matter.

If yer on an island, and u have an experience alone, lets say it makes u breathe one milesecond different.

That changes oxygen, that changes trees, that changes roots, and so on.
 
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