Often i have read and seen in documentaries doctors stating that a trip resembles a psychosis. That its kind of a temporay induced psychosis. Sadly i cant give a source as i dont remember where i have read/seen it. Assuming that a trip is like a psychosis it would kind of make sense why people often perceive another reality.
If one can benefit from this "temporary insanity" is another point, where i am not sure. I think it depends a lot on the person, set and setting. To perceive another reality can most probably open up the mind and make people in general more open towards new thoughts etc. (see the Johns Hopkins Magic Mushroom Study). As tryptamines and phentylamines work on serotonin, they are usualy quit pleasand and i think thats a important factor. Compared to salvia extracts, that are not really euphoric and are mostly described as confusing and terrifying experiences. I have not heard about people describing them as life changing. I guess the induced euphorie is the key that allows people to enjoy a "different reality". Something that would be on the other hand frightening if it would not be connected with euphoria. Because of this positive experience i guess its more easy to integrate the experience. If it would be a negative one, people would probably try to quell the memories and experienced emotions.
People who are having delusions also feel like they are real, otherwise you could not call it delusions. A common example is what happens on deliriants.
Not saying that everything you experience in a delirium or psychedelic trip is fake, but I think you are being very optimistic there, and misled.
Reality is subjective and personal, be wary if you become unable to separate your own reality from that of someone else.
Philip K Dick says that reality is that which does not go away if you stop believing in it, but I am not sure how that applies to psychedelia and deliria. Convictions and projections run deep and your subconscious has a lot to do with it. I personally think that a lot of people are fooled by projections from the more subconscious parts of their psyche, since the source is not immediately apparent it might seem tempting to believe that the reality you perceive or the alterations are coming from outside of ourselves. This is compounded because we are used to finding the reality we perceive to be relatively 'stable' when we are sober, and this is mistaken for objectivity just like intersubjectivity is mistaken for it.
Even when sober, we constantly apply personal interpretations to the incoming sensory data. Our live datastream from our senses is not unadulterated, there are plenty of sensory illusions and cognitive illusions constructed to show us that our ideas and the way sensory information is analysed and processed shape our personal realities, always.
When we trip, this is complicated even more because those systems that are supposed to analyze and process our perception are being influenced by the psychedelics.
I believe that many realisations and personal values or lessons we have and take from a psychedelic trip are as real or true as anything else in our subjective world, even if we arrive at them going through a warped mental state where some things are blown up and exaggerated while other things are missed and dissociated from completely. Because our thinking is not entirely disabled in the average trip, having the balances shifted and tipped of many ideas and values, they show an alternate interpretation of the world, sometimes like a caricature. A caricature should not be seen as purely real or purely fake, it is a distortion with a basis of truth, and some of the emphasis it shows can allow us to see that truth more clearly.
But surrounding it (in our minds) is often a circus of creative and imaginative effects, and they can be pretty random because there is just cross-chatter in our minds and parts of the brain are probably just lighting up like a christmas tree semi-randomly. This can really obscure what makes sense and what does not, or what is worth taken seriously.
But here comfortablynumb has a point because what we still take away from it and take seriously is what we consider profound realisations that feel like they make sense despite the distortions.
I am very sceptical of there being anything especially real about being, say, transported to other places on psychedelics, unless those places are just all in our mind and in the world residing as a hologram or reflection in our mind. (Same applies to entity contact and other amazing / special phenomena)
No offense but what I find ignorant about that is that it is not put into perspective. If we think about the many chemicals we can put in our body and the many effects that can be rationalized, it seems ignorant to at some point suddenly stop doing that when the experience produced is 'too extraordinary or too convincing' to reject or submit to that. It just seems weird to say about countless drugs: "oh yeah that is just chemicals in the brain, but this particular chemical actually transports you to another dimension.". Really? It's not still just a chemical acting on receptors in the brain, something we know about?
If you want to keep your magical beliefs because they give you a sense of wonder go ahead and do that, but be careful about calling it real. It would be fair to the truth to see if those experiences cannot just be explained by just taking the rationalisations of what chemicals do in our body / brain a few steps further. Yes it can get complex and at some point you will need a better understanding of what our brain regions do under normal circumstances and what we could conceivably get them to do if just stimulated the right way. I am not a neurologist either. But often enough I have a theory about such experiences that tells me not that I know exactly how it works but that it is enough for Occam's razor.
If we consider the universe to be a field / continuum of energy fluctuating in certain ways and patterns, and a tiny part of that field describes the wetware from which our consciousness is emergent... that seems to suggest that individual consciousness is a matter of perspective and 'the way the world - the grand pattern - looks like from within the small pattern, again a reflection'. So what happens if the coherence of that local consciousness is perturbed, what happens if the focus or perspective from that place or pattern is temporarily lost? This is something we cannot really answer, but I think it is too simple to say that there is just unconsciousness beyond that point. The concepts of non-locality and non-duality are fascinating to me, and it makes me wonder about the kind of experiences that are typical for profound trips from 5-MeO-DMT / Ketamine type substances. And I think if anything shifts it might be the focus or perspective of consciousness. I don't know how experience of unity falls into that and it doesn't make sense that we would remember or take away back from the workings of the grand pattern, but what are called transcendental experiences do often seem to relate to that.
It still seems too incredible that anything could be communicated on that ultimate level, and the safer bet would still be that everything is limited to our 'simulation' our reflection of the world, our individual small pattern.
But yes, people do like to believe we are indeed connected more directly than through our senses.
^ I think "fake" was the wrong word.
I meant that if you feel something it is real because you are feeling it, wether it is true or not it's another matter.
an example is people on MDMA, they may feel love and joy for everything and in the moment they are on MD those emotions are real, but if they don't persist when the drug wears it means they were not true (probably) I don't know if you understand my idea xD and I think I should think about it more thoroughly, but I don't have much time now
well put tho
Human beings have been having spiritual, paradigm-shifting experiences as long as we have kept recorded history and I am sure much, much longer than that. I believe the reason for this is that we are advanced enough that we are able to understand and ponder our place in the universe, and in what the universe even is at all, rather than simply being swept along by our instincts. For me, the root of spirituality is in understanding what we are, and what reality is. For me, quantum physics and astronomy are spiritual.
I've had a number of intensely spiritual experiences on psychedelics. Whether these specific experiences are real or illusions is up for debate, of course, though I believe the ones I am referring to are real. But regardless, psychedelics have shown me that consciousness and perception are malleable. I can now see other times, other instances, without drugs, where our ordinary perception was revealed to be false. The fact that our own perception is so subjective, to me, speaks volumes about the nature of reality. And as I said, feeling and perceiving the nature of our reality is, to me, the very essence of spirituality.
The root of my beliefs is that we are the universe experiencing itself subjectively. Psychedelics have helped me to see this, certain experiences which showed me and allowed me to feel something more real than ordinary perception, and the subsequent thought and study since. Am I deluded? Maybe, I'll never know for sure as this human. Nor, I think, will anyone.
what a loaded question... i don't even think its a meaningful question, unless we very narrowly define the terms "real" and "fake" within a specific context for debate.
