No of course not, none of us can prove anything one way or the other, so we are left with interpreting the experiences we have individually had.
For me, the experiences
feel true. Not all experiences by a longshot that I've had on psychedelics feel true, but my breakthrough, oneness experiences do. They feel like I have awoken from a dream, but the dream was my non-altered life. The experiences also jive with my beliefs about the nature of life/reality.
Seriously, it feels the same way it feels when you wake up from a dream, and for a moment you still feel the reality of the dream and then it skitters away from you and you think "wow, how could I have thought that was real?" Same for my regular life when I have a breakthrough psychedelic experience. I become aware that I have woken up into something more real, I remember what I am unable to remember ordinarily.
Well, this is just what comes to mind for that.... You've actually given me the perfect example for this. It makes you feel like you've awoken from a dream.... This is an ordinary experience that we are all wired to have, every one of us. It is, like I said before, inherent to being human. In that way, the encoding for that entire perceptual process is just a normal aspect of how our brains create our reality. I think this is entirely logical to put into this framework too. We all know that for a wide variety of reasons you can feel like you're dreaming when you're not, because the general feeling of that level of consciousness is just another state that the brain is used to writing into your cognitive experience. In the same way, there must be a neural correlate of feeling "awake", because we feel it all day long. And also as we know, drugs and extreme states can of course push feelings beyond their normal limits....
Serotonin itself has actually been shown to be involved in the transition from sleep to wakefulness, but not under ordinary conditions. The time it's used is when your brain's carbon dioxide levels are high; it's actually the system that forces you to go from a peaceful sleep straight into an alert and focused wakefulness as part of a panic reaction. This process was shown to be absent in response to carbon dioxide when serotonin neurons were genetically deleted in animals. So if you ask me, the most fascinating part of that is that it implicates serotonin as having an essential role in one of your body's "oh shit I'm dying" responses, that as far as I'm concerned could contribute directly to the mindset of psychedelic experiences. After all, carbon dioxide itself is often said to cause panic when inhaled, but particularly as shown by the use of carbogen, it can be experienced positively in the right set and setting, just like psychedelics. And also just like psychedelics, it makes you hallucinate if you dose high enough.... It's areas like the cerebral cortex, the thalamus, and limbic structures like the amygdala that become active as part of this carbon dioxide response, and it's interesting because while those areas make perfect sense as part of increasing alertness and wakefulness, they're also all areas that could definitely cause some hardcore hallucinations if all of their levels of activity are pushed too far outside of the norm. What if this combined activity was the reason why some near death experiences, which of course often involve carbon dioxide in response to not breathing, and by extension of those the psychedelic experience can create feelings of "waking up" into a greater reality, because what's in fact going on is that both the parts of the brain involved in waking up and in sensory processing are being stimulated to the point of causing a profound feeling of being more awake than normal, being extremely alert and focused, and causing intense hallucinations? And the fact that only those oneness experiences feel truly real is because they just correlate with the most intense activation of these mechanisms, which might just be the amount required to feel that profound of an effect, particularly to override the various other hallucinogenic aspects of psychedelics which can definitely all contribute to dreamy feelings as well....
I want to say too, I'm really not trying to say anything about your beliefs per se.... You can believe whatever you want about reality, I certainly don't have any more answers than anyone else.... I'm not a total prude myself. I'm not so sure if I believe in this oneness, but I tend to believe that reincarnation is the most likely scenario for what happens when we die. (Based on a simple thought: I was born from nothingness once, so who's to say it couldn't happen again?) The only thing that really gets to me is taking a feeling from a drug as convincing evidence.... I'm left wondering, were your beliefs in nature and reality like this before or after your first experience of this kind? Believe me, I've held back here a lot heh.... I have all kinds of ideas about how the feelings described in these kinds of trips could relate to normal brain processes. But if you really did have these beliefs already before experiencing anything like this, then I have to ask as well, how can you know that the trip isn't just giving you what you want? The same neural processes are often involved in both reward and hallucinations.... Considering that these states are incredibly euphoric to the point of feeling mystical, wouldn't it make sense to have extremely positive hallucinations or delusions accompanying them in such a state of mind? I mean, psychedelics definitely do that kind of thing for me with any emotion at pretty much any dose, so it just seems logical to me there.... Plus, with the whole dying mindset thing and serotonin I think it just makes sense that the plot of the trip would be influenced by that as well, and if your mind is pumping out intense hallucinations using a combination of death themes and extreme euphoria, I think it would be reasonable to suggest that that could end up creating the kinds of transcendental experiences you expect out of death... and I think it could definitely play into why people experience heaven or hell on psychedelics or during near death experiences as well. What I can say for sure is that my inner desires definitely start to manifest externally when I have a strong, euphoric trip....
Of course, as I said, you are free to believe as you like... I just think that these kinds of experiences are definitely the kinds of things the brain could handle when pushed to these levels of activation and even entirely logical consequences of the activating the processes that are involved in response to psychedelics. And that doesn't make me feel like reality and life are any less mystical or infinite or incomprehensible... I just tend to think that the interaction between human consciousness and psychedelics is literally the peak of the beautiful absurdity of reality, all the reality that we're aware of anyway. Thinking about these states as just the result of neural reactions doesn't stop me from viewing them as the most incredible, spiritual, transcendental, and even enlightening things in existence. I just feel that they're spiritual and enlightening in a human way... as I've already said with LSD.
