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Why do some people see and identify with Hindu or Egyptian gods when on LSD?

J

Japhy

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Aug 14, 2014
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Twice when I have dosed LSD I became the embodiment of the Egyptian god Anubis. I could feel the energy of that being within me. Up to that point, I had hardly ever been interested in Egyptian gods, and hardly knew anything about Anubis.

Is there any scientific explanation for this type of experience?
 
Has there ever once been scientific explanation for religious phenomenon? not that I can recall.. I'd be more impressed if you became the embodiment of a god(/ess) that you had no knowledge of before tripping, and went on to find that (s/)he had existed wthin a religion prior to your experience.
 
Kittycat5 said:
I think psychedelics affect your brain is sufficient.
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This is about the best explanation you're gonna find haha.

That's really cool though, I've never had any experience with entities when on psychs let alone becoming one. Sounds like a really interesting experience.
 
Kittycat5 said:
I think psychedelics affect your brain is sufficient.
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I know, I know. Nothing about the subjective psychedelic experience can be proven. I'm just one of those people who's infinitely curious...

dariozee said:
You might want to read about Jung's collective unconscious..
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Yeah, I actually thought about this a lot--Jung and Stanislav Grof's theories. They probably have the best explanation. I suppose all of the Egyptian/Hindu gods (as well as all things that have been expressions of human minds) could in fact exist in a dimension above ours, outside of time, and are merely accessed more directly via psychedelics...

devilsgospel said:
This is about the best explanation you're gonna find haha.

That's really cool though, I've never had any experience with entities when on psychs let alone becoming one. Sounds like a really interesting experience.
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For me, it has happened especially often during sex. Maybe it's because during sex the ego dissolves even more so, allowing entities from hyperspace to become ever more present.


My biggest question is, I wonder if, as CrypticArc suggested, these types of experiences have ever happened to those who have NEVER been exposed to the entities which they experienced. THAT would indicate rather strong validation of the Grof-Jungian holotropic/collective subconsciousness.
 
I think for Westerners the psychedelic experience is so foreign (Huxley called it the antipodes of the mind) that they turn to unfamiliar cultures to try and make sense of it.

What's more the experience of being one with the world that you can attain on LSD can be paralleled with certain buddhist beliefs. This is one of the reason why Leary & co used it to explain the psychedelic experience (that and a fascination for Eastern cultures that clearly borders on cultural appropriation).
 
look up mana personalities and archetypes
i haven't had an experience where i was a specific god(dess) but i've been possessed by the great mother personality essentially resulting in grandiose/i must save the world delusions
i didn't know what was happening at the time, but it could be one explanation
 
I was speaking in jest in my original post but I do believe it basically to be true. The first time I did AL-LAD the visuals were dominated by vaguely Hindu aspects and the music I was listening to, some of it familiar, had what I would consider an Indian sound to it. Neither the art or music of India/Hinduism is something I find aesthetically pleasing nor know very much about. It is just one of those oddities I chalk up to even the individual knowing very much about their own mind, let alone science.

And as to has there ever been scientific findings for religiosity, take a look at this. It isnt the actual study I read, I have it somewhere will look, but does mention it.


http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/12/believe.aspx
 
We all know LSD has fair tendency to produce spiritual feelings, it is also shown that iirc temporal lobe stimulation (electrically) can instantly give people feelings like 'god' is present.

I think it's not an unfair assumption that we cannot only experience these feelings, being wired for it, but also have associations with those feelings (a lot of em). So I think that what you see, experience and identify with has a lot to do with what you personally associate with spirituality, since not only the feelings are triggered but also the associations.
If your setting is themed in a certain way like the music you are listening to or something like that, then it probably influences which associations are most likely to be triggered, since they are all the most coherent and interassociated.

How it's manifested exactly in the trip, visually etc that's just your basic psychedelia (however that works lol).
 
It's because LSD tends to cause kundalini activity and thus people who use it tend to be more drawn to religions which work with the kundalini energy, such as Hinduism (although Christian experiences are possible with LSD also, I used to drop acid and study the Bible).

If you want a sacrament which is more likely to give you a traditional Christian experience, then you need to experiment with amanita muscaria. Start with low doses and work your way up.
 
CrypticArc said:
Has there ever once been scientific explanation for religious phenomenon? not that I can recall.. I'd be more impressed if you became the embodiment of a god(/ess) that you had no knowledge of before tripping, and went on to find that (s/)he had existed wthin a religion prior to your experience.
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There has definitely been hypotheses based in neuroscience, supported by trials performed by a very weak form of transcranial magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes which can cause people, whether religious or not, to experience profound religious experiences.
However the reports are rather anecdotal and no mechanism or neural structures have been linked specifically with religious experience.
It's also interesting to note that transcranial magnetic stimulation applied to the posterior medial frontal cortex caused a sharp decrease in religious beliefs in a significant portion of test subjects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...n-stimulation-alter-beliefs-study-claims.html
 
HZTB said:
I think for Westerners the psychedelic experience is so foreign (Huxley called it the antipodes of the mind) that they turn to unfamiliar cultures to try and make sense of it.
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You would think, logically, that American trippers might see visions of Abraham Lincoln or maybe MLK Jr., not completely foreign deities from cultures on the other side of the world.

What's more the experience of being one with the world that you can attain on LSD can be paralleled with certain buddhist beliefs. This is one of the reason why Leary & co used it to explain the psychedelic experience (that and a fascination for Eastern cultures that clearly borders on cultural appropriation).
Click to expand...

Perhaps the entity which the word "Brahma" represents, as perhaps with Jesus or other Bodhisattvas, is real and exists in another dimension(s), unlike Abraham Lincoln and MLK Jr., who were not Bodhisattvas and almost certainly reincarnated (as long as we're speaking within the Buddhist paradigm).
 
Japhy, what you are suggesting just as well shows that as much as you or generally American trippers consider Lincoln or MLK as historically important they are not in the category of spiritual godly figures, sorted in your minds. So just from a skeptical viewpoint here, pulling things like the collective unconscious into it can just as easily be a projection of what you are all (collectively hah) thinking and associating as a culture. I don't think seeing this as some Jungian energy field or whatever helps, it is just a convoluted new agey way of expressing mass psychology.
 
It surprises me that no one has pointed out the fact that we might see similar things to ancient peoples simply because they had just as much capacity to hallucinate as we do. Religions are not formed by a totally ordinary person just sitting down and doodling new gods, they come from spiritual experiences themselves, whether they be from plant drugs, schizophrenia, hunger and dehydration, or what have you. I mean, take Shiva for instance: seeing a person with a different from normal skin color and multiple arms trailing behind them as they move around is like one of the most basic visual hallucinations known to man, but it would still probably be either awe-inspiring or terrifying to someone with no knowledge of how drugs work in the brain or why in they world they may be perceiving such a thing. Likewise, Anubis is a little bit more of a jump than Shiva, but barely. It's just a distorted face on an idealized human body, also an extremely simple hallucination.

Beyond that, I do think your expectations fill in the blanks - there'd be zero reason for you to assume it's Anubis specifically if you knew nothing about Egypt, and thinking that it is probably shifts the visual representation closer to your memories of Anubis as well - but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the experience. I feel similarly when people claim that we probably see ancient temples on hallucinogens because it makes us think back to those cultures where those people who built those temples were known to use natural hallucinogens as well.... That's ridiculous logic to me, it seems far simpler to conclude that these people simply saw the same kinds of geometric visuals we do and decided to try to recreate their spiritual experiences in a physical representation, again just like we do with art.
 
Multiple arms = tracers, lol good point.. =D

I think the original question was not so much why we all have similar visions (then you could also continue to discuss form constants etc, and extrapolate that to many other things), but rather why we would hallucinate things that *seem* like they belong to other cultures than our own.

Definitely agreed on stressing expectation bias which is a classic fallacy. When your consciousness is expanded with psychedelics, the reach of your associations is also extended. The limits we normally unconsciously impose as considering to be our modern or national culture dissolve together with many other boundaries.

Personally I find it a more interesting challenge to try and explain time-inconsistent memories, phenomena similar to deja vu: believing that you have had a dream or vision of someone or something that you come to experience in real life later on. I think that our mind can play tricks on us, and our memories are especially fooling. We constantly rearrange them by recategorizing associations (a lot of it being processed during dreams), but we are almost never aware that we do this. Which can sometimes lead to uncanny experiences. I also think that we may sometimes form generic memories or concepts/percepts that still have to take on more precise shape to be useful, so this may be like an empty imprint that is planted somewhere that we fill in later with the details once it becomes relevant (a model or concept that is in development)... yet since it was formed in the past we are amazed about the apparent time-inconsistency, giving us the illusion of precognition! imho

Illustrative:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201208/the-neuroscience-d-j-vu

Oh, you temperal lobe once more (see post #12 and yes echoed in #14)! Shame shame
 
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I have never connected with an Egyptian of Hindu godhead while experiencing LSD but I have while experiencing magic mushrooms. I encountered Ganesha which occurred before I had any knowledge of this Being. I have had my experiences corroborated by someone who was versed in Hinduism and it turns out that there is a particular manifestation of Ganesha that I had contacted. It is important to remember that each deity often has hundreds of different forms which are defined by the cultures that summon them through worship or other forms of visualization.
 
Solipsis said:
Personally I find it a more interesting challenge to try and explain time-inconsistent memories, phenomena similar to deja vu: believing that you have had a dream or vision of someone or something that you come to experience in real life later on. I think that our mind can play tricks on us, and our memories are especially fooling. We constantly rearrange them by recategorizing associations (a lot of it being processed during dreams), but we are almost never aware that we do this. Which can sometimes lead to uncanny experiences. I also think that we may sometimes form generic memories or concepts/percepts that still have to take on more precise shape to be useful, so this may be like an empty imprint that is planted somewhere that we fill in later with the details once it becomes relevant (a model or concept that is in development)... yet since it was formed in the past we are amazed about the apparent time-inconsistency, giving us the illusion of precognition! imho

Illustrative:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201208/the-neuroscience-d-j-vu

Oh, you temperal lobe once more (see post #12 and yes echoed in #14)! Shame shame
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That is something that's very interesting as well, I used to have those moments all the time as a kid. :) And I also got a really strong out-of-body-type one one of the first times I ever smoked cannabis. It's weird stuff.... I also find experiences I've had while high where I thought it was sometime in the past to be very interesting, like times I've had where I'm back at my parents' house and going through some motion and everything just starts to have the same "feeling" to it that it did back when I was in high school or something and I will sort of forget that I'm not, and it will take me a moment to reorient myself from it afterward. Reliving past memories has that sort of feeling too.... Memory is a very interesting, tricky thing.
 
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