Psychedelic connections with afterlife?

[maxxsskip]

First post here-
so I was watching this show called "I survived..." and this episode was about people who died and came back to life. One of the stories was
a guy who was shot in the back
of the head and killed instantly and remained dead for 6 minutes before he was revived...and what he described corralated perfectly with a salvia
or dmt trip (which makes sense because dmt is released during nde's). This made me think that maybe high doses of psychs show people a glimpse of where you go after death...just a thought but this show was pretty convincing..anyone who has brokenthrough with salvia I suggest you watch this episode (beyond and back) because you will see what I mean. He basically said reality folded on itself, he lost all vision and was violently thrown in to another dimension where he was shackled down in a cell with absolutely no memory of identity so I guess he had an ego death. He also said that he had a strong feeling of an entity (common with salvia and dmt) and that it was purely evil...he also felt the feeling of eternity and infinity which is also common with salvia. The scary thing is he thought he was in hell and was convinced so which made me think that maybe bad trips
show you a glimpse of hell to maybe keep you from
going there. I'm in now way religious but after seeing this (while baked) it actually
made me think a little bit more and definitely I will try to take point of the spiritual side of my future trips. Sorry if this sound rambly but I'm
pretty baked, just want to know if anyone else has thought on this subject.

 

[SKL]

do you think DMT has anything to do with an after life, q.v.

TL;dr - No.

 

[Sega420]

OP, the "dmt is released during NDE's" is bullshit.
not a fact but rather simply a theory.

educate yourself before making claims in future that you do not know the validity of.

 

[PROZ4C]

Out of all the trips I have had oddly DXM was the only one to come close to any near death experience type stuff for whatever that's worth...

Honestly thought I died, saw the universe being born in my head big bang and all that... saw my life replay before my eyes and thought that I was re-born into a similar body and had my memory re-uploaded to start where I left off...lol... The coolest part though was the time dilation of all that, it all felt subjectively like a years passed...

This was a 4th plataue dose taken after spending a few days in plateau sigma.

Shrooms give me strong ego death but nothing like that... Never had ego-death from even high dose LSD... but those two are always 10x funner than DXM.

 

[tBirdee]

^Care to elaborate on 'plateau sigma'? I'm just genuinely interested

 

[Sega420]

i imagine its a made up term.

i know guys, lets all shoot ourselves in the back of the head and trip balls!

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

I guess we'll all find out someday.

Friends of mine who have taken Ibogaine and Ayahuasca in places where they're legal, have said how both of those experiences were the closest things you can have to death.

 

[SKL]

To think that just because you experience something on drugs it has any kind of external validity is the height of arrogance, presumption, and ego-inflated false spiritual nonsense IMO. thats not to say that psychedelics are useless--far from it...but their utility is internal, for introspection into your mind, not for discovering some ultimate reality or spiritual truth. That's just the drug talking, drugs which are quite capable of causing (borderline or full-on manic or even psychotic) grandiosity, in the clinical sense.

 

[SpinOutOfControl]

I agree SKL. This is a problem with some who take psychedelics. I see it in groups of people who all validate ideas through each other and start believing that shit.

Psychedelics will show you the truth in many ways but I believe it is in such a round abut way that it leads to confusion along the road somewhere. Things get mixed up.

Its like going from point A to point D, skipping points B and C, but still arriving at D. I noticed the idea is usually on track but the details and validity in the thoughts are all messed up and out of wack.

Its fun to have these ideas flying through your head and to entertain them during a trip, but afterwards they just plain don't make and fucking sense to me.

 

[rickolasnice]

A bullet through the brain can have strange affects on ones consciousness.. Apart from the brain trauma being what nearly killed him.. i doubt it has anything to do with a near death experience.

 

[Roger&Me]

Psychedelics will show you the truth in many ways but I believe it is in such a round abut way that it leads to confusion along the road somewhere.

I agree.

Using psychedelics for spirituality is kind of like building a Rube Goldberg contraption to crack an egg-- it may work, but there are much easier and more direct ways to do it.

 

[Radone]

To think that just because you experience something on drugs it has any kind of external validity is the height of arrogance, presumption, and ego-inflated false spiritual nonsense IMO. thats not to say that psychedelics are useless--far from it...but their utility is internal, for introspection into your mind, not for discovering some ultimate reality or spiritual truth. That's just the drug talking, drugs which are quite capable of causing (borderline or full-on manic or even psychotic) grandiosity, in the clinical sense.

The irony is staggering.

 

[Solipsis]

Plateau sigma would be a state achieved with DXM that takes long-term exposure to increase sigma receptor agonism? The same receptor DMT is an endogenous ligand for, and also one that PCP acts on in part. It might be coincedental and NMDA and serotonergic effects explain it already, or perhaps this sigma receptor is closely related to some kind of aspect of our proprioception and/or feeling of reality or 'being in this carthesian dimension we call home'.

I don't think there is any merit to the afterlife story, instead I think these correlations point to what happens to you when you die or have NDE's in terms of brain chemistry. Basically I just don't know enough specifics, but I imagine it is similar to the explanations for the NDE-like experiences NMDA antagonists produce, shutting down glutamate interaction to prevent brain damage when something bad happens to you you might recover from later. So it would be a sort of defense mechanism to mentally log out of our lives... making us travel through a transient state of pure symbolism and conceptual language - also where a mystical or spiritual part of us lives that senses things on a scale of life and death, a very deeply metaphysical sense, it is so otherworldly and pure that we may thing we are in heaven or hell or another dimension...
While in actuality we don't really travel outwards but inwards, in an effort to preserve ourselves for after we have healed, after we - hopefully - come back from a critical condition. Just a theory of course, but this is one I believe in because it makes more sense to me than other things I have heard about.
Similarly I believe that what people call heaven or hell are mental places where memories exist outside of space and time, where we would have to be and endure the guilt we might have for something creating our own personal hell... or being able to let ourselves free from such things and be in a state that would be described as heaven. In that moment of death we might feel like either of those things or something on a gradual scale I think. Considering there is no time there because no new events are experienced it might feel like an eternity like some psychedelic experiences really seem to. Simultaneously, from an outsider perspective time goes on... the person may die... and nothing at all remains except for the atomic or subatomic particles of that person that are recycled forever. I do not think anything personal of us remains beyond that, because patterns that give us individuality have disappeared. Conversely our biological patterns do live on through our DNA in our children although obiously expressed in a whole new way/ configuration.

My theory would indeed predict that there is no heaven nor hell experience for those having their brains blown out, while those having an especially drawn-out death getting a much more gradual transition into nothing.

 

[Ismene]

Friends of mine who have taken Ibogaine and Ayahuasca in places where they're legal, have said how both of those experiences were the closest things you can have to death.

Dunno about Ibogaine but I've taken ayahuasca dozens of times and it's about as far from death as you can possibly get. I've never felt so alive in my life. I think they must've just been using a turn of phrase.

 

[Ismene]

I agree.

Using psychedelics for spirituality is kind of like building a Rube Goldberg contraption to crack an egg-- it may work, but there are much easier and more direct ways to do it.

Like what? Certainly psychedelics are far more effective than any religious horseshit like buddhism or Hinduism because you are living your own direct experience.

 

[SKL]

I agree.

Using psychedelics for spirituality is kind of like building a Rube Goldberg contraption to crack an egg-- it may work, but there are much easier and more direct ways to do it.

Psychedelics are good for bringing up questions; however, most of the time when people claim to gain "answers" from tripping they border on the delusional ... Sometimes "border on" is generous. They open a door, sometimes, but do little to walk you through it.

 

[Roger&Me]

Like what? Certainly psychedelics are far more effective than any religious horseshit like buddhism or Hinduism because you are living your own direct experience.

I'm not religious, and I do advocate direct experience. I just think that techniques like meditation are better for a gaining a more realistic sense of spirituality.

 

[Solipsis]

Like what? Certainly psychedelics are far more effective than any religious horseshit like buddhism or Hinduism because you are living your own direct experience.

As if zen buddhism for instance isn't purely centered around your own direct experience... :')
Za-zen = just sitting i.e. meditating.

Actually I find it very similar to a psychedelic experience after having been on a Zen retreat for a week.
I really wonder how much you actually know about this making statements like that. Mind you, there might be lots of people seeing themselves as followers of buddhism or hinduism that neglect this direct experience which really is all about mysticism.
Belief systems like christianity and islam actually seemed to be much more about this personal experience back in the day, like with gnosticism. Nowadays much more of it seems to be revolving about revelation, using your thoughts to emulate your beliefs and try and rationalize it with knowledge and dogmatism.

But I wouldn't reject either of these religions completely, disregarding the value some existing belief systems can have for ritual purposes to create a structure around your own experiences, facilitating and integrating the beliefs that come from them better.

 

[DwayneHoover]

Here's something related to "presence" of a recently deceased "spirit" or whatever it was, verified by it being experienced the same way and time by two independent trippers (a friend and I) in the same room, who did not mention it for several days afterward and found they had both experienced identical inner events/thoughts/feelings.sensations... also verified by three cats and a parrot all acting utterly freaked and like there was something powerful and wierd in the room that they felt but could not see (the people were being totally rapt and motionless, so the animals were certainly not queing off of us, btw): http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showpost.php?p=9142297&postcount=45

Perhaps two strongly tripping minds of his 2 best friends (who he had tripped with separately many many times) so soon after his passing somehow triggered the formation of some kind of "attractor" of some sort of "psychic energy traces" left by his presence in the world on the space-time continuum or some such, not necessarily that there was a "ghost" in the room... good Lord I sure hope he did not end up a ghost!

(*BTW heres a more recent version of Sarah Brightman doing her haunting rendition of Scarburough Fair from the La Luna concert video that DOES have sound (the link in the post above had it removed)... switch to 720p then pause and wait for buffering to finsh and hit play for much improved sound and video quality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1vmXNM9GVU)

 

[Ismene]

I just think that techniques like meditation are better for a gaining a more realistic sense of spirituality

I never got anything out of meditation. And I know the theory is "If you havn't got anything out of it then you need to spend another 30 years doing it every day" but I'd rather take mushrooms because I do get something out of them.

I really wonder how much you actually know about this making statements like that.

I read lots of books on Buddhism and zen for about a decade. Then I lost someone I loved suddenly and found none of it was any use to me whatsoever. The only thing that helped was psychedelics. That's the kind of thing that opens your eyes to what these religions are really offering. In my hour of need, psychedelics helped.

But I wouldn't reject either of these religions completely

If someone gets anything out of them then fine, I don't and I felt I was conned by them. Especially when I became aware of stuff like the Hindu treatment of the untouchables and how the Buddhist monks actually lived as brutal slavemasters in Tibet.

But I still read the occasional book - I'm currently browsing through the Dali Lama's history of Tibet.