Sorry to butt in on THIS thread (having never used a psychedelic in my life) but it comes up from time to time (the thread) and I've watched (or tried to watch anyway) some of these videos on YouTube (including "research" where some or the other academic has gotten loaded).
My question really is:
Why do people think that there's more to what they see other than simply the fact that they're on a drug and having a trip and the brain is simply just firing off in an abnormal fashion?
I'm not trying to be facetious here at all i.e. I'm really curious. Matter of fact and one that threw me a curve ball: Sam Harris, an atheist, and a Neuroscience Professor, and somebody for whom I have the greatest admiration and respect for, tested this out. And to this day: I cannot make sense of exactly what it is that he found or understood (not that he had some religious epiphany or anything like that).
Not to be coy here: but why is a trip experience perceived to be different from hallucinations (or maybe an even dumber example e.g. my having been paranoid after overdoing the crack and actually being worried the the DEA is abseiling down the walls outside) (and I'm really not trying to be funny here). Very curious.
This is so painfully apparent immediately upon having the first 'psychedelic' experience because it's NOT simply the brain firing off in an abnormal fashion. This gross oversimplification is inappropriate for any description of consciousness. The brain's activity affected by caffeine and a smartphone screen are akin to a good meal and a cigarette, but the two share nothing in my mind that makes one activity reminiscent of the other.
The brain, once affected by some flavor of psychedelic, is all of a sudden having an experience that human beings refer to as the 'spiritual awakening,' 'opening of the third-eye,' etc. and is (in my mind) without question the origin of all spiritual and religious practice.
I'm 24. I tried LSD for the first time when I was 20. The first two hours of that experience I was pretty much immobilized, laying sideways on a big ottoman, laughing a lot, finding myself looking at my buddy in sheer awe as this was 10 p.m. and he took the two tabs I did after having been tripping all day, and he seemed way more together than I could imagine myself ever being again.
Last winter, after being up a couple days on meth and taking some Lyrica, I was walking home. I had a long walk ahead of me and was really thankful I at least was still under the influence of meth, although the Lyrica just had me asleep riding around the city for a couple hours (passed my stop twice, shrugged off the suggestion by my friend it might be necessary to transfer to the bus that actually takes me where I'm going, got off where I got on and resigned to the walk.) I was high, my peripheral vision was as flooded as ever with movements of people, lights, shit that wasn't there. I had a persistent static kind of noise like putting your ear to a shell. I could feel and see people along every block I walked looking at me from their porches, shouting at me, arguing, all who weren't actually there, which I knew the entire time and was fairly comfortable with. Not 3/4-1.5 miles into this little hour and a half 5-mile hike I notice my friend standing at the corner ahead. I stop, we talk for a couple minutes, I'm laughing about something she said when she offers to give me her new number, I go to reach for my phone. I'm searching coat pockets, I finally look back over my shoulder and pull it out of the back pants pocket, but as I swung back around, she had gone. I was immediately crushed. I've just been standing on a street corner for some time talking to someone who was actually in prison. This ended up happening 4 more times with various people I dreamt or imagined along the way home.
I won't begin to describe a psychedelic experience, but it's NOT EVER this.
EDIT: P.S. I actually will be happy to try and shed some light on what the trip experience is in contrast to a traditional hallucination but in short, "tripping" is NOT hallucinating. You aren't having hallucinations and nothing has ever confronted one so intensely sincerely, genuinely, or with as much honesty or 'truth' as that of one's first "psychedelic trip."
Some folks actually seek this kind of experience or use these compounds as an aid for exactly this. But there is a chance, especially when it gets to ones identity, that there will be a lot of resistance, cognitive dissonance and confusion at first, until things settle down in a new way which is compatible with the experience made.
