lainchan / drug

Proof that psychedelics are spiritual?

The Fin · 2023-04-14 12:23
Do you guys actually have any proof that psychedelics do something besides let you explore your brain in novel ways? I mean, for example, how do you know you are traveling somewhere and talking with real otherworldly entities? Your brain can just be creating those. I asked the psychonaut subreddit if they had ever seen pic related during a trip and a bunch of people said they had, but they could have seen it beforehand since it's a famous painting and then hallucinated it. That's the best proof I have, and it's not enough for me anymore. Do you guys have something better?
Random · 2023-04-14 12:48
It isn't that this "traveling somewhere and talking with real otherworldly entities" is outside of our mind or that we can't do that while not being high, it is just that our senses and perception don't allow it. My best proof for otherworldly entities existing and being perceived is the fact that many people had group psychedelics sessions and they all seen the same thing without speaking to each other. Group collective hallucinations? Could be. Multiple times? Sure, why not. Many people doing drugs years apart sharing similar stories? Okay, why the fuarrrk not. But when you come to situations where people actively want real 100% proof confirmation and they get it from another person then it's weird. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHLpB38LNg4&ab_channel=Animated
Agent Smith · 2023-04-14 13:34
Personally I never try rationalizing or explaining things that I can't explain. I think that a lot of the time the visions from psychedelics, especially DMT, are so otherworldly that they cannot be expressed or comprehended properly by the human mind. Trying to changes the memories into something more familiar and digestible, until eventually even if the vision came from outside the mind, the memory of it is thoroughly an invention of the mind. The closest thing to 'spiritual' my visions have been was when I perceived an infinite heirarchy of things, all of which were completely alien to me and vast compared to me, but I realized that some of them were so vast that I would have as much trouble perceiving them as a microbe would have perceiving an elephant. Even as I write this I am realizing how much my further analysis of that experience has changed my memories. The things that actually made me doubt the naive materialism I had as a teenager all happened when I was completely sober or on small amounts of weed. >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHLpB38LNg4&ab_channel=Animated Lmao that's a really funny story.
Ivan Petrov · 2023-04-14 14:55
>>12662 There is more to spirituality than questions about the mechanical nature of reality even if those questions are worth considering. Spiritual insights and feelings are what they are and have their own weight whether you can fit them into a model of "explore your brain" or not. I think it's better to let go of any strict hierarchy of conceptual authority for purposes other than instrumental decision making. This is because almost all of our real strength and value as people is impeded and confined by those structures. People may feel pressured to their detriment to not take seriously insights from spiritual experiences because those insights seem to present a threat to their existing beliefs. They may think of importance as needing to be derived from a doctrine of what has been established as real and mattering, and so the visceral directly experienced significance of an insight from psychedelics might seem to demand justification where justification is a finite and jealously apportioned resource, provoking retaliatory dismissiveness. My conclusion is that most contradiction and struggle can be avoided and the benefits retained by regarding meaning as a separate thing entirely from concrete reality. The only exception is if you are trying to develop an edge over people with a less complete model of reality, ie gain occult powers, but who really needs those, assuming they are even attainable? Or I guess maybe if your sense of an alternate model is very overwhelming, for me it just hasn't been, I can always see doubt as a valid truth.