It is that when you realize that they are conveniently created with your own mind, they disappear immediately, you become tolerant because you have learned not to lose track of reality. I do not recommend it at all, meditation is preferable in all its aspects.

that is a pretty sweeping claim given the limitation of science when it comes to understanding the psychoactive effects of entheogens.

Especially for something like spirituality, which is almost by definition something experienced within.

That's true! But, don't you think that our inner state can be correctly described in terms of electrochemical activities inside the brain, including spirituality?

In the same way that the current state of a computer can be described by the position of electrons within its components or a party can be described by the relative position and density of various types of atoms in the room, sure.

I believe the electrostuff in the brain is determinstic, but we exist in a parallel dimension which is able to bias the movement of any of those interactions. Picture the brain as a pinball game, and we're able to "tilt" the table to influence it to some extent to go in a direction we want, but only in a very limited way :)

This is a very interesting way to look at this. Do you have many more resources for this "interpretation" of a psychedelic experience.

I believe, the slowing down of the "clock" can be said for meditation as well in some sense. Because even in a deep meditation you lose a sense of "time" and that's when it gets slightly "psychedelic", for a lack of a better word.

One thing that is different with meditation is that the senses are somewhat rendered inactive. So that means, the feedback artifacts are generated on our internal networks, i.e. consciousness and not from external stimuli ?

check section 3 of this review: https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/golubitsky.4/reprintweb-0.5/o...

or for a narrower slice this paper is reference [6]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11500666_What_Geome...

The full mathematics are quite challenging, but the gist of the result (iirc) is basically: many common hallucinatory experiences, including the geometric patterns reported from both psychedelics and migraines, can be explained by the inherent connectivity patterns in the visual cortex. Consistent with this idea, there's other strains of research (sorry, too lazy to look up more citations) that show that psychedelics tend to decrease input from the primary sense organs, so that during a trip we really are literally turning inward. (if you want to look it up, iirc the effect is called "thalamic gating" or something? the senses all come up the spinal nerves into the thalamus which helps gate our attention, but during psychedelic experiences all thalamic input is turned down.)

So what happens when you turn down the dimmer on external senses, is that you "see" only from the "higher" cortical areas: suddenly the neurons that are several synapses removed from primary sense activity are the 'loudest' in our experience. This is why "set and setting" are so important in a trip, because you're going to literally experience your mood and emotional state more strongly than usual, since it won't be mediated as much by external sensory events. That's not to say there's no external senses- most people report experiencing a sort of psychedelic remix of ordinary reality. But back to the geometric patterns -- sometimes what you see really does seem to be based on the fundamental connectivity matrix. it's like in absence of strong input, the visual cortex just has activity rippling across it along its own wiring.

anyways hopefully this rambling with a few sources cited helped a little.

What originally got me thinking about it was a variation of these Analog Fractals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv26QAOcb6Q which show how you can generate fractals with feedback from analog signals, and how feedback in general has some fractal qualities. We know our senses use electrical impulses, so it wasn't a leap to imagine that we could cause feedback in them. That it's chemically induced is just ridiculously cool.

I don't entirely discount the spiritual aspect or disrespect it either, in spite of my original comment. While I've never used DMT, the experiences of friends who have used ayahuasca could not just be feedback and distortion artifacts of impairment, they are a complete break, where the needle on the player of self just lifts off the record entirely. But for milder recreational stuff like lsd and mushrooms, it's nice to just have the self shut up for a little bit by impairing it.

You admit that there is plenty of recreational and therapeutical use for them and then that leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.

Spiritual experiences have been about recreation, understanding others, the self, personal growth, coming of age, etc…

I feel like your post in general is full of acknowledgment of these drugs capabilities followed by attempts to downplay it with pejoratives like “chemical glitching” or “lower dimension”. It’s quiet confusing that you seem to think positively of the drugs but then dunk on them in the same breath.

I don’t think being able to explain, categorize and describe phenomena needs to make them less significant or impact. The mechanism of action being non mystical doesn’t need to change the significance of the experience.

This reminds me of a quote from Margaret Boden about her work on understanding creativity in a academic context.

> A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.

I don’t think “lower dimension” is a pejorative, just, contrasting with the “higher dimension” claim. Like, just literally a lower dimensionality (on account of the fractal dimension, where the metric dimension is less than the (integer) topological dimension)

LSD also seems to lead to extradimensional bypass

Is this a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy reference / joke ? About how they destroy the earth in order to make a travel route?

If not, what do you mean?

> (...) leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.

How does that surprise you? I mean do spiritual gateways exist at all? Is there even a concrete definition and concept? Or are they just a conjecture without any basis whatsoever?

It seems you start from baseless beliefs and blindly assume they are require no validation and afterwards feel surprised others don't share your wild assumptions.

My definition would be that spiritual gateways are tools that help you have spiritual experience.

Plenty of people have had that shared effect from psychedelics.

I’m sure what baseless belief you see.

Would you describe the biochemical mechanisms behind aspirin as 'spiritual'? Why or why not?

I hadn’t heard this theory before but it makes sense at first glance.

I am not at all qualified to say this, but that sure does feel like an answer that makes sense.

We would expect other effects though! Probably that's where the hallucinations come from (There are cool articles suggesting that the spiral patterns many see are due to other artifacts being altered by a polar -> rectangular transform), but there are also cognitive aspects as well. You'd have to target a drug pretty precisely to only affect perception- one would assume that the sensory effects are downstream of some more fundamental variable. Global sensitivity for instance, how strongly incoming data is weighed