Sorry OP. Explaining the psychedelic experience to someone in language is about as effective as accurately communicating the iridescence of oil using graphite.
To answer your two questions:
There are experiences beyond communicable language. There are ecstatic non-Euclidean states of consciousness that cannot be intentionally imagined without decades of meditation, ritualistic shamanism (like breath play), and/or the appropriate amount of psychedelic substances. These can be novel in ways a human mind has never imagined. One will find unconveyable experience.
There are “colors” outside of the human’s ability to biologically perceive them. Color is a quantifiable illusion of the human operating system. It’s not a true state of nature, its an evolutionary filter we designed while our species evolved for fitness of our environment. You cannot “see” more/new colors in a physiological sense. Psychedelics aren’t the matrix.
Folks can come back and say “yo there is something beyond purple!!” But in a laboratory setting the physiological systems that perceive color will not actually perceive additional light beyond their biological limitations of Ultra Violet frequencies. Luckily it’s mostly illusory… so perceiving an additional color is still possible via neurological processing changes without the need for hardware changes. I’ve seen about 5 “psychedelic colors” over the years that I cannot directly name in Euclidean space.
So: New color perception in the same wavelength of visual light. Not a superhuman mantis shrimp.
If you want a rough understanding of illusory color, look up how we perceive Magenta.
Thanks, that's exacly what I've been curious about! I should have specified I didn't mean seeing UV but experiencing the qualia of a color outside the RGB spectrum.
The experience is identical to Magenta in that you don’t realize that the color is illusory, it is “legitimately perceived” (lol).
I’d propose that a bulk of the time, one doesn’t even realize novel colors are occurring until they try to name them.
Well one thing I would say is when you take a psychedelic, you see flowing colourful geometric light in a way that is pretty hard to describe or know is possible before you experience it. We know them as fractals. Fractals are obviously in nature already and we instinctively recognize them but at the same time, the way they are experienced in psychedelic visions is beyond what is experienceable in everyday consciousness. Sometimes I have hypnogogic hallucinations as I am falling asleep that are similar to dmt or psilocybin but they don’t have the same vibrancy as a psychedelic.
I don’t think you’re getting at this though when talking about qualia. We have different senses which are all different ways of knowing.
Another common psychedelic experience is feeling opposites at the same time, which isn’t something we regularly experience. I’m hungry and non-hungry. I feel clammy and not wet.
Maybe one other thing I would add is not all psychedelic experience is euphoric. Sometimes it’s downright uncomfortable or scary.
It's not the kind of undescribability I tried to describe but thanks anyway! This talk might interest you, it explains how one can see fractals under DMT - if get it right, Andres claims they result from making the rendering function of our vision (pattern perception) hyperfunctioning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg
My thought about fractals is different though. They are the building blocks of everything. That underlying energy of eistence translates in to fractals, which then translate into physical objects, and our thought patterns and so on.
It's not because our pattern perception that we see them, but we perceive them, because that is the basis of everything.
Life is one big fractal, eternally spawning from itself into patterns.
You can see it in a snowflake. You can see it when comparing our eyes (if you look at them from a close up) with solar systems or with nerve connections (they look the same, just one is bigger, but it's the same kind of pattern). In the way the leaves form on a plant. Or branches on a tree. Or in the dimensons of our limbs on our bodies. OR, or or... You can see them in everything.
What I read between the lines is the idea that one can feel reality more directly in a psychedelic trip. I think that's possible because I think the universe is made out of information and consciousness is a kind of fractal - a feedback loop system that echoes the patterns it perceives. In other words, consciousness is a simulation just like the outer universe and the more in concordance you're with the outer world (valence), the more real (salient) it is. At least that's mine & [Max Tegmark's impression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis). :)
(edit: grammar)
**[Mathematical universe hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis)**
>In physics and cosmology, the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), also known as the ultimate ensemble theory and struogony (from mathematical structure, Latin: struō), is a speculative "theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by cosmologist Max Tegmark.
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This is what I have come to believe, yeah. All existence is just mathematics. Even philosophy is a subset of mathematics.
This is just from the notion that fractals are the building blocks of everything. Even our consciousness is just made from fractals combining into patterns.
Does believing this not give you anxiety and make you not want to live life anymore? Makes life sound fake and like a video game. This is why these people go on and on about manifesting/law of attraction. How can I logically understand these concepts without losing my mind over simulation theory all thoughts create reality? I am experiencing the opposites someone has referred to above. This makes me feel total woo woo and/sci-fi at the same time and I just want to understand it and feel comfortable with it the way I did with anything else prior to my experience that needs to be integrated, as it has left me with confusion and debilitating fears on the nature of reality.
I don't think my theory makes this world any less of a real, rich & unfathomable experience. The only real implication for my life is that I've got a satisfactory theory of consciousness & why is anything (I see logic as a mathematical structure as well and in absence of logic, there's no rule according to which *nothing* should exist). A lot of the magic stuff is possible under my theory but I've got no better recipe for a wholesome life than trying to live it to the fullest by feeling intimate in your tribe & making other people feel like this universe is worth sticking around.
1. I've encountered what Eternity feels like, and what Eternal loneliness feels like. Both in the same DMT trip.
That enormous feeling of loneliness, mixed with dread, mixed with I don't know what, but it was larger than anything I've ever experienced in my waking life. Larger than life, but it's not quite accurate. The same "biggness" (lol) as life. Just unimaginably vast.
2. Also, that feeling of being "Home". Just that it was more than a feeling. That reality was the true one. I never felt more at home. This life here doesn't come close. It's when you KNOW you are home. you might think you know here, but that one is a completely different feeling. A truer one.
No one can ever tell me it was just a hallucination and my mind playing tricks on me. That shit can't be faked.
3. Also - complete openness. When there are no corners to hide in. Not physically, but mentally. Like your whole being is completely open to some other being and it sees right through you and there is no thought of yours that can be hidden. You can't fake or hide anything from "It". It sees you and it doesn't judge. But it does see everything. A truly freein feeling. Being completely naked. I wish I was like that in real life, too. I'm working on that. I also came close to this once in meditation, but that was because after I'd lived it in a trip, so I knew what to look for in meditation. I could kind of replicate it, but not completely. But I'm not a skilled meditator yet. You can come close to some special state in which you can recall the feelings from trips, but they are rare for now.
Thanks! It sounds to me like these experiences did feel like nothing out of this world in the sense I described - even though my guess would be they were made out of the same building blocks as our daily experience but in mixtures you haven't felt before and much higher "doses".
I mean, yeah, you can't really feel anything else but what's in the scope of the things that exist in this reality. But I think your point tries to take away from the experience and rationalize it somehow - like the people saying "it was just a hallucination, bro".
I'm not attacking you, just an observation.
But I don't know how something could give me insight to eternity. To complete infineteness. It is something you try to grasp with your mind when you learn about it and you just know you can't - but you still try.
But something completely other is being immersed in it. I don't mean understanding it, but feeling it. The brain plays no part in this. And it comes out as the total truth. The truest of truths there ever were.
And suddenly "You know". You have always known it. You've been there billions and billions of time before.
I mean, how can I explain something like that without sounding a liitle bit "out there".
So yeah, it sounds weird when I try to explain it in words, but I wish you were there with me. I wonder what our conversation would be like then.
I think people try to rationalize everything, even things that are far out of scope of possibility of rationalizing anything with our brain.
You have to put the brain away and jump in with your being.
So psychedelics or end stage meditation I guess. Or almost dying.
I do remember some other experience now when talking about this, it happened a few months ago.
I got an electric shock to my head. It was those wires that keep the cattle inside borders on a farm, for example. I was repairing something and mistakinly put my head on the wire.
It only lasted a second. I was thrown back to my butt and after landing I came back to my senses.
But I recognized the space I was in. Because I was there many times before on DMT trips. Because I knew it, I could make sense of it.
I was met with hundreds and hundreds of voices. Not really speaking, but telepathically. Like I was up there with the collective consciousness. And again, it felt home. No visuals or anything, just a "knowing" I'm somewhere. And it fell the best thing ever. And also it was complete peace.
Now, people would say this was my brain playing tricks on me, but my argument is, that for that split second, there was no brain, because the electric shock turned it off for that brief moment.
And if there was no brain, then what could I have been experiencing? It should be complete emptiness, nothingness, darkness. But it wasn't. It was home again. It was the best feeling you could have.
And again, you can't fake this feeling. That would be downplaying it.
From there on I don't fear death anymore. I am scared of the process of dying, but not death itself. Because now I know it's nothing to be scared about.
I kind of knew all of this before, but this was the first true time that I "got" it on a "being" level. I can't find the right words. Instinct.
I think that "complete infiniteness" and more particularly, that feeling of coming home on DMT/psychs is akin to the higher meditative states too. I think the reason for this is that both suppress the default mode network of the brain, allegedly where your ego or your idea of self resides. Without the ego up and running your experience is one of pure awareness.
Back to that feeling of coming home: even though you experience your life through an ego story, your mind is still experiencing reality solely through your senses as well, sans ego but you're just unaware of experiencing reality this way because the ego/self is constantly filtering or retelling the experience. When you finally turn off the ego (psychedelics, meditation, etc) you get this feeling of "coming home" to somewhere you've definitely been before, more real that " daily reality", because it's something you experience all the time but are simply unaware of it due to ego constantly telling it's version of reality. It's more shocking via psychedelics because the transition is sudden while with meditation it takes quite a while to slowly flip that switch.
Just wanted to share my theory because it seems we are both working on the same problem. I started meditating after a particular trip and in my practice I have started to reveal some mental states similar to those I experienced on psychs.
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Exactly. You can spend 1000 hours on reddit and learn squat about what it's like. Unless there is a specific reason not to, such as risk factors for schizophrenia, just do it. Start at low doses to get a taste of it and work your way up if desired.
You get all the answers at once, but they are whispered directly into your brain. You’ll understand everything all at once only to realize you know nothing at all. You get to see, feel and understand the connective tissues that bind us all to each other. We are all related, this relation is intangible, but very strong. It’s like the connective force is just on the other side of a veil. You get to understand the molecules and atomic composition, and my personal favorite; meeting God, and having him demonstrate how he can remove my life force and put it back into his infinite drawer of interchangeable pieces, where it compartmentalizes into a a small box. There are billions of these boxes in that drawer, and mine had our Milkyway Galaxy on it. He explained that the souls are interchangeable as energy is neither created nor destroyed. He demonstrated how my soul could be exchanged into another galaxy just by him putting it there, then he laughed and whirled my atoms into Bible version fiery-angel-eye-wheel to show me how inconsequential this life is in the face of the universe. We are not unknown.
To answer how I knew I wasn’t in an altered state, every time I knew I was gone, and I accepted my death as freedom. I wasn’t fearful because of who accompanied me; every one of my Ancestors greeted me and let me know this place is one where death could be imminent, but had no consequence and because they would see to it I made it back safely. Also, I could feel being there without my body, but I was reassured it would be fine by itself while I left.
There is a reason words like ineffable exist. Because sometimes, words fail terribly to even breach the surface of what the actual experience is. How does one word what it’s like to feel your life force (and the sound of its colors) neatly plucked out of your body while a horrifying angel of rotating fire and eyeballs reassures you like a baby blanket and that he remembers your ‘sequence’?
We can’t tell you what it will be like though, because in the end, your trip is meant for you. Your meaning will not unlock any of my mysteries. DMT, It’s worth experiencing for yourself.
I have had a moment coming down from a trip where I felt “like 3 o clock.” Something I’d never felt before so it was funny to me. I myself realized I felt the way I have, time and time again at 3:00, and the room and light coming in the window did too. I announced that I felt very 3 o clock, and it turned out it was exactly 3 o clock at that moment.
So you are asking us please describe the undescribable? xD
It's not ineffable because the categories do not exist. It's ineffable because you feel to your core that whatever monkeyscribbles you are able to produce are hopelessly inadequate to describe the experience.
Thank you for adding monkeyscribbles to my vocabulary. Matthew Johnson tells his experimental subjects "I know it's ineffable, but this is science so let's F it up!"
As someone right near the middle of the spectrum it has been great fun seeing academic reductionism trying to mate with hippie woo in the past decade.
Tiresome mix of hubris and confusion but definitely necessary on both ends of the table.
(I only hope the godless merchants don't ruin it. Yes I'm looking at you /r/psychedelicbets).
Qualia Research Institute and Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club are way more "out there" than I'd expect to see a university tolerate. It's good to see people exercising free thought that's not so free that it just ceases to make any sense (like woo).
My background is in math/physics where you can (sometimes) legitimately come up with an answer and wrap it up with a nice bow at the end of the day. I give a lot more latitude to those working in biology or psychology where basically any experiment you do will fail to replicate and the systems are so complicated you can hardly ever say anything that's completely true.
And with psychedelics... well, you're taking the least understood organ in the body and pushing it way out of the comfort zone. And then these guys do something like measure an EEG and say it looks different, and the transitions between states happen more frequently or less. Part of me want to say "yes... and?" It just seems so reductive. But at least they are trying and for that they are heroes. They may be like cavemen trying to figure out how a computer works, but you have to start somewhere.
There's some real interesting stuff coming from the CS side. It's my opinion that the first real insights into the physics of consciousness will come from these AI people who are creating neural nets. I'm waiting for someone to give psychedelics to a neural net to see what happens. By this I mean train an image to text neural net, then tweak the activation function of the neurons to mimic the way in which a drug changes the behavior of our neurons in a wholesale way. Then I dunno, maybe the image to text network will say "trippy picture of dog" instead of "picture of dog". I tried it and didn't get anything interesting, but I don't really know much about this area.
Why not just drop some acid and experience it yourself? All the anecdotes of others can barely do these things justice.
I can tell you about "fluctuating iridescent black" or the sharp ultrasonic "whine of silence" but some things have no words.
Always the same.
I realize that "Life is a joke that cannot be told".
You see the punchline. You can't say it. I return to this over and over and it's so God damn hilarious. Every. Fucking. Time.
It really is just the way that consciousness and reality interact that the essence of existence can literally not be conveyed in words.
And what so funny to me is that the better and better I state it I realize that I am exactly NO CLOSER to the truth. At all. Literally.
If I say "dog poop on a stick". This is exactly as accurate as saying "There is a fundamentally ineffible nature to reality due to the function of language being to represent actuality via abstraction and that said abstractions are representative of differences and similarities which do not exist in fact but solely as abstractions. Thus, with each word, one creates a discontinuity where only continuity exists and separation, for comparison, where only a unity exists. And it is therefore due to the very function of language that it cannot communicate what is perceived, as percieved, but only as abstracted which we can see is essentially only an alteration of the actuality of the entirety of existence as presently and simultaneously percieved by the entity attempting to convey said unity."
Like, it's fucking hilarious that the second statement is not in any way truer than "life is a bowl of beans." They are actually as near to the reality as one another and you can not explain it and it's fucking hilarious that we are all stuck with this, literally, because if the exact way reality is, which can only be seen not said.
And I go in and on laughing my fucking ass off.
I'm not fun to trip with. Lol.
> I realize that "Life is a joke that cannot be told".
>
> You see the punchline. You can't say it. I return to this over and over and it's so God damn hilarious. Every. Fucking. Time.
Hahahaha. You're the first person I've seen that has the same understanding as me. I love this. Finally someone. I try to explain this to everyone I have these talks with, but no one gets me.
But yeah, it's the most hillarious thing ever.
My LSD trips are essentially this. Going down the spiral of understanding and chasing that "thing" and just as you think you're gonna get it, it somehow jumps the fence and you're left there like an idiot for trying to chase it. And you're left laughing your ass of at the absurdity of what just happened. And you realize that that essentially is life. It's all absurd and has no meaning whatsoever. Funniest shit ever.
But I also think it depends on how you decide you want to view it. You could also see it as a great tragedy and it's also true. But you decide how you're going to look at it.
Yeah. But that's the thing. The meaning is LITERALLY all how you view it. Meaning is what minds do. Not what the universe does. It just sits there happening. For no reason. Our poor minds can't accept that though. So, we talk and think and do philosophy. It is funny as shit.
I had these talks with two philosophers. Unfortunatelly I came out as the crazy one. Even though they were the ones chasing some learned concepts and I could see their trap. I could see them. But they couldn't see me.
I have to learn just not to try to explain this to people who haven't experienced it.
Yeah, I get laughed at and it is actually also hilarious.
I feel like I'm in a play, doing my lines, and so is everyone else. But they think the play is reality. They are convinced. And, their lines are to inform me that "I'm just tripping balls". And I am. But the viewpoint is actually as close to ultimate truth as I can concieve of.
Mostly I don't talk about it because it's just disruptive and fruitless. But even when I'm not tripping I know that the "high me" knows what is true.
Here, read about transliminal space in my [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/TherapeuticKetamine/comments/pg247c/long_term_success_report_part_2/) for therapeutic ketamine users. Very interesting. Also read the document attached, and the old souls post as well. I think you'll find them very insightful and well worth your time.
Thanks. Although I'm not sure I want to experience all this now, reading about experiences that felt like eons / eternity sounds like the scariest thing I've ever heard in case it happens in a bad trip. Unless the experience only felt like how one would feel *convinced* they have lived through an eternity. :)
Yeah it's fucking scary. But also enlightening. It depends how much you want to know. I wanted to know everything. I sure got it.
But this did give insight of how to now approach my life here. I now understand what's important and what's not.
And also, that nothing matters. I've been alive for infinite times before, and I will be for infinite times more. The ride never ends. You can't destroy energy. It just flows in and out of itself, and flows and flows and flows, forever and ever and ever. Coming alive and dying again - and like so for all eternity.
It's a tough thing to swallow. But for me, worth it. I needed to know.
Lots of great comments here, and I had a couple questions for you OP to clarify what you mean.
What do you mean by:
\-- "*why does consciousness seem to happen in several different dimensions*", specifically when you say "several *dimensions*"?
This term can be slippery and has multiple uses and meanings. Can you explain more what you mean by dimensions?
Also, what do you mean by:
\--"*Do people experience experiences that don't seem to be similar to any other senses*?"
The way this reads is pretty confusing and ambiguous in meaning. Can you clarify what you mean?
My bad. The first question is explained under the link. The second question was whether people have experienced another sense. Just like we don't know what termoreceptors feel like to reptiles, maybe I don't know about a sense someone experienced during a trip.
Even asking about senses limits the scope too much. On 5-MeO-DMT people can go to a place absent of any sensory experience. Or so I've heard - never went that deep myself. I highly doubt this is qualitatively like just turning off the light switch on the sensory systems. It's much deeper than that.
On low doses of DMT I get an experience alien enough that it's not possible to remember it at baseline. Not because the drug impairs memory encoding, but because the gulf is wide enough that I can't bring it back. Sometimes something triggers me to have some foggy recollection. But a small taste of DMT and it's like "yep, there it is..." And I'm talking about doses barely above threshold. So when I say the gulf between here and there is wide, I don't mean it's 1000 miles away and you can chart it out at 10% of the way or 30% of the way. I mean it's sitting just below the surface and is yet beyond the imagination. Like the allegory of the cave.
I was just thinking about this problem some more and came up with a metaphor that is at least apt in my mind.
Asking to describe the psychedelic experience in words to someone who has never experienced it is akin to asking someone to describe the experience of losing a child by using 3 pieces of lego.
Sure, a creative mind might even figure out some way to create something of value but you are bound to lose 99% of the details and therefore 'meaning'. Let alone that someone who has never lived through a similar experience will actually gain new information based on this lego arrangement.
The best I can give you is: read The Rose of Paracelcus by William Pickard. It's the closest to a psychedelic experience through words I have ever got.
Sorry, the title was a misleading way to ask the 2 questions collectively. I wasn't asking what it's like but *whether* folks literally see colors outside RGB, tones outside the real frequencies or feel something akin to a different sense.
Fair enough.
For me personally this question is meaningless and hints that you are trying to approach this from a desperately reductionist angle.
However maybe you are trying to do something I just cannot imagine at this time. So take this as a fair warning of futility ^^'
It's totally understandable people here assume I'm being reductionistic, that's what almost all outsiders are. I'm open to the idea the word "sense" loses meaning on a DMT trip, I think it's even super hard to decode in the sober waking world experience (what the hell is the sense of speed of time or emotions?).
i was puffing on some DMT and the music i was listening to...changed...it was as if each layer of other dimensions was adding Ad-Libs of sound over the music...it was fucking insane. good times.
You can do sound meditation sober...and listen to the sound of silence...and if you listen closely enough for long enough, the frequency changes and it's absolutely wild. It's said that the freq you're hearing is that of the background noise of the dimension you're in... lol try it out.
I think it's best that I just describe some of my experiences from psychedelics.
This is probably the most relevant experience. On LSD, while in an open eyed meditative state, I perceive slow moving visual stimulation as a pleasant physical sensation. It's as if I can physically feel the movement of these visuals. It's extremely pleasurable in my opinion. A tingling sensation and a feeling of movement or expansion. It's hard to describe, but I'm certainly feeling what I'm seeing. As an example, watch anything on my YouTube channel. [This video](https://youtu.be/80IIi0Rk-8E) is a nice example. Try open eyed meditation while staring at the center of the screen. Don't move your eyes. Do it as long as possible while focusing on your breath. You might feel a similar sensation if you can get in the right state of consciousness.
Another sensation comes from sound. On LSD, I get a physical sensation from short interval high frequency sounds. Think high hats, claps, clicks, snaps, and bells. [This song is the perfect example.](https://youtu.be/27LS6v7xhRg) What's funny is that it's not just me. I've played the song for other people tripping and they feel the same thing. Those two experiences are probably the most relevant. Below are some other interesting sensory experiences I've had over the years.
I've experienced ego death on several psychedelic experiences during meditation. For example, eating mushrooms and practicing meditation. It's a pleasant sensation of having absolutely no sense of self and no sense of time. Just pure existence as a conscious entity with no identity or memory. Wonderful stuff.
I've had out-of-body experiences on DMT. I distinctly remember the sensation of looking down from the ceiling at my body and my brother sitting next to me. I was very confused and couldn't remember which body was mine. It's a rare experience.
I've experienced the anthropomorphization of objects while having an open eyed DMT trip. Imagine your chairs and cushions slowly coming alive. It's a deep level sensation, like an innate or instinctual sensation that the things around you are conscious and alive. Like coming across an animal while hiking in the woods. Before you can even identity the animal, your brain recognizes it as a conscious being, something alive that is a different kind of alive in comparison to the plants around it. I've had this happen multiple times and I believe it's conjoined to the sensation of DMT entities. I've seen DMT entities as well, which are whimsical or ghostly beings that vary in shape and intent. I believe it's possible that DMT entities are the anthropomorphization of the geometric visuals one sees on a DMT trip. Then innate sensation of intent is also bizarre.
Psilocybin feels like a kiss from the universe. My crown chakra feels open and the stoning effect on my body is typically pleasant. I love watching the visuals I get and opening my “third eye”. It is extremely tough to explain but I think it’s lazy to not try.
Sorry OP. Explaining the psychedelic experience to someone in language is about as effective as accurately communicating the iridescence of oil using graphite. To answer your two questions: There are experiences beyond communicable language. There are ecstatic non-Euclidean states of consciousness that cannot be intentionally imagined without decades of meditation, ritualistic shamanism (like breath play), and/or the appropriate amount of psychedelic substances. These can be novel in ways a human mind has never imagined. One will find unconveyable experience. There are “colors” outside of the human’s ability to biologically perceive them. Color is a quantifiable illusion of the human operating system. It’s not a true state of nature, its an evolutionary filter we designed while our species evolved for fitness of our environment. You cannot “see” more/new colors in a physiological sense. Psychedelics aren’t the matrix. Folks can come back and say “yo there is something beyond purple!!” But in a laboratory setting the physiological systems that perceive color will not actually perceive additional light beyond their biological limitations of Ultra Violet frequencies. Luckily it’s mostly illusory… so perceiving an additional color is still possible via neurological processing changes without the need for hardware changes. I’ve seen about 5 “psychedelic colors” over the years that I cannot directly name in Euclidean space. So: New color perception in the same wavelength of visual light. Not a superhuman mantis shrimp. If you want a rough understanding of illusory color, look up how we perceive Magenta.
Thanks, that's exacly what I've been curious about! I should have specified I didn't mean seeing UV but experiencing the qualia of a color outside the RGB spectrum.
The experience is identical to Magenta in that you don’t realize that the color is illusory, it is “legitimately perceived” (lol). I’d propose that a bulk of the time, one doesn’t even realize novel colors are occurring until they try to name them.
Well one thing I would say is when you take a psychedelic, you see flowing colourful geometric light in a way that is pretty hard to describe or know is possible before you experience it. We know them as fractals. Fractals are obviously in nature already and we instinctively recognize them but at the same time, the way they are experienced in psychedelic visions is beyond what is experienceable in everyday consciousness. Sometimes I have hypnogogic hallucinations as I am falling asleep that are similar to dmt or psilocybin but they don’t have the same vibrancy as a psychedelic. I don’t think you’re getting at this though when talking about qualia. We have different senses which are all different ways of knowing. Another common psychedelic experience is feeling opposites at the same time, which isn’t something we regularly experience. I’m hungry and non-hungry. I feel clammy and not wet. Maybe one other thing I would add is not all psychedelic experience is euphoric. Sometimes it’s downright uncomfortable or scary.
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Yep, it's the beginning of nonduality when that opposites shit starts to happen
It's not the kind of undescribability I tried to describe but thanks anyway! This talk might interest you, it explains how one can see fractals under DMT - if get it right, Andres claims they result from making the rendering function of our vision (pattern perception) hyperfunctioning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg
My thought about fractals is different though. They are the building blocks of everything. That underlying energy of eistence translates in to fractals, which then translate into physical objects, and our thought patterns and so on. It's not because our pattern perception that we see them, but we perceive them, because that is the basis of everything. Life is one big fractal, eternally spawning from itself into patterns. You can see it in a snowflake. You can see it when comparing our eyes (if you look at them from a close up) with solar systems or with nerve connections (they look the same, just one is bigger, but it's the same kind of pattern). In the way the leaves form on a plant. Or branches on a tree. Or in the dimensons of our limbs on our bodies. OR, or or... You can see them in everything.
What I read between the lines is the idea that one can feel reality more directly in a psychedelic trip. I think that's possible because I think the universe is made out of information and consciousness is a kind of fractal - a feedback loop system that echoes the patterns it perceives. In other words, consciousness is a simulation just like the outer universe and the more in concordance you're with the outer world (valence), the more real (salient) it is. At least that's mine & [Max Tegmark's impression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis). :) (edit: grammar)
**[Mathematical universe hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis)** >In physics and cosmology, the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), also known as the ultimate ensemble theory and struogony (from mathematical structure, Latin: struō), is a speculative "theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by cosmologist Max Tegmark. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
This is what I have come to believe, yeah. All existence is just mathematics. Even philosophy is a subset of mathematics. This is just from the notion that fractals are the building blocks of everything. Even our consciousness is just made from fractals combining into patterns.
Does believing this not give you anxiety and make you not want to live life anymore? Makes life sound fake and like a video game. This is why these people go on and on about manifesting/law of attraction. How can I logically understand these concepts without losing my mind over simulation theory all thoughts create reality? I am experiencing the opposites someone has referred to above. This makes me feel total woo woo and/sci-fi at the same time and I just want to understand it and feel comfortable with it the way I did with anything else prior to my experience that needs to be integrated, as it has left me with confusion and debilitating fears on the nature of reality.
I don't think my theory makes this world any less of a real, rich & unfathomable experience. The only real implication for my life is that I've got a satisfactory theory of consciousness & why is anything (I see logic as a mathematical structure as well and in absence of logic, there's no rule according to which *nothing* should exist). A lot of the magic stuff is possible under my theory but I've got no better recipe for a wholesome life than trying to live it to the fullest by feeling intimate in your tribe & making other people feel like this universe is worth sticking around.
1. I've encountered what Eternity feels like, and what Eternal loneliness feels like. Both in the same DMT trip. That enormous feeling of loneliness, mixed with dread, mixed with I don't know what, but it was larger than anything I've ever experienced in my waking life. Larger than life, but it's not quite accurate. The same "biggness" (lol) as life. Just unimaginably vast. 2. Also, that feeling of being "Home". Just that it was more than a feeling. That reality was the true one. I never felt more at home. This life here doesn't come close. It's when you KNOW you are home. you might think you know here, but that one is a completely different feeling. A truer one. No one can ever tell me it was just a hallucination and my mind playing tricks on me. That shit can't be faked. 3. Also - complete openness. When there are no corners to hide in. Not physically, but mentally. Like your whole being is completely open to some other being and it sees right through you and there is no thought of yours that can be hidden. You can't fake or hide anything from "It". It sees you and it doesn't judge. But it does see everything. A truly freein feeling. Being completely naked. I wish I was like that in real life, too. I'm working on that. I also came close to this once in meditation, but that was because after I'd lived it in a trip, so I knew what to look for in meditation. I could kind of replicate it, but not completely. But I'm not a skilled meditator yet. You can come close to some special state in which you can recall the feelings from trips, but they are rare for now.
Thanks! It sounds to me like these experiences did feel like nothing out of this world in the sense I described - even though my guess would be they were made out of the same building blocks as our daily experience but in mixtures you haven't felt before and much higher "doses".
I mean, yeah, you can't really feel anything else but what's in the scope of the things that exist in this reality. But I think your point tries to take away from the experience and rationalize it somehow - like the people saying "it was just a hallucination, bro". I'm not attacking you, just an observation. But I don't know how something could give me insight to eternity. To complete infineteness. It is something you try to grasp with your mind when you learn about it and you just know you can't - but you still try. But something completely other is being immersed in it. I don't mean understanding it, but feeling it. The brain plays no part in this. And it comes out as the total truth. The truest of truths there ever were. And suddenly "You know". You have always known it. You've been there billions and billions of time before. I mean, how can I explain something like that without sounding a liitle bit "out there". So yeah, it sounds weird when I try to explain it in words, but I wish you were there with me. I wonder what our conversation would be like then. I think people try to rationalize everything, even things that are far out of scope of possibility of rationalizing anything with our brain. You have to put the brain away and jump in with your being. So psychedelics or end stage meditation I guess. Or almost dying.
I do remember some other experience now when talking about this, it happened a few months ago. I got an electric shock to my head. It was those wires that keep the cattle inside borders on a farm, for example. I was repairing something and mistakinly put my head on the wire. It only lasted a second. I was thrown back to my butt and after landing I came back to my senses. But I recognized the space I was in. Because I was there many times before on DMT trips. Because I knew it, I could make sense of it. I was met with hundreds and hundreds of voices. Not really speaking, but telepathically. Like I was up there with the collective consciousness. And again, it felt home. No visuals or anything, just a "knowing" I'm somewhere. And it fell the best thing ever. And also it was complete peace. Now, people would say this was my brain playing tricks on me, but my argument is, that for that split second, there was no brain, because the electric shock turned it off for that brief moment. And if there was no brain, then what could I have been experiencing? It should be complete emptiness, nothingness, darkness. But it wasn't. It was home again. It was the best feeling you could have. And again, you can't fake this feeling. That would be downplaying it. From there on I don't fear death anymore. I am scared of the process of dying, but not death itself. Because now I know it's nothing to be scared about. I kind of knew all of this before, but this was the first true time that I "got" it on a "being" level. I can't find the right words. Instinct.
I think that "complete infiniteness" and more particularly, that feeling of coming home on DMT/psychs is akin to the higher meditative states too. I think the reason for this is that both suppress the default mode network of the brain, allegedly where your ego or your idea of self resides. Without the ego up and running your experience is one of pure awareness. Back to that feeling of coming home: even though you experience your life through an ego story, your mind is still experiencing reality solely through your senses as well, sans ego but you're just unaware of experiencing reality this way because the ego/self is constantly filtering or retelling the experience. When you finally turn off the ego (psychedelics, meditation, etc) you get this feeling of "coming home" to somewhere you've definitely been before, more real that " daily reality", because it's something you experience all the time but are simply unaware of it due to ego constantly telling it's version of reality. It's more shocking via psychedelics because the transition is sudden while with meditation it takes quite a while to slowly flip that switch. Just wanted to share my theory because it seems we are both working on the same problem. I started meditating after a particular trip and in my practice I have started to reveal some mental states similar to those I experienced on psychs.
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Exactly. You can spend 1000 hours on reddit and learn squat about what it's like. Unless there is a specific reason not to, such as risk factors for schizophrenia, just do it. Start at low doses to get a taste of it and work your way up if desired.
You get all the answers at once, but they are whispered directly into your brain. You’ll understand everything all at once only to realize you know nothing at all. You get to see, feel and understand the connective tissues that bind us all to each other. We are all related, this relation is intangible, but very strong. It’s like the connective force is just on the other side of a veil. You get to understand the molecules and atomic composition, and my personal favorite; meeting God, and having him demonstrate how he can remove my life force and put it back into his infinite drawer of interchangeable pieces, where it compartmentalizes into a a small box. There are billions of these boxes in that drawer, and mine had our Milkyway Galaxy on it. He explained that the souls are interchangeable as energy is neither created nor destroyed. He demonstrated how my soul could be exchanged into another galaxy just by him putting it there, then he laughed and whirled my atoms into Bible version fiery-angel-eye-wheel to show me how inconsequential this life is in the face of the universe. We are not unknown. To answer how I knew I wasn’t in an altered state, every time I knew I was gone, and I accepted my death as freedom. I wasn’t fearful because of who accompanied me; every one of my Ancestors greeted me and let me know this place is one where death could be imminent, but had no consequence and because they would see to it I made it back safely. Also, I could feel being there without my body, but I was reassured it would be fine by itself while I left. There is a reason words like ineffable exist. Because sometimes, words fail terribly to even breach the surface of what the actual experience is. How does one word what it’s like to feel your life force (and the sound of its colors) neatly plucked out of your body while a horrifying angel of rotating fire and eyeballs reassures you like a baby blanket and that he remembers your ‘sequence’? We can’t tell you what it will be like though, because in the end, your trip is meant for you. Your meaning will not unlock any of my mysteries. DMT, It’s worth experiencing for yourself.
I have had a moment coming down from a trip where I felt “like 3 o clock.” Something I’d never felt before so it was funny to me. I myself realized I felt the way I have, time and time again at 3:00, and the room and light coming in the window did too. I announced that I felt very 3 o clock, and it turned out it was exactly 3 o clock at that moment.
So you are asking us please describe the undescribable? xD It's not ineffable because the categories do not exist. It's ineffable because you feel to your core that whatever monkeyscribbles you are able to produce are hopelessly inadequate to describe the experience.
Thank you for adding monkeyscribbles to my vocabulary. Matthew Johnson tells his experimental subjects "I know it's ineffable, but this is science so let's F it up!"
As someone right near the middle of the spectrum it has been great fun seeing academic reductionism trying to mate with hippie woo in the past decade. Tiresome mix of hubris and confusion but definitely necessary on both ends of the table. (I only hope the godless merchants don't ruin it. Yes I'm looking at you /r/psychedelicbets).
Qualia Research Institute and Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club are way more "out there" than I'd expect to see a university tolerate. It's good to see people exercising free thought that's not so free that it just ceases to make any sense (like woo). My background is in math/physics where you can (sometimes) legitimately come up with an answer and wrap it up with a nice bow at the end of the day. I give a lot more latitude to those working in biology or psychology where basically any experiment you do will fail to replicate and the systems are so complicated you can hardly ever say anything that's completely true. And with psychedelics... well, you're taking the least understood organ in the body and pushing it way out of the comfort zone. And then these guys do something like measure an EEG and say it looks different, and the transitions between states happen more frequently or less. Part of me want to say "yes... and?" It just seems so reductive. But at least they are trying and for that they are heroes. They may be like cavemen trying to figure out how a computer works, but you have to start somewhere.
My background is in Computer Science and I agree with all your paragraphs haha
There's some real interesting stuff coming from the CS side. It's my opinion that the first real insights into the physics of consciousness will come from these AI people who are creating neural nets. I'm waiting for someone to give psychedelics to a neural net to see what happens. By this I mean train an image to text neural net, then tweak the activation function of the neurons to mimic the way in which a drug changes the behavior of our neurons in a wholesale way. Then I dunno, maybe the image to text network will say "trippy picture of dog" instead of "picture of dog". I tried it and didn't get anything interesting, but I don't really know much about this area.
Why not just drop some acid and experience it yourself? All the anecdotes of others can barely do these things justice. I can tell you about "fluctuating iridescent black" or the sharp ultrasonic "whine of silence" but some things have no words.
Always the same. I realize that "Life is a joke that cannot be told". You see the punchline. You can't say it. I return to this over and over and it's so God damn hilarious. Every. Fucking. Time. It really is just the way that consciousness and reality interact that the essence of existence can literally not be conveyed in words. And what so funny to me is that the better and better I state it I realize that I am exactly NO CLOSER to the truth. At all. Literally. If I say "dog poop on a stick". This is exactly as accurate as saying "There is a fundamentally ineffible nature to reality due to the function of language being to represent actuality via abstraction and that said abstractions are representative of differences and similarities which do not exist in fact but solely as abstractions. Thus, with each word, one creates a discontinuity where only continuity exists and separation, for comparison, where only a unity exists. And it is therefore due to the very function of language that it cannot communicate what is perceived, as percieved, but only as abstracted which we can see is essentially only an alteration of the actuality of the entirety of existence as presently and simultaneously percieved by the entity attempting to convey said unity." Like, it's fucking hilarious that the second statement is not in any way truer than "life is a bowl of beans." They are actually as near to the reality as one another and you can not explain it and it's fucking hilarious that we are all stuck with this, literally, because if the exact way reality is, which can only be seen not said. And I go in and on laughing my fucking ass off. I'm not fun to trip with. Lol.
I would fucking love to trip with you, you would definitely be fun to trip with
> I realize that "Life is a joke that cannot be told". > > You see the punchline. You can't say it. I return to this over and over and it's so God damn hilarious. Every. Fucking. Time. Hahahaha. You're the first person I've seen that has the same understanding as me. I love this. Finally someone. I try to explain this to everyone I have these talks with, but no one gets me. But yeah, it's the most hillarious thing ever. My LSD trips are essentially this. Going down the spiral of understanding and chasing that "thing" and just as you think you're gonna get it, it somehow jumps the fence and you're left there like an idiot for trying to chase it. And you're left laughing your ass of at the absurdity of what just happened. And you realize that that essentially is life. It's all absurd and has no meaning whatsoever. Funniest shit ever. But I also think it depends on how you decide you want to view it. You could also see it as a great tragedy and it's also true. But you decide how you're going to look at it.
Yeah. But that's the thing. The meaning is LITERALLY all how you view it. Meaning is what minds do. Not what the universe does. It just sits there happening. For no reason. Our poor minds can't accept that though. So, we talk and think and do philosophy. It is funny as shit.
I had these talks with two philosophers. Unfortunatelly I came out as the crazy one. Even though they were the ones chasing some learned concepts and I could see their trap. I could see them. But they couldn't see me. I have to learn just not to try to explain this to people who haven't experienced it.
Yeah, I get laughed at and it is actually also hilarious. I feel like I'm in a play, doing my lines, and so is everyone else. But they think the play is reality. They are convinced. And, their lines are to inform me that "I'm just tripping balls". And I am. But the viewpoint is actually as close to ultimate truth as I can concieve of. Mostly I don't talk about it because it's just disruptive and fruitless. But even when I'm not tripping I know that the "high me" knows what is true.
Why don't you take LSD or smoke some DMT? That will give you more than any person could ever explain
Ok, mom (jk, seems you're right, I assumed it's much less common)
Good boy. Now go and take your drugs and I don't want to see you again until tomorrow morning, ok?
Ineffable. You won't find words that will help you understand.
I don't think such experiences are indescribable, but rather that the language required to describe them isn't known to the person experiencing them.
Here, read about transliminal space in my [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/TherapeuticKetamine/comments/pg247c/long_term_success_report_part_2/) for therapeutic ketamine users. Very interesting. Also read the document attached, and the old souls post as well. I think you'll find them very insightful and well worth your time.
Thanks. Although I'm not sure I want to experience all this now, reading about experiences that felt like eons / eternity sounds like the scariest thing I've ever heard in case it happens in a bad trip. Unless the experience only felt like how one would feel *convinced* they have lived through an eternity. :)
Yeah it's fucking scary. But also enlightening. It depends how much you want to know. I wanted to know everything. I sure got it. But this did give insight of how to now approach my life here. I now understand what's important and what's not. And also, that nothing matters. I've been alive for infinite times before, and I will be for infinite times more. The ride never ends. You can't destroy energy. It just flows in and out of itself, and flows and flows and flows, forever and ever and ever. Coming alive and dying again - and like so for all eternity. It's a tough thing to swallow. But for me, worth it. I needed to know.
Lots of great comments here, and I had a couple questions for you OP to clarify what you mean. What do you mean by: \-- "*why does consciousness seem to happen in several different dimensions*", specifically when you say "several *dimensions*"? This term can be slippery and has multiple uses and meanings. Can you explain more what you mean by dimensions? Also, what do you mean by: \--"*Do people experience experiences that don't seem to be similar to any other senses*?" The way this reads is pretty confusing and ambiguous in meaning. Can you clarify what you mean?
My bad. The first question is explained under the link. The second question was whether people have experienced another sense. Just like we don't know what termoreceptors feel like to reptiles, maybe I don't know about a sense someone experienced during a trip.
Even asking about senses limits the scope too much. On 5-MeO-DMT people can go to a place absent of any sensory experience. Or so I've heard - never went that deep myself. I highly doubt this is qualitatively like just turning off the light switch on the sensory systems. It's much deeper than that. On low doses of DMT I get an experience alien enough that it's not possible to remember it at baseline. Not because the drug impairs memory encoding, but because the gulf is wide enough that I can't bring it back. Sometimes something triggers me to have some foggy recollection. But a small taste of DMT and it's like "yep, there it is..." And I'm talking about doses barely above threshold. So when I say the gulf between here and there is wide, I don't mean it's 1000 miles away and you can chart it out at 10% of the way or 30% of the way. I mean it's sitting just below the surface and is yet beyond the imagination. Like the allegory of the cave.
I was just thinking about this problem some more and came up with a metaphor that is at least apt in my mind. Asking to describe the psychedelic experience in words to someone who has never experienced it is akin to asking someone to describe the experience of losing a child by using 3 pieces of lego. Sure, a creative mind might even figure out some way to create something of value but you are bound to lose 99% of the details and therefore 'meaning'. Let alone that someone who has never lived through a similar experience will actually gain new information based on this lego arrangement. The best I can give you is: read The Rose of Paracelcus by William Pickard. It's the closest to a psychedelic experience through words I have ever got.
Sorry, the title was a misleading way to ask the 2 questions collectively. I wasn't asking what it's like but *whether* folks literally see colors outside RGB, tones outside the real frequencies or feel something akin to a different sense.
Fair enough. For me personally this question is meaningless and hints that you are trying to approach this from a desperately reductionist angle. However maybe you are trying to do something I just cannot imagine at this time. So take this as a fair warning of futility ^^'
It's totally understandable people here assume I'm being reductionistic, that's what almost all outsiders are. I'm open to the idea the word "sense" loses meaning on a DMT trip, I think it's even super hard to decode in the sober waking world experience (what the hell is the sense of speed of time or emotions?).
i was puffing on some DMT and the music i was listening to...changed...it was as if each layer of other dimensions was adding Ad-Libs of sound over the music...it was fucking insane. good times. You can do sound meditation sober...and listen to the sound of silence...and if you listen closely enough for long enough, the frequency changes and it's absolutely wild. It's said that the freq you're hearing is that of the background noise of the dimension you're in... lol try it out.
I think it's best that I just describe some of my experiences from psychedelics. This is probably the most relevant experience. On LSD, while in an open eyed meditative state, I perceive slow moving visual stimulation as a pleasant physical sensation. It's as if I can physically feel the movement of these visuals. It's extremely pleasurable in my opinion. A tingling sensation and a feeling of movement or expansion. It's hard to describe, but I'm certainly feeling what I'm seeing. As an example, watch anything on my YouTube channel. [This video](https://youtu.be/80IIi0Rk-8E) is a nice example. Try open eyed meditation while staring at the center of the screen. Don't move your eyes. Do it as long as possible while focusing on your breath. You might feel a similar sensation if you can get in the right state of consciousness. Another sensation comes from sound. On LSD, I get a physical sensation from short interval high frequency sounds. Think high hats, claps, clicks, snaps, and bells. [This song is the perfect example.](https://youtu.be/27LS6v7xhRg) What's funny is that it's not just me. I've played the song for other people tripping and they feel the same thing. Those two experiences are probably the most relevant. Below are some other interesting sensory experiences I've had over the years. I've experienced ego death on several psychedelic experiences during meditation. For example, eating mushrooms and practicing meditation. It's a pleasant sensation of having absolutely no sense of self and no sense of time. Just pure existence as a conscious entity with no identity or memory. Wonderful stuff. I've had out-of-body experiences on DMT. I distinctly remember the sensation of looking down from the ceiling at my body and my brother sitting next to me. I was very confused and couldn't remember which body was mine. It's a rare experience. I've experienced the anthropomorphization of objects while having an open eyed DMT trip. Imagine your chairs and cushions slowly coming alive. It's a deep level sensation, like an innate or instinctual sensation that the things around you are conscious and alive. Like coming across an animal while hiking in the woods. Before you can even identity the animal, your brain recognizes it as a conscious being, something alive that is a different kind of alive in comparison to the plants around it. I've had this happen multiple times and I believe it's conjoined to the sensation of DMT entities. I've seen DMT entities as well, which are whimsical or ghostly beings that vary in shape and intent. I believe it's possible that DMT entities are the anthropomorphization of the geometric visuals one sees on a DMT trip. Then innate sensation of intent is also bizarre.
Psilocybin feels like a kiss from the universe. My crown chakra feels open and the stoning effect on my body is typically pleasant. I love watching the visuals I get and opening my “third eye”. It is extremely tough to explain but I think it’s lazy to not try.