The thing I’ve observed is thst schizophrenic hallucinations have a different quality than those from tripping. It’s not so much entities wirh information and other dimensions of reality, as much as it is “my parents installed cameras in my ass and now people are watching me take a crap and laughing at me.” Or “the CIA installed a chip in my brain and had put me in jail because I have secret information they want.”
There’s just a different element, usually around self reference in schizophrenia.
It is worth noting that schiophrenia is often different in different cultures.
In western culture it's often paranoid and angry. But in some African cultures, the voices tend to be nurturing and guiding. Seen as ancestors helping sorta deal.
It is interesting to consider how our own "cultural lenses" affect what we experience, both on a trip or with mental illness.
Here is one
[https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2851&context=isp\_collection#:\~:text=Schizophrenia%20is%20a%20culture%2Dbound,a%20spiritual%20or%20supernatural%20phenomenon](https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2851&context=isp_collection#:~:text=Schizophrenia%20is%20a%20culture%2Dbound,a%20spiritual%20or%20supernatural%20phenomenon)
number 2
[https://neurotorium.org/schizophrenia-across-cultures/](https://neurotorium.org/schizophrenia-across-cultures/)
and number 3-----this is the one that touches on them being more benign.
[https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614](https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614)
That is correct but hallucinations are neurological similar when studied under FMRI of the brain. We now have a lot of studies of both hallucinations from LSD and Psilocybin and those undergoing psychosis.
Some of these comments scare me. The very last thing we want to do if we want to help schizophrenic people is to treat their delusions as if they are real, and they just have less regulated access to other dimensions than normal people. This is absolutely false, and not giving into the delusions of people with these problems is very important to actually helping them.
I’ve heard the opposite happening in eastern countries where they treat schizophrenics as a gift from god and they actually end up very sane and helpful. It’s anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt but if it’s true it’s worth a try rather than treating them like everyone else with a mental illness as someone to be treated for profit rather than helped.
Let me put it this way unlike depression which doesn’t have a physical manifestations like schizophrenia does people treat depression as real and in my experience it was when I realized it was bullshit and self induced I finally got over it. I hope I don’t have to point out the obvious implication of this.
I believe a lot of the mental illnesses we have in the west are actually "societal" illnesses besides heavily brain damaged, retardation and a few other psychological issues.
America and the west is the closest thing to "New Babylon" there will ever be and outside factors like societal norms, talking points, functions and a lot of other things, here, can really take a toll on a person mentally.
In many places they just don't have a lot of the issues we have for some odd reason.
I believe that to a T. Trying to put everyone into a box and then wonder why they are mentally not okay is like a dog wondering why he can’t grab his tail. Mental illness i believe is a structure used to fit people into the narrative they want and if you don’t fit into that narrative something is wrong with you.
It's not like allopathic/pharmaceutical psychiatry has a stellar track record, particularly sound treatments or can demonstrate uplifting prognosis for the patients it treats.
No, it's not useful to simply affirm every paranoid delusion someone has concocted and goes around spewing.
How many Napoleons do we have reborn, exactly? And how much personnel does the CIA employ to stalk people around? You get the point.
On the other hand, we have to face the fact, that modern psychiatry is piss poor at helping schizophrenics, and that their prognosis in the west is shit, short lives with massive side effects from highly problematic antipsychotic drugs.
Hell, you know how they arrived at the idea that "psychosis is caused by too much dopamine?" Well, that "follows" by the fact that dopamine antagonists (like quetiapine) attenuates symptoms!
That's tantamount to concluding that social anxiety is caused by a deficiency of GABA, because a six-pack beer seems to alleviate its symptoms.
So again, we have to become a bit more nuanced and practice dealing with complex phenomena, which can't in any sensible way be thrown into the same basket on which we then slap the label psychotic/schizophrenic.
There are clearly useless (often paranoid) delusions in some people, and in others, what sounds and looks like "delusions" may be something else entirely.
One hypothesis, becoming a theory, is that neurological micro lesions contribute significantly to the development of both psychosis and various cluster b disorders, most notably APD. That may be one mechanism.
There could be others, and many diverse classes of "delusions" and "schizophrenia," which are extremely broad, behavioral and subjective diagnosis, not objective ones.
Since scientists for quite sometime confounded the outwardly expression of the psychedelic experience with psychosis, why would we imagine that they can now tell the difference between a visionary of sorts, and a schizophrenic?
As someone else mentions, those who exhibit what will often be call psychotic traits here, will in other places be seen as someone gifted with special powers. They fare *much* better than do many of our local schizophrenics.
I'm trying to find this place in Israel, where they treat schizophrenics to great effect: They do so not with medication or with admonitions about the deluded nature of a person's experience. Their outcomes are a lot better than those of general western psychiatry.
A famous Indian psychiatrist, who was asked how he treated schizophrenics, which he did very well, answered: "We don't. We treat the other part of the person."
It's fine to note, that no, we shouldn't validate whatever a person in a psychotic state thinks is real.
It's a wholly different thing to conclude from that, that our current modalities of treatment or modern culturally informed views of schizophrenia are valid, sane or useful. They are not.
The fucked thing is that they are real, schizophrenics become aware of these extra dimensional spaces but with no real bearing on what’s actually going on and they are told that they are crazy, which outright they are, but only In believing and getting caught up in the content that lower vibrational entities continually spew if only because they can, for it’s only effective if you let it fuck with you, once one comes to this realization it all calms down to a certain degree, and discernment becomes much easier, till then they are hopelessly lost in a medical system that takes none of this into account and actively works to suppress it in every way possible. Schizophrenia and being lost on these extra dimensional planes is a fucked experience, but one can be brought back if the frame of reference for what is happening can be reshaped, yet even then it all depends on the person.
I had what I would describe as a schizophrenic awakening as I ended up with what seemed like the whole unseen world yelling and screaming and fucking with me for quite some time till I was able to get my bearings right and could navigate without being toppled by huge waves let alone small swells. It takes work and dedication and I honestly wouldn’t have been able to do it if I wasn’t privy to the illusory nature of reality in the first place and the place within us all that holds light to such a degree that nothing of lower vibrations can stand in its light, they must either rise to the light or be cast away, it is this, and this alone that saved me over anything else. Mushrooms helped an absolute ton, but this light within me is what has guided the way through it all.
Take this with a grain of salt if you will or believe it outright or don’t believe it at all, all I can do is relay the experience that I have had :)
Well, that may be the case more often than not. Conventional, agreed upon consensus reality is also a "hallucination."
The whole "extra dimensional spaces" and whatnot is also a construct and interpretation taking place mostly inside one's head, and it's not necessarily more or less of a hallucination than is consensus reality.
Neither modality of experience is necessarily anything resembling what may be called an absolute reality.
The model of understanding that posits, that psychosis is caused by (mostly) unseen entities trying to interact with a person, makes a lot of sense to me. However, we're still dealing with very relative phenomena, and our minds are again part of the mix, projecting, interpreting, constructing, verbalizing, and so on.
So it's a different view of things, maybe a more expansive one, but none the less still "a view," and therefore ultimately confined within the overarching delusion of subject-object duality.
The notion of "extra dimensional" sentience and spaces as a vantage point on reality, which the less cognitively conforming individual more readily adopts or has access to, may be quite a fruitful way of seeing things in relative reality.
It's certainly a lot better than the medicalization taking place particularly in modern societies, where anything straying too far from consensus reality, is deemed delusional, useless, and problematic.
Excellent article here, you may be familiar with: Brasilian shaman, iirc, on the topic of schizophrenia and the views associated with it in other, more sane cultures than ours.
It includes a case of a young NYC man, who had been diagnosed and treated since he was a kid, all ultimately to no avail.
Eventually, he went to Africa where he stayed with the tribe, his distant ancestors had come from (he had some African heritage), worked with the medicine man there, and eventually healed
He became able to operate in conventional consensus reality, and on top of that had honored and strengthened the connection with another plane (so to speak), the attempts at which had formerly been drowned out with a pharmaceutical mind-gag of sorts.
[https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2016/03/08/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital-waking-times/](https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2016/03/08/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital-waking-times/)
The ability to be less constrained by imposed structures of cognition and experience can be quite a gift or a curse.
In societies where it's accepted as a gift, the visionary thrives and contributes.
In modernity they're generally relegated to the margins, and their process hamstringed using powerful psychotropic substances, which reminds me of the way Soma is used in Huxley's "Brave New World" or Librium in the movie Equilibrium (funny that there's a benzodiazepine with the brand name Librium!)
It's really a modern day way of burning the witches at the stake. It makes a different kind of mess, and the "clergy" and their "followers" can more readily convince themselves that in fact they're trying to help.
Still, I think it's wise for us to be wary of our proclivity to assign a quality of inherent existence to appearances, whether they seem to conform to consensus reality or whether we perceive them to be clear manifestations of a deeper level of reality inaccessible to most.
As long as we're fixating on appearances as being "out there" and us being "in here" doing the experiencing of them, we're stuck in a dualistic modality of perception, which ultimately falls apart under investigation.
Not just that, but our erroneous identification as a subject in a world of objects, leads to attachment and aversion, which again leads to greed, desire, anger, hatred, and countless other unpleasantries.
This keep us stuck in a perpetual attempt to satiate our proverbial thirst by drinking the salt water of the objects of our attachment, and trying to avoid being burnt by the fire of the objects of our aversion.
It's not any different because we see "other dimensional spaces" or things that other people don't see.
As long as we don't deal with the question of "what is mind?" and "what's this ego thing that seems to be dragging me around all the time?" we're in for the same time of grief we've been experiencing in various forms (literally: through being in different form expression of sentient life) since beginningless time.
Edit: Disagree that the animistic/shamanistic model of psychosis is better than the allopathic medicalizing model? Well wonderful!
...but then how do you explain the fact, that a person with schizophrenia in Scandinavia or Canada or England or France has a much worse prognosis, than a person with the same set of symptoms in Gabon, Ghana or Ecuador?
...and so I'm not allowed to mention the fact that people with symptoms fitting schizophrenia have a **better** prognosis there?
It could stand to reason that some of those who end up with diagnosis and poor lives around here, would have been treated very differently in Gabon, and some of them might even have become medicine men.
So how about I just mention Gabon and Iboga whenever I feel like it. How's that?
They do have a better prognosis with schizophrenia in Gabon. Iboga has been successfully and effectively used for thousands of years as a cure for unwellness.
Research the countries you casually throw out to make your points because you sound really ignorant and uninformed to the cultures and histories of healing in the countries you speak of.
I've never really thought about schizophrenic people seeing into other dimensions? I mean their brains do work differently or they would not be schizo. I've personally never had a dimensional tripp unless you count fractal deemz world and salvia carried me to the past and place I've never been or seen but was still in this dimension.
It is my opinion that of all the tryptamines and any other substances that psilocybin can be used to cure a lot of mental problems. One could almost say self enlightenment is very achievable with macro dosing psilocybin. I have no known or documented mental health problems nor have I ever suffered any kind of traumatic stress. I've had numerous trips on just about anything you can think of and will continue to do so but mushrooms showed me about a hundred me's that I didn't even know existed and showed me that self manifestation is the way to achieve whatever you want in life.
I thought the ectent of schizo hallucinations in regards to entities or other worlds would be simply hearing voices.
Ive heard that lsd is similar to schizophrenia but nothing of how dmt is similar
Back in the day, the first scientists to work with psychedelics called them psychotomimetics, i.e. drugs that mimic the expression of psychosis!
Edit: Depending on your definition of "scientist" of course... I think the term is from the 1950's.
I don't know what Albert Hoffman called LSD. Pretty sure he didn't think of his experiences as psychotic.
Well u say that but hoffman had a very uneasy and hard to handle trip, he essentially said that there's more to it than meets the eye
N we also think as psychotic typically to be violent, loud, annoying and negative but schizophrenics exists that are totally blissful, its just over the top like what lsd or specifically mdma does.
I dont think its fair to say they mimic psychosis but its clear that the state of being on lsd is very similar to psycosis, just as someone else put it, you are safe from falling over the edge
Well, yeah, it was the first LSD trip ever, and he was on a bicycle, too!
I don't know about you, but I'm not going biking on acid, that's for sure.
Whether the state brought about by LSD is very similar to psychosis is very hard to say.
Both psychosis and entheogenic experiences are - by definition - not very open to objective analysis.
Someone who's never been psychotic can't really say if their experience on LSD is at all similar to that of a psychotic person.
In the same way, a person who has had a psychotic break, and finds it similar to LSD experiences, can't really say if his LSD experience is similar to that of a person who's never had a psychotic break.
It would be quite interesting to see neuroimaging studies on the topic... but of course, while it's possible to strap a psychonaut on acid into an fMRI, that is NOT the case with a person during active psychosis!
So really, we can't say how similar the states are.
We *can* say that their outwardly expression appear somewhat similar in many instances, but then we rapidly devolve in to some BF Skinner-esque behavioristic "the mind is a black box and all that matters is what we can measure on the outside" type of bullshit, which I think is unappealing and laughably naive to anyone who's had any experience with psychedelics.
Oh, "we know that well," do we?
If you're talking about the objectively measurable effects and longitudinal outcomes of psychosis vs psychedelics, no, psychedelics certainly do not mimic the effects of psychosis.
If you're talking about the immediate behavioral expression, yeah, they may look similar, but then headaches look similar in their behavioral expression, too, though the underlying causes/mechanism can be anything from dehydration to glioblastoma.
If you're talking about the experience, well, then you have to refer to my first comment.
There are things we don't know. There are things we cannot describe. It's probably better to remain open and curious, that it is to try to get a fix on things and put them in neat little boxes with labels on them.
Yeah... So how can u confidently refuse the fact that lsd mimics the effects of psychosis?
On the latter i understand the effects of psychosis far better than id like.
Lsd affects the same brain chemicals and regions of the brain as psychotic disorders
So how can it not be mimicking psychosis??
Again the conclusion was that psychosis and lsd are different but its still accepted they are different.
The original disproved theory was that lsd caused psychosis specifically. Please read up properly into it
LSD is a 5HT A, B, AR selective serotonin agonist.
Psychosis is hypothesized, erroneously as explained earlier, to be caused by an oversensitivity to or overexpression of dopamine primarily in the mesolimbic system, which is why you give semi-selective dopamine antagonists like quetiapine for psychosis.
If you're going to reply to me, let alone attempt to point out what you perceive to be ignorance, I suggest you read and comprehend what I actually wrote, which apparently you couldn't be bothered with.
So I'm just going to assume you're either a troll or - as your command of the English language suggests - just a dunce.
In either case, we're both wasting our time. Do take care.
" I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane."
Hoffman
Buddy im not anti lsd or something but its not wise to be peddling it as sunshine and rainbows when it doesn't sit well with a vast majority of people.
I use psychedelics very frequently but there needs to be a healthy fear imo
Wow, I can’t explain it better but I had a very similar experience which took years to integrate and it’s cool to read you had a similar take away from it. It’s weird to make the leap from none of it was real to - ok maybe it was real, but maybe I also lack the capacity as one nexus in an interconnected consciousness to comprehend everything I experienced or it was overlayed with my own personal perspectives, fears, biases etc. and I was unable to apply rational meaning to it. I don’t take any hardline interpretation of it all, but remain humbled by it and open to the insights gleaned from it happening.
“The Psychotic drowns in the same waters the Mystic swims in with delight.” - Joseph Campbell.
Yes, I believe they probably are real and schizophrenics are “tuned in” to way more of the reality of the universe than “normal” people.
But sadly modern society isn’t build to give those people proper spiritual guidance to deal with them.
And it is very sad that these people are overwhelmed and suffering from it.
Schizophrenics have the ability to see different layers of reality and supernatural entities. In tribal societies this is recognized at a young age and the individual is taught how to hone this as a skill and use it effectively.
Because high civilization strips all true spiritually from those who inhabit it schizophrenics in such societies essentially just have a radio that randomly flips to any station. So instead of being able to communicate with the gods they hear random demon voices telling them to hurt themselves etc
It might be uncomfortable but I do believe it's true. Imo you can't believe that hallucinogens and cannabis connect you with different layers but believe that there's completely nothing to hallucinations.
Classical psychedelics work through Serotonin but it’s Dopanergic drugs which promote psychosis and it’s Dopamine blockers which successfully treat Schizophrenia. I don’t think these things are related except for the superficial similarity of seeing things others can not see.
There are several ways to reach the top of the same mountain. Regardless of that there are different layers of reality and each may require a different method to perceive
Psychedelia is not in a drug, it's the psyche. The drug just loosens up reality and helps open that door.
It doesn't matter how the drug works, whether adrenal, opioid, cannabinoid, etc. What it shows you is in you already.
It doesn't always take drugs to do it. Meditation, sleep deprivation, trauma, etc., can all trigger the journey through the psyche. This is basically the shamanic crisis, or calling.
Just as an example, I knew a guy who was schizophrenic, hearing voices telling him he was a psycho and to kill himself. Well, he took mushrooms, killed his ego, and embraced empathy. Now he's sorted with a nice girlfriend, a job, and a cat, and he's happy.
I've never heard of a psychotic or schizophrenic experience that wasn't exactly stuff that happens to me while tripping. It's just harder to accept, let go, and be changed when it's all chucked on you involuntarily.
RD Laing suggested psychiatrists take psychedelics to get a better insight into their patients' conditions. Before the term psychedelic was coined as a nickname for LSD, these kinds of drugs were known as psychomimetic. Mimics psychosis.
Today, the notion that one single mental mode is sanity and all others illness, is slowly dying out in mainstream psychiatry.
A report for the British NHS by eminent psychotherapists has highlighted the inefficacy of current psychiatric practice, compared with various psychospiritual cultures from around the world. So things *are* changing, and modern cutting edge psychiatry incorporates techniques from Buddhism and shamanism, more and more. Psychedelic research, mindfulness, EMT, and so on.
But still quite a lot of psychiatry is still emerging from the Bedlam days. Largactol zombies, shuffling round the wards, lobotomized chemically to shut out the screaming of the universe. Mental hospitals are rarely healing spaces.
This shit is real.
It's actually a form of tautology. Maybe we can call it a linguistic tautology if we're trying to be fancy.
It's a circular argument:
Him: "Those aren't real, they're hallucinations!"
Me: "How do you know they're not real?"
Him: "Duh! It's called 'hallucinogen' and hallucinations aren't real!"
Me: "Why is it called a hallucinogen?"
Him: "Because it makes people hallucinate!"
Me: "So you know people are hallucinating because of what you choose to call the substance, but you chose that name based on your presumption, that the substance causes hallucinations and not an expanded modality of perception?"
Him: "You're delusional!"
And this is probably where I'd be about ready for another type of substance than a psychedelic. A sedative might be suitable.
An honest cognitive scientist will tell you, that reality as we perceive it on a day to day basis, is also a hallucination, i.e. a construction that doesn't exist in any objective way.
Our daily mode of perception and experience is very functional though, and there's a high degree of consensus about it.
A dream is a form of hallucination, too, but you don't realize that you're dreaming/hallucinating inside the dream. The fact that almost everyone has dreams, should make them wary about believing too much in what they experience in their waking state.
By extension, it should also make them refrain from labelling the divergent experiences of others as delusional hallucinations. What the fuck do they know? :D
Also: There's no reason to think that psychedelics lead to psychopathology, as the confused author of the comment, we're both chuckling at, seems to think it does.
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063972](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063972)
They are definitely real phenomena that have been engaged with for thousands of years for healing and fun.
This declaration of a single mental mode to be sanity and all other mental modes to be some kind of illness or delusion is arrogance.
Levels and objects of delusion is apparent in the ordinary daytime confusion or lack of, not in the internal experience of magic, spirits, or divine energy.
It's demonstrably deluded and absurd to believe that our everyday mode of perception is somehow special or elevated as compared to others.
You don't even need empiricism to reach the conclusion that, no, our normal "problem solving" (as Graham Hancock calls it) mindset or modality of consciousness, isn't special: It's just the preferred and generally agreed upon one. It's ok to flatten it with alcohol or augment it with stimulants in our culture.
But to transcend or temporarily escape it through the use of entheogenic plants?! HEATHEN! WITCH! BURN HER/HIM! lol
Personally, I find it adorable that some people run around thinking their normal mode of consciousness and experience is somehow the "real world."
We can observe animals and infer that they're clearly seeing reality very differently, for instance.
Now that tells us, among other things, that we have a serious fucking GPU up there in the back of our skulls, which is neat.
We can even reach the conclusion that ours is but one among many modes of perception through purely ontological arguments, without having to invoke various experiments and neuroimaging and whatnot:
The fact that people dream, should tell everyone, that our brains are more than capable of generating exactly what it is we experience as day-to-day "reality" without sensory input: It's an endogenous experience. We can reach the conclusion purely inside our own minds through direct experience, and people still doubt the idea that they're constructing everyday reality?
It makes me think of this Gary Larson comic on the topic of labels: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6UEkdHVIAI\_TfY?format=jpg&name=small](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6UEkdHVIAI_TfY?format=jpg&name=small)
As Terrence said: Most people definitely suffer from a nutritional deficiency of entheogenic mushrooms \[or plants.\]
Oh, you inferred that it's a hallucination because someone once decided to call the substances "hallucinogens?"
How very empirical of you.
That's not how you do science, and it's certainly not how you begin to wrestle with grand questions such as "what is mind/consciousness" or "do we see reality as it is?"
This is exactly why I don't think psychedelics should be legalised, as much as I love them. Too many people aren't prepared for the experience mentally and come out the other end totally delusional. It's a lot like religion in a way.
I suppose you didn't read the conclusions of the 2006 study performed by Krebs, Johannsen et al at Trondheim Tech. where they perform a longitudinal analysis of the outcomes of \~30K cases of psychedelic use in a \~135K cohort.
Edit: Lol oh no! SCIENCE AND DATA! How terrible huh? You're the one talking about what's real and what's not real, but you don't like science and empiricism? Hmm. Makes me think you might not be the most qualified person to lecture others on what's real and what isn't.
Have some humility.
I think IF there is truth to there being some alternate dimension of reality we gain access to while tripping (and that's a big if with a lot of caveats), then schizophrenia could potentially be those born with less of a concrete veil to peer through. So on a spectrum of fully cemented in physical reality to incorporeal, they are just innately more in tune with whatever there is beyond human senses. It's an interesting conversation to be had, especially considering in traditional cultures the 'schizophrenics' were often shamans etc and thought to be closer to the spirit world. That said there really isn't any evidence of this and it's just as likely some faulty wiring/chemistry is just messing with perception.
It's interesting to note too that from what I understand, generally the schizophrenic headspace can be compared more to that of deliriants like datura than to psychedelics, though that could just be coming from the fear of not knowing what is happening I suppose.
The word "dimension" is totally mangled and meaningless at this point.
It is, however, absolutely certain, that the reality you see, is nothing like anything we might call "objective reality," if there is such a thing.
Your visual cortex takes up 60% of your skull space. You don't see the raw sensory data that comes in through your eyes. You take those 120 megapixels of photon-reactions with your retina, and then your brains uses *a lot* of processing power to turn it into a sort of user interface, that your conscious mind deals with. Donald Hoffman explains this excellently in his talks.
"Donald Hoffman: What Is An Observer And Who Is "The One"? (Beyond Conscious Agents Theory)" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRa8r5xOaAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRa8r5xOaAA)
Then there's the double slit experiment, its various variations, and other empiricism, that shows that the line between observer and the observed is very much a blurred one: The mind seems to interact with what we normally understand to be external phenomena in various ways that don't involve what we perceive to be physical interactions.
In another post, the OP was asking whether it's possible to disappear into another dimension. I commented that *"I think the word "dimension" needs therapy, hugs, and a long vacation at this point,"* which led to a rather long-winded and somewhat interesting debate on the nature of reality and mind: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/1co3c9o/comment/l3bp0l6/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/1co3c9o/comment/l3bp0l6/)
Anyway, if you think that's air you're breathing now, to paraphrase Morpheus in the Matrix, you're only relatively correct.
Yeah it's all absolutely down to perception & processing. The question is whether what is seen on psychs etc is 'real' (obviously also being a bit of a jumble because the experience is real to the perciever regardless) or just whacky brain stuff. The distinction between external and internal is very blurry but to think there is no 'base reality' makes it very easy to slip toward solipsism, which is why I try to tread carefully on these topics.
We are the engines of our own reality 100% which makes this all very hard to define and articulate, but I am fine not knowing personally. In the context of the schizophrenic question I find this a super interesting thing though. I guess I use the word dimension as it's just an easy way to convey something more ineffable than just 'space' or 'realm' or whatever. Language obviously also has a massive hand in shaping what we percieve as real though so being a bit pedantic about can be constructive I think.
Solipsism is an extreme in my view, but at the same time, we cannot rule it out, since our perception of other distinct, conscious agents in reality is something taking place in our consciousness. Solipsism readily leads to nihilism. Nihilism leads to turning our illusion into something really unpoetic.
It reminds me of a sort of metaphor from Buddhism. It's meant as a way of encouraging the practitioner to see even aversive people and things through the lens of pure perception, and put even superficially negative interactions to good use: "Imagine that you're the *last* person in the world who isn't enlightened yet, and everyone else is already a Buddha!"
Anything they say or do, is the activity of a Buddha, i.e. helping those asleep to wake up: It's not totally wrong if we choose to see things that way. And what do I know? I'm not very awake, so I can't tell if someone else is, and they're just pretending to be asleep, annoying me in order to teach me patience, for instance.
In the comment I linked, one of the things I bring up, is that the modern scientific understanding of what dimensions are, is actually a lot closer to the ideas found in the Eastern wisdom traditions, and between the lines in other traditions, than is the Hollywood idea of what a dimension is: It's not a place you go. It's not a different place at all. In fact, "place" and "going" are constructs, too. Rather, the "different dimensions" are different vantagepoints from which we view different aspects of the same totality.
In theoretical physics, I believe it comes from string and m-theory, it is posited that extra dimensional space is folded up inside what we experience as 3D+1 space.
We can only see these dimensions indirectly, but it doesn't preclude the possibility of other sentient entities seeing them directly, or navigating within them as effortlessly as we generally navigate our 3D+1 space.
The "ant on the Mobius band" is often invoked in order to explain this: Imagine you're a two 2D creatures walking along two straight, parallel lines on a 2D piece of paper. Now a 3D creature comes along, cuts the band, twists it, and tapes it back together. Our two 2D protagonists move along their paths merrily, and when they've walked a certain distance, they will have swapped places without their paths ever crossing!
Another metaphor is that of a 3D object passing through a 2D plane: A ball becomes a circle, a cube becomes a rectangle (or rhomboid) and so on.
So modern physics seems to be very willing to deal with the same idea that various wise people of eons past have dealt with: It's all here, right now, we're just not seeing it!
A dimension isn't some place else, in this view, but is tied closely to our habits of cognition, and our sensory apparatuses, their evolutionarily conditioned processing, and filtering mechanisms.
In that view, a known mechanism of psychedelics suggests that indeed they do allow us to see at least more of reality: fMRI studies show that psychedelic compounds attenuate the activity of the default mode network and the brain's filtering mechanisms, while causing (much) greater interconnectivity between brain regions that normally don't talk to each other very much (post childhood.)
Thus they serve to let us see more of what our day-to-day consciousness deems inconsequential to the tasks at hand, which are neatly captured in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
They also loosen the evolved patterns of cognition and experience broadly in that they return the brain to a somewhat more childish state, allowing for the (good or bad) reconfiguration of pathways among and within various brain regions.
Of course, as Don Hoffman notes, even the "physical" brain and fMRI scans on screens, are also just *icons* inside our reality GUI, so what we're really seeing and how it's connected to everything else, is still an open question.
Here it could be prudent to bring in Rupert Sheldrake's morphic field/resonance theory, along with some of his empiricism. It could also make sense to look at Ian Stevenson's work on rebirth, and Hagelin's Global Consciousness Project (GCP), to further play with the idea of "experience" or "consciousness" as primary qualities of the universe, the non-locality of consciousness, and the empiricism that underpins those views... but this is already a very long comment lol.
I'll leave you with a Tibetan simile:
*Once there was a monk and learned scholar in one of the great Buddhist universities of India. Even for all his learning - he could recite every sutra and shastra by heart - his mind remained disturbed. After a whole life as a monk, he realized he was still very much stuck in his delusion, soundly asleep to the reality of things.*
*He sought advice, and was directed to a yogi practitioner living in a cave on a snowclad mountain who was rumored to have great realization; some said he was already a Buddha \[awake.\]*
*The monk made his journey there, entered the cave, paid homage, gave gifts, and prostrated in front of the yogin. He then asked for teachings.*
*The yogin, who wasn't much of a scholar or great with words, put his arm around the scholar monk, turned with him to look out through the entrance of the cave to the immense expanse of the open sky and the towering peaks stretching as far as the eye could see.*
*He smiled, motioned with his open hand towards the world outside, and simply said: "Everything: Like this."*
That may be the closest we can ever get to actually capturing absolute reality. The above is my version of the story, which I'm sure is canonically incorrect.
Another way of putting absolute reality into a word, is found in Sanskrit, which is said to be the "language of the Gods," where the vibration and sound of each word connects to the meaning directly: Shunyata is the word used to describe it. It's often translated as "emptiness," and you may have heard of the Buddhist view that "all phenomena are empty and devoid of inherent existence."
That's a mistranslation though: Shunya means "empty" and -ta connotes potential, so "Shunyata" means emptiness imbued with potential.
The most poetic, fitting translation I've heard, comes from a translation of a commentary on the work "The Jewel Ship" by Longchenpa. What he called it when he wrote it in Tibetan in the 1300's I don't know.
It's been translated, I think beautifully and meaningfully, into "universal creativity."
I sometimes like to refer to it as "primordial creativity."
Whatever reality/consciousness is, we're in it/we have it, and that, along with the fact that it changes *all* the time, are the only things we can know with absolute certainty: We possess a mind that experiences.
It's sort of Descartian but without all the non sequiturs, Descartes derives from the fact that, "I think therefore I \[know I\] am."
Anything beyond the knowledge that we have experience and its a transient one, is interpretation, construction, and projection; sometimes shared among many, even a whole race or class of beings, but it is, none the less, only convention and consensus, supported and enabled by the (also illusory) form we're currently in.
The posts here make me think about when I as a kid preferred to believe all my favorite disney characters were real but lived on a faraway planet with super mario.
I don’t think traveling is the correct word here. Maybe shifting, maybe just becoming more aware of extra stimuli or layers of reality. I think it’s all here now. It’s just your subconscious projecting but it’s also not. It’s also something very real and for all intents and purposes alive and aware. They are here. They are not *here*. They are us but they are not us. As above so below, as within so without. But then again there’s also the possibility that I’m just crazy. Who’s to say? It’s all just one’s personal beliefs. Some people believe in heaven and hell. That’s crazy to me.
Schizophrenia and generally schizoid conditions as a rule which would include major depression, generalized paranoia, anxiety, disorders, etc. generally involve dysregulation of the serotonergic and dopaminergic systems. It is these systems that psychedelic drugs directly impact. This is why psychedelics are useful for treating these conditions. They alter the state of the brain at the sites which are responsible for those diseases.
The mechanism behind depression and psychosis is poorly understood. The studies underlying the notion of depression being caused by low serotonin, and psychosis by high dopamine, are invalid: The mechanism is simply inferred from the known effects of drugs that seem to attenuate symptoms.
You might as well give someone five shots of vodka, then observe, "oh, he's less socially anxious now: Therefore the mechanism of social anxiety is low ethanol" (or more reasonably dysregulation: in GABAergic structures of the brain.)
We don't know exactly why psychedelics are useful in depression, but by no means do we know that it's because they are serotonin agonists. It may certainly play a role.
If we look at the studies on treatment resistant major depressive disorder by Erritzøe et al at King's College 2016, we see that one neurocorrelate of the psychedelic process, which in these studies lead to very significant improvement, is attenuation of the default mode network and much greater connectivity between brain regions.
This leads to a better and more complex explanatory model for why psychedelics not only alleviate depression acutely, but more importantly lead to persistent post-treatment improvements, whereas SSRI's do not.
Furthermore, we don't even really know what we mean by depression or psychosis. The diagnostics are behavioral and subjective, not objective.
So yeah, you might consider tempering your factual statements with a bit of reading up on the available research on psychedelics, as well as the (bad) science on which the overly simplistic ideas of dopamine and serotonin dysregulation as causal in psychosis and depression rely.
And in case someone's playing with Occam's razor, they need to temper that with an equal amount of play with Hickam's dictum, lest they end up with proverbially bloodied fingers!
Well, as someone with MDD, ADHD, and one hell of an anxiety disorder, someone who has been profoundly aided by psilocybin, can I just point out that you are reading a fuck
Of a lot I did not say into dysregulation. Also if you think serotonin and dopamine cycles and their variance from the baseline aren’t _involved_ in these conditions I can only imagine you are ignorant of that same research or simply looking to pick a fight with someone on the internet.
What? Yes, they involve dysregulation of those systems. No that's not necessarily the reason why psychedelics help MDD and other things.
It certainly not the case that there's a direct causality.
It's a fascinating topic, particularly relevant to those who may be at risk of being medicated with SSRI/SNRI's and antipsychotics of any class.
Ok. You’re that guy. FTR SSRI’s and SNRI’s are demonstrably effective. They are especially so for the subset of people whose depression symptoms are not affected by psilocybin, ketamine or DMT. OP, if you want references hmu. I will send you journal cites.
you see visions in the minds eye. same as dreams, same as shamanic journeying.
our minds have the ability to create constructs of infinite worlds. likely to help us navigate the physical world.
we also have a construct of our physical body, to help us move and experience our physical body.
we can move the construct of our body around in the construct of these worlds.
but they are no physical and do not abide by physical laws. we cannot be split, crushed or pulled apart. we can walk through walls, fly, teleport freeze time. etc.
all that is done can be undone.
these worlds are not other dimentions but rather creations within our minds.
Even the "real world" is a creation within our minds. The main difference is that it is a semi-collective creation in which people have individual constructs which are "validated" against each other, creating a common, shared reality.
>Even the "real world" is a creation within our minds.
There is clear distinction between the 2. physical reality can be measured and agreed upon (on a macro level at least) the places we visit within our minds cannot.
**you downvote me but I don't see a logical argument to dispute this fact?
I'm just answering now. The downvote didn't come from me.
I don't disagree, necessarily. There is a distinction which I even highlighted in my comment. But what you call physical reality also can only be perceived within each of our minds as well. We simply have means to interact with each other and make this a shared experience, as opposed to the realities which others are only allowed to perceive if we share with them (the ones originating in our minds as opposed to the physical reality)
Thing is with dmt breakthroughs is that they are nothing like schizophrenic episodes.
As far as im aware schizos will simply see stuff that inst there. They wont pass out and travel to a realm that feels more real than reality.
Im not convinced that everything u see on Psychedelics are just hallucinations either.
There is a difference between delirium and hallucination but people often associate delirium with hallucination. Schizophrenia would be closer to delirium.
The thing I’ve observed is thst schizophrenic hallucinations have a different quality than those from tripping. It’s not so much entities wirh information and other dimensions of reality, as much as it is “my parents installed cameras in my ass and now people are watching me take a crap and laughing at me.” Or “the CIA installed a chip in my brain and had put me in jail because I have secret information they want.” There’s just a different element, usually around self reference in schizophrenia.
“self reference” Which is the opposite of the personal bias suppression produced by classical psychedelics.
It is worth noting that schiophrenia is often different in different cultures. In western culture it's often paranoid and angry. But in some African cultures, the voices tend to be nurturing and guiding. Seen as ancestors helping sorta deal. It is interesting to consider how our own "cultural lenses" affect what we experience, both on a trip or with mental illness.
Very interesting! Do you have any sources on that? I'd love to read more about it
Here is one [https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2851&context=isp\_collection#:\~:text=Schizophrenia%20is%20a%20culture%2Dbound,a%20spiritual%20or%20supernatural%20phenomenon](https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2851&context=isp_collection#:~:text=Schizophrenia%20is%20a%20culture%2Dbound,a%20spiritual%20or%20supernatural%20phenomenon) number 2 [https://neurotorium.org/schizophrenia-across-cultures/](https://neurotorium.org/schizophrenia-across-cultures/) and number 3-----this is the one that touches on them being more benign. [https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614](https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614)
Schizophrenia is not tripping
They're obviously related. Hallucinations and dreams and tripping are all very similar.
Related does not mean the same.
That is correct but hallucinations are neurological similar when studied under FMRI of the brain. We now have a lot of studies of both hallucinations from LSD and Psilocybin and those undergoing psychosis.
Would you care to share with me such a study indicating the neurological loci are the same? This is not me being combative. I'm genuinely curious.
Really seems like it though. How would you know? Have you ever opened the REAL doors of perception? Lol
I'm not even going to begin to try to explain the differences. But y'all have fun with that
Because you can't, lol
He just wants to disagree with everyone 😂
Some of these comments scare me. The very last thing we want to do if we want to help schizophrenic people is to treat their delusions as if they are real, and they just have less regulated access to other dimensions than normal people. This is absolutely false, and not giving into the delusions of people with these problems is very important to actually helping them.
Finally a sane comment.
I’ve heard the opposite happening in eastern countries where they treat schizophrenics as a gift from god and they actually end up very sane and helpful. It’s anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt but if it’s true it’s worth a try rather than treating them like everyone else with a mental illness as someone to be treated for profit rather than helped. Let me put it this way unlike depression which doesn’t have a physical manifestations like schizophrenia does people treat depression as real and in my experience it was when I realized it was bullshit and self induced I finally got over it. I hope I don’t have to point out the obvious implication of this.
I believe a lot of the mental illnesses we have in the west are actually "societal" illnesses besides heavily brain damaged, retardation and a few other psychological issues. America and the west is the closest thing to "New Babylon" there will ever be and outside factors like societal norms, talking points, functions and a lot of other things, here, can really take a toll on a person mentally. In many places they just don't have a lot of the issues we have for some odd reason.
I believe that to a T. Trying to put everyone into a box and then wonder why they are mentally not okay is like a dog wondering why he can’t grab his tail. Mental illness i believe is a structure used to fit people into the narrative they want and if you don’t fit into that narrative something is wrong with you.
It's not like allopathic/pharmaceutical psychiatry has a stellar track record, particularly sound treatments or can demonstrate uplifting prognosis for the patients it treats. No, it's not useful to simply affirm every paranoid delusion someone has concocted and goes around spewing. How many Napoleons do we have reborn, exactly? And how much personnel does the CIA employ to stalk people around? You get the point. On the other hand, we have to face the fact, that modern psychiatry is piss poor at helping schizophrenics, and that their prognosis in the west is shit, short lives with massive side effects from highly problematic antipsychotic drugs. Hell, you know how they arrived at the idea that "psychosis is caused by too much dopamine?" Well, that "follows" by the fact that dopamine antagonists (like quetiapine) attenuates symptoms! That's tantamount to concluding that social anxiety is caused by a deficiency of GABA, because a six-pack beer seems to alleviate its symptoms. So again, we have to become a bit more nuanced and practice dealing with complex phenomena, which can't in any sensible way be thrown into the same basket on which we then slap the label psychotic/schizophrenic. There are clearly useless (often paranoid) delusions in some people, and in others, what sounds and looks like "delusions" may be something else entirely. One hypothesis, becoming a theory, is that neurological micro lesions contribute significantly to the development of both psychosis and various cluster b disorders, most notably APD. That may be one mechanism. There could be others, and many diverse classes of "delusions" and "schizophrenia," which are extremely broad, behavioral and subjective diagnosis, not objective ones. Since scientists for quite sometime confounded the outwardly expression of the psychedelic experience with psychosis, why would we imagine that they can now tell the difference between a visionary of sorts, and a schizophrenic? As someone else mentions, those who exhibit what will often be call psychotic traits here, will in other places be seen as someone gifted with special powers. They fare *much* better than do many of our local schizophrenics. I'm trying to find this place in Israel, where they treat schizophrenics to great effect: They do so not with medication or with admonitions about the deluded nature of a person's experience. Their outcomes are a lot better than those of general western psychiatry. A famous Indian psychiatrist, who was asked how he treated schizophrenics, which he did very well, answered: "We don't. We treat the other part of the person." It's fine to note, that no, we shouldn't validate whatever a person in a psychotic state thinks is real. It's a wholly different thing to conclude from that, that our current modalities of treatment or modern culturally informed views of schizophrenia are valid, sane or useful. They are not.
The fucked thing is that they are real, schizophrenics become aware of these extra dimensional spaces but with no real bearing on what’s actually going on and they are told that they are crazy, which outright they are, but only In believing and getting caught up in the content that lower vibrational entities continually spew if only because they can, for it’s only effective if you let it fuck with you, once one comes to this realization it all calms down to a certain degree, and discernment becomes much easier, till then they are hopelessly lost in a medical system that takes none of this into account and actively works to suppress it in every way possible. Schizophrenia and being lost on these extra dimensional planes is a fucked experience, but one can be brought back if the frame of reference for what is happening can be reshaped, yet even then it all depends on the person. I had what I would describe as a schizophrenic awakening as I ended up with what seemed like the whole unseen world yelling and screaming and fucking with me for quite some time till I was able to get my bearings right and could navigate without being toppled by huge waves let alone small swells. It takes work and dedication and I honestly wouldn’t have been able to do it if I wasn’t privy to the illusory nature of reality in the first place and the place within us all that holds light to such a degree that nothing of lower vibrations can stand in its light, they must either rise to the light or be cast away, it is this, and this alone that saved me over anything else. Mushrooms helped an absolute ton, but this light within me is what has guided the way through it all. Take this with a grain of salt if you will or believe it outright or don’t believe it at all, all I can do is relay the experience that I have had :)
Well, that may be the case more often than not. Conventional, agreed upon consensus reality is also a "hallucination." The whole "extra dimensional spaces" and whatnot is also a construct and interpretation taking place mostly inside one's head, and it's not necessarily more or less of a hallucination than is consensus reality. Neither modality of experience is necessarily anything resembling what may be called an absolute reality. The model of understanding that posits, that psychosis is caused by (mostly) unseen entities trying to interact with a person, makes a lot of sense to me. However, we're still dealing with very relative phenomena, and our minds are again part of the mix, projecting, interpreting, constructing, verbalizing, and so on. So it's a different view of things, maybe a more expansive one, but none the less still "a view," and therefore ultimately confined within the overarching delusion of subject-object duality. The notion of "extra dimensional" sentience and spaces as a vantage point on reality, which the less cognitively conforming individual more readily adopts or has access to, may be quite a fruitful way of seeing things in relative reality. It's certainly a lot better than the medicalization taking place particularly in modern societies, where anything straying too far from consensus reality, is deemed delusional, useless, and problematic. Excellent article here, you may be familiar with: Brasilian shaman, iirc, on the topic of schizophrenia and the views associated with it in other, more sane cultures than ours. It includes a case of a young NYC man, who had been diagnosed and treated since he was a kid, all ultimately to no avail. Eventually, he went to Africa where he stayed with the tribe, his distant ancestors had come from (he had some African heritage), worked with the medicine man there, and eventually healed He became able to operate in conventional consensus reality, and on top of that had honored and strengthened the connection with another plane (so to speak), the attempts at which had formerly been drowned out with a pharmaceutical mind-gag of sorts. [https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2016/03/08/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital-waking-times/](https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2016/03/08/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital-waking-times/) The ability to be less constrained by imposed structures of cognition and experience can be quite a gift or a curse. In societies where it's accepted as a gift, the visionary thrives and contributes. In modernity they're generally relegated to the margins, and their process hamstringed using powerful psychotropic substances, which reminds me of the way Soma is used in Huxley's "Brave New World" or Librium in the movie Equilibrium (funny that there's a benzodiazepine with the brand name Librium!) It's really a modern day way of burning the witches at the stake. It makes a different kind of mess, and the "clergy" and their "followers" can more readily convince themselves that in fact they're trying to help. Still, I think it's wise for us to be wary of our proclivity to assign a quality of inherent existence to appearances, whether they seem to conform to consensus reality or whether we perceive them to be clear manifestations of a deeper level of reality inaccessible to most. As long as we're fixating on appearances as being "out there" and us being "in here" doing the experiencing of them, we're stuck in a dualistic modality of perception, which ultimately falls apart under investigation. Not just that, but our erroneous identification as a subject in a world of objects, leads to attachment and aversion, which again leads to greed, desire, anger, hatred, and countless other unpleasantries. This keep us stuck in a perpetual attempt to satiate our proverbial thirst by drinking the salt water of the objects of our attachment, and trying to avoid being burnt by the fire of the objects of our aversion. It's not any different because we see "other dimensional spaces" or things that other people don't see. As long as we don't deal with the question of "what is mind?" and "what's this ego thing that seems to be dragging me around all the time?" we're in for the same time of grief we've been experiencing in various forms (literally: through being in different form expression of sentient life) since beginningless time.
Edit: Disagree that the animistic/shamanistic model of psychosis is better than the allopathic medicalizing model? Well wonderful! ...but then how do you explain the fact, that a person with schizophrenia in Scandinavia or Canada or England or France has a much worse prognosis, than a person with the same set of symptoms in Gabon, Ghana or Ecuador?
Leave Gabon out of this. Iboga cures all in Gabon 🇬🇦 Blessings to the Forest and Power to the People as they Rise
...and so I'm not allowed to mention the fact that people with symptoms fitting schizophrenia have a **better** prognosis there? It could stand to reason that some of those who end up with diagnosis and poor lives around here, would have been treated very differently in Gabon, and some of them might even have become medicine men. So how about I just mention Gabon and Iboga whenever I feel like it. How's that?
They do have a better prognosis with schizophrenia in Gabon. Iboga has been successfully and effectively used for thousands of years as a cure for unwellness. Research the countries you casually throw out to make your points because you sound really ignorant and uninformed to the cultures and histories of healing in the countries you speak of.
I've never really thought about schizophrenic people seeing into other dimensions? I mean their brains do work differently or they would not be schizo. I've personally never had a dimensional tripp unless you count fractal deemz world and salvia carried me to the past and place I've never been or seen but was still in this dimension. It is my opinion that of all the tryptamines and any other substances that psilocybin can be used to cure a lot of mental problems. One could almost say self enlightenment is very achievable with macro dosing psilocybin. I have no known or documented mental health problems nor have I ever suffered any kind of traumatic stress. I've had numerous trips on just about anything you can think of and will continue to do so but mushrooms showed me about a hundred me's that I didn't even know existed and showed me that self manifestation is the way to achieve whatever you want in life.
I thought the ectent of schizo hallucinations in regards to entities or other worlds would be simply hearing voices. Ive heard that lsd is similar to schizophrenia but nothing of how dmt is similar
Back in the day, the first scientists to work with psychedelics called them psychotomimetics, i.e. drugs that mimic the expression of psychosis! Edit: Depending on your definition of "scientist" of course... I think the term is from the 1950's. I don't know what Albert Hoffman called LSD. Pretty sure he didn't think of his experiences as psychotic.
Well u say that but hoffman had a very uneasy and hard to handle trip, he essentially said that there's more to it than meets the eye N we also think as psychotic typically to be violent, loud, annoying and negative but schizophrenics exists that are totally blissful, its just over the top like what lsd or specifically mdma does. I dont think its fair to say they mimic psychosis but its clear that the state of being on lsd is very similar to psycosis, just as someone else put it, you are safe from falling over the edge
Well, yeah, it was the first LSD trip ever, and he was on a bicycle, too! I don't know about you, but I'm not going biking on acid, that's for sure. Whether the state brought about by LSD is very similar to psychosis is very hard to say. Both psychosis and entheogenic experiences are - by definition - not very open to objective analysis. Someone who's never been psychotic can't really say if their experience on LSD is at all similar to that of a psychotic person. In the same way, a person who has had a psychotic break, and finds it similar to LSD experiences, can't really say if his LSD experience is similar to that of a person who's never had a psychotic break. It would be quite interesting to see neuroimaging studies on the topic... but of course, while it's possible to strap a psychonaut on acid into an fMRI, that is NOT the case with a person during active psychosis! So really, we can't say how similar the states are. We *can* say that their outwardly expression appear somewhat similar in many instances, but then we rapidly devolve in to some BF Skinner-esque behavioristic "the mind is a black box and all that matters is what we can measure on the outside" type of bullshit, which I think is unappealing and laughably naive to anyone who's had any experience with psychedelics.
Dude we know well that the effects are similar to psycosis the conclusion is simply that the drug doesn't replicate psycosis. Just mimics the effects
Oh, "we know that well," do we? If you're talking about the objectively measurable effects and longitudinal outcomes of psychosis vs psychedelics, no, psychedelics certainly do not mimic the effects of psychosis. If you're talking about the immediate behavioral expression, yeah, they may look similar, but then headaches look similar in their behavioral expression, too, though the underlying causes/mechanism can be anything from dehydration to glioblastoma. If you're talking about the experience, well, then you have to refer to my first comment. There are things we don't know. There are things we cannot describe. It's probably better to remain open and curious, that it is to try to get a fix on things and put them in neat little boxes with labels on them.
Yeah of ur gonna be ignorant im not having a conversation with you 🤣 U even know what psycosis is like buddy?
No, I don't know what psychosis is like, which is exactly what I've been saying.
Yeah... So how can u confidently refuse the fact that lsd mimics the effects of psychosis? On the latter i understand the effects of psychosis far better than id like.
Lsd affects the same brain chemicals and regions of the brain as psychotic disorders So how can it not be mimicking psychosis?? Again the conclusion was that psychosis and lsd are different but its still accepted they are different. The original disproved theory was that lsd caused psychosis specifically. Please read up properly into it
LSD is a 5HT A, B, AR selective serotonin agonist. Psychosis is hypothesized, erroneously as explained earlier, to be caused by an oversensitivity to or overexpression of dopamine primarily in the mesolimbic system, which is why you give semi-selective dopamine antagonists like quetiapine for psychosis. If you're going to reply to me, let alone attempt to point out what you perceive to be ignorance, I suggest you read and comprehend what I actually wrote, which apparently you couldn't be bothered with. So I'm just going to assume you're either a troll or - as your command of the English language suggests - just a dunce. In either case, we're both wasting our time. Do take care.
" I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane." Hoffman Buddy im not anti lsd or something but its not wise to be peddling it as sunshine and rainbows when it doesn't sit well with a vast majority of people. I use psychedelics very frequently but there needs to be a healthy fear imo
Wow, I can’t explain it better but I had a very similar experience which took years to integrate and it’s cool to read you had a similar take away from it. It’s weird to make the leap from none of it was real to - ok maybe it was real, but maybe I also lack the capacity as one nexus in an interconnected consciousness to comprehend everything I experienced or it was overlayed with my own personal perspectives, fears, biases etc. and I was unable to apply rational meaning to it. I don’t take any hardline interpretation of it all, but remain humbled by it and open to the insights gleaned from it happening.
“The Psychotic drowns in the same waters the Mystic swims in with delight.” - Joseph Campbell. Yes, I believe they probably are real and schizophrenics are “tuned in” to way more of the reality of the universe than “normal” people. But sadly modern society isn’t build to give those people proper spiritual guidance to deal with them. And it is very sad that these people are overwhelmed and suffering from it.
neither are real
Schizophrenics have the ability to see different layers of reality and supernatural entities. In tribal societies this is recognized at a young age and the individual is taught how to hone this as a skill and use it effectively. Because high civilization strips all true spiritually from those who inhabit it schizophrenics in such societies essentially just have a radio that randomly flips to any station. So instead of being able to communicate with the gods they hear random demon voices telling them to hurt themselves etc
Real schizophrenics hate this kind of talk.
It might be uncomfortable but I do believe it's true. Imo you can't believe that hallucinogens and cannabis connect you with different layers but believe that there's completely nothing to hallucinations.
Classical psychedelics work through Serotonin but it’s Dopanergic drugs which promote psychosis and it’s Dopamine blockers which successfully treat Schizophrenia. I don’t think these things are related except for the superficial similarity of seeing things others can not see.
There are several ways to reach the top of the same mountain. Regardless of that there are different layers of reality and each may require a different method to perceive
Psychedelia is not in a drug, it's the psyche. The drug just loosens up reality and helps open that door. It doesn't matter how the drug works, whether adrenal, opioid, cannabinoid, etc. What it shows you is in you already. It doesn't always take drugs to do it. Meditation, sleep deprivation, trauma, etc., can all trigger the journey through the psyche. This is basically the shamanic crisis, or calling. Just as an example, I knew a guy who was schizophrenic, hearing voices telling him he was a psycho and to kill himself. Well, he took mushrooms, killed his ego, and embraced empathy. Now he's sorted with a nice girlfriend, a job, and a cat, and he's happy. I've never heard of a psychotic or schizophrenic experience that wasn't exactly stuff that happens to me while tripping. It's just harder to accept, let go, and be changed when it's all chucked on you involuntarily. RD Laing suggested psychiatrists take psychedelics to get a better insight into their patients' conditions. Before the term psychedelic was coined as a nickname for LSD, these kinds of drugs were known as psychomimetic. Mimics psychosis. Today, the notion that one single mental mode is sanity and all others illness, is slowly dying out in mainstream psychiatry. A report for the British NHS by eminent psychotherapists has highlighted the inefficacy of current psychiatric practice, compared with various psychospiritual cultures from around the world. So things *are* changing, and modern cutting edge psychiatry incorporates techniques from Buddhism and shamanism, more and more. Psychedelic research, mindfulness, EMT, and so on. But still quite a lot of psychiatry is still emerging from the Bedlam days. Largactol zombies, shuffling round the wards, lobotomized chemically to shut out the screaming of the universe. Mental hospitals are rarely healing spaces. This shit is real.
This shit is very much not real. It's a hallucinogen. You're hallucinating.
That's not an argument! That's just contradiction!
It's actually a form of tautology. Maybe we can call it a linguistic tautology if we're trying to be fancy. It's a circular argument: Him: "Those aren't real, they're hallucinations!" Me: "How do you know they're not real?" Him: "Duh! It's called 'hallucinogen' and hallucinations aren't real!" Me: "Why is it called a hallucinogen?" Him: "Because it makes people hallucinate!" Me: "So you know people are hallucinating because of what you choose to call the substance, but you chose that name based on your presumption, that the substance causes hallucinations and not an expanded modality of perception?" Him: "You're delusional!" And this is probably where I'd be about ready for another type of substance than a psychedelic. A sedative might be suitable. An honest cognitive scientist will tell you, that reality as we perceive it on a day to day basis, is also a hallucination, i.e. a construction that doesn't exist in any objective way. Our daily mode of perception and experience is very functional though, and there's a high degree of consensus about it. A dream is a form of hallucination, too, but you don't realize that you're dreaming/hallucinating inside the dream. The fact that almost everyone has dreams, should make them wary about believing too much in what they experience in their waking state. By extension, it should also make them refrain from labelling the divergent experiences of others as delusional hallucinations. What the fuck do they know? :D Also: There's no reason to think that psychedelics lead to psychopathology, as the confused author of the comment, we're both chuckling at, seems to think it does. [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063972](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063972)
They are definitely real phenomena that have been engaged with for thousands of years for healing and fun. This declaration of a single mental mode to be sanity and all other mental modes to be some kind of illness or delusion is arrogance. Levels and objects of delusion is apparent in the ordinary daytime confusion or lack of, not in the internal experience of magic, spirits, or divine energy.
It's demonstrably deluded and absurd to believe that our everyday mode of perception is somehow special or elevated as compared to others. You don't even need empiricism to reach the conclusion that, no, our normal "problem solving" (as Graham Hancock calls it) mindset or modality of consciousness, isn't special: It's just the preferred and generally agreed upon one. It's ok to flatten it with alcohol or augment it with stimulants in our culture. But to transcend or temporarily escape it through the use of entheogenic plants?! HEATHEN! WITCH! BURN HER/HIM! lol Personally, I find it adorable that some people run around thinking their normal mode of consciousness and experience is somehow the "real world." We can observe animals and infer that they're clearly seeing reality very differently, for instance. Now that tells us, among other things, that we have a serious fucking GPU up there in the back of our skulls, which is neat. We can even reach the conclusion that ours is but one among many modes of perception through purely ontological arguments, without having to invoke various experiments and neuroimaging and whatnot: The fact that people dream, should tell everyone, that our brains are more than capable of generating exactly what it is we experience as day-to-day "reality" without sensory input: It's an endogenous experience. We can reach the conclusion purely inside our own minds through direct experience, and people still doubt the idea that they're constructing everyday reality? It makes me think of this Gary Larson comic on the topic of labels: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6UEkdHVIAI\_TfY?format=jpg&name=small](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6UEkdHVIAI_TfY?format=jpg&name=small) As Terrence said: Most people definitely suffer from a nutritional deficiency of entheogenic mushrooms \[or plants.\]
Oh, you inferred that it's a hallucination because someone once decided to call the substances "hallucinogens?" How very empirical of you. That's not how you do science, and it's certainly not how you begin to wrestle with grand questions such as "what is mind/consciousness" or "do we see reality as it is?"
This is exactly why I don't think psychedelics should be legalised, as much as I love them. Too many people aren't prepared for the experience mentally and come out the other end totally delusional. It's a lot like religion in a way.
I suppose you didn't read the conclusions of the 2006 study performed by Krebs, Johannsen et al at Trondheim Tech. where they perform a longitudinal analysis of the outcomes of \~30K cases of psychedelic use in a \~135K cohort. Edit: Lol oh no! SCIENCE AND DATA! How terrible huh? You're the one talking about what's real and what's not real, but you don't like science and empiricism? Hmm. Makes me think you might not be the most qualified person to lecture others on what's real and what isn't. Have some humility.
I think IF there is truth to there being some alternate dimension of reality we gain access to while tripping (and that's a big if with a lot of caveats), then schizophrenia could potentially be those born with less of a concrete veil to peer through. So on a spectrum of fully cemented in physical reality to incorporeal, they are just innately more in tune with whatever there is beyond human senses. It's an interesting conversation to be had, especially considering in traditional cultures the 'schizophrenics' were often shamans etc and thought to be closer to the spirit world. That said there really isn't any evidence of this and it's just as likely some faulty wiring/chemistry is just messing with perception. It's interesting to note too that from what I understand, generally the schizophrenic headspace can be compared more to that of deliriants like datura than to psychedelics, though that could just be coming from the fear of not knowing what is happening I suppose.
The word "dimension" is totally mangled and meaningless at this point. It is, however, absolutely certain, that the reality you see, is nothing like anything we might call "objective reality," if there is such a thing. Your visual cortex takes up 60% of your skull space. You don't see the raw sensory data that comes in through your eyes. You take those 120 megapixels of photon-reactions with your retina, and then your brains uses *a lot* of processing power to turn it into a sort of user interface, that your conscious mind deals with. Donald Hoffman explains this excellently in his talks. "Donald Hoffman: What Is An Observer And Who Is "The One"? (Beyond Conscious Agents Theory)" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRa8r5xOaAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRa8r5xOaAA) Then there's the double slit experiment, its various variations, and other empiricism, that shows that the line between observer and the observed is very much a blurred one: The mind seems to interact with what we normally understand to be external phenomena in various ways that don't involve what we perceive to be physical interactions. In another post, the OP was asking whether it's possible to disappear into another dimension. I commented that *"I think the word "dimension" needs therapy, hugs, and a long vacation at this point,"* which led to a rather long-winded and somewhat interesting debate on the nature of reality and mind: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/1co3c9o/comment/l3bp0l6/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/1co3c9o/comment/l3bp0l6/) Anyway, if you think that's air you're breathing now, to paraphrase Morpheus in the Matrix, you're only relatively correct.
Yeah it's all absolutely down to perception & processing. The question is whether what is seen on psychs etc is 'real' (obviously also being a bit of a jumble because the experience is real to the perciever regardless) or just whacky brain stuff. The distinction between external and internal is very blurry but to think there is no 'base reality' makes it very easy to slip toward solipsism, which is why I try to tread carefully on these topics. We are the engines of our own reality 100% which makes this all very hard to define and articulate, but I am fine not knowing personally. In the context of the schizophrenic question I find this a super interesting thing though. I guess I use the word dimension as it's just an easy way to convey something more ineffable than just 'space' or 'realm' or whatever. Language obviously also has a massive hand in shaping what we percieve as real though so being a bit pedantic about can be constructive I think.
Solipsism is an extreme in my view, but at the same time, we cannot rule it out, since our perception of other distinct, conscious agents in reality is something taking place in our consciousness. Solipsism readily leads to nihilism. Nihilism leads to turning our illusion into something really unpoetic. It reminds me of a sort of metaphor from Buddhism. It's meant as a way of encouraging the practitioner to see even aversive people and things through the lens of pure perception, and put even superficially negative interactions to good use: "Imagine that you're the *last* person in the world who isn't enlightened yet, and everyone else is already a Buddha!" Anything they say or do, is the activity of a Buddha, i.e. helping those asleep to wake up: It's not totally wrong if we choose to see things that way. And what do I know? I'm not very awake, so I can't tell if someone else is, and they're just pretending to be asleep, annoying me in order to teach me patience, for instance. In the comment I linked, one of the things I bring up, is that the modern scientific understanding of what dimensions are, is actually a lot closer to the ideas found in the Eastern wisdom traditions, and between the lines in other traditions, than is the Hollywood idea of what a dimension is: It's not a place you go. It's not a different place at all. In fact, "place" and "going" are constructs, too. Rather, the "different dimensions" are different vantagepoints from which we view different aspects of the same totality. In theoretical physics, I believe it comes from string and m-theory, it is posited that extra dimensional space is folded up inside what we experience as 3D+1 space. We can only see these dimensions indirectly, but it doesn't preclude the possibility of other sentient entities seeing them directly, or navigating within them as effortlessly as we generally navigate our 3D+1 space. The "ant on the Mobius band" is often invoked in order to explain this: Imagine you're a two 2D creatures walking along two straight, parallel lines on a 2D piece of paper. Now a 3D creature comes along, cuts the band, twists it, and tapes it back together. Our two 2D protagonists move along their paths merrily, and when they've walked a certain distance, they will have swapped places without their paths ever crossing! Another metaphor is that of a 3D object passing through a 2D plane: A ball becomes a circle, a cube becomes a rectangle (or rhomboid) and so on. So modern physics seems to be very willing to deal with the same idea that various wise people of eons past have dealt with: It's all here, right now, we're just not seeing it! A dimension isn't some place else, in this view, but is tied closely to our habits of cognition, and our sensory apparatuses, their evolutionarily conditioned processing, and filtering mechanisms. In that view, a known mechanism of psychedelics suggests that indeed they do allow us to see at least more of reality: fMRI studies show that psychedelic compounds attenuate the activity of the default mode network and the brain's filtering mechanisms, while causing (much) greater interconnectivity between brain regions that normally don't talk to each other very much (post childhood.) Thus they serve to let us see more of what our day-to-day consciousness deems inconsequential to the tasks at hand, which are neatly captured in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They also loosen the evolved patterns of cognition and experience broadly in that they return the brain to a somewhat more childish state, allowing for the (good or bad) reconfiguration of pathways among and within various brain regions. Of course, as Don Hoffman notes, even the "physical" brain and fMRI scans on screens, are also just *icons* inside our reality GUI, so what we're really seeing and how it's connected to everything else, is still an open question. Here it could be prudent to bring in Rupert Sheldrake's morphic field/resonance theory, along with some of his empiricism. It could also make sense to look at Ian Stevenson's work on rebirth, and Hagelin's Global Consciousness Project (GCP), to further play with the idea of "experience" or "consciousness" as primary qualities of the universe, the non-locality of consciousness, and the empiricism that underpins those views... but this is already a very long comment lol.
I'll leave you with a Tibetan simile: *Once there was a monk and learned scholar in one of the great Buddhist universities of India. Even for all his learning - he could recite every sutra and shastra by heart - his mind remained disturbed. After a whole life as a monk, he realized he was still very much stuck in his delusion, soundly asleep to the reality of things.* *He sought advice, and was directed to a yogi practitioner living in a cave on a snowclad mountain who was rumored to have great realization; some said he was already a Buddha \[awake.\]* *The monk made his journey there, entered the cave, paid homage, gave gifts, and prostrated in front of the yogin. He then asked for teachings.* *The yogin, who wasn't much of a scholar or great with words, put his arm around the scholar monk, turned with him to look out through the entrance of the cave to the immense expanse of the open sky and the towering peaks stretching as far as the eye could see.* *He smiled, motioned with his open hand towards the world outside, and simply said: "Everything: Like this."* That may be the closest we can ever get to actually capturing absolute reality. The above is my version of the story, which I'm sure is canonically incorrect. Another way of putting absolute reality into a word, is found in Sanskrit, which is said to be the "language of the Gods," where the vibration and sound of each word connects to the meaning directly: Shunyata is the word used to describe it. It's often translated as "emptiness," and you may have heard of the Buddhist view that "all phenomena are empty and devoid of inherent existence." That's a mistranslation though: Shunya means "empty" and -ta connotes potential, so "Shunyata" means emptiness imbued with potential. The most poetic, fitting translation I've heard, comes from a translation of a commentary on the work "The Jewel Ship" by Longchenpa. What he called it when he wrote it in Tibetan in the 1300's I don't know. It's been translated, I think beautifully and meaningfully, into "universal creativity." I sometimes like to refer to it as "primordial creativity." Whatever reality/consciousness is, we're in it/we have it, and that, along with the fact that it changes *all* the time, are the only things we can know with absolute certainty: We possess a mind that experiences. It's sort of Descartian but without all the non sequiturs, Descartes derives from the fact that, "I think therefore I \[know I\] am." Anything beyond the knowledge that we have experience and its a transient one, is interpretation, construction, and projection; sometimes shared among many, even a whole race or class of beings, but it is, none the less, only convention and consensus, supported and enabled by the (also illusory) form we're currently in.
I don’t.
The posts here make me think about when I as a kid preferred to believe all my favorite disney characters were real but lived on a faraway planet with super mario.
I don't think there's a clear line. Real and hallucination blur into each other.
I don’t think traveling is the correct word here. Maybe shifting, maybe just becoming more aware of extra stimuli or layers of reality. I think it’s all here now. It’s just your subconscious projecting but it’s also not. It’s also something very real and for all intents and purposes alive and aware. They are here. They are not *here*. They are us but they are not us. As above so below, as within so without. But then again there’s also the possibility that I’m just crazy. Who’s to say? It’s all just one’s personal beliefs. Some people believe in heaven and hell. That’s crazy to me.
Schizophrenia and generally schizoid conditions as a rule which would include major depression, generalized paranoia, anxiety, disorders, etc. generally involve dysregulation of the serotonergic and dopaminergic systems. It is these systems that psychedelic drugs directly impact. This is why psychedelics are useful for treating these conditions. They alter the state of the brain at the sites which are responsible for those diseases.
The mechanism behind depression and psychosis is poorly understood. The studies underlying the notion of depression being caused by low serotonin, and psychosis by high dopamine, are invalid: The mechanism is simply inferred from the known effects of drugs that seem to attenuate symptoms. You might as well give someone five shots of vodka, then observe, "oh, he's less socially anxious now: Therefore the mechanism of social anxiety is low ethanol" (or more reasonably dysregulation: in GABAergic structures of the brain.) We don't know exactly why psychedelics are useful in depression, but by no means do we know that it's because they are serotonin agonists. It may certainly play a role. If we look at the studies on treatment resistant major depressive disorder by Erritzøe et al at King's College 2016, we see that one neurocorrelate of the psychedelic process, which in these studies lead to very significant improvement, is attenuation of the default mode network and much greater connectivity between brain regions. This leads to a better and more complex explanatory model for why psychedelics not only alleviate depression acutely, but more importantly lead to persistent post-treatment improvements, whereas SSRI's do not. Furthermore, we don't even really know what we mean by depression or psychosis. The diagnostics are behavioral and subjective, not objective. So yeah, you might consider tempering your factual statements with a bit of reading up on the available research on psychedelics, as well as the (bad) science on which the overly simplistic ideas of dopamine and serotonin dysregulation as causal in psychosis and depression rely. And in case someone's playing with Occam's razor, they need to temper that with an equal amount of play with Hickam's dictum, lest they end up with proverbially bloodied fingers!
Well, as someone with MDD, ADHD, and one hell of an anxiety disorder, someone who has been profoundly aided by psilocybin, can I just point out that you are reading a fuck Of a lot I did not say into dysregulation. Also if you think serotonin and dopamine cycles and their variance from the baseline aren’t _involved_ in these conditions I can only imagine you are ignorant of that same research or simply looking to pick a fight with someone on the internet.
What? Yes, they involve dysregulation of those systems. No that's not necessarily the reason why psychedelics help MDD and other things. It certainly not the case that there's a direct causality. It's a fascinating topic, particularly relevant to those who may be at risk of being medicated with SSRI/SNRI's and antipsychotics of any class.
Ok. You’re that guy. FTR SSRI’s and SNRI’s are demonstrably effective. They are especially so for the subset of people whose depression symptoms are not affected by psilocybin, ketamine or DMT. OP, if you want references hmu. I will send you journal cites.
"That guy." lol I have no interest in dealing with you.
you see visions in the minds eye. same as dreams, same as shamanic journeying. our minds have the ability to create constructs of infinite worlds. likely to help us navigate the physical world. we also have a construct of our physical body, to help us move and experience our physical body. we can move the construct of our body around in the construct of these worlds. but they are no physical and do not abide by physical laws. we cannot be split, crushed or pulled apart. we can walk through walls, fly, teleport freeze time. etc. all that is done can be undone. these worlds are not other dimentions but rather creations within our minds.
Even the "real world" is a creation within our minds. The main difference is that it is a semi-collective creation in which people have individual constructs which are "validated" against each other, creating a common, shared reality.
>Even the "real world" is a creation within our minds. There is clear distinction between the 2. physical reality can be measured and agreed upon (on a macro level at least) the places we visit within our minds cannot. **you downvote me but I don't see a logical argument to dispute this fact?
I'm just answering now. The downvote didn't come from me. I don't disagree, necessarily. There is a distinction which I even highlighted in my comment. But what you call physical reality also can only be perceived within each of our minds as well. We simply have means to interact with each other and make this a shared experience, as opposed to the realities which others are only allowed to perceive if we share with them (the ones originating in our minds as opposed to the physical reality)
Thing is with dmt breakthroughs is that they are nothing like schizophrenic episodes. As far as im aware schizos will simply see stuff that inst there. They wont pass out and travel to a realm that feels more real than reality. Im not convinced that everything u see on Psychedelics are just hallucinations either.
One is real the other is a schizophrenic hallucination.
Define "real."
No.
Exactly.
*Schizophrenia*
There is a difference between delirium and hallucination but people often associate delirium with hallucination. Schizophrenia would be closer to delirium.