Psychedellics: the paradox of the physicality of spirituality

[Dr Palmer Aldritch]

Hello everyone.  I'm new here.  Surely this has been addressed elsewhere in the forum, but I'm just going to ask it.  First, though please excuse my ignorance.  I'm a medical student with 2 kids, so the time I have to dedicate to spirituality and growth is limited.  Here goes....

Leo states that psychedelics are essentially the best way to attain enlightenment and higher states of consciousness.  This rubs me the wrong way, a bit like Midichlorians, for you fellow SW nerds.  The theory goes that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of reality.  If that is so, then why is it that taking substances (psychedelics) that have particular bonding capacity for certain brain receptors are the road to spiritual enlightenment?  This seems profoundly physical, and scores a point for the materialist world view.  

It would be more intuitive for higher states of consciousness to be more readily reachable with shear will, practice, and meditation.  I don't know.  I am open to the idea of nonmaterialism, but this paradox hurts my brain and sows doubt.  

I've had a few psychedelic experiences with shrooms and 2Ci.  I've also had a few mystical ESP type experiences that were more or less spontaneous.  Any thoughts out there fellow Seekers?

[Leo Gura]

4 hours ago, Dr Palmer Aldritch said:

If that is so, then why is it that taking substances (psychedelics) that have particular bonding capacity for certain brain receptors are the road to spiritual enlightenment?  This seems profoundly physical, and scores a point for the materialist world view.  

It would be more intuitive for higher states of consciousness to be more readily reachable with shear will, practice, and meditation.  I don't know.  I am open to the idea of nonmaterialism, but this paradox hurts my brain and sows doubt.

That is the delicious paradox!

There's really not a good answer to it other than to do a massive amount of psychedelics until your whole notion of a material reality melts away forever.

I have become more conscious than most humans on this planet. But I still cannot tell you why psychedelics are as effective as they are. It's like a magic key.

But if you think deeply about it, it's not so complicated to understand why it must work that way. Because your genetics and chemistry regulates absolutely everything about your life. If the chemicals in your body were off by just a few milligrams, you'd be dead. But the mistake you make here is to take that as evidence for materialism being true. But that's just bad epistemology. Just because your consciousness or life is contingent on chemistry does not in any way mean that materialism is true. Because what you're failing to consider is that chemistry is just Consciousness!

Just because your player character dies when he is shot in the head in a video games does not make the video game world real or physical. That is just a relationship that is coded between various phenomena inside the video game world. A physical bullet is not actually killing anything in the video game world. There's just a rule that says: if these pixels collide with these other pixels, trigger a death animation and restart the game.

Or consider your dreams. If you are running away from a serial killer inside a dream, and you lock the door behind you, why do you do that? Since this is a dream, isn't it obvious to you that the serial killer could just fly through door like a ghost? Why are you playing these games? And why are you running away in the first place? Isn't it obvious to you that if a serial killer stabs you that nothing bad will happen?

But you see... the problem is that you're DREAMING. You're unconscious. So you mistake all these illusions for something substantial and physical. You actually believe that the walls of your house are physical. This is ridiculous if you just become a little more conscious.

I am so conscious that I do not exist on planet Earth. Planet Earth is just a figment of my imagination. I exist nowhere. And I have no brain. That is Awakening. There never was physicality. It's pure fiction.

Edited March 22, 2023 by Leo Gura

[OBEler]

Jordan peterson had a good answer for this I just forgot. Look for an Interview with him discusding psychedelics 

I research psychedelics also since 8 years. I have no idea really. It opens the Gates 

[PeaceOut96]

@Dr Palmer Aldritch

Think of it as different layers of imagination. The physical is the grossest level of Consciousness. It is the manifisted also known in yogic term as "shakti". The screen which is the source of your consciousness, or you could think of it as your awareness is the empty holder of all your experiences in any different levels. The body-mind has an affect on your level of consciousness no doubt. But its all just imagination stemming from your source. You are limitless but as soon as you enter the body you become limited. Thats why you were never in control as an ego. You as a human being are a construction of life, your will became limited to all the different limits imposed on you. Awakening is to realize you are indeed the limitless. Its a paradox. ?

Edited March 22, 2023 by PeaceOut96

[bmcnicho]

My interpretation is that right now our consciousness is essentially playing a game with itself where it’s focusing its intelligence on keeping a particular human body alive.  This isn’t a physical body though, I guess you could call it a thought-form.  One of the challenges of this game is that the “brain” is energy intensive to keep running, the food required to obtain energy is scarce, and if the brain stops running, the dream ends.  
 

Of course with access to infinite intelligence, all challenge would cease to exist, but if our level of consciousness is arbitrarily capped relative to brain complexity, then challenge is maintained as a more complex brain would require too much energy.  Therefore, a well adapted person’s abilities and attention are limited mostly to things that either directly or indirectly benefit their survival.

Where psychedelics come in, is that plants and fungi are surviving in the same way.  Chemical defenses are an effective strategy to avoid being eaten, and altered versions of neurotransmitters are a logical choice, as they will incapacitate animals such as insects or slugs, while being harmless to the plant which does not have neurons.

The chemicals of particular interest to us are altered versions of serotonin and melatonin.  Serotonin is primarily responsible for maintaining wakefulness, the consistent reality we must survive in during the day.  Melatonin induces sleep, a time when, while the body is inactive, our consciousness is more free to exist temporarily in alternate realities (nighttime dreams) that can benefit the mind in waking life.

Serotonergic psychedelics, being somewhere in between the two in structure and function, therefore induce what I would call a waking dream state.  It combines the energy and clarity of wakefulness with the freedom and mysteriousness of sleep.  The result of this is that human limitations on consciousness can be removed, as the serotonin system seems to be central in how the mind constructs its reality.  This can be taken to the extreme of completely losing connection to the human form and gaining connection to radically expanded levels of consciousness and intelligence.

One thing to consider though is that we didn’t have knowledge of chemistry until very recently.  Before then, “psychedelics” as a concept didn’t exist.  Instead, these experiences were thought of as coming into contact with a living spirit, whether existing within the plant itself, or in a transcendent realm with the plant being a deliberately placed sacrament.

This conception sounds more “spiritual” than describing it as physical chemistry, but I think they’re different ways of describing the same thing.  All human understanding is metaphorical, as reality is always more complex than mental models, so both conceptions have their own strengths and weaknesses.  The difference between “physical” and “spiritual” is merely a construction of the mind.

Edited March 22, 2023 by bmcnicho

[TheAlchemist]

Bernardo's take:

Main argument, some central points (by chatGPT):

1. Psychedelics have been found to reduce brain activity across the board, which is a robust and consistent finding across different groups studying psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and ayahuasca.

2. This reduction in brain activity contradicts materialism because if experience is correlated with brain activity, then an increase in experience should correlate with an increase in brain activity, which is not the case with psychedelic trips.

3. Efforts to find correlations between psychedelic experiences and brain activity may be misguided because even if something is found, it would contradict the rest of the body of work in neuroimaging, which finds correlations between experience and patterns of activation in the brain.

4. The lack of brain activity during psychedelic trips is unique compared to other experiences such as dreaming or looking at a picture, where scientists can predict what someone is experiencing based on patterns of brain activation.

5. The information content of a psychedelic trip is orders of magnitude higher than the information content of a brain scan, yet the brain activity of someone undergoing a psychedelic experience is lower than that of a control receiving a placebo, which is difficult to explain within a materialist framework.

[Leo Gura]

I don't buy this idea that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Psychedelics increase the interconnectedness of the brain.

[axiom]

32 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I don't buy this idea that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Psychedelics increase the interconnectedness of the brain.

Some psychedelics appear to reduce brain activity in some "important" networks (such as the DMN), but can increase brain activity overall. It is an over-simplification to simply suggest that they "decrease brain activity" - this is a popular misapprehension because people are hooked into the idea of calming the mind, chillaxing, reducing negative thinking and so on.

[Leo Gura]

They certainly reduce the DMN, which leads to ego-loss. But I think that overall they increase activity.

Subjectively I feel like my brain is firing on all cylinders when I'm on a psychedelic. And long trips are mentally and physically exhausting, which is a good clue that lots of activity was taking place. If the trip reduced activity then I wouldn't get so exhausted from a 6 hour trip.

From my POV, the psychedelic is so effectively because it allows your neurons to fire in much more interconnected ways. It's like injecting nitrous gas into a race car. The neurons are not silencing as in meditation.

This also explains why meditation cannot be used to achieve the same states as psychedelics. You cannot get deep interconnection through silencing your mind. Which is why medtiators do not reach God-Realization, they reach Emptiness. Which is not at all the same thing.

Edited March 22, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Butters]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

This also explains why meditation cannot be used to achieve the same states as psychedelics. You cannot get deep interconnection through silencing your mind. Which is why medtiators do not reach God-Realization, they reach Emptiness. Which is not at all the same thing.

Aren't there yogis who don't change at all when taking extreme doses of acid? 

[Girzo]

@Leo Gura there is a study on DMT effects on brain conducted using fMRI and EEG. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2218949120 

Someone skilled in designing EEG biofeedback protocols could make a program to train brainwave patterns just like on DMT. There are also already a few meditator who have similar brainwave patterns as a result of their practice. Not all meditation techniques lead to the same results. Focus, "energy" intensive meditation practices are the psychedelic-like practices when it comes to their effects on the brain.

Edited March 22, 2023 by Girzo

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Butters said:

Aren't there yogis who don't change at all when taking extreme doses of acid? 

There are autistic people who don't feel much from 700ug of LSD.

[something_else]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

There are autistic people who don't feel much from 700ug of LSD.

This is making me think I have autism  I don’t feel much difference between 1 and 3 tabs of the acid I’ve taken and it’s rated at 250ug

Even if it was 100ug you would still expect to notice severe difference between 100ug and 300ug based on typical descriptions but practically the only difference is duration and slightly more intense visuals

[CosmicExplorer]

19 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I don't buy this idea that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Psychedelics increase the interconnectedness of the brain.

They do both, decrease brain activity and make the remaining activity more interconnected. Psychedelics has not been found to increase brain activity anywhere, if they do anything to a brain area, they only decrease activity. Meditation also decrease activity 

 

18 hours ago, axiom said:

but can increase brain activity overall. It is an over-simplification to simply suggest that they "decrease brain activity" - this is a popular misapprehension because people are hooked into the idea of calming the mind, chillaxing, reducing negative thinking and so on.

Which psychedelics? To my knowledge, no study has ever shown increase in brain activity on psychedelics, only decrease. This is the paradox - your brain is going to sleep but you have the most crazy, rich, meaningful experience of your life. Biggest argument against physicalism imo

Edited March 23, 2023 by CosmicExplorer

[Grateful Dead]

@something_else Maybe you have OCD?  Grof had patients with severe OCD take up to 1500 mcg with no significant effect.

[ZenSwift]

On 21/03/2023 at 6:21 PM, Leo Gura said:

I am so conscious that I do not exist on planet Earth. Planet Earth is just a figment of my imagination. I exist nowhere. And I have no brain. That is Awakening. There never was physicality. It's pure fiction.

This gets me excited about Awakening.