I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni.
Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :).
The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently.
I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together.
But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.
The brain can mimic the _feeling_ of having had an incredible idea when in reality nothing actually incredible or mind opening has been understood. But some people do indeed have deep realizations, while others just deeply feel the feeling of having had a deep realizations, if that makes sense.
the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
Thats why this stuff works the best of very deeply depressed people or people struggling with trauma because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way.
It's also why many bros are super confident in whatever crap they believe though, because they thought about it while high and even though they can't explain it, they feel very strongly it has to be true because of the strong feelings felt during.
> because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way.
I took my first (RC) benzo when I was 30 (to stop long acting stimulants/panic attacks) and it was a profound experience precisely for this reason.
Just carrying a pill in my wallet ended a half-year streak of panic attacks and just knowing you're not at the complete mercy of anxiety eased the anxiety greatly and also pushed me to actively want to change the way I feel by other non-chemical means.
There are also other problems: while on acid once I came to a realisation that really changed how I experienced things later on. My realisation was that most of my perceptions of things were really "coloured" by a layer of society. For example, during that trip I found some husks of dead lobsters, that were sundried and quite rotten and gory. But during the trip they were this amazing structure of iridescent craziness on a dimpled hard and shiny shell, combined with dried out half rotted soft meat on the inside. I knew that I should keep the germs away from my mouth or cuts/wounds and I think I played and analysed it for a bit, being amazed by its structure, textures and colours. After that the trip got a bit stronger and the focus was on other things, however. Some hours after the trip I came by the same place that I had happenstanced the lobster husk. The same lobster was lying there. It was ugly and disgusting. I had washed my hands thoroughly after playing with it but really had an urge to wash my hands again.
I laughed at how my amazement of the dead lobster had felt so profound just hours earlier.
But. The next day after a nice rest I actually started to see that many things are actually very special and beautiful but our upbringing has destroyed the ability to experience this beauty. Society has teached us that rotten things are ugly. But that is just a layer on your perception. The materiality of things has their intention embedded in them and if their intention is of great beauty, then the materiality tends to be beautiful as well.
What I am trying to say is that first order dismissal of "deep insights" might not be warranted. You might have really had a deep insight, but you cannot correctly assess it because the setting has changed.
I did know a guy who claimed to have lived years of family life with a wife and kids once on DMT. I doubt it was actually years but it probably felt like it and it did fuck him up a bit. He had to mourn the loss of the perfect family life he'd gotten used to. He knew all of their names and favorite foods and sports and colors and what happened at school and first kiss and pregnancy announcement and wedding and stuff. Honestly kinda scared me. He just started reciting a whole life, and then he refused to talk about it again
The biggest thing that DMT taught me is that time is an illusion, created by our minds as part of the construct that allows us to exist and focus on survival. This is true for all life that experiences an internal chronology, but as humans we can only know how this applies to humans. Sorry, time travel hopefuls :)
DMT also taught me that our perception is our reality, and that we cannot actually perceive "objective" reality in any form. It helped me understand my mother, who we believe was suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia (she was never able to be diagnosed before physical health issues became the primary concern). She would tell me about these stories of traveling to write movies or novels. Prior to my DMT experience, I would respond like many would, "oh but you never left the bed! you've been here the whole time!" in the gentlest way possible. After my DMT experience, I would sit with her and ask her about them. She was never able to go into quite as deep detail as the person you are talking about, but from that point, I truly believed that, in her perception, in her reality, she did very much indeed travel to write movies and novels. Or at the very least, I believe that is how her brain interpreted what the DMT was presenting her.
I believe DMT is ultimately the "guide" for death. It doesn't cause or induce death, but our brains release it in response to death. And sometimes, like all biological machines, it happens at the wrong time. Sometimes before, and sometimes maybe the brain misses the signals and is unable to secrete DMT at the appropriate time, for whatever reason. I believe dementia is merely the early natural introduction of DMT into the brain. I guess I'll find out when I feel what it feels like if I end up suffering dementia.
There's a lot of "belief" here, sure. Some may even go so far as to call it "woo". But DMT gave me this profound understanding at a deeply visceral level. This even took some time to realize upon lengthy reflection on the experience and what it took me through, with surprisingly strong remnant memories of the visuals of being forced through a "time loop" where my eyes were sort of "dragged" along the very path I'd looked around the room in the early part of the trip. We do scientifically know our brain will sometimes "rewind" to fill in gaps in our vision (think of the classic example of looking at a clock with a second hand and the first second kind of seems to linger, that's our brain rewinding and lying to us about what we were seeing in that moment, using all available information once our eyes stabilize).
What you remember (that wasn't mind-blowing) was what you thought, would be a reminder to the first sign post along a trail of thoughts that led to the much bigger idea, which was the thing that was mind-blowing. But of course, it's too big of a thought to communicate via words, so all you're left with is a feeling of reminiscent awe and a trudge of disappointment.
Yeah, that's common. Only slightly more common than having actual mind blowing realizations that help people see how others see them, give them empathy they never knew, and give the motivation to fix their lives before they die unhappy.
The big problem is that there's only so many actual realizations you can have, but it feels big every time you take it. So the people that take acid every month inevitably end up with a mind full of so much "incredible importance" that it turns into mysticism and the realizations are at best buried, at worst completely lost. If you take shrooms one every 3 years i bet your gonna have actual realizations every single time, and they're gonna help you reevaluate and plan your future. If you take it every week you're gonna go insane.
> Only slightly more common than having actual mind blowing realizations that help people see how others see them, give them empathy they never knew, and give the motivation to fix their lives before they die unhappy.
I don't think that's true? I know that's what Tim Leary was hoping would happen, but it never panned out.
I know plenty of people who have experience with hallucinogens, and none of them really had those kind of life changing revelations. Most found it fun, a few appreciated the new perspectives it offered, but none of them came away with a new path in life. I know I certainly didn't.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I think it takes a certain type of person, in a certain state of mind or view on life, that has those sort of life changing experiences.
And that would make sense? If hallucinogens give you a glimpse of a world view that everyone is human, everyone has struggles, life is short and human connections are what matters - if you already have that world view (or something close to it), then those perspectives wouldn't be revelations, but rather reminders of what you always knew.
I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight.
When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!
I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics.
Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life.
Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool.
PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
> I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem...
May work for some folks[1]:
> A number of subjects had worked for weeks or months on their chosen projects without being able to find a satisfactory solution. Various psychologic tests and tests of creativity were administered before and after the drug sessions, which involved administration of 200 mg mescaline. Participants were prepared by presession interviews and instructions regarding how to approach the drug sessions. The results reported are rather remarkable. Of the 44 problems brought by the subjects, 20 had new avenues opened for further investigation, 1 was a developmental model that received authorization to test the solution, a working model had been completed for 2, 6 had a solution that had been accepted for construction or production, and 10 had partial solutions that were being developed further or being applied in practice. No solution was obtained only for four of the problems. Although lacking detailed specifics as well as a follow-up, this early report does suggest that psychedelics might acutely improve creativity.
> ... Another incidence of psychedelic drug–induced creativity from the scientific community comes from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, who is quoted as saying “Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it… I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.”
> wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :)
There's this (possibly apocryphal) story about George Orwell in Burma, where he served in the civil service. He had a friend that took Opium occasionally and felt like he deeply understood the universe and all its secrets when he was high, but could never remember it. Orwell asked him to try and write it down. What he wrote down was "The banana is big, but the skin is bigger."...
Meaning is real and very important but so is the craving for it and it's a good thing.
Like the craving for love/object of love?
I've had dreams in my teenage years about an ex loving me back and I can still remember how happy I was and a bit hurt when I woke up.
The deep realisations, euphoria and profound happiness -- these are not something the human brain can experience every day, it's in the very nature of the brain's chemistry to downregulate if you feel them too often.
Another example -- the first time I took isopropylphenidate, I was staring at this ancient PLSQL stored procedure bug and I realized SqlDevelop had the option to debug the code just like I could debug my java code. My colleagues were basically pulling at me to go to lunch but I was enthralled by how beautiful the SqlDebugger looked and felt, even in UX terms.
The same about my 1 years old daughter obsessive playing with water and children's excitement when they discover mundane(to us adults) things. To us adults they seem to be on MDMA, but it's just the nature of the brain to be so excited about new experiences that it deems "profound" because it's the only way they can learn about the world -- you have to be motivated to exercise those neural circuitry to learn about the word, otherwise you become catatonic .
Also take for example this experience I had playing Catan board game with my wife and brother in law. It had profound meaning to me :). For once, I discovered how much satisfaction a few pieces of cardboard and plastic can bring to humans.
My wife and her brother were highly competitive and I played the broker between them. I would always accept their trade offers. They thought they got the better deal, but just because they gave me 2x of the stuff they didn't want I was far ahead of them in the game. Because they did not want to trade between themselves and only traded with me, it mean I would get 4x the items they could have traded directly between themselves.
I would win the game and not tell them, I would just watch them compete and play along with an inner smile. I'm sure life is like this for some people, who have won at the game of life but others just don't realize it.
But the very fact that the game had such deep "meaning" (the feeling) to me made me realize the deeper meanings of being together with others, that the human interaction itself has meaning, that money and a lot material possessions are utterly meaningless and we're giving them too much meaning by introducing a lot of negativity in the game of life just to give them meaning, finally that taking life in a light hearted way, helping others (as long as on your terms) and the human ethos are ALWAYS with you (in a Dune "other memory" sort of way) and those are not 0 sum games and can bring a lot of joy into the world.
Anyway, I think that "meaning" is something objectively true and real (controversial, I know), but our feelings and "aha!" is not and it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
And if it's true for such a beautiful and positive feeling, how much more so for negative feelings?
These experiences made me more flexible, empathetic towards myself and others and more mellow in general to ideas.
A lot of rambling to say that the experience of realizing a deep realization of meaning in a dream/hallucination was utter garbage does not disprove meaning itself, but the contrary, that meaning is something very important and true to humans and we crave it deeply, we just have to find the right places to find true meaning to us, very few people can find true meaning in great mathematical ideas, but ALL of us can find it in the "mundane" and if you find it there you'll find that it won't be garbage the next day you wake up, young or old, 10000 BC or 100.000 AD.
>ALL of us can find it in the "mundane" and if you find it there you'll find that it won't be garbage
Because you will have calibrated you mind to perceive those particular things as meaningful! And then (to paraphrase another poster) you've failed the test, hehe.
Of course, there is no actual "test". Regardless, next one is scheduled in a generation's time. Ganbatte kudasai to the next class of test-takers!
Hallucinogens demonstrate that even the experience of "meaning" can be intentionally induced or suppressed by direct chemical action on the brain. Which realization was expected to "enlighten" people en masse at some point, and I guess in some ways it did. I'd expect taking a pure "meaning potion" would either make people addicted, or make them infuse the outside world with novel meanings, but I ain't seeing that much of either going on.
"Meaning" is just referentiality. Thing A means thing B; these squiggles mean "no swimming"; this stack pointer means that struct over there on the heap, etc. "Meaningfulness" (banned word, hehe) is an abstract quality which you attribute to things whose meaning you've successfully parsed - usually when you parse them for the first time, and you go like, "oh, so now I see what this means (to me)!"
One of my favorite musicians has a pretty dark song about some teenage hoodlums committing a grisly murder over drugs... its exposition just so happens to contain the line, "and LSD to make it mean more than it meant", which I think is the most succinct description of it.
That is to say, "meaningful" itself is a quale, an atom of pure experience that has no identified physical counterpart (though it surely must have one, if it can be induced chemically?) So, just like the means to induce visual experiences is called a display, and the means of inducing sonic ones is called a loudspeaker, the means of inducing abstract mental experiences is... illegal. Huh! :o
Sounds like you had some beautiful experiences, I like to hear that! And I like how you speak about your grappling with this, and I don't think you're saying "all meaning is therefore utter garbage" - it's also satisfying and interesting to me to discuss the possibilities and share my own views from experience.
Saying a deep inner meaning is utter garbage is just a value judgement you are applying to it (maybe one point of that experience was to call you to question your value judgements and confidence in them) - the judgement is also an inner meaning experience itself that may be unqualified to judge the other experience you had - it could also be comforting to 'orphan' the experience so you don't feel the need to integrate it into your everyday reality and the adjustment that might entail. For me, I think the meaning, the feeling and the aha is real and true - but you may be misinterpreting or failing to translate the inner realization into normal consciousness. Also, whatever labels that could be applied, the utility of those learnings or experiences can also depend on context and your goals.
My issue with the part of your words saying "it was just in an altered state, it's meaningless" is why should we impose some other meaning value system from outside us, as "normal waking state" consciousness is a highly conditioned value system, taking as input culture, etc.
I believe people's first relation to the world should be their own intuition and feeling, and development of that should be the primary focus. All other value systems should be judged in relation to the primacy of that. People are terrified that means unexamined raw subconscious should be lifted to reality, in the same way they are terrified of their shadow. True experience with that process of trusting yourself indicates it's not that - it's like any other skill you must develop mastery of with time, it's nuanced - it's not binary.
Another key thing is that the information, ideas, feelings are real - but how useful they might be depends heavily on context - and most importantly - none of those things are you.
In other words, you have all these experiences, you make the meaning you choose, but you don't have to identify with any of it. You are not those things. This separation realization is a more useful way to approach these experiences than the easier and incorrect path of declaring some "utter garbage". How can you judge that? If your inner experience is utter garbage, how can you even trust your judgement of it?
Socially - an issue with encouraging people to distrust themselves or their inner states is it makes them more vulnerable to external manipulation by those who would anoint themselves authorities. "Trust me, not yourself" is classic gaslighting tactic of abusers. "Trust what I label you, not what you feel" is similarly awful and abusive. In my experience, the people who push those lines have been bad people. So take the utmost care with declaring your belief in the unreality of inner experiences!
Also be mindful of the contradiction it entails - if you declare someone else's inner experience false, wrong or untrue, you also admit that your own are similarly flawed, which undermines your very ability to determine the truth or falsehood of anyone else's inner experience, contradicting your point. It's a self-and-other-disempowering notion that can be compelling for how it encourages the surrendering of personal responsibility, yet it has to be avoided.
At the same time, taking the extreme "I must trust my inner and develop that" could be approached differently by different people. And someone's way for that, might not work for someone else. Also every is at some stage of development, if this is not a stage someone is that, they will not see the utility of it. They will be blind to its usefulness in anyway. That is what it is. You're not there, tho, you're further along.
Are you a person dreaming about being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming about being a person?
It's safe to assume that sleep is the default mode of living, since it predated being awake. That one cell living happily in the ocean long time ago probably slept 24/7.
There is a poem where the poet realized everything is like turpentine. Woke up next morning to realise the answer to be gibberish. Emotional centers can weigh certain stuff very high
I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni.
Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :).
The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently. I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together.
But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.