Out of Your Head

I agree with Sacks. While taking large doses of LSD or DMT I had experiences with what felt like otherworldly entities, or a sense that some cosmic revelation was imminent, but once I&#x27;d come down I didn&#x27;t think something had been revealed to me or that I had been in contact with some supernatural plane, I just thought &quot;wow I was really fucking high&quot;.<p>It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can&#x27;t say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.<p>I am almost pathologically sceptical and I have absolutely zero belief in anything metaphysical. I believe that capability is simply not within me. I can see how other people would believe that there is something beyond though.

I don&#x27;t believe in anything metaphysical, I believe all these things can be explained by what is &quot;real&quot;. If I draw a circle and put two dots in it and a curve below the two dots, your brain will immediately recognize these shapes as a human face (smiley face). That means somewhere in your brain there is a mechanism to recognize faces. I believe in everybody&#x27;s brain there exists such knowledge and reflexes that may become more prominent under the effect of some drugs - there is nothing unusual about that. I do believe this is very mysterious and interesting, and that it must be researched so we can learn more about it. But I find it wrong and dangerous to try to theorize that there is &quot;something out there bigger than our brain&quot;. Like no, it is all in our brain - but that does not make this issue any less interesting. Brain is capable of great many things and great number of things can be revealed to an individual when their brain is functioning differently under some drugs. I just don&#x27;t think this hints towards some metaphysical world of wonders that is otherwise hidden from our normal state of mind.

I think there&#x27;s something in how a good shrooms high makes you feel that &#x27;you&#x27; are less real, and that something like nature is more cohesive and real than you are used to thinking about it.<p>But as someone else said, the next day you don&#x27;t care anymore and you don&#x27;t actually think you unlocked a new dimension. The experience of what drugs feel like doesn&#x27;t seem like a valid way to get at the true nature of anything.

All we experience is in our mind alone - psychedelics reveal nothing about the universe but they do reveal everything about our perception of it. It wont make you see colors that you are incapable of normally seeing, or hear things you are incapable of normally hearing, but it will re-arrange your senses to seem that way. IMO, we should not be fooled by these cheap sensory tricks and im disappointed Sacks has been.

Tangential question.<p>Is Nautil.us worth the subscription.<p>I&#x27;m trying to find a modern magazine that is like the old &quot;OMNI&quot; from the 70&#x27;s and 80&#x27;s. Wondering if this is it?

The main thing you get out of LSD and even THC is new pattern associations. Due to the way the brain works, and its constant desire to reduce resource usage, when our life consists of the same patterns, the brain will slowly tune them out. These drugs, by the simple virtue of making you feel &quot;different&quot;, will force your brain to reassess all patterns. This is why creative types love these drugs, because they make you see regular things differently.

There was this post from Scott Alexander which I can&#x27;t find. The gist of it is that some drugs like caffeine and LSD made the brain overvalue patterns and connections, so that epiphanies that honestly aren&#x27;t.<p>I can&#x27;t find it, and I remember that it was just the author&#x27;s educated guess. Nonetheless it stuck with me.

Your head is like an island. All directions lead out. Which says something about how you might be travelling normally.

&gt; Once, after injecting himself with a large dose of morphine, he found himself hovering over an enormous battlefield, watching the armies of England and France drawn up for battle, and then realized he was witnessing the 1415 Battle of Agincourt... The vision seemed to last only a few minutes, but later, he discovered he’d been tripping for 13 hours.<p>This doesn&#x27;t make any sense... morphine is not a hallucinogen or a psychedelic. You don&#x27;t &quot;trip&quot; on it. I have a feeling the journalist mixed something up here.