The God Chemical

Did anyone listen to the second part of this series today called the Searching for the God Spot? Pretty interesting

  Drahken said:

Man some of you just get me all wiley thinking about these things. I bet if we gathered together Awe, Hat, Dos, myself and are respective kits we'd have one hell of journey.

Count me in! But let's do it somewhere nice and flat just this once...

  Hautlle said:

Did anyone listen to the second part of this series today called the Searching for the God Spot? Pretty interesting

there's a whole chapter about Persinger and his God Helmet in that book I was pimping:

  zazen said:

just wanted to interrupt this thread to say that if you're into this sort of stuff I highly recommend this book:

 

Rational Mysticism - Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment

by John Horgan

http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Mysticism-S...t/dp/061844663X

 

blah blah blah ....

  zazen said:

  Hautlle said:

Did anyone listen to the second part of this series today called the Searching for the God Spot? Pretty interesting

 

there's a whole chapter about Persinger and his God Helmet in that book I was pimping:

 

  zazen said:

just wanted to interrupt this thread to say that if you're into this sort of stuff I highly recommend this book:

 

Rational Mysticism - Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment

by John Horgan

http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Mysticism-S...t/dp/061844663X

 

blah blah blah ....

I'll definitely have to check that out then. I'm looking forward to hearing the rest of this series. Works out perfect too because I always listen to All Things Considered on my way home from work.

Figured I'd post a link to the third installation of this series. This one's talking about how lots of prayer/meditation rewires/affects the brain

  doorjamb said:

eventually a penis called homo emerged.

  Drahken said:

Man some of you just get me all wiley thinking about these things. I bet if we gathered together Awe, Hat, Dos, myself and are respective kits we'd have one hell of a drum circle.

oh Ian C and your hilarious remarks about people who enjoy psychedelics!

If you've ever lived with people who's idea of fun is taking DOB and playing a fucking Djembe for six hours, you'd understand.

These guys touch on something but it succumbs to the inevitable shortfall of passively looking into this field of information: they do not seem to bother recognizing the implications of the fact that DMT is a neurotransmitter "designed" to be perfectly metabolized by the brain (thusly the interaction between DMT and the brain is an evolutionary function)...and in a very ignorant way (-of course, though, this is a consumer society-), make the quite obvious observation that since the religious experience is neurologically observable, most religious practices stem from attempting to stimulate this action in the brain. -But they don't think, or don't dare to analyze this, maybe they draw some flakey life help thing from it, but don't go further; it is "un-academic" to make assumptions about what role spirituality actually plays in the path of the Human Species. But I suppose that is asking to much, I mean, non-news NPR programming largely exists to make self-satisfied new england democrats to feel even more self-satisfied with themselves, lol

  Salvatorin said:

These guys touch on something but it succumbs to the inevitable shortfall of passively looking into this field of information: they do not seem to bother recognizing the implications of the fact that DMT is a neurotransmitter "designed" to be perfectly metabolized by the brain (thusly the interaction between DMT and the brain is an evolutionary function)...and in a very ignorant way (-of course, though, this is a consumer society-), make the quite obvious observation that since the religious experience is neurologically observable, most religious practices stem from attempting to stimulate this action in the brain. -But they don't think, or don't dare to analyze this, maybe they draw some flakey life help thing from it, but don't go further; it is "un-academic" to make assumptions about what role spirituality actually plays in the path of the Human Species. But I suppose that is asking to much, I mean, non-news NPR programming largely exists to make self-satisfied new england democrats to feel even more self-satisfied with themselves, lol

yeah i largely agree, i wish that some of these examinations would go farther but i think they don't in fear of coming off as too new agey or something.

  doorjamb said:

their properties are extroardinary and potentially extremely beneficial to humanity

A chemical that makes people religious... beneficial to humanity?

Come up with a chemical that makes people skeptical and rational, then we'll talk about beneficial to humanity.

  my usernames always really suck said:

  doorjamb said:

their properties are extroardinary and potentially extremely beneficial to humanity

A chemical that makes people religious... beneficial to humanity?

 

Come up with a chemical that makes people skeptical and rational, then we'll talk about beneficial to humanity.

Now I'm not praising religion, the point of religion itself being far removed from spirituality, but there lies a fundamental problem in tying "skepticism" with so-called "rationalism." Obviously, skepticism functions by basing personal judgement on inherited and learned beliefs, but there is no guarantee that any of these beliefs are "rational" (because what is rational is determined by society/culture), therefore deleting the whole validity of "rationalism."

Consider that the society that most of us here belong to (which I think rightly deserves to be called consumer society, because capitalism ultimately absorbs any cultures under its influence) considers, out of "rational thinking" that we have created a stable system which to live in, and they are "skeptical" of future problems that we are creating for ourselves, because most are "irrational". Then science, partnered with sociological analysis, shows that our way of life is an imbalanced, and ultimately suicidal system...ie: irrational.

How can one truly believe they are rational when they also know that they, as a species, have actually evolved over massive amounts of time, and just in a few generations, just blinks in the history of the universe, created everything you base one's "rationality" on? I don't want to get into how this relates to the psychedelic experience at the moment, cuz I have to take a dump

  my usernames always really suck said:

  doorjamb said:

their properties are extroardinary and potentially extremely beneficial to humanity

A chemical that makes people religious... beneficial to humanity?

 

Come up with a chemical that makes people skeptical and rational, then we'll talk about beneficial to humanity.

I was actually trying to argue that would be impossible to equate or even compare narco-psychedelic experiences to religious/mystical ones as they are completely different beasts. psychedelic drug experiences are proven to: 1) actually occur, and 2) occur due to the interactions between the drug and the brain. religious/mystical experiences are, purportedly, interaction between the brain and some higher consciousness(es). they have not been proven to actually occur, and have as yet not even been adequately defined (largely due to the fact that the concept is inherently impossible to conceive of short of actually experiencing it oneself; it's contact with "god", a concept which is itself inherently unknowable).

psychedelics do not make people religious. they simply skew your point of view, pick you up and put you Over There to see what things look like from a new angle. what you see is you and your surroundings, not the drug. if you see or feel "god", well, maybe you did and maybe you didn't, but it wasn't the drug, it was your interpretation of what you saw/felt. psychedelics are simultaneously warped windows and windex. in many ways they are filters, but in other ways they remove the filters we have up every day. the trick is learning to distinguish between the two.

iain c you're such a commie.

  abusivegeorge said:

Why is there still no C at the end of your name?

 

Alcofribas?

JOYREX??

  doorjamb said:

  my usernames always really suck said:

  doorjamb said:

their properties are extroardinary and potentially extremely beneficial to humanity

A chemical that makes people religious... beneficial to humanity?

 

Come up with a chemical that makes people skeptical and rational, then we'll talk about beneficial to humanity.

 

I was actually trying to argue that would be impossible to equate or even compare narco-psychedelic experiences to religious/mystical ones as they are completely different beasts. psychedelic drug experiences are proven to: 1) actually occur, and 2) occur due to the interactions between the drug and the brain. religious/mystical experiences are, purportedly, interaction between the brain and some higher consciousness(es). they have not been proven to actually occur, and have as yet not even been adequately defined (largely due to the fact that the concept is inherently impossible to conceive of short of actually experiencing it oneself; it's contact with "god", a concept which is itself inherently unknowable).

 

psychedelics do not make people religious. they simply skew your point of view, pick you up and put you Over There to see what things look like from a new angle. what you see is you and your surroundings, not the drug. if you see or feel "god", well, maybe you did and maybe you didn't, but it wasn't the drug, it was your interpretation of what you saw/felt. psychedelics are simultaneously warped windows and windex. in many ways they are filters, but in other ways they remove the filters we have up every day. the trick is learning to distinguish between the two.

Actually one of the studies out there is on 'near death' experiences where they have documentation of massive releases of DMT in the brain at the same time as a 'near death' experience. Until that point, and even today, near death experiences are considered 'religious' in the context they are presented (Seeing the light of god, etc). Thats a pretty important bridge connecting religious experiences and psychedelic ones under the same umbrella of cognition. I wouldn't go so far as to say psychedelics make people religious. I would propose that spiritual experiences could be caused by psychedelics, whether they be ingested deliberately or released naturally in the brain and unbeknown to the person experiencing it.

  Awepittance said:

i've always seen drugs like LSD and especially DMt to be like a 'game genie' for spiritual experiences.

i think this is correct. the problem is that the your psyche usually can't handle it, ultimately, it you didn't get there naturally

drugs simply change your reality. but they change it in a way that your brain dictates. people of a certain spiritual heritage will probably have their reality changed in a particular way that is rationalized by some sort of process in their belief structure. this is why people of certain faiths often have "visions" about very specific idols/ideas perpetuated by their religion. for example seeing jesus or muhammed in a vision. not many muslims see visions of buddha, not many christians hallucinate about yin and yang.

my own personal view is somewhere between functional materialism and eliminative materialism, so i pretty much disregard "spirituality," at least as humans know it. i see drugs as simply changing the chemistry of your brain, which is the single entity that any human has for comprehending reality. they change sensory operations, emotion and can induce synesthesia. in any context, the effect of the drug, given these properties, is able to induce a nearly infinite number of combinations of mood/visions/emotions/beliefs.

the reality presented to your inebriated brain is taken by your brain as fact (and sometimes stored as short/long-term memory), when it's basically what you are seeing or thinking or feeling through some sort of filter, not unlike routing an instrument through an effect loop. sometimes humans arrive at silly conclusions for what they've viewed through their own personal "drug goggles" (not limited to sensory sight, mind you). this is basically what i think any "religious" experience rooted in psychedelics is. a silly conclusion based on an affected human's ability to view and comprehend its environment.

  Drahken said:

  doorjamb said:

  my usernames always really suck said:

  doorjamb said:

their properties are extroardinary and potentially extremely beneficial to humanity

A chemical that makes people religious... beneficial to humanity?

 

Come up with a chemical that makes people skeptical and rational, then we'll talk about beneficial to humanity.

 

I was actually trying to argue that would be impossible to equate or even compare narco-psychedelic experiences to religious/mystical ones as they are completely different beasts. psychedelic drug experiences are proven to: 1) actually occur, and 2) occur due to the interactions between the drug and the brain. religious/mystical experiences are, purportedly, interaction between the brain and some higher consciousness(es). they have not been proven to actually occur, and have as yet not even been adequately defined (largely due to the fact that the concept is inherently impossible to conceive of short of actually experiencing it oneself; it's contact with "god", a concept which is itself inherently unknowable).

 

psychedelics do not make people religious. they simply skew your point of view, pick you up and put you Over There to see what things look like from a new angle. what you see is you and your surroundings, not the drug. if you see or feel "god", well, maybe you did and maybe you didn't, but it wasn't the drug, it was your interpretation of what you saw/felt. psychedelics are simultaneously warped windows and windex. in many ways they are filters, but in other ways they remove the filters we have up every day. the trick is learning to distinguish between the two.

 

Actually one of the studies out there is on 'near death' experiences where they have documentation of massive releases of DMT in the brain at the same time as a 'near death' experience. Until that point, and even today, near death experiences are considered 'religious' in the context they are presented (Seeing the light of god, etc). Thats a pretty important bridge connecting religious experiences and psychedelic ones under the same umbrella of cognition.

It is very probable that some of the earliest Human religious activity was based on psychedelic shamanism

This is somewhat unrelated, but I've been traveling around Germany lately, and I happened to go to an abbey called "Maria Laach." I attended a mass (they still sing in the gregorian tradition), and I happened to notice how altogether cosmic and hyperspacial the main romanesque pedestal was:

Now of course, the benedictines didn't interpret their architecture as alien and psychedelic, but rather holy and awe-inducing. But it led me into interesting thought patterns (as the study of religious architecture and sacred geometry often does); leading me to question the primal function of the temple, what brought the earliest beings to alter and improve natural shamanistic landmarks?

Many have reported almost the exact same progression of hallucinations during the DMT experience. A clicking sound and a vibration in the back of the head, (similar to what is described by near-death experiences) and then a traveling through some kind of immense tunnel, all the way witnessing perfectly symmetric architectural structures...then coming into some massive type of interdimensional lobby, some which have dubbed "the Chrysanthemum" which is kind of like a massive flowered dome, and then speeding towards it and breaking through a kind of membrane at the center, entering a dynamic room of separate entities (a whole nother discussion to get into can be based on these entities). The whole experience is saturated with geometrically precise rooms, endlessly complex patterns, fractal functions, and such.

Now I don't want to elaborate too much yet, because this idea needs more fleshing out. So its a given in some religions like Hinduism that the temple is a representation of the macro and microcosm. But where are these archetypal ideas of the cosm coming from? It is a thought to be pursued that in prehistoric times, as psychedelic shamanism went on, the temple came to be as a physical representation of the hyperspacial realm. So in that light, civilization thereon inherited the prior reverence of geometry and it was associated with the sacred.

I need to organize my thoughts at the moment, because whenever I get along this track of thinking, I don't know where to begin, because there is so much to say.

Another note: romanesco broccoli, nature itself following fractal mathematics, the universes quantum structure being explained by fractal geometry, hyperspace as a representation of such, AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

i am convinced that "reality", whatever it really is, is a fractal construct. since it seems to appear naturally and can help explain certain things in science and that it is also common in psychedelic visions. someone mentioned here that these fractal patterns and form constants might be visual presentations of thought/consciousness processes and considering the synesthesia (blurring of senses, if we can see music then it follows that it's also possible to see our mental processes) that is so common in these experiences it might hold some ground. psychedelic experiences for me are like one huge fractal, where i can go infinitely deep into different metalevels of thinking and end up at a very similar place where i started, following the self-replicating nature of fractals.

i can definetley feel what salvatorin mentioned above. this sort of thing is so rooted in the human psyche that it's bound to pop up in all kinds of different cultures and religions.

human consciousness, spirituality etc. is all so damn fascinating and the fucked up thing is that we will probably never fully understand it as we can't observe it objectively.

  azatoth said:

human consciousness, spirituality etc. is all so damn fascinating and the fucked up thing is that we will probably never fully understand it as we can't observe it objectively.

I agree with everything you've said except for this. This kind of thinking is exactly what I have eliminated, partly by psychedelic influence, but mostly by just observing the nature of our progression as a species. We happen to be in a time period unparalleled in human history, and as it goes we are socially conditioned to believe our current rate of change is normal and understandable. But it is not. Observing the rate of acceleration, in all applicable terms, of the Human species, we are bound to finally reach the point in technology where we are able to disintegrate the gap between this world and the hyperspacial realm we have been interacting with throughout our own evolution...just look at recent physics journals, quantum physics is starting to observe the existence of it (although not in those terms).

In a very fractalline way, all of time has led up to a point where we, as a species, break free of it (???); the iterations repeat themselves on smaller scales until we finally hit the point of no return. The question I have to ask now is how this ties in with the eventual failure of global consumerism...either this bout of civilization is not the final iteration, and another reciprocal lies ahead of us, or somehow, it will all come together as chaos takes hold...

  theSun said:

the reality presented to your inebriated brain is taken by your brain as fact (and sometimes stored as short/long-term memory), when it's basically what you are seeing or thinking or feeling through some sort of filter, not unlike routing an instrument through an effect loop. sometimes humans arrive at silly conclusions for what they've viewed through their own personal "drug goggles" (not limited to sensory sight, mind you). this is basically what i think any "religious" experience rooted in psychedelics is. a silly conclusion based on an affected human's ability to view and comprehend its environment.

I think your point about "drug goggles" is important. if you look at my last post I mentioned the way drugs act as filters and as filter removers. my point being that while, yes, psychedelics alter the ways one's brain receives and interprets signals from one's body's sensory equipment, they also drastically change the thought patterns and systematic assessments of the brain, literally allowing one to think in completely new ways. so "drug goggles" really do filter everything - including the subconscious filters of sobriety.

to use your "routing an instrument through an effect loop" analogy, imagine a flanger effect pedal that also boosts frequencies lower than the human ear has the ability to hear. the result would be the instrument sounding swirly (influence of drugs) and very different from it's actual sound (reality), but also the addition, albeit swirly, of sounds which DID EXIST before engaging the effect but could not be heard without it (sur-reality).

try to describe Salvia using an audio effect analogy.

here ill try : granular resampling controlled with a squarewave LFO at 1 hz

there should also be some discussion here about people who have had spiritual /life changing experiences via lucid or semi-lucid dreaming states.

Tibetan Dream Yogis were some of the first people ever to document lucid dreaming techniques. They believed that one could not truly be at peace without first removing any bad karmic energies from dreams. To have a fully balanced nirvana your own dream world must be free of any imbalances.

From my own lucid dreaming experience i can assure you that it can be just as powerful as a smoked DMT trip.

I think it's also somewhat of a 'game genie' to spiritual experiences because it is much easier to achieve lucid dreaming than it is to lie down and meditate to one's own ego dissolution (this is usually what it takes to reach a state of spiritual experience with no drugs while conscious and it is also one of the most challenging)

to Azatoth from Michael Talbots Holographic Universe

  Quote

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

 

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

 

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

 

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

 

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

 

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

 

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

 

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

 

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

 

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

 

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

 

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross-correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

 

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

 

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

 

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

 

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

 

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.