But never forget to who one should be channeling to, your creator, or you'll be swept away by the other entities. Many don't even think on this before the leap. Opening that portal is a discussion that goes back thousands of years.
Anyone who thinks DMT journeys are nothing but hallucinations are fools who need to stay quiet when grown men are talking. The things I have seen, and experienced, when journeying with DMT are not of this world and there is no possible way my brain could ever conceive of such wonderous beauty, the colors that don't exist in this dimension, the music(on a recent journey the elves/jesters/clowns were singing an opera to me the entire time, how could that be a hallucination?), I've seen how reality is created, been reduced down to nothing but my atoms, have had reality completely dissolve around me, had OBEs where I saw aliens doing surgery on my etheric body, how could any of these things be mere hallucinations? They are not, as you state in your article, simply hallucinations; these substances open doorways for our consciousness to enter the astral realms/other dimensions. The one thing I know for certain is the power these marvelous substances have to transform us, they have helped me get rid of almost all of my anxiety and I feel reborn, like I am now the man I was meant to be in this life.
Well said. This conversation bifurcates in the following ways: 1) Those who have had a mystical experience 2) Those who haven't.
Unfortunately, many in the second cohort have been programmed to dismiss these experiences, and lack curiosity & an open-mind (although I suspect the tide is turning here). Those in the first cohort, as you know, understand that something incredibly special is happening, and these aren't mere hallucinations.
Ages ago, I had a friend who examined the entire periodic table, so to speak. Including DMT. It left him speechless, he could barely describe the experience. All these decades later, I want to try it now, having read your article.
Be interesting if you added quantum physic into you article, "the double-slit experiment." That scientific experiment can be duplicated over and over again in a laboratory, and it suggests that consciousness is the creator of reality, not a mere participant of it. In practice, this means that somehow the universe βknowsβ that someone is watching.
I do appreciate your blog but this is poorly thought-out β I hope youβll spend some time thinking a little deeper, mercilessly looking for vulnerabilities in your logic, and building a deeper relationship with the words you use.
First, you use the word βhallucinationβ inconsistently and incorrectly.
We say that we hallucinated when we see/hear something which was βnot there.β Claiming that our waking perceptions are hallucinations is a misuse of the word. Thatβs like saying if someone translates French into English for me, the English I hear is a βhallucinationβ because itβs no the original.
Now, you could decide that youβd just like to redefine the word βhallucinationβ so that it fits your purposes. People often do this for effect. Itβs a more bombastic claim, real click bait, to say βyour waking reality isβ¦ a hallucination!β Of course, you donβt mention that youβve tinkered with the definition (kind of how young people wanting to win an argument might say βyouβre racist!β so as to import the social baggage of that label, even though theyβre using the word in a non-traditional way which hasnβt earned that baggage).
If we use your definition, what do we then call those convincing misperceptions we experience? What about when I wake up in the middle of the night and my dreaming mind, for a moment, sees a butterfly in the dark corner of my room (a βhypnopompicβ hallucination)? Would that be a sub-hallucination? What about dreams and daydreams?
What about people with Hallucinogenic Persistent Perception Disorder β when they see their coffee swirling into brown fractals, or static βsnowβ throughout their visual field, should we say that these are just as much hallucinations as the rest of our perceived reality?
We generally do not say that, because it robs the word of its main usefulness and creates confusion.
Second, after employing a novel definition of the word, you offer no real argument for why it shouldnβt be similarly applied to psychedelic perceptions.
You make two points: 1) People experience strikingly similar phenomena on psychedelics. 2) Our minds would not predict those experiences.
I fail to see how the first point is meaningful. Ok, a bunch of people see machine elves. Well, a bunch of people see this coffee table Iβm sitting at. And a good illusionist could have everyone at the table believing they just saw a playing card sliding across the table by its own volition. βWe all saw the same thingβ is not grounds for calling something a non-hallucination.
The second point is inaccurate. Across the globe, there are historical reports of seeing small humanoid figures of various flavors. But not until recent history do we have accounts of βmachine elves.β Could this be because growing up in a modern world with advanced machinery might be influencing our psychedelic perceptions?
Do uncontacted Amazonian people see Buddha figures if they take psychedelics (or Christ figures, like I saw with peyote)?
Research points quite strongly to either hard or soft constructivism β our life experiences shape the details of our psychedelic and mystical experiences.
So the fact that people have similar experiences could be explained in multiple ways.
Lastly, you create a false dichotomy between hallucination and βobjectiveβ realness.
Letβs say we have become non-constructivists and decided that machine elves are βobjectively realβ in some way that transcends the influence of βmaterialβ reality β why should we assume that those perceptions are a direct experience of some objective reality rather than just an interpretation of some uncommon aspect of reality?
Nothing in your piece here even attempts to answer that question.
So why am I giving you a hard time about all this?
Because we need wisdom which allows us to integrate the insights, visions, and experiences we have with psychedelics. Rather than get into the ontological weeds and start making claims about whatβs objective or subjective β we could just start at what those experiences were like, how they made us feel, and who we discovered ourselves to be.
If we chase the dopamine high of the paradigm shift β βactually, up is down, down is up, and weβre all aliens,β or whatever flavor of βactuallyβ¦β is shiny and attractive for someone β weβre now creating a disconnect between our heart and our mind, and weβre limiting our ability to connect with othersβ experiences.
If psychedelics ever became highly normalized in our culture, there would be a wide variety of ontological interpretations of our experiences with them. Folks will debate forever over what is real. Essentialists, perennialists, constructors, mysterianists, materialists, diests, etc.
For me, one of the big jobs before is to create the context for normalizing that people can use psychedelics without being charged as criminals.
Trying to tell people that their psychedelic experiences are βthe objective realityβ and their waking life is a βhallucinationβ might be a fun βwhoa, mannnnnβ¦β trip to go on (despite being an undisciplined rhetorical game) β but is that whatβs going to help open peopleβs minds?
On the contrary, I think it will close more minds than it might open. People will here this kind of thing and think βyeah, no, I like to think clearly, I donβt want to risk losing that just so I can see some machine elves or whatever.β
Now, if you donβt care about opening peoplesβ minds in that way, and youβre more just preaching to the βactuallyβ¦β choir who like to get high on βinsight pornβ β well, carry on and forget I said anything :)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, but your critique is riddled with misunderstandings & overconfidence in your own interpretations. I'll unpack this.
On Hallucination:
You claim I misuse the word "hallucination" without grasping the broader context. Leading neuroscientists like Anil Seth & Karl Friston argue that all perception is, at its core, a controlled hallucination. The distinction between βhallucinationβ & βrealityβ lies in coherence & consensus, not some rigid binary youβve imposed. Your analogy of translating French to English is not only clumsy but irrelevantβit ignores the well-supported notion that the brain doesnβt passively observe reality but actively constructs it.
If youβre going to argue semantics, at least update your framework to align with current cognitive science instead of clinging to a dated, oversimplified view of perception.
Shared Psychedelic Experiences:
You dismiss shared Psychedelic phenomena like machine elves as cultural constructs, citing modern machinery as an influence. This conveniently ignores the historical & cross-cultural prevalence of entities in mystical experiences. From shamanic traditions to medieval religious visions, these themes appear globally. Your argument cherry-picks examples to fit your narrative while ignoring evidence to the contrary.
You reduce this to mere "similar experiences" without addressing the deeper question: Why are these phenomena so consistent across individuals and contexts? Constructivism alone doesnβt fully explain thisβacknowledging the limits of your perspective would serve you better here.
Objective vs. Subjective Reality:
You accuse me of creating a false dichotomy between hallucination and objective reality. This critique is ironic, given that your argument rests on rigid binaries and assumptions about perception. The blog never claims Psychedelics reveal βobjective realityβ in its entirety; rather, it questions whether they grant access to layers of reality our waking consciousness filters out.
Your attempt to boil this down to βfun, clickbait rhetoricβ shows a lack of engagement with the actual point: the boundaries between subjective & objective reality are far more porous than your black-and-white reasoning allows.
Closing Minds vs. Opening Them:
You seem fixated on the idea that challenging conventional views will alienate people. Newsflash: Paradigm shifts arenβt meant to coddle the status quo. Psychedelics themselves are disruptiveβthey challenge deeply ingrained beliefs and force us to reexamine assumptions. If someoneβs mind βclosesβ because they canβt handle the idea of questioning their waking reality, thatβs on them, not on the argument.
Your jab about βinsight pornβ is a lazy attempt to trivialize bold exploration. Iβm not here to cater to people unwilling to think critically or engage with uncomfortable ideas. The goal isnβt to water things down for mass appealβitβs to push boundaries and foster meaningful dialogue, something your reductive critique fails to do.
You position yourself as a voice of reason while delivering a poorly reasoned argument, riddled with logical holes and dismissive rhetoric. Instead of lecturing me about how to think deeper, perhaps reflect on your own biases and the limits of your understanding.
Psychedelic/mystical idealists often dismiss these critiques as mere close-mindedness, nothing more than reductive thinking. But theyβre not quite right. And I can try to explain.
Youβre conflating my statements about semantics with assumptions youβre making about my framework of βtheory of mindβ. And along the way youβre playing a cherry picking game.
In your post you donβt make a distinction between βcontrolled hallucinationsβ and βuncontrolled hallucinationsβ the way that Anil Seth does. Rather, you do the thing youβve accused me of, which is create a rigid binary instead of teasing out the nuance.
As you put it:
βThe brain is constantly hallucinating. This process is what we typically consider βnormalβ perception. However, when substances like Psychedelics are introduced, we label the resulting experiences as hallucinations. This distinction is deeply flawed.β
halΒ·luΒ·ciΒ·naΒ·tion β noun βan experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.
If a child is prescribed some psychoactive medication and starts freaking out because she sees starts seeing spiders crawling all over the walls, weβd say βitβs ok, donβt worry, those are just hallucinations.β We would not say βthe medicine has lifted the veil of reality and now youβre seeing things which were already thereβ ( β both funny and terrifying to think about some unhinged parent actually saying that. But knowing humans, Iβm sure itβs happened).
People see all kinds of things on psychedelics. Clouds turn into rabbits. Gradients become fractals. You can close your eyes and perceive a psychedelic swirl of anything from Looney Toons to classical music. And itβs a huge stretch to claim it is βflawedβ to distinguish these phenomena as hallucinations. Even Anil Seth makes a huge distinction, saying that psychedelics lead to βuncontrolledβ rather than βcontrolledβ βhallucinationsβ.
Speaking of Seth, you lazily prescribe that I get with the βcurrent cognitive science.β I could turn that around on you.
Seth rejects your claims that psychedelics give us access to a βshared, objective realityβ (your words) which our waking minds βfilter outβ (your words). He explicitly rejects that and says that psychedelics lead the mind to construct/infer interpretations of the βpossibility spaceβ, and acknowledges that there are many unknowns around how and why psychedelics work, but leans entirely on neurological explanations, especially the dopaminergic system.
But youβre happy to take one of Sethβs points, oversimplify and distort it, and then act like βcurrent scienceβ bolsters your claims, while then rejecting that same scientist when he challenges your claims. Not exactly a strong position to argue from, especially when you donβt provide your own deeper arguments.
And even where I agree with Seth, I think terms like βuncontrolled hallucinationβ are a bad language game. He more often uses terms like inference/prediction/construction which I think work better, for all the reasons stated in my first comment and above. Iβd happily argue him on this point.
On machine elves, if you can show me evidence of such phenomenological reports or depictions pre-Renaissance, lay βem on me β Iβve been studying shamanic traditions and the cultural mysteries for 20 years and havenβt come across that yet.
But of course, βabsence of evidence is not evidence of absence.β (Thatβs a principle worth remembering as you further contemplate the meaning of psychedelic experiences β unless your mind is closed to questioning your own perspectives).
Letβs look a little closer at some of your logic:
You claim that because certain phenomena are cross-cultural and historical, they canβt be called cultural constructs. This conveniently ignore that there is loads of material overlap across cultures throughout time and space. No matter when or where you are, any two groups of humans are going to have to have a whole lot in common. It would follow that their non-ordinary mental constructions might also have loads in common.
But of course there are differences too. And mystical perennialist would point out that these differences show up in a predictable ways in non-ordinary experiences. Encounters with βthe divineβ and βsupernatural entitiesβ tend to be colored by oneβs cultural milieu.
If you can point to a specific examples of phenomena that would seem to defy these expectations, do share. Little people, snakes, geometric patterns, etc, donβt cut it.
Hereβs a trip report for you: When I was around twenty I started meditating, and I once mediated in my closet for a couple hours in total darkness. Nothing too exciting happened. But then I turned on the lights and, with pupils highly dilated, my vision quickly went all white, and then quickly morphed into a sea of colorful fractalized pixelation. It was beautiful, even though it only lasted a brief moment. Of course, Iβve seen similar patterning, with both open and closed eyes, with psychedelics. But with sustained psychedelic experiences, those fractals often morph into recognizable shapes or pseudo-shapes. Geometric faces and figures, etc.
Maybe itβs not a βshared, objective realityβ Iβm tapping into with those experiences, but rather a shared, objective capacity of the brain when it becomes excited with external stimuli or internal modulation. Iβm saying βmaybeβ because consciousness itself is, in my opinion, transcendentally mysterious, and we βdonβt know what we donβt know,β so Iβm hesitant to imagine that any explanation can fully capture our phenomenological experiences.
But Iβm also not quick to say what processes of the brain are βsimply impossibleβ (your words).
Also your words: βIf these experiences were mere hallucinations, weβd expect them to be as unique as fingerprintsβ¦β
Why would we expect that? I donβt know anyone who says we should expect that. It doesnβt make sense to expect that. Seems youβve set up a very weak βstrawmanβ argument here which doesnβt actually strengthen your claim.
βThe brain didnβt evolve to construct such complex, intricate worlds. Doing so would serve no evolutionary purpose and is therefore impossible within the brainβs natural repertoire.β
As you admit earlier, the brain definitely constructs complex, intricate worlds β itβs doing that right now, and it does it all the time. Itβs one of the brains most important evolutionary functions β modeling a complex world so that we can effectively navigate through that world.
So the fact that it will model very different worlds when its normal material functioning is modulated, isnβt too surprising. And then consider the brainβs algorithmic processing functions (including visual processing), our deepest instinctual and evolutionary drives, our vast access to personal memories, the wild cultural biosphere we are steeped in from the moment our brains form in the womb β and youβve got the ingredients for all kinds of relatively explainable but highly non-ordinary experiences.
Am I claiming that there are not additional ingredients which we donβt yet understand or maybe will never understand? No. But Iβm also not going to use broken logic to reject entire domains of the explanatory space in favor of a poorly defined gesture toward a βshared, objective realityβ that, itself, has no explanation.
Thatβs not because Iβm against paradigm shifts or watering things down. Itβs because wisdom demands openness. And openness begets learning. And itβs in learning that the limitations of old paradigms are discovered, and helpful new paradigms can be considered.
What I am rejecting in your post is a dogmatism that says your paradigm is the right one, that others are merely βpreposterousβ, and that youβve accomplished anything close to a convincing argument.
Maybe youβre just βopenβ enough to trade one paradigm for another, but not enough to keep the door open between those two paradigmatic worlds. Thatβs not a harsh judgement from me β most humans are pretty limited in their openness. But I challenge you to develop the psychological strength to push your limits.
Your comment is an exercise in verbosity masquerading as intellectual depth. You accuse me of oversimplifying and cherry-picking, yet your own critique selectively leans on Anil Seth when it suits you & dismisses his contributions elsewhere. You conflate scientific frameworks with your own rigid interpretations and then criticize me for not aligning with your worldview.
The distinction between "controlled" and "uncontrolled" hallucinations is a semantic game, not a substantive critique. The fact remains: all perception is a construction of the brain, whether during waking life or altered states. Your fixation on semantics doesn't refute this but rather highlights your discomfort with ideas that challenge your tightly held paradigms.
Your appeal to authorityβyour 20 years of studying shamanic traditionsβis irrelevant here (and revealing). You demand "evidence of machine elves" pre-Renaissance while conveniently dismissing cross-cultural and historical commonalities in mystical experiences as mere "cultural constructs." This selective skepticism reveals the fragility of your argument, not its strength. Anytime someone invokes the 'I have accomplished such & such' they are grasping at straws.
Lastly, your parting jab about βdeveloping psychological strengthβ is laughably condescending & reflects the mindset of someone unwilling to engage in true intellectual humility. Projection is the last refuge of a weak-minded man.
Andrew, I like your ideas, but I am wondering about what you said to Chris, namely,
"...yet your own critique selectively leans on Anil Seth when it suits you & dismisses his contributions elsewhere."
Generally speaking, everyone everywhere does this all the time and that is OK.
I honestly can't see where it is inherently wrong to agree with some of what a person (even a serious researcher) says, but disagree elsewhere. Mind you, dismissing a whole ball of wax because one disagrees with only one aspect of his/her ideas/findings etc. is not good.
I guess if you canβt understand what someone is saying, calling it a βsemantic gameβ is a nice rhetorical maneuver to avoid actually addressing. Your entire reply is a burrito of Brandoliniβs law. But lucky for me, itβs so bad that I donβt need to point it all out β almost everyone reading it will see that itβs wand-having rhetorical salad. If everything is a hallucination, I suppose youβre hallucinating the belief that you can reason very well.
I, for one, appreciated this whole exchange, it made me think much harder about all of this. Would have been nice if the snarky could have been avoided but hey, I get it and am easily guilty of the same. Weβre all just human after all. But I enjoyed the sparing that didnβt completely go off the rails. Cheers to you all π»
Not to kick up dirt when it's been settled for a bit but...a quick point about your addressing Andrew's first point of "People experience strikingly similar phenomena on psychedelics." As a long-time member of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, I'd say yes to your point that Amazonian people probably ain't gonna be visited by Buddha or machine elves, but...the essence of the experience is the same. What over 10,000 guided & recorded trips from Stanislov Grof's work would call "an experience of cosmic unity." for one example - which is the same for everyone, and completely unique for everyone, at the wonderfully paradoxical same time. And...if you've ever had this experience, or any of the others by peoples from every continent around the world, like "after death" or "time travel" or "out of body travel" or "meeting your helping and compassionate spirits" of all types, I can assure you speaking for myself, there's no way my little brain would have come up with that. And most importantly, the feeling that occurs, as a kind of synesthetic knowing of truth, that they exist - outside of me -watched, witnessed and communicated with. Oh, and the same thing has been, and is consistently able to be, repeated through the use of steady monotonous drumbeat/percussion and some training sans psychs. You wield the word well, and I have love ones who you've nailed with the "don't want to risk losing my mind" but...that's part of the problem as I see it...the mind wants to control everything & eliminate the variables, but the heart - spirit - is looking to surrender that control. And that be scary - especially when "hallucination" gets thrown about.
I don't think we're disagreeing much. You'll find in my previous comments that I am not advocating for total material reductionism, as I believe that consciousness itself is fundamentally mysterious. So for me, its not controversial to say that "there's no way my little brain would have come up with that", because I don't believe the brain alone can come up with any of our experiences.
I'm challenging the author's notion that psychedelic experiences are categorically non-hallucinatory (which is not only poorly argued, but also inconsistent with his claim that we are "constantly hallucinating").
He uses poorly-researched half-truths to claim that these experiences are "a shared, objective reality that Psychedelics allow us to access".
Even though I've had experiences that seem to track very closely to, for instance, Buddhist cosmology, that might simply be a consequence of our shared human psychology, not evidence of an "objective realm".
I remember my friend's report of her first experience with LSD. Before the trip, she had been looking at pornography, and during the trip she saw a psychedelic swirl of nude body parts on her bedroom ceiling. According to Andrew M Weiss, this couldn't be a hallucination. No, she must have been accessing the Objective Realm of Swirling Ceiling Titties or whatever. It's just a bad argument he's made.
Everything that happens under a Psychedelic is a firing of neurons for sure. From a neurobiological perspective, that is precisely what is happening.
What matters more is what is the significance of these neurons firing? Materialists argue it is just random. Those who have actually experienced this phenomenon report something vastly different is happening.
My belief is neurons firing are like the debris falling off a rocket during launch; markers that we are leaving this realm.
Hi Andrew. Just stumbled onto this, one week after returning home from a ceremony reinforcing every word. It wasn't my first, but it was my deepest, and the revelations were... ineffible.
Our world isn't the only world. Our reality isn't the only reality.
Thanks Andrew. For anyone who wants to understand how the brain sees, labels, and explores things this is a very good article.
What we think we see, and remember about this physical experiences in this world is most definitely something that we can call a halucination - if, and only if we're using our physical minds to intrepret what we experience in a human form.
But...... What about those things we experience when we're not in a human body anymore?
The simple truth is that we don't even need to be in a human body to experience new realms of existence.
On many occasions durning this lifetime, I've been able to experience many different cosmic realms AFTER MY BODY AND MIND HAD COMPLETELY DISSAPPEARED.
During some of these experiences, other people simple walked right straigt through the space where my "phisical body had been several moments earlier. I could see them as they walked right straight through me.
On other occassions my body would often "blink" in and out of existance about several times a second. And most normal (who were in their physical human bodes) could still not see or feel me.
Now, here's another interesting observation. ... I could still meditate, at very deep levels of fully enlightened "Cosmic" consciousness even when my physical body had dissappeared.
Appreciate your thoughts! Youβre touching on something fascinatingβthe nature of perception and how much of what we experience is shaped (or limited) by our physical senses. It definitely raises the question: if our baseline reality is already a kind of hallucination, what happens when we step outside of it?
Your experiences sound incredibleβlike firsthand encounters with the idea that consciousness isnβt tied to the body in the way we assume. The whole "blinking in and out of existence" part is especially wild. It makes me think about those moments in deep Psychedelic states where the body feels irrelevant, or even nonexistent, yet awareness persists.
To your last point-I suspect those that have achieved 'cosmic consciousness' can access this place via modalities like meditation or breathwork.
You are making me remember! This must've been 40 years ago: on PBS there was a docu about some really, really stone age tribe (Amazon region?) taking some root that they dug up from somewhere, not sure if it was a root or a leaf, which they then ingested and these men had some apparently amazing experience which caused them to drool. So some scientists analyzed it and called it DMT. IIRC - di methyl tryptamine.
OK, I will now look it up to be sure. Here is what they said,
"DMT is a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States. This means that it is illegal to manufacture, buy, possess, or distribute the drug. The substance has a high potential for abuse, no government-recognized medical use, and a lack of accepted safety parameters for use."
So I guess I better forget about it. I don't have what it takes to make my way into the Amazon jungle...
This is more reflective of our western culture - i would hazard to say the majority of people outside modern culture, consider this to be portals to reality rather than man made dreams
Actually you didnβt have to βproofβ it. Those who went through the portal know. Those who didnβt, never will.
Amen, brother.
You don't need to use drugs to have the same experience. Meditation will do the trick.
Calm the mind and then the veil can come down.
But never forget to who one should be channeling to, your creator, or you'll be swept away by the other entities. Many don't even think on this before the leap. Opening that portal is a discussion that goes back thousands of years.
Yep!
Anyone who thinks DMT journeys are nothing but hallucinations are fools who need to stay quiet when grown men are talking. The things I have seen, and experienced, when journeying with DMT are not of this world and there is no possible way my brain could ever conceive of such wonderous beauty, the colors that don't exist in this dimension, the music(on a recent journey the elves/jesters/clowns were singing an opera to me the entire time, how could that be a hallucination?), I've seen how reality is created, been reduced down to nothing but my atoms, have had reality completely dissolve around me, had OBEs where I saw aliens doing surgery on my etheric body, how could any of these things be mere hallucinations? They are not, as you state in your article, simply hallucinations; these substances open doorways for our consciousness to enter the astral realms/other dimensions. The one thing I know for certain is the power these marvelous substances have to transform us, they have helped me get rid of almost all of my anxiety and I feel reborn, like I am now the man I was meant to be in this life.
Well said. This conversation bifurcates in the following ways: 1) Those who have had a mystical experience 2) Those who haven't.
Unfortunately, many in the second cohort have been programmed to dismiss these experiences, and lack curiosity & an open-mind (although I suspect the tide is turning here). Those in the first cohort, as you know, understand that something incredibly special is happening, and these aren't mere hallucinations.
Ages ago, I had a friend who examined the entire periodic table, so to speak. Including DMT. It left him speechless, he could barely describe the experience. All these decades later, I want to try it now, having read your article.
PS. I do recall one thing he said: that everything "shifted".
Be interesting if you added quantum physic into you article, "the double-slit experiment." That scientific experiment can be duplicated over and over again in a laboratory, and it suggests that consciousness is the creator of reality, not a mere participant of it. In practice, this means that somehow the universe βknowsβ that someone is watching.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/what-is-the-double-slit-experiment-and-why-is-it-so-important
Thanks for this! I believe there was a draft where I included double-slit, but it didnβt make it to the final copy.
Appreciate you sharing this!
I do appreciate your blog but this is poorly thought-out β I hope youβll spend some time thinking a little deeper, mercilessly looking for vulnerabilities in your logic, and building a deeper relationship with the words you use.
First, you use the word βhallucinationβ inconsistently and incorrectly.
We say that we hallucinated when we see/hear something which was βnot there.β Claiming that our waking perceptions are hallucinations is a misuse of the word. Thatβs like saying if someone translates French into English for me, the English I hear is a βhallucinationβ because itβs no the original.
Now, you could decide that youβd just like to redefine the word βhallucinationβ so that it fits your purposes. People often do this for effect. Itβs a more bombastic claim, real click bait, to say βyour waking reality isβ¦ a hallucination!β Of course, you donβt mention that youβve tinkered with the definition (kind of how young people wanting to win an argument might say βyouβre racist!β so as to import the social baggage of that label, even though theyβre using the word in a non-traditional way which hasnβt earned that baggage).
If we use your definition, what do we then call those convincing misperceptions we experience? What about when I wake up in the middle of the night and my dreaming mind, for a moment, sees a butterfly in the dark corner of my room (a βhypnopompicβ hallucination)? Would that be a sub-hallucination? What about dreams and daydreams?
What about people with Hallucinogenic Persistent Perception Disorder β when they see their coffee swirling into brown fractals, or static βsnowβ throughout their visual field, should we say that these are just as much hallucinations as the rest of our perceived reality?
We generally do not say that, because it robs the word of its main usefulness and creates confusion.
Second, after employing a novel definition of the word, you offer no real argument for why it shouldnβt be similarly applied to psychedelic perceptions.
You make two points: 1) People experience strikingly similar phenomena on psychedelics. 2) Our minds would not predict those experiences.
I fail to see how the first point is meaningful. Ok, a bunch of people see machine elves. Well, a bunch of people see this coffee table Iβm sitting at. And a good illusionist could have everyone at the table believing they just saw a playing card sliding across the table by its own volition. βWe all saw the same thingβ is not grounds for calling something a non-hallucination.
The second point is inaccurate. Across the globe, there are historical reports of seeing small humanoid figures of various flavors. But not until recent history do we have accounts of βmachine elves.β Could this be because growing up in a modern world with advanced machinery might be influencing our psychedelic perceptions?
Do uncontacted Amazonian people see Buddha figures if they take psychedelics (or Christ figures, like I saw with peyote)?
Research points quite strongly to either hard or soft constructivism β our life experiences shape the details of our psychedelic and mystical experiences.
So the fact that people have similar experiences could be explained in multiple ways.
Lastly, you create a false dichotomy between hallucination and βobjectiveβ realness.
Letβs say we have become non-constructivists and decided that machine elves are βobjectively realβ in some way that transcends the influence of βmaterialβ reality β why should we assume that those perceptions are a direct experience of some objective reality rather than just an interpretation of some uncommon aspect of reality?
Nothing in your piece here even attempts to answer that question.
So why am I giving you a hard time about all this?
Because we need wisdom which allows us to integrate the insights, visions, and experiences we have with psychedelics. Rather than get into the ontological weeds and start making claims about whatβs objective or subjective β we could just start at what those experiences were like, how they made us feel, and who we discovered ourselves to be.
If we chase the dopamine high of the paradigm shift β βactually, up is down, down is up, and weβre all aliens,β or whatever flavor of βactuallyβ¦β is shiny and attractive for someone β weβre now creating a disconnect between our heart and our mind, and weβre limiting our ability to connect with othersβ experiences.
If psychedelics ever became highly normalized in our culture, there would be a wide variety of ontological interpretations of our experiences with them. Folks will debate forever over what is real. Essentialists, perennialists, constructors, mysterianists, materialists, diests, etc.
For me, one of the big jobs before is to create the context for normalizing that people can use psychedelics without being charged as criminals.
Trying to tell people that their psychedelic experiences are βthe objective realityβ and their waking life is a βhallucinationβ might be a fun βwhoa, mannnnnβ¦β trip to go on (despite being an undisciplined rhetorical game) β but is that whatβs going to help open peopleβs minds?
On the contrary, I think it will close more minds than it might open. People will here this kind of thing and think βyeah, no, I like to think clearly, I donβt want to risk losing that just so I can see some machine elves or whatever.β
Now, if you donβt care about opening peoplesβ minds in that way, and youβre more just preaching to the βactuallyβ¦β choir who like to get high on βinsight pornβ β well, carry on and forget I said anything :)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, but your critique is riddled with misunderstandings & overconfidence in your own interpretations. I'll unpack this.
On Hallucination:
You claim I misuse the word "hallucination" without grasping the broader context. Leading neuroscientists like Anil Seth & Karl Friston argue that all perception is, at its core, a controlled hallucination. The distinction between βhallucinationβ & βrealityβ lies in coherence & consensus, not some rigid binary youβve imposed. Your analogy of translating French to English is not only clumsy but irrelevantβit ignores the well-supported notion that the brain doesnβt passively observe reality but actively constructs it.
If youβre going to argue semantics, at least update your framework to align with current cognitive science instead of clinging to a dated, oversimplified view of perception.
Shared Psychedelic Experiences:
You dismiss shared Psychedelic phenomena like machine elves as cultural constructs, citing modern machinery as an influence. This conveniently ignores the historical & cross-cultural prevalence of entities in mystical experiences. From shamanic traditions to medieval religious visions, these themes appear globally. Your argument cherry-picks examples to fit your narrative while ignoring evidence to the contrary.
You reduce this to mere "similar experiences" without addressing the deeper question: Why are these phenomena so consistent across individuals and contexts? Constructivism alone doesnβt fully explain thisβacknowledging the limits of your perspective would serve you better here.
Objective vs. Subjective Reality:
You accuse me of creating a false dichotomy between hallucination and objective reality. This critique is ironic, given that your argument rests on rigid binaries and assumptions about perception. The blog never claims Psychedelics reveal βobjective realityβ in its entirety; rather, it questions whether they grant access to layers of reality our waking consciousness filters out.
Your attempt to boil this down to βfun, clickbait rhetoricβ shows a lack of engagement with the actual point: the boundaries between subjective & objective reality are far more porous than your black-and-white reasoning allows.
Closing Minds vs. Opening Them:
You seem fixated on the idea that challenging conventional views will alienate people. Newsflash: Paradigm shifts arenβt meant to coddle the status quo. Psychedelics themselves are disruptiveβthey challenge deeply ingrained beliefs and force us to reexamine assumptions. If someoneβs mind βclosesβ because they canβt handle the idea of questioning their waking reality, thatβs on them, not on the argument.
Your jab about βinsight pornβ is a lazy attempt to trivialize bold exploration. Iβm not here to cater to people unwilling to think critically or engage with uncomfortable ideas. The goal isnβt to water things down for mass appealβitβs to push boundaries and foster meaningful dialogue, something your reductive critique fails to do.
You position yourself as a voice of reason while delivering a poorly reasoned argument, riddled with logical holes and dismissive rhetoric. Instead of lecturing me about how to think deeper, perhaps reflect on your own biases and the limits of your understanding.
Oh boy. Alright letβs dig into this.
Psychedelic/mystical idealists often dismiss these critiques as mere close-mindedness, nothing more than reductive thinking. But theyβre not quite right. And I can try to explain.
Youβre conflating my statements about semantics with assumptions youβre making about my framework of βtheory of mindβ. And along the way youβre playing a cherry picking game.
In your post you donβt make a distinction between βcontrolled hallucinationsβ and βuncontrolled hallucinationsβ the way that Anil Seth does. Rather, you do the thing youβve accused me of, which is create a rigid binary instead of teasing out the nuance.
As you put it:
βThe brain is constantly hallucinating. This process is what we typically consider βnormalβ perception. However, when substances like Psychedelics are introduced, we label the resulting experiences as hallucinations. This distinction is deeply flawed.β
halΒ·luΒ·ciΒ·naΒ·tion β noun βan experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.
If a child is prescribed some psychoactive medication and starts freaking out because she sees starts seeing spiders crawling all over the walls, weβd say βitβs ok, donβt worry, those are just hallucinations.β We would not say βthe medicine has lifted the veil of reality and now youβre seeing things which were already thereβ ( β both funny and terrifying to think about some unhinged parent actually saying that. But knowing humans, Iβm sure itβs happened).
People see all kinds of things on psychedelics. Clouds turn into rabbits. Gradients become fractals. You can close your eyes and perceive a psychedelic swirl of anything from Looney Toons to classical music. And itβs a huge stretch to claim it is βflawedβ to distinguish these phenomena as hallucinations. Even Anil Seth makes a huge distinction, saying that psychedelics lead to βuncontrolledβ rather than βcontrolledβ βhallucinationsβ.
Speaking of Seth, you lazily prescribe that I get with the βcurrent cognitive science.β I could turn that around on you.
Seth rejects your claims that psychedelics give us access to a βshared, objective realityβ (your words) which our waking minds βfilter outβ (your words). He explicitly rejects that and says that psychedelics lead the mind to construct/infer interpretations of the βpossibility spaceβ, and acknowledges that there are many unknowns around how and why psychedelics work, but leans entirely on neurological explanations, especially the dopaminergic system.
But youβre happy to take one of Sethβs points, oversimplify and distort it, and then act like βcurrent scienceβ bolsters your claims, while then rejecting that same scientist when he challenges your claims. Not exactly a strong position to argue from, especially when you donβt provide your own deeper arguments.
And even where I agree with Seth, I think terms like βuncontrolled hallucinationβ are a bad language game. He more often uses terms like inference/prediction/construction which I think work better, for all the reasons stated in my first comment and above. Iβd happily argue him on this point.
On machine elves, if you can show me evidence of such phenomenological reports or depictions pre-Renaissance, lay βem on me β Iβve been studying shamanic traditions and the cultural mysteries for 20 years and havenβt come across that yet.
But of course, βabsence of evidence is not evidence of absence.β (Thatβs a principle worth remembering as you further contemplate the meaning of psychedelic experiences β unless your mind is closed to questioning your own perspectives).
Letβs look a little closer at some of your logic:
You claim that because certain phenomena are cross-cultural and historical, they canβt be called cultural constructs. This conveniently ignore that there is loads of material overlap across cultures throughout time and space. No matter when or where you are, any two groups of humans are going to have to have a whole lot in common. It would follow that their non-ordinary mental constructions might also have loads in common.
But of course there are differences too. And mystical perennialist would point out that these differences show up in a predictable ways in non-ordinary experiences. Encounters with βthe divineβ and βsupernatural entitiesβ tend to be colored by oneβs cultural milieu.
If you can point to a specific examples of phenomena that would seem to defy these expectations, do share. Little people, snakes, geometric patterns, etc, donβt cut it.
Hereβs a trip report for you: When I was around twenty I started meditating, and I once mediated in my closet for a couple hours in total darkness. Nothing too exciting happened. But then I turned on the lights and, with pupils highly dilated, my vision quickly went all white, and then quickly morphed into a sea of colorful fractalized pixelation. It was beautiful, even though it only lasted a brief moment. Of course, Iβve seen similar patterning, with both open and closed eyes, with psychedelics. But with sustained psychedelic experiences, those fractals often morph into recognizable shapes or pseudo-shapes. Geometric faces and figures, etc.
Maybe itβs not a βshared, objective realityβ Iβm tapping into with those experiences, but rather a shared, objective capacity of the brain when it becomes excited with external stimuli or internal modulation. Iβm saying βmaybeβ because consciousness itself is, in my opinion, transcendentally mysterious, and we βdonβt know what we donβt know,β so Iβm hesitant to imagine that any explanation can fully capture our phenomenological experiences.
But Iβm also not quick to say what processes of the brain are βsimply impossibleβ (your words).
Also your words: βIf these experiences were mere hallucinations, weβd expect them to be as unique as fingerprintsβ¦β
Why would we expect that? I donβt know anyone who says we should expect that. It doesnβt make sense to expect that. Seems youβve set up a very weak βstrawmanβ argument here which doesnβt actually strengthen your claim.
βThe brain didnβt evolve to construct such complex, intricate worlds. Doing so would serve no evolutionary purpose and is therefore impossible within the brainβs natural repertoire.β
As you admit earlier, the brain definitely constructs complex, intricate worlds β itβs doing that right now, and it does it all the time. Itβs one of the brains most important evolutionary functions β modeling a complex world so that we can effectively navigate through that world.
So the fact that it will model very different worlds when its normal material functioning is modulated, isnβt too surprising. And then consider the brainβs algorithmic processing functions (including visual processing), our deepest instinctual and evolutionary drives, our vast access to personal memories, the wild cultural biosphere we are steeped in from the moment our brains form in the womb β and youβve got the ingredients for all kinds of relatively explainable but highly non-ordinary experiences.
Am I claiming that there are not additional ingredients which we donβt yet understand or maybe will never understand? No. But Iβm also not going to use broken logic to reject entire domains of the explanatory space in favor of a poorly defined gesture toward a βshared, objective realityβ that, itself, has no explanation.
Thatβs not because Iβm against paradigm shifts or watering things down. Itβs because wisdom demands openness. And openness begets learning. And itβs in learning that the limitations of old paradigms are discovered, and helpful new paradigms can be considered.
What I am rejecting in your post is a dogmatism that says your paradigm is the right one, that others are merely βpreposterousβ, and that youβve accomplished anything close to a convincing argument.
Maybe youβre just βopenβ enough to trade one paradigm for another, but not enough to keep the door open between those two paradigmatic worlds. Thatβs not a harsh judgement from me β most humans are pretty limited in their openness. But I challenge you to develop the psychological strength to push your limits.
Take care.
Your comment is an exercise in verbosity masquerading as intellectual depth. You accuse me of oversimplifying and cherry-picking, yet your own critique selectively leans on Anil Seth when it suits you & dismisses his contributions elsewhere. You conflate scientific frameworks with your own rigid interpretations and then criticize me for not aligning with your worldview.
The distinction between "controlled" and "uncontrolled" hallucinations is a semantic game, not a substantive critique. The fact remains: all perception is a construction of the brain, whether during waking life or altered states. Your fixation on semantics doesn't refute this but rather highlights your discomfort with ideas that challenge your tightly held paradigms.
Your appeal to authorityβyour 20 years of studying shamanic traditionsβis irrelevant here (and revealing). You demand "evidence of machine elves" pre-Renaissance while conveniently dismissing cross-cultural and historical commonalities in mystical experiences as mere "cultural constructs." This selective skepticism reveals the fragility of your argument, not its strength. Anytime someone invokes the 'I have accomplished such & such' they are grasping at straws.
Lastly, your parting jab about βdeveloping psychological strengthβ is laughably condescending & reflects the mindset of someone unwilling to engage in true intellectual humility. Projection is the last refuge of a weak-minded man.
Andrew, I like your ideas, but I am wondering about what you said to Chris, namely,
"...yet your own critique selectively leans on Anil Seth when it suits you & dismisses his contributions elsewhere."
Generally speaking, everyone everywhere does this all the time and that is OK.
I honestly can't see where it is inherently wrong to agree with some of what a person (even a serious researcher) says, but disagree elsewhere. Mind you, dismissing a whole ball of wax because one disagrees with only one aspect of his/her ideas/findings etc. is not good.
I guess if you canβt understand what someone is saying, calling it a βsemantic gameβ is a nice rhetorical maneuver to avoid actually addressing. Your entire reply is a burrito of Brandoliniβs law. But lucky for me, itβs so bad that I donβt need to point it all out β almost everyone reading it will see that itβs wand-having rhetorical salad. If everything is a hallucination, I suppose youβre hallucinating the belief that you can reason very well.
I, for one, appreciated this whole exchange, it made me think much harder about all of this. Would have been nice if the snarky could have been avoided but hey, I get it and am easily guilty of the same. Weβre all just human after all. But I enjoyed the sparing that didnβt completely go off the rails. Cheers to you all π»
Not to kick up dirt when it's been settled for a bit but...a quick point about your addressing Andrew's first point of "People experience strikingly similar phenomena on psychedelics." As a long-time member of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, I'd say yes to your point that Amazonian people probably ain't gonna be visited by Buddha or machine elves, but...the essence of the experience is the same. What over 10,000 guided & recorded trips from Stanislov Grof's work would call "an experience of cosmic unity." for one example - which is the same for everyone, and completely unique for everyone, at the wonderfully paradoxical same time. And...if you've ever had this experience, or any of the others by peoples from every continent around the world, like "after death" or "time travel" or "out of body travel" or "meeting your helping and compassionate spirits" of all types, I can assure you speaking for myself, there's no way my little brain would have come up with that. And most importantly, the feeling that occurs, as a kind of synesthetic knowing of truth, that they exist - outside of me -watched, witnessed and communicated with. Oh, and the same thing has been, and is consistently able to be, repeated through the use of steady monotonous drumbeat/percussion and some training sans psychs. You wield the word well, and I have love ones who you've nailed with the "don't want to risk losing my mind" but...that's part of the problem as I see it...the mind wants to control everything & eliminate the variables, but the heart - spirit - is looking to surrender that control. And that be scary - especially when "hallucination" gets thrown about.
I don't think we're disagreeing much. You'll find in my previous comments that I am not advocating for total material reductionism, as I believe that consciousness itself is fundamentally mysterious. So for me, its not controversial to say that "there's no way my little brain would have come up with that", because I don't believe the brain alone can come up with any of our experiences.
I'm challenging the author's notion that psychedelic experiences are categorically non-hallucinatory (which is not only poorly argued, but also inconsistent with his claim that we are "constantly hallucinating").
He uses poorly-researched half-truths to claim that these experiences are "a shared, objective reality that Psychedelics allow us to access".
Even though I've had experiences that seem to track very closely to, for instance, Buddhist cosmology, that might simply be a consequence of our shared human psychology, not evidence of an "objective realm".
I remember my friend's report of her first experience with LSD. Before the trip, she had been looking at pornography, and during the trip she saw a psychedelic swirl of nude body parts on her bedroom ceiling. According to Andrew M Weiss, this couldn't be a hallucination. No, she must have been accessing the Objective Realm of Swirling Ceiling Titties or whatever. It's just a bad argument he's made.
So this is really crazy, but I see those things in my third eye without psychedelics.
I didnβt know that other people saw clowns, I saw one this morning and I thought thatβs odd lolβ¦
Fascinating! Yeah, many ways we can achieve altered states of consciousness. The patterns people report are intriguing.
Psychedelics were badly categorized, early on. They are not hallucinogenic, but hallucinolytic.
Very interesting!
I feel like this is technology allowing Us to tap in to the greater whole⦠The Grand Scheme Of Things
Love this, we are aligned.
Would you say that everything you see on a trip is by design and not random firing of neurons?
Everything that happens under a Psychedelic is a firing of neurons for sure. From a neurobiological perspective, that is precisely what is happening.
What matters more is what is the significance of these neurons firing? Materialists argue it is just random. Those who have actually experienced this phenomenon report something vastly different is happening.
My belief is neurons firing are like the debris falling off a rocket during launch; markers that we are leaving this realm.
Hi Andrew. Just stumbled onto this, one week after returning home from a ceremony reinforcing every word. It wasn't my first, but it was my deepest, and the revelations were... ineffible.
Our world isn't the only world. Our reality isn't the only reality.
Great work!
Thank you!
Sounds like you had an amazing journey.
I suspect we are only scratching the surface of the amount of worlds that exist.
We're just skipping over the surface.
I'd love to connect for a deeper conversation at some point if you're of a mind, once I get up and running after the equinox. Good to hear from you.
Thanks Andrew. For anyone who wants to understand how the brain sees, labels, and explores things this is a very good article.
What we think we see, and remember about this physical experiences in this world is most definitely something that we can call a halucination - if, and only if we're using our physical minds to intrepret what we experience in a human form.
But...... What about those things we experience when we're not in a human body anymore?
The simple truth is that we don't even need to be in a human body to experience new realms of existence.
On many occasions durning this lifetime, I've been able to experience many different cosmic realms AFTER MY BODY AND MIND HAD COMPLETELY DISSAPPEARED.
During some of these experiences, other people simple walked right straigt through the space where my "phisical body had been several moments earlier. I could see them as they walked right straight through me.
On other occassions my body would often "blink" in and out of existance about several times a second. And most normal (who were in their physical human bodes) could still not see or feel me.
Now, here's another interesting observation. ... I could still meditate, at very deep levels of fully enlightened "Cosmic" consciousness even when my physical body had dissappeared.
Appreciate your thoughts! Youβre touching on something fascinatingβthe nature of perception and how much of what we experience is shaped (or limited) by our physical senses. It definitely raises the question: if our baseline reality is already a kind of hallucination, what happens when we step outside of it?
Your experiences sound incredibleβlike firsthand encounters with the idea that consciousness isnβt tied to the body in the way we assume. The whole "blinking in and out of existence" part is especially wild. It makes me think about those moments in deep Psychedelic states where the body feels irrelevant, or even nonexistent, yet awareness persists.
To your last point-I suspect those that have achieved 'cosmic consciousness' can access this place via modalities like meditation or breathwork.
You are making me remember! This must've been 40 years ago: on PBS there was a docu about some really, really stone age tribe (Amazon region?) taking some root that they dug up from somewhere, not sure if it was a root or a leaf, which they then ingested and these men had some apparently amazing experience which caused them to drool. So some scientists analyzed it and called it DMT. IIRC - di methyl tryptamine.
OK, I will now look it up to be sure. Here is what they said,
"DMT is a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States. This means that it is illegal to manufacture, buy, possess, or distribute the drug. The substance has a high potential for abuse, no government-recognized medical use, and a lack of accepted safety parameters for use."
So I guess I better forget about it. I don't have what it takes to make my way into the Amazon jungle...
DMT being illegal is a travesty. It is a beautiful medicine with profound abilities to open the eyes of those who walk through life asleep.
Havenβt even read this yet, but Iβm already loving the title πͺπ½
ππ»
This is more reflective of our western culture - i would hazard to say the majority of people outside modern culture, consider this to be portals to reality rather than man made dreams
Loved this thanks for sharing
Thank you!
Good work Andrew. And practical.
Thank you!
This is a fascinating explanation.
How did you first decide to dip your toes in the water, or rather, open the portal?
Thank you.
As an attempt to heal from a profound loss. That initial journey catalyzed an exploration into this fascinating world.