Posts

DMT And Physics

Image
I have left around a number of (what I would call) psychedelic books, which you will notice consist very largely of photographs of pattern in nature: crystal structures, shells, bone structures, leaf structures, animalcules, erosion patterns, patterns in marble, all kinds of pattern in nature. Because, for some reason or other, one of the strongest effects that I had from the use of psychedelics was a vastly renewed appreciation of this dimension of the natural world; a kind of perception that the whole world is pattern. This is a very strange feeling, because our common sense normally bases the world on substance. We think of primordial and more or less solid stuff, which is found in dense forms as in granite or a ball of steel, and found in very refined forms such as a gas. And we think that all the world is shapes of, forms of, this primordial stuff. But one of the extraordinary consequences of using psychedelics is that everything suddenly turns into transparency. I think that’s wh

How The Eye Forms Images

Image
Our eyes continually move even while we fix our gaze on an object. Although these fixational eye movements have a magnitude that should make them visible to us, we are unaware of them. If fixational eye movements are counteracted, our visual perception fades completely as a result of neural adaptation. So, our visual system has a built-in paradox — we must fix our gaze to inspect the minute details of our world, but if we were to fixate perfectly, the entire world would fade from view. Owing to their role in counteracting adaptation, fixational eye movements have been studied to elucidate how the brain makes our environment visible. Moreover, because we are not aware of these eye movements, they have been studied to understand the underpinnings of visual awareness. Recent studies of fixational eye movements have focused on determining how visible perception is encoded by neurons. https://drive.google.com/file/eye_brain.mp4

The Dream And Waking State

Image
The waking state is becoming more dreamlike and the dream state is becoming more vivid. In the Bhagwad Gita it says that 'What is daytime for the ignorant is nighttime for the sage and what is daytime for the sage is nighttime for the ignorant.' What is meant by that is what is daytime or the waking state, from the conventional point of view, the waking state consists mainly of objects made out of matter. And objects are considered from the conventional point of view in the waking state to be the most real aspect of experience. When in fact the very word real or reality comes from the Latin word meaning the 'realis' meaning a thing. Betraying our belief that it is the extent to which something is a thing that it is real. And the extent to which it something departs from being a thing it becomes correspondingly less real. So when somebody says to you, "Oh come on, get real", they mean come out of your thoughts and feelings and come down to earth. Deal with thin

The Nature Of Perception

Image
John Searle turns his attention to perception — visual perception, to be precise. Perception is both the basic way that minds connect with configurations of objects and attributes in a local environment, and an epicenter for sensory feeling and experience. That is, perception is a site of both representation and phenomenology. And since the capacities for representation and phenomenology have long been taken by philosophers to be characteristic marks of the mental, philosophical questions about perception provide a window into philosophical questions about minds more generally. When it comes to the long tradition of thinking and writing about perception, Searle takes the situation to be rather bleak. He believes that the entirety of philosophical work on perception since Descartes has been bewitched by what he calls 'the Bad Argument' and, as a consequence, is unnecessary and incoherent. Yet Searle wants to not just bury philosophical theories of perception but also praise them

Everything We Don’t Know

Image
  This is green. This is red. And this is blue. But how can you tell that what you’re seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue? We’ve named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them, but in reality, there’s no way of knowing that what you see is the same as what another person sees. Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we’ve made as a species, there is still a lot to learn about earth, life, and the human condition. There’s still everything we don’t know. On the 26th of February 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. While some saw it as gold and white, others saw it as blue and black. Since then, there have been a number of repetitions of the same experiment either using the same sense, in this case, sight, or even other senses, like hearing in the famous 'yanny' or 'laurel' debate. These experiments remind us that there’s no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things. What I call red might just

Dreams Communicate Emotionally

Image
Have you ever been at a movie and let out a bellowing laugh and snort only to realize no one else is laughing? Have you ever gotten uncomfortable when someone cries in class or in a public place? Emotions are clearly personal, as they often project what we’re feeling on the inside to those around us whether we want it to show or not. Emotions are also interpersonal in that another person’s show of emotion usually triggers a reaction from us—perhaps support if the person is a close friend or awkwardness if the person is a stranger. Emotions are central to any interpersonal relationship, and it’s important to know what causes and influences emotions so we can better understand our own emotions and better respond to others when they display emotions. Emotions are physiological, behavioral, and/or communicative reactions to stimuli that are cognitively processed and experienced as emotional. This definition includes several important dimensions of emotions. First, emotions are often intern

Dreaming DMT Addict

Image
DMT grants access to otherwise invisible realms of universal consciousness, where extraterrestrial communication and confrontations with death commonly occur. When taken properly, the user launches into an ethereal journey of disembodiment, on a hyperdimensional round trip from couch to cosmic consciousness and back, all in less than 20 minutes. But mysteriously, this enigmatic substance is naturally (endogenously) produced by the human body. Sixty years after this discovery, modern science has yet to answer what may be the ultimate psychedelic question: Why do our bodies readily manufacture this potent psychedelic substance?  Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szara became the first person to experience the subjective effects of synthetic DMT in 1956 through self administration. Following Szara’s discovery of DMT’s subjective effects, the leading hypothesis was that endogenous DMT may act as a 'schizotoxin'—an internal substance that causes symptoms of schizophrenia an