multiple realities

Sounds good enough for me . It's very easy to discount everything as simply imagination at first. The tricky part, however, is how you deal with something once it seems to have come from somewhere other than just your mind. This is kind of what I got with Salvia. Everything sensible about myself wants to say that it was just the drug stimulating my mind and that none of it was "real", but man...it seems so real that I just can't throw it away without at least consideration.

I can see where someone might see believing in multiple realities as dangerous somehow, but the trick is to keep it on an intellectual level. You have to realize that it's all speculation and that, even if you really began to believe it, the only way to really breach into another reality would certainly be death, and that isn't desirable by any means for most of us.

EDIT: I know with LSD the nature of the drug makes the experience much less about hallucinations and much more about an alteration of what is already there. I think for this reason what we're talking about is perhaps less common from just LSD. Just from reading I would say it's most common with smoked DMT and Salvia (and I suppose either disassociatives or deliriants, whichever one is supposed to make the hallucinations more real). From my experiences with ayahuasca and salvia I'd say this is probably true. LSD never gave me nearly as much of that "other reality" effect. I hear it's also somewhat common on hero doses of shrooms, but I've yet to try shrooms (have a few jars in my closet about ready to birth, though ).

 

I know what you mean. It's a practice that improves with time. For me, it's all about having control over my own mind.

 

I definetly believe that there are other realities that we can tap into through psycedelics or meditation. the different "antipodes" (A. Huxley) of the mind are a maze of different worlds in our minds.

peace,
steven

 

Yeah this is a subject ive also wondered about. I think the first time you have an "out of reality experience with salvia, it is after that when you truly start thinking about this kinda shit. And then when i took acid i thought about it even more. Acid has really enlightened this idea overall for me, because after i had those salvia trips, i had known that i had been to another reality, but the problem was that salvia gives you a feeling of anxiety/paranoia when you are tripping hard. So the point is that i had been to a negative type of reality. But i am soo glad that i did salvia before acid because it had mentally prepared me and once i did acid the reality i had entered was "real heaven" which had made me so enlightened because now i truly belive in some kind of heaven somewhere somehow. Even if all the heaven there is was just in that one trip, than thats good enough for me because i now know that there are realities out there that are better than you can imagine.

 

i had a revelation one night while stoned. just watching a movie in the dark, it was the sinking of titanic actually. and i suddenly realised that what i am watching, the film, must be real. have its own reality where it endlessly plays out and these people in the film endlessly are tortured in a hell of the sinking titanic. cause its like well, even if it is a film no matter what film, with the amount of possibilities their are in reality or realities than this must have occured somwhere, somplace on one of those infinite amount of realities.

cause for us to think somthing or gather some information, it must be real some where in reality. like a dream or an image in your head, if you can imagine it, than it must be real. because where did you imagine it from, it came from somwhere in some reality.

but still now i dont know what i beleive, its a mixture of all the revelations iv had, but crushed by the beleife shattering lsd experience i had the other month. i guess i dont have one set beleif, but just an assortment of all the shit my brain has realised about the "truth" of existenze.

 

Yeah, like maybe the actual Titanic a century ago? But, no, I get what you're saying.

Tell us about this.

 

Yah I just took 350 hits of acid, im trippin ballz

 

i was on the way home from this party, my friends mum had picked us up. and i was just sitting in the back, looking out the window and it was just phenominal, to see the city lights as i went past, and everthing just going past. but anyway we passed this christian school which had this absolutly massive cross in the air on the building. and i was just in such deep thought on that car trip home. and when i saw it i just realised that i dont know what i beleive, and thought to myself, well maybe there is a god. just because i never did beleive before means there isnt, but it was just an amazing ride home. doesnt sound it, but if anyones been in a car on the tail end of acid (was only about 6-7 hours actually) and just looked out and seen everything go by. id trade it all for that again. but it just opened my mind and made me think when i saw that, it deffinatly shattered everthing i beleived in. i sooo want to experience that car trip again...iv never felt so good and so Connected with reality. i was actually scared when the car first started moving, i thought i wouldnt be able to take the 15 min drive home.

 

Almost makes me feel guilty every time I think about people getting hurt or dying ):

 

I personally believe something along the lines of "multiple realities". My drug experiences have merely seemed to confirm my suspicions about the nature of existence. First, I believe that there is no god, and we are exactly what we seem to be, for all practical intents and purposes. "Smart monkeys" is one description, but I think that "large scale self-replicating chemical reactions" is even better. Sometimes I'm a little intimidated by the scale and irrationality of human existence. There is literally so much going on, so much of it contradictory (genocide, infanticide, love, friendship, rolling) that it is difficult to see how anyone would think god that would do this. The endless tensions between our biological reality of things and our desires as consciousnesses is a testament to the fundamental fact that reality sucks.

Second, I believe that the fact that we are constrained to our set of sensory systems gives us a highly biased view of reality. There is something objectively real out there, but we will never be able to comprehend it, simply because there is so much there that we simply cannot take it all in. Can you imagine being able to see every frequency of electromagnetic radiation, instead of just visible light? What's worse is that our sensory systems conspire against us in pursuit of the true nature of reality. Nerves filter out common patterns, so after you sit with a shirt on for a while, you no longer notice it being there. If something so simple as the presence of a shirt on your body is filtered away from you, can you imagine how much more you're missing on account of your nervous system? What's the justification for this? Chemical reactions propagate more easily if they aren't distracted by what's going on around them. We resort to drugs throw our nervous system into disarray, to break up these patterns, and allow us to remove the filter for a short while.

Sometimes I think a solipsistic perspective on reality is the right one... So, number three: I think that we each have our own personal realities, that are defined by the biological hardware we were given. I suspect that this is how something as concrete as biological differences translate into something as ephemeral and difficult to define as personality differences (personality is a useful abstraction for everyday life, but a baseless one). It's a little easier to deal with how crazy the opposite sex is when you think to yourself that they are experiencing a totally different reality, and not just a different reality in the sense of being a different consciousness, but different even in presentation to that consciousness. Shy people have a certain reality they perceive, while outgoing people another.

Fourth, I think it's highly likely that the universe is a simulation. Not that this means I run out and murder people... just something to be aware of. The reason why I think this mostly statistical. Imagine a civilization with sufficient computational capacity to run another universe, what would they simulate? Probably another universe where life arises, to study what happens under different physical rules. You can imagine that some of these simulated universes might eventually give rise to civilizations with enough computing power to simulate another universe, and so on. It's kind of like a tree, where there are an exponential number of branches, but only one trunk.

Fifth, I think all of this just goes to show that we should revel in being sentient. I'm actually having a pretty great time at life.

Peter Popper, you mention that a movie seems like another reality. I think that this is a really, really interesting insight that people do not seem to notice, and that is why it is highly problematic. Not only is it a different reality, but that reality *very* closely resembles the one we exist in. It's kind of scary, feeling touched by a movie, because that is essentially letting a reality that is structured very differently than your own on a non-superficial level (it's telling a story) influence you within your own reality, even if there is no basis for that change within your own experience of reality. Philip K. Dick had a really interesting speech where he pointed this out: http://downlode.org/etext/how_to_build.html I disagree with most of the second half of that speech, but it's good that he's thinking about reality.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

If you think that some of these thoughts and beliefs are contradictory, I agree. Isn't the world fucked up? :-D

 

are you trying to call me a liar by lying yourself? dumb ass!

just because you dont believe it does not make it untrue.

i did not take that much on purpose. i had tripped the night before and i had just gotten off the phone with the girl who was about to become my ex-girlfriend. she said that she told the cops about my acid and that i would be smart to just hand it over. so i went to the bathroom and dropped more then 150hits of acid in the toilet. immediately after i did this i freaked out and reached in like an idiot, grabbed them with my hands and pulled them out of the toilet. i sat there for a minute or so staring at the acid wondering -what i should do. then i realized what i had done and said 'holy shit' in my head then dropped them into the toilet. i went to the couch to chill out a bit. i woke up some time later higher then i have ever been in my entire life. i have taken up to 30hits of acid at once before and i know i was on more then that. 100 just seems like a good number... all i really know was it was a lot. something i would probably never do on my own. - but a great experience none the less.

i guess i would have been smart to include this information in my trip report. i am not sure what is more believable but i know that this is the truth - would have been good to be completely honest i guess.

the cops did eventually come to my house but i was fortunate enough to be aware that they were coming. for some reason i knew i had to get out of the house right away as i felt the cops were coming. i was in no shape to be talking to the cops. i went across the road by the river to wait. i wasnt waiting long and sure enough they came by looking for me - i left the front door of my house open so they could just look around. they searched my house and the property with flashlights for about half an hour before they got called to go somewhere else. i guess they got a good enough search of the house because they never came back.

 

i'm not sure what i think about "multiple realities"

but i do believe in multiple universes (err...multiverses) as well as additional dimensions not normally perceivable by humans. but then again, both of these things are pretty damn close to scientifically proven. either way, if i'm not mistaken, both ideas are pretty widely accepted as likely.

now the question is: are there other lifeforms which may exist in these other multiverses or dimensions which, in normal consciousness, we are unable to notice or communicate with while under the influence of certain substances?

do the experiences of entity contact found often with DMT, salvia, and high doses of other psychedelics like mushrooms or LSD have any validity in the sense of being real? do these substances metaphorically unlock something in our brains which allows us to perceive parts of reality that we normally cannot, or do they simply alter the way that we perceive the three dimensions which we are normally confined to?

there are several possible scenarios.

its quite possible that these substances may allow us, in some way currently unknown to science, to perceive some very real things which we normally can't in everyday reality. we may have contact with very real entities.

at certain dosage levels or with some particularly strong psychedelics (i.e. DMT, Salvia) we may actually have our psyche mostly perceive some very real multiverse physically seperate from our own, and entity contact may in fact simply be contact with alien species which really exist somewhere infinitely far away from us.

its also possible that this is theologically valid and actual, that we are encountering gods, devils, goddesses, angels, jin, spirits, ghosts, or other spiritually based entities which do not exist as such in physical realms and therefore are present but need not exist in some unseen deminsion or in some multiverse seperate from our own. we could be literally having visions of heavens, hells, and purgatories, or stories from our past, future, or present.

its also VERY possible that these substances simply alter our ability to perceive what we think of as "normal" reality - our world and our universe of three (and only three) dimensions, and that the more "fucked up" we become the more "crazy shit" we dream up.


but something of a mantra can be found within the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman, and it reads: "if so, so what?"

these possibilities are all intriguing from an academic standpoint, and worth investigation if someday science develops an ability to actually study these issues, but what real difference does it make?

basically there are more important issues to consider.

1. the psychedelic experience is able to present us with new ways of thinking about ordinary reality, and provide us with new was of understanding ourselves and our culture.

2. if evolutionary theory is to be believed, there is no readily clear reason for substances like DMT to be found in the human brain, no clear reason for mushrooms to contain psilocybin and psilocin, no clear reason for any number of plants and animals to create any number of psychedelic substances. evolution tells us that very few traits found within every member of any given species is worthless, and that so many things produce psychedelics is a fact of no little importance. human beings since prehistory have included use of such substances in religious rites and rituals, and may very likely have influenced the very early religions which have transformed into our modern world religions. clearly many "undeveloped" and "backwards" peoples still use psychedelic rites today in religious practice, and the practices are being taken back up and adapted by people of more modern and technologically advanced peoples today. it is also clear that use of such substances was vital to many prehistoric peoples' religions. these substances have been profaned in the past several thousand years by many cultures, but without them our cultures would have a VERY different appearance - and we may still be a prehistoric civilization only slightly different from our apelike ancestors.

3. the psychedelic experience has little to no value in and of itself. proper set, setting, and dosage are of paramount importance. tripping simply out of boredom or for fun is worthless. of course it is perfectly alright to enjoy tripping, but for that to be the sole motivation will achieve nothing of any more value than watching a TV show.

4. the psychedelics can provide modern cultures with experiences of both psychiological and spiritual import regardless of their dis-/ability to provide contact with real entities or show us alternate realities or universes. even if everything in the psychedelic experience comes strictly from within our brains, the experiences are valid and can be very worthwhile in both therapeutic and spiritual/religious settings.


i think that -most- reasonably intelligent and rational people who are able to step away from their socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, and political biases can see that empirical evidence has proven the earth is millions of years old, and that human beings existed for many millenia before the advent of art or written language, and that religion existed at the time of the earliest written/depicted history. to think that religion was born at the same time as writing, painting, or drawing is foolishness. the world religions of today, while potentially valid ways of enterpreting reality, ourselves and our cultures, are not possibly all true in a literal sense, and since none of them are the Original, one and only religion of the world, none of them can (fairly) claim to be more correct than another. this does not make them valueless or deny them of their respectability of positive benefits to the world; it merely demonstrates that fact is NOT the determining factor of what religions have to offer! religious practice in almost any fashion is often beneficial to the believers independent of the facts or myths upon which the religion is based.

one of the main differences in human beings and animals, apart from our ability to adapt to virtually any climate found on earth and learn to exploit its resources, is the immeasurably long history of religious practices. religion definitely began in prehistory, and may even have begun among our prelinguistic ancestors with more than average capacity for thinking and reasoning. in such a case, these people had to have something inspire them into dreaming up gods and goddesses, powers beyond their control, and so on. most likely in our spreading over the globe and expanding our habitat, learning about new food sources and new organisms, we definitely quickly encountered some psychoactive plants, fungi, and even animals, including psychedelics like psilocybian mushrooms.

to paraphrase the ideas laid out in terrence mckenna's food of the gods, psilocybe cubensis could have provided very early humans with a reliable, easily found means of experiencing bizarre, extraordinary and otherworldly experiences beyond their ability to describe. these experiences likely laid the groundwork for religious beliefs and practices, revelations about ourselves and our communities, and laid the groundwork for modern humanity.

these experiences are no less valid or applicable today, provided we do not profane them by using them for simple recreation. whether or not we can contact other worlds, dimensions, or spiritual entities through the use of psychedelics, we can still learn and adapt based on the lessons they teach us.


sure, its possible that there are other realities than what we normally experience. more likely, in my opinion, is that there are other dimensions which we cannot normally perceive, but which we MAY be able to perceive while using psychedelics. also likely is the existance of multiverses, but in my opinion its not as likely that we are able to communicate with beings from another universe while under the influence of psychedelics. its also quite possible that we may have contact with the Truly Divine. the "most likely" is that psychedelics simply alter our perception of the one and only reality, the three dimensions of Planet Earth.

but if so, so what?