41–50 of 142 posts
If anyone is in NYC this week, this conference on DMT has a ridiculously stacked speaker list: https://events.theassemblage.com/dmtdialogues
A HN friend and I are going to this. Email in bio if anyone attending is interested in meeting up.
So anyway, I can imagine that a pleasant death from opioid or barbiturate overdose might be comparable. Or maybe breathing helium, where there's no overt respiratory feedback. Or maybe hypothermia, although in my experience that involved too much twitching around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People experience death (and psychoactives) in a variety of ways, and its metaphorical usage reflects that. The meat-grinder sense maps better to stimulants (ie., caffeine, amphetamine, etc) whereas the exhausting, perhaps harrowing and enlightening sense of death is what we tend to experience with the psychedelics.
back in the day I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms and experienced what is called 'ego death'. basically, you lose a sense of self and identity. You are literally a blank slate. It was a surreal experience and I felt panicky like 'oh shit i think im dead but im still concious'. Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experienc…
The absolute worst combination is marijuana on the tail of an LSD peak. Your short term memory drops to about 100 msec. I spent a few hours, decades ago, reminding a friend who they were, and that everything would be OK in a few hours. And it was hard work, because I could barely remember who I was, and who they were ;)
edit: clarity
Can anyone give a reason in darwinian terms, for why brains would evolve a feeling of detachment and contentment near death? I can't project a selfish-gene reason. Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual
It could be social. Imagine the family surrounding the deathbed of an elder, dying relative. It's probably the case that the relative is observed closely while 'crossing over,' and depending on the relatives' interpretation of what's happening to their dying loved one, they may be left at peace or in turmoil. So maybe DMT has to do with creating the desired appearance to communicate to loved ones at the deathbed.
“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.” I'm not exactly sure how close I came to dying, but I had the exact opposite ex…
I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.
Did you not expect that going in? Or it was worse than anticipated?
I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.
ayuasca and smoked DMT are too very different experiences.
Ive done DMT probably 10-15 times in my life so far but quit all recreational drugs ~3 years ago. My last trip being the most intense; me and a friend used a dabbing rig and poured about a gram of dmt onto the heated metal nail - for 20 minutes but what seemed like eternity I Observed the birth, life, and death of myself multiple times over until I finally came back down to the ‘real world’.
Can anyone give a reason in darwinian terms, for why brains would evolve a feeling of detachment and contentment near death? I can't project a selfish-gene reason. Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual