after drinking ayahuasca a couple of times in large quantities and meditating full time (16 hours a day on average) for a year i also see things.
it's not a hallucination though, i'm certain this energy is really there.
it doesn't bother me and i hold down a job as a software engineer despite the funky visuals.
i also find myself playing with this energy at times. for anybody else with this issue, hopefully you'll just get used to it like i have
Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
161–170 of 190 posts
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#162Some people have "Profound Life-changing spiritual experiences" and it would be nice if those stuck around for longer than the week or two afterward. IME they seem to fade as you get wound back up in the culture and everyday grind.
There's evidence that classical (5-HT2a agonist) psychedelics can have a permanent impact on a person's openness score (as part of the Big 5):
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/unique-everybody-els...
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#163I’m just not sure whether or not some of the things I see were always there, and I just didn’t notice, or just didn’t care. Like, for example, blurred after images (“trails”) when I wave my hands around. I see them all the time. I’m just not sure they are new. I suspect I experienced that visual effect prior to doing psychedelics, then when on psychedelics they looked really cool and “trippy” and now I’m just conscio…
> I see patterns in the dark visual space that occurs when my eyes are closed.
I never took any psychedelics, but also experience this; it can get a bit trippy sometimes when they coalesce into shapes or patterns.
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#164I sustained pretty severe HPPD after taking LSD and drinking alcohol at the same time. I had taken a number of hallucinogens before that time. It took two years and went away. I still have tinnitus, however. I took a 300mg MDMA pill 2 years ago (on accident - I didn't realize pills were this strong - and had no experience with MDMA prior to that), and have permanent low-level anxiety at all times now. The quality of…
MDMA had the opposite effect on me, i had mild anxiety all the time and after a couple times dosing it (300mg) it went completely away
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#165Alright, I'll bite. I developed HPPD in 2017, and I've been seeing unusual things for a bit over 2 years. The HPPD was triggered by dropping on the order of 1000-1400 micrograms of LSD - and for context a reasonable dose was 50 micrograms. This was way too much, and I fried for a few days. I'm not sure when I came down because HPPD decided to show up and it took me a while to realize that the HPPD was, well, persiste…
With HPPD, do you find that you're able to increase/decrease the levels of distortions by mentally moving into it/ pulling out of it?
I developed fairly severe HPPD from a large dose of LSD as well. This was about 20 years ago. It eventually waned over the course of a few years and is no longer noticeable though.
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#166I'm the one who provided the third quoted anecdote in the article. What I didn't mention was the HPPD coincided with a sort of depersonalization/derealization effect. Basically I got very checked out from my own life. I felt as if I was a spectator watching my life happen and I didn't really feel any connection or agency towards anything coming into my sensorium. It was a really weird and hard time for me. Those feel…
Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off. I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and…
>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]
I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]
I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]
In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0147...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Newberg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happ...
[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/28/psychedelic-drug-b...
[5] https://realitysandwich.com/11276/psychedelics_light_yoga_su...
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#167I'm the one who provided the third quoted anecdote in the article. What I didn't mention was the HPPD coincided with a sort of depersonalization/derealization effect. Basically I got very checked out from my own life. I felt as if I was a spectator watching my life happen and I didn't really feel any connection or agency towards anything coming into my sensorium. It was a really weird and hard time for me. Those feel…
Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off. I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and…
I have a similar experience with HPPD...the ability to "flex" the mind to either increase or decrease the degree to which I was experiencing the visual pattern distortions. it was mostly just a matter of directing attention into the experience vs. pulling out of it. anyway, fascinating thread on HN this morning.
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#168I read a lot of comments about people recommending the use of psychedelics. I don't understand why some people with a healthy mind are so eager to alter (often definitively) their precious mind/self/brain.
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if it is the baseline we measure against (which it is). Or if it has survival/performative utility (which it does).
How does it have a survival / performative advantage? You can, eg, protect the body from harm, without having a sense of self, which ties into survival.
Basically allowing societies to function (people assuming roles, shame, and whatever). It should be of no surprise that a damaged sense of self often correlates with poor integration into a society.
Re: Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
#170I have heard several people with massive audiences discussing positive effects of psychedelics.
However, I don't recall any of them discussing potential negative side effects, except for briefly mentioning a possibility of having a bad trip that might cause PTSD.
It would be great if they would mention that there's a possibility of permanently altering your perception, to the point of seeing severe hallucinations for the rest of your life.
I'd also like to see them discuss the risk of inducing an onset of schizophrenia that someone mentioned in this thread.
Sure, maybe people who developed schizophrenia after taking psychedelics were predisposed to it already, but what if they could have avoided an onset if they had not taken the drugs? Wouldn't it make sense to warn people about this?
It just seems extremely irresponsible to talk about the potential positive effects without addressing the potential negative effects.
Especially considering that the main potential positive effect, resolving psychological issues that the person isn't able to resolve on their own, is likely to appeal to people who I'd guess are at a higher risk of the potential negative side effects due to already being mentally unstable.