Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

> Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking.

Define "thinking." Is an ecoli deciding to move towards or away from a chemical signal "thinking?"

> I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order.

How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web forums?

Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism? Because if not, I have a lot of questions about souls that I'd love you to answer. Here are a few.

- when you were a wee child, was your soul also unable to think sophisticated thoughts and was also afraid of monsters under the bed?

- does your soul sleep when you are asleep, or is it just waiting for you to wake up?

- how does a soul manifest its influence on the physical body? Do you posit that it violates physical laws to make the material body do something other than follow the physical laws, or is there some undiscovered force of nature that allows a soul to "tunnel" into the physical world?

- at what point does the soul attach itself to the physical body? That is, does a blastomere have a soul? If so, what happens when a blastomere cleves fully in two, making identical twins -- does another soul pop into existence? Does the original soul split into two as well?

- when a person develops dementia, does the soul suffer from it too? or does the soul get frustrated that it can no longer communicate with its associated body?

- is there one soul that everyone taps into, or does each person have their own soul?

- do souls get one "life", or do they get recycled? if they are recycled, do souls specialize in one type of creature, or can a soul be a worm in one life and a physicist in the next?

Sorry, that's not what they mean.

My carpet is not changing color, my mother's face isn't melting. That's not happening on a physical level.

My sober perception is repeatable and verifiable. It exists no matter my state of mind.

It's novel to make yourself see things that are unreal. It's novel to have your emotions fluctuate wildly. But it's just novel, and unreal, and nothing more.

We can agree that anyone who reports having no subjective experience is not a part of the discussion, i think.

I was surprised by this - but microdosing has had a more profound effect on my daily life than macrodosing. After a very long and arduous journey with therapist(s), psychiatrist(s), counseling, etc… I finally decided to trust myself and take my own well-being into my own hands: cultivating my own medicine at home. During the entire process I was convinced macrodosing would be the most helpful and microdosing would just be a nice fun thing to try. I was wrong.

Microdosing helps me every day in my everyday encounters - I don’t have a negative voice in my mind, I can think about things from a more logical vantage point versus getting caught up in emotions or triggers.

Macrodosing to me can best be describes as getting a UART debug port to your brain. It’s also helped me develop (or perhaps in my case: expose/identify/become aware of) my mind-body connection. Sometimes for an entire trip I’ll just foam roll, meditate and try and unwind years of abuse and trauma on my body. I got into a lot of accidents in my youth and my conditioning led me to ignore the needs of my body to recover properly.

One downside to macrodosing (for me) has been the vasoconstrictive effect of psilocybin. Long story short, I’m particularly susceptible to this and it can crush me. A big 5g Terrence McKenna ego-death dose can basically put me right to sleep due to the way my neck and muscles will get so tight that I can’t breath and essentially chokehold myself. Benadryl has been a helpful tool in this scenario.

All this being said - I haven’t measured this stuff scientifically so who really knows. But I do feel more compassion for everyone and I am able to observe things in others that used to bother me tremendously from a place of non-judgement. I see the journey that I am on, and I can see the journey that everyone else is on too. I can hold those in my mind without judgement, and it gives me strength where before I would have been perturbed.

If anyone has questions please don’t hesitate to email me privately. This medicine can and will change the world.

There are a lot of levels of "thinking" across the animal / insect / even plant kingdoms. The simplest levels of stimulus response (like a venus fly trap closing its mouth) don't seem to require a metaphysical explanation. But insect behavior is more complex and mammal and human behavior even more so.

At which level do the existing rules of the material world start to seem less plausible to you than a second unseen world with different rules, that interacts with this one under specific circumstances (if that's what you mean by dualism)?

As we can presently see with computers and machine learning, pretty complex behavior is possible through systems that operate via known physical processes.