Quote:It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling the truth, because the demons are of many kinds: "Some are made of ions, some of mind; the ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind." The reaction to these voices is not to kneel in genuflection before a god, because then one will be like Dorothy in her first encounter with Oz. There is no dignity in the universe unless we meet these things on our feet, and that means having an I/Thou relationship. One say to the Other: "You say you are omniscient, omnipresent, or you say you are from Zeta Reticuli. You're long on talk, but what can you show me?" Magicians, people who invoke these things, have always understood that one must go into such encounters with one's wits about oneself. -terence McKenna
For myself, novel information can come through my experiences, and at times I have even had prophetic visions which ended up correlating quite well with the way that existance unfolded. I also generate new and novel ideas through psychedelic states, though considering my brain is functioning in a novel manner this does not surprise me...
specially when you consider things like "thalamic gating"...
you are bombarded with billions of signals every second, all of which (except for smell) enter through the thalamus, the thalamus then filters these signals down to what is essential before passing them on to the cortex regions, where your higher functioning occurs. When you consume these psychedelics, your thalamus stops filtering these signals, so rather than getting a very clean, filtered slice of the existance around you, you are getting it all.
Then there's actions mediated by the locus coeruleus which act in a way where you may perceive things which you have encountered many times as being novel, then there can be decreased blood flow to the thalamus, the posterior cingulate and the medial prefrontal cortex...all in all its a novel neurological situation, so it doesn't surprise me that novel information is gained through it...
Though think about this, as your thalamus filtering mechanism is "switched off", and as serotonin temporarily looses its rather repressive control over the conscious state, you would technically be far more receptive to novel information from the outside...like I said, you are bombarded with billions of signals, billions of kinds of them as well, every second, now all of these, except for smell, enter your brain through the thalamus, which filters them before they are sent to the cortex regions, on psychedelics the thalamus eases up on its filtering, so I suppose you are getting information from the outside that you would not otherwise.
I also feel that in accordance with The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that there could be infinite alternate "lines"...
Quote:The quantum-mechanical "Schrödinger's cat" theorem according to the many-worlds interpretation. In this interpretation, every event is a branch point; the cat is both alive and dead, even before the box is opened, but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, but which do not interact with each other. -Wikipedia
Multiverse theory also makes some interesting claims...
Perhaps we do encounter entities from these other dimensions, or perhaps when the conscious-being leaves it's physical body it's migrates into one of these other dimentions, which could explain why some encounter extra-terrestrial and sci-fi like environments, while others experience death and spiritual environments, it could be because consciousness is vast and quite complex, it exist simultaneously on many different "levels", many of which are pretty much touching, they are right on top of each other, and they are all inter-correlated, from humans on earth, to.the dead, to beings existing on other conscious planes are all essentially using the same "high-ways"...
Look into "branes", I feel it relates, but would over complicate this already hectic and information laden post...
http://www.sciencedirect...le/pii/0370269396001049
All of this raises some interesting ideas, I'm not saying I take these ideas all that seriously, but there are great exercises in thought, and fairly entertaining as well...
Back to obtaining novel information tough these experiences, as I mentioned before about the locus coeruleus and novelty detection, I wanted to.go.into just a little bit more detail:
Quote: the locus coeruleus (LC) is often referred to as the "novelty detector" for salient external stimuli. One would predict that sensory events that may not ordinarily seem remarkable may be perceived as having "increased novelty". This is indeed one of the effects commonly reported by users of hallucinogens (D.E.Nichols, 2004).
I feel This vastly contributes to being able to derive information which "I could never have come up with" or which appears so foreign that it must be from "outside"
This excerpt further elaborates
Quote:Novelty detection is accompanied by increased hippocampal noradrenergic activity, driven by enhanced firing of the locus coeruleus (LC), the main source of noradrenalin (NA) in the brain (Sara et al. 1994; Kitchigina et al. 1997). Lesioning the afferents that carry neuromodulatory inputs (including NA) to the hippocampus impairs recollection of episodic-like memory (Easton 2006). LC stimulation improves memory retrieval (Devauges and Sara 1991), whereas vagus nerve stimulation enhances memory encoding and consolidation (Clark et al. 1995, 1999; Ghacibeh et al. 2006) via LC activation, suggesting that the LC, and the noradrenergic activity it mediates in the hippocampus, may be a key factor in driving synaptic plasticity in response to novel spatial events
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih...mc/articles/PMC2774396/
Below outlines how Kary Mullis used skills gained through his psychedelic exploration, and applied them to his work, and it resulted in a Nobel prize:
Quote:A significant instance of problem solving resulted in a Nobel Prize for Kary Mullis. Until the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a common problem in biology was that biological samples were often too small to analyze, but Mullis solved that and won a Nobel Prize. He described how LSD aided him in doing so.
"PCR's another place where I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it and I wasn't stoned on LSD, but my mind by then had learned how to get down there. I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the [indistinct] go by. . . . I've learned that partially I would think, and this is again my opinion, through psychedelic drugs . . . if I had not taken LSD ever would I have still been in PCR? I don't know, I doubt it, I seriously doubt it." (Mullis 1998; "Horizon: Psychedelic Science" 1997)
From the point of view of psychedelic cognitive studies, Mullis's example is noteworthy because he did not have his insight while taking psychedelics but instead used psychedelics to increase his ability to visualize, then transferred that cognitive skill back to his ordinary mindbody state. This confirms the idea that some skills learned in one state can be transferred to another. Transference and nontransference between mindbody states is itself a cognitive process that deserves study — learning to remember dreams, for example. Learning to increase this flow, if it is possible, would increase access to stores of information and possibly to new cognitive skills.
http://realitysandwich.c...ding_cognitive_studies/
Then there are cases, which there are many, which abilities are gained while in a psychedelic state, I'm going to use the next example just because it's part of the same article which outlined Mullis:
Quote:Unlike Mullis's experience of transferring a skill back to his ordinary state, most instances of psychedelic problem solving occur while the person's cognitive processes are psychedelically augmented. This is most clearly illustrated by "Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem Solving: A Pilot Study," by Willis Harman, a professor of engineering economic systems, and a team of researchers at Stanford Research Institute. Working with twenty-seven men who were "engaged in various professional occupations, i.e., engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist and had a total of 44 professional problems they wanted to work on," the Stanford Research Institute team divided them into groups of three or four and gave them 200 milligrams of mescaline, followed by a quiet period of listening to music. Then they had snacks and discussed their problems with their group. Following this they spent three or four hours working alone on their problems. As a result of psychedelic enhancement, the practical results were impressive.
http://realitysandwich.c...ding_cognitive_studies/
Though ultimately I have to agree with terence:
Quote:My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to the dark ocean of mind, and let our nets down into that sea. And what you're after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we're looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, "Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril?", and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle-size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible. Middle-size ideas we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner. And every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It's not for your elucidation, it's not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about. -terence McKenna
If you can bring back New and novel ideas, or stories to "tell around the camp fire" which leave people astounded, astonished, intrigued, or which provoke deep thought or if you can use psychedelic thinking to further yourself at excelling at tasks which demand abstract and creative thought, or if these entities are giving you useful information which is applicable to the real world or which improves your life or others, than I think this is great, but you must keep your "intellectual and logical razors" sharp, and maintain a healthy skepticism, and if these entities are giving you information, be sure it's good information...
Quote:My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to seek the weird. And to seek it seriously. Now, if you seek the weird without a critical intelligence, it will find you faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of squirrelly ideas on the market these days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), "the balkanization of epistemology". This is what we're dealing with now. You understand what I mean? It means people can't tell shit from Shinola, but they wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical razors. One is: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be multiplied without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words, keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first."
- Terence McKenna
Your posts always interest me, stay safe, it's always a good idea to be mindful of keeping healthy relationships with these entheogens and what can be accessed through them, stay safe, and keep sharing your thoughts.
-eg