Electric Gristle

Many people interpret the psychedelic experience in terms of the mystical and spiritual. I love reading it and I love you all for believing it
For you the psychedelic experience is more ‘real’ than it is for me. But, I think, no less beautiful.

I would like to present an alternative interpretation because I sometimes see that the materialistic perspective is not treated fairly in the psychedelic community. Although this may clash with other interpretations and the philosophies that inform them and I would love a discussion it’ll be a lot more fun if we pleasantly ponder each others ideas with no bickering

I am a fantastic being.

I am a three pound lump of amazing electric gristle. This matter is arranged into the most complicated structure known to man. I am wired to reality by spectacularly sensitive and acute sensory modalities honed over 600 million years of evolution to give me the most pertinent information about my surroundings. My vision can finely discriminate wavelengths and relative intensity of electromagnetic radiation. My sense of sound is no less amazing. The cochlea is an altogether psychedelic organ. Look it up if you’re bored sometime!

All of this raw data is brought together and processed by structural motifs of the electric gristle. The gristle analyzes the scattered radiation and I see a cat and not a dog. It analyzes compression waves in the air and fills itself with CSNY.

I am the crest of an ancient wave.

The basic mechanisms of nerve transduction and neurotransmitter release are over 600 million years old and first appeared in animals that resembled modern sea anemones. These critters had all the basic types of neurons (and neurochemicals) that all animals share today. This is basically all the basic building blocks of the human mind. What is peculiar about the mammalian lineage among all of life is that selection has really focused on sensory acuity and processing power rather than ‘somatic’ adaptations. In the hominid lineage selection has strongly favored sensory acuity and processing power OVER somatic adaptation. Evidence of this is found in all of us. We really are maladapted animals. Natural childbirth can be very dangerous to us, this represents a huge evolutionary cost and part of the problem is the giant human head. If we keep evolving gianter heads I predict a time when the human species will be totally dependant on caesarian for survival, especially since western society prizes women with small pelvis. But I digress. . .

The mind sees much more than the consciousness.

My premise is that we are amazing animals crafted over eons to have accurate sensory awareness of our environment. This takes both the gristle and the senses working in great harmony to decide what to present to your conscious awareness because the senses are far more powerful than most people (outside of this community) realize. The senses are always collecting much more data than is presented to you sensory awareness. This data is the same light and sound data and it is not filtered its just processed differently. It enters your brain and informs your awareness of your environment in ways you are ordinarily not aware of.

You don’t need eyes to see.

In the absence of sensory stimulus the gain in the gristle goes through the roof. Patterns are almost always reported and occasionally more intense visions involving multiple modalities. These are happening in your gristle without any sensory input at all. Just amplified noise that becomes reinforced by a system ready to spring. Our gristle is perfectly capable of generating ‘unimaginable’ things.

The psychedelic experience.

You wouldn’t want to see all the code in a computer program superimposed over the user interface. When the code is displayed it looks alien to most of us and we just want to get our programs back up and running. Part of the psychedelic experience is showing you the code. But we have no real programmers that can fully understand it. (although I bet some members of the psychedelic community are as close as you could get)

Your pattern recognition systems, normally so honed to show only patterns that exist, creates patterns and forms. Fractals and swirlies and mandalas and blossoming waves of hyperspace. Your gristle is exquisitely attuned to patterns. A huge amount of processing has to go on to reveal the most useful patterns to hominid reproduction (the ones that are actually in our environment. Tweaking the system even a little bit begins to loosen these processing mechanisms. If you project the code for recognizing, say, a rapidly expanding electric paisley pattern onto a blank wall it will exist in your vision. Noise can can lead to cascades leading to visions. These cascades will be shaped by the structure of your gristle. This is in turn shaped by your life.

Some of the patterns and visions are so amazing people think they could not possibly have originated from the gristle. This is selling your self far short. Everyone has an extremely creative core that can often be reached with psychedelics (although few of us have the skill to present it to others.) All of these wonderful and strange things are contained in you and have always been in you. They are you. They are made from fine structures that are always present.

Psychedelics show you this and it looks unutterably alien and strange but familiar at the same time. They show your code.

The gristle runs deep. Human creativity resides there. This is where god lives too.

Thanks to anyone who read all of this

<light grammer editing>

I really like this point of view. to be honest, I don't get the spiritualism wrap up in dmt. yes it is an amazing/beautiful/insightful/frightening experience but I don't see a higher significance beyond that. all of that madness comes from within. those entities, elfs and reptiles people report seeing, they're simply your creation.

Lemonscented,

If I somehow agree with the statements above, I do not agree with

The words 'simply your' does not seem to apply here

'You' as the subjective entity writting on that forum is not able to create what 'you' see while 'you' are in the DMT world (at least I assume it :wink

Because 'you' have some materialist/scientific knowledge, 'you' build a mental representation of what happend and then declare this is 'simply you', evacuating many more complicated implications.
Please see no offense in what I say. I tend to think the same way but DMT 'showed' me that there is much more than 'simply me'

Also on 'serious' dosing, what is seen becomes quite anecdotic (althought visually impressive) compare to what is *perceived*.

Deedle-doo,

Thanks for starting that discussion. There is a lot to say here.
Yes, it seems 'easier' for some people to believe about the independant existence of entities. But for a materialist educated guy it is easier to interpret the DMT experience as a auto-organised schema from a chaotic stimutation.

Some intuitions came to me that there are other possible interpretations. But I will need years (and thousands of spice dreams) to be able to formulate them.

yes thanks for starting this discussion since it is something i often think about.

ill agree that the chemical and phsyical explanations offer no less meaning and beauty over this experience. to me chemicals physical energy etc is the most infinite complicated amazing stuff in the universe especially because it can come together to make me be able to exist and type all this.

i often wonder if the knowledge and or insigts and or visuals etc that you see ultamitly come from your own psyche. that is no external information except that coming from external sources that our senses are picking up on. psychedelics may heighten and definatly do alter this sensory awareness. so are other beings etc that people encounter a result of an altered awareness picking up on things we normally cant? i dont know. but i find the idea that they come from within so far makes more sense.

however as you point out with a nice term the gristle hah does run deep. and what resides in these depths is very very interesting.

Yeah. I wouldn't trivialize the experience just because it flows from within. It is still a barn-shattering experience, maybe even moreso because you might have to acknowledge that there are agents within you that can be separated from your personality. I still haven't worked out really what that means. More experiments are needed

Most of us simply lack the skill to present the graphical side of a DMT trip. The emotional side could be presented using poetry etc. but most of us lack that skill too.

It's interesting to contemplate that this creativity is locked out of our normal conscious awareness. Humans have been aware of this forever and have always sought 'muses' to help tap into this place and bring some back. DMT just blows the doors off this place and shoves it up your consciousness. Hard.

This is an excellent point. These experiences do not happen in a vacuum and are informed by your own mind and how you have trained it. How you train your mind, in turn, is strongly affected by your own upbringing and life experiences. It's a kind of very interesting feedback loop between eperienceing the world and training your mind to understand the world and then re-experiencing the world and so on.

So we are spelunkers. Shining the flashlights of awareness in the secret dark nooks and crannies of our minds.

thats a huge assumption. just because you do not willfully make the dmt experience doesn't mean that it wasn't something you still designed. unconscious ideas are still your design even if you are not aware of them. my arguement is that it 'simply' comes from within, it's internal as oppose to spiritual. I was not trying to trivalize internal in any sense of the concept. the word 'simply' was used as a qualifier in that sentense in order to distinguish the internal view from the one view that looks to the experience as more or less supernatural and outside of the person's concious and unconscious control. my comment said nothing about the complexity of self.

your reading way to far into the word simply. besides, what else is there except 'simply you' involved in a dmt trip? 'simply you' includes all of your main components: the id, ego, superego, unconcious and concious. what else could of i meant?

Thanks, deedle-doo! Rather interesting and original and promising, etc., like any other concept and/or interpretation This all is of much appeal, indeed.

This is soooo old talking - whether we do have something "spiritual", supernatural, something GREATER outside our bodies and perception horizons/borders, or don't

For me personally this all is senseless I mean what I can truly be sure of is that we can easily PROVE for ourselves the "reality" of what we believe in. And what we believe and PERCIEVE is conditioned by our personal biological (well, too much ways to speculate here )and social experience.

Aleister Crowley suggested very useful (and to the same extent dangerous) way of practicing bhakti-yoga: choose a religion and god that appeal to you, search for TRUE initiation then start devoted worshiping and serving, be 200% sincere and serious. After the results achieved ("meeting God", etc.), start the same in the other confession, repeat it as much times as you need Of course, you should not limit yourself with just religious sphere of life in practicing this approach
Takes years, but the results are marvelous! It is one of the possible ways to achieve understanding that it's only YOU who are programing YOUR space-trip. Or at least YOU should or could... Will it help gaining understanding of WHAT is YOU? I don't know. Possibly... You'll see for yourSelves

After Castaneda's "Don Huan" who was interpreting famous philosopher's phrase, I often repeat - just two things make me breathless - the infinite beauty of the world around and the infinite human's stupidity

Speaking in general, why don't we choose an interpretation which is more PROFITABLE and USEFUL depending on situation?

Sorry man, I did misconstrue 'simply.' I gotcha now You used 'simply' as 'entirely.'
I guess this threw people because these agents that we encounter are very complex manifestations of the deep non-experiential parts of the mind.

Thanks for chipin in! I love these kinds of conversations and I love this community for tolerating so many radically different 'lifeworlds.'




This is probably one of the oldest human conversations. I think this talking has been going on since the dawn of language.

It's true. After all whether we say "spiritual" VS "materialistic" it's just a matter of language. It's our history and our language which granted us with this dualism. Hope one day there will be no necessity to separate these two conceptions, both illusive imho

I'll have to agree it is often a matter of language and the dualisms that it creates. So in the end the argument does get rather pointless. However I still think people should pursue science just as much as they pursue creative or spiritual paths. However I find people tend to get lost in both to the point where it doesn't make sense anymore. Beliefs are very easy for people to get lost in.

I don't think there is that much of a dichotomy. My point is that science isa creative and spiritual path. These dichotomies were intorduced to us by judeochritian/roman society and it has sort of stuck. Over the last couple hundred years we have been moving closer to the concept of a continuous external reality that the ancient Athenians enjoyed. They understood that reality is a singular hard object that we have to look at through imperfect, man-made lenses.

How are you defining spiritual? Your point also depends on how you are defining science. For you, does science have a final goal? if it does and perhaps you think that at the core of science there's a god creating meaning, then yeah I suppose science can be construed as spiritual but i'm not sure if this view of science is absolutely beneficial to the overall practice of it.

this idea reminds me of the arguement held by creationists, that since the human eye is so complex it could not be a product of evolution but rather a gift from god. complete madness. Its like resisting the unknowable all your life and then at the last moment surrendering yourself to a rather bland 'I don't know what this thing is therefore god must of made it.'

I really think there is a dichotomy. it is very difficult to disconnect spiritualism from the belief in a god of some sort. Spiritualism implies a level supernaturality. in that sense it is incomptabile with science because science wishes to align meaning in the natural. or should anynow!

i do not believe in the supernatural. nothing is beyond or above nature. science should not accept supernatural ideas, since they are inherantly anti-scientific.

seriously, but i think deedle-doo is defining spiritual in a way that deviates from the traditional judeo-christian means. his defintion is closer to creative and enlightening.. pretty sound understanding but the word itself, it's heavy with god and anti-scientific semblance. probably should be avoided at all cost...

Yeah. The madness is to think that God is 'outside'. That we are 'objects' in the view of the subject 'God'.
God "beeing" the evolution is an even more 'marvelous' concept than imagining a big subject giving the eye to human beeings (and frogs and cats and ...).

The issue of 'supernatural' is a big point we may explore at our individual levels.

Let's assume that nothing is beyond or above nature... *except*... consciousness. What would it imply ?

well consciousness is part of nature therefore it can't be above it. conciousness above naturality seems to lead to problematic understandings like creationism is prone to. anyhow, thats how i see it..

I agree with your view of god. I believe god is a verb, the first verb; the first thought that constructed the universe -- the big bang perhaps.. everything part of the universe is related to that understanding of god; evolution, biology, physics, logic, everything but since god is not a noun the concept has no affect on our daily lives other than the fact that the original thought (god) set all of this into action.