McKenna to ponder

[novapsyche]

The big bugaboo of Western civ is that we deny the existence of spirit. It's been a thousand-year project to eliminate the spirit from all explanations of how reality works, or the personality works, or anything works. The absence of spirit permits the murder of the planet. But the cost of the denial of spirit is life empty of meaning, which doesn't mean we have to return to the world of beady-eyed priestcraft and its slimy minions. But it does mean that we have to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental. And apparently what this means, then, is fusion with Nature, and the psychedelics do this. They dissolve boundaries. They open the way to the Gaian mind.

Now you can believe this is bullshit, but you cannot believe it's bullshit unless you have made the experiment yourself and found it to be wanting--this isn't a philosophy course, here. We're talking about something real. And if the critics are not willing to invest time in it, then the critics have already declared their terror and fear of the solution.

The entire text is quite illuminating.

Here's the great paradox in this domain, as far as I'm concerned. DMT, without contest, is the most powerful psychedelic that I know of--and I hope there's nothing stronger, cause if there is, I don't wanna know about it! It's very brief and fast acting, and it clears your system very quickly. It occurs as a neurotransmitter in ordinary human metabolism. Now isn't that interesting? That the most powerful and radical and alien of all these hallucinogens is the one most like--in fact, exactly like--what's in your own body. This is also a Catch 22 for the Establishment cause it means we're all holding, all the time! They can come and get you, folks! It's worse than a U. A.--you haven't got a prayer! And there's something very interesting--well, there are a number of things--but one thing very interesting about DMT is that, if you've had it, it's possible to have a dream, years later, in which something's going on, and going on, and then someone whips out a little glass pipe, and puts it in your mouth, and you have the complete experience. Not a pale memory or a vivid memory--the real thing happens in the dream. Well this is big news, because what it's saying is that human metabolism is very, very close to being able to produce this at any time, and sometimes it can produce it. Now, it's known that DMT is at its highest concentration in cerebrospinal fluid between 3 and 4 AM in most people. And that's the time of day when the deep REM sleep occurs, accompanied by deep dreaming. So, it looks to me like the chemistry of dream and the chemistry of the psychedelic experience are the same.

Comments

[inhumandecency.livejournal.com]

We were right to remove all spirit-related constructs from descriptions of how things work. We can explain natural phenomena without any need for spirit -- and even if there are some that we can't, the ones that we can already overlap heavily with another set of phenomena: the ones we can royally screw up if we don't approach them spiritually.

We need to be able to have spiritual experiences for the very pragmatic reason that they're the just about the best way of getting us to act as if everything were as interconnected and overwhelmingly complex as it really is.

I think the great failing of postmodernism and modern feminism is that it never managed to get this distinction across to outsiders. Adopting a postmodern outlook does not require you to say that there is literally no such thing as objective reality operating according to deterministic laws -- or, as detractors sometimes put it, that 2+2=4 is culturally constructed. What you're saying instead is that we can't accurately compute everything in the universe. Bringing spirit, compassion, and moral duty into policymaking discourse is a way of making sure we don't overreach ourselves, either by trying to calculate things we can't really calculate (for example, writing a bunch of theory and deciding it justifies killing 20 million people in order to collectivize the farms), or by applying rigid laws in inappropriate places (for example, deciding that because so many useful things to map onto the symbolic statement 2+2=4, we should devalue all enterprises in which the relevant values aren't additive).

[inhumandecency.livejournal.com]

The significance of endogenous DMT is questionable. Exogenous DMT is probably able to exert its effects because we have natural receptors for it, but that doesn't mean that our internal system of producing and releasing DMT has anything to do with the way it works exogenously. GHB is a similar case -- it's an endogenous neurotransmitter, but except for a few cases of extreme hypoxia, natural levels are less than 1/100th what you take in a normal recreational dose. This suggests that we've found a way to hack those receptors profitably, not that our brains have an endogenous system for making us happy and fuzzy. (not that they don't, but it doesn't appear to be GHB mediated).

The dream example is questionable. I've had dreams where I realized the meaning of life, or heard the catchiest song ever written, but that doesn't mean those things actually existed in my mind. From another angle, we acknowledge that people can have LSD flashbacks without needing to postulate that our brains can endogenously produce the stuff.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

The significance of endogenous DMT is questionable.

I don't know enough about DMT to speak on it. It does make sense that a hallucinogen is released by the body right before going into deep sleep, however, and that was my main point.

I've had dreams where I realized the meaning of life, or heard the catchiest song ever written, but that doesn't mean those things actually existed in my mind.

Then I must ask: Where else did they exist? Several poems have been fashioned while the poet was asleep (but recalled the poem upon waking); and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence of great thinkers coming up with something while asleep and translating that knowledge into the real world.