In Indian philosophy we could say that during the experience, the "ahamkara" is destroyed. The ahamkara is a subtle organ ("organ" from a phenomenological perspective, ie. something that absolves a function and it's present in experience) that creates the illusion that there is a "me" (or ego) that is expericing things and "owns" them. Your experience and understanding of DMT sounds like very similar to this concept and the realisation that it's not a part of consciousness, but it's just one of its contents
Ahamkara is more like the false identification of ur self with material things or the body. Most of hindu philosophy doesn't believe that there is no self
Does this map thoroughly onto the content-container metaphor? Or perhaps the mirror metaphor? Or the "no self in self" stance that Gary Snyder draws from Chinese philosophy? Or the claims for a "self-model" in consciousness? Picture consciousness as a sphere, perhaps without a clear boundary only a fading out from the center. Picture contained within the sphere a the smaller sphere of a self model, mirroring in its way the larger sphere. Now you're drugged in a way which makes that self model eclipsed from your view for a time. Consciousness must always be aware of itself beyond the self model, else the self model could never be formed by and in it. Drugged, you've got the primal, preliminary awareness of consiousness, but without the self-model reflection available -- a reflection which, due to its generally usable and useful enough accuracy, you commonly come to mistake for consciousness itself.
I know this is supposed to be about the psychedelic experience but honestly I'm more interested in the so-called "ordinary" experience -- because I still just don't get it.
> "Our ordinary experience presents us with objects that have properties: the ball that is red and round, the table that is brown and square."
does it really? I mean, for me, it's more like, "This red blur... it's a ball. it's round, it must be a ball. and that's where I left my ball, so ... that is in fact what it is." But I could imagine not being able to identify it or not caring enough about it to try to identify it. Not all red blurs are identifiable as distinct objects.
> "Even when we attend to experience itself, there seems to be a subject-predicate structure: there are the experiences but also the thing that has the experiences — the “I” that sees colour and feels pain."
I don't understand this either. I mean, I may say that I feel pain, but who else could I speak for with regards to feeling anything? If you are aware of the experience, then, logically, the experience is occurring to you, not to someone else. But this isn't a feeling, it's a logical entailment. The "I" doesn't feel like anything, at least not to me. I don't understand at all by what people mean by "subject-predicate" structure.
Fair point I didn't argue for these things in the article.
On the perception case, I follow Susanna Siegel in thinking perceptual experience involves conceptual representation of objects: a ball, a cup. It's not just colours and shapes.
On the consciousness case, I'd recommend Martine Nida-Rumelin's work arguing that we are directly aware, in a subtle way, of the subject of our experiences.
One is observation system, which stays alive during trips, where senses trigger thoughts or thoughts trigger themselves. That is, from noise we make a shape.
Second is modeling. In our cortex we have expectation that a particular set of senses is representing a concept, an object. This gets dissolved in certain trips, I believe.
We constantly evaluate incoming senses vs. stored ones, and compare the edges. And update the model if it is lacking.
Wider explanation is quite long. You have good questions, but I think a proper book is best on this. I am an amateur lurker, and short of scholarly experience to explain much further. ♥️
What I guess I don't understand is how "this gets dissolved" (referring to the "expectation that a particular set of senses is representing a concept, an object") is different from just seeing a blur with some color and shape and not being able to identify it, not modeling it as an object, and not particularly trying to model it as an object -- an ordinary experience for everyone, presumably?
Yes. Imagine seeing a word “Red”, it is laden with expectation for you. Then read “빨간” - it has no bearing as far as color for you. But it is Red in Korean. You and I don’t have the model for this projection.
With reality we can lose projection, and see things unmoored from concept. Just objects.
With red ball: you describe sensory noise, and it’s like you say. But in your mind there is a model of a red ball. And small bird. And loud sound. And self. It is the models, objects their properties that get unpaired.
> But in your mind there is a model of a red ball.
Can you be more specific here? I am still confused.
When you say "a model of a red ball" I can imagine something that is red and something that is a ball, okay. What is the difference between this and "sensory noise" as you call it?
Until I imagine it, it doesn't exist in my mind as an integrated model. I could generate a model of a specific ball based on attributes I remember: It is round, it is red, it is a ball. Is that what you mean? But that has more to do with recalling from memory than direct consciousness. If my memory was inaccessible, then I wouldn't be able to conjure up a mental model of the red ball. But what's so interesting about that?
What does it mean to pair up objects and their properties?
I can say the following:
This red blur: --> it is a ball
This red blur: --> it is round
so the object (red blur) has the attributes "ball" and "round". But this is higher level, it is a conceptual interpretation. I could interpret the blur differently if I wanted to.
I don't understand what it means to have an experience with no experiencer honestly. How can *you* even remember anything if "you" didn't experience it, how do you even know anything was experienced at all? to even know that you did not exist (and how that feels), there has to have been a "you" to experience that and record it and bring it back to us, right?
I know it's hard to make sense of relative to ordinary experience, but there was experience without the "I" that normally has my experience. A memory was formed of the experience even though I wasn't there to witness it.
you can certainly remember without experience. A few years ago I had a minor procedure under a general anaesthetic. When I came round the surgeon asked me if I remembered him speaking to me previously. I didn't, but everything he then said to me I did remember.
So either I didn't remember the experience, or I remembered what he said without experiencing his words. You can never know which of these two histories is true.
Individual thoughts arise, sometimes in response to other thoughts or in response to perceptions. They may contain elements that suggest an I, for instance a verbal thought may contain the words “I” or “me” but this means little. They give way to more thoughts and perceptions in a sort of chain that seems to unroll mechanistically. None of this needs a stable I unless you declare the container of all this activity (and what is that, exactly?) to be that I. But that would be a further thought declaring this, just one more link in the chain.
Could experiencing exist (where there is not distinction between an experiencer and an experience) and additionally there becomes an experiencer and experience and part of that experiencer’s experience is a memory of there also being just experiencing?
Analogy required! Take dancing, dancers and dances.
In the moment of a dancer dancing a dance, there can be the complete loss of any distinction between a dancer and the dance, there is just dancing happening.
An observer could then bring themselves out of this 'just dancing’ reality by conceptualising the distinction between the dancer and the dance. The dancing will end at some point at which point there will be a dancer but no dancing. That same performance could be performed by someone else so we can talk of the dance as a thing separate from the performer.
These distinctions take an additional conceptual effort to the lived reality of ‘just dancing'.
Maybe in Philip’s experience, he completely let go of these conceptual distinctions and there was just experiencing. After the conceptual aspect returned he could talk about the experiencing in experiencer-experience terms.
Skipping “self” issue, which is inportant but derivative in my view.
Subject/property topic is my focus here.
I believe consciousness to be the field of causality itself that we perceive, in small ways.
Subject/property is definitely a strand of consciousness fractal. Two concepts can only be linked if we see the potential use, cause/effect of it, eventful vector.
For example, I believe that apes have found rocks way before it used the rock to break the nut. Birds have felt the magnetic field way before they knew how to use it to navigate.
Observation of the object is noncausal, factual, nondual. But once we have felt thru consciousness that objects can be used (in a wider meaning of this word) we had to classify them, sort them, distinguish them. Which developed a concept of link — object/property.
Sounds like substances dissolve the mind’s programming to link them, pure observation returns which drops our constant search for causality. We let go and swim in sensation, not paddling anymore.
p.s. In this theory “self”is such an object. A tool.
I’m curious, does this type of experience move you towards panqualityism at all? Panqualityism holds that our every day experience is explained by the relation between the base qualities (quiddities) and our higher order cognitive architecture.
From your description of the experience it seems compatible with the relaxation of these higher order thoughts, self-model + other cognitive architecture and a version of experience which is closer to “qualities only”.
From a physicalists perspective, I think it could absolutely make sense that there be experience without an experiencer. I already kinda think of the whole conception of the self is pretty far down the chain of phenomenology (I tend to think that descartes gets it backwards, that our own subjectivity isn't the first, most necessary thing we are aware of but one of the last, most contingent), I think it's pretty likely that "organisms with some kind of experience" predate "organisms with subjectivity" by many millions of years. Your description of dmt sounds kinda like what I imagine oysters experience, something like raw sense data without higher order abstractions like "concepts" or "language" imposed onto it. Which matches with the idea of dmt shutting down certain frontal lobe processes. And I do think that dmt and other psychadelics are very likely the key to scientifically cracking this whole consciousness thing wide open. Even if we can't get into other people/organism's subjectivities to do experiments, we can at least do experiments on our own subjectivities with substances that radically change not just our experiences but our way of experiencing.
I think I can accept that characterization as coherent and as vitally useful data in our understanding of consciousness without accepting it as veridical though (for the same reason I wouldn't accept an oyster's description of reality as veridical: surely humans with full brain function are in a strictly better--albeit still not ideal--epistemic position than oysters, even if the experience of an oyster is vitally important to our understanding of how consciousness evolved)
Super interesting take but I think it is best understood not as the complete erasure of self or the collapse of all distinctions, but as the temporary suspension of higher egoic strata that allows the vital-affective foundations of the person to disclose themselves more fully. This moves us from a merely negative claim (minimal self survives) to a positive ontological insight into the layered reality of human being. I addressed these concerns in my most recent post commenting on a paper by Day and Zahavi https://dannytheforde.substack.com/p/phenomenology-of-psychedelic-ego?r=1dut79&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Thank you all for sharing that too Philip. People are either intelligent, respectful, and responsible enough to understand how and why divide and conquer fake man-made religions, other fake political groups, electronic voting machines, and Democracy have never been valid in America, or they're not. We already teach how and why America was formed. If anyone got mixed up in any of that Abrahamic-approved cult disguised as three different traditions, cultures, or religions, blame some moron named King James.
Fascinating. You might find the ideas of Robert Salzman interesting. He feels there is no real, essential I that "has" experiences. I always screw up when I try to explain his ideas, but maybe the way you put it captures his notions better: "There is no 'I' that has the experience. There is just experience." He wrote a couple of great and really engaging books about this: "The Ten Thousand Things" and "Depending on No-Thing". He thinks you can, and would do well to, get by with no metaphysical assumptions, to just just live your life in the moment, experiencing. He writes really fun posts on Substack. So does Freyja Theaker in a very similar vein.
If you wanted to put it in mythological/religious terms, you could say that humans in the garden of Eden lacked a self. They were just experiencing, until the knowledge of self took over. The breakdown of the bicameral mind. Animals experience being but rarely recognize themselves. What you experienced with DMT 5 was the extreme condition, degree of this. As a musician, I would experience times onstage where the music existed apart from me. I was playing it, I was in a state where the notes I played on the guitar were what I wanted to play, but it wasn't me. The music was just playing, rather than me playing it. This seems to me to be the immersive experience of self-less consciousness, where consciousness itself emerges as the active component. Then, there is only the experience, of which 'you' are a part, but when the entire experience emerges, you are no longer a part, or 'apart,' you are of it. Therefore, you can't be both it and yourself. You are there in the emergence, but the emergence isn't you. See, it always returns to a metaphysical language that can't be stated precisely.
what you experienced is non-conceptual direct awareness. But what happens out of that experience with DMT is that your narrative wants to explain but it can't because it never had this experience. But this is the consciousness everybody is looking for. The theory of McGilchrist but then lived. Right leading and left following, experiences raw into the right hemisphere and only when needed transported to the narrative that only can translate the real thing. No residue no content in the brain that doesn't belong there and therefore every experience is new, without any prediction and is processed without narrative. No residue, no mental issues because every experience is processed and experiences without truth are kept outside by the original intuition. Full explanation based on permanent first person experience available. Nothing fancy, just the explanation of our human default state that sadly becomes overruled by upbringing education and all the other conditioning's.
I don't think it puts you in touch with a more "real" reality.
Our perception of reality is a model, a metaphor, constructed by our brains from the tiny proportion of available information that our senses capture from the real world.
That metaphor is consistent so we accept that it reflects something real.
Science has enabled us to build a better and even more consistent metaphor.
Our perception of reality is the user-interface that natural selection has given us, so it's sufficient unto the task assigned to it. But it's still a user interface, just like the screen you're staring at now.
Back in the days when screens were CRT's you could manipulate the image by moving a powerful magnet near the screen. This told you something about the technology of the CRT screen, but nothing about the underlying reality of the text display program you were using, nor of the electronics underlying that.
I submit that tripping might tell you something about how your brain works, just like all the other damaged brain studies, but it has nothing to say about the underlying reality.
If your poisoned brain could appreciate a deeper reality, natural selection would have found a way to put that in the UI, cos a deeper reality is always more reliable.
Is our personal Ego, our autobiographical memory sense of self & reality? And is this experience based on the subconscious phenomenon of reification (the illusory feeling of realness, injected into every thought-word we habitually experience, about the reality of experience) and the recursive (a process, rule, or function that is repeated) nature of the "imaginary" demands of language?
And is this what causes the circular nature, of the feeling of being conscious? Through a subconscious process of "fusing" our biologically receptive awareness of reality, with our psychologically projective sense of reality? Which our personal Ego experiences as the surface-level impressions of reality received by the biological reality of our eyes, and the psychology of reality-labeling words, we habitually project into this biological experience.
And though this personal Ego experience, do we unwittingly create the dichotomy of a body immersed in cosmic reality & a mind simultaneously immersed in a reification-fallacy? With our modern day mind's, arguably so possessed by a too literal sense of words & linear sense of time, that we cannot grasp the "riddle me this" intentions of ancient sayings & stories about our dichotomous nature?
As the synchronous sense of separation involved in the way language "automatically" describes & disguises reality? Through the subconsciously automatic nature, of our human behaviors? Like the way we can wiggle our fingers without conscious instruction from our mind? And how we habitually mistake the reality of our finger & the moon, because neither of those forms of objective reality, is a Word?
In Indian philosophy we could say that during the experience, the "ahamkara" is destroyed. The ahamkara is a subtle organ ("organ" from a phenomenological perspective, ie. something that absolves a function and it's present in experience) that creates the illusion that there is a "me" (or ego) that is expericing things and "owns" them. Your experience and understanding of DMT sounds like very similar to this concept and the realisation that it's not a part of consciousness, but it's just one of its contents
please stop talking about "indian philosophy" like it's one unified thing lol
You are right, I did it just to simplify things. I understand ahamkara as in non-dual shaiva tantra, as explained by Dr Mishra.
Ahamkara is more like the false identification of ur self with material things or the body. Most of hindu philosophy doesn't believe that there is no self
Does this map thoroughly onto the content-container metaphor? Or perhaps the mirror metaphor? Or the "no self in self" stance that Gary Snyder draws from Chinese philosophy? Or the claims for a "self-model" in consciousness? Picture consciousness as a sphere, perhaps without a clear boundary only a fading out from the center. Picture contained within the sphere a the smaller sphere of a self model, mirroring in its way the larger sphere. Now you're drugged in a way which makes that self model eclipsed from your view for a time. Consciousness must always be aware of itself beyond the self model, else the self model could never be formed by and in it. Drugged, you've got the primal, preliminary awareness of consiousness, but without the self-model reflection available -- a reflection which, due to its generally usable and useful enough accuracy, you commonly come to mistake for consciousness itself.
Thanks for sharing, I'll reflect further!
I know this is supposed to be about the psychedelic experience but honestly I'm more interested in the so-called "ordinary" experience -- because I still just don't get it.
> "Our ordinary experience presents us with objects that have properties: the ball that is red and round, the table that is brown and square."
does it really? I mean, for me, it's more like, "This red blur... it's a ball. it's round, it must be a ball. and that's where I left my ball, so ... that is in fact what it is." But I could imagine not being able to identify it or not caring enough about it to try to identify it. Not all red blurs are identifiable as distinct objects.
> "Even when we attend to experience itself, there seems to be a subject-predicate structure: there are the experiences but also the thing that has the experiences — the “I” that sees colour and feels pain."
I don't understand this either. I mean, I may say that I feel pain, but who else could I speak for with regards to feeling anything? If you are aware of the experience, then, logically, the experience is occurring to you, not to someone else. But this isn't a feeling, it's a logical entailment. The "I" doesn't feel like anything, at least not to me. I don't understand at all by what people mean by "subject-predicate" structure.
Fair point I didn't argue for these things in the article.
On the perception case, I follow Susanna Siegel in thinking perceptual experience involves conceptual representation of objects: a ball, a cup. It's not just colours and shapes.
On the consciousness case, I'd recommend Martine Nida-Rumelin's work arguing that we are directly aware, in a subtle way, of the subject of our experiences.
You have two systems interacting:
One is observation system, which stays alive during trips, where senses trigger thoughts or thoughts trigger themselves. That is, from noise we make a shape.
Second is modeling. In our cortex we have expectation that a particular set of senses is representing a concept, an object. This gets dissolved in certain trips, I believe.
We constantly evaluate incoming senses vs. stored ones, and compare the edges. And update the model if it is lacking.
Wider explanation is quite long. You have good questions, but I think a proper book is best on this. I am an amateur lurker, and short of scholarly experience to explain much further. ♥️
What I guess I don't understand is how "this gets dissolved" (referring to the "expectation that a particular set of senses is representing a concept, an object") is different from just seeing a blur with some color and shape and not being able to identify it, not modeling it as an object, and not particularly trying to model it as an object -- an ordinary experience for everyone, presumably?
Yes. Imagine seeing a word “Red”, it is laden with expectation for you. Then read “빨간” - it has no bearing as far as color for you. But it is Red in Korean. You and I don’t have the model for this projection.
With reality we can lose projection, and see things unmoored from concept. Just objects.
With red ball: you describe sensory noise, and it’s like you say. But in your mind there is a model of a red ball. And small bird. And loud sound. And self. It is the models, objects their properties that get unpaired.
> But in your mind there is a model of a red ball.
Can you be more specific here? I am still confused.
When you say "a model of a red ball" I can imagine something that is red and something that is a ball, okay. What is the difference between this and "sensory noise" as you call it?
Until I imagine it, it doesn't exist in my mind as an integrated model. I could generate a model of a specific ball based on attributes I remember: It is round, it is red, it is a ball. Is that what you mean? But that has more to do with recalling from memory than direct consciousness. If my memory was inaccessible, then I wouldn't be able to conjure up a mental model of the red ball. But what's so interesting about that?
What does it mean to pair up objects and their properties?
I can say the following:
This red blur: --> it is a ball
This red blur: --> it is round
so the object (red blur) has the attributes "ball" and "round". But this is higher level, it is a conceptual interpretation. I could interpret the blur differently if I wanted to.
Is that what you mean? or something else?
I don't understand what it means to have an experience with no experiencer honestly. How can *you* even remember anything if "you" didn't experience it, how do you even know anything was experienced at all? to even know that you did not exist (and how that feels), there has to have been a "you" to experience that and record it and bring it back to us, right?
I know it's hard to make sense of relative to ordinary experience, but there was experience without the "I" that normally has my experience. A memory was formed of the experience even though I wasn't there to witness it.
There's an old medical observation that anaesthetics
1. immobilise the patient.
2. block the formation of memories.
From this we infer that they stop you feeling the pain.
(Nowadays we can check brain activity, but that's quite a recent development)
you can certainly remember without experience. A few years ago I had a minor procedure under a general anaesthetic. When I came round the surgeon asked me if I remembered him speaking to me previously. I didn't, but everything he then said to me I did remember.
So either I didn't remember the experience, or I remembered what he said without experiencing his words. You can never know which of these two histories is true.
Individual thoughts arise, sometimes in response to other thoughts or in response to perceptions. They may contain elements that suggest an I, for instance a verbal thought may contain the words “I” or “me” but this means little. They give way to more thoughts and perceptions in a sort of chain that seems to unroll mechanistically. None of this needs a stable I unless you declare the container of all this activity (and what is that, exactly?) to be that I. But that would be a further thought declaring this, just one more link in the chain.
Could experiencing exist (where there is not distinction between an experiencer and an experience) and additionally there becomes an experiencer and experience and part of that experiencer’s experience is a memory of there also being just experiencing?
Analogy required! Take dancing, dancers and dances.
In the moment of a dancer dancing a dance, there can be the complete loss of any distinction between a dancer and the dance, there is just dancing happening.
An observer could then bring themselves out of this 'just dancing’ reality by conceptualising the distinction between the dancer and the dance. The dancing will end at some point at which point there will be a dancer but no dancing. That same performance could be performed by someone else so we can talk of the dance as a thing separate from the performer.
These distinctions take an additional conceptual effort to the lived reality of ‘just dancing'.
Maybe in Philip’s experience, he completely let go of these conceptual distinctions and there was just experiencing. After the conceptual aspect returned he could talk about the experiencing in experiencer-experience terms.
Skipping “self” issue, which is inportant but derivative in my view.
Subject/property topic is my focus here.
I believe consciousness to be the field of causality itself that we perceive, in small ways.
Subject/property is definitely a strand of consciousness fractal. Two concepts can only be linked if we see the potential use, cause/effect of it, eventful vector.
For example, I believe that apes have found rocks way before it used the rock to break the nut. Birds have felt the magnetic field way before they knew how to use it to navigate.
Observation of the object is noncausal, factual, nondual. But once we have felt thru consciousness that objects can be used (in a wider meaning of this word) we had to classify them, sort them, distinguish them. Which developed a concept of link — object/property.
Sounds like substances dissolve the mind’s programming to link them, pure observation returns which drops our constant search for causality. We let go and swim in sensation, not paddling anymore.
p.s. In this theory “self”is such an object. A tool.
That's a very good distinction.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece Phillip.
I’m curious, does this type of experience move you towards panqualityism at all? Panqualityism holds that our every day experience is explained by the relation between the base qualities (quiddities) and our higher order cognitive architecture.
From your description of the experience it seems compatible with the relaxation of these higher order thoughts, self-model + other cognitive architecture and a version of experience which is closer to “qualities only”.
From a physicalists perspective, I think it could absolutely make sense that there be experience without an experiencer. I already kinda think of the whole conception of the self is pretty far down the chain of phenomenology (I tend to think that descartes gets it backwards, that our own subjectivity isn't the first, most necessary thing we are aware of but one of the last, most contingent), I think it's pretty likely that "organisms with some kind of experience" predate "organisms with subjectivity" by many millions of years. Your description of dmt sounds kinda like what I imagine oysters experience, something like raw sense data without higher order abstractions like "concepts" or "language" imposed onto it. Which matches with the idea of dmt shutting down certain frontal lobe processes. And I do think that dmt and other psychadelics are very likely the key to scientifically cracking this whole consciousness thing wide open. Even if we can't get into other people/organism's subjectivities to do experiments, we can at least do experiments on our own subjectivities with substances that radically change not just our experiences but our way of experiencing.
I think I can accept that characterization as coherent and as vitally useful data in our understanding of consciousness without accepting it as veridical though (for the same reason I wouldn't accept an oyster's description of reality as veridical: surely humans with full brain function are in a strictly better--albeit still not ideal--epistemic position than oysters, even if the experience of an oyster is vitally important to our understanding of how consciousness evolved)
Super interesting take but I think it is best understood not as the complete erasure of self or the collapse of all distinctions, but as the temporary suspension of higher egoic strata that allows the vital-affective foundations of the person to disclose themselves more fully. This moves us from a merely negative claim (minimal self survives) to a positive ontological insight into the layered reality of human being. I addressed these concerns in my most recent post commenting on a paper by Day and Zahavi https://dannytheforde.substack.com/p/phenomenology-of-psychedelic-ego?r=1dut79&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Thank you all for sharing that too Philip. People are either intelligent, respectful, and responsible enough to understand how and why divide and conquer fake man-made religions, other fake political groups, electronic voting machines, and Democracy have never been valid in America, or they're not. We already teach how and why America was formed. If anyone got mixed up in any of that Abrahamic-approved cult disguised as three different traditions, cultures, or religions, blame some moron named King James.
https://old.bitchute.com/video/jsHTV8JdIlAt/
🐈
also here
https://odysee.com/@tidbitsfortruth:2?view=content
and here
https://old.bitchute.com/channel/NBu3vOs8kXFY/
🍂
It's all a science thing.
🦣
Thank you.
https://michaelatkinson.substack.com/
🦖 👀
Fascinating. You might find the ideas of Robert Salzman interesting. He feels there is no real, essential I that "has" experiences. I always screw up when I try to explain his ideas, but maybe the way you put it captures his notions better: "There is no 'I' that has the experience. There is just experience." He wrote a couple of great and really engaging books about this: "The Ten Thousand Things" and "Depending on No-Thing". He thinks you can, and would do well to, get by with no metaphysical assumptions, to just just live your life in the moment, experiencing. He writes really fun posts on Substack. So does Freyja Theaker in a very similar vein.
If you wanted to put it in mythological/religious terms, you could say that humans in the garden of Eden lacked a self. They were just experiencing, until the knowledge of self took over. The breakdown of the bicameral mind. Animals experience being but rarely recognize themselves. What you experienced with DMT 5 was the extreme condition, degree of this. As a musician, I would experience times onstage where the music existed apart from me. I was playing it, I was in a state where the notes I played on the guitar were what I wanted to play, but it wasn't me. The music was just playing, rather than me playing it. This seems to me to be the immersive experience of self-less consciousness, where consciousness itself emerges as the active component. Then, there is only the experience, of which 'you' are a part, but when the entire experience emerges, you are no longer a part, or 'apart,' you are of it. Therefore, you can't be both it and yourself. You are there in the emergence, but the emergence isn't you. See, it always returns to a metaphysical language that can't be stated precisely.
what you experienced is non-conceptual direct awareness. But what happens out of that experience with DMT is that your narrative wants to explain but it can't because it never had this experience. But this is the consciousness everybody is looking for. The theory of McGilchrist but then lived. Right leading and left following, experiences raw into the right hemisphere and only when needed transported to the narrative that only can translate the real thing. No residue no content in the brain that doesn't belong there and therefore every experience is new, without any prediction and is processed without narrative. No residue, no mental issues because every experience is processed and experiences without truth are kept outside by the original intuition. Full explanation based on permanent first person experience available. Nothing fancy, just the explanation of our human default state that sadly becomes overruled by upbringing education and all the other conditioning's.
I don't think it puts you in touch with a more "real" reality.
Our perception of reality is a model, a metaphor, constructed by our brains from the tiny proportion of available information that our senses capture from the real world.
That metaphor is consistent so we accept that it reflects something real.
Science has enabled us to build a better and even more consistent metaphor.
Our perception of reality is the user-interface that natural selection has given us, so it's sufficient unto the task assigned to it. But it's still a user interface, just like the screen you're staring at now.
Back in the days when screens were CRT's you could manipulate the image by moving a powerful magnet near the screen. This told you something about the technology of the CRT screen, but nothing about the underlying reality of the text display program you were using, nor of the electronics underlying that.
I submit that tripping might tell you something about how your brain works, just like all the other damaged brain studies, but it has nothing to say about the underlying reality.
If your poisoned brain could appreciate a deeper reality, natural selection would have found a way to put that in the UI, cos a deeper reality is always more reliable.
Is our personal Ego, our autobiographical memory sense of self & reality? And is this experience based on the subconscious phenomenon of reification (the illusory feeling of realness, injected into every thought-word we habitually experience, about the reality of experience) and the recursive (a process, rule, or function that is repeated) nature of the "imaginary" demands of language?
And is this what causes the circular nature, of the feeling of being conscious? Through a subconscious process of "fusing" our biologically receptive awareness of reality, with our psychologically projective sense of reality? Which our personal Ego experiences as the surface-level impressions of reality received by the biological reality of our eyes, and the psychology of reality-labeling words, we habitually project into this biological experience.
And though this personal Ego experience, do we unwittingly create the dichotomy of a body immersed in cosmic reality & a mind simultaneously immersed in a reification-fallacy? With our modern day mind's, arguably so possessed by a too literal sense of words & linear sense of time, that we cannot grasp the "riddle me this" intentions of ancient sayings & stories about our dichotomous nature?
As the synchronous sense of separation involved in the way language "automatically" describes & disguises reality? Through the subconsciously automatic nature, of our human behaviors? Like the way we can wiggle our fingers without conscious instruction from our mind? And how we habitually mistake the reality of our finger & the moon, because neither of those forms of objective reality, is a Word?