Thread by @owenbroadcast

i will explain a dichotomy in terms of two paths for reasoning about psychedelics here that i essentially never see explicated. once you see and understand it you will understand this type of “reasoning” a lot more (i tried to explain this to mike, he never responded). [...]

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1394463485606563840

i just woke up and am having coffee. presumably there will be typos. good morning. did you sleep well. apparently no one is.

anyway when DMT was becoming more popular in our culture, more people were doing it, of course naturally people wanted to discuss it and explain it, right

we are going to characterize the default “type of” explanation as the machine elf explanation. this is more of a meta look at it, + that (if youre familiar with it, if not i’ll explain) is just the perfect example. if youre unfamiliar, lets zoom in on one aspect of the experience

so, maybe you use DMT, and see these kind of shifting hyper spinny weird balls of light that seem to be these creatures. that happens a lot. theyre moving around, bouncing around, whatever. then you come off it and are naturally like, well, what was that. how do i explain that.

the typical, default, not even default, its what happens 100% of the time, type of explanation [begins w the presupposition that what u were experiencing has some tether into something external to yourself]. that is a fancy way of saying, users always assume the cause is external

i mean obviously we can say the DMT is a cause but you know what i mean. they want to know why they saw THAT, that creature-y ball of light, and they being their deduction process at the square that says “this thing i saw must be at least kind of real and is out there somewhere”.

so this person will read books on fairies, pixies, mythology, tibetan buddhism, shamanism, go to great lengths digging and digging to find explanations and to stack more information onto their plate because they literally have never considered that theres an alternate route.

theres a guy, james kent, who was publishing a psychedelic magazine (i think) when terrence mckenna was getting the most popular and the machine elf style explanation because the norm. this kind of frustrated him because he wasnt totally sold. actually, his specific critique [..]

was something like, it would be better to not ASSUME that there is a spiritual nature to the phenomenon from the get go. that it is also (maybe better) to look at from a scientific perspective, because there may be (may be) mundane or physical explanations for these experiences.

so he wrote a book called psychedelic information theory, and thats what its about. attempting to explain the entire psychedelic phenomenon by appealing only to whats happening internally in the user, their brain, not ASSUMING that something spiritual is taking place as a cause.

now, im not totally sold on that 100% explaining everything obviously, however, considering both angles prevents false positives. essentially everyone goes in assuming that everything they experience will have, ultimately, a spiritual cause behind it. they get false positives.

im using spiritual here as short hand for “non physical”. essentially no one in these circles ever considers a mundane or “brain mechanics” explanation for essentially anything + WHEN THEY DO its always tethered back into some HIGHER SPIRITUAL CAUSE that at least imparts meaning

i put that part in all caps because people are going to be like uhhhh bruh muh dmt brain studies. i know. im talking about people on the ground trying to make sense of their experiences. ULTIMATELY they dont think X happened because of brain chemistry, they see a “higher cause”.

this is all kind of vague so let me give you an example. those balls of light machine elves. well, it just so happens to be the case that for a variety of reasons during these experiences you have something that i would colloquially call self generating phosphenes. [...]

you see balls of light. in your eyes. and then naturally your brain is trying to interpret what they are, so youre trying to pin down details. thats why they look like that. and theyre moving. well naturally, your brain sees anything moving erratically as “alive”. [...]

if you saw a black mark moving around your floor in a certain way your mind would immediately say “that thing is alive” and youd assume it was a mouse or something. so, thats a totally cohesive and full mundane explanation for one aspect of things. [...]

i know some people say they talk to them sometimes, im not saying this explains everything but you have to eliminate false positives. personally i had that exact phenomenon happen to me and in the moment thought (knew, really) i was seeing some type of creatures. [...]

later when i reconsidered it i decided it was much more likely that they were these phosphenes or something like that and that it was internal to myself and self generated from my mind. but in the moment, i “knew”, with certainty, that i was seeing these creatures. for sure.

many many aspects of the experience can be explained (i know it’s not all of them, obviously) by appealing to internal brain mechanisms and knowing this on a specific case by case basis prevents false positives and presuming spiritual meaning where there may not be any.

the flying thing is a perfect example because there are mundane reasons for why when your brains “top down” control mechanism is altered you feel like youre floating. you feel like youre falling some times when youre falls asleep. does that mean youre actually falling. no.

so i have those two “realms” of explanation in my mind, the psychedelic information theory road and the terrence mckenna road. neither 100% explains it but without both you are setting yourself up to make wild inferences based on every little aspect of the drug experience

because of your presupposition. and, this happens all the time but in such circles. actually its the norm because to say, essentially, maybe that particular thing was meaningless and all in your mind, is heretical, and you will be proverbially stoned (great pun) if u say that.

if you came this far as a piece of bonus info, its true that levity thing often happens on DMT, but on other substances its not the case (to be fair, irrelevant to mikes point). in european shamanism (no one normal knows about this) techniques were developed to create that feeing

so women would sit up on items with their feet off the ground so they would feel like theyre flying. this was atypical for men who would go another route + cover themselves in animal skin at places where their limbs touched their body to coax them into thinking they were animals

always suspected this has something to do with intrinsic differences between the male + female spirit and still lives on in certain tales (tails, lycanthropy for example) but i have to walk my dog (appropriate) so just read the euro chapter in this book (heres the other book btw)