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Comment by throwaway64389 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip.

I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that take us to the next 'frame', but the other decisions still exist and have their own decision trees.

Also, we're all the same person or being.

Weird day.

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I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common. I experienced it myself after trying magic mushroom: We are all one being(we call it the universe), it's consciousness subdivided between us all in order to escape it's solitude. It was scary at the time believing this sad possibility. I'm not so sure but the thought remains. Also follows: whatever you do to me you will be experiencing it.

> I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common.

More importantly, the description isn't just found in trip reports. It's found throughout history, in reports of people who have had what are called peak experiences, sometimes involving trauma. There are many stories of prisoners in the literature, for example, who come to the realization that both the jailer and the jailed are the same.

Jack Kornfield is one of many who is famous for relating the story about how the person being tortured suddenly observes that the person torturing them is the same entity. I believe there are also many reports from concentration camps coming to the same conclusion. It's difficult for us to admit this, because normal waking consciousness would have us sort things into us and them, but there is a level of perception that one can reach, where the interconnectedness of all things is seen.

Many people tend to toss these things into religion or spirituality, but there's nothing supernatural about it at all, it's a biological and ecological reality. The question, however, that doesn't go away, is why are these peak experiences trying to communicate the same or similar ultimate truths to us, truths that seem to contradict and oppose the conditioning and programming of our dominant culture, which tells us we are separate from each other and should be fearful, aggressive, and violent.

The boring possibility is that humans have to self-generate an ego- babies don't really know the difference between themselves and other people, it's one of the recognized developmental stages. So in unusual situations it's maybe not surprising that that particular ability could get disrupted, it might actually be quite fragile.

Agreed. This kind of ego dissolution starts to look like philosophical panspychism if you stare at it long enough, particularly when you read the reports of people identifying with non-human animals, plants, and yes, even rocks. At that point, there might be another mechanism at work. If life and mind are just emergent properties of organized and self-replicating matter, is it really crazy (or juvenile) to look back and reflect on everything around us and see it not as a discrete set of things, but as one continuous form? Maybe the problem isn't what we are experiencing, but how we think about it.

> Many people tend to toss these things into religion or spirituality

It is a shame that interesting and/or valuable aspects of our lives are held hostage by (what I see as) irritating cults.

I would call spirituality in general the 'mapping' of these spaces, descriptions of the way to get there and navigate them, and the preservation of accounts of people who've visited them.

A religion, as I see it, is already focused on one particular version of the map. This can be fine, for example if the particular path is especially compatible with the rest of the culture that's around it. It starts being problematic once it discredits other versions and accounts. Irritating cults is what it becomes when it gets further warped by ego concerns and misinterpretations.

I'm an atheist (post-mormon) but I do consider it "spiritual" but I hate religion, so I don't group it in there, but I've been having some sort of "awakening" ... I'm not fully atheist though I guess, I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth...

Something something... I can buy an afterlife, just don't buy there's a God, at least not one like any worshiped on earth, they all resemble kings too closely, and are too narcissistic. Enki might be the only exception, he was a scientist - stood up for man, gave us knowledge, but basically is as most scientists humble and could give a rats ass about being worshipped, considers us just the discovery channel. Keyword: Aloof.

Of course, that's just a myth. Still, my favorite mythological character. Anyhow, tangent aside my point - is no God, no need to worship. however if we're all each other, and we are the universe, or part of it and it's all different layers of conscious "agents" as Donald Hoffman calls it, then I think maybe a religion based on that could at least encourage fairness. One tenet : All are one, treat all as you would yourself regardless of race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

Honestly, I see that as the penultimate human utopian ideal, but I think as long as we give elitism roots, we'll never get there, there's no room for elitism in a world where all are equal.

>I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth...

Why did they need to exist before they were generated here? Firefox didn't float through space before people invented computers and wrote it up in 2002.

By the anthropic principle, we happened to start here, of all possible places, in our heads, of all possible heads, and will end here. What's beautiful, I think, is being okay with that, and overcoming ego enough to realize how petty and small our differences from each other are -- you from me, us from Ancient Romans 2000 years ago, and us from the uncountable consciousnesses 2000 years from now, which will be witness to wonders we can only dream about. The local tragedy of death is a momentary drop of sorrow in an global ocean of adventure and beauty, experienced by people whose difference from ourselves and each other is a different sensory feed and a lonely, selfish conceit of the self. :p

You only need an afterlife insofar as you can't overcome the ego to empathize with those who come after you as much as you do with yourself.

The relationship aspect is also an important feature of psychosis in paranoid schizophrenia.

I think it’s possible we, as a social species, just have an elaborate model of other people and things in our brain which gets mixed up with the experience of self under certain conditions and the brain is coming up with unifying explanations trying to achieve homeostasis under the influence.

> ultimate truths

OMG man, this is delusional. We are not all the same person. To be specific, you and I are not the same person by any reasonable non-trivial definition of a person. We may only be parts of some larger entity (duh) like humanity, which may or may not be considered a person (separate from us, its parts) depending on definition you choose.

See nondualism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondualism

It's considered an "ultimate truth" in those traditions. The question isn't whether or not this is delusional, it's why is this experience widely shared across human history.

Judging from the page description they make the same mistake of simply ignoring definitions and coming up with their own.

Is there anything special to this experience? Historically, all kinds of delusions were "widely shared". This is true even today. People "talked" to trees everywhere around the world.

> Is there anything special to this experience?

Yes, it is plausible, but logically impossible.

What do you mean by "impossible"? I just described exactly how people get that experience: they mess up definitions. It is a perfectly logical description.

Under influence people think peeing in public is OK is plausible, though logically it is not the best action to take. So that is not unique either.

Use the concept of paradoxes in Taoism as a metaphor for nondualism:

> The paradox is that by talking about the Tao, and by attempting to define the Tao, we ensure that the reader does not actually grasp the concept. At its heart, the Tao is nonverbal in its essence, beyond the confines of language. The Tao is an experience rather than definition.

Each tradition has their own version. For the west, it's the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa. This goes beyond definitions because language can't describe it. This is not a failing, this is the essence of its impossibility.

What you just described makes about as much sense as Seado - a word that I just came up with - e.g. no sense at all.

You're starting to get it. Paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsense is how these traditions attempt to get the practitioner to overcome dualism. The problem is that you think you can use either-or logic to understand it when the practice is designed to destroy it.

Get what? Understand what? Destroy what?

Dualistic thinking.

As I explained above, what you call "dualistic thinking" is just refusal to follow common definitions for relatively simple concepts. For example, Wikipedia's entry for abovementioned personhood is clear enough to say, that I and you are two distinct persons. The two of us may be called a person, but it has nothing to do with the "way of thinking", and only has to do with the definition of a person. If a definition of a person had a clause, that would prevent congregates of persons to be a person, no amount of "dualistic thinking" would make two of us, or the entire humanity a person.

Sadly, this discussion appears to be at an end. Nondualistic thought processes are not based on definitions. They are based on direct experience of the ineffable, beyond words themselves. You keep trying to impose Aristotelian logic on to paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsensical attempts to break one out of dualistic perceptions. There are numerous ways this works, from dreaming, to creativity, to peak and flow experiences of all kinds, all of which aim to break the mind out of what is perceived as separate and to give it a new holistic POV. Just as you cannot have music without the notes that define it, you also cannot have the notes without the empty spaces between them. You can pretend that the notes represent the music, but it is also equally composed by its absence in the form of silence. They are one and the same.

There's nothing ineffable in anything you are referring to. Anyone can generate tons of bullshit by combining letters and words. You are clearly much worse at Seado than I am at non-dualism. Your thought process needs to grow much before you can realize significance of Seado. Then you will learn some truth (and still it will not be universal).

What is sad about it? It seems liberating to me.

Maybe it’s sad if you routinely go around treating other people like shit…

Is it common because it's some sort of profound mystic realization, or just an expected replicable biochemical reaction?

One can experience fractal sensations from a strong cannabis high, are psychedelic ones any qualitatively different? Maybe that's just the way our minds are supposed to bend.

That sounds like a profound experience, would you say these insights had any lasting impact on your life? And, if may ask, in what way was it a bad trip? I once took LSD and was hoping for that level of experience, but only got nice visual sfx and some bad emotions later on.

Consider that you're remarking on his takeaway here. The "insights". The conceptual end-product of all that strange-seeing.

But it's the strange-seeing that's the real feast.

I would say it has opened a door to different way of seeing reality, and I can open that door whenever I want, but I don't think it has changed any of the practical decisions I've made.

It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details). You can never rest, it's all an infinite loop, and that idea made me extremely distressed, like this fractal nature was some sort of punishment or permanent purgatory.

"It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details)."

This echoes Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which he thought would in fact be terrifying to the ordinary man, but the overman could live their life in such a way that the infinite repetition would be fully and unreservedly welcome.

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.”

https://youtu.be/DWpzT56nxZI?t=71

Somewhat similar: Based on the fact that if you break a holographic picture in half then the two halves show a fainter representation of the whole and not a left and right portion, I imagined we each contain the whole mind of god, but a faint representation of it, since we are only a part of the whole.

https://www.litiholo.com/blog/2019/10/11/what-happens-when-y...

I've noticed ... changes to existing facts in reality that shouldn't change. No, it wasn't bad memory. I have a bad memory, but when it's something I'm hyper (adhd) obsessively focused on, and then it changes within 3 days, that is different than a mis-remembered childhood spelling like Berenstein/Berenstain Bears.

I'm agnostic (exmormon), I think God(s) are narcissistic man-king-modeled control structures. However after experience reality shift -- all without any drug use... I've become somewhat "spiritual" in a sense, in that I feel there's a lot more to everything than I ever imagined.

Simulation theory is my strongest belief, but secondary would be entropic multiverses colliding when they have no more room to split into new universes.

Scientifically, I find the Cosmological Axis of Evil quite odd that it puts our solar system somehow "central" to the universe (on one axis), from a simulation perspective you could argue the simulation renders what's needed and started here on out.

Anyhow, i've been going down rabbit holes on "occult" wisdom trying to see if there's a way to actually change reality by one's accord. So far dead ends (or I haven't gone far enough yet to reach "enlightenment"), most promising idea is meditation (silencing brain completely) might open some "conduit" to learn from the universe or make changes, or both.

Looking at toltec (/r/castaneda), spiritual subs, buddhist, hindu, etc... that's the one common thread: quiet the mind. Learn to meditate. Lucid dreams may help. Astral Projections could help. I guess in other words train your brain to find some of the same things LSD brings organically without the need for drugs. Probably healthier that way, but it's a long process.

There is a big benefit though in working on meditation practices: anxiety goes way down. That's nice after last year. I've had panic attacks, etc. So, I guess if I figure shit out or not, there's at least a benefit for trying.

I think this is the way your brain decides things: by replaying events slightly differently, and choosing the best option.

And if that is the way the brain works, then that is the way you would make sense of the world.

somewhat related to your second point https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI (egg theory)

http://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Sounds like a fantastic trip.

What did you do next? :)

Had the same exact experience a year ago on my first trip.

We’re all the same person = experiencing one-ness/ego death.

For a lot of people it adds magic into their lives. For my materialist mind, not as much. Just confusion.

I think it gave me what Jordan Peterson calls ontological shock. Having OCD doesn’t help since I now obsess about it and I also suspect it made me feel derealized.

I find these experiences like a video game. And since I have to take ketamine for my depression it sometimes provides entertainment to distract me from the other side-effects.

You mention microseconds and micometers. Those are on the scale of the edge of our various human senses.

Now, your quantum thingies happen on the scale of the Planck constant. I've just asked Google what h is and I got this beast:

6.62607004 × 10^-34 m^2 kg / s

Note the mixed suffixes and the silly precision for a web search result. I'm not a mathematician. If I was a physicist or chemist or whatever doing calcs for real, I probably wouldn't use Google to look up the latest result. I'd quote a paper. So 6.63 is more than enough for the number in a search result.

Units: metres squared kilograms per second. The notation for the number is different to the notation for the unit, so we can conclude that Mr Google is a bit slack. The number is given with negative exponent notation and the units with slash notation.

OK, so Google is a bit crap.

Back to my thesis: Your trippy self needs to really get to grips with the fabric of reality. That fabric is far more fantastic and granular than you have experienced so far on LSD.

You carved things up into 10^-3 (micro) when you stuffed some pretty funky drugs into your bloodstream. Mr Planck has shown that you need to worry about 10^-34 if you are going to really get to grips with the fabric of reality. You'll need quite a large lab and some decent funding .... or a bit more imagination.

Good luck.

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