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Comment by nick__m | Hacker News Reader

  Personally I have reached a personal belief that entheogens allow you traverse the realms of existence [1] within your lifetime. For example, descending into the hell realm or ascending into the deva realm

If you take hallucinogen frequently enough (it took me around 150 trips over 2 years) , you began to see how it work behind the curtain, how it pulls your strings and it loose all it's magic forever.

I now "know" that I cannot know anything about the spiritual realm. Spiritual "knowledge" gained by religion, meditation and hallucinogen it's all fake, what we can perceive as spiritual is a distorted projection of the inner working of the mind that gets rationalized as spirituality. That agnosticism is the only rational position.

I don't claim that hallucinogen religion and meditation cannot have positive benefits but don't seek spirutal enlightenment to hard or you will eventually into an hole or join a cult.

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> you began to see how it work behind the curtain, how it pulls your strings and it loose all it's magic forever. (...)

> That agnosticism is the only rational position.

Please tell us more about the insights you have gained leading to this conclusion

I cannot word it coherently but I will try! Succinctly it feels like the scene in The wizard of Oz where Dorothy see that the Wizard himself is nothing more than an ordinary man behind a curtain.

I started an intense spirutal quest after a meditation session¹, that unexpectedly left me disoriented, depressed and generally dysfunctional. My first few trips after that event made me hopeful again but left me curious as I felt that there was a deeper truth to be found.

1-in a college course on meditation (I had the choice between soccer, golf and meditation... in retrospective I should have chosen Golf)

At that time most of the more obscure hallucinogen described in Tikal and Phikal were legal and easy to obtain from Sigma-Aldrich at reasonable price and I knew people who could obtain quality LSD. So I tried almost everything that Shuglin described as +++.

But it's repeated combination of dextromethorphan (a surprisingly complex drug that is mostly a dissociative) and things in Thikal (LSD, 4-AcO-DMT, 5-meo-mipt...) that pulled on the curtain. 350mg of DXM made me prone to recursive toughts without blocking my ability to remember and the tryptamine brought the spiritual aspect. After thinking about thinking that I am thinking for what felt like a thousand years I came to experience the holodeck effect where you can will any scene into "existence", it's my repeated interactions with my "holodeck" that pulled that metaphorical curtain to reveal that the Wizard was nothing more than a physical process inside me.

After that I lost my access to the holodeck, hallucinogens became physically unpleasant and mentally uninteresting. My quest ended as I felt that I had learned what could be learned about spirituality and stopped worrying about a deeper hidden meaning in life. Things happen because they happen and there is no answer to why something instead of nothing (a complete nothingnes, not the nothingnes of a perfect vaccuum) and it doesn't matter!

I work at a traditional ayahuasca retreat center and have seen a few people who have "holodeck"-like experiences with ayahuasca. In our view it's a bit of a block, or a crutch and way to distract oneself from looking at yourself and doing necessary healing work. I've heard the most fantastic stories but it is all very ungrounded and disconnected from what we actually see in them. DXM is indeed a powerful dissociative and would contribute to that (I believe it's possible to burn yourself out with it; regular users report losing the magic of early experiences fairly quickly). Alas it does look like you've started some great work but may have hit a plateau...as someone who has drank hundreds of times with no plan on stopping any time soon, I'd encourage you to dig deeper :)

Thank you but I feel great and have no interest I digging deeper.

edit: And to learn what you need to change I never experienced something as effective and as harsh as 2CE, personal problems were magnified front and center and you feel like if you doesn't make a plan to adress those issues and execute that plan you will painfully burst into flame.

Also I don't opposed nor judge the work you do, spiritual beliefs or lack of are deeply personal, that why I put quote around "know" in my post.

Thank you for sharing some of your story. It's really wild to imagine a time where Shulgin's 'dirty pictures' were still legal and could be easily ordered.

By the time I got round to PiKHAL and TiKHAL everything was scheduled.

Personally, I disagree with the notion that "it doesn't matter" when reflecting on life. However, I understand the tremendous importance of being able to let go of things and the freedom that comes with that.

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