Neurochemistry and Mystical Experiences

Hello people.

I am writing a paper on the neurochemistry behind mystical experiences.

1. Has anybody experienced any mystical experiences that would not mind telling me about? (due to sleep deprivation, acid trips etc.)

2. Does anybody know of any good books on this matter?

 

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I had a dream that came true exactly how I dreamt it once.
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please explain..what's so mystical about acid trips or sleep-deprivation. :bugeye:

 

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I have dreams that come true all the time and its starting to get scary

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Acid trip hallucinations are mistaken for mystical experiences.


Lil Ms Sexy Photon.
Here's a link for mystical/pseudoscientific studies:
http://deoxy.org/8circuit.htm

More links:
http://www.rushkoff.com/

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/3000/

http://www.johnclilly.com/

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/9654/tesla/projecttesla.html

http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush.shtml

 

thank you, Cool Skill....couldn't have said it any better myself. acid trips are delusions/hallucinations of the brain brought on by chemicals; sensory mis-perceptions are due to the chemical (lsd) working/wreaking havoc inside your body..nothing mystical about that. it's purely chemical.

 

I've posted a few times on Radiology usage in the creation of hallucinations/holograms.

There are ways to manipulate the brains chemistry holographically, but there are side effects that I'm aware of also that could lead to liver/kidney complaints.

From the point of view on Illicit chemicals:

True LSD gives traces, if anyone sees any more, then it's likely they were given a radioactive isatope that could be used to "track" them.

This of course would be in conjunction with certain research projects.

 

(1) Once when I was working on an archaeological dig, there was a day where the temperatures had hovered between 110 to 115 degrees. All day long we were digging and humping dirt in buckets...it was nearly unbearble. You simply could not drink water fast enough to stay hydrated. On this particular day I became so dehydrated, that I believe I had mild a mild heat stroke. I pointed out to my coworkers, a beautiful wolf or coyote that was traversing it's way down the opposite hillside and was coming in our direction. Of course, I was the only one that could see it as I was hallucinating.

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However, it was "very" real to me.

(2) I think all of Carlos Casteneda's work would qualify.

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Sexy Photon

New Scientist did a story maybe a year or two back about this subject. The story covered the research of some people who had been checking out the similarities between observed brain activity in meditating people, hallucinatin people, et cetera. If you wish, I will check through the issues I have for that story, and give you the names and perhaps webpages for further reading.

 

I think all life is just one big pattern, constantly repeating itself. More and more often I will do something or someone will say something that eerily reminds me of something that happened along time ago, to the point where i cant remember the specifics, but I just KNOW it happened before. Or maybe didnt happen before but i drempt about it happening awhile ago. I unno. Maybe im just crazy, too.

 

In the Spring of 2001 the popular press carried a number of articles claiming that scientists had 'explained' religious feelings as 'just a product of how the brain works'.

These articles referred back to a report in the New Scientist ('In Search of God' by Bob Holmes, New Scientist, 21st April 2001, pages 25 - 27 ). The report described experiments which demonstrated that when Tibetan Buddhist meditators experienced the dissolution of the distinction between self and other, there was an associated shutdown of the parietal lobe, a region of the brain responsible for the sensation of personal identity.

The tone of the tabloid press was that science had finally explained away religion as some kind of malfunction of the brain. The original New Scientist report wasn't quite so simplistic, but did make some reductionist statements such as:

'Experiments on the brain have led neuroscientists to suggest that the capacity for religion may somehow be hardwired into us'

'You can have a dream and and it feels real at the time, but you wake up and it no longer feels as real. The problem is, when people have a mystical experience, they think that is more real than baseline reality - even when they come back to baseline reality'.

 

once again....it all boils down to chemicals and their various interactions. yep.

 

Mystical experiences... Ive posted this link before but the people at www.astralforum.com have plenty mystical experiences...try looking around there

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WARNING!

Rationale and reasoning are verboten at astralforums.com.

If you do not agree with their group think they will do everything in their power to run you off their forum. The moderators will change or delete your posts if they don’t agree with you.

These people are extremely sensitive to their beliefs and will get very upset when questioned - especially if the word “evidence” is used.

So if you wish to turn a forum upside down into total chaos, please go there and do so. Registration is not required on the “Anything Goes” and “Disbelievers” boards.

Have fun!

 

What exactly do you mean by that?

 

Traces like you might see if you swiped your hand in front of your face quick enough, or wave it infront of a television screen.

 

"traces" a good analogy of them would be: watching an action in slow motion as it catches up with itself. all in breath-taking color...btw.

 

I would suggest that mystical experiences should be defined not as just hallucinations or bouts of insanity, although they may be both of these things in any particular case. What distinguishes a mystical experience from the experience of seeing ghosts or pink panthers flying across the moon is that mystical experiences are felt by their subjects to have meaning to them, to tell them something about existence.

Thus psychoactive drugs have been used for millenia by many peoples as a means of developing understanding (rather than knowledge). The neuroscience is interesting but the 'meanings' are much more so because regardless of the particular drug and the particular culture the learning outcomes for those who take psychoactive drugs share a remarkable similarity. How can this be?

What physical mechanism detirmines that the use of marijuana tends to lead people to care more about the environment, or feel more empathetic? One would expect such a drug to disrupt brain functioning in a way that was fairly random and very muddling to the user, and badly damaged their ability to be rational. In fact it seems to be very unmuddling, and in general I find its users to be quite clearly more rational and 'deeper' in their thinking than most.

I would suggest that it is because such drugs do actually disrupt our more intricate (and in evolutionary terms later) brain functions/thinking and therefore users become less distracted by trivia and more focused on basic and common sense truths. Just a thought for discussion.

Hmm. Slightly lost the point I think. Partly I just meant to defend mystical experiences against the charge of emptiness just because they are caused sometimes by drugs and their neural correlates can be photograhed by neuroscientists. The cause is not as important as the consistency found in the nature and structure of the experiences themselves, which is in far greater need of an explanation than the patterns of neurons that encode for those experiences, which are in themselves meaningless.

Is it true to say that everything we ingest affects our brain, not just those things that we have classified as 'drugs', and thus that all foodstuffs are in some sense psychoactive?

 

um....yeah...that's why i was saying...

 

I may have misunderstood. Earlier you said: "acid trips are delusions/hallucinations of the brain brought on by chemicals; sensory mis-perceptions are due to the chemical (lsd) working/wreaking havoc inside your body..nothing mystical about that. it's purely chemical."

I intended to disagree with you.