Disregard Everything I Say

Since the dawn of history psychedelics have been used in shamanism to communicate with ancestors and visit the spirit world. The hallucinations brought about through the ingestion of psychoactive plants such as Mushrooms, Ayahuasca and Mescaline of these pre-scientific people have always been assumed to be real and externally generated by some unknown force outside of our brains and exist completely independent of the human imagination. Today however although the psychedelic experience is largely under studied and even less understood by the scientific literature it is generally thought that these hallucinations are generated through some sort of neural chaos or are perhaps little snippets of everything a person has ever seen being presented in a staggeringly organized kaleidoscopic fashion.

Personally I lean slightly more to the internal generation side of the debate since it seems to be the simplest explanation but have real no opinion on this either way as both options seem to be riddled with holes. On one hand I have during a particularly deep trip encountered visuals that were so indescribably bizarre, lifelike, impossible and coherent that I was literally forced to accept in the moment that these hallucinations were externally generated by something trying to communicate with me and the thought that this experience was the result of a “neural chaos” seemed almost like blasphemy at the time but upon coming down my mind was immediately flooded with the familiar rational doubt that this could be true. On the other hand however I recognize that this sort of thinking is not grounded in any sort of scientific reasoning and that Psychedelics are often associated with self delusion. The two main problems here are that it’s difficult to admit that an experience such as a DMT trip you had was simply a hallucination when it felt realer than any experience ever had during normal sober thought but also difficult to admit the reality of it since it only came about by drastically altering your own brain chemistry.

As a fun thought experiment lets contemplate the implications of both of these options.

Option 1 - The hallucinations are externally generated:

If the hallucinations are indeed generated outside of the human brain then we are standing on the edge of an unexplored universe of infinite proportions that contains more art, more beauty and more alien concepts than human beings have created throughout the entire course of history.

Option 2 – The hallucinations are internally generated:

If the hallucinations are indeed generated inside of the human brain then existing within every single one of us is an unexplored universe of infinite proportions that contains more art, more beauty and more new concepts than human beings have created throughout the entire course of history.

It seems that either way our society has a huge amount of work to do and many a ball to trip in terms of exploring, studying and mapping these new worlds out. To my mind this is almost as important of a question as something like “are we alone in the universe?” and that to tell a person that a hallucination does not exist because it is dependent on the human mind seems as silly as telling somebody that a file does not exist because it is dependent on the hard drive it is saved to.