Comment

Comment by optimalsolver

20th Century, but here's a great article on Benny Shanon, perhaps the foremost researcher on DMT:

https://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-t...

One of the reports of his own experiences with the substance was as follows:

>Another pattern of interpreting-as is one I shall characterize as seeing the particular as generic, or rather, seeing the generic in the particular. I have experi­enced this on a number of occasions. The first, which for me was very striking, occurred during the daytime. It was in a village and I, intoxicated, was sitting on a small verandah overlooking the meadows. A farmer (a real one) was passing by, and I saw The Farmer, the universal prototype of all farmers. Again, as in the previous example, the standard perception and the non-ordinary one are related. After all, I saw The Farmer, not The Fisherman or The King. Yet, while normally I would have seen just a farmer, this time I saw The Farmer. While semantically linked, experientially these two perceptions are totally different. I have heard accounts of the very same phenomenon from my informants.

--

I've never taken DMT, but I'm curious if people who have can report similar experiences of effectively seeing Platonic forms (or at least, believing they have).

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton