You’re absolutely right and I can’t convince of anything and I won’t try. All I can say is have some psychedelic trips and see how you feel.
To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.
The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.
But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.
The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.
But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.