Psychedelics: Unstable Reality & The Nature of Consciousness

psychedelics just make me think a lot about what it means to be alive you know? like the things in your perception that feel so stable and constant your whole life are suddenly revealed to not be stable. proprioception was one that threw me off, it felt like my limbs were shrinking and growing and the boundary between me and my surroundings became fuzzy, which would’ve been completely alien of a concept to me a couple years ago. on dmt i saw rick from rick and morty, and it almost didn’t feel like a silly weird fleeting thing, it was almost like rick was a symbol. that whole show is about nihilism, they have infinite universes, and they can always escape to the next one, and what’s the meaning when you have everything? everything is nothing and nothing is everything you know? rick showed up in my dmt trip almost as if it were saying “guess what, all you are is chemicals and electricity” and it also made me think about what it means to be conscious you know? does consciousness arise from mere existence? does it come from certain circuits? certain chemical reactions? a person who has never tried psychedelics has no idea how unsteady their reality actually is. it makes me think of the boltzmann brain thought experiment you know? but psychedelics are like entering a new type of consciousness, it gives you a new perspective on what life is and what experiencing actually means you know? and having been shown that consciousness can take other forms, it makes me wonder what the limit is

The user reflects on how psychedelic experiences deconstruct the stability of reality, citing proprioceptive shifts and a DMT encounter with Rick from 'Rick and Morty' to explore nihilism and the nature of consciousness. They use these states to challenge the assumption that reality is constant, pondering whether consciousness is merely biological or a more fundamental phenomenon.

Agreed

I think what we regard as consciousness is the awareness and control we have over our pattern recognition systems, perception and behavior. We are conscious because and when we consider our actions and reactions, our place in our environment and how we interact with that environment. Thing is, in creating civilization, humanity has progressively seperated itself from the nature that birthed and sustained us, producing an environment that is almost entirely artificial, but most importantly, a socialization that too is artificial, compliant to the norms that our artificial (and repressive & exploitative) society imposes on us, both passively and actively. One of the beauties of psychedelics is that they dissolve the barriers of that socialization, of our conditioning. We see things not for their productive value, not for any worth, quality or relation we would normally, automatically, consider in them, but in how they are, in how they're presented to us in the moment we perceive them and, and imo, most incredibly, in how they are connected to us and to everything else, which they inherently are, as well as how we are connected to everything. Consciousness-wise, we become like the children we once were before the socialization that taught us what would be right or wrong or useful or useless or worth our time vs not worth; ironically though, that is a state in which, we could argue, we are much more conscious, more conscious of just about everything. Your experience sounds very cool, and our human history has a very profound connection to and use of symbolism (as well as altered states, often in tandem with symbolism), so I believe you might be correct in your assumption. I also think you might find Phenomenology quite interesting, namely the works of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and maybe Sartre? These - especially Husserl - elaborate on what a consciousness (not necessarily just a human one) is, how it interacts with objects (both mental and of the real world) and what that interaction can tell us about the world and ourselves (on ourselves and empathy there's also the works of Edith Stein), but also on perception and it's connection and importance in relation to everything else I mentioned. Cheers!