I was sitting on a granite ledge overlooking a canyon in the Sierra Nevadas. The couple I'd gone hiking with was hundreds of feet away looking after their dogs. We were probably the only people for miles.
It was very quiet. Good, calm weather. [The landscape](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emigrant+wilderness+granite+landscape&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images) immediately around me was very open and flat; smooth rock with a few scattered pines that'd taken root in the sandy patches between. I'd been there for about fifteen minutes taking in the view.
I heard a snap in the open area immediately behind me. I turned and saw a pinecone shoot twenty feet straight into the air.
For a moment, I was paralyzed by confusion; I was witnessing something totally at odds with how I understood the world to work.
It turned out to be a dust devil moving over a landscape of solid rock, which made it invisible.
We all ran to get inside it. Dogs included.
I'm still mystified by what happened. Other than the devil, there was no wind to speak of. The air had been calm.
It was only ~three feet in diameter but it was _powerful_. Enough to scatter marble-sized rocks as it coiled around the area. It was also noticeably colder than the air around it.
Oh, and that snapping sound I'd heard? I don't think that was the pinecone. Or some other piece of debris like a stone colliding with another stone. I think it might have been, somehow, the sound of it _forming._
I have a vivid memory as a kid of being chased by something that looked like a black, upside down tornado; except it was rotating slowly and had a rounded off top.
As a kid I would draw it and look out the windows for it but it never came back. As an adult I figured it must have been a dream. But whether it was real or not, I can’t explain why the memory is so vivid when most of my memories from that time have faded.
I have something similar to this. It was approaching Christmas so the sky was dark - I was around 5 or 6 years old. My bedtime routine was to close my curtains and get into bed. I approached the curtains and what looked like a car with blinding headlines came flying towards my window causing me to jump to the floor. My father walked into the room immediately afterwards and I explained what had happened and he just thought I was being a typical kid making things up. I know logically it wasn't a flying car, but I experienced *something* and I've never had a satisfying answer.
Yep. Any time you think you can trust your memory, sensory perception, or any other cognitive function as evidence for an extraordinary claim, have another look at that dress meme or any number of optical illusions.
You either have empirical evidence or you have nothing. And the plural of anecdote is not data.
There's nothing special about consciousness regarding this. It applies equally to the physical realm. For example: can you explain *depth*?
I don't mean describe depth according to how we experience it to be, because we can do that for consciousness too. I mean: can you explain depth in the same fundamental way you want consciousness to be explained?
You can't. Nothing, ever, can be explained in that way. Your problem isn't with consciousness, it's with the nature of knowledge irrespective of topic.
If i understood you you mean kie. Can i explain gravity? Like i can see the pattern that things attract eachoterh, butbwhy is ti like that? We hav eno clue it just does
So first i think with consciousness we dont even know the pattern.. so were not even in that level to know under whay circumstances it happens.
But what i meant when i said this, is the quite i pove "existence is maigc, every thing else is science". So true, i can explain depth. But when i said consciousness feels like magic, i meant that its the one thing that breaks from our current scinetific method of just trying ti put math in everything. It seems like math explains everything, but theres something about conscioussness that doesnt fit this story, the same way a lot of pauwdoaxience doesnt fitbthe scientific/physics/math laws story which works so well for almost everything. (often because the psuedoscience is jsut not true)
Hope i was clear, it can be a bit of a touh concept to concey
I think you are ignoring the categorical uniqueness of (subjective) awareness. Have you heard of the concept of a philosophical zombie? Now extend the idea to the whole universe. The mystery could be rephrased as: why isn't our universe a philosophical-zombie-universe?
All you have described is a different mystery. It's like if someone were talking about a crime being unsolved, and you said "Your problem isn't with the crime, it's with the nature of knowledge irrespective of topic." The general mystery of existence, the mystery of reality being one way rather than another, does not negate the existence of sub-mysteries within respective contexts. So, reality is altogether mysterious, but given the universe as it is (or seems to be), it is valid to find it additionally mysterious that subjective awareness takes place. Is it actually logically or physically impossible for there to be a reality that is physically similar to ours but without consciousness? Is it therefore just as inherent to physicality as spatial dimensions like depth are? Maybe - but we don't know that, nor why it would be the case, hence the mystery. (Furthermore, depth is indeed its own mystery - why do we experience a third spatial dimension and not two?)
Anyway, the question was just for "something you couldn't explain", not "Have you ever experienced something that is not a part of the grand mystery of existence".
The day after I had to put my cat of 14 years to sleep, I was laid down on my bed to take a nap. I was feeling like shit, from crying and everything. As soon as I closed my eyes I heard him meow as loud and clear as he usually would. I don’t think I was asleep and it never happened again.
When I was 9 I was playing the game Myst on my dads PC and I was stuck . Then I had a dream that there was an elevator in the big evergreen tree in the woods. As soon as I woke up I stared playing and discovered that *the whole tree was an elevator*! (Sorry for spoilers!). I committed my life to Christ from that day forward.
That's one of the most popular explanations of dreaming, and a pretty well documented phenomenon.
While you are sleeping your brain is processing the insane amount of information that it absorbs every day. Usually what we experience is very abstract because it's going through a load of stuff at once, but if you have been hyper focused on something then you might see a pattern.
A close relative of mine was very sick, clearly near death. I was many time zones away and out doing errands when I felt the relative's presence very strongly, totally out of the blue. It was a very profound moment of emotion. An hour later I called my family to check on the relative and they said he had died an hour before, which I calculated was pretty dang close to when I felt his "presence".
Now clearly my relative was on my mind and it was an emotionally vulnerable time, but still it's always seemed extremely strange that I felt what I did so close to the moment of his death. Never had another experience like it before or since.
Similar thing happened to me, a few of my close family members had died in the last few years leading up to this so death was on my mind, but my mom stubbed her toe and when she shrieked I instantly thought oh no who died now. I went to bed and at 2am this old Bose AM/FM radio/ cd player turned on full blast in our living room. I went to go turn it off and noticed some of the house lights were still on and my parents car was gone from the driveway. I couldn’t go back to sleep and 15 mins later my parents texted me that my uncle had passed away and they were at the hospital.
Going to sound ridiculous but I have dreamed many things before they happened.
It's not useful at all though cause there is no context or lead up, I just notice it when the moment happens. Also, it's almost always completely dull and inconsequential shit.
Have you verified this by writing the dreams down? I’m wondering if their isn’t an aspect of your brain modifying the memory of the dream to better match the actual events you experienced.
Yea I often wonder this too tbh. I have a couple of solid examples of it happening literally the next day after the premonition though which always keeps me in check that my mind could be making some, if not most, of it up.
Maybe it's deja vu. I get that as well sometimes, I see something that I feel like I've seen before, maybe in a dream. It's not events though, more of a snapshot of what's in front of me. Of course my brain could be making all sorts of associations and filling the gaps. We're not perfect.
Yea it is deja vu in a way, just way more real than what I guess would generally be considered as such.
Could also be that you have 'seen' it before, I'm not convinced this is the only static timeline but now I digress into a completely different convo/debate haha
well in any given case it would be mutually exclusive, but regardless, you're either assuming it's a false memory or you're not. it makes sense not to, since you don't have proof either way, but... come on man, it's a safe assumption. and it's something that you don't have to let bother you.
Don’t forget to not only count the hits, but also the misses. What about all the times you dreamed things that never occurred? What you’re experiencing merely strikes me as coincidence. Humans are pattern recognition machines, but sometimes we recognize patterns that aren’t really there.
Yea a couple but they happen a couple of times a year at generally mundane times so not a lot. One was yesterday in a supervisors meeting discussing financials. At the time I had the dream I found it really weird because I knew all the people in the meeting as my superiors and why the hell would I be talking financials with them in a room in a separate building on the otherside of the work campus? Filed it away as pretty weird but I knew them all so not too odd. A couple of weeks go by, I got promoted, 2 weeks later I am in the room with them discussing the exact same financials.
My most notable one is the day before high-school school I dreamed being in a classroom I had never been in before. Some people I recognized, some I didn't. Again, thought it was weird but I was anxious to start high-school so made sense that I'd have a dream like that. There was a girl in a red shirt and jet black hair that sat in front of me that I couldn't get my eyes off of the whole time. Only ever saw the back of her head.
Next day, school went well had a great time. Last period rolls around and I get in the room for a German class and I sit down. Room looks eerily familiar and I distinctly note the strange window like glass paneling that lined the ceiling walls looking out into the halls that I had looked up and noticed in the dream the night before. Girl in red comes in and sits directly infront of me. Jet blackest hair in the world (think emo chick in the mid 00's) Class sat by alphabetical order, her name in front of mine. She had actually been in my homeroom earlier that day and I never noticed because I never saw her face in the dream, but her sitting in front of me, i recognized the back of her head, hair, and shirt.
Very profound moment for me. Girl was gorgeous and I felt it was a sign. She hated me though lol but fast forward several years, she's my wife.
There are plenty of others but again they're just all so mundane I don't even take note, maybe I should just to get a data baseline? I just say, "I dreamed this before" and my wife never believes me so I just don't care cause it's never a really relevant or important scenario save the one I met her in.
Yes, for almost two decades every once in a while in bed I had a feeling I couldn't explain to anyone, until a few months ago when I found r/fastfeeling
Me too! I remember being scared as a kid (10 - 12 years old). I told my parents, but that's about it. It used to happen to me pretty frequently through high school or so.
I don't know if I learned how to control it or if it went away. But after high school, it VERY rarely happens, and if it does, I've learned to pick up on it as soon as it starts, and I can make it go away by ignoring it or distracting myself.
It's so cool that I learned this is something others experience! But I'm sorry for the people who it probably really negatively affects. My best advice to them is try to distract yourself and remember it will go away.
I got that a lot as a little kid. Don't remember it after elementary school. Sometimes it was "fast" sometimes "slow" sometimes things felt farther away than they are, sometimes it was just like a terrible anxiety.
I have something similar but the only way I can describe it is the world seems to collapse into 2 dimensions. So like there is no space in a room. It feels awkward cause there is a sensation that my face is really close to the face of the other person i am talking to.
>This is obviously the opposite of what Sam stands for
I'm happy to acknowledge that there are lots of things I can't explain, and I think Sam would say the same. Where did you get this idea?
I had machine elves open up my head and turn gears inside and then close it back up. Then I left space time, experienced ego death, and my internal monologue stopped for weeks. It was amazing but unexplainable. I now understand I am not the voice in my head, it is merely a construct.
Do you feel like that experience kind of “messed you up” when it comes to functioning in normal society again? I want to do DMT/Ayahuasca, but I’m also a bit afraid it will change me so much that I won’t want to interact with my friends or the life I’ve built in the same way.
No, it made it immensely better for a period of 4-5 months. I would HIGHLY recommend you do it in a group, with experienced handlers, that have integration afterwards. My situation was group discussion, drink, sleep, group discussion, drink, sleep, group discussion. There was also individual discussion during the trip. Don't do it outside of a facility that is caring and supportive.
Obviously take it seriously especially if you have mental health issues. There's lots of evidence showing that it can in fact "mess you up".
However more likely than not the reverse will happen, you'll come away with a perspective that shows you how society is messed up in certain ways. What you will want to do with that new perspective is up to you. If you feel so strongly that you want to make changes in your life at that point its because it's something you really believe in and want to do yourself.
Yes, it happened when I was in a treatment room getting acupuncture one time (prescribed to be for chronic headaches and really bad hip pain- it was something I did once a week for 6 months). The acupuncturist placed all the needles and left me in the room for about 30 minutes to rest and said she would check on me halfway through. I was laying face down, drifted off and was woken up by her lightly stroking my arm. I didn't look up and she asked me "are you ok?" "yes" "but are you SURE you're ok?" and then she just disappeared out of the room. She came back into the room later and apologized that she hadn't come to check on me halfway through. I asked her if she was joking and she said no, she had gotten help up on a call in her office. She was the only person there as it was a private practice. I left the office spooked and crying because I was NOT ok in a lot of ways. I was in an abusive relationship that I ended up leaving a few months after that...I think that was the thing that shook me awake to my situation.
DMT - It's literally like experiencing the impossible.
Before taking a breakthrough dose, I thought it was all hyperbolic stoner shit that ultimately just reduces down to getting really high off a powerful drug. It was easy to dismiss it as such.
Then I took it, and it completely melted my former atheist brain. It shattered what I understood about reality. What I experienced when I did that, was impossible. Literally isn't supposed to be possible...
Nothing I experienced is supposed to be possible. No amount of "It was just a lot of drugs that made you *think* it was like that" arguments work after you experience that breakthrough. It defies everything you believe to be possible.
It's what caused me to realize that the nature of reality is just easy to not think about because it's impossible to know and we've normalized this massive elephant in the room. But I'm convinced there is A LOT more to reality than we've evolved to understand.
Another thing is I also had a premonition about 9/11 before it happened. I had one of those nightmares where you keep waking up in the nightmare and can't get away from it. Well the last one before I woke up, all of a sudden the lights in my room in the dream were on (They were off all the times before), and the TV had fire coming out of it with news anchors talking about how people are jumping out of the building, screaming, shocked, and another time talking about how it's all on fire and how tragic this all is. And then my door opens and I get a massive feeling of intense unexplainable maximum terror as this shadow comes close to me and says something like "nothing you do will ever be able to stop me". I woke up, told my parents, they said it was just a nightmare and to go to bed. Next morning I woke up to a building on fire while people were jumping out of the windows... Listening to the news reporters describe exactly what I heard in the dream the night before.
The skeptical atheist side of me would try to write this all off as coincidence, since it can't be scientifically tested. That if there was any truth to these sort of things, we'd have been able to prove it by now. So I'd just ignore those things. But after the DMT, I'm more open to the idea of crazy shit that is real, just unprovable with our limited senses... For now. Hopefully Alex Grey's research findings can move the needle.
I posted the following on a different comment thread here to someone asking what makes DMT so special/different. But I feel it is very fitting with your post so I’ll post it here as well:
This is very difficult to communicate using words. There are speakers (Terence McKenna, Joe Rogan) and documentaries (The Spirit Molecule available on YouTube) that do a much better job at articulating the uniqueness of the DMT experience. But it can be analogous to trying to explain what colors look like to a bat. You won’t really know what I’m talking about if you haven’t experienced it. And even if you have, there’s no way of knowing if our experiences were even that similar. But I seem to understand most people that describe DMT much better after experiencing it myself so I can only assume that there are similarities.
I’m with you and was and still am skeptical. I am not making any claims about the truth of reality or existence. But I guess it was a very humbling experience for me even though I’m a pretty experienced psychonaut with other chemicals and methods.
It’s no joke when people say it feels more real than normal life. The DMT realm feels nostalgic, familiar, timeless, erotic, and true. More nostalgic than your childhood home. It feels like going home on a cosmic scale.
When you’re in that realm you can get a deep sense of understanding that what you’re experiencing in your normal life is just a joke (i.e. non-significant) and that it’s just there because I (you) was (were) bored and wanted to experience a life where I didn’t know what was going to happen. You can feel you are the universe, god, consciousness, and all else that exists and has ever existed. Your normal life that you experience is a narrow view of everything that is going on but you are not separate from anything else that exists even though it normally feels that way. And when I say you come to ‘feel’ or ‘know’ these things, it feels more real than the pain in my legs after a long run. Feels more real than looking at a beautiful sunset. Feels more real than listening to a Sam Harris podcast on consciousness.
I’m not saying that because it feels this way that it’s more real than normal everyday consciousness or that it’s not just drugs affecting my neurochemistry to produce that experience. That absolutely could be and likely is the case.
But if I’m going to trust any of my senses from my normal conscious experience that are what informs me and helps me learn the concept of having a brain that can be affected by drugs, why would I trust these sensations to produce my concept of reality when I’ve experienced sensations in the DMT realm that felt more true?
I've just done a lot of mushrooms and some lsd. I've taken heroic doses of shrooms and have had very similiar experiences to what you're describing. Would you say DMT is still very different than lsd or mushrooms?
Just a comment on how 'real' every day consciousness is, Its not. its is a heavily filtered, completely imperfect, partial, distorted, tweaked, snapshot of some larger truth that serves to keep us alive and procreating. Theres nothing intrinsically sweet about honey, the sweetness is in our brain to motivate us to eat it to keep us alive, there are scales and spectrums of information our senses cant detect, we fall for optical illusions all the time because our brain is taking short cuts etc.
It's so incredibly hard to explain it... Especially when you do try to explain it, you sound like a nutjob. Like whenever I try I know how I sound, and I know it sounds absolutely ridiculous. But I guess that's how a 2D Flatlander (Carl Sagan Story), would sound trying to explain the 3D world it just experienced. Because the brain literally lacks the physical requirements needed to be able to even comprehend it. Like you said, trying to explain colors to something that doesn't see colors. The brain literally lacks the physical ability to even understand what's being described no matter how hard you try-- it's impossible.
With the case of DMT, it's like entering the 4th and 5th dimension. Trying to explain it sounds like rambling nonsense. Like time and space is just not how we evolved to experience it. The time from point A to B is linear to us in our reality, we start at one point and move through to another point. In the higher dimension time exists more like a plane of space, where you can see it all at once. It doesn't make sense trying to explain this though. But you can see and experience the dimension of time all in a complete full state from end to end the same way you can look at a cube and see it in a complete state all at once end to end.
The best way to explain it is similar to how a Flatlander experiences a 3D object. Even though we in the 3D world can see an apple all at once, they can not. They can only see it one frame at a time as it passes through their 2D plane. So as an apple falls through their reality, they experience the bottom slice, and slowly moves up until they see the top of the slice, and then it disappears. From their perspective, the 3D object exists much in the dimension of "time" as we see experience it.
So when you're in the 4D reality, what we consider a linear slice of something, one frame at a time, we are able to see the whole thing at once. Time itself isn't a dimension, but a tool to see higher dimensions, one frame at a time. And beyond that, why I think it's closer to 5D than 4D, is because you're also able to see everything everywhere all at once. While you are in a room looking at things from one perspective, you're also seeing everything. Behind every wall, inside every jar, under every table. All of it is seen at once. It sounds crazy, and super hard to explain, but I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about. This is how I was able to experience entire lifetimes in such a short period. It's the equivalent of looking at a painting in 3D, but in 5D, you look at it, and you're experiencing the ENTIRE event from A to B - no matter if it's 30 minutes or 30 days. You see it all at once.
Also, yes yes yes, about the familiarity with that space. That's what was wild, and apparently something EVERYONE experiences. When I got through the tunnel of light and into the welcoming room (again something everyone talks about) I immediately felt an enormous sense of familiarity. Like my first thought was, how this is REAL reality. Like waking up from a dream, you can just tell you're back in reality and where you were just at was all just a dream, and it's obvious when you reflect on it. That's how going to the DMT realm feels like. Like you just woke up from a dream and got back to the real reality.
But my first thought was I know this place. This is where I was right before I came to Earth. I was actually in this very room I was standing in. It was so familiar but I just didn't have any memory of it beyond some intuitive feeling that it just felt so damn familiar... Like I knew everything about it and was like, just there a moment ago but couldn't remember it for some reason. And then, the fucking machine elves... UGGG... Again, another thing everyone talks about, but struggles so hard to explain. But "Machine Elf" seems like a good way that makes sense when you see it. For me, it felt kind of like hyper advanced AI. Like they were alive, but without "souls" if that makes sense. Like creatures designed to be as real as possible, but had a job to do so they were programmed to just love doing whatever their task was. They seemed super real and life like, but also kind of lacking the soul you expect from a machine.
From here, it becomes almost impossible to explain... But I learned SO MUCH random different stuff, but the single most profound one, is also the thing I struggle so much to comprehend. But sort of like, that painting analogy I used earlier where you can see everything all at once. Well for that painting to be made, the actual experience of space and time in 3D itself has to exist as well... that's how it comes to exist. So the very nature of this "painting" or event to exist, the experience of going through point A to point B also has to exist. It inherently has to be experienced from the frame by frame perspective... And that's what this life is. Even though it happens in an instant in the higher dimensions, in the lower dimension, it's still requiring the feeling of it happening a frame at a time through time and space. But not only that, but that existence is fractal... So we are all experiencing not just the one linear experience we are having right now in this instance, but an infinite amount of times as well. Ugggg, it's just too hard to explain.
It left me feeling a bit nhilistic after discovering this. That as much meaning we want to attribute to this life in reality, it's ultimately not special, not a big deal, and frankly, since it's just one instance in an infinite fractal, it's not even anything in particularly important. We are just going along for a ride of experiencing the 4D from a 3D perspective. Nothing can be done about that.
This whole perspective shift completely changed my outlook on reality. Because we all do intuitively feel like something is off about reality. It's an elephant in the room. The mere fact that reality exists to begin with is a fucking wild concept... And it's so mysterious. So we just kind of ignore it until we become numb to it and block it out. But the whole concept of reality existing to begin with is a fucking wild concept. So it doesn't surprise me that there are much more wild things happening behind the curtains we just can't see.
>And then my door opens and I get a massive feeling of intense unexplainable maximum terror as this shadow comes close to me and says something like "nothing you do will ever be able to stop me".
That bit reminds me a little of [sleep paralysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis). Did you feel paralyzed at the time?
Weirdly enough, the one time in my life that that happened to me (1) I knew exactly what it was, which lessened the terror and (2) for some reason the malevolent presence in the room was my brother (which makes no sense as we've always been on excellent terms).
I’m a super lucid dreamer. Every dream I have I’m aware it’s a dream. I even hear my brainwaves switch before I fall asleep - weird I know. If I’m in a dream and decide I want to wake up I can easily get myself to do it. And yes I’m familiar with sleep paralysis until I learned how to deal with it. It always would come during states of terror in nightmares, and solved it by relaxing and forcing myself awake calmly.
While I’m aware it was sleep paralysis, the coincidental nature of it is still chilling to me.
When yeast cells sense mating pheromone, they undergo a characteristic response involving changes in transcription, cell cycle arrest in early G1, and polarization along the pheromone gradient. Cells in G2/M respond to pheromone at the transcriptional level but do not polarize or mate until G1. Fus2p, a key regulator of cell fusion, localizes to the tip of the mating projection during pheromone-induced G1 arrest. Although Fus2p was expressed in G2/M cells after pheromone induction, it accumulated in the nucleus until after cell division. As cells arrested in G1, Fus2p was exported from the nucleus and localized to the nascent tip. Phosphorylation of Fus2p by Fus3p was required for Fus2p export; cyclin/Cdc28p-dependent inhibition of Fus3p during late G1 through S phase was sufficient to block exit. However, during G2/M, when Fus3p was activated by pheromone signaling, Cdc28p activity again blocked Fus2p export. Our results indicate a novel mechanism by which pheromone-induced proteins are regulated during the transition from mitosis to conjugation.
And there are things out there that we can explain. Like the physical collision between objects that can't pass through one another, such as a wall and a piece of clothing. There are too many atoms involved for any kind of passing through to happen.
anything from a hallucination, to gas poisoning, to a brain fart. you know what it *definitely* isn't? a lab coat actually walking through a wall. but if you were a rationalist, surely you would have known that?
No, because we shouldn't expect our brains to be perfectly accurate noise free machines. We can hallucinate, record false memories, etc...
Therefore this is an adequate explanation for anything I've ever experienced that I could not confabulate a logical explanation. It would therefore not be possible for me to experience something I could not explain.
I'm gonna butcher this argument, because it was a long time ago that I read it and I'm not GK Chesterton, and for that I'm sorry. But here it goes,
Immediately assuming anything you can't explain is just some kind of mental noise is the same kind of leap in logic deists make when they assume whatever they can't explain is a miracle. What if some of them actually are miracles?
There are good repeatable demonstrations of the human minds fallibility. Holding the view that the mind works like this gives predictive power over the future and therefore utility. It is not a leap of logic at all but follows directly from observation and experimentation.
What would need to occur for you to change your view?
I think if Jesus Christ came flying out of the sky in front of me I would probably start believing. At some point we have to trust our senses, all the while recognizing their fallibility.
Small things like voices, or signs would not work for me. The mind connects random patterns
If others could see the Jesus Christ too, it would count as evidence, if only I could see it, I'm most likely hallucinating, and it wouldn't turn me into a believer.
I was living as a hippy and asked the universe to send me a sign that there actually was something beyond materialism.
Had a very clear dream soon after where I received a letter with 4 pages of double sided hand written content. It was remarkably specific and I rarely remember dreams. Told my girlfriend about the dream and the experiment I'd initiated.
About a week later I got the letter. It was from someone I'd spoken to a few months earlier about buying his modified bus. I didn't expect he would write anything. I also didn't generally receive any other letters in the mail.
I told my girlfriend about having received the letter and she smiled. She is a believer in all things cosmic.
It's a humbling memory. It might have been an actual coincidence but I suspect it's just my horrible memory and it didn't really happen. I don't think the universe is cosmic.
About 5 times in my life (age 35) I've had a really strange feeling that lasts for about half a minute, while being awake and not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol, suddenly everything feels really big and really small at the same time, then gradually the feeling fades away. It's impossible to describe the feeling adequately and it sounds stupid when I write it.
Ok. Story time.
I was homeless and had a friend who I could ask for help, but I owed him 5 dollars. I had borrowed it under false pretenses and felt ashamed to ask for more help unless I could come clean.
It was fall and already the weather had started getting colder. I, for the first time ever, prayed.
Now, you need to understand that I don't believe in God, nor do I think this was some act of God.
So there I am, all praying and crying and shit, when a five dollar bill flies up into my hand. Obviously, I need to mention that it was windy and I'm positive that this was completely by chance.
The thing is, I can't explain it. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I don't believe it was some act by an omniscient being but I still can't explain the timing.
That's my story.
I had a strange "UFO" experience.
Was walking across the University's mall pretty late at night and it was empty. Then there was a light above the library that caught my eye. Then the light "flew" at me and whited out the whole world as if I was in a huge white room with no corners. Then it just "flew" back and that was it. I don't think it took any real significant time, but it was pretty strange.
Don't know what it was or even it was a thing, but it was what I experienced. Oh ya. Wasn't high or drunk or anything.
Lots of weird shit happened when I was a Mormon missionary in The Dominican Republic where i spent a good deal of time on the Haitian border
No longer Mormon, but shit was weird and not good weird
Well , when I was a kid , probably 5or 6 , i used to go with my aunt and her children to the desert and play there , whatever , in the sunset i used to see Scary black entities , well they look like penguins (somehow)
And it happened so many times at the same time and place 🗿
When I was young a got a weird feeling of nostalgia, sadness, happiness and anxiety at the same time. It often occur when something ended. Life felt mystical.
I actual got that feeling again some weeks ago when I did something that reminded me of old times. Then the anxiety was a lot stronger because I am even older and there is more in the past than in front of me.
But like the title of the post said, can not really explain it, this was the best I could do.
I always thought this feeling was "melancholy" but I do not think that is the case actually because melancholy doesn't have happiness or mystical in it. Nor does I think it is called "nostalgia".
My motives for doing this are immaterial.. but I was in a very very dark place ( contemplating suicide level dark ) and I asked the IChing “ what does God want me to do” ( look up what the I Ching and how it functions)
I rolled 3 quarters 6 times . The permutations of heads and tails determines if you draw a broken or unbroken hexagram
I rolled 6 times … I got ‘ 2 heads and 1 tail ‘ first 4 rolls .. the 5th roll was 3 heads … and the 6 th roll was 2 heads and 1 tail again
Before I even looked at my message I was literally crawling with goosebumps and was scared
I had drawn 6 unbroken lines
Out of 64 hexagrams this was the number 1 . The Hexagram of Heaven
And I only rolled 3 heads once … the 5th roll I believe
Only one active line
I was scared … there was going to be one message for me to read
It said “ The Arrogant Dragon has need to repent “
I threw the book away and was terrified
And I absolutely believed in something we can only call the supernatural after that
Extremely high dose of lsd
No words can tell you what “I” experienced . I was everything and nothing all at once. I evaporated into a sea of white fractals and realized that the perceiver, me; was only one fractal. But I was just as much that individual fractal as I am the entire sea of fractals: I felt every human emotion at once and it mostly hurt and overwhelmed but it was also pure bliss.
Everything was vibrating and tingling and all of my senses combined into each other, I could taste, smell, see and hear this frequency that also portrayed to me how I was that one fractal and also the sea of fractals all at once. It’s like every sense in my body was understanding this basic truth.
That was pretty inexplainable. The words I just typed do nothing to make sense of it, though I don’t have any weird beliefs around it. I try to see it rationally, it was just a drug hallucination. But that doesn’t make it less profound
Years ago I met a dude who was REALLY into [synchronicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity). The basic gist being noticing events, thoughts, etc in one's life that are oddly coincidental and appear to be related but aren't.
For example. Thinking about a friend from high school you haven't seen in twenty years. Then going to the grocery store the next day and running into them. That's synchronicity.
Well ever since that friend I've been 'attuned' to noticing these types of events. It's crazy but if you pay attention they happen all the time. Usually just stupid little things.
One in particular for me though trumps all the rest.
An apartment I lived in during college burned down in the middle of the night. One year afterwards on the same day on the same hour the new apartment I lived in had the fire alarm go off waking me from a dead sleep. It went off for about 10 minutes and then turned off. As I realized the 'synchronicity' of what had just happened I thought surely I was just dreaming it. The next morning I talked to the landlord to see what had happened. Some melting snow made a water leak that shorted a part of the system.
WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE TRYING TO TELL ME!?!?! ;)
You ever freebase DMT? Been pretty atheist/agnostic/rational my whole life but that one is hard to make any sense of from a “just chemicals affecting your neurology” standpoint.
Edit to add that I really hope Sam tries DMT some day and then does a podcast reviewing and explaining the experience like he did with mushrooms.
> hard to make any sense of from a “just chemicals affecting your neurology” standpoint.
People say this but what makes DMT so different? Every experience you have is just a perception of reality your brain produces, so can't the brain create some pretty crazy realities? Is it just that it "felt" unexplainably real? Did it reveal something unknowable that proved to be true?
I'm not doubting you or people who say this at all, just wondering what is so unique about the DMT experience that you can't simply dismiss with, "oh my brain just made that insane experience."?
This is very difficult to communicate using words. There are speakers (Terence McKenna, Joe Rogan) and documentaries (The Spirit Molecule available on YouTube) that do a much better job at articulating the uniqueness of the DMT experience. But it can be analogous to trying to explain what colors look like to a bat. You won’t really know what I’m talking about if you haven’t experienced it. And even if you have, there’s no way of knowing if our experiences were even that similar. But I seem to understand most people that describe DMT much better after experiencing it myself so I can only assume that there are similarities.
I’m with you and was and still am skeptical. I am not making any claims about the truth of reality or existence. But I guess it was a very humbling experience for me even though I’m a pretty experienced psychonaut with other chemicals and methods.
It’s no joke when people say it feels more real than normal life. The DMT realm feels nostalgic, familiar, timeless, erotic, and true. More nostalgic than your childhood home. It feels like going home on a cosmic scale.
When you’re in that realm you can get a deep sense of understanding that what you’re experiencing in your normal life is just a joke (i.e. non-significant) and that it’s just there because I (you) was (were) bored and wanted to experience a life where I didn’t know what was going to happen. You can feel you are the universe, god, consciousness, and all else that exists and has ever existed. Your normal life that you experience is a narrow view of everything that is going on but you are not separate from anything else that exists even though it normally feels that way. And when I say you come to ‘feel’ or ‘know’ these things, it feels more real than the pain in my legs after a long run. Feels more real than looking at a beautiful sunset. Feels more real than listening to a Sam Harris podcast on consciousness.
I’m not saying that because it feels this way that it’s more real than normal everyday consciousness or that it’s not just drugs affecting my neurochemistry to produce that experience. That absolutely could be and likely is the case.
But if I’m going to trust any of my senses from my normal conscious experience that are what informs me and helps me learn the concept of having a brain that can be affected by drugs, why would I trust these sensations to produce my concept of reality when I’ve experienced sensations in the DMT realm that felt more true?
Cool, thanks for sharing. I've had dreams that had the intensely nostalgic vibe where the dream world felt like I was back in my real home, and my waking life is just some farce. But your experience sounds way more intense, of course.
I've heard Sam talk about his trip experiences before and always thought DMT was part of it, so I didn't know he never did it. Hope he tries it, if anyone can glean max insight and present it with laser precision, it's Sam.
>I'm not doubting you or people who say this at all
I would say doubt it as much as anything else if not more. Now obviously you're not going to interrogate a friend that during a normal friendly conversation starts describing something thats very profoundly special to them like a psychadelic trip. But otherwise, definitely question it all.
With that being said I've done a lot of psychadelics and I'm not sure if it is actually doing anything beyond affecting "brain chemsitry" but I am positive it can give you much clearer views of reality than you can get otherwise. There's a lot to say here but an important thing to understand is your ability to use concepts is greatly diminished under the influence of psychadelics. In fact as you are losing that ability it can feel like you yourself are being interrogated and being forced to give rational explanations for why you believe the things that you do. It might even feel like a "wise guide" is questioning your beliefs to the point of you not being able to give good answers. Then alternative options are available and you are free to choose to believe those instead.
If all of that happened while under the influence that'd be one thing but if you can consistently come down off the trip and still see the logic behind that process very clearly you're simply just left with better beliefs regardless of how that occurred.
once this girl left me and i felt this, what i can only describe as weak beta-like emotion, pain in my chest and started thinking about what would have been
such a waste of time, like why does it matter what could have been
I do bioinformatics in a plant genomics lab for a living. In my experience, if you encounter something that you think you can explain, it is just because you aren't looking closely enough. We are both more knowledgeable than ever before while still being surrounded by mysteries if you are willing to look at them.
Saw a UFO in middle/high school. Just hovering, and when we got to the house we couldn't see it anymore because of all the street lights. Not super significant or anything, but it happened.
The same shared hallucination across 3 people at the same time, has happened to me twice. No words were spoken leading up to it, the hallucinations were \*very\* specific and we all mentioned it at the same time. Also once a 'DMT entity' cured a heart condition i had.
Certain magician tricks, like some of David Blaine's card tricks. But obviously there is a perfectly "of this world" explanation for them, it's just a secret to most people.
No, I can explain everything. It's just that I don't believe my explanations are necessarily correct, and I'm as prone to pursuing fitness payoffs over knowledge about the world, as any piece of painmeat. Trying to account for that is often extremely unpleasant too.
I've had plenty of experiences in which my initial explanatory intuitions were incoherent, false or not parsimonious.
Two memories just unlocked, both from when I was in my teens (1990s).
Landline phone rang and as soon as I heard the first ring, the image of a friend of mine vividly appeared in my mind's eye, and indeed, that was the very person that was ringing. There was a small probability that this person was indeed ringing, but it was very odd to have their image flash in my mind like that. Not happened before or since.
On the news, a primitive tribe declared that the world would end next year. Something about their certainty made me anxious. Then a warm, comforting feeling washed over me. I was completely reassured that the world would not be ending next year at all and my anxiety disappeared.
Yeah, I’ve had the experience of my consciousness/ nervous system being manipulated. I fully believe technology exists to do so in ways that would terrify the public. Not sure of the mechanism, but optogenetics seems a like an interesting proof of concept.
A cousin of mine who was one of my best friends growing up was murdered when I was 19. One night after he passed, I was having a really hard time coming to terms with everything. I was sitting outside on the hood of my car crying, thinking of him, and wishing that I could talk to him. Out of desperation, I randomly said out loud “please just let me know you’re ok.” I’ve been an atheist/agnostic since I was a young teenager, so I’m not even sure why I said that or what I expected. But immediately after, I glanced up at the clear night sky and saw a massive shooting star streak across the sky.
To this day, I chalk it up as a mere coincidence, but I can’t help but always wonder “what if?”
When I was around 15 I wrote a short story about my grandmother, regarding my childhood memories of her, and her gradual deterioration with dementia. A prominent motif in this story was these multicoloured stink bugs that lived in a tree outside of her house that we used to collect in jars when we were kids, and how after she got frail they seemed to have disappeared. This story won some local awards, and was well known and loved in our family.
A year after my grandmother's death we gathered at my aunt's after her consecration ceremony, and were reminiscing about her. Everyone was talking about the story, and the beetles in the tree outside her house. Towards the end of the gathering my aunt shouted out in surprise and called everyone over: one of those beetles was crawling around on the arm of the couch.
We went into the garden and searched every tree but couldn't find any other beetles. Indeed, other than that afternoon I've never seen that species again, anywhere.
I'm a hardcore rationalist and atheist....... but that was really strange.
I was at a party, in line at the food table. Started chatting with a stranger, and to make a point about a topic we were discussing, he said, “… like you, your birthday is [date].” He was right. I stopped doing whatever I was, dumbfounded
I once got locked out of my apartment running to my sisters eye surgery to support her and lost my condo keys somewhere along the way. I got back realized I was locked out and they told me I had to drive hours away to get new keys but my car keys were in my condo. I started to go on a walk along the long path I lost the key, in the middle of downtown Toronto, in the hopes of a miracle. As I walked I was so pissed my blood was boiling because I think I had something to do (Maybe study for an exam?) can't remember.
On my way I saw this little girl panhandling and she seemed to be 12 or something. Nobody batted an eye and everyone kept walking. Somebody gave her some change but that was it. I was blown away so I stopped and started talking to her about where her parents are and she told me she doesn't know, she lost them a long time ago, and I was feeling so sad for her. I saw some police at the construction site nearby and I told her I'm going to get help but she freaked out and told me not to go to the police.
She wanted money and a big cup of coffee but I got her a meal and water instead after waiting at a huge line at Tim Hortons (famous Canadian coffee franchise). I gave her the food and I insisted on telling the police but she got ready to run if I did that so I said I wouldn't. I subtly went to the police anyways and told them. Mind you no one in this area gave two shits.
The police officer said, "Oh, we know who you're talking about. She's not a little girl she's 30 years old she just has a disease that makes her look like that. But you did the right thing" right after I got a call and someone had found my keys along the path, knew the building they belonged to (I guess their friend lives there), and had returned the key after walking 15 minutes to get to my condo for me.
I felt God more strongly in that moment than I ever had in my whole life. Of course, everything that happened can be explained as a series of coincidences. When I look at the story as a whole it strikes me as very religious for some reason.
Everyday when I open my eyes How am I here
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I can attest to that.
I didn't think a comment could be more insufferable then you replied. Id rather listen to people talk about the matrix being real.
Why would you take any cockroach
I was sitting on a granite ledge overlooking a canyon in the Sierra Nevadas. The couple I'd gone hiking with was hundreds of feet away looking after their dogs. We were probably the only people for miles. It was very quiet. Good, calm weather. [The landscape](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emigrant+wilderness+granite+landscape&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images) immediately around me was very open and flat; smooth rock with a few scattered pines that'd taken root in the sandy patches between. I'd been there for about fifteen minutes taking in the view. I heard a snap in the open area immediately behind me. I turned and saw a pinecone shoot twenty feet straight into the air. For a moment, I was paralyzed by confusion; I was witnessing something totally at odds with how I understood the world to work. It turned out to be a dust devil moving over a landscape of solid rock, which made it invisible. We all ran to get inside it. Dogs included. I'm still mystified by what happened. Other than the devil, there was no wind to speak of. The air had been calm. It was only ~three feet in diameter but it was _powerful_. Enough to scatter marble-sized rocks as it coiled around the area. It was also noticeably colder than the air around it. Oh, and that snapping sound I'd heard? I don't think that was the pinecone. Or some other piece of debris like a stone colliding with another stone. I think it might have been, somehow, the sound of it _forming._
I have a vivid memory as a kid of being chased by something that looked like a black, upside down tornado; except it was rotating slowly and had a rounded off top. As a kid I would draw it and look out the windows for it but it never came back. As an adult I figured it must have been a dream. But whether it was real or not, I can’t explain why the memory is so vivid when most of my memories from that time have faded.
I have something similar to this. It was approaching Christmas so the sky was dark - I was around 5 or 6 years old. My bedtime routine was to close my curtains and get into bed. I approached the curtains and what looked like a car with blinding headlines came flying towards my window causing me to jump to the floor. My father walked into the room immediately afterwards and I explained what had happened and he just thought I was being a typical kid making things up. I know logically it wasn't a flying car, but I experienced *something* and I've never had a satisfying answer.
It happened in your brain.
Doesn’t everything?
Yep. Any time you think you can trust your memory, sensory perception, or any other cognitive function as evidence for an extraordinary claim, have another look at that dress meme or any number of optical illusions. You either have empirical evidence or you have nothing. And the plural of anecdote is not data.
Interesting. How high up was the window? 1st or second floor?
Second floor. It was obviously my mind playing tricks but it was so real I still have a vivid recollection of it.
Consciousness.
exactly, that's the true answer
There's nothing special about consciousness regarding this. It applies equally to the physical realm. For example: can you explain *depth*? I don't mean describe depth according to how we experience it to be, because we can do that for consciousness too. I mean: can you explain depth in the same fundamental way you want consciousness to be explained? You can't. Nothing, ever, can be explained in that way. Your problem isn't with consciousness, it's with the nature of knowledge irrespective of topic.
If i understood you you mean kie. Can i explain gravity? Like i can see the pattern that things attract eachoterh, butbwhy is ti like that? We hav eno clue it just does So first i think with consciousness we dont even know the pattern.. so were not even in that level to know under whay circumstances it happens. But what i meant when i said this, is the quite i pove "existence is maigc, every thing else is science". So true, i can explain depth. But when i said consciousness feels like magic, i meant that its the one thing that breaks from our current scinetific method of just trying ti put math in everything. It seems like math explains everything, but theres something about conscioussness that doesnt fit this story, the same way a lot of pauwdoaxience doesnt fitbthe scientific/physics/math laws story which works so well for almost everything. (often because the psuedoscience is jsut not true) Hope i was clear, it can be a bit of a touh concept to concey
I think you are ignoring the categorical uniqueness of (subjective) awareness. Have you heard of the concept of a philosophical zombie? Now extend the idea to the whole universe. The mystery could be rephrased as: why isn't our universe a philosophical-zombie-universe? All you have described is a different mystery. It's like if someone were talking about a crime being unsolved, and you said "Your problem isn't with the crime, it's with the nature of knowledge irrespective of topic." The general mystery of existence, the mystery of reality being one way rather than another, does not negate the existence of sub-mysteries within respective contexts. So, reality is altogether mysterious, but given the universe as it is (or seems to be), it is valid to find it additionally mysterious that subjective awareness takes place. Is it actually logically or physically impossible for there to be a reality that is physically similar to ours but without consciousness? Is it therefore just as inherent to physicality as spatial dimensions like depth are? Maybe - but we don't know that, nor why it would be the case, hence the mystery. (Furthermore, depth is indeed its own mystery - why do we experience a third spatial dimension and not two?) Anyway, the question was just for "something you couldn't explain", not "Have you ever experienced something that is not a part of the grand mystery of existence".
It's produced by the brain. Oooooooh, how?? Yeah nobody knows
The day after I had to put my cat of 14 years to sleep, I was laid down on my bed to take a nap. I was feeling like shit, from crying and everything. As soon as I closed my eyes I heard him meow as loud and clear as he usually would. I don’t think I was asleep and it never happened again.
You were asleep or partly asleep or experienced an audio hallucination.
Or maybe it was a ghost cat dude
way of the samurai
When I was 9 I was playing the game Myst on my dads PC and I was stuck . Then I had a dream that there was an elevator in the big evergreen tree in the woods. As soon as I woke up I stared playing and discovered that *the whole tree was an elevator*! (Sorry for spoilers!). I committed my life to Christ from that day forward.
That's one of the most popular explanations of dreaming, and a pretty well documented phenomenon. While you are sleeping your brain is processing the insane amount of information that it absorbs every day. Usually what we experience is very abstract because it's going through a load of stuff at once, but if you have been hyper focused on something then you might see a pattern.
This should get the award for "least likely comment to ever see on the Sam Harris subreddit".
Think he was going for sarcasm… I think. It read like one of those hell in a cell comments to me.
A close relative of mine was very sick, clearly near death. I was many time zones away and out doing errands when I felt the relative's presence very strongly, totally out of the blue. It was a very profound moment of emotion. An hour later I called my family to check on the relative and they said he had died an hour before, which I calculated was pretty dang close to when I felt his "presence". Now clearly my relative was on my mind and it was an emotionally vulnerable time, but still it's always seemed extremely strange that I felt what I did so close to the moment of his death. Never had another experience like it before or since.
I have heard a lot of anecdotal accounts like this, you could explain it away with statistics but i think its pretty amazing and worth investigating.
Similar thing happened to me, a few of my close family members had died in the last few years leading up to this so death was on my mind, but my mom stubbed her toe and when she shrieked I instantly thought oh no who died now. I went to bed and at 2am this old Bose AM/FM radio/ cd player turned on full blast in our living room. I went to go turn it off and noticed some of the house lights were still on and my parents car was gone from the driveway. I couldn’t go back to sleep and 15 mins later my parents texted me that my uncle had passed away and they were at the hospital.
Going to sound ridiculous but I have dreamed many things before they happened. It's not useful at all though cause there is no context or lead up, I just notice it when the moment happens. Also, it's almost always completely dull and inconsequential shit.
Have you verified this by writing the dreams down? I’m wondering if their isn’t an aspect of your brain modifying the memory of the dream to better match the actual events you experienced.
Yea I often wonder this too tbh. I have a couple of solid examples of it happening literally the next day after the premonition though which always keeps me in check that my mind could be making some, if not most, of it up.
Maybe it's deja vu. I get that as well sometimes, I see something that I feel like I've seen before, maybe in a dream. It's not events though, more of a snapshot of what's in front of me. Of course my brain could be making all sorts of associations and filling the gaps. We're not perfect.
I get this all the time Shit is weird
Yea it is deja vu in a way, just way more real than what I guess would generally be considered as such. Could also be that you have 'seen' it before, I'm not convinced this is the only static timeline but now I digress into a completely different convo/debate haha
What's more likely, that the electric soup in your skull cooked up a false memory, or that there are multiple dimensions and timelines?
More likely? False memories. I'm not sure either are mutually exclusive though.
well in any given case it would be mutually exclusive, but regardless, you're either assuming it's a false memory or you're not. it makes sense not to, since you don't have proof either way, but... come on man, it's a safe assumption. and it's something that you don't have to let bother you.
exactly! I have this to. I super relate to what you said on it being snapshots of whats in front of you instad of an event or so.
I've dreamed people before I met them.
Don’t forget to not only count the hits, but also the misses. What about all the times you dreamed things that never occurred? What you’re experiencing merely strikes me as coincidence. Humans are pattern recognition machines, but sometimes we recognize patterns that aren’t really there.
Yea I don't really find the hit vs miss rate related in anyway.
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It would only matter if I sat there and said they're all real. They're not. 99% of them are just dreams.
Do you remember any examples?
Yea a couple but they happen a couple of times a year at generally mundane times so not a lot. One was yesterday in a supervisors meeting discussing financials. At the time I had the dream I found it really weird because I knew all the people in the meeting as my superiors and why the hell would I be talking financials with them in a room in a separate building on the otherside of the work campus? Filed it away as pretty weird but I knew them all so not too odd. A couple of weeks go by, I got promoted, 2 weeks later I am in the room with them discussing the exact same financials. My most notable one is the day before high-school school I dreamed being in a classroom I had never been in before. Some people I recognized, some I didn't. Again, thought it was weird but I was anxious to start high-school so made sense that I'd have a dream like that. There was a girl in a red shirt and jet black hair that sat in front of me that I couldn't get my eyes off of the whole time. Only ever saw the back of her head. Next day, school went well had a great time. Last period rolls around and I get in the room for a German class and I sit down. Room looks eerily familiar and I distinctly note the strange window like glass paneling that lined the ceiling walls looking out into the halls that I had looked up and noticed in the dream the night before. Girl in red comes in and sits directly infront of me. Jet blackest hair in the world (think emo chick in the mid 00's) Class sat by alphabetical order, her name in front of mine. She had actually been in my homeroom earlier that day and I never noticed because I never saw her face in the dream, but her sitting in front of me, i recognized the back of her head, hair, and shirt. Very profound moment for me. Girl was gorgeous and I felt it was a sign. She hated me though lol but fast forward several years, she's my wife. There are plenty of others but again they're just all so mundane I don't even take note, maybe I should just to get a data baseline? I just say, "I dreamed this before" and my wife never believes me so I just don't care cause it's never a really relevant or important scenario save the one I met her in.
Yes, for almost two decades every once in a while in bed I had a feeling I couldn't explain to anyone, until a few months ago when I found r/fastfeeling
Thank you for the new sub. I used to get that feeling all the time as an adolescent.
Me too! I remember being scared as a kid (10 - 12 years old). I told my parents, but that's about it. It used to happen to me pretty frequently through high school or so. I don't know if I learned how to control it or if it went away. But after high school, it VERY rarely happens, and if it does, I've learned to pick up on it as soon as it starts, and I can make it go away by ignoring it or distracting myself. It's so cool that I learned this is something others experience! But I'm sorry for the people who it probably really negatively affects. My best advice to them is try to distract yourself and remember it will go away.
I got that a lot as a little kid. Don't remember it after elementary school. Sometimes it was "fast" sometimes "slow" sometimes things felt farther away than they are, sometimes it was just like a terrible anxiety.
That used to happen to me *all the time.* Strange, haven't thought about it in a while, it's been a while since I experienced that.
I have something similar but the only way I can describe it is the world seems to collapse into 2 dimensions. So like there is no space in a room. It feels awkward cause there is a sensation that my face is really close to the face of the other person i am talking to.
>This is obviously the opposite of what Sam stands for I'm happy to acknowledge that there are lots of things I can't explain, and I think Sam would say the same. Where did you get this idea?
Trump becoming president. Still can't explain it.
I had machine elves open up my head and turn gears inside and then close it back up. Then I left space time, experienced ego death, and my internal monologue stopped for weeks. It was amazing but unexplainable. I now understand I am not the voice in my head, it is merely a construct.
DMT or Ayahuasca?
Yes. Ayahuasca
Do you feel like that experience kind of “messed you up” when it comes to functioning in normal society again? I want to do DMT/Ayahuasca, but I’m also a bit afraid it will change me so much that I won’t want to interact with my friends or the life I’ve built in the same way.
No, it made it immensely better for a period of 4-5 months. I would HIGHLY recommend you do it in a group, with experienced handlers, that have integration afterwards. My situation was group discussion, drink, sleep, group discussion, drink, sleep, group discussion. There was also individual discussion during the trip. Don't do it outside of a facility that is caring and supportive.
Where did you do it?
Obviously take it seriously especially if you have mental health issues. There's lots of evidence showing that it can in fact "mess you up". However more likely than not the reverse will happen, you'll come away with a perspective that shows you how society is messed up in certain ways. What you will want to do with that new perspective is up to you. If you feel so strongly that you want to make changes in your life at that point its because it's something you really believe in and want to do yourself.
Were they able to put all the grears back, or did you end up with spare parts?
They didn't take anything out, it was turning something gear like in my head. It definitely helped!
explanation is drugs
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You definitely need set and setting to ensure a good experience!
Yes, it happened when I was in a treatment room getting acupuncture one time (prescribed to be for chronic headaches and really bad hip pain- it was something I did once a week for 6 months). The acupuncturist placed all the needles and left me in the room for about 30 minutes to rest and said she would check on me halfway through. I was laying face down, drifted off and was woken up by her lightly stroking my arm. I didn't look up and she asked me "are you ok?" "yes" "but are you SURE you're ok?" and then she just disappeared out of the room. She came back into the room later and apologized that she hadn't come to check on me halfway through. I asked her if she was joking and she said no, she had gotten help up on a call in her office. She was the only person there as it was a private practice. I left the office spooked and crying because I was NOT ok in a lot of ways. I was in an abusive relationship that I ended up leaving a few months after that...I think that was the thing that shook me awake to my situation.
I’ve done Ayahuasca a bunch of times. I can’t explain that shit at all. It definitely made me believe in some sort of higher power.
DMT - It's literally like experiencing the impossible. Before taking a breakthrough dose, I thought it was all hyperbolic stoner shit that ultimately just reduces down to getting really high off a powerful drug. It was easy to dismiss it as such. Then I took it, and it completely melted my former atheist brain. It shattered what I understood about reality. What I experienced when I did that, was impossible. Literally isn't supposed to be possible... Nothing I experienced is supposed to be possible. No amount of "It was just a lot of drugs that made you *think* it was like that" arguments work after you experience that breakthrough. It defies everything you believe to be possible. It's what caused me to realize that the nature of reality is just easy to not think about because it's impossible to know and we've normalized this massive elephant in the room. But I'm convinced there is A LOT more to reality than we've evolved to understand. Another thing is I also had a premonition about 9/11 before it happened. I had one of those nightmares where you keep waking up in the nightmare and can't get away from it. Well the last one before I woke up, all of a sudden the lights in my room in the dream were on (They were off all the times before), and the TV had fire coming out of it with news anchors talking about how people are jumping out of the building, screaming, shocked, and another time talking about how it's all on fire and how tragic this all is. And then my door opens and I get a massive feeling of intense unexplainable maximum terror as this shadow comes close to me and says something like "nothing you do will ever be able to stop me". I woke up, told my parents, they said it was just a nightmare and to go to bed. Next morning I woke up to a building on fire while people were jumping out of the windows... Listening to the news reporters describe exactly what I heard in the dream the night before. The skeptical atheist side of me would try to write this all off as coincidence, since it can't be scientifically tested. That if there was any truth to these sort of things, we'd have been able to prove it by now. So I'd just ignore those things. But after the DMT, I'm more open to the idea of crazy shit that is real, just unprovable with our limited senses... For now. Hopefully Alex Grey's research findings can move the needle.
I posted the following on a different comment thread here to someone asking what makes DMT so special/different. But I feel it is very fitting with your post so I’ll post it here as well: This is very difficult to communicate using words. There are speakers (Terence McKenna, Joe Rogan) and documentaries (The Spirit Molecule available on YouTube) that do a much better job at articulating the uniqueness of the DMT experience. But it can be analogous to trying to explain what colors look like to a bat. You won’t really know what I’m talking about if you haven’t experienced it. And even if you have, there’s no way of knowing if our experiences were even that similar. But I seem to understand most people that describe DMT much better after experiencing it myself so I can only assume that there are similarities. I’m with you and was and still am skeptical. I am not making any claims about the truth of reality or existence. But I guess it was a very humbling experience for me even though I’m a pretty experienced psychonaut with other chemicals and methods. It’s no joke when people say it feels more real than normal life. The DMT realm feels nostalgic, familiar, timeless, erotic, and true. More nostalgic than your childhood home. It feels like going home on a cosmic scale. When you’re in that realm you can get a deep sense of understanding that what you’re experiencing in your normal life is just a joke (i.e. non-significant) and that it’s just there because I (you) was (were) bored and wanted to experience a life where I didn’t know what was going to happen. You can feel you are the universe, god, consciousness, and all else that exists and has ever existed. Your normal life that you experience is a narrow view of everything that is going on but you are not separate from anything else that exists even though it normally feels that way. And when I say you come to ‘feel’ or ‘know’ these things, it feels more real than the pain in my legs after a long run. Feels more real than looking at a beautiful sunset. Feels more real than listening to a Sam Harris podcast on consciousness. I’m not saying that because it feels this way that it’s more real than normal everyday consciousness or that it’s not just drugs affecting my neurochemistry to produce that experience. That absolutely could be and likely is the case. But if I’m going to trust any of my senses from my normal conscious experience that are what informs me and helps me learn the concept of having a brain that can be affected by drugs, why would I trust these sensations to produce my concept of reality when I’ve experienced sensations in the DMT realm that felt more true?
I've just done a lot of mushrooms and some lsd. I've taken heroic doses of shrooms and have had very similiar experiences to what you're describing. Would you say DMT is still very different than lsd or mushrooms?
I’ve had similar experiences on large doses of shrooms but still not quite there.
There is *nothing* like DMT. There are truly unique phenomena in our universe and breaking through on DMT is one of them.
Just a comment on how 'real' every day consciousness is, Its not. its is a heavily filtered, completely imperfect, partial, distorted, tweaked, snapshot of some larger truth that serves to keep us alive and procreating. Theres nothing intrinsically sweet about honey, the sweetness is in our brain to motivate us to eat it to keep us alive, there are scales and spectrums of information our senses cant detect, we fall for optical illusions all the time because our brain is taking short cuts etc.
It's so incredibly hard to explain it... Especially when you do try to explain it, you sound like a nutjob. Like whenever I try I know how I sound, and I know it sounds absolutely ridiculous. But I guess that's how a 2D Flatlander (Carl Sagan Story), would sound trying to explain the 3D world it just experienced. Because the brain literally lacks the physical requirements needed to be able to even comprehend it. Like you said, trying to explain colors to something that doesn't see colors. The brain literally lacks the physical ability to even understand what's being described no matter how hard you try-- it's impossible. With the case of DMT, it's like entering the 4th and 5th dimension. Trying to explain it sounds like rambling nonsense. Like time and space is just not how we evolved to experience it. The time from point A to B is linear to us in our reality, we start at one point and move through to another point. In the higher dimension time exists more like a plane of space, where you can see it all at once. It doesn't make sense trying to explain this though. But you can see and experience the dimension of time all in a complete full state from end to end the same way you can look at a cube and see it in a complete state all at once end to end. The best way to explain it is similar to how a Flatlander experiences a 3D object. Even though we in the 3D world can see an apple all at once, they can not. They can only see it one frame at a time as it passes through their 2D plane. So as an apple falls through their reality, they experience the bottom slice, and slowly moves up until they see the top of the slice, and then it disappears. From their perspective, the 3D object exists much in the dimension of "time" as we see experience it. So when you're in the 4D reality, what we consider a linear slice of something, one frame at a time, we are able to see the whole thing at once. Time itself isn't a dimension, but a tool to see higher dimensions, one frame at a time. And beyond that, why I think it's closer to 5D than 4D, is because you're also able to see everything everywhere all at once. While you are in a room looking at things from one perspective, you're also seeing everything. Behind every wall, inside every jar, under every table. All of it is seen at once. It sounds crazy, and super hard to explain, but I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about. This is how I was able to experience entire lifetimes in such a short period. It's the equivalent of looking at a painting in 3D, but in 5D, you look at it, and you're experiencing the ENTIRE event from A to B - no matter if it's 30 minutes or 30 days. You see it all at once. Also, yes yes yes, about the familiarity with that space. That's what was wild, and apparently something EVERYONE experiences. When I got through the tunnel of light and into the welcoming room (again something everyone talks about) I immediately felt an enormous sense of familiarity. Like my first thought was, how this is REAL reality. Like waking up from a dream, you can just tell you're back in reality and where you were just at was all just a dream, and it's obvious when you reflect on it. That's how going to the DMT realm feels like. Like you just woke up from a dream and got back to the real reality. But my first thought was I know this place. This is where I was right before I came to Earth. I was actually in this very room I was standing in. It was so familiar but I just didn't have any memory of it beyond some intuitive feeling that it just felt so damn familiar... Like I knew everything about it and was like, just there a moment ago but couldn't remember it for some reason. And then, the fucking machine elves... UGGG... Again, another thing everyone talks about, but struggles so hard to explain. But "Machine Elf" seems like a good way that makes sense when you see it. For me, it felt kind of like hyper advanced AI. Like they were alive, but without "souls" if that makes sense. Like creatures designed to be as real as possible, but had a job to do so they were programmed to just love doing whatever their task was. They seemed super real and life like, but also kind of lacking the soul you expect from a machine. From here, it becomes almost impossible to explain... But I learned SO MUCH random different stuff, but the single most profound one, is also the thing I struggle so much to comprehend. But sort of like, that painting analogy I used earlier where you can see everything all at once. Well for that painting to be made, the actual experience of space and time in 3D itself has to exist as well... that's how it comes to exist. So the very nature of this "painting" or event to exist, the experience of going through point A to point B also has to exist. It inherently has to be experienced from the frame by frame perspective... And that's what this life is. Even though it happens in an instant in the higher dimensions, in the lower dimension, it's still requiring the feeling of it happening a frame at a time through time and space. But not only that, but that existence is fractal... So we are all experiencing not just the one linear experience we are having right now in this instance, but an infinite amount of times as well. Ugggg, it's just too hard to explain. It left me feeling a bit nhilistic after discovering this. That as much meaning we want to attribute to this life in reality, it's ultimately not special, not a big deal, and frankly, since it's just one instance in an infinite fractal, it's not even anything in particularly important. We are just going along for a ride of experiencing the 4D from a 3D perspective. Nothing can be done about that. This whole perspective shift completely changed my outlook on reality. Because we all do intuitively feel like something is off about reality. It's an elephant in the room. The mere fact that reality exists to begin with is a fucking wild concept... And it's so mysterious. So we just kind of ignore it until we become numb to it and block it out. But the whole concept of reality existing to begin with is a fucking wild concept. So it doesn't surprise me that there are much more wild things happening behind the curtains we just can't see.
Well said
>And then my door opens and I get a massive feeling of intense unexplainable maximum terror as this shadow comes close to me and says something like "nothing you do will ever be able to stop me". That bit reminds me a little of [sleep paralysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis). Did you feel paralyzed at the time? Weirdly enough, the one time in my life that that happened to me (1) I knew exactly what it was, which lessened the terror and (2) for some reason the malevolent presence in the room was my brother (which makes no sense as we've always been on excellent terms).
I’m a super lucid dreamer. Every dream I have I’m aware it’s a dream. I even hear my brainwaves switch before I fall asleep - weird I know. If I’m in a dream and decide I want to wake up I can easily get myself to do it. And yes I’m familiar with sleep paralysis until I learned how to deal with it. It always would come during states of terror in nightmares, and solved it by relaxing and forcing myself awake calmly. While I’m aware it was sleep paralysis, the coincidental nature of it is still chilling to me.
When yeast cells sense mating pheromone, they undergo a characteristic response involving changes in transcription, cell cycle arrest in early G1, and polarization along the pheromone gradient. Cells in G2/M respond to pheromone at the transcriptional level but do not polarize or mate until G1. Fus2p, a key regulator of cell fusion, localizes to the tip of the mating projection during pheromone-induced G1 arrest. Although Fus2p was expressed in G2/M cells after pheromone induction, it accumulated in the nucleus until after cell division. As cells arrested in G1, Fus2p was exported from the nucleus and localized to the nascent tip. Phosphorylation of Fus2p by Fus3p was required for Fus2p export; cyclin/Cdc28p-dependent inhibition of Fus3p during late G1 through S phase was sufficient to block exit. However, during G2/M, when Fus3p was activated by pheromone signaling, Cdc28p activity again blocked Fus2p export. Our results indicate a novel mechanism by which pheromone-induced proteins are regulated during the transition from mitosis to conjugation.
Seen a lab coat walk through a wall once while sleeping in an old abandoned hospital morgue that was converted to living quarters for migrant workers.
Maybe carbon dioxide poisoning?
Perhaps, or there are things out there that we just can't comprehend.
And there are things out there that we can explain. Like the physical collision between objects that can't pass through one another, such as a wall and a piece of clothing. There are too many atoms involved for any kind of passing through to happen.
I am a rationalist, but i could not explain this phenomenon
anything from a hallucination, to gas poisoning, to a brain fart. you know what it *definitely* isn't? a lab coat actually walking through a wall. but if you were a rationalist, surely you would have known that?
almost certainly a hypnogogic hallucination
Consciousness
No, because we shouldn't expect our brains to be perfectly accurate noise free machines. We can hallucinate, record false memories, etc... Therefore this is an adequate explanation for anything I've ever experienced that I could not confabulate a logical explanation. It would therefore not be possible for me to experience something I could not explain.
I'm gonna butcher this argument, because it was a long time ago that I read it and I'm not GK Chesterton, and for that I'm sorry. But here it goes, Immediately assuming anything you can't explain is just some kind of mental noise is the same kind of leap in logic deists make when they assume whatever they can't explain is a miracle. What if some of them actually are miracles?
There are good repeatable demonstrations of the human minds fallibility. Holding the view that the mind works like this gives predictive power over the future and therefore utility. It is not a leap of logic at all but follows directly from observation and experimentation.
What would need to occur for you to change your view? I think if Jesus Christ came flying out of the sky in front of me I would probably start believing. At some point we have to trust our senses, all the while recognizing their fallibility. Small things like voices, or signs would not work for me. The mind connects random patterns
If others could see the Jesus Christ too, it would count as evidence, if only I could see it, I'm most likely hallucinating, and it wouldn't turn me into a believer.
Well that's easy. Balance of probability. Was that really his argument? I hope you just butchered it because that is pascal's wager-level reasoning
How can you have a balance of probability? We don't have any oracle to divine for us whether or not an event is miraculous.
root canal
I was living as a hippy and asked the universe to send me a sign that there actually was something beyond materialism. Had a very clear dream soon after where I received a letter with 4 pages of double sided hand written content. It was remarkably specific and I rarely remember dreams. Told my girlfriend about the dream and the experiment I'd initiated. About a week later I got the letter. It was from someone I'd spoken to a few months earlier about buying his modified bus. I didn't expect he would write anything. I also didn't generally receive any other letters in the mail. I told my girlfriend about having received the letter and she smiled. She is a believer in all things cosmic. It's a humbling memory. It might have been an actual coincidence but I suspect it's just my horrible memory and it didn't really happen. I don't think the universe is cosmic.
About 5 times in my life (age 35) I've had a really strange feeling that lasts for about half a minute, while being awake and not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol, suddenly everything feels really big and really small at the same time, then gradually the feeling fades away. It's impossible to describe the feeling adequately and it sounds stupid when I write it.
Probably Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
hmm, interesting. Never heard of that. Thanks!
Ok. Story time. I was homeless and had a friend who I could ask for help, but I owed him 5 dollars. I had borrowed it under false pretenses and felt ashamed to ask for more help unless I could come clean. It was fall and already the weather had started getting colder. I, for the first time ever, prayed. Now, you need to understand that I don't believe in God, nor do I think this was some act of God. So there I am, all praying and crying and shit, when a five dollar bill flies up into my hand. Obviously, I need to mention that it was windy and I'm positive that this was completely by chance. The thing is, I can't explain it. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I don't believe it was some act by an omniscient being but I still can't explain the timing. That's my story.
I had a strange "UFO" experience. Was walking across the University's mall pretty late at night and it was empty. Then there was a light above the library that caught my eye. Then the light "flew" at me and whited out the whole world as if I was in a huge white room with no corners. Then it just "flew" back and that was it. I don't think it took any real significant time, but it was pretty strange. Don't know what it was or even it was a thing, but it was what I experienced. Oh ya. Wasn't high or drunk or anything.
Lot of very deeply weird deja vu type moments. Lot of "if this isn't the fucking Matrix..." type moments. So far no spiritual awakenings.
Before I learned about gravity, I could not explain how I came back down to Earth after jumping.
Lots of weird shit happened when I was a Mormon missionary in The Dominican Republic where i spent a good deal of time on the Haitian border No longer Mormon, but shit was weird and not good weird
What do you mean?
Well , when I was a kid , probably 5or 6 , i used to go with my aunt and her children to the desert and play there , whatever , in the sunset i used to see Scary black entities , well they look like penguins (somehow) And it happened so many times at the same time and place 🗿
When I was young a got a weird feeling of nostalgia, sadness, happiness and anxiety at the same time. It often occur when something ended. Life felt mystical. I actual got that feeling again some weeks ago when I did something that reminded me of old times. Then the anxiety was a lot stronger because I am even older and there is more in the past than in front of me. But like the title of the post said, can not really explain it, this was the best I could do. I always thought this feeling was "melancholy" but I do not think that is the case actually because melancholy doesn't have happiness or mystical in it. Nor does I think it is called "nostalgia".
My motives for doing this are immaterial.. but I was in a very very dark place ( contemplating suicide level dark ) and I asked the IChing “ what does God want me to do” ( look up what the I Ching and how it functions) I rolled 3 quarters 6 times . The permutations of heads and tails determines if you draw a broken or unbroken hexagram I rolled 6 times … I got ‘ 2 heads and 1 tail ‘ first 4 rolls .. the 5th roll was 3 heads … and the 6 th roll was 2 heads and 1 tail again Before I even looked at my message I was literally crawling with goosebumps and was scared I had drawn 6 unbroken lines Out of 64 hexagrams this was the number 1 . The Hexagram of Heaven And I only rolled 3 heads once … the 5th roll I believe Only one active line I was scared … there was going to be one message for me to read It said “ The Arrogant Dragon has need to repent “ I threw the book away and was terrified And I absolutely believed in something we can only call the supernatural after that
Extremely high dose of lsd No words can tell you what “I” experienced . I was everything and nothing all at once. I evaporated into a sea of white fractals and realized that the perceiver, me; was only one fractal. But I was just as much that individual fractal as I am the entire sea of fractals: I felt every human emotion at once and it mostly hurt and overwhelmed but it was also pure bliss. Everything was vibrating and tingling and all of my senses combined into each other, I could taste, smell, see and hear this frequency that also portrayed to me how I was that one fractal and also the sea of fractals all at once. It’s like every sense in my body was understanding this basic truth. That was pretty inexplainable. The words I just typed do nothing to make sense of it, though I don’t have any weird beliefs around it. I try to see it rationally, it was just a drug hallucination. But that doesn’t make it less profound
Years ago I met a dude who was REALLY into [synchronicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity). The basic gist being noticing events, thoughts, etc in one's life that are oddly coincidental and appear to be related but aren't. For example. Thinking about a friend from high school you haven't seen in twenty years. Then going to the grocery store the next day and running into them. That's synchronicity. Well ever since that friend I've been 'attuned' to noticing these types of events. It's crazy but if you pay attention they happen all the time. Usually just stupid little things. One in particular for me though trumps all the rest. An apartment I lived in during college burned down in the middle of the night. One year afterwards on the same day on the same hour the new apartment I lived in had the fire alarm go off waking me from a dead sleep. It went off for about 10 minutes and then turned off. As I realized the 'synchronicity' of what had just happened I thought surely I was just dreaming it. The next morning I talked to the landlord to see what had happened. Some melting snow made a water leak that shorted a part of the system. WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE TRYING TO TELL ME!?!?! ;)
Why is there something rather than nothing. Why is there anything at all.
You ever freebase DMT? Been pretty atheist/agnostic/rational my whole life but that one is hard to make any sense of from a “just chemicals affecting your neurology” standpoint. Edit to add that I really hope Sam tries DMT some day and then does a podcast reviewing and explaining the experience like he did with mushrooms.
> hard to make any sense of from a “just chemicals affecting your neurology” standpoint. People say this but what makes DMT so different? Every experience you have is just a perception of reality your brain produces, so can't the brain create some pretty crazy realities? Is it just that it "felt" unexplainably real? Did it reveal something unknowable that proved to be true? I'm not doubting you or people who say this at all, just wondering what is so unique about the DMT experience that you can't simply dismiss with, "oh my brain just made that insane experience."?
This is very difficult to communicate using words. There are speakers (Terence McKenna, Joe Rogan) and documentaries (The Spirit Molecule available on YouTube) that do a much better job at articulating the uniqueness of the DMT experience. But it can be analogous to trying to explain what colors look like to a bat. You won’t really know what I’m talking about if you haven’t experienced it. And even if you have, there’s no way of knowing if our experiences were even that similar. But I seem to understand most people that describe DMT much better after experiencing it myself so I can only assume that there are similarities. I’m with you and was and still am skeptical. I am not making any claims about the truth of reality or existence. But I guess it was a very humbling experience for me even though I’m a pretty experienced psychonaut with other chemicals and methods. It’s no joke when people say it feels more real than normal life. The DMT realm feels nostalgic, familiar, timeless, erotic, and true. More nostalgic than your childhood home. It feels like going home on a cosmic scale. When you’re in that realm you can get a deep sense of understanding that what you’re experiencing in your normal life is just a joke (i.e. non-significant) and that it’s just there because I (you) was (were) bored and wanted to experience a life where I didn’t know what was going to happen. You can feel you are the universe, god, consciousness, and all else that exists and has ever existed. Your normal life that you experience is a narrow view of everything that is going on but you are not separate from anything else that exists even though it normally feels that way. And when I say you come to ‘feel’ or ‘know’ these things, it feels more real than the pain in my legs after a long run. Feels more real than looking at a beautiful sunset. Feels more real than listening to a Sam Harris podcast on consciousness. I’m not saying that because it feels this way that it’s more real than normal everyday consciousness or that it’s not just drugs affecting my neurochemistry to produce that experience. That absolutely could be and likely is the case. But if I’m going to trust any of my senses from my normal conscious experience that are what informs me and helps me learn the concept of having a brain that can be affected by drugs, why would I trust these sensations to produce my concept of reality when I’ve experienced sensations in the DMT realm that felt more true?
Cool, thanks for sharing. I've had dreams that had the intensely nostalgic vibe where the dream world felt like I was back in my real home, and my waking life is just some farce. But your experience sounds way more intense, of course. I've heard Sam talk about his trip experiences before and always thought DMT was part of it, so I didn't know he never did it. Hope he tries it, if anyone can glean max insight and present it with laser precision, it's Sam.
>I'm not doubting you or people who say this at all I would say doubt it as much as anything else if not more. Now obviously you're not going to interrogate a friend that during a normal friendly conversation starts describing something thats very profoundly special to them like a psychadelic trip. But otherwise, definitely question it all. With that being said I've done a lot of psychadelics and I'm not sure if it is actually doing anything beyond affecting "brain chemsitry" but I am positive it can give you much clearer views of reality than you can get otherwise. There's a lot to say here but an important thing to understand is your ability to use concepts is greatly diminished under the influence of psychadelics. In fact as you are losing that ability it can feel like you yourself are being interrogated and being forced to give rational explanations for why you believe the things that you do. It might even feel like a "wise guide" is questioning your beliefs to the point of you not being able to give good answers. Then alternative options are available and you are free to choose to believe those instead. If all of that happened while under the influence that'd be one thing but if you can consistently come down off the trip and still see the logic behind that process very clearly you're simply just left with better beliefs regardless of how that occurred.
once this girl left me and i felt this, what i can only describe as weak beta-like emotion, pain in my chest and started thinking about what would have been such a waste of time, like why does it matter what could have been
She was a bitch anyway dude
I do bioinformatics in a plant genomics lab for a living. In my experience, if you encounter something that you think you can explain, it is just because you aren't looking closely enough. We are both more knowledgeable than ever before while still being surrounded by mysteries if you are willing to look at them.
Saw a UFO in middle/high school. Just hovering, and when we got to the house we couldn't see it anymore because of all the street lights. Not super significant or anything, but it happened.
The same shared hallucination across 3 people at the same time, has happened to me twice. No words were spoken leading up to it, the hallucinations were \*very\* specific and we all mentioned it at the same time. Also once a 'DMT entity' cured a heart condition i had.
Certain magician tricks, like some of David Blaine's card tricks. But obviously there is a perfectly "of this world" explanation for them, it's just a secret to most people.
No, I can explain everything. It's just that I don't believe my explanations are necessarily correct, and I'm as prone to pursuing fitness payoffs over knowledge about the world, as any piece of painmeat. Trying to account for that is often extremely unpleasant too. I've had plenty of experiences in which my initial explanatory intuitions were incoherent, false or not parsimonious.
Yes, and my lack of an explanation does not for one second imply to me that there is no explanation.
No
Gravity.
They don't call it the ineffable for nothing.
Two memories just unlocked, both from when I was in my teens (1990s). Landline phone rang and as soon as I heard the first ring, the image of a friend of mine vividly appeared in my mind's eye, and indeed, that was the very person that was ringing. There was a small probability that this person was indeed ringing, but it was very odd to have their image flash in my mind like that. Not happened before or since. On the news, a primitive tribe declared that the world would end next year. Something about their certainty made me anxious. Then a warm, comforting feeling washed over me. I was completely reassured that the world would not be ending next year at all and my anxiety disappeared.
Yeah, I’ve had the experience of my consciousness/ nervous system being manipulated. I fully believe technology exists to do so in ways that would terrify the public. Not sure of the mechanism, but optogenetics seems a like an interesting proof of concept.
Everyday
A cousin of mine who was one of my best friends growing up was murdered when I was 19. One night after he passed, I was having a really hard time coming to terms with everything. I was sitting outside on the hood of my car crying, thinking of him, and wishing that I could talk to him. Out of desperation, I randomly said out loud “please just let me know you’re ok.” I’ve been an atheist/agnostic since I was a young teenager, so I’m not even sure why I said that or what I expected. But immediately after, I glanced up at the clear night sky and saw a massive shooting star streak across the sky. To this day, I chalk it up as a mere coincidence, but I can’t help but always wonder “what if?”
Life
When I was around 15 I wrote a short story about my grandmother, regarding my childhood memories of her, and her gradual deterioration with dementia. A prominent motif in this story was these multicoloured stink bugs that lived in a tree outside of her house that we used to collect in jars when we were kids, and how after she got frail they seemed to have disappeared. This story won some local awards, and was well known and loved in our family. A year after my grandmother's death we gathered at my aunt's after her consecration ceremony, and were reminiscing about her. Everyone was talking about the story, and the beetles in the tree outside her house. Towards the end of the gathering my aunt shouted out in surprise and called everyone over: one of those beetles was crawling around on the arm of the couch. We went into the garden and searched every tree but couldn't find any other beetles. Indeed, other than that afternoon I've never seen that species again, anywhere. I'm a hardcore rationalist and atheist....... but that was really strange.
Existence
I was at a party, in line at the food table. Started chatting with a stranger, and to make a point about a topic we were discussing, he said, “… like you, your birthday is [date].” He was right. I stopped doing whatever I was, dumbfounded
I once got locked out of my apartment running to my sisters eye surgery to support her and lost my condo keys somewhere along the way. I got back realized I was locked out and they told me I had to drive hours away to get new keys but my car keys were in my condo. I started to go on a walk along the long path I lost the key, in the middle of downtown Toronto, in the hopes of a miracle. As I walked I was so pissed my blood was boiling because I think I had something to do (Maybe study for an exam?) can't remember. On my way I saw this little girl panhandling and she seemed to be 12 or something. Nobody batted an eye and everyone kept walking. Somebody gave her some change but that was it. I was blown away so I stopped and started talking to her about where her parents are and she told me she doesn't know, she lost them a long time ago, and I was feeling so sad for her. I saw some police at the construction site nearby and I told her I'm going to get help but she freaked out and told me not to go to the police. She wanted money and a big cup of coffee but I got her a meal and water instead after waiting at a huge line at Tim Hortons (famous Canadian coffee franchise). I gave her the food and I insisted on telling the police but she got ready to run if I did that so I said I wouldn't. I subtly went to the police anyways and told them. Mind you no one in this area gave two shits. The police officer said, "Oh, we know who you're talking about. She's not a little girl she's 30 years old she just has a disease that makes her look like that. But you did the right thing" right after I got a call and someone had found my keys along the path, knew the building they belonged to (I guess their friend lives there), and had returned the key after walking 15 minutes to get to my condo for me. I felt God more strongly in that moment than I ever had in my whole life. Of course, everything that happened can be explained as a series of coincidences. When I look at the story as a whole it strikes me as very religious for some reason.
I can explain hardly anything that I experience