Hello all

[Alkhemist]

I've been a follower of the nexus for some time, but have more recently became interested in contributing to the discussions.

Chemistry and Neurology are my passion, and I feel that as factual as these field appear, there is an essence of neuroscience that is transcendental. When we look at Psychology it appears that the ethereal is explored at the expense of hard facts; when we ignore consciousness, neurochemistry shows us a machine that lacks translatable parallels with our daily lives.

What has interested me about DMT is that DMT appears to provide a medium through which chemistry speaks on a conscious level. Specifically, I'm intrigued by the fact that a substance can conjure up the sensation of beings present in this alternate reality.

I do look forward to the exchange of ideas among so many intelligent psychonauts!
Especially the Chemistry discussions!

 

[Enoon]

Welcome to the Nexus, Alkhemist.

You breach a very interesting topic mentioning neuroscience and psychology and the ethereal etc. There is one approach I find very useful of looking at this kind of thing - it is called the AQAL approach which stands for "All Quadrants All Levels". Basically the idea, afaik originating from Ken Wilber, is that each thing, unit or entity (referred to as a holon by Wilber) can be seen as having four different aspects of interaction or four different contexts so to speak - the four quadrants.

Take a human being for example - the upper left quadrant is the internal subjective - basically anything it experiences or perceives and processes, anything it feels and thinks etc. On the upper right you have the objective reality of the human, its biology, its bio-chemistry, the physical reality of its existence and the mechanisms by which it works.
On the lower left you have the inter-subjective aspect of the human where I would locate communication and human-human interactions and culture. And then on the lower right you have the inter-objective aspect which is a more objective view of collective interactions, like in demographics or statistics.

The different levels exist within each of these quadrants separately, for example in the upper right quadrant different levels could be:

elementary particles -> atoms -> molecules -> large complexes (e.g. proteins) -> cells -> ...

The upper left could range from basic perception to complex cognition and emotion and for the lower left there are different levels of collective consciousness one can talk of, that are reflected in the kind of culture one has. Levels like that can also be applied to the upper left quadrant, similar to theories of developmental psychology, starting from primitive cognition, going through mythical and magical stages to personal, rational and post-rational stages... I needn't tell you that there are many models (e.g. by Ken Wilber, Spiral Dynamics, Jean Gebser, Piaget, etc.) and many of them are very interesting to look at.

The point is that the quadrants and levels all have some correlation with one another - obviously atoms don't have as many stages of consciousness as more complex forms of life, but while the physical reality of a complex life-form may give rise to an interior world, the conceptualization of the objective reality does not explain the subjective, in the sense that it will not be able to communicate to you how someone is feeling if you know the brain chemistry.

In integral theory the idea is that one must always look at all these quadrants and levels to get a full picture of something. It is both a differential and holistic approach and I find it very useful when dealing with the topic of psychedelics, especially when integrating experiences.

a rough overview of dmt in this approach would be:

- the dmt experience feels a certain way (phenomenology, experience)
- the neuro-chemistry and chemistry of dmt
- the cultural context of dmt use - here on the nexus or in your outside culture
- the sociological statistics, laws and history of it

cheers