So... what ARE the endogenous hallucinogens? What causes psychedelia without substances?

[embracethevoid]

Regarding these magnetic fields: the interference with our neurons will certainly skew the flow of our minds.

E.g. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation:

You can imagine that any subtle magnetic field is of course going to set up an electric field in the human brain via induction of susceptible chemicals. The result is an altered neurotransmitter flux however subtle this may be.

I saw a documentary a long long time ago that found a correlation between living near power lines and experiencing ghosts/sleep paralysis at night. What I do not understand is that they seemed to have actually caught the fuckers on camera.

A cursory web search presents this:

POWER FAILURE

The computer goes crazy, the television comes on and off, the phone rings but no one is there, doorbells chime for no reason. ENERGY. Once again, a Ghost's best friend and best tool to communicate with. Ghost's seem to have no problem manipulating electrical appliances. They also seem to feed off of electricity. Many Ghost investigators or "parapsychologists" have proven that hauntings often happen in rooms or places near power lines or feeder cables coming into a building. Anything that produces a big electromagnetic field (EMF) seems to be food for ghosts! This is also the reason many hauntings (and old ghost stories) take place during electrical storms. The electricity in the air is like a giant "buffet" for ghosts in the area. Once charged up, they can manifest themselves in the ways described above.

It is pretty simple. A subtle current induced can often cause havoc via the transistor effect: if it reduces the minimum potential for a larger flux to be triggered in the same way that a gentle nudge off a cliff will kill you.


As for ORMES, what you're saying sounds like the Book of Aquarius, Philosopher's Stone. Certainly an incredible read. Supposedly contained in a person's urine is the "Stone".
Going by that alone, I would think it is either endogenous psychedelics excreted in the urine and purified or perhaps it is ORMES. Essentially the writer states that the subtlest component of the life force, which we isolate from urine, is also present everywhere in the air and it traverses its own cycle (see this part of the book).

What I find most interesting is that this same Life-Force is talked about worldwide. Everyone knows about it but we know little. In Taoism it is called Chi, in the West it is just vitality/life energy, in Islam it is known as 'Ruh'. But despite all human observation it remains quite the mystery.

 

[nen888]

..great thread all!..good to see joedirt back

my question on top of all those great concepts:

where or what is the 'Observer'..?

 

[The Neural]

without thoughts there would be no need for neurochemicals to cross synapses and carry on signals.

Neurotransmitters cannot possibly be only an effect. There are very well known cases of individuals who lost their visual imagery, being completely unable to generate visual pictures in their minds and report them, but their visual cortex was being active in the same way as controls. Neurotransmitters are not there just for "thoughts". They have roles pertinent to cortical maintenance, movement (voluntary or involuntary), unconscious memory encoding/decoding and recall, autonomic functions (breathing, heart rate), signaling vital goals (hunger, thirst, temperature), auditory and tactile processing... to say that without thoughts there would not be a need for neurotransmitters to cross synapses sounds erroneous.

By this premise, all beings with a central nervous system would have to have "thoughts", and this is something no one can possibly know. There are beings with only one large neuron to cover reflexes; that neuron is there to carry signals, just like ours, nothing to do with "thoughts".

How I defined "thoughts" in this post : A voluntary process that we, as "I", control with our will, to guide it and manipulate it as we desire (be it verbal/auditory or visual in nature), just like your example with the apple.

To give a quick educated guess on the question of "which came first", I would say that since every living organism depends on neurotransmission (e.g. plants), the neurotrasmitters came first. But a wiser answer would be that they are both a result of an interaction, almost like everything else. Because we think, neurotransmitter levels and distribution change, and because they are changed, our thoughts are changed accordingly (repeat until death).

You can imagine that any subtle magnetic field is of course going to set up an electric field in the human brain via induction of susceptible chemicals. The result is an altered neurotransmitter flux however subtle this may be.

TMS is extremely powerful, it involves a huge magnet in the room, and a portable coil which is placed on the scalp. The magnet is usually not shown in videos, which is why most people think that even a subtle magnetic field can alter brain function. It is extremely difficult for a disruption to take place, cameras and computers would FIRST show signs of disruption before any takes place in the brain. That's why there are no reports of weird MRI brain phenomena, no one observed any cognitive disruption in MRI rooms, yet cameras and other devices are highly affected. Any Tesla levels lower than MRI (TMS is rather high), should not be effective in creating a magnetic field on a brain region, capable of disrupting cognitive processes, however, a disruption of sleep could potentially happen, but not as a result of neuronal disruption, but more of a momentary shift in brain waves. This could explain why some individuals would leave deep sleep and become "awake" with sleep paralysis.

Regarding the OP :

"What causes psychedelia without substances"

Until now and what has been studied, we know that certain psychotic/hallucinatory episodes are linked with a handful of clinical "disorders". Lately, several meta-analyses were performed on brain imaging data of individuals suffering from schizophrenia, with tons of subjects. What was observed, was a structural abnormality ("abnormality", as in different from individuals who are not reporting any type of hallucination), specifically, thinning of several brain regions; the same effect but with different brain areas was observed in the same meta-analyses of bipolar individuals. We can only speculate, that thinning of cortical grey matter alters numerous variables on how the brain operates, from neurotransmitters and different firing rates, to over-active plasticity and receptor dysfunction. Anything could trigger a "hallucinogenic" state, not just the known endogenous substances (bufo, dmt etc). An effect of the thinning could be the production of an unknown metabolite of e.g. serotonin, that binds to the respective receptor and causes a form of "psychedelia". This is probably why the effects of schizophrenia are qualitatively different from DMT induced hallucinations.

All this, provided that a "hallucination", is nothing more than an alteration of a specific (or many) cognitive process caused by anything that has the physical capability of altering the said process.

To quote the great Shulgin, "these substances don't "do" things, rather they "allow" certain things to happen.


P.S. sorry for the wordy analysis, can't help it...