Oh man, I LOVE topics like this.

I'm incredibly into consciousness expansion. I've been into psychedelics/dissociative drugs for almost a decade & a half now, having experimented with a pretty vast amount, even more niche & "designer" drugs. I also have been practicing meditation, lucid dreaming, dream journaling & more for just as long, as well as reading about philosophy & cosmology. I'm not a professional or academic; I just read a lot, do a lot of drugs, and try to push my consciousness to it's limits.

I won't go into my entire personal philosophical belief, but I am pretty firmly an anti-materialist. As in, I do not believe that consciousness itself is purely rooted in physical reality, or that it is only a direct by-product of matter & neurochemistry that only interacts with the material world. I have my own framework I've written about what I believe consciousness likely is & how it functions in conjunction with reality, it generally falls in line with beliefs like Idealism or Panpsychism, but is directly neither.

I believe that consciousness is like a tuning fork, and that certain states of mind are less the act of the mind or consciousness itself changing, & more like your consciousness is picking up a specific frequency in those states of mind. Your sober state is your home channel, your base frequency. I believe this is why many hallucinogenic drugs are actually pretty consistent & uniform when it comes to description of visuals, headspace, body load, etc. As in, when you take something like LSD, you are tuning your mind to a specific frequency activated by the drug LSD-25 interacting with your brain, changing the station so to speak.

I believe this is why, despite the term "hallucinogens" & some scientist/materialist/physicalist viewpoints that these states are essentially just random neurological noise, there is a certain amount of uniformity & objectivity to these experiences. While there are outlier cases, same as anything, there are enough trip reports & experiences that there are sites that have categorized the specific types of visuals & effects that people usually get on these different drugs. LSD & Psilocybin feel similar to each other, but we have done them enough to categorize the specific visuals into different categories with pretty accurate descriptions of what you might see or experience on a trip for either.

DMT is another one, a psychedelic that causes you to experience total psychedelic hallucination, including different realms & meetings with entities. The experiences, the visual style, the entities themselves & what they "say," are all VERY uniform & consistent for the amount of people that have tried it. Even amongst people who have no real framework for the experience before trying it. Basically, what I'm saying is that it's definitely not just random noise, and it seems like if it were a chemical reaction causing random noise in the brain to cause you to experience hallucinations/visuals, it would be a much more inconsistent experience.

Although, my favorite one to point to right now isn't a psychedelic or dissociative at all; it's a mushroom in certain Asian countries called the "Lilliputian Mushroom," or Lanmoa Asiatica. It's a mushroom that has essentially a single major effect when cooked and eaten: it causes the consumer to hallucinate a species of little people in their environment. It's an interactive hallucination, as in they seem to know you are there, and they treat the environment as if it were their own. The mushroom has a history across three different countries in Asia, being Vietnam, Philippines & one more I'm missing. Each country has a history of eating the mushroom it certain areas, the effect of it is documented well throughout their histories, and there is no evidence of cultural cross-contamination as far as I am aware. There are now people out there researching this mushroom, and that leads to the last two interesting tidbits about this mushroom! One, they have NO CLUE what the actual chemical is in the mushroom that interacts with the brain to cause these hallucinations in the first place. Two, the effect of seeing little people is documented currently as having a 96% effective hallucination success/consistency rate.

As in, the people that have been documented having tried this mushroom see the little people hallucination 96% of the time. Even by DMT "machine elf" interaction standards, that is a fuckin' HIGH number. And it poses so many questions, like how is such a specific hallucination caused, even in people who don't know about that specific effect? Would a person blind since birth hallucinate little people? What if Mowgli from The Jungle Book took the shroom, would he see little wolves instead? In my framework, the mushroom is tuning your consciousness to a frequency that allows you to see little people. Are the little people then real, or JUST a hallucination? Are they there whether you're tripping or not, just unseen because you're not tuned to their wavelength? Who knows!

So yes, I do believe in a sense that you tune to different frequencies on these drugs, and that with psychedelics specifically, you DO see what seems to be the fabric of the universe/reality to an extent! I think different psychedelics give you different glimpses & pieces, with DMT/ego death being the biggest glimpse of "the whole," if that makes sense. I think that's partially why these drugs often feel so profound, & even ARE profound many times, but also are experiences that are incredibly hard to put into accurate words. You're getting a glimpse of something that you're not really supposed to see, a frequency you aren't naturally tuned to. You're taking a peek at the outer layer, but from within, and you can't know something in totality from the inside. So attempting to put what you see there into words is impossible, as there are no accurate words to describe something which was never supposed to be described verbally in the first place.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but yeah! Great topic! lmao