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The speaker describes a DMT experience that seemed to resemble Hindu iconography, then introduces reports of similar entity encounters and geometric visions in psychedelic users.
Speaker A
About 10 years ago, I was sitting beside a lake in Portugal when I took three big hits of dmt.Within seconds, the entire sky transformed into this enormous kaleidoscope.Reality seemed to fracture into endlessly repeating patterns.Everything was moving together, almost like some impossibly complicated cosmic machine.And then I noticed something at the center of it.
It was blue.It seemed to have multiple arms stretching out into the geometry around it.And those arms appeared to connect to these enormous cog like fractals.It genuinely looked as though this thing was sitting at the center of reality, turning the gears.And I remember coming back and thinking to myself, wow, that looked incredibly Hindu.
Now, I don't think I literally met Shiva, but it did get pretty strange when years later, I discovered that I'm far from the only person to have experienced something like this.People take dmt, psilocybin and other psychedelics and and often report seeing blue beings.Multi armed beings, gods and goddesses, elaborate geometric worlds, and sometimes specific Hindu deities.So why, why would taking a chemical that disrupts the human brain produce experiences that sometimes resemble religious imagery created thousands of years ago?There are a few possible explanations, and the deeper I went into this, the stranger the question became.
Because it isn't just the gods that look familiar.Sometimes the philosophy does too.It's in 2022, researchers analyzed nearly 4,000 descriptions of DMT experiences posted online between 2009 and 2018.And almost half of them contained some kind of entity encounter.People described aliens, jesters, elves, demons, mythological creatures and religious figures.
And among those religious figures were Hindu deities.The researchers specifically found reports mentioning Ganesh, Shiva, K. Kali, Indra, Naga and Shakti.Now, it's important not to exaggerate this.Most people taking DMT aren't meeting Shiva.Hindu gods were only a small proportion of the entities that people reported seeing, but they appeared often enough to be identified in the analysis.
But there was something else that appeared much more frequently.Geometry.Fractals, shapes and recurring patterns appeared roughly in a third of the reports.
This section explores possible explanations for the overlap between psychedelic imagery and Hindu art, including visual cortex geometry, cultural memory, and Jungian archetypes.
Speaker A
And that caught my attention, because if you look at Hindu religious art, you often see multiple arms, multiple, multiple heads, third eyes, impossible geometry, radiating patterns, beings existing at enormous scales, and gods containing worlds within themselves.One of the most spectacular examples is in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna reveals his universal form, the Vishvarupa, to Arjuna.
And suddenly Krishna isn't simply this human like figure anymore.Arjuna sees countless eyes, countless mouths and countless arms.An overwhelming being seemingly contained in the entire universe within itself.Now, when I read descriptions like that after taking dmt, I can't help but think how psychedelic that sounds.But that doesn't mean ancient Hindus were smoking dmt.
There's actually a more interesting possibility.Scientists have known for a long time that hallucinations aren't completely random.People repeatedly see certain kinds of geometry.Spirals, tunnels, lattices, fractals, and concentric circles.And researchers have proposed that some of these forms may emerge from something much less mysterious.
The architecture of our visual system itself.A famous mathematical model published in 2001 explored how the organization of the visual cortex could generate recurring geometric hallucinations.In other words, there may be shapes the human brain is naturally predisposed to produce when normal visual processing becomes disrupted.And that changes the question.But maybe psychedelic users and ancient mystics weren't necessarily encountering the same supernatural beings.Maybe they were encountering some of the same underlying features of human perception.So imagine trying to draw an experience where a being appeared, infinitely powerful, existed in multiple places simultaneously, was somehow connected to everything around it, and seemed to contain more information than a normal human body possibly could.Drawing a bloke with two arms probably isn't going to cut it.So you give him 10, you give him multiple faces, you surround him with impossible geometry, you make him enormous and put worlds inside of him.
Maybe some religious imagery isn't supposed to be realistic at all.
Maybe it's an attempt to represent experiences that realistic art simply can't represent.But there's an obvious problem with this explanation, because geometry doesn't explain why somebody sees Shiva for that, there's a simpler explanation.We don't enter a psychedelic experience with an empty brain.By adulthood, you've accumulated an enormous library of faces, symbols, stories, and images, most of which you probably don't consciously remember seeing.And you don't need to have studied Hinduism to know roughly what a Hindu God looks like, whether it's Shiva, Kali, or Ganesh.
These images are everywhere in films, art, tattoos, album covers, festivals, books, and social media.So imagine DMT generates a strange blue humanoid shape emerging from a mass of geometry.Your brain has to interpret it.And buried somewhere in your memory is an image of a blue Hindu deity with multiple arms.Suddenly, it's Shiva.This explanation also makes sense of something else.People on DMT don't exclusively see Hindu gods.They also see Christian figures, Buddhist figures, Egyptian gods, aliens, demons, jesters and elves, and all sorts of bizarre creatures.So maybe psychedelics generate something much more ambiguous and culture provides the costume.But that doesn't quite explain the whole phenomenon, because culture influencing the experience doesn't necessarily mean culture creates the entire experience.
Culture may influence the costume, but it appears there's something underneath it that's more consistent.This is where Carl Jung becomes interesting.Jung believed that certain patterns repeatedly emerge in human psychology, dreams, mythology and religion.They include the mother, the hero, the trickster, the destroyer, death, revolution, rebirth and transformation.And different cultures give these forces different names and appearances.
But Jung thought that something deeper might be shared.And Hindu gods may be incredibly rich representations of these kinds of forces.Kali represents destruction, death, time, liberation and maternal power.Shiva contains apparently contradictory qualities.Destruction and creation, stillness and ecstatic movement and meditation and sexuality.
So imagine someone has an overwhelming psychedelic experience involving death, terror, femininity, rebirth and transformation.Maybe the brain doesn't simply pull up an image of Kali from somewhere in your memory.Perhaps the experience comes first, and then Kali becomes one possible way that the mind represents it.Someone in another culture might encounter a terrifying mother Goddess.Someone else might encounter some enormous feminine intelligence.
And another might simply describe a presence that they can't name.They're different entities, but a similar underlying experience.
The discussion shifts to ego dissolution, nondual philosophy, and research on mystical experiences, then asks whether ancient Indian traditions may have reached similar states through other means.
Speaker A
The costume changes, but perhaps the pattern doesn't.But the similarities in these experiences aren't limited to what people see.It's also what they come back believing.
One of the classic features of a powerful psychedelic experience is something called ego dissolution.The normal boundary between you and everything else essentially disappears.People describe becoming the universe, feeling interconnected with everything, and realizing that their individual identity is somehow only a tiny piece of something much larger.And if you've spent enough time reading psychedelic trip reports or had them yourself, you've probably encountered some version of I realized everything was one.And that sounds remarkably similar to ideas humans were discussing in India thousands of years ago, particularly in the philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta.Advayata is non dual.Put extremely simply, it argues that separation we normally perceive between ourselves and ultimate reality is isn't quite what it seems.Atman, the deepest self and Brahman ultimate reality are ultimately not separate.And similar mystical ideas appear in Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism and many other traditions.But that's precisely what makes this interesting.
Because perhaps this isn't specifically about Hinduism at all.Maybe it's about human consciousness.Researchers at Johns Hopkins surveyed more than 4,000 people who had reported encounters with God or or some kind of ultimate reality.Some happened spontaneously, others happened after psilocybin, lsd, Ayahuasca, or dmt.There were differences between them, but there were also striking similarities.
Both psychedelic and non drug experiences could involve encounters with something perceived as conscious.As sacred or ultimately real.And both could produce lasting changes in people's attitudes towards life, meaning and spirituality.So maybe humans have been entering these strange states of consciousness for thousands of years, and psychedelics are simply one particularly reliable way of getting there.Which raises an obvious question.
Were ancient Hindus used in psychedelics too?This is where we enter one of the biggest mysteries in the history of psychoactive drugs, Soma.Soma appears throughout the Rig Veda, one of humanity's oldest religious texts.We know it was a sacred substance, that it was consumed during rituals, and that it was so important that soma itself was personified as divine.The problem is no one knows exactly what soma was.
Researchers have proposed all sorts of candidates.Ephedra, cannabis, blue lotus, and perhaps most famously, Amanita muscaria, the red and white fly agaric mushroom.The ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson famously argued that soma was amanita.And naturally, psychedelic culture absolutely loves this theory.An ancient sacred mushroom producing mystical visions and leading to birth of Hinduism.
It's a fascinating theory, but we can't quite prove it.The identification remains controversial, and scholars have proposed numerous other candidates.So saying ancient Hindus were definitely drinking psychedelic mushroom juice goes way beyond the evidence.And actually, they didn't need to be, because humans have discovered plenty of ways of profoundly altering consciousness without drugs.Meditation, fasting, chanting, breath control, sensory withdrawal, sleep deprivation, intense concentration and ritual.
Some ancient Indian traditions became extraordinarily sophisticated at deliberately manipulating attention, breath, sensory experiences and consciousness.So perhaps ancient mystics were exploring some of the same territory that psychedelics throw modern people into, just through a different route.
The speaker returns to the original lake experience, weighs neurological explanations, examines studies on DMT entity encounters, and ends by reflecting on the deeper mystery of consciousness and perception.
Speaker A
And that brings me back to the lake.I still have absolutely no idea what that blue multi armed thing was.The simplest explanation is probably neurological.
DMT massively disrupted my normal perception.My visual system generated extraordinary geometric imagery.My brain detected agency inside that imagery.And somewhere inside my memory was the visual language of Hinduism, so my brain used it.That's completely plausible.
But calling something a hallucination doesn't completely solve the mystery, because there's still something we have to explain.Why this pattern?Why this geometry?Why do people meet entities and gods?Why the feeling of encountering something vastly more intelligent than yourself?
And why do some of these experiences resemble descriptions that humans have been given of mystical states for thousands of years?In another large Johns Hopkins study, researchers surveyed more than 2,500 people about memorable DMT entity encounters.People called what they encountered beings, guides, spirits, aliens and helpers.Most attributed consciousness and intelligence to whatever they'd encountered.And many came away believing that the entity continued to exist somewhere even after the trip ended.
Remarkably, more than half of the people who identified as atheists before the encounter no longer identified as atheists afterwards.That shows just how real these experiences feel.So there are several possibilities.Maybe Hindu imagery has become part of our cultural vocabulary, and psychedelic brains use it to make sense of otherwise incomprehensible experiences.But maybe ancient Hindu mystics became very skilled at exploring aspects of consciousness that psychedelics can also expose.
Maybe gods and entities are archetypal constructions emerging from the shared architecture of human minds.Maybe it's some combination of all three.Or maybe consciousness itself is considerably stranger than we currently understand.Maybe there are autonomous conscious entities that exist and altered states allow us to perceive them.I recently made a video about a group of scientists who have a theory suggesting this and have plans to actually run experiments to try and prove it.Now, I don't think I literally met Shiva beside that lake, but seeing that blue geometric presence apparently turning the fractal machinery of reality gave me a new appreciation for why humans might have created images of beings like this in the first place.So the interesting question isn't really whether people are literally meeting Hindu gods on psychedelics.It's why, when ordinary reality falls apart, the worlds people encounter can sometimes look so much like the worlds that mystics have been describing for thousands of years.
Now, if you're interested in this kind of research, the cutting edge, important psychedelic science that often gets missed by the mainstream, I write a free newsletter called the Spore Report, where every week I dig through the latest studies and put out the stories that I think are actually worth knowing about.There's a link below if you want to join.
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