comments:
Stanislav Grof has a section on Ketamine in his book "When the Impossible Happens" that I think gets at it pretty well. Ketamine is a vehicle for highly dissociative experiences. It's well known for producing surgery patients who look down at the operating table from the ceiling, and so forth, heh I personally have a lot a trauma around sleep that has made deep relaxation and hypnagogic states very difficult for me to access without prescription drugs, and I frequently combine ketamine with, say, the gateway tapes (the ones without narration especially), or say, something like Jon Hopkin's Spotify "Music for Psychedelic Therapy" playlist (no association with Johns Hopkins University, by the way. (often confused as they have psychedelic playlists of their own - nowhere near "as good" imo, but anyway)) I've used gateway trainings and altered states (in both very mild, and very deep form) to try and train my brain to let go and go with liminal state experiences. I am pretty good at achieving vibrations, and have had some brief decoupling of the second body, though I did no more than flutter or rotate relative to my physical body. But hey, I'm working on it! To take a tangent to form a very vague and ill formed hypothesis that I have no idea how to test, my intuition is strong that there is a correspondence mapping between OBE/AP states and enlightenment, or that they are different parts of the same mapping, whatever it be. Sometimes I feel that I get "downloads" new perspectives, and other such that are my personal internal equivalent of the OOB state / AP. who knows! I find that when I tell myself I have power over my brain space in such meditative/altered/deeply relaxed states, I do indeed deepen the experience, and some of these have been quite profound. I have shifted my relationship to psychedelics since "childhood" (childhood == early 20s in this regard)I think that just about the most boring and stressful thing I could do "on" psychedelics would be to hand out with people. All those raging uncontrolled mindstate take me far from my own optimal state for exploration, healing, learning, and inhabiting new perspectives generally. I am sorry for your friends bad experiences, whatever the cause (set and setting?? - not assuming, just positing) I am glad to hear of your positive experience! Good luck in future travels!