Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amelius 1126 days ago
Can we create a trip without drugs but e.g. using VR goggles only?
4 comments

There are people looking at "psychedelic game design", see e.g. https://anticiplay.medium.com/chocolate-covered-magic-mushro...

They are not looking at creating a "trippy" experience per se, but rather to generate an experience that produces a potential shift in the way to relate with the world

The Lumenate app.

Or if you don't count oxygen as a drug: Breathwork (Holotropic Breathwork, Quantum Light Breathing, Shamanic Breathing, Rebirthing, etc.).

Never tried but I heard that multi-day retreats in complete darkness can also induce some kind of (visual) trips.

No because most of the trip is absolutely not about visuals (even more with Ketamine).
Only if it's so immersive that it feels more real than reality. If you can at all tell that it's not "real", then it all falls apart.
This might be true if what you want is to emulate the experience under actual psychedelic drugs; I do not think that this is necessary if your only aim is to create _transformative_ or _healing_ experiences.

One of the core concepts of Rob Burbea I mentionned above is the idea of "imaginal middle way", which, in short, consists in seeing mental images as "neither real nor not real", "simultanously discovered and created". Going deeper into that topic would require way too much text and time for a simple comment here, but I can tell from experience that this way to engage with imaginative faculties can have deep and long lasting effects. And the important aspect here is that, while engaging with the image, one is constantly balancing between reification (considereing the image, for instance of a divinity, as having independent reality) and disdain (considering the image as "just made up").