@manna
The aspects of DMT trips you are bring up do interest me a lot, but ideally they should be in a thread of their own, as this thread is supposed to be on the immunomodulatory properties of psychedelics, which is biochemistry.
But with the risk of going even further of topic, I will answer your points:
Nowadays there is a scientific understanding of how inflammation in the gut can affect the brain: a major gut-to-brain route is the vagus nerve, which runs from gut to brain, and has detectors for inflammation. This nerve will signal to the brain when it senses inflammation in the gut. When the brain receives this signal from the vagus nerve, the brain turns on sickness behavior, which interestingly has symptoms very similar to those of ME/CFS.
I agree that first hand descriptions of DMT experiences are valid and worthy of study, and I have read many such accounts. However, when those DMT trippers start creating theoretical frameworks or ornate theologies as an attempt to explain or embellish what they experienced on DMT, then I reserve the right to be skeptical, especially when those people don't have a scientific stance, and so often tend to create their belief system based on what they would like to be true, or based on what beliefs may support the social cohesion of the tribe.
To give you an example: I have read many accounts of people taking DMT encountering what Terence McKenna called "self-transforming machine elves," otherwise known as fractal elves, or just machine elves. Most DMT trippers tend to assume these machine elves are beings distinct from their own self; ie, they assume these machine elves have their own separate existence, mainly because they seem to behave autonomously.
However, in one of the rare DMT trip accounts I read from a scientist, he wanted to put this idea of the autonomous existence of machine elves to the test. So during his DMT trip, he made mental efforts to control appearance and behavior of these machine elves, and after a while, succeeded in doing so. This experiment indicates that machine elves are likely just manifestations of your own mind, rather than autonomous beings or autonomous consciousnesses.
If I remember rightly, I think I came across a study many years ago suggesting that the fractal imagery seen during DMT and LSD trips may be generated in the optic nerve, as a result of the action of these drugs on this nerve.
One thing that does interest me about DMT is the reporting of certain recurrent themes that different trippers independently observe. For example, snakes seem to be seen a great deal. Perhaps taking ayahuasca in the Amazon rainforest might explain that in terms of cultural conditioning, as perhaps indigenous peoples in the Amazon may for good reason be fearful of snakes. However, when taking DMT in an urban environment, it is hard to explain why snakes are seen. Though I understand it make take many trips of DMT before you first see a snake, so they are not that common.
The appearance of gnomes or alien creatures with large eyes and smooth faces also seems to be a commonly reported experience of DMT. DMT or psilocybin in naturally growing plants may explain why there are so many "gnome sitings" reported in Iceland. My theory to explain the numerous Icelandic gnome sitings is that these naturally growing plants or mushrooms may be used in food, perhaps then leading to gnome hallucinations.
Iceland takes gnome sitings so seriously, that a couple of years ago,
a highway project was canceled because it was thought that the new road might disturb the elf environment!
I personally think that consciousness may well have transcendental qualities (as in transcending space and time), and that one day these might be better understood when the theories of quantum consciousness that are currently in their infancy are better developed.
Love, like any other emotion, can be become the content of consciousness, as can the sensations of an itch on your ankle; but whether love is anything more than one of the sensations or feeling that consciousness can contain — a color of consciousness if you like — that's another question.
The art of science is being able to work out what factors are causally relevant in a given situation, are what are not. I think what makes a good scientific mind is the uncanny ability to sift the relevant from the non-relevant.
Conversely, those without this scientific ability are often caught up and confused by all the myriad minutiae of any situation; they cannot filter out the causally relevant from the causally non-relevant. And these are usually the same people who have an anti-science stance.
You would have to study science to understand that fully.
But even ignoring way the utility of science, there is a great pleasure involved in performing this reductionism. When you take any given situation or system, there is almost an infinite number of ways that you could dissect that system into component parts, or conceptual elements. You can consider these parts or elements of the system as perhaps the invention of human mind, divisions we impose on the system, or lines of demarkation we ourselves draw up, dividing the system into parts.
But the uncanny ability to perform reductionist analysis on a system involves seeing (or is it creating) the parts or elements that have
causal relationships to each other.
Anyone can come along and mentally divide the world into arbitrary parts. That's easy. But to divide the world into the right parts that then have a
causal and mathematical relationship to each other, that usually takes genius.
