Imagination and delusion

iv done a bit of acid, and iv seen in others what acid can do.

from all of this i have come to realise somthing, theres no more answers in acid than pure imagination and delusion.... simple.

i saw some friends i hadnt seen since about 8-9 months ago and they think its great i can actually hold down a conversation now. and not be walking around crazy talking to yourself.

all of my friends and i have done a bit of acid, and nothing good or great has resulted in it, mostly just anguish or being lost tryin to work things out. the good bit lasts in the afterglow but thats merely delusion too.

its somthign we have all gotten away from realising its not helping us tryin to put our lives together, but doing the exact opposite.
most people grow up and realise this shit doesnt help them, or their relationships or family. one friend i have at the moment i cant even talk to he has gotten so strange, we been friends for like 5 years. the scary thing about lsd is it can change you. alter your personality... same body but the natural sole is dead. a zombie like, slowly returning to reality hopefuly eventually...

 

Good for you. Fortunatley for many of us, what you just posted is only your opinion based on your experience. Yes LSD is bizarre and lays the foundation for extremley off the wall thoughts and lifestyles. But the open awareness LSD puts you into, can just as easily bring about the foundation for a very positive, healthy, and loving atmosphere for you to live under and build up into. It's a balancing act and the scale tips in favor of your intetions for taking the drug in the first place, but even moreso, by the intentions latent behind repetitive use.
God bless

 

didn't you ever imagine things before taking acid?

 

Do you know why you think this way about acid Pete? It's because you abused it, plain and simple. You took LSD indulgently, and now you are placing the blame for what happened on the drug rather than your own conscious decisions. Every regular poster here is familiar with your disfunctional relationship with lucy, and we've seen you post time and time again how horrible your life way going and how you think you were crazy and blah blah blah.

A person can find their answers in anything. But Pete, they key to life is moderation. If you are hungry, you eat until you are full, not until your stomach bursts. I've always said acid and other psychedelics are sort of like a forced spirituality. And that means just like anything else, you can't abuse it or treat it recklessly.

I'm sort of sad to see you post this, especially the part at the end where you state that "we have all gotten away from realising its not helping us tryin to put our lives together, but doing the exact opposite."
Many posters here have used LSD to enrich out lives, and have come out better than ever.

 

Were you taking acid as a tool to help you with your friends and family? That is your first mistake, imo.

 

So many times you've heard this but I will say it again, speak for yourself.

It has been very obvious for some time now that you do not want to see lsd as anything but a destructive force in your life. When you consider that psychedelic drugs are subjective it is no wonder that your experience has been so negative.

You've made no attempt to benefit from your experience by learning from the positive experiences of others, instead you disrespect the drug and anyone who claims to have benefited from it.

You say that you and your friends have done a bit of lsd and you figure that this is the cause for your current situation. What about all the pills and whatever else that you are doing a shit load of?

A negative psychedelic experience is your own fault and should not be blamed on the drug itself.

With all of the successful and enlightened famous people in the world who have benefited from the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs you'd have to be a complete idiot to think that everyone's experience has been as horrible as yours. If what you say was true then everyone on this forum would have negative things to say just like you.

Yes it is true that there are fucked up people who use LSD but it is also true that there are fucked up people who don't use LSD and never have.

 

Maybe LSD just isn't for you Popper.

 

How together your life may be is purely up to the observer. If you think your life is shit, then it's your job to do something to change it. A person could be completely broke, living in a hubble with pigs, alone, and still be one of the happiest people alive. Would you consider this to be an example of a broken life?

The funny thing about life, is that it's yours to do with what you will, and as long as you're not disrupting the same rights of life of another then why shouldn't you try to excel your life to something you enjoy.

I could completely convince myself right now that having taken acid has made my life miserable, has made me a completely insane monster, and has made me socially inept, or I can look at it from a more positive and realistic view and see that I am much the same person and can still make all the same decisions I would've before, except I choose not to.

Before LSD and Cannabis, my life was going literaly nowhere. I was close to alcoholism, and NEVER thought where I would be this time tomorrow, a month from now, or years from now. Since my expierences in psychedelics I have realised how intelligent, capable, and determined I really am toward life. Without them, I would still be drinking, irresponsible, and probably be sitting in a 6x6 cell.

 

Popper your constant posts of this nature are getting old and tiring. You seem to still be trying to figure out where your wrong move was, while keeping LSD to blame...

LSD changed my life. I needed God. I needed reason. I needed to know there was something more to it than what I was seeing. It changed my perception 100% but I never lost 'me'.

You went wrong when you began to think you lost yourself, when you used to post about personality changing issues and the like. It seems your attitude and perception are entirely wrong, and you are over-thinking every aspect of it, including blaming LSD. This is what's changing YOU, your soul is still there, your personality is still there, you are just thinking way too much, and then you are beginning to believe yourself, which is inevitably what is bringing all these delusions to you.

IMO, LSD is what YOU make it. I thank God everyday it found me, or my paths led me to it. I also am so appreciative that this community and the internet is there for me throughout my journeys. I don't know how people in the 70's did it with such little knowledge and no real resources for the drug.

Also, you are who you hang out with, if your friends are anything like you (which seems so) they are probably partially influenced by you, and if this is how you are carrying out the light, it's a damn shame.

Just live, stop thinking, stop the drugs, and LIVE.

You will either live a life of thinking or a life of JOY after a strong LSD experience, you choose...

God bless

 

Peter it seems that you and Hunter S. Thompson came to the same conclusion: acid can not change the world. Now acid can not change the world, because not everyone will use it properly so that they learn and gain insight from the drug. The drug does not do the work, the person is in control of what is receieved interms of learnng and awareness. On the other hand, some people don't need LSD to learn what I and many others have similarly learned. Thus, handing out acd in sandwiches and serving it to the unkowing and unprepared is dangerous. Acid is powerful, we must be wise when using it.


I'm sorry to hear that you think your friends have gone crazy. I have had three friends go crazy from lucy...after taking more than most can imagine. BUt I have at least ten times more friends that have gained so much from acid that their lives have been impacted for the better.

now killing the soul...perhaps on a scary trip...perhaps ego death...

You and Thompson are right. Acid can not change the world, but it will help awaken some who will in turn help to change the world...sounds sketchy, but I'm actually quite serious.

 

I believe LSD can either help a person find exactly what they need in their life to be happy, or can completely crush that dream... which is why Set and Setting are so vitally important.

For most people LSD will show them their spirituality.
For me it showed me the joys of science and the expansion of the mind.

 

The only difference between Illusion and Delusion is a drawing exists for the prior.

Peter, do you draw or make music?
Atleast in my experience I see a steady trend, committed artists have absolutely no problem maintaining sanity with psychedelics, because all their 'delusion' simply gets channeled into art and through art, back into reality, thus regrounding and balancing them. Plus when your making your own art, your constructing your own reality at a deeper level of your being. If you don't make your own drawings, your own videos, your own music, then you are running around in the world created by someone elses.

 

This is really really good advice. If you have a very active mind and are a thinker, then you need some sort of outlet for all your thoughts. I've always done visual arts, but I've also recently taken up writing and poetry, and it really helps but your mind at ease. It's sort of like creative meditation.

 

some people want too much, too fast. in the span of 3 years, i have taken lsd 7 or 8 times.

i have watched a few close friends lose it; some of them taking it as often as every other day. there is only one person i know that took it that frequently and turned out ok. he is also very intelligent, and i imagine his mind was of ironclad strength through his years of subjection to acid.

the others? one decided he had a friend in california that he had to go see, got in his car, and wrecked it. good thing he didn't hurt himself.

and the other? thought everybody was watching him and conspiring against him constantly, had delusions of being jesus, constantly talked about jesus and the devil, and the great all-knowing epiphany he had at the traffic light that sent him through the roof (and yes, he drove around tripping balls all the time). often he wouldn't make sense. he constantly spoke of positive and negative energies, and i think he had developed feelings for me somewhere in the midst of all this insanity...

all his supposed friends told him he was nuts and to fuck off. i was the only one that stuck around to help him through it all.

he's doing ok now, but it's taken about a year.

 

Maybe you dont really know what makes you happy

 

I've said it before, an acid trip is a compressed lifetime. Your normal reality is dissolved to the point that you "step out of it," and can view it summarily. You can sense how your thoughts immediately influence your perceived universe. This is true in real life, but we can't see it instantly like we can on a trip, so we are normally under the delusion that we are not the creators of our own reality, and that it's influenced by externals.

There's benevolence in the acid trip; you return to reality slowly and the principles of the trip remain true, even as we fully return to the ego. Our thoughts and actions create our reality, only the process is delayed while sober.

My point is that life consists of delusions from top to bottom; we all buy in to some delusions, but we also create them. One could infer that the acid trip simply points that out; rather than discarding the experience as illusory we can share our delusions and their inherent beauty, and by knowing reality is an illusion we become less vulnerable to its turbulence. Fear is diminished and life is better lived, IME.

I for one am grateful for these sacraments. I was born and raised mormon, and after removing myself from mormonism, all belief in God and universal love was removed as well. They really beat your soul to shit in that church. Any spiritual feelings I had in the church I cast aside along with the fraudulent doctrine, even though they were real feelings.

The acid experience helped restore my spiritual essentials. It wasn't just the drug, all that did was facilitate ego dissolution, and what was leftover was purity, beauty, love....but I had to cast off the deluded state of my former self in order to see it.

My mental programming was warped and it might still be now if I didn't have the chance to wash my brain on my own terms, without any middleman. Now I write the terms for my own reality, illusory as it is.

 

Peter is an amazing catalyst for self reflection. But people dont like to see themselves in peter, only what they are not.

We need to remember that peter represents a person and we should all learn from his experiences as well as from everyone else's experiences, and not cast them aside as if they are 'anomolies'.

What we should learn from peter is the way that acid convinced him of many things. Many people are convinced of things around here and its one thing to say 'peter represents an case of abuse', but it is another to say that 'what happened to peter cannot happen to me' or 'peter is nuts and we should discount what he says'

Peter has posed a great mix of insight and blindness.

Acid is a drug. We should all consider ourselves 'special' or 'gifted' or 'integrit' to maintain our sanity and sense of self throughout all our trips (if that is even the case!), instead of thinking it to be normal, and for teh negative effects to only affect the abnormals.

It would just be a bit better if peter did not talk about 'how acid is' and 'what acid will do to YOU' and he just talked about his own experiences as 'what happened to me'. Because he has things to say.. but a lot of people cast him aside..

think of him as a spokesperson for a sort of person that is probably much more common than most of us think, but who usually dont talk to anyone about it or try to work it out at all...

we dont actually hear about the real toll of acid because those people dont go around chattin about it in a coherent, open, sensitive way

 

I think LSD itself is a completely neutral experience. LSD is just "more." More feelings, more thoughts, more awareness, more imagination. 8-12 hours of "more" is not good or bad. Some people benefit or think they benefit from the experience. Others don't.

Let's look at two famous examples - Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. They were close friends, colleagues, and two of the first people to push the use of psychedelics to its extremes. What ended up happening to the two of them? Well, after tripping hundreds of times and deciding to become the self-appointed spokesman not only for LSD but for "turning on, tuning in, and dropping out," a lot of people began to see him as a sort of cartoon character. He spent a large percentage of his energy running away from the law (or in jail), defending himself from those who called him insane, and doing more drugs. After he got out of jail, he became obsessed with space colonization, and while I don't disagree that space is an important step in our future, his writings became almost completely irrelevant.

Richard Alpert, though, decided to follow his heart. He experienced a form of transcendence and peace on LSD, but he recognized that no matter how much he took and no matter how great he felt at the time, he always came down to the neuroses of reality. He followed his heart, and his heart took him on a spiritual journey to India where he "found God." He has spent the rest of his life hoping to bring inner peace and joy to all who seek it. He has written books that have changed millions of lives, and he has personally touched lives with his love and inner peace.

Leary became the cartoon character of the crazy drug addict, and he never really changed before he died. Richard Alpert/Ram Dass has profoundly altered so many lives, including my own. Don't get me wrong - I respect Leary, and he changed lives, too. But the point being, heavy LSD use took them, in the end, to very different places. Was it really "the drug" that brought about these changes? Who the **** knows, but I think the point is clear.

I try to provide a balanced approach to LSD on this forum. I have seen some UGLY bad trips and I've almost lost it myself a few times, and it is not a harmless thing. Sometimes I think that it is a powerful and useful thing, and sometimes I think that it does little more than provoke delusions. The truth, I'm sure, is somewhere in between, or both, and it varies from person to person.

 

In a lot of ways, I agree with this post. Especially the "just live, stop thinking, stop the drugs, and LIVE" spirit of the message.

Obsessing about where you went wrong with LSD is only going to drive you more crazy. I used to be absolutely obsessed with the effects LSD had had on my mind, and it was a bit scary. These days, I only think about the fact that I've done LSD every now and then, and I've realized that it really didn't change me all that much at all, whereas at the time, like you did, I thought that my personality and thinking had been forever ruined.

I don't think it's wrong to say that LSD is bad for some or even many people. People are naturally going to get defensive on this board. If you, Peter, want to believe that LSD is meaningless garbage and that you never should have done it, then I don't think there's anything wrong with it, and I don't think it's terribly inaccurate to think that way. But, if that's what you choose to believe, then you need to quit coming to the forums, quit thinking about LSD, and just accept it as a mistake for you and move on. Lots of people going through the same thing you are have done the same and they are fine, and you would never know that they did LSD. Maybe you will decide that LSD has had a benefit for you in that it has shown you that you have issues with anxiety and identity. I'm sure that you had these issues to some extent before you took L. That's been one of the biggest benefits of drugs for me, but of course it was very painful to realize how much anxiety and self-doubt I had been carrying around with me for the previous 20 years. Sometimes we have to go through heaven to get through hell.

Anyway, I don't think it really matters what you think about LSD as long as you decide something and stick to it. LSD really isn't that mysterious in my opinion. It's a drug that makes everything seem really really important - every thought, every flower, every moment of existence. Is this good or bad? I have no idea.

 

Stay Loose and Bill said it perfectly.