Psychedelic "Insight"/Spirituality

yeah I'm nowhere near as depressed as before I tripped, I can deal with my feelings and have control over them as opposed to me letting them take over my life.

 

thats awesome dude. good for you.

 

Come on dudes... how about a bit more of this... :grouphug:
and a bit less of this... :boxing_smiley:

GB your guys are both pretty bright, insightful and introspective. I think you do understand when Herman is talking about capacity vs. access. You can have a case of beer (capacity) and not be able to open a bottle (access). Maybe Herman was harsh with the word lame, but do the two of you want to have a flame war over it? I don't think it was meant in a demeaning manner, was it Herman?


Speaking of anterograde amnesia, have you seen Memento? Man that movie rocks, it launched Christopher Nolan's career.

 

Maybe lame was the wrong word to use.
It is more like "not well thought out or not what he intended". When I read it I pictured Kelly Bundy trying to learn stuff and each new thing meant some other thing she knew would have to be lost to make room in her brain.
In that sense it is a completely mistaken notion. Maybe that wasn't what GB intended, but the only thing I can go by are the words used and the common definition(s) of those words.

Memento is an awesome movie. First time I watched it I was thinking WTF???. Definitely a "must see" flick.:2thumbsup:
Don't know what he would do now, they don't make Polaroid cameras anymore.

 

Reminds me of that clip in Family Guy, someone who experienced time backwards watching Memento: "Well that was pretty straightfoward."

 

God, this thread is ruinted, ruinted, ah tellz ya.

 

:smilielol5:


I love that shit!


Need to have this in the room when watching Memento on LSD.

 

This setence is perfectly acceptable to anyone who hasn't fried their fucking brain to pieces:

An individual with antereograde amnesia no longer has the capacity to form new memories. :sunny:

 

I look at psychedelics as something that for me, reflects therapy in a way. Damn effective therapy too. Its kind of like a 'refresh' button for my mind, or a 'clear cookies' if you wish. I feel like I'm no longer even apart of society or we as a people. I am alone, and I savor the trip in solitary giddy creative confusion. I was initially hesitant of psychedelics though, had a few bad trips on mushrooms...but the good ones were enough to keep me coming back. LSD came soon after. And yes, once my outlook on psychedelics changed, so did the average quality of my experiences. By the time I took LSD for the first time, I was well aware of psyche outs and haven't yet had a bad acid trip.

The loose weight of the combined negativity of daily life accumulates in the back of your mind like soap scum on a bath drain. Break ups, lay offs, put downs or cave ins, it doesn't matter what the scum is made of. You can have perfectly 'clean' water above the drain, but it doesn't matter. When its all drained through perception, its filtered through this disgusting scum that taints almost every thought in one way or another. Bringing negativity to your personality and can mean quick sand for the creative mind. So yes, I take plenty away from my trip. Quite a bit actually, now that I think about it.

L.S.D is C.L.R for my mind. Keeps things running smoothly, keeps things running creatively, and keeps my mind from running in circles of uncertainty. As far as what there is worth pursuing, I feel as though L.S.D is there so you can be free to pursue whatever you feel like you need to take care of. Decide whats weighing you down and chop it off your back. If you feel like life has been good to you and you don't have any mental problems or challenges, I wouldn't take it really.

Don't follow the hallucinations, they aren't 'trying' to tell you anything. Follow your mind, not what it projects. Follow the advice of your feelings and LSD can do wonders for you. Whether spirituality comes into the picture or not well....to each his own.

 

Isn't that condition extremely rare? I'm sure we could find exception to every rule, but do you think that's pertinent to the average joe and psychedelics?

Dontcha think there's some merit to the idea of the brains ability to soak up and store data, but our ability to recall that info being a limiting factor? I feel that is very much the case for me, dunno for sure about anyone else.

No excuse for calling someone lame, but, I guess you can be tweeked about it if you like. Don't mean any harm dude.

 

Yes it is, but that was not the statement that I called into question, it was this one;

I'm sorry GB, but that is just not a true fact, or at least we have not as of yet discovered any "upper limit" to the amount or number of memories that can be stored by the human brain. It is just that simple.
You are confusing the ability for memory storage and retrieval with the amount of memory that can be stored.
If I have a 10,000 square foot warehouse, but no way to open the doors to put stuff in or take stuff out, that doesn't have any effect on the size of the warehouse. It's still 10,000 square feet.

Again I'll be the grammar nazi here and kindly point out that I never said Guerillabedlam was lame, but rather that the statement he made was lame.

There is a difference.
Sorry GB, I should have just said that you were mistaken.

Concerning "frying one's brain to pieces", GB, sir you use psychedelics and experiment with so many different substances with such regularity, if your posts are true, that maybe you should look into the mirror on that one.

Beyond that I harbor no ill will towards you GB.
Peace brother?

 

I've had a lot of epiphanies and insight on DXM I just can't ever remember what it was the next morning

 

As I said

Anyways my first sentence in my response to the op there may have been a bit vague and it certainly got misinterpreted but I no longer care to expand on that post so instead I will post a quote from Timothy Leary which was more along the lines of where I was going in regards to being able to retain information from the psychedelic experience. I'm interested in some responses from this quote, and the older heads in particular may be able to gobble this quote up easier and critique, analyze, ponder, or bash it however they see fit.

There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory,
decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.
-Timothy Leary

 

whatever, I extended the olive branch, but I guess you would rather hit me with it. So be it.

Well I'm an older head, one you have interacted with numerous times and have actually said you enjoy a lot of what I have posted in the past.

This is a good book on the subject of altered states of consciousness and does deal a bit with what I already mentioned and the OP asked about, state specific knowledge.

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/soccont.htm

This quote from the above in the section on State-specific sciences I feel is the same idea you (GB) were putting forth in your first post;

"Finally, various phenomena of d-ASCs (discrete Altered States of Consciousness) may be too complex for human beings to understand. The phenomena may depend on or be affected by so many variables that we can never understand them. In the history of science, however, many phenomena that appeared too complex at first eventually became comprehensible."

Concerning Leary's quote, It looks as if it is a kind of tongue-in-cheek joke.
The problem with these type of questions is that science still really has no idea of how memories are formed at the neuronal level or how they are retrieved, categorized, etc. There is a lot of work being conducted in that area and a lot of theories, but still no conclusive evidence of how it actually functions. So any questions regarding long term/short term memory and how psychedelics elicits some of the effects in regards to memory that they do for now remain unanswered.

:sunny:

 

Let me rephrase it then, how does that Leary quote relate to your experiences with retaining knowledge from psychedelics?

There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory,
decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.
-Timothy Leary

 

I will chime in on that one briefly...

I kind of take that as tongue in cheek as well, Leary was famous for unserious but yet sublime quotes such as "LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it" or something like that.

I mostly have those symptoms, a decent long term memory and poor short term. I suspect that might be at least partly from smoking mass amounts of herb in my younger years but that doesn't account for it all. Perhaps age too.
As I'm only recently revisiting psyches, I don't know if I can account the differences to psyches but I will say that I have had "rememberances" of older memories that are now more accessible as a result of them coming up in a trip. But the short term memory of the multitude of ideas that come up during a trip fade fairly rapidly. Writing them down or recording them in some way might be a way to hold on to them, but I"ve yet to do that.

 

Personally I only have had problems with recalling "epiphanies" when cannabis is involved. With psychedelics my memories are just as clear, if not clearer, as memories that are made during normal consciousness.

Where the issue of recall comes into play isn't with the retention of the knowledge, it's the fact that often it is ineffable and of a different nature completely while under the influence of a psychedelic substance. Because our brains are processing info in a different manner than during normal waking consciousness, the problem is more one of recalling insights through the same channels, so to speak. All the elements are there for me, but the OMG!!! Eureka! type of emotional import is lacking as well as the "How did I arrive at that?" component.
Hard to find the right words to convey what I mean, hence the ineffability of the experience and relating it to others. But I still retain the overall gestalt of any insights and often very specific details often relating to interpersonal relationships that I may examine while on an inner-journey.

There does seem to be an enhanced ability to recall very detailed memories from the far past in my life. That is yet another well documented effect of LSD in particular and one of the reasons it lends itself so well to psychotherapy work. So in terms of long-term memory recall, I would agree with what Leary said.
As I said, I never have had any problem with forming new, short-term memories while on psychedelics.

As for the third part of the quote....Uhm, Uhh, what were we talking about again?

 

Haha, well I've reached the limits of my memory capacity. I think my memory is pretty good in general. But I sometimes find myself in the kitchen or wherever with no idea what I came there for. Sooner or later I always remember and it's always some obscure something like a battery.

 

That still is just recall, not capacity

 

But that brings up an interesting thought... (though I'm sure there's alot of scientific research on this one...) but, don't you think Herman at some point in life, that the ability to store more information, beyond just "i need to go in the kitchen and get a battery' becomes more and more difficult? The brain does age. We still don't know exactly what the psycho-chemical process is that act like a hard drive, but at a certain point it seems logically that that process slows or stops. Just as a heart gets weaker, our bones more fragile.