Psychedelics and Mathematics - Thoughts?

Hey All,

First-time poster. I'm just wondering if any of you would like to talk about the relationship between mathematics and religious/psychedelic experience. I'm not a left-brainer by any stretch of the imagination, but I can name several times in grade school - before I ever tripped - reaching pretty deep levels of quietude when I was deep into a very complex equation -- something not unsimilar to ego loss. I felt similar feelings years later when I first began experimenting with mysticism and psychedelic experience.

I think too often we relegate math to the realm of the pragmatic, but when you think about it, numbers are pretty weird. Have any of you experimented with mathematics and psychedelics?

Also, I'm polling a similar question to this on wis.dm...check it out and vote/see how other people have responded.

http://wis.dm/questions/101447

Thanks for reading. Much love.

-Rusty

 

hey ill respond to this..

i get where u are coming from. i never really dwell over it, but sometimes while im tripping ill think about of strange it is that humans invented a bunch of symbols, and then it takes the greatest of human minds to be able to actually understand them.

 

Yeah, I know what you mean. When i'm tripping I cant help but think about the things that your sober mind just block out like what is actually going on inside a speaker when listening to it, and I cannot veiw it as a "noisebox" as I do when sober. The same is with mathematics, I can see all the differnt parts working together.

 

I do the same thing, when i'm doing my math home work every now and then i think of some random stuff that i normally wouldn't think of and make wierd connections...but only some times not alot

 

Mathematics can get very deep and beautifully represent concepts that are otherwise difficult to communicate. But most often it is a left brained, procedural activity. Thinking about math and doing math while on psychedelic drugs are two diferent things. I have thought that it may be worthwhile to investigate the possible bridging of the two. Possible candidates include hydergine, the racetams, and very low dose lsd. Not anything that I've personally investigated because I have little mathematics beyond early calculus.

 

Doing all the procedural stuff is what computers are for. I think things like graphic or musical expressions of mathematics, like fractals, go well with psychedelics. Several of the main scientists that built up complexity and chaos as a mathematical science were known to have done psychedelics.

 

hey great topic, i started using acid in high school for some reason. and i sucked at trigonometry. but under the awsome effects of lsd, i somehow mastered it. got an A and D's in the rest of my classes. somethin about formulas and shapes just drew me in and it was a breeze!

 

i'm really beginning to love mathematics. they are everything....

 

I recently concluded (while tripping) that acid makes me think in fractals FAR more than I previously thought (I always knew acid gave me fractal thoughts, but I had no idea to the extent to which that was true)

My last 3 trips have been fucking insane.. the first two confused me somewhat, even though they were (in hindsight) DESPERATELY trying to tell me what they were about - my mind was dropping me hints left right and centre basically I've started to see human life as a fractal.

This has some really weird implications for my trips, ranging from a mindblowingly beautiful "tribal" vibe (I usually trip at parties/festivals btw so I'm often around a lot of strangers), to some really creepy paranoia (mostly auditory hallucinations) revolving around the concept that the whole of reality (not just my own perception of it) is a construct of my own mind (ie solipsism).

 

I happen to think that math contains many secrets of the universe. I wish I was better at it, because higher math truly interests me.

 

Doing math is hard as fuck.

just imagine this.

cutting a single hit for someone of a sheet when you are peaking.

that shit is next to fucking impossible.

i can't do math worth shit tripping.
and even the day after i feel completely intimidated by the thought of addition and subtraction.

after that my rule was when i had cid around was...nobody gets any cid after we start tripping...i don't care who it is.

 

A couple times a friend of mine has asked me to give him math problems when we were high. For some reason he enjoyed it beyond measure and laughed at every number. I can't really relate to mathmatics while tripping but I get really into art

 

i never realized it until i got older but mathematics truly are fascinating. they represnet intangible concepts that aside from basic addition and subtraction are almost entirely theoretical b/c differents number systems dont correspond with each other and open an entirely new dimension to reality when you start to look at it all the universes complexities could quite possibly be explained by mathematics if we could only understand that level of math but then again maybe not

 

Numbers are really cool, my boss used to tell me at work that " Math is Everything." I never really got what he was saying until i tripped on acid though.

 

Well, LSD certainly improves music ability Herbert said it well in the wired.com article: "When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm" http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015

also countless bands have used LSD for crafting music.

music and mathematics are surprisingly(to me) said to be very much related as this article and many others say: http://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/math+music.html

 

maths is my favourite subject to do, but only if i know how to do the problems. you can be great at maths without doing much work. but to be great at maths AND be , for example, a stoner, a bit of study is required extra. for psychedelics, i dont know, but i find that psychedelics cause my symbolic recognition to warp a bit with words and numbers. but ive honestly not tried. to do maths while trippin. but i find with maths you really gotta go all out and do maths work and stuff and then you can get full marks so easily because there is always a certain solution.

 

I had a flashback once brought on by music theroy as I was playing a scale progression
As it got more complex like a math problem/ and when it came out perfectly I had a euphoric feeeling without drugs. My head felt tingly like something was drawing on my forehead/ But now that you mentioned it seemed alot like the feeling of discovery. that We lose as we grow old/.

 

I agree totally

 

when I try to do math while tripping i get distracted by the designs on my paper or the numbers melting and twisting or the floor etc. etc. what im saying is WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DO MATH WHILE TRIPPING! lol i get to adhd

 

here are the absolute top mind expanding books:

nClone by Dovin Melhee
Diaspora by Greg Egan
The Singularity by Ray Kurzweil
Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

do you have any?