https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfA1EYnmq5U&mode=related&search Worth checking out this short clip from one of the early LSD pioneers, and if I'm not wrong, the man who coined the term 'psychedelic'.
Yeah i remember that quote from a while back. I think the quote in itself is insane. I don't know what the fuck he meant by unsane. I think he needed to be a little more specific. And the circle thing completely through me off. Can anyone explain what he was talking about a little better or are you just as lost as i am?
What he meant was that the psychiatrists who in the earlier part of the last century thought LSD produced temporary bouts of insanity weren't totally correct in their thinking. He's not saying that "unsanity" is beyond our normal definitions of sane/insane, rather, it's something different. Basically what he's talking about is that LSD changes how a person thinks, similar to the way people come up with new ideas. The circle thing was to show that it's related to sanity and insanity, only a different form; that it was neither of the two, but something new.
Cohen has always made sense to me. Neuronaut7, there's no way that I can think of to say it better than you just did
My bad. Thats sort of what i was thinking but wasn't sure. I still can't tie together the example of the circle to it though.
I'm thinking he means like Venn diagrams. Like, sanity, insanity and unsanity are all like intersecting circles. And you can be completely sane, insane or unsane. But you can also sort of weave in-between the three. To be honest I don't think anyone EVER is only one of the three. I think those areas are just hypothetical whereas in our everday lives we experience the three continously intersecting. I guess acid just emphasises the unsanity.
No. If he had meant a Venn diagram, he would have talked about three circles. He talked about one - all he was doing with the circle concept was showing that the three things are related, and quite possibly that it's possible to travel from one state to another and back, or continuously go through them all. So, you think that everyone is both sane and insane at the same time? I'm sorry, but that is definitionally impossible.
Yes, but there still is such a thing as a contradiction - if you say that someone in insane, you preclude the possibility of saying that they are sane. You CANNOT be both at the same time; it's like saying that you're both in Cleveland and Toronto.
I think acid, and other psychedelics, just pull creativity out of you while lowering other aspects of brain functioning. Like for example as your creativity is going up, your ability to communicate and stay in touch with the world goes down. By this it's just using all of your brains energy to fuel this creativity. A mind with to much creativity is a bad thing, but not enough is as well. I think thats perhaps one of the main factors why LSD and other drugs are disliked, whether people realize it or not. It's so easy to swirl things up in your mind with acid.
The thing is that it either boosts your imagination, or suppreses it the same way just opposite , its crazy stuff. Its like a magnyfying glass.
As I see it the only difference between sanity and insanity is that sane people recognise the crazy stuff going through their head as merely fantasy. Whereas insane people are unable to distinguish reality from fantasy. Unsanity? Hm....maybe that's when reality and fantasy takes a step back to....something.....that we probably don't have a suffecient word for. The soul? Creativity? God? The collective conciousness of humankind? I dunno.
I think Cohen hasn't expressed this very well. It could be seen as a kind of chaotic or untamed region of the psyche he's talking about when he says there is 'un-sanity'. An area outside the purview of the rational side of our minds, which LSD etc can open up for us. Maybe a layer of mind that evolved before the modern, thinking mind? Anyway, I do think Cohen is right here. This area of un-sanity is probably the source of most creativity. It is a kind of pre-rational aspect of ourselves which is normally held in abeyance by our thinking processes. It is also perhaps the source of deep feelings and emotions. The unconscious isn't governed by reason or logic - that's what he's saying I think.
