What Psychedelics are to me.

I really don't wanna sound like a "yeah I'm so cool because I smoke pot and nothing else" kinda person but I even find smoking pot clears these filters, especially with music. It brings back that new, creative feeling I got when I first really started playing guitar and making music. This is one of the reasons I really can't wait to try some kind of psychedelic (hopefully acid) for my first time, seeing as it's obviously a thousand times greater in terms of clearing the so-called filter.

 

:iagree:

 

you haven't done enough.

What is a strong physical understanding? That psychedelics mimic endogenous neurotransmitters which compete for receptor sites against serotonin? 5HT2 I believe? No? I didn't look it up. That they interrupt normal neurochemical processes causing disturbances in the visual field? I realize the inside and the outside of the mind are the same. I also realize that matter necessitates an observer to undergo the formality of existing.

Just because I say god doesnt mean I'm some lunatic either. A creator is a necessary existential imperative to avoid the fallacy of infinite regression asshole. Fuck your disagreement it sucks. Existance exists. Period. Its not superstition. I'm not superstitious. If I prayed to anthropomorphized god, then I agree, I would be superstitious. But remember, the concept of god that you rejected is not the same as my concept of god that I find acceptable.

The reality is that people use psychedelics for different reasons. As the OP stated " What are psychedelics TO YOU"

If you use them in high infrequent doses in solitude for introspection, they do dissolve boundaries and have little effect on personality. If you take them in a social setting, they do have an effect on personality because that is part of your focus in a social setting. But you can't use them in high doses in a social setting, because at a high dose, you won't be able to socialize. If you're a psychiatrist performing psychoanalysis on patients under the influence of LSD, you're going to say its a nonspecific amplifier of the personality. But if you've never done them in high doses alone, you have no authority to argue what they do, because they act like any other drug in low doses. Cocaine also amplifies the personality and "effects" perception, but it is not psychedelic in any way. DMT has NOTHING to do with personality, nor does it "effect" perception, it completely replaces your reality-that you're a human made of matter on this earth with a name and adress.

The true psychedelic experience itself, for what it is, is not what you see in the barks of trees, in clouds, in cracks in the pavement or in your personality. What it is for itself is what you experience with as little sensory input as possible without the inhibition of sensory input becoming an impediment, i.e. not isolation tanks etc. just a quiet dark room. Try that and you'll see what they actually are. But I know you're not going to do that, you'll remain ignorant of the true gem that you could just never sit still long enough to see.


Expansion is almost synonymous with boundary dissolution. You cant have boundaries and expand.

Skip is right on the money, and its another way in which they cause boundary dissolution. Behavioral repetition is a fact of neurology. The more you do something, the thicker the myelin coating on the nerve axon gets, allowing for a stronger impulse. This is how habbits are formed. The restructuring of parts of the nervous system is the physical process of the felt experience of one's normal lucid reality dissolving into the fluidity of the psychedlic experience.

 

I stopped reading at "asshole".

Infinite regression is no more unreasonable than a "creator". It could, in fact, BE the "creator" you speak of.

Chew on that, "asshole".

*edit* I also saw something at the bottom, while writing this about skip being on the money about the physical nature of our consciousness, etc. Okay, no one disputed this, or if they did, it certainly was NOT me. Of course it's all physical, we're physical beings, that's why physical drugs affect us. How the fuck else would our minds work, just because jeebus said so?

 

I don't think LSD is "better" than weed. It's quite different, but also very similar in some ways. You'll feel the similarities after you drop acid. (that is, not when smoking while on acid, but in the future, after your acid trip)

Other than specific goals in psychotherapy or understanding that you have thought out before hand, I don't think there's a legitimate reason to take LSD, before you've taken it. You learn why it's worth taking when you do it. It doesn't clear filters, even if it does feel like that the morning after. It builds all sorts of new pathways and alters all sorts of functionalities. It might do the equivalent of defragging a computer hard disk, but much more too, it won't simplify things.

 

This page is what psychedelics are not, to me.

 

Living in a world full of Spectrum illusion - a sparkle of brilliant light
This coupled with the shadowy blur of mystic allure - a fantasy that takes me away from the reality of depression
Hmm, I guess I'll live in my world of play - it may be a dream, but I'll take that over living purely for work

 

If, in the post above yours, I described what psychedelics are not to you, I pity you, life must be hollow and sucky

Then again, maybe if, to me, life sounds hollow without proper psychedelic experiences, I'm the one with a hollow life

 

Yeah that was a bit harsh I was not in a good mood that night sorry. I do tend to get offended though when someone calls my opinion a waste of oxygen, so I don't feel too bad about it. My cellular respiration is no less or more important than anyone else's.

I don't believe in jeebus, or jesus, other than that he was some radical probably chomping down on psychedelic mushrooms having revelations that no one could understand. Theres a big difference between believing in the healing power of the son of god, and believing in a life-force responsible for the phenomenon of being self-aware. The difference is the first is completely dogmatic, and the second is an existential conclusion one can arrive at via deductive reasoning. From science we know that we are besically incredibly complex molecular machines, which have been reproducing themselves for 4 billion years and have evolved to present biodiversity. That we started as simple molceular machines such as prokaryotic single-celled bacteria, and even before that we were simply naked, unnucleated DNA, strands of deoxyribonucleic acids replicating themselves. But why? How? How did that get started? The probability of something like that ocurring from chance is so small that if it did happen by chance, it would have taken longer than the earth is old. But they taught me in 7th grade that thats exactly what happened- this molecular machiner just 'spring to life!" Dogmatic? YA. Just remember that science only explains an aspect of our physcial reality. It is disempowering to the individual to believe that science is the end all be all to all questions. It produces beautiful material trinkets but has little grip on aesthetic delights.

 

Oh no, science isn't the be-all end-all, it's inherently much more limited than religion. Religion (of the nutso type we're talking about) starts at the top, and functions by claiming to have the answers. Science starts at the bottom, and says we can think whatever we want, right up to the top, but we can't say we know it until we prove it. We can build complex models based upon complex models with nothing but theory holding the whole thing up, but if it's wrong instead of clinging to it we build a new, better model.

I personally think it's highly likely that our universe is only a speck, an atom-like unit in another bigger.... SOMETHINGverse. And I think that electron clouds in our universe could juts be clouds of tiny-verses. And there could be things as fantastic as life on earth, or much more fantastic. Our universe is expanding.... but WHAT is it expanding into? If "space" is empty and expanding, it's logical to think that there was something there, nothing can't push nothing out of the way.

But I'm rambling. I'm simply trying to say that especially on psychedelics, to me, the possibilities are amazingly, terrifyingly, beautifully infinite, and it bothers me when people who are not prepared to properly expand their minds take psychedelics, and instead, in a defensive reaction, grasping at "reality", find "religion" of the sort developed to account for a lack of knowledge and drugs.

It's like, congratulations, you just took the molecular key to your brain, and instead of breaking the molds and seeing the possibilities, you built much newer, stronger neural pathways cementing jeebus into your self, making him that much harder to erase.

I don't really feel like reading the conversation backwards, but I was probably aggressive on the other page, was probably just in a less-than-great mood myself when I wrote the reply. But still, I think you misunderstood my point of view. (maybe I remember wrong, and wrote just the opposite of this post... ehh well... I have a tendency to be a douche, out of frustration)

.....Again, maybe that creator IS an infinite string of "verses", no uni to it... or something even more self contradicting. It seems to me that all logic is based on one central logical fallacy, a huge loop. Probly just my own personal way of being burnt out by drugs. But I was pretty close to this before taking them too.


Also, exactly: prophets of old where the equivalent of you and me(To be a conceited jackass about it), seeing how little their contemporaries pushed the boundaries, they only proposed a newer, better way of seeing things, they didn't (at least the respectable ones) mean to forever cement the world into their time period and their ignorance.

 

Yeah, we're on the same page. I guess I'm just less touchy about the G word. I hate religion too. I dont find "religion" in a psychedelic trip, rather, when I take a psychedlic I realize that psychedelic plants were probably the cause of religion, which eventually morphed into the cancerous, antagonistic beauracracy that it is today. Don't forget that to an ayahuasquero in the peruvian rainforest, "religion" is drinking ayahuasca. Religion to someone growing up in Texas, is probably anal-retentive schizophrenia, nothing like the "religion" an amazonian shaman experiences. Dont be so ethnocentric.

Religion doesnt mean jesus. Religion doesnt mean christianity. Religion doesn't even dictate monotheism. There is a difference between being unhealthily religious- believing in the bible etc. and having a certain sense of humility that entails entertaining the notion that maybe there is something greater than you.

What are psychedelics to me? An initiation into the mystery of self-awareness.

You dont get anwsers, just more questions.

 

I think the difference you're talking about is that between institutionalized religion and personalized spirituality. To me, the psychedelic experience is a very personal one - it can't be generalized to everyone's experience - and it is definitely the backbone that holds together the spiritual dimensions of my life and outlook.

The function of psychedelics in the lives of those who know how to use them effectively is, in my opinion, very similar to what blissfully described. In fact, I don't know if the way I would describe it would be any better - different, yes, but I don't know about better. I would say: the function of psychedelics is to keep one from becoming too attached to a socially indoctrinated vision of the world and how it works. Psychedelics "shake things up" in the mind of the psychonaught such that when the pieces fall back to Earth, they don't necessarily fall back in the same places they originally started out in.

This can be as dangerous as it can be beneficial.

It is dangerous when the subject begins to invest more faith in the new structure that emerges in the aftermath of a trip (usually several trips). The more dogmatically he clings to this, the more his state of mind veers into psychosis (ex. on acid, you hallucinate aliens divulging the secrets of the universe, and when you sober up, you refuse to consider that they might have just been drug-induced hallucinations).

It can be beneficial, though, when one focuses, not so much on the experience you had while high, but on what that tells you about the nature of your own mind and the relation between perception and reality - that is to say, on the fact that you had the experience (whether or not is was real) and what it means to be overcome by its virtual 'realness'. This is just a fact - the experience will be had and it will seem real - so real as to be overcome by it without the power to regard it as merely a drug-induced illusion (or at least to struggle with this).

What one usually gains from this (at least what I have gained from it) is what I call a 'multi-reality' perspective on the world - there is no one 'reality' that is entitled to be called 'the' reality over any other. Psychedelics are a tool to verify this in one's own hands-on practical experience. The point wouldn't so much be to believe this per se, but to allow this idea to guide your practice, not only in the stoned state of mind, but in many aspect of life generally.

This to me is the real 'expanding' of consciousness - or 'raising' of awareness. One is not brought to a 'higher' reality when he believes in aliens - he's brought to a different reality (and not necessarily a functional one). A truly 'higher' reality is one from which the vantage point allows for a broad view of all realities - to be, so to speak, 'above' realities.

With much practice, the psychonaught can gain even greater skills and learn deeper lessons, one of which is to control or guide where the pieces fall after they've been scrambled and blown about (like snow flakes in a glass ball). It's one thing to accept or reject the new structure that emerges from a drug induced shift in awareness - it's another to be able to control (to whatever extent you can) where it gets shifted. But insofar as one can, he/she has the opportunity to lead the trip in useful directions (to himself and to his society).

 

Bolded part is very true.

I do realize there's lots to religion, but what you're describing as your beliefs (or admittance of lack of knowledge) is more like agnosticism, something which I do identify with.

And yes, there's respectable religion, even respectable christianity. But I'm used to dealing with certain types, and there's certain types that are more common the world over. So those are the ones I'm addressing. If someone in the US gets religion, it's probably christianity, and a rather insane (ie. current) interpretation of christinaity. And that's at the mild end of things.

In general, I think a lot of people with more primitive religions, or psychedelic based religions, would have no problem assimilating more science into their understanding.

Religion was basically the precurser to science. If the church hadn't been so insane, they could have smoothly transitioned into being the center of all science. Science is just building theories and models to explain the world around you, and then trying to prove (and) disprove them as well as you can, to eleminate the worst models and improve the best. A religion that refuses to accept new ideas is doomed to archaic bigotry, like contemporary christianity in most of the world today. however many pagans or peoples with a more primitive understanding of things understand their myths on several levels, and can see them as allegorical if you show them reason to, and can simple accept new ideas without abandoning their previous beliefs, their beliefs adapt to work with things.

But christianity has a book. And if you cross it's book, you've got the fires of hell awaiting you, after the fires of the christians burning you at the stake. It does NOT evolve or change, it is exactly right, always was exactly right, and always will be exactly right.

Other religions have accountable gods. So-and-so made this, and he fucked up. So-and-so made this, he didn't fuck up. So-and-so had an affair, and created this, and was punished in such a way that it created this. A new thing can happen and change your opinion of a god. No one god made everything, so it's easy to step out of paganism and see that something else could have made something, or that you're not so sure this allegorical guy made it. But when you shall have NO gods before your sexist bigoted imaginary friend and his book, well you're just shit outta luck.

And if you're using DMT to help you visualize and understand your concept of a god, and you learn a bunch of awesome scientific ideas, and take DMT, chances are you and your god are going to have a blast thinking about that new stuff you learned. He won't tell you it's just evil because it doesn't think the world is 6 thousand years old.

So yeah, that's why I have that opinion of christianity, and why I assume religion to mean christinaity in this context. I'm "spiritual" beyond most skin-deep christian bigots, but that doesn't mean I have an imaginary friend, who has an imaginary enemy that he created, and each has an imaginary army, but my friend is going to destroy the world and kill millions more than he has already, all in the name of good.... or something like that.

 

:2thumbsup:

 

If post #23, etc, are psychedelic to you, then I guess there's nothing more to say.

 

Yes

 

It seems odd that there would be so much hostility toward Christianity here and that the hostility would be based on a fundy cartoon version of the religion. From Joseph Campbell to the Dalai Lama to Ken Kesey to just a whole lot of heavy-hitters, there have been many people finding much to respect and honor in Christianity.

On the other hand we see Rick Perry resonating like the hate strings of the heartland. Sigh. No, groan. No, goddam mother-fucker, can you believe this shit! Yeah, that's what I wanted to say.

 

Well he IS my gov.

So that's the christianity I see and fight daily.

 

There's much good in what you say TM. Very much so. I liked Kesey's essay about smoking hash and reading the bible.

It's just that a few rotten apples spoil the batch. Like most religions. Islam is a well repected religion but the focus seems to go towards the whack jobs that practice their sociopathic beliefs on the rest of us.
Like people like Perry and Bachmann.

 

Well I apologize for that little bummer of a sidetrack. I'm really not that guy - the one trying to bring people down.

What psychedelics are to me ... they've been healing, illuminating, helping me toward wholeness, fun, dangerous, life-changing, a great blessing, and more. Mostly, I'm grateful. The miracle is that there is any time at all in a high psychedelic state.

Boom