Fun Stuff > CHATTER
A thread about psychedelics
Dimmukane:
Some comedians have stated that boredom is a disease and drugs are the cure. There is some truth to that statement. That being said, yeah, it's pretty common in the States. For Scandinavia being scarce, that may be partially due to location. I imagine it's too cold to grow most of the entheogenic plants, and I imagine smuggling things in might pose some difficulty to some areas (especially those farther up North). Whereas in the States, we have two countries who export a lot of pot on our borders, and a lot people with at least some knowledge of organic chemistry.
happybirthdaygelatin:
When I was 17 I spent a month doing Dramamine on enough of a regular basis. For a year after that while abstaining from everything except tabacco I'd still regularly have visual hullicanations where if I was turning my head I'd get a visual effect that the closest description I can think of is when you're scrolling down looking at an image file that's still loading and there would be this jumps of lag in my head. Later on when I tried mushrooms of some variety I had what must have been just a small dose of the mushrooms themselves and smoked a fuckton of weed and zoned out playing Super Smash Brothers and the Wind Walker Zelda game for four hours at least.
Hat:
I think the most curious thing about my personal reaction to psychedelic drugs is that they have in fact, profoundly influenced my current lack of a real spirituality. This seems to be the exact opposite to every other story I have heard, but when I first began experimenting with them, I was essentially a pagan, I suppose.. My first LSD experience led to me finding a church with that had been left unlocked (unintentionally) and meditating on the altar. It wasn't exactly a moment of clarity or anything so sudden but from that point on I treated subjects of spirituality with great suspicion. This has led to some tensions with other friends who become extremely spiritual on psychedelics because I will admit, I am probably frustrating to be around while trying to discover truths about yourself and the world around you because I am extremely cynical and deconstructionist.
The thing is I still get extremely philosophical and I talk about things that would be completely indistinguishable from a lot of religious experiences on drugs, but I become extremely anal about wording. Once I was trying to describe what I would essentially call Chi, and my friend suggested 'energy' and I told him that was not the right word and got very angry about it towards him. This was immediately followed by us both leaving the room and going elsewhere.
About half an hour later we both found each other on the roof of the nearby shops with an incredible view of the city, by sheer coincidence. We'd both gone up there and we had a massive D&M which really cemented our friendship, and has made him my best tripping buddy to this day. This was on a lot of mushrooms, I believe.
I become very focused by and fascinated by language on psychedelics, but particularly LSD. Its the reason I decided to major in Linguistics at uni actually. Semantic and grammatic rules on what sounds right and what doesn't become fascinating to me and I am always attempting to experiment with them, usually with me sounding like a spoken word version of Finnigans Wake.
I think the most productive use of psychedelics isn't actually spiritual at all (I am not attempting to denigrate the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes, mind you, its just I have the opposite reaction), its interpersonal and psychological. While the average description of at least the more intense parts of an acid trip includes the term 'Ego-Dissolution' I typically have the exact opposite, although I have had a MDMA/Mushrooms experience that had this effect. Anyway, usually I go into intense psychological introspection and start to look at my neuroses and examine them, giving myself a kind of self-psychotherapy. The thing about this is it doesn't allow you fix any of the problems, it just gives me the ability to peel back the layers of denial that cover them up and observe them. I've had varying success with actually treating these problems later once i've identified them. At times I have managed to, over the course of time, use this information to soberly help my psychological development, but at other times I haven't been able to do anything about them and the fact that i was so powerless to help myself actually arguably made myself worse for a time.
In my interpersonal relationships I find the sheer honesty involved tends to have some interesting effects. MDMA is obviously the staple for this, but the other psychedelics tend to do quite well for this. The reactions to people that I've had these experiences with vary in ways I doubt I would have predicted. Some of the most open people I know have found the experience to be awkward to integrate into our friendship after the effects wear off, and some of the most closed off, emotionally isolated people have become very close to me as a result.
I actually really enjoy the disturbing, schizophrenic trips that seem to pop up time and time again. I certainly am not acting like I am at the time, but whenever they happen, I wind up coming to the realisation a few days later that it is because of conflicts I have in my everyday life, that i need to resolve to shake that terrified feeling you have for a day or two after a bad trip. Sometimes I will deliberately take LSD when I am in a bad emotional state because I'm just not sure what the hell is up with me and I want to find out.
However I think my favourite thing about psychedelics in general is the less insightful part of it. I like the fact that I explore and try interesting new things on psychedelics that I would never even think of doing in my everyday life. On one notorious occasion I saw a really interesting looking house and knocked on the door and asked the person who answered the door if they knew how interesting their house looked. He was actually incredibly pleased to see a barely coherent person compliment them on their house and I was actually invited in for a cup of coffee, and we chatted about his massive collection of books for a while before I left. I've found interesting places in my city that you'd never know exist just walking around on the streets, fascinating little sections of town, little bars and restaurants behind doors you'd never give a second glance to.
Scandanavian War Machine:
i have a pretty interesting text file from some friends and i frying on mushrooms awhile back. basically, i tried to type up everything that was being said around me but, due to my state, couldn't keep up.
i'll try to find the file so you guys can read it. it's definitely good for laughs.
EDIT: my name is Danny, by the way.
onewheelwizzard:
Wow ... Hat, you basically just wrote the post that I would've written on this thread two years ago. The relationship you describe yourself having with psychedelics is very familiar to me. When I started to take psychedelics, the approach I most often took was to play devil's advocate to every worldview or philosophical perspective I could. I also became extremely exacting when it came to the use of language, and I often found myself unwilling to say things that I did not have perfectly accurate vocabulary for.
What you have to say about having a response to LSD that is "the opposite of ego-dissolution," though, is really interesting to me. See, your accounts describe many of my early LSD experiences perfectly, but I look back now and see those experiences as very clearly being experiences of ego-dissolution. The fact that my ego was the object of my attention did not mean it was not dissolving ... in fact, your description of getting the clearer picture of your own psyche, and doing self-psychotherapy of sorts, is exactly what I would call a classic ego-dissolution experience, because I believe that gaining a more clear consciousness of yourself, and eliminating the very existence of yourself, are one and the same thing. Basically, the act of isolating and identifying a neurosis or addiction, even if you don't go on to eliminate it, is still an act of separating that aspect of your ego from what you consider to be your true self, making that concept of your "true self" smaller. Eventually, any person should theoretically be able to rid themselves of all the baggage that they carry around and call "themselves" ... and I would say that having the experience of figuratively looking down and seeing that you're carrying it is a step in the direction of dropping it.
To be honest, having your ego fully dissolve despite not having noticed all the baggage you're carrying around is an incredibly disorienting experience, and not one that is likely to be particularly useful or interpretable. My first experience of complete ego loss happened before I'd even started to really ask important questions about myself while tripping, and it made absolutely no sense to me and I didn't even realize what had happened until years later (the second time I took mushrooms, I ended up being forced to go to bed at the peak of it, and ended up losing all concepts of time, space, identity, etc. ... except I didn't understand that this was what was happening, so it was just infinitely confusing, and the only reason I wasn't terrified out of my mind was that I wasn't coherent enough to understand that there was anything weird going on. If you'd asked me about it then, I would've said "I had an ego-loss experience," but I would've been guessing.)
This is actually why I made the points that I did towards RedLion earlier in the thread about meditation being a more important factor than drug use ... the process of successfully asking questions about yourself doesn't require drug use (even if drug use often prompts it or speeds it up), but drug use, in order to be more than "recreational" experience (which is a term I hate to use because the process of "recreation" is in fact an incredibly important one in my opinion) very much needs it.
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