Evolution:
1. This is the greatest thing ever! Absolutely the path to enlightenment!
2. I had a crazy trip. I need some time to recover and to digest these thoughts.
3. This crap just gets in the way.
1. This is the greatest thing ever! Absolutely the path to enlightenment!
2. I had a crazy trip. I need some time to recover and to digest these thoughts.
3. This crap just gets in the way.
This might indicate that:
1. This is the wrong person/substance for you.
2. You're not ready. Perhaps if you worked on yourself (through meditation, mindfulness, yoga, spiritual practice, therapy) you could get more out of future experiences.
3. You're abusing the relationship. You're not treating the person or substance with enough respect. All too commonly, psychedelics are used as "party drugs" rather than used constructively in a deliberate therapeutic, spiritual, religious, or shamanic context. This can lead to all sorts of problems.
4. You don't have the right guide or purpose. A therapist skilled in psychedelic therapy could be a great help, as can some serious introspection about exactly what it is you need to get from the experience.
5. Another problem that's all too common is that trippers fail to integrate what they learn on a trip in to the rest of their lives. This could lead to lessons forgotten and backsliding.
6. You might just need a break. Doing psychedelics too frequently is bordering on abuse.
Where is the future and what is there to get?
Somewhere between stage 1 & 2.
Bullshit. Some of my most profound life-altering psychedelic experiences have happened while losing my shit on a dance floor.
Don't be a pompous ass.
Psychedelics are merely tools. Just as coffee is a means to an end when you need to stay awake and work, so psychedelics are a means to an end when you are trying to figure yourself and the world out on an emotional level. Just eating them and expecting benefit is fallacious. It's like buying a hammer and being surprised that you don't suddenly have a shed - you need to pick the tool up, apply it to the relevant things and be skilled in how you do so.
Personally, I see psychedelics as a compliment to meditation. I would not recommend that anyone trip before they have a solid foundation. If your mind wanders easily, if you cannot look inside yourself, if you cannot sit in silence and be OK with it then you are not ready. Meditate regularly for a year first and then you will be able to reap some real benefit from tripping. Don't pick up a hammer before you know what a nail is. You might hit the wrong thing and end up with a hole in the wall.
I've had about 5 or 6 trips, and although some of them had bad moments (I get paranoid about unusual sensations with heart or breathing which are just exaggerated by the mind), I never regretted those trips. They weren't “eye-opening” or something, but the experience was very exciting, especially the nature, the music, the animals & the people part.
5. ... but that's all there is.
6. Derelict insanity.
(4 and 5 are direct quotes from people I know, one of whom went to #6. I've known people who use frequently and never burn, but there's a certain pattern of use that seems bent that way. The "all there is" mentality is a sign of someone on a dangerous path.)
Why? Sanity is a mob-rule, society-dictated perspective, with no clear definition.
Yes, 'sanity' in the eyes of society is useful within social systems. However, if one continues to 'function' (eat/sleep/do stuff interesting/be happy/not inflict pain and harm repetitively upon undeserving* others), then what's the problem?
My point is that conceptually, we should all support alternative mental modes of engagement, regardless of society's perspective, as long as they are harmless. We should support differences, not crush them. In heterogeneity lies strength, and humans' great strength is their capacity of abstract thought and communication.
Historically, we know that brilliant art and science derive largely from people who have been labelled insane by contemporary society.
Consider this when choosing to deploy words like 'insane'.
* Let's not get in to a greater discussion of law here.
Personally, I think everyone should experience psychedelics when they're ready but to think that they are harmless is dangerous.
The effects of drugs are like having an addiction: you won't know at all what it's like until you try it and once you do, there's no going back, for better or for worse
Do not mistake insanity for interesting and creative. Heavy drug abuse can cause major permanent brain malfunction that results in a real compromise of sanity, and the result is not pretty.
These HN drug threads are always filled with fearless commentary like this by young people who have never seen the before and after.
I have no problem with people who choose to explore alternate states of consciousness, whether through meditation, brainwave entrainment, sensory deprivation, or psychedelics. I don't think they're "insane" for doing so. Most people who use LSD or psilocybin come out of the experience with no lasting harm. Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, used it into his 80s with no health problems. (He lived to be 102.)
However, if you spend significant time in a hipster enclave (e.g. Williamsburg) you see the long-term effects for people of certain mental patterns. The problem is that the people who are most attracted to frequent psychedelic use are also those, in my opinion, most vulnerable to the mental problems that this lifestyle can exacerbate.
Cocaine and alcohol are extremely dangerous, but everyone knows that. I think the danger of psychedelics (which are biologically non-toxic) is that they can appeal to an experience-chasing mentality, and that they sometimes become entwined with a pattern of self-medication for an existing mental problem that would be better treated by a real psychiatrist.
I've altered my consciousness a lot over the course of my life, and won't get into details (real name) but I haven't used any of these drugs for years. I don't even drink, except for an occasional beer with dinner. Drugs are not necessary. The way I think of it is that altered consciousness is like a wilderness. Meditation is like riding your bike into it, in the sense that if you're not in shape, you won't go very far but you'll be able to go back out. Keep riding, and you'll be able to go deeper over time. Psychedelics are more like hitch-hiking. You catch a ride, can go deep into the thick of it, and end up with no idea where you've landed. You hope you can find a safe ride back. Most of the time, you get a ride back and you're fine, but the probability of disaster is not zero.
While I certainly respect your experience, views and choices, I would highlight the fact that you are looking back upon experiences of the past and the human memory is a prickly beast. Further, wherever you make the statement that something is "not necessary", it's very much loaded. I think it's sometimes difficult to empathise with or second-guess other peoples' (like your former self's) life goals, experience, motivations-of-the-moment and general situation.
Remember: children and many free thinking types, such as artists and hackers, can be largely motivated by curiosity, and that's a motivational asset that it's probably fair to say is rarer than hen's teeth in the adult population.
Also, quite unlike some foreign cultures that celebrate serious schizophrenia (eg. India) and other more evident conditions, today in the west the dominant perspective on insanity seems to be largely defined by two factors.
(1) An outgrowth of the historic western response (ie. 'mentally ill' people are 'treated' to return to what is assumed to be a preferable 'norm', or otherwise doped-up on antipsychotics that can prevent them from fully functioning)... the net message here is 'something is wrong with you', and 'the rest of society is right'.
(2) Led by big pharma, aggressive Western-led drug marketing, and post-industrial-era 9-5 schedules (not to talk of related issues of mortgages, debt, lack of free time/exercise/social outlet/access to daylight) loads of people IMHO spuriously consider themselves to have depression, ADD, or some other 'illness' that in the past was either not present in society or fell in to the regular realm of human experience. Now I'm not dismissing that some people really have extreme mental situations that can cause social or personal problems, but I am saying that a lot of them could probably improve just as much if not more by moving, switching routines, eating differently, exercising more, or being allowed by their relevant authority figures to operate outside of the artificially imposed constraints of an Orwellian post-industrial-era clockbound mass-psychological consensual hallucination under high velocity, socially charged 24x7 multi-channel surveillance of themselves, by themselves/employer/school/state/cult/etc.
(TLDR;) Let's just cut to the chase here: often, these people can start to realise the possibilities outside of their current mode of experience by taking a psychoactive drug, and it can do them real good, or at least provide food for thought. Necessary? Let each be their own judge.
When I say that psychedelics are "not necessary", I mean exactly that. I don't mean to say that they're evil, or even that they do more harm than good, because I don't think either is true. I think they're one path to something that can be attained through more difficult but, in the long term, safer means.
I don't know where you get the idea that Indian culture celebrates severe schizophrenia. It doesn't. In fact, the contentions some people have that schizophrenia is an asset in other cultures is untrue. That belief comes from a time in which this illness was poorly understood and sloppily (read: too easily) diagnosed in other societies. In all cultures, actual schizophrenia is a disadvantage. However, having traits often classified as schizotypal can be an advantage in some cultures.
It's a near-direct quote from an Austrian mental health professional I encountered in Indonesia some months back. Also, it is generally supported by the rather broader minded approach to mystics and non-mainline-society people's physical presence on the street and within broader society that is immediately evident to the traveller in India, as well as in other developing world countries.
> ... in other cultures ... in all cultures ...
Big claims. I would wager that you have not spent much time living longer-term in cultures significantly distinct from the west.
One is a variety of spiritual practice pursued by healthy people seeking divine communion, enlightenment, or some other desirable but hard-to-attain spiritual state. The other is a problem, usually with the physical brain, that harms the ability to perceive reality and often causes immense suffering for the person who has it.
Quantatively perhaps, but qualitatively, insanity is not subjective. It's a miserable, miserable experience I would wish upon no one, and wish no one would experience. Weird is fine, funky beliefs are fine, insanity is a different quality altogether.