I know many, many people start finding the 'magic' of them, talking about alternate/transcendent realities, profound and externally-generated insights, so on. This bothers the shit out of me. Physically ingesting a physical drug as it works physical effects on your physical brain creating alterations to your subjective experience, to me has always been superb evidence of the physical basis of said subjective experience. That this is not obvious to most is frankly depressing. I've lost good friends to that sort of lunacy. But! So it goes.
I posted way too much on this board and in this thread in particular, and ended up with too many people calling me out to respond to them all. But this quote right here is basically the point I wanted to make.
I hope that those of us participating weren't terrible about it?
I will reiterate that this doesn't invalidate the possibility of drugs making the short of "multidimensional connections" as I think may have been suggested up-thread.
Wic - it may bother the shit out of you, but for me it's an even more intense mix of frustration, rage, anxiety fear etc. I've lost too many friends just like you have, and also probably lost far too much of my own mind too.
The issue I think Past Madness had upthread with simply attributing these lost souls to chemical imbalance is that that wide eyed tendency to wax religiously about experience is a product of experience. "Sober" people sound worse to my subjectivity than any of the worst druggies that I sat there nodding my head with to avoid the torsion of contradiction.
"
How can you not see that which is obvious to be true?"
Stoned, sober, it's all the same deluded creature. I mean, I'm not even hard-delusion a la Bakker, I think there are degrees of awareness to be had within BB (though, ultimately, I agree with his worse conclusions about asymptotic limits and that they are
probably impassible without perceptual augmentation).
I still want to find a way to communicate.
I got really frustrated trying to explain what you've said in social contexts, because living in a really desolate and culturally and economically deprived place, there's very few spaces I can go to avoid the aforementioned lunacy.
And what's even more pathetic/disgusting is how utterly PROUD so many people are now of their macho hedonist/nihilist individualism. How scandalized they are when you dare suggest they aren't in god like control of it all, that there's any cultural and social programming involved, that they aren't just enthralled in a kind of dipshitted consumer existentialist ideology that works to create profit for others at the expense of their lives... and of course the lives of others who suffer from the fall out of their behaviours.
Lol. Application. I can't see a mind like yours be lost to the frustration. I think we can affect change, and while maybe we should curtail our rampant reproduction - with some restraint even - I think that we should even harness the seven billion brains available. It kills me that another Einstein, Newton, Darwin, whoever are working and dying because of, rather than being facilitated by, circumstance of the dominant culture's making (at this point in globalization anyhow) - which is me, buying my bullshit; basically just food and books.
It doesn't HAVE to be this way. The horrible banality of it all is really grating.
+1. But you have to find some personal solace somewhere. Dwelling on the suck, sucks. I'm lucky in that I get warped about just being alive and experiencing (it used to be a negative experience and I had to reach an understanding to harness it as positive) and that I'm deluded into think I can affect change and do that by honing myself to do so
.
All of this is not to say I didn't party HARD, because I did, and am a bitter burn out whose stuck with the dullness of sobriety. It's sad that I prefer this to anything else that's going on.
Lol - I think sobriety gets a bad rap. What's wrong with functioning normally?
I hope by this you mean the forum. It's already gotten me through tough shit in two years. Not to mention, that I saw a dramatic sharpening of my debating skills
.
Don't like linking to the UKs equivalent of Fox News, but has anyone else come across this theory? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2527074/Did-BEER-create-modern-society-Ancient-man-developed-agriculture-brew-alcohol-not-bake-bread-claims-scientist.html
Makes such a terrible amount of sense...
I know it has come up elsewhere but have you read
Food of the Gods?
Indeed. I would certainly consider them more valid spiritual experiences than anything that involves the interjection of another person between you and [insert transcendent entity here]. If someone was going to develop a relationship with a god, they should be digging inward.
+1 - I'm all about positing human first.
Before I ever took any, I fortunately spent years reading about them from a solid group of educated trippers (many in their 30's/40's) discussing them on a forum (forum wasn't all about psychedelics, but the topic came up frequently). I didn't realize the magnitude of it at the time, but they thoroughly equipped me for just about anything.
Awesome. If only society enabled more of that discussion... but, of course, informed people don't make money perpetuating
as is. We wouldn't see so many lost.
And I know I've seen some fMRI studies of brains on mushrooms and marijuana.
Yeah, I remember one recently about the surprising - to some - of the decreased activity in the brain on psylocibin. I think it was presumed to be, in part, a decreased activity of inhibitors (which, if I remember my Oliver Sacks readings right, is associated with other, internally-generated hallucinations). I agree there seems to be a slowly growing comeback, which is great.
Give me time to find the others - this is one of the more foundational pieces of new research:
Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin.
In reading a bit of that again, I remembered it as a type of communicative inhibition. So structures that are normally communicate with each other cognate alone (?).
I think you misinterpreted me there - I was talking about losing them to the goofy mysticism. If a generally rational, irreligious friend started attending church and yakking about the light of the lord spilling out of every pore, I'd consider that a loss too. 
I like seeing deviance in the world, just as a personal opinion. I agree that there can be very perturbing aspects of indulgent nihilism, shallowness and arrogance, but these just things people carry them around, we see it all over. People who don't observe themselves, don't read books, etc. At least they throw decent parties.
Lol. I actually have to say I've probably landed closer to james' perspective more than once at those "decent parties." Sometimes there were just no mutually curious people around and intoxication becomes plastic.
Yeah, I actually got hold of "Bad Pharma" by Ben Goldacre, and that is surely going to be a depressing read for sure. It is rather absurd that this industry can alter consciousness of kids so they will fit the societal state of consciousness, which some people might call the slave mentality. Those other mind altering drugs that may teach you to think for yourself, those are not recommended. Of course the western empire works much better if the people in it ask as few vital questions as possible.
To read it how McKenna puts it in
Food of the Gods, those were the same dividends of distributing coffee and sugar worldwide in the past couple hundred years. It's always an interesting perspective. Goldacre works hard.
I might also add that some kids who have been medicated have probably gotten a better life because of it, so it is not necessarily 100% evil:)
In some cases. But we could be working harder to eliminate bias that sees a number of kids dosed to make money.
Sometimes, indulging a child's innate curiousity really is the best tactic.
I had a few semi-bad experiences with psychedelics, like taking shrooms and going to nightclubs. That was a terrible experience for me. My older brother said that this is not the way you should take these substances, started talking about Timothy Leary and "set and setting" and so on, and I have to say that it is not bullshit at all. It made all the difference in the world for my experience of psychedelics.
"Set and setting" is pulled right from the drugs and behavior textbook I've been exposed to.
If the various effects of psilocybin interests you, I highly recommend the youtube channel called "maps". Lots of interesting talks on the subject.
Never really got a handle on how I felt about
MAPS.
I agree with you about the mysticism. Funny enough, my experience of it has shown it to be often MORE corrupt than any organized, conservative religion. There's something about telling people fluoride and heart medicine are poison and what you really need is to take dodgy shrooms in the forest with a gropey "druid" that makes me long for the dullness of sunday worship.
Lol.
I think you should also check this guy out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ignacy_Witkiewicz. He was a Polish writer, poet and painter of the pre-WWII period, who experimented with mind-altering substances of various kinds. And he would sign his paintings with symbols that show what substance was he using while painting (or not - some are signed something like "two days without cigarettes", too). He also wrote a book about his experiences.
"In the late 1920s he turned to the novel, writing two works, Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability."
I
love when scientists do works of fiction to encompass their theories - though this isn't really that. I want to both read those books and find out if he marked portions of writing like his paintings.
Did anyone know that BF Skinner wrote a piece of
fiction?
Nice input Alia:) Could be interesting to read his take on this, compared with Huxley who wrote "the Doors of Perception" about 20 years later.
Have you read other Huxley, Royce?
Psychedelics and drugs are for depressed people.
... I just don't know how to take you.
