Don't you have to go there in learn more about yourself and who/what you are?
Many people go to farflung places in their minds and while they are there experiment with this new state of being but many return learning more about themselves and all while potentially pushing themselves to the edge, if not over the edge, in the process. Sometimes as they say, you need to plunge the depths in order to overcome obstacles in life. That's why any therapist, psychiatrist and anybody who REALLY cares about mental health and the vastly infinite realities that exist within the mind, will tell you there is WISDOM in all of these experiences. Talk to a schizophrenic about creativity. In fact, you probably don't need to talk to a schizophrenic about creativity because the creativity is right there before you. In order to be schizophrenic, you have to be creative in order to make meaning out of the madness! Talk to someone with BPD about identity. They know more about what identity means because they've spent their life like a counterbalance swaying from one extreme, one personality, one identity - to the next. Talk to someone about depression, chances are they have spent their life contemplating the vast territory that depression covers in philosophical, sociological and metaphysical ways - even if they don't realize it. In order to live with depression, you first need to make sense out of it. We make complex and elaborate stories about our depression.
So your pathologizing makes no sense to me whatsoever, because it takes away the MEANING of that individuals experience and reduces them down to merely pathology. Which then creates room for dogma, which is what you are using to counter what you assume is dogma of another individual. The dogma of psychiatry and mental illness is the very plague we have been seeking to eradicate yet we still use it when it suits to form prejudice to relieve ourselves of having the embrace difference. It's pretty rich if you ask me. You keep using words like new agers. What are new agers? What are fundamentalist xtians? These aren't real words with real meaning. They are labels. And we label people in order to feel a sense of control over them to make us feel better because it removes the humanity of other while artificially raising us in the process, or our egos moreover. It does nothing to change the reality in front of us. And it is OUR reality that is threatened. We MUST force other realities to be shaped around our own. You MUST see things like me. You MUST believe in what I believe.
People can take as many psychedelics as they want. It is their choice and you have to step aside. If you are a real friend to anybody, you wouldn't be talking about your friends like they somehow f*cked up but that's the message I'm getting from your messages. Nobody f*cks up. They just go to different places and sometimes these places are more difficult than other places they could go to. As a friend, I believe it's your job to support them regardless of their choices and to not judge them and attempt to project yourself onto them.
And as you say, you've had bad experiences yourself with drugs so maybe all this is a projection on your part?
Nobody is living your life and experiencing your reality. While your experineces might be bad, those experiences belong to you and you only and all you can do is share them. Not force others to be consumed by them. When you do that, you do more harm than good. The best thing you can do is support people and accept them and their choices for who and what they are. If you can't do that then have the decency to remove yourself from any position of influence because you know you'll just get in the way. When it comes to psychedelics, many people are using them reguarly to understand themselves more and the world and others and what it's all about. Outside of what you may think, and what society thinks, there is nothing wrong with that. You may end up starting as a Buddhist and ending one episode as a Christian. The next episode you could be Jesus and the next episode a bum. The next episode after that you could have answers to peoples suffering and wanting to profess those answers and the next episode you don a business suit and go back to work. Swings and roundabouts man
There is NO right or wrong way. But there is way. And we are taking that way in our own way because that IS the way, for us anyway.
It's a journey. It might end up dark, it might not. It may take uncomfortable violent turns, it might not. It might be disturbing to witness, it might not.
You could end up on a psychiatric ward, then again you might not. You could lose your mind, then again you might not. How do you lose your mind anyway?
Nonetheless, that is the process of an individual making sense of things and like you mention about other drugs, people are trying to make sense of things. That is life, period. Some might be trying to make sense of things even if they are trying to escape. Escapism in a way is sensemaking, it's just sensemaking done back to front. A homeless person on the streets smoking crack is trying to make sense of his/her life, he just does it in ways we don't agree with it because society has 'rules' for being a 'normal' person in society. You could read a book, get a PhD and learn quantum physics. Or you could be a bum on the street with no home, no money, nothing. Which person has more? It depends on how you look at it. It's terribly strenuous going through many years of education to get a PhD and then you have to keep up the act of being a PhD by getting a job. A job that might eventually destroy you with stress and expectations you can never fill. The bum on the street doesn't have to do any of that. He's as free as the wind. He looks at people rushing by distracting themselves with important tasks and roles and he sees beyond it all. You could say being a bum has wisdom in and of itself. Most of the most influencial mystics and spiritual teachers came from humble roots. And if they didn't, they gave much of their belongings/assets away in order to get closer to the truths they were seeking.
What are those truths? What is the right way to seek them?
People will find their own way. Only someone who is not truly at peace with himself cannot accept that to be so because he is too busy trying to force others to find his way, not their own. And that happens out of insecurity.
And anyway, you're on a drugs forum pitching a speech about taking too many drugs.
If that's not projection then I don't know what is. It's admirable you have returned from the depths of your own suffering but it doesn't put you above anybody else nor does it give you the right to assume your journey is complete. If you think it is complete, maybe you need to take more drugs to realize you've still got more work to do! Maybe you need more reality checks! Maybe you need to hit rock bottom a few more times!
I think sometimes there comes a level of narcissism from those who quit drugs. Many seem to quit to be better people forgetting that it's this belief that takes them from one addiction (the drug) to another (obsession with self). You're still recovering. You always will be. Anybody whose done the 12 steps knows that. You're in the humble care of something higher than yourself. It's about connection and compassion, understanding and integration. Virtue signalling is none of those things, in fact, it's the opposite. When you come out of the other side assuming you have the ability to look down on all those who do the things you assume made you less of a person, you really haven't come out of the other side at all. Your journey has just begun because the work clearly hasn't been done to get over yourself and to finally accept who you are. Now the drugs are gone, you're left with the person in the mirror. And that's the hardest part. Remember, that's why you take the drugs in the first place
If it is, what's so wrong about taking drugs? What's so wrong about any of it? It all has it's place and it all makes sense.
Only it doesn't if you haven't got over yourself yet and you're too busy pushing your reality onto others.
