I hope what i have to say to the op here doesn't sound condecending, I would like salute his curiosity
and intrepidness in posting as a psychedelic skeptic in a jungle of ethusiasts among which I would count myself.
I would say the many replies to this thread have about covered it: 1.psychedelics aren't for everyone
2. follow your nose, if they terrify you or fill you with aversion, don't take them, end of story, don't waste your
precious short life thinking too much more about it. 3. psychedelics are like most important things in life, potentially life altering,
such as getting married, getting pregnant, going away to college, moving to a different locale, and when you think about it
essentially everything youdo and experience adds up and influences greatly your life.
As the Buddhists say, your ego is a delusion anyway,
why cling to it and try to protect from change and control it when you can't even prove it exists, "you" are the sum of everyone and
everything, no thing is discretely and concretely extant, probably least of all "your" mind, all things are in flux and interdependently influencing and creating
each other but nothing, not "your" ego, not psychedelic drug effects, nothing can be separated and pointed to and definitively isolated
from the rest. Meditate daily and understand this don't take my word for it.
Its unwise to say, I or that guy was ruined by psychedelics, its almost like scapegoating. To many people and the society itself is just
itchng for any pretext to dismiss and essentially cripple you so that they can make you live on their terms, stigmatizing
people who take psychedelics is just one of many ways. So screw those guys, who create the criteria upon which people
are judged as being fit for ther purposes, working a their banks or in their coporations or what have you you can't win, they'll
take you on for a few years then fire you in disgrace or whatever so if you want to explore psychdelics
do it, you likely won't be a big winner in life on their terms anyway.
But should you succumb to curiosity and take psychdelics anyway, depending
on dose, the way psychdelics are, you are likely to be very susceptible to suggestion regarding your pre-trip
judgements, beyond a certain dosage level, your judgements could balloon into some kind of unpleasantness
while under the effect of the drug, that is a characteristic of psychdelics, the name is Greek for mind-manifesting,
so what is on and in your mind will manifest more clearly, blatantly.
That said, small, half doses are very unlikely to cause you a problem, they are, I think in most peoples experience
simply bliss and hilarity and child like wonder causing, maybe some subtle visual effects, tracers and some alteration in the appearance of
of the things. Its not much more proound and life changing than going to a party and getting drunk.
I would wager though you are obviously curious and want to deleve into psychedelics but quite understandably and rightly very trepidacious.
I would add that I think your fear that psychedelics would damage you, that fear or anxiety is a product of a way that most people tend to
think when they try to rationalize and generalize to try and get their heads around things, particularly
when they don't have any experience of them, there is a strong tendency to form very rigid concepts about things and as thouh tjose thngs don't have a life of their
own and change independently of our assessments,
we like it to be as though the actual things/phenomena we are trying to come to grips with are one and the same as our
concepts about them. The problem is that the two are very separate.
And the tendency with most people is to force this notion of things that things do not change because you don't like
having an idea or judgement about things that changes, that's just too difficult to keep track of all the time , we want to nail things down and
say "Yeah, I know what thats about we're finished here, next!" that is what you are doing when
you say, "I have fucked myself up from that psychdelic i took last year, I'm broken. So for example, if I take acid
and I suddenly perceive a different world to how I used to, and I come down from my trip and feel bothered in subseqent days, weeks, months
by how i cannot revoke or somehow unsee what I saw or understood and I then formulate a judgement about myself and then tell others
about it maybe even a therapist, and those people agree that I have a problem, let's say my therapist tells me i am alienated and paranoid
because of an LSD trip, really it should be like, well, yeah so what, there are so many other things influencing and changing me every minute
making me more or less paranoid or alienated, why fixate on acid as bein the cause of that?
Ultimately I think you are just talking about fear of making a judgement on yourself that you have been messed up by some drug. But The reality would be different,
there are many other things at work, LSD is ultimately just some molecules on paper, or even in your body should you ingest them, it is the complex of all the things and factors in concert with it that
make for what happens during and after a trip, blaming yourself or the acid is a gross reductionistic distortion and inaccurate assessment and unfortnately one that our
society and peers and family will make all too often. Whatever happens from an acid trip is done when its done. Whatever you are stuck with when it is finshed will also be done with and finished.
The only problem is when we fixate and worry too much
and yes, that is not an insignifcant consideration, it could cause a problem. More than psychedelics actually being harmful is the stigmatization and the perception
by society about them which contributes much too our tendency I think to be influenced to think of them more negatively than we should,
yes, when people form the judgement about you that you are a say for example an acid freak, it says more about their ignorance
about and fear of what acid can show them than anything else, but there is no denying their ignorance and delusion can make a significant problem for you.
80% of humanity doesn't want to even look at their own mind and see whats in there,
let alone like the idea of some substance that you could take and that shit is laid bare like nobody's business, so they don't like it and they won't like you
and then you stand the chance of not liking yourself anymore because of how this substances altered your outlook. You could say so-and-so is a cigarette freak, and even though evryone knows
cigarettes harm the smoker and anyone exposed to the smoker,its pretty clear, thats not a big problem for most of them, they don't don't freak out about it like they do about a psychdelic
that person and his family might become ill and die rom the cigarettes, and they ave no problem, its cool, its your business, not mine, but with psychdelics its like
"Whoa Now hold on there! You get outta here with that mess! Whats wrong with you? Are you a psychopath! A schizo or something?", but with cigarettes it makes half of
the people in this world perhaps vaguely happy, one less asshole they figure, and plus there's money to be made from cigarettes, you can't make money from psychdelics to that level as few people
want to consume them the way they do cigarettes, gigarettes help the economy by golly! Think of all the drus and doctors that get work because of lung cancer etc.
The point being, it is actually your society's problem with themselves, their lack of fortitude as far as being able to stomach the truth of their own psyches, it is your own
rigid societal influenced concepts about psychedelics that stem from that society that are the barrier you face not the psychdelic itself if it is taken in proper dosages and following time tested safety prtocol
like not taking psychedelics when you have problems in your life, taking them in settings where you are comfortable and planning when you take it so that your trip does not overlap
with obligations and circumstances where such psychedelics are not appropriate. Some people feel the need for a sitter, personally I want to take care of myself when I am tripping,
but then I don't take huge doses and don't find that those contribute that much, I like to think I can get the messages and experiences that I need to on moderate doses. I would recommend you try
micro and then small doses, otherwise just drop it and move on, maybe meditation or lucid dreaming is something that would work for you.
