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Applying what you learn on psychedelics to everyday life

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washingtonbound

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Joined
Aug 19, 2013
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I was thinking about this today because it?s something that?s frustrated me as I?ve tried to incorporate my trips into day to day life. When I first took LSD; I did so with the hopes that I would get a lot of insight from it. And over the course of the last few years that has been my goal with pysch use, to probe my consciousness.

I had a similar experience to many others of seeing my ego ripped apart from me as well noticing the triviality of many things that I?d not realized before. Tripping always made more mindful and I could see how puny and insignificant my ego driven hang ups really were. It?s hard to put these kind of experiences into words but I know many people are sure of what I?m talking about here. Basically I?d achieve what I felt to be a more awakened state during and maybe briefly after a trip; but once day to day life started again my internal strife would continue to wear me down. I?ve not been able to learn to stay in the moment despite these experiences.

Anyone have methods they use in applying useful aspects of trips in their life?
 
My husband had a sudden and nearly fatal heart attack years ago when our sons were only four and seven. I really thought I was going to lose him. From the moment I saw him come out of the operating room, all my petty grievances fell away as did his. We were so aware of how meaningless all of our marital struggles were and that all that mattered was the love we shared with each other and with our kids. And that blissful existence lasted.....about two months tops.:\ I don't even think we humans are capable of putting our egos aside to that level every day. But the truth is that it did reset the bar for us and I feel the same way about the wisdom gained from psychedelics. Neither experience made me a perfect or even drastically better person but simply having those temporary but powerful experiences did change me as a person.

Staying in the moment and living more mindfully is an ongoing process and it can feel sometimes like I am getting nowhere. But I can look back over years (many of them!) and see that in fact I have changed my internal strife quite a bit. Maybe it helps to be old--I don't know. One of the best things I received from psychedelics was a deeper and much more meaningful relationship with nature and that has never gone away. I had it as a child, it was lost and then found again at a time in adolescence when I really needed it to get out of my own self-destructive head. Spending time in nature can help you revisit the wisdom and peace that you felt when you let the mind chatter fall away.

Also, make sure you are not placing an artificial standard of perfection on yourself. ;)<3
 
Tripping allows you to access higher states of consciousness, because all states of consciousness are always "alive" in some way, and thus accessible. However, just because you've accessed a higher state, doesn't mean you will grow to a higher stage. States and Stages are separate from one another, and to actually hold that state of consciousness continually, you must develop into the stage that can hold it. Of course, it's not an all-at-once process, it's just easiest to share in that way, but you get the idea.

Moving up stages requires actual work and growth, moving up states is easy.

Just keep growing and pushing your edges and you'll naturally integrate these things. Since you've experienced them, you can anchor them, you just have to grow until you can.
 
Psychedelics can sometimes be useful but they are not magical or miracle drugs, and there are a lot of people who have taken them and suffer from or experienced delusions both while on them, and after taking them.

Meditation and not using any drugs in large amounts or that frequent-including psychedelics is far more effective.

I do not even use drugs anymore, aside from caffeine and I do not really have a major desire to use them. This is one reason I am stepping down as a moderator here.
 
I've used psychedelics and dissociatives to reset my Ego and try and take a different approach to life.

I found that after a while the 'insights' from my trips fade into the background noise of daily living and things that didn't bother me when high and seemed insignificant became important again as I had to face it sober. The novelty of the oneness experienced soon evaporates when the @ssholes start to grind you down again.

As PTCH says meditation is a more practical and long lasting way to alter things as is living in the moment. I've stopped tripping as much now as I find I can take less and less from my trips to alter my life and need to find a better more permanent solution to the inaneness that inhabits my psyche.

In saying that I have a different acceptance of things from since I started tripping although it is hard to know if it was the drugs or life in general that has done the alteration.
 
I somehow wonder how concrete the 'insights' gained from psychedelics actually are. When pressed to be specific usually they come in the form of fairly generic advice about making sure to prioritize different things in life. I get the impression that sometimes psychedelics simply give a feeling of insight or awe without any actual take-home knowledge. I've definitely felt like I finally figured life out while tripping only to have whatever ideas that had inspired me slip through my fingers into little more than a vague notion of wonder.

I think I've come to the conclusion that there is usually little substance behind these feelings. Not that the feelings themselves aren't important but that there isn't usually any special wisdom they contain that you can take back to sober life and enlighten the masses with.
 
Nice responses guys.
I definitely agree that meditation is essential to learn in order to really rich those higher states that many use psychedelics
to try and achieve. I just wish that I could find a meditation method that worked for me; I don’t like listening to people’s voices on tapes or binaural beats that much, and whenever I try doing my own mantras that becomes useless as well. I have a real issue getting not just the thoughts to settle down but the shitty feelings in the pit of my stomach that I can not will away. It is frustrating when you you have chemical processes going on that you do not control which in turn cause other issues in your life.
 
Things that can help are:

-Don't trip too much. If the outcome of a behaviour is not satisfactory is probably wiser to stop it than to keep trying.

-Write down your experiences and what you are saying to yourself while on higher states of conciousness. Writing them down will help to remember and to reflect. Sometimes you can see things really clearly while on higher states but it doesn't really stick on you, so try catching it on paper at least.
A distorted perception won't always offer you useful or practical ideas and you'll need to separate the wheat from the chaff while sober.

-Try to implement the learnings in your every day life. That might be extremely difficult. If you find yourself getting same message in every trip again and again you need most likely a change of perspective and a lot of hard work...and a break.

-Some kind of spiritual practice will help your spiritual growth. Some kind of cognitive practice will help your cognitive growth. Higher states work better as adjuvants to other practices. The clearer your intention the higher the possibilities to fulfil it (and I am not talking about strong will here, more like lucidity). The higher you are on any scale (spiritual, cognitive, etc...) the most likely you'll get benefits from psychedelics. Growth attracts growth.
 
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Both Zilpe and washingtonbound, look up Integral Theory and the four quadrant model contained therein.

Zilpe, you're noticing that insights and knowings of exactly what to do in the top left or interior individual quadrant don't necessarily correlate to growth and knowing in the top right quadrant, or exterior individual, aka behaviors, etc. Great insight. I think Integral Theory could help you pull your experiences together in a way that could lead to more progress actually being made.

washingtonbound, I don't have any specific words for you, but check it out as well, it will help. Both in practical day to day living, as well as understanding the experiences and changes you're seeing or not seeing.

This could be useful for the both of you, Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening - https://www.amazon.com/Integral-Life-Practice-21st-Century-Blueprint/dp/1590304675
 
herbavore said:
My husband had a sudden and nearly fatal heart attack years ago when our sons were only four and seven. I really thought I was going to lose him. From the moment I saw him come out of the operating room, all my petty grievances fell away as did his. We were so aware of how meaningless all of our marital struggles were and that all that mattered was the love we shared with each other and with our kids. And that blissful existence lasted.....about two months tops.:\ I don't even think we humans are capable of putting our egos aside to that level every day. But the truth is that it did reset the bar for us and I feel the same way about the wisdom gained from psychedelics. Neither experience made me a perfect or even drastically better person but simply having those temporary but powerful experiences did change me as a person.

Staying in the moment and living more mindfully is an ongoing process and it can feel sometimes like I am getting nowhere. But I can look back over years (many of them!) and see that in fact I have changed my internal strife quite a bit. Maybe it helps to be old--I don't know. One of the best things I received from psychedelics was a deeper and much more meaningful relationship with nature and that has never gone away. I had it as a child, it was lost and then found again at a time in adolescence when I really needed it to get out of my own self-destructive head. Spending time in nature can help you revisit the wisdom and peace that you felt when you let the mind chatter fall away.

Also, make sure you are not placing an artificial standard of perfection on yourself. ;)<3
Click to expand...

Amazing post! ^
 
This is a difficult question to really answer. But I can say that it definitely takes work. The thing that psychedelics have brought to my life that has been most useful on a day-to-day basis has been self-awareness, or specifically awareness of my thoughts. With intentionality, and practice (ie, trying to remind myself constantly), I have been able to foster a much higher degree of objective oversight of my thought processes and feelings. I have developed a nearly constant loop of checking myself and my reactions. Whenever I feel something, I pause, step back, and considering how I am feeling and why, before I actually react or even begin to tell myself what just happened. In this way I am usually able to catch myself before reacting in negative ways to stimuli. This has resulted in a much higher degree of peace and serenity in my life. I don't usually feel uncontrollably subjected to my emotions and impulses anymore.
 
Not expecting anything, and not going looking for the drugs works for me. Also, taking them randomly, inconsistently (anywhere from daily, to once yearly+), and solo when the time is right (for myself, it's never really planned until the day of). Paying attention to the body. I like not planning trips, because then if I don't feel like tripping I don't have to. I trip when the spontaneous desire to do so arises.

Apart from that if I stay hydrated, eat well, yin yoga, and keep active I will be good.

Here is my problem. I have definitely achieved a more awakened state, but I can't channel the energy. It has taken a long time to become the new me. I can have deep awakenings on psychedelics... insights into the nature of reality. These tend to stick with me, as my consciousness has been altered strongly by it, but I can't quite discern how. I can have shallow but very important awakenings too and these can be constructive, and what I do when I'm tripping can be accomplishing. I find microdosing constructive too with some psychs. It is the deep awakenings that I have trouble understanding.

I feel that they helped my become aware of my borderline disorder and that's all it really took to get things going.

Whenever I am through tripping though, there is not always something I can point my finger at that I learned (sometimes there is). Then there is the matter of what exactly you are learning on psychedelics, as it can be anything from easily expressible to code language to someone who hasn't tripped. I find it is well described by an energy change and I really need to start behaving like I do on moderate doses of 2c-c when I'm sober. I honestly don't know how, I tend to go right back and I'm not in a good place. They have almost certainly made things better not worse. I can't say that about cannabis.
 
washingtonbound said:
Nice responses guys.
I definitely agree that meditation is essential to learn in order to really rich those higher states that many use psychedelics
to try and achieve. I just wish that I could find a meditation method that worked for me; I don’t like listening to people’s voices on tapes or binaural beats that much, and whenever I try doing my own mantras that becomes useless as well. I have a real issue getting not just the thoughts to settle down but the shitty feelings in the pit of my stomach that I can not will away. It is frustrating when you you have chemical processes going on that you do not control which in turn cause other issues in your life.
Click to expand...

I struggle with meditation too and found the best I do is with focusing on my breath. I get comfortable lying down and count the breaths on the exhale to ten and then start over again. I do that for a while and then move my focus to the breath itself feeling it going in and out and the movement of my diaphragm, (diaphragmatic breathing) and I slow my breath down as relaxed as I can. I find this helps me reach decent depths, hope it helps.

Don't will away the feelings look at them - if you push against them you are pulling them towards you. Look at them from a scientific view point - you body is producing this chemical, from whatever place and this is causing you to think whatever way you are and wonder at the magic way your body communicates strange messages and how they can't be your thoughts because if they were yours you would just stop thinking them. I developed panic attacks as part of a whole mass of physical health problems and I used this technique to get me through and finally over them.
 
I genuinely believe that tripping, specifically on LSD, has changed me and my mindset for the better as a person ultimately but in terms of drastic changes to my daily life these last for a month or so at the very most and more often a couple of weeks. Something I am still trying to master, the integration of what I learn tripping and what I do in daily life. The single biggest change I have taken from tripping and put into action in 'rl' is kicking a pretty destructive cocaine habit, but aside from that it is little thing after each time.
 
Also another thing I struggle to understand is how people have these very clear and well thought out realisations? Personally I only every have a general realisation that we are all one, amazement at the world, people and the universe, how insignificant material life is. Beyond that though my thoughts are all very very muddled and race through my mind to fast to make any sense of them.
 
It varies, but most of what I have actually applied to my life from psychedelics has been the results of sober reflection/integration from a moment of insight, or even perhaps sober reflection on the confusion itself. Generally for me it's these little flashes of intense clarity and insight while actually tripping, and if I'm lucky I can form that into something useful later. Although I've also had trips that were very clear of thought the whole time. On DOC I tend to have very focused and clear-headed trips, and I am able to think through things very deeply during the trip, but that's sort of a property of DOC. It's not the same for many other psychedelics although I find LSD similar. Tryptamines, on the other hand, generally make my thoughts very intense and even overwhelming, it's difficult to grab ahold of something, but the experiences are much more abstract and otherworldly.
 
Obligatory speech:

You gotta remember to take long periods of sobriety/low drug use to incorporate these novel states of mind into your every day way of perceiving the world. Your brain is like a computer you have to give it a chance to fully download the information you're trying to access and store through psychedelic drugs. If you keep trying to cram more and more information into your biological harddrive it's going to take longer to finish downloading and incorporating that information into a stable, readable format.
____________________

This doesn't seem to be the issue you're experiencing necessarily but it's good to know. As far as the day to day wear and tear on your consciousness and spirit, well welcome to modern living man, the fact that it makes you feel less than you could be is no coincidence, the way we live is incredible stressful for the most part, our enviornment is full of toxins, our leaders are fools and our identities as drug users are often hidden, our public faces then are contingent on maintaining a pleasant facade for those who can't and won't understand why we engage in socially taboo behaviors. On top of that many of us have things that must be kept to ourselves for the most part, opinions, worries, hopes, fears, desires, fetishes, hatreds. A lot of adult life nowadays consists of suppressing who you really are to function just well enough within the social hive to survive. So naturally the psychedelic experience seems like a huge relief, a return to oneself in full volume and brightness and essence. I would wager that the psychedelic experience would be less jarring and alien if we lived in a way that was congruent with psychedelic oriented priorities. We live in the world created by psychopathic power hungry tyrants, those of us who just want to feel connected to something eternal and bright have to find the light that shines through the cracks of a prison that we were born into and many of us will die in.

I would argue the world is the problem, not the drugs, not the people doing the drugs, and not really any specific part of anyone's day. The way we have set up living is simply insane.
 
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Fuckin awesome post acid man dude. Def agree. Sanity is insanity, and insanity is sanity.

Can't stand when hustlers wear masks. The whole mess is a hustle. People who are real, seem to be so rare where did they go? Down the rabbit hole right, at least there are no brainwashed egos down there in the abyss.

15 years ago I had a skater and snowboard crew and everyone was so real... it's all competition now. Survival of the douchiest. We didn't have cell phones back then. Believe it or not, we just knew where to go in the forest after school to smoke bong without people sending 200 texts around days in advance.

Survival of the greediest, most manipulative and selfish.
 
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I can see a pattern in these "takeaways"
Psychedelics provide something extra, and lead to heightened appreciation.
The world is a crazy place.
If you use too much or too frequently you become crazy.

so maybe the takeaway I might offer, is to gently make bits of the world a little less crazy so that you can have a heightened appreciation of it.
 
Nice post acid man. You make a good point about how it is hard to incorporate the psychedelic experience in your life as far as sharing your insights/use with others. I spent a semester studying abroad in England and I would hardly ever discuss anything related to psychs because of the close mindedness I experienced from others. It is something I generally keep to myself unless I’m in the right setting. Soceital taboos are stupid.
 
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