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Psychedelics are about life not death

I

Ismene

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Joined
Jun 17, 2005
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Strange that so many want to link psychedelics with ideas like "ego-death" or "the total death of the self". Doesn't anyone find that psychedelics are about life rather than death? It's sad that Tim Leary's fanciful tales have had such a influence on peoples thinking.

I don't think I've ever felt as alive as when I'm on psychedelics.
 
Meditations and psychedelic journeying have shown me that my existence encompasses both life and death...transience is the core substance....something always to fall into past, while another is to ripen before us.

Lol, on a less poetic note...I feel ya...seems like a lot of death talk in te psych culture. And i also agree of the feeling of life these exps bring, that part of the exp deserves a little more credit.

I do see the value in the idea of death and re-birth as an archetypal representation for the exp. Like a shedding of skin for a snake or something...psychedelics are often a catalyst to help me 'let go', or allow to die certain aspects of myself, or certain attachments which are no longer harmonious with my being, yet still are easy to 'hold onto' without a psychedelic nudge.

Befriend the end :-) but don't be all emo about it
Like ismene is suggesting, balance that deathliness with some good vibe livingness :-)

*you think if a dead entity like a ghost partook it would exp ego-birthing? ;) *
 
I've died a few times, sometimes many times in a row.
Other times, my ego has died, and it scared the crap out of me and made me roll into fetal position.
And then there is those times that are just extremely awesome or just plain regular.

If you don't roll the dice you'll never know.
It's usually all worth while unless you pushed too far.

I am of the impression that "death" on psychedelics is cleansing.
Of course, please don't really die, just hallucinate it. ;)

If you haven't been there yet and you keep playing with the fire you may find it one day. (ego death or similar out of body experience type deaths and separating/splitting from yourself)

This kind of stuff seems to be common on my real heavy good trips.

Sometimes dieing doesn't even feel so bad!
On MXE "dieing" feels good! Not for real of course!

I "broke through my own ego death like a shattering window across a black background of giant destructive white letters of my worst fears" on Mushrooms and MXE. I laughed about it for twenty minutes. How I know I did that, I don't know, but I watched it happened and knew that's exactly what it was. It was amazing and I laughed good and hard about it. As the rainbows danced about the room OEV or CEV.

Another time on just shrooms alone I totally had a bad ego death and scared the crap out of me and wanted to die and called my sitter for help to love me because the world didn't care and wanted to leave me behind and mushrooms were too much truth and my ego was being killed by crazy monsters and eyeballs and slimy liquidy intensity.

Yeah I've totally died and avoided death and had multi-deaths and splitting deaths and out of body experiences and all that.

Datura was the worst one. I felt like I was a spirit attached to my body stuck inside a balloon floating behind me while my body did whatever it wanted and I watched in amazement at me fucking up in the middle of the street thinking my finger was glowing like ET because I wanted to go home.

Hahahaha funny now but wasn't then.
There's a lesson in all this somewhere.
Thanks again for the memories.
 
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thoughtsUnThought said:
Lol, on a less poetic note...I feel ya...seems like a lot of death talk in te psych culture.
Click to expand...

Do you think it is all purely down to Tim Leary and people thinking that unless they say "I had an ego-death brah" people won't take them seriously?
 
eye_wide_open said:
If you haven't been there yet and you keep playing with the fire you may find it one day. (ego death or similar out of body experience type deaths and separating/splitting from yourself)
Click to expand...

I think you have to believe in it first, which means taking Leary's ideas at face value. I tend to think Leary was talking bullshine so I'll never experience a placebo like that.

Do you always feel like you're dying when tripping? Don't you ever feel really alive?
 
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Who's Leary guy I keep hearing about?
I only heard of McKenna. Even then what I heard of him was mostly referencing DMT.
I died on shrooms once through it was nasty. What I can relate it to being is what people call ego death.

Most of the other times It's like I'm splitting from myself and my body dies and somewhat pleasant or euphoric as my spirit rises away or whatever and I watch me float away. Then I usually start trippin' like crazy. Or it could be in the midst of a heavy trip.

Yes, when I get breakthroughs, I feel more alive and in tune than anything I can imagine.
This has happened a few times along with OK trips and good trips and bad trips. They're all mixed in the jelly bowl. I'm sure they all have roots and all have their own elements at play which make me have certain ideas. Not only are psychedelics interesting and fun but they are a powerful mind game. You're going to find more questions than answers to be honest.

I sure as hell know what it is to have yourself scared out of your pants on a trip to smash your ego into the ground though. I can totally understand what that means.
Some people say it can be good or not as bad as what happened to me, but to me it was like my worst nightmare. Too much truth is too much to handle.

I still learned greatly from it and value shrooms as a fun, spiritual and psychiatric tool.

I have tripped a ton of times on a few different things.
One thing I notice is it's always a bit different even while kinda the same.

The other night I found out how bad it sucks to get something into your eye while tripping.
I never found out what it was really but the concept of it and the fact that something got in my eye pissed me off for hours.

All kinds of outside experiences can play a role in what is going on with your trips or "what needs to happen for you to learn and advance".
 
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The time I died on DMT it was all black for the whole trip besides one flash of wicked things crawling on me really quick and then black again. Then when it was over I was shown a rainbow with stars flying out of the middle of it like I passed some sort of test. And a pyramid hand sign.

I could relate that to like an ego death or ego loss. Complete darkness and struggle and heavy breathing and "bad trip" feeling. I was shown the abyss. It's dark in there.
 
I believe that typical psychedelics "psilocybin, lsd, etc." are about birth, transformation, a new beginning, etc. I mean , while on shrooms i typically experience great epiphanies about life, whats important, etc. Ego death does occur, but thats not really death in the true sense. the ego "I" becomes nonexistant or altered, but thats not really death. there is still a recording of information by the mind, the mind still functions, just not with the entity "I". you are still conscious, just in a very different way. you kind of merge with the universe. In death, there is no consciousness, there is no awareness, there is a separation from you and the real world,. ego death is helpful in the "soul transformation" that psychedelics (or even heavy meditation (i have not yet been able to reach ego death while sober, but some people apparantly can do so as part of certain religious meditation rituals)). Transformation is more like birth than death.

I would say that the dissociative psychedelics (dxm , pcp, ketamine) are more like death. For example, on a high dose of dxm, i may feel this strong separation from all my senses and from the real world. going outside on dxm feels like i walked outside in a post-apocalyptic afterlife like world. you are aware of your senses, but there is that separation, almost like you are half dead, like your soul is halfway out of the body. Its a numbing separation. Unlike psychedelics , which tend to brighten colors
for me , and make me enjoy patterns stuff in the outside world (hence, psychedelics feel like the enhance the senses, rather than numb them) and be more introspective about life and stuff , DXM tend to make everything deafened or numbed. there are visual distortions, but they seem to be related to this dissociation from the senses. I have done 3 regular psychedelics, but the only dissociative i have tried is dxm. However, from what i have read; the other 2 common dissociatives (ketamine and pcp) are even more intense with this dissociative effect.
 
"Psychedelics are about life, not death" to me,=

glass half full/ half empty...

partly cloudy/parrtly sunny..

tomato/ tomatoe... :)

life is just as mucha part of death as death is a part of life.. in fact there are studies done w terminally ill patients that use LSD as a tool in therapy to come to terms w death, through living their life( there was just a good segement on the Psych episode on Drgs,inc.)

. its all part of the circle of life <3
 
Ismene said:
Do you think it is all purely down to Tim Leary and people thinking that unless they say "I had an ego-death brah" people won't take them seriously?
Click to expand...

yeah, good point. eh, leary serves as a subcultural icon and i suppose did some good works, but there was alot more to him that waas not enitrely positive or accurate- i personally, although reading some of his works, take his words w a grain of salt. i think ppl like Kesey and Shulgin play alot more meaningful roles in the psychedelic subculture.

but when it comes down to it, they and we are all just human beings- some w more experience than others... none that are perfect or know everything there is to know about psych exploration. in other owrds, im sure we all have good points to make that even him or anyone else could learn from...some just have a louder voice and are heard more than others, idk, im not sayin i have anything against the guy, but the more i learn about him, the more his credibilty drops from my POV.
 
i really like the name of the dpt thread "life and death are but one" ;) i think it could apply to all psychedelics
psychedelics are not about life or death or any one thing altough you could use them in a specific direction they could be used in whatever direction you chose
 
!!4iV4HF9R34g said:
Psychedelics are about what you make of them.
Click to expand...
absolutely.

these substances are tools which are used in different ways by different people. as long as nobody is being harmed, who's to say what's the 'right and wrong' (for want of better terms) to use them. for some they're about death. for some they're about life. for some they're about deep, spiritual introspection. for others they're about getting fucked up. suggesting that one or the other is more important (for want of a better term) sounds like drug snobbery to me.

on the subject of death, i think the reason that the subject gets so much attention - especially in this context - is that, for some, the most life-affirming thing of all is facing death head on. i echo the others who say that life and death go hand in hand so considering one is very much considering the other.

alasdair
 
With almost every psychedelic experience that I have had and thought about life and death I have come to the conclusion that we can be anything that we want to be but that we should enjoy every moment of life that we have.

With dissasociatives however, I have almost always come to the conclusion that death is the next step and the answer, that death is what we are meant to do.

I combine the two to give me a view that I am not afraid of death as I am pretty sure that it is the next step and is not the end but that I will enjoy every moment of this life that I can before then.

I'm sure there is lots more that I will learn, but those are the two fundamental things about life and death that psychedelics and dissasociatives have helped me realise.
 
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