rhinogrey
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2009
- Messages
- 45
I’m not anti-drug. I’m very pro-drug. I think all drugs should be made legal, regulated, and available for purchase from reliable retail vendors. In this case, any time you would make a purchase, you’d receive with your chemical an information sheet showing you precisely what you’re getting, the chemical structure, the dosage, the purity, etc. This alone would eliminate massive amounts of drug disaster stories since many of these horror stories are caused simply because the user has been forced to buy from underground markets, where there is no reliable way of knowing what you’re getting without simply putting the drug into your system and seeing what happens.
I also disagree with some people who think we should make psychedelic drugs available for research purposes, but not to the general public. The fact of the matter is that acid is fun, or at least wildly intriguing, and people are going to keep doing it outside of research settings. I can’t imagine a worse setting for a psychedelic trip than being in some research lab hooked up to a bunch of machinery, or being monitored by doctors. We’ll never learn what we need to know from these chemicals that way. I don’t think more psychological-biological research is what we need with regards to these chemicals. Even if we can stabilize models of their activity on the brain and nervous system, such knowledge will never have anything to say about the remarkably polyvalent first-person effects, and how much those effects vary from person to person, from trip to trip. I’d trust a shaman in Peru to dose me with Ayahuasca long before I’d engage in any laboratory research.
I do think first person phenomenological research is necessary, from people who are able, willing, and psychologically healthy. The only problem is when we start treating drugs as ends in themselves, and not as tools for research in self-knowledge, etc.
Why is that? Because it takes work to integrate psychedelic experiences. It takes work to change oneself for the better, and ingesting chemicals is only one step in the process.
I myself have had life-altering experiences on psychedelic chemicals—many of them. I’ve tasted the cleanest acid, smoked the finest green, and I would never take that back. I was a fast-food junky until my first mushroom trip. During that trip, I was told, not in so many words, but rather in a unique and uncanny kind of language which takes up the central nervous system during tryptamine experiences (see McKenna), that I needed to eat healthier. The mushrooms were telling me something that I needed to know. And I did it. I changed. For the next two years I didn’t eat any fast food. I stopped drinking sodas, and to this day won’t touch the stuff. My diet consisted of quinoa and sardines for a couple years. Though eventually I expanded my diet and even started indulging in fast food every once in a while, I was changed for life. I had begun to fashion a lifestyle of health, and I knew that something important had happened. I felt for the first time that I could substantially change myself and my reality, and I had the motivation to do so.
I first realized that I wanted to study and pursue philosophy seriously while I was out of my gourd on mescaline and watching a video made by Timothy Leary. I was enrolled as a screenwriting major at University at the time. The next day, I changed my major to philosophy and never looked back. I’ve had great success with this venture. I now get paid to do philosophy, and love my job. It has taught me in many ways to be more intuitive, to trust myself and act on my gut instincts. And, let's face it, there's a lot of philosophers out there who you just can't understand until you've been down the rabbit hole one way or another.
My wife and I had some unbelievable mind-melding experiences on LSD. There was one uncanny moment that I’ll never forget in which I properly read her mind. I had a vision of precisely what was in her mind at the time. To this day, we often do not need to speak to know what the other is thinking. I know this kind of thing is possible without LSD, but I’m also quite convinced that our LSD experiences together made the connection stronger.
One time my house was robbed. They stole the two material possessions I cared about, my Parker guitar and my Macbook Pro laptop. I was fine for a few months, but after a while I began to realize that being robbed had had an effect on me. I began to get paranoid and anxious that it would happen again. All day at work, at home, I was worried that someone was going to rob me. I didn’t open the door to solicitors, afraid that they were trying to stake out the joint. One night I got super high on ketamine. I was literally able to isolate the paranoia I was having about this issue. ‘It’ –the paranoid feeling— looked to me at the time like a ball of energy, golden, fluctuating like a ghost. It came from my solar plexus, and I discharged it out of my system, watched it float away. And I tell you, I never once felt that anxiety again.
I also just had some flat-out awesome and fun times on drugs. Music writes itself for me in my head when I’m on mushrooms. I’ve had amazing hallucinations that I never thought possible, feelings of ecstasy. It was acid that taught me how to laugh—how to really laugh, an effortless laugh from opening up the diaphragm. The highest I’ve ever been was a laughing fit on acid, the entire world became a spiral like some MC Escher painting and I just kept going up and up and up. It was almost scary to realize that the spiral upward never ended of necessity. Some downright transcendent moments at music festivals and raves, Eleusian mysteries in mass crowds all mind-melding into one organism. It was acid that taught me how to dance. And that’s no small feat—dancing is important, and always has been, for human civilization.
But there were dark times as well. The time at Joshua Tree when I combined acid and mushrooms and felt the entire desert sky collapse in on me, a kind of cosmic claustrophobia which I hope I never have to experience again.
The problem with drugs, like with almost anything, is that the youth won’t listen to the Elders. The Elders know, and they have experienced. “Don’t’ say I never warned you/ When your train gets lost,” Bob Dylan once sang. Indeed, those of us who have frequented the rabbit hole understand exactly what it means for one’s train to get lost—and it’s terrifying. It’s not something that should be romanticized.
There was a time period where I was taking psychedelic trips an average of twice a month. Not so bad, but still too much. When you trip frequently, trips take on a strange character. You’re tripping, but you’re used to it. It’s not the same. You feel stronger depersonalization, less euphoria. You begin to question yourself during the trip, to wonder if you’re even tripping at all, only to be taken up again by the drug the next moment. You begin to want to be tripping while you’re sober, and wanting to be sober while you trip. It’s a mirror world, intoxicating at first but ultimately empty, like the call of a Siren.
But I was aware of myself enough through all this to roll back when the time came. Terrence McKenna wisely advises psychedelic trips about 3-4x a year. That’s enough to stay “psychedelic” in your normal life, without having the detrimental effects of frequent tripping. After one particularly strange experience on methoxetamine at a dance club, I realized that I had lost track of the reason I loved psychedelics—for self-knowledge and spiritual development—and was using them just to get high. I decided to heed McKenna’s advice. And with great results. I began holding myself to it—I only allowed myself a trip once every three months at most. And every trip was happy, ecstatic, exactly what I needed out of the drug. It recharged me, energized me. The next few weeks colors would be brighter, everything seemed possible, I felt one step ahead. And this is exactly what psychedelics are good for.
But it takes work to actually enact the realizations you have. I’ve had friends who have had the same kinds of psychedelic realizations, only to be too lazy to act on them when they come down. They think the high should do all the work. But let’s face it, getting high is not work, no matter how scientific you’re being about it. Getting high is just that—getting high. Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s important to get high. I think human culture and civilization is dependent in some strange way upon people getting high. But the high isn’t something you can chase. You simply can’t get high on psychedelic drugs every day. There’s an inbuilt mechanism against it. You have to take about double what you did the previous day for the same high. After more than two or three days of tripping in a row, you’re just wasting good acid.
But it was never the really powerful psychedelic drugs that cost me anything. The great thing about an acid trip is that if you take enough, you don’t need to do anymore the next day. Don’t want to. It was the daily cannabis smoking. It’s a lot easier to get high on cannabis every day. But the fact of the matter is that cannabis is a psychedelic drug, and should be treated like one. It certainly isn’t a strong psychedelic, like the tryptamines LSD, psilocybin, DMT, etc. but it’s a mild psychedelic none-the-less. And though it can be a cure for the right kinds of anxiety, it’s also very damn good at enflaming anxious tendencies in some people. Keeping cannabis to no more than once per week is advisable. I know there’s a certain romanticism to smoking herb every day. But in the long run it simply doesn’t do you any good. It can very easily lead to strong feelings of depersonalization and dissociation. This further can lead to a mistrust of losing control of one’s body. Then, when it comes time to breakthrough on DMT or ketamine, you're too afraid. The fact is: If you’re having dissociative feelings when you’re not high, it’s time to roll back.
The reason I’m saying this is because I’m sick of people having to quit cold turkey because they didn’t know where to draw the line, and then go on to pronounce on the evils and worthlessness of drugs. The alternative is to continue using them moderately, and understand their power and the responsibility that comes with that power. Rather than looking back at “that time in my life when I was irresponsible and used drugs,” and re-start the entire ridiculous cycle of prohibition, misinformation, misunderstanding.
Look, I’m not saying don’t do drugs. I encourage experimentation for those in the right state of mind and life. But please heed the old warning—roll back when you need to. Be aware of yourself. Be aware of what’s happening in your mind and your body. Exercise, eat healthy. Listen to the elders who have come before you, take their advice. Work to enact the psychedelic realizations you have, or else they really are mere hallucinations, as the AA people would have it.
I also disagree with some people who think we should make psychedelic drugs available for research purposes, but not to the general public. The fact of the matter is that acid is fun, or at least wildly intriguing, and people are going to keep doing it outside of research settings. I can’t imagine a worse setting for a psychedelic trip than being in some research lab hooked up to a bunch of machinery, or being monitored by doctors. We’ll never learn what we need to know from these chemicals that way. I don’t think more psychological-biological research is what we need with regards to these chemicals. Even if we can stabilize models of their activity on the brain and nervous system, such knowledge will never have anything to say about the remarkably polyvalent first-person effects, and how much those effects vary from person to person, from trip to trip. I’d trust a shaman in Peru to dose me with Ayahuasca long before I’d engage in any laboratory research.
I do think first person phenomenological research is necessary, from people who are able, willing, and psychologically healthy. The only problem is when we start treating drugs as ends in themselves, and not as tools for research in self-knowledge, etc.
Why is that? Because it takes work to integrate psychedelic experiences. It takes work to change oneself for the better, and ingesting chemicals is only one step in the process.
I myself have had life-altering experiences on psychedelic chemicals—many of them. I’ve tasted the cleanest acid, smoked the finest green, and I would never take that back. I was a fast-food junky until my first mushroom trip. During that trip, I was told, not in so many words, but rather in a unique and uncanny kind of language which takes up the central nervous system during tryptamine experiences (see McKenna), that I needed to eat healthier. The mushrooms were telling me something that I needed to know. And I did it. I changed. For the next two years I didn’t eat any fast food. I stopped drinking sodas, and to this day won’t touch the stuff. My diet consisted of quinoa and sardines for a couple years. Though eventually I expanded my diet and even started indulging in fast food every once in a while, I was changed for life. I had begun to fashion a lifestyle of health, and I knew that something important had happened. I felt for the first time that I could substantially change myself and my reality, and I had the motivation to do so.
I first realized that I wanted to study and pursue philosophy seriously while I was out of my gourd on mescaline and watching a video made by Timothy Leary. I was enrolled as a screenwriting major at University at the time. The next day, I changed my major to philosophy and never looked back. I’ve had great success with this venture. I now get paid to do philosophy, and love my job. It has taught me in many ways to be more intuitive, to trust myself and act on my gut instincts. And, let's face it, there's a lot of philosophers out there who you just can't understand until you've been down the rabbit hole one way or another.
My wife and I had some unbelievable mind-melding experiences on LSD. There was one uncanny moment that I’ll never forget in which I properly read her mind. I had a vision of precisely what was in her mind at the time. To this day, we often do not need to speak to know what the other is thinking. I know this kind of thing is possible without LSD, but I’m also quite convinced that our LSD experiences together made the connection stronger.
One time my house was robbed. They stole the two material possessions I cared about, my Parker guitar and my Macbook Pro laptop. I was fine for a few months, but after a while I began to realize that being robbed had had an effect on me. I began to get paranoid and anxious that it would happen again. All day at work, at home, I was worried that someone was going to rob me. I didn’t open the door to solicitors, afraid that they were trying to stake out the joint. One night I got super high on ketamine. I was literally able to isolate the paranoia I was having about this issue. ‘It’ –the paranoid feeling— looked to me at the time like a ball of energy, golden, fluctuating like a ghost. It came from my solar plexus, and I discharged it out of my system, watched it float away. And I tell you, I never once felt that anxiety again.
I also just had some flat-out awesome and fun times on drugs. Music writes itself for me in my head when I’m on mushrooms. I’ve had amazing hallucinations that I never thought possible, feelings of ecstasy. It was acid that taught me how to laugh—how to really laugh, an effortless laugh from opening up the diaphragm. The highest I’ve ever been was a laughing fit on acid, the entire world became a spiral like some MC Escher painting and I just kept going up and up and up. It was almost scary to realize that the spiral upward never ended of necessity. Some downright transcendent moments at music festivals and raves, Eleusian mysteries in mass crowds all mind-melding into one organism. It was acid that taught me how to dance. And that’s no small feat—dancing is important, and always has been, for human civilization.
But there were dark times as well. The time at Joshua Tree when I combined acid and mushrooms and felt the entire desert sky collapse in on me, a kind of cosmic claustrophobia which I hope I never have to experience again.
The problem with drugs, like with almost anything, is that the youth won’t listen to the Elders. The Elders know, and they have experienced. “Don’t’ say I never warned you/ When your train gets lost,” Bob Dylan once sang. Indeed, those of us who have frequented the rabbit hole understand exactly what it means for one’s train to get lost—and it’s terrifying. It’s not something that should be romanticized.
There was a time period where I was taking psychedelic trips an average of twice a month. Not so bad, but still too much. When you trip frequently, trips take on a strange character. You’re tripping, but you’re used to it. It’s not the same. You feel stronger depersonalization, less euphoria. You begin to question yourself during the trip, to wonder if you’re even tripping at all, only to be taken up again by the drug the next moment. You begin to want to be tripping while you’re sober, and wanting to be sober while you trip. It’s a mirror world, intoxicating at first but ultimately empty, like the call of a Siren.
But I was aware of myself enough through all this to roll back when the time came. Terrence McKenna wisely advises psychedelic trips about 3-4x a year. That’s enough to stay “psychedelic” in your normal life, without having the detrimental effects of frequent tripping. After one particularly strange experience on methoxetamine at a dance club, I realized that I had lost track of the reason I loved psychedelics—for self-knowledge and spiritual development—and was using them just to get high. I decided to heed McKenna’s advice. And with great results. I began holding myself to it—I only allowed myself a trip once every three months at most. And every trip was happy, ecstatic, exactly what I needed out of the drug. It recharged me, energized me. The next few weeks colors would be brighter, everything seemed possible, I felt one step ahead. And this is exactly what psychedelics are good for.
But it takes work to actually enact the realizations you have. I’ve had friends who have had the same kinds of psychedelic realizations, only to be too lazy to act on them when they come down. They think the high should do all the work. But let’s face it, getting high is not work, no matter how scientific you’re being about it. Getting high is just that—getting high. Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s important to get high. I think human culture and civilization is dependent in some strange way upon people getting high. But the high isn’t something you can chase. You simply can’t get high on psychedelic drugs every day. There’s an inbuilt mechanism against it. You have to take about double what you did the previous day for the same high. After more than two or three days of tripping in a row, you’re just wasting good acid.
But it was never the really powerful psychedelic drugs that cost me anything. The great thing about an acid trip is that if you take enough, you don’t need to do anymore the next day. Don’t want to. It was the daily cannabis smoking. It’s a lot easier to get high on cannabis every day. But the fact of the matter is that cannabis is a psychedelic drug, and should be treated like one. It certainly isn’t a strong psychedelic, like the tryptamines LSD, psilocybin, DMT, etc. but it’s a mild psychedelic none-the-less. And though it can be a cure for the right kinds of anxiety, it’s also very damn good at enflaming anxious tendencies in some people. Keeping cannabis to no more than once per week is advisable. I know there’s a certain romanticism to smoking herb every day. But in the long run it simply doesn’t do you any good. It can very easily lead to strong feelings of depersonalization and dissociation. This further can lead to a mistrust of losing control of one’s body. Then, when it comes time to breakthrough on DMT or ketamine, you're too afraid. The fact is: If you’re having dissociative feelings when you’re not high, it’s time to roll back.
The reason I’m saying this is because I’m sick of people having to quit cold turkey because they didn’t know where to draw the line, and then go on to pronounce on the evils and worthlessness of drugs. The alternative is to continue using them moderately, and understand their power and the responsibility that comes with that power. Rather than looking back at “that time in my life when I was irresponsible and used drugs,” and re-start the entire ridiculous cycle of prohibition, misinformation, misunderstanding.
Look, I’m not saying don’t do drugs. I encourage experimentation for those in the right state of mind and life. But please heed the old warning—roll back when you need to. Be aware of yourself. Be aware of what’s happening in your mind and your body. Exercise, eat healthy. Listen to the elders who have come before you, take their advice. Work to enact the psychedelic realizations you have, or else they really are mere hallucinations, as the AA people would have it.
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