Just to say I totally agree with this. I'd go so far as to say that it's the directly experiential, emotional - even downright hedonistic - side of tripping that I've gained most from. The analytical and philosophical srs bznz side of tripping definitely has great value but I find that more to be the icing on the cake if anything. It's fun. But I don't necessarily feel it does me great good. Or certainly not by itself anyway. It's the more sensational aspects that I feel have done me most good - the stuff that can't really be put into words or analysed but simply experienced.
Even when it comes to the "serious" stuff I find I tend to need to have it backed up by direct feeling before it clicks with me. I can ponder the mysteries of cosmology and particle physics as much as I like but get nowhere until I can feel it directly, and to do so generally needs triggering with music or other direct physical stimulus. Does for me anyway. Pondering alone feels kinda empty to me, I really do need to have a lil hedonism to make it all gel for me.
Yeah you're absolutely right. It reminds me of a point I made earlier in the thread. I was speaking in general terms at the time, but now that I think about it I actually have an excellent example from my own life. In my first post in the thread I wrote this:
Humans are good at rationally analyzing things and concluding they should follow a logically sound path out of the metaphorical woods, and then promptly going and doing the irrational, heat of the moment thing that is counter to that rational approach. So I theorize that by allowing emotions, negative or positive, to be part and parcel of any attempt at rational analysis, we may more effectively plot a course we can – or more accurately that we will – actually follow. Emotions are often far more powerful as stimulatory or motivational mechanisms than level-headed 'rational thinking'.
The example from my own life has to do with my onetime massive cocaine addiction. I had been doing it for about six months, and thanks to having a rich girlfriend and a rich best friend, who later died from a heroin overdose (such a waste, he had the most intrinsic human potential of anybody I've ever known), we spent over $22000 in that six month period. For anybody who calls me out for dicksizing on that statement, I would counter that dicksizing is an attempt to pose things in a 'positive', bragging way in a misguided attempt to appear impressive, whereas I speak of that much spending on coke with shame and utter disgust, and anyone who may find such a figure impressive likely has their priorities very much out of order. I mention it only because it's relevant to demonstrating exactly how far gone and fucked up I was at the time. Anyway I was doing it every day, and I think you can easily picture how much of a physical and psychological mess I was as a result.
So eventually – some time in the sixth month of this madness – I rationally realized that I knew I needed to stop, that I was abusing the stuff to a massive degree, and that it was quite literally destroying me as a person. And so I planned to quit, but my emotions overruled any logical conclusion that could be drawn about my cocaine addiction, and I kept using. Luckily, somehow around the beginning of the seventh straight month I just broke, and I suddenly realized I wanted to stop. And that want was a deeply, viscerally emotional sort of want. When this finally came about I quit, and quit over the course of about a week.
I did relapse probably about five times in the year after I quit, but by relapse I mean that I did a line, no more than that, because it seems my body simply rejects cocaine entirely now, going straight from sober to anxious, paranoid, and coming down with no high in between. Other than those four or five lines I haven't touched the stuff since. While I moved to heroin upon quitting coke and have been a daily opiate user since then, I am still incredibly proud to say I'm now almost eight years clean of cocaine.
The point is that this is a real world example of how rational decision making fails to change behavior when it isn't backed up by emotion, or worse still when your emotional feelings on the subject are actually fully contrary to your logical conclusions as was the case in my cocaine addiction, no matter how serious the situation and accordingly how strong the immediacy and importance those rational conclusions may possess. Sure, it's a truism that 'you can't quit until you want to', but that's ambiguous and not fully true because there's no distinction made between wanting to quit in an abstract, rational way, and wanting to quit with every fiber of your being. There's a huge difference there, and that disconnect is subsequently reflected in your behavior.
And to wrap this up and connect it back to psychedelics, everybody that trips knows that tripping sort of turns up the volume on a great many of the 'subsystems' of the psychological aspect of our being. Your senses are enhanced, your thoughts speed by more quickly, the associative properties of our minds (linking seemingly distinct / dissimilar concepts) are increased, and most of all our emotions are inflated, becoming more powerful than they are sober. Naturally, if emotions are already so important as to be the key to backing up our rational decisions with actual action, then if emotions are increased in quantity and intensity on psychedelics they should be recognized as being that much more important to being capable of actually behaving in accordance with the decisions we make and willing ourselves to stay the course when difficult things have to be done in order to make use of whatever insight into flaws in our character we may derive while tripping.
Oh, and just to make a passing attempt at the topic, I'm a big fan of "This too shall pass". If I do happen to be heading into dark places I tend to repeat that which seems to help. Also a big fan distraction. If alone that tends to mean music - or changing music - or often watching summat amusing. Kids TV and cartoons usually works a treat for me. Anything funny really. Or anything thought-provoking too - am an absolute sucker for a good documentary on just about anything really but sciencey stuff especially. Nature docs are also usually a winner for me too.
A tripping mind is such a flexible thing. So very easily flicked from one thing to another.
The art and science of becoming experienced with psychedelics could very well be described as learning how to flick your tripping mind from one subject to another willingly, under your conscious direction. One of the best defensive mechanisms for keeping things under control should things get stormy is to remind oneself that not only shall whatever is happening – negative looping perhaps – pass, but furthermore that the psychedelic state itself shall pass.
Life is full of ups and downs. If psychedelics enhance emotional content, then we should expect that these experiences too will likely contain negative content at one point or another as well. I'd say that as far as therapeutic potential goes, more than half the battle is learning simply not to shrink away from these episodes when they arise. Once that potential barrier is overcome – perhaps only after it is overcome – may we gain access to any of the insights or realizations that psychedelics can unlock, an obvious precondition for any attempt to try to put into practice behavioral alterations in the pursuit of self-improvement or healing.
Isn't dualism awesome! Abrahamic and Oriental all the way for me in my reality and awesome use of what they say is now a politically incorrect term!
