[Bad Trip Subthread] Have You Ever Had a Bad Trip?
- Thread starter Krowsnose
- Start date
God I am beginning to wonder how much bunk acid people really are taking.
Fight or flight? Seriously?
cosmic charlie
Bluelight Crew
You really need to stop talking about bunk tabs its annoying , You didn't take it , How could you know what it was. Just because you get bunk shit doesnt mean everyone else does. Most blotters sold as LSD are LSD in my experience .
Theres just so much negativity in your posts
Why ?
You really need to stop talking about bunk tabs its annoying , You didn't take it , How could you know what it was. Just because you get bunk shit doesnt mean everyone else does. Most blotters sold as LSD are LSD in my experience .
Theres just so much negativity in your posts
Why ?
It's not negativity, it's just anger knowing how much bunk L gets circulated.
Everytime I hear about LSD and violence/people getting knives ect. it just doesn't add up.
cosmic charlie
Bluelight Crew
Ive seen people totally lose their shit on good LSD
That me and my friends tripped off many many times
It's the person not the drug
That me and my friends tripped off many many times
It's the person not the drug
Trilobite
Bluelighter
I've never had a bad trip, although I've only taken P. cubensis and LSD as far as standard psychedelics go. I even love Salvia!
The closest thing I've had to a "bad" trip is having taken too much (2 tabs of good acid + 125mg of MDMA), and kind of losing touch with reality. That could have turned bad if something happened, but I usually plan my trips so that set and setting are controlled. But really, LSD in particular puts my brain into a happy place. Even once when I was surrounded by chaos (several friends having personal crises on 1/3 of the amount I took), it didn't faze me at all. I was sympathetic, and tried to console them, but how could I possibly get upset when there are rainbow unicorns dancing on the ceiling? :D
MDMA on the other hand has given me a couple difficult experiences. I find that it opens me up more. While this is desirable if in the right situation, allowing me to connect on a deeper level with people, it also leaves me very vulnerable emotionally, which can be devastating under certain circumstances.
The closest thing I've had to a "bad" trip is having taken too much (2 tabs of good acid + 125mg of MDMA), and kind of losing touch with reality. That could have turned bad if something happened, but I usually plan my trips so that set and setting are controlled. But really, LSD in particular puts my brain into a happy place. Even once when I was surrounded by chaos (several friends having personal crises on 1/3 of the amount I took), it didn't faze me at all. I was sympathetic, and tried to console them, but how could I possibly get upset when there are rainbow unicorns dancing on the ceiling? :D
MDMA on the other hand has given me a couple difficult experiences. I find that it opens me up more. While this is desirable if in the right situation, allowing me to connect on a deeper level with people, it also leaves me very vulnerable emotionally, which can be devastating under certain circumstances.
daysonatrain
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2009
- Messages
- 1,371
no bad trips, most difficult would certainly be salvia.
dread
Bluelighter
How is it that every time someone has a bad trip you automaticly assume "DOx"...
Face it, LSD can cause bad trips, and some people can have really good ones on DOx. People are different. And like Charlie said
jam uh weezy
Bluelighter
no bad, but very difficult.
when i was 16, i took 2 grams of shrooms. it wasn't really reality-crushing or anything, but i was in a shitty mind state to begin with and had no business taking psychs like that. I ended up hiding in my room just crying for like an hour thinking about my life.
when i was 16, i took 2 grams of shrooms. it wasn't really reality-crushing or anything, but i was in a shitty mind state to begin with and had no business taking psychs like that. I ended up hiding in my room just crying for like an hour thinking about my life.
I've had bad trips before on LSD (or DOX, still not sure), high plateau DXM, and salvia. The worst of these was salvia. 40x- became an object that didn't know what it was, lost all grip on reality, and wal stuck in a loop (physically). On LSD, I had a lot of bad thoughts, mostly self-deprecating and don't remember a lot of it, and on DXM I thought I was dying. Although I did have a very strong and beautiful appreciation of life and the little grip I still had on it.
I understand bad trips, but I've always had the good sense to just stay in one place! There's been quite a few posts of people having a bad trip and running around screaming and getting violent. I've never felt the need to do anything like that! I actually make note to lay down and move as little as possible if things get bad(on salvia I heard a voice telling me on a loop: don't move!). Even when I'm having a good trip, I try not to stray too far from a place I know is safe and authority free. Maybe I've just been lucky that I've hung on to that thought during the rough parts, but I just don't understand how/why people feel the need to get violent or crazy.
I understand bad trips, but I've always had the good sense to just stay in one place! There's been quite a few posts of people having a bad trip and running around screaming and getting violent. I've never felt the need to do anything like that! I actually make note to lay down and move as little as possible if things get bad(on salvia I heard a voice telling me on a loop: don't move!). Even when I'm having a good trip, I try not to stray too far from a place I know is safe and authority free. Maybe I've just been lucky that I've hung on to that thought during the rough parts, but I just don't understand how/why people feel the need to get violent or crazy.
eViLChEf
Bluelighter
Sorry if this is a little long but, Back in '89 my friends and I were just out of high school. My girlfriend's dad was out to sea so we had run of her house and a group of us all ate two hits of "where the wild things are" blotter. A few hours in, a couple of dip-shits from the neighborhood show up drunk and started causing problems and wouldn't leave at the end of the night untill we did. So (this was when I was young and "stupid" so don't trip and drive) I hopped into my truck with my two friends and left my girlfriends house watching in the rear view mirror for the dip-shits to follow. My two friends, well on their way into pretty intense trip started to rib me about the two dudes still at my girlfriends house and in an act of anger and late teen invincibility I slammed on the brakes of my truck and slid onto the shoulder. I stepped out of the truck and leaned on the bed looking down the road for headlights and realized that I was starting to peak on some pretty clean, intense blotter. Right as I was starting to get into the bushes morphing in the yellow green glow of the street light I noticed headlights trailing up the street. Too my utter, utter dismay it was a cop. As soon as he saw the truck and ruts in the shoulder he lit us up, my friends still sitting in the truck bolted upright and my whole life instantaneous stopped and flashed before my eyes. So, long story longer the cop asks and I explained the situation and was completely honest 
and the cop says"Well would you mind waiting in the back of the car while I run your licence?" Heart attack #2. As he cuffs and stuffs my 6'3" ass into the back of the cruiser he says "Keep your feet off my tanks" He was a SCUBA rescue cop and had his gear in the back of his car. So there I was in the limbo hell of tripping balls in the back of a cop car, busted dead to rights with two dudes probably back at my girlfriends throwing her on the rotisserie, my two friends wondering wether to leave their bro hanging and run like hell, and this cop has me cuffed and holding my feet off the floor. heart attack #3 The dispatcher comes back on the radio and says my information doesn't exist in their records. WTF???? My heart sank, the cop who if didn't know what was up at that point must have eaten paint chips, looked at me in the back seat and said "Sometimes the computers go down, but if not we're going for a ride" Just as he finished sealing my fate another call comes over the radio "Accident 4300 Block of Hodges Blvd. All units respond, injury and death" At this point I actually thought I was hallucinating the next five minutes. The cop looks back and said"where do you live?" I was like "By the time I hit third gear I'll be in my drive way" and with that.........THE COP UNCUFFED ME AND LET ME GO!
I hopped back in my truck freaking the absolute fuck out, wondering if I was still in the cop car, wondering if it was a set up, dreading the prospect of pulling back onto the road in front of the cop. And then I looked over at my two friends, the same two friends that had been sitting in a truck, tripping balls, with the driver cuffed and stuffed for fifteen minutes. Thats when my trip changed again. Their eyes were as big as hubcaps and I got quite a laugh from this as I pulled away from the curb. Just before we got to my neighborhood we saw life flight landing in the street and every cop for thirty miles surrounding a pretty horrible one car accident. I can't lie- it was beautiful! The helecopter landing with all those blue and red lights from the cruisers..WOW! So once again in a decision made by a dick strong teen on drugs we should park my truck at my house and watch the scene. So we park the truck and walked the quarter mile back at the scene was like something out of ER with all the lights and cops and paramedics and such. As I stood there and watched,I tried to reconcile in my own mind the intensity of what was before me and what was in my head. Long beautiful trails and auditory hallucinations mixed with the horror of the paramedics tugging on a dead body, wedged in the twisted charred nest that used to be a car. Heart attack #4 as I'm totally in the moment, I notice my friend standing at the scene (we had been a good 100 yrds. away) directly behind two cops, one of which was the cop that cuffed me earlier. The cops turn around, words were exchanged and we ended up running like hell. We finally got back to my house, fucked up, out of breath, confused, tripping, and the phone rang. It was my other girlfriend....."Where the fuck have YOU been?" It was the worst/best trip of my life
and the cop says"Well would you mind waiting in the back of the car while I run your licence?" Heart attack #2. As he cuffs and stuffs my 6'3" ass into the back of the cruiser he says "Keep your feet off my tanks" He was a SCUBA rescue cop and had his gear in the back of his car. So there I was in the limbo hell of tripping balls in the back of a cop car, busted dead to rights with two dudes probably back at my girlfriends throwing her on the rotisserie, my two friends wondering wether to leave their bro hanging and run like hell, and this cop has me cuffed and holding my feet off the floor. heart attack #3 The dispatcher comes back on the radio and says my information doesn't exist in their records. WTF???? My heart sank, the cop who if didn't know what was up at that point must have eaten paint chips, looked at me in the back seat and said "Sometimes the computers go down, but if not we're going for a ride" Just as he finished sealing my fate another call comes over the radio "Accident 4300 Block of Hodges Blvd. All units respond, injury and death" At this point I actually thought I was hallucinating the next five minutes. The cop looks back and said"where do you live?" I was like "By the time I hit third gear I'll be in my drive way" and with that.........THE COP UNCUFFED ME AND LET ME GO!I hopped back in my truck freaking the absolute fuck out, wondering if I was still in the cop car, wondering if it was a set up, dreading the prospect of pulling back onto the road in front of the cop. And then I looked over at my two friends, the same two friends that had been sitting in a truck, tripping balls, with the driver cuffed and stuffed for fifteen minutes. Thats when my trip changed again. Their eyes were as big as hubcaps and I got quite a laugh from this as I pulled away from the curb. Just before we got to my neighborhood we saw life flight landing in the street and every cop for thirty miles surrounding a pretty horrible one car accident. I can't lie- it was beautiful! The helecopter landing with all those blue and red lights from the cruisers..WOW! So once again in a decision made by a dick strong teen on drugs we should park my truck at my house and watch the scene. So we park the truck and walked the quarter mile back at the scene was like something out of ER with all the lights and cops and paramedics and such. As I stood there and watched,I tried to reconcile in my own mind the intensity of what was before me and what was in my head. Long beautiful trails and auditory hallucinations mixed with the horror of the paramedics tugging on a dead body, wedged in the twisted charred nest that used to be a car. Heart attack #4 as I'm totally in the moment, I notice my friend standing at the scene (we had been a good 100 yrds. away) directly behind two cops, one of which was the cop that cuffed me earlier. The cops turn around, words were exchanged and we ended up running like hell. We finally got back to my house, fucked up, out of breath, confused, tripping, and the phone rang. It was my other girlfriend....."Where the fuck have YOU been?" It was the worst/best trip of my life
PLUR2000
Bluelighter
Keep some xanax and or kpins on hand... just my 2cents from a decade of avoiding bad times on drugs.! OH AND SET AND SETTING really matter, not just in hippy books!
bunnyhentman
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2009
- Messages
- 344
Sorry this one is really long too…
Up until recently I thought I had never had a "bad trip" -- sure, there were moments on acid where I experienced total devolution and became protoplasmic slime, or drug experiences I didn't enjoy (like being chastised by thin blue aliens on salivia); but nothing I didn't feel gave me an experience worth having.
But recently I realized this wasn't true at all, my first drug experience was an extremely bad trip. So bad I never even classified it with any other psychoactive.
When I was 13 my dad's best friend, who thought he was something of a shaman, told me parents he wanted to take me on a vision-quest type "coming of age" experience. We were going to go out to the middle of the desert at night (on my 13th birthday) and smoke jimson weed so we could identify my totem animal. My mom had done this with him, and my dad was a classic 60's era acid head so this sounded like a great idea to them.
I'd never taken recreational drugs at all at that age, and never even considered it. But I'd seen people tripping out my whole life. I was way more excited at the prospect of finding my magic wand that night (part of the calendar of events my dad's friend planned). For context, this was a guy I'd known since I was 3 and when I was 5 broke the news to me that Mary was artificially inseminated by aliens from the future, so that made Jesus a virgin-born cyborg.
We drove out to the desert the night before my birthday and set up a campfire near his car. He did some probably very inauthentic chanting type stuff, and then he pulled out a joint with jimson weed in it. It was my first time smoking anything, and it tasted horrible. He told me to sit across the fire from him and wait for his totem animal to appear on his face. My totem animal would appear on my face and he would tell me who I was.
As you can imagine, when I looked into his face across the flickering fire it became a series of horrible monsters. This is the only part I remember clearly. My stomach twisted and all I could do was try to get away from the horrible beast. I jumped up and started running through the scrub brush, which has tiny poking burrs that shoot out at you and stick to your skin and clothes. I couldn't see anything, it was like I was completely blind. I thought I was being chased by a huge pack of wolves from hell.
The only other thing I remember from that night was retching and breathlessness and him trying to make me breathe into a paper bag. He was like "we still have to find your magic wand" which needed to be a branch with exactly 13 leaves on it but I was completely done with "magic" in any form. He found some random branch and we got in the car and drove home. He told my mom he thought this was probably too soon for me. (Um, yeah. I don’t think I will ever be ready for jimson weed.)
The branch turned out to have 15 leaves on it anyway, so it was no good. Despite that, we kept it in the pantry along with my mom's poisonous herbs (wormwood tea anyone?) for years. I threw it away when I left for college.
I didn’t take a psychedelic drug for several years after this happened. It worked better to scare me straight than any school program could have done. In a way this could have been very positive as I had easy access to lots of brain-twisting chemicals at a young age. The first time I tried mushrooms, I approached them with a lot of respect. And the result was as wonderful as this experience was terrible.
Up until recently I thought I had never had a "bad trip" -- sure, there were moments on acid where I experienced total devolution and became protoplasmic slime, or drug experiences I didn't enjoy (like being chastised by thin blue aliens on salivia); but nothing I didn't feel gave me an experience worth having.
But recently I realized this wasn't true at all, my first drug experience was an extremely bad trip. So bad I never even classified it with any other psychoactive.
When I was 13 my dad's best friend, who thought he was something of a shaman, told me parents he wanted to take me on a vision-quest type "coming of age" experience. We were going to go out to the middle of the desert at night (on my 13th birthday) and smoke jimson weed so we could identify my totem animal. My mom had done this with him, and my dad was a classic 60's era acid head so this sounded like a great idea to them.
I'd never taken recreational drugs at all at that age, and never even considered it. But I'd seen people tripping out my whole life. I was way more excited at the prospect of finding my magic wand that night (part of the calendar of events my dad's friend planned). For context, this was a guy I'd known since I was 3 and when I was 5 broke the news to me that Mary was artificially inseminated by aliens from the future, so that made Jesus a virgin-born cyborg.
We drove out to the desert the night before my birthday and set up a campfire near his car. He did some probably very inauthentic chanting type stuff, and then he pulled out a joint with jimson weed in it. It was my first time smoking anything, and it tasted horrible. He told me to sit across the fire from him and wait for his totem animal to appear on his face. My totem animal would appear on my face and he would tell me who I was.
As you can imagine, when I looked into his face across the flickering fire it became a series of horrible monsters. This is the only part I remember clearly. My stomach twisted and all I could do was try to get away from the horrible beast. I jumped up and started running through the scrub brush, which has tiny poking burrs that shoot out at you and stick to your skin and clothes. I couldn't see anything, it was like I was completely blind. I thought I was being chased by a huge pack of wolves from hell.
The only other thing I remember from that night was retching and breathlessness and him trying to make me breathe into a paper bag. He was like "we still have to find your magic wand" which needed to be a branch with exactly 13 leaves on it but I was completely done with "magic" in any form. He found some random branch and we got in the car and drove home. He told my mom he thought this was probably too soon for me. (Um, yeah. I don’t think I will ever be ready for jimson weed.)
The branch turned out to have 15 leaves on it anyway, so it was no good. Despite that, we kept it in the pantry along with my mom's poisonous herbs (wormwood tea anyone?) for years. I threw it away when I left for college.
I didn’t take a psychedelic drug for several years after this happened. It worked better to scare me straight than any school program could have done. In a way this could have been very positive as I had easy access to lots of brain-twisting chemicals at a young age. The first time I tried mushrooms, I approached them with a lot of respect. And the result was as wonderful as this experience was terrible.
tathra
bluelighter
fact. i'd come across people having bad trips on lsd long before anybody ever heard of DO-x. fortunately i found it to be pretty easy to talk somebody out of a bad trip from lsd though.
i've had incredibly difficult experiences on other things, and there was no possible way to be talked out of it, although talking helped as a distraction until the difficulty passed.
Choronzon333
Bluelighter
Great quote. Most people look at bad trips the wrong way. They can be terrifying and extremely painful but in the end there is usually something important to learn from them. In fact if you read Stanislov Grof, the premier psychedelic psychoanalysist, you will understand the importance of encountering difficult material while tripping...
Choronzon333
Bluelighter
When ever things get to intense or crazy and i'm having a really difficult time I like to just lie down and close my eyes and just submit to whatever is bothering me. Its the best way to get through it. You have to give in. The more you resist the worst it will be!!!!
any major dude
Bluelight Crew
I voted no bad trips, but some difficult ones. I think that sometimes the more difficult trips are the more productive ones. Also, I've never had a trip that was uniformly bad/difficult. A lot of times, especially with the longer lived substances, parts of a trip will be joyous, and other parts will be somewhat difficult. Only experienced crippling negativity once that I can think of off hand, but it only lasted an hour or two, the other 7-9hrs I was tripping were really fun, that being said, watch out for mushrooms+sleep deprivation. Not for the faint of heart!
underground_troll
Bluelighter
I've had some difficult times tripping, of course. It is an inherent part of taking psychedelics! I'm very grateful for the lessons I've learned. You can't know the light without the dark, joy without sorrow.
Moral Decay
Bluelighter
I have never had a bad trip but i have certainly had difficult or really intense trips that made me temporarily uncomfortable. In each instance i always came out of it feeling mentally stronger and gained much insight about myself. The closest i have come to a "bad" trip was an extremely terrifying saliva experience. I didn't feel right for weeks after, but even that was not necessarily bad, just way too intense for what i was prepared for. I have eaten in excess of 5-10 hits of acid in a single dose with no residual tolerance from previous days of tripping and none of it could compare to what i experienced one day with saliva. Granted acid lasts MUCH longer then salvia, but my terrifying experience on salvia, had it been as lengthy as an acid trip; i do not think i would have survived it had i been alone. Luckily i was with a friend who kept reassuring me the trip would end soon. It seemed like an eternity though it was only about 10-15 minutes from start to baseline.
colors
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2006
- Messages
- 664
i voted 'yes i have'. i realize that i am suffering from some mental illness, and that psychedelics often exasperate the condition. i use psychedelics as a tool for self-analysis, but have found myself in over my head on a number of occasions, where i arrive at fear or love fork, but am unable to choose the love for whatever reason.
i was just reading Huxley's "Heaven & Hell" today and found it to offer insight into the nature of 'bad trips'. here's an excerpt:
"Visionary experience is not always blissful, It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven. Like heaven, the visionary hell has its praeternatural light and its praeternatural significance. But the significance is intrinsically appalling. In the Journal d'une schizophrene, the autobiographical record of a young girl's passage through madness, the world of the schizophrenic is called le pays d'eclairement - 'the country of lit-upness'. It is a name which a mystic might have used to denote his heaven. But for poor Renee, the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal - an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to Renee only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace. And then there is the horror of infinity. For the healthy visionary, the perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation of divine immanence; for Renee, it was a revelation of what she calls 'the System', the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt and punishment, solitude and unreality.
Sanity is a matter of degree, and there are plenty of visionaries who see the world as Renee saw it, but contrive, none the less, to live outside the asylum. For them, as for the positive visionary, the universe is transfigured - but for the worse. Everything in it, from the stars in the sky to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister or disgusting; every event is charged with a hateful significance; every object manifests the presence of an Indwelling Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal. The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds himself associated with a body that seems to grow progessively more dense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to being the agonized consciousness of an inspissated lump of matter, no bigger than a stone that can be held between the hands. It is worth remarking, that many of the punishments described in the various accounts of hell are punishments of pressure and constriction. Dante's sinners are buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees, frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones. The Inferno is psychologically true. Many of its pains are experienced by schizophrenics, and by those who have taken mescalin or lysergic acid under unfavourable conditions.
What is the nature of these unfavourable conditions? How and why is heaven turned into hell? In certain cases the negative visionary experience is the result of predominantly physical causes. If the body is diseased, the associated mind may find itself in hell. But what is more important for our present purposes is the fact that negative visionary experience may be induced by purely psychological means. Fear and anger bar the way to the heavenly Other World and plunge the mescalin taker into hell. Virtue is not the sole or sufficient condition of blissful visionary experience. It is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful. Negative emotions - the fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred, anger, or malice which exclude love - are the guarantee that visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling. The nature of the mind is such that the sinner who repents and makes an act of faith in a higher power is more likely to have a blissful visionary experience than is the self-satisfied pillar of society with his righteous indignations, his anxiety about possessions and pretensions, his ingrained habits of blaming, despising, and condemning. Hence the enormous importance attached, in all the great religious traditions, to the state of mind at the moment of death. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence."
i was just reading Huxley's "Heaven & Hell" today and found it to offer insight into the nature of 'bad trips'. here's an excerpt:
"Visionary experience is not always blissful, It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven. Like heaven, the visionary hell has its praeternatural light and its praeternatural significance. But the significance is intrinsically appalling. In the Journal d'une schizophrene, the autobiographical record of a young girl's passage through madness, the world of the schizophrenic is called le pays d'eclairement - 'the country of lit-upness'. It is a name which a mystic might have used to denote his heaven. But for poor Renee, the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal - an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to Renee only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace. And then there is the horror of infinity. For the healthy visionary, the perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation of divine immanence; for Renee, it was a revelation of what she calls 'the System', the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt and punishment, solitude and unreality.
Sanity is a matter of degree, and there are plenty of visionaries who see the world as Renee saw it, but contrive, none the less, to live outside the asylum. For them, as for the positive visionary, the universe is transfigured - but for the worse. Everything in it, from the stars in the sky to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister or disgusting; every event is charged with a hateful significance; every object manifests the presence of an Indwelling Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal. The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds himself associated with a body that seems to grow progessively more dense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to being the agonized consciousness of an inspissated lump of matter, no bigger than a stone that can be held between the hands. It is worth remarking, that many of the punishments described in the various accounts of hell are punishments of pressure and constriction. Dante's sinners are buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees, frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones. The Inferno is psychologically true. Many of its pains are experienced by schizophrenics, and by those who have taken mescalin or lysergic acid under unfavourable conditions.
What is the nature of these unfavourable conditions? How and why is heaven turned into hell? In certain cases the negative visionary experience is the result of predominantly physical causes. If the body is diseased, the associated mind may find itself in hell. But what is more important for our present purposes is the fact that negative visionary experience may be induced by purely psychological means. Fear and anger bar the way to the heavenly Other World and plunge the mescalin taker into hell. Virtue is not the sole or sufficient condition of blissful visionary experience. It is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful. Negative emotions - the fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred, anger, or malice which exclude love - are the guarantee that visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling. The nature of the mind is such that the sinner who repents and makes an act of faith in a higher power is more likely to have a blissful visionary experience than is the self-satisfied pillar of society with his righteous indignations, his anxiety about possessions and pretensions, his ingrained habits of blaming, despising, and condemning. Hence the enormous importance attached, in all the great religious traditions, to the state of mind at the moment of death. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence."