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Eating from the tree of knowledge

Detrevni

Detrevni

Bluelighter
Joined
Feb 7, 2005
Messages
612
Location
In NE Tennesee/SW Virginia near AT
Do any other Psych users ever feel like they are "eating from the tree of knowledge" after taking a powerful psychedelic? I know sometimes after i've seen alot and my brain has been rewired I almost get the feeling that I wasn't supposed to see or know what I just experienced, sometimes in a negative way. It's almost as if I've been shown the inner workings (or behind the scenes) of the universe we inhabit. And upon entering daily life once again it seems to make things mundane. This has been something that i've had to struggle with after years of exploration within and I was just wondering if anyone else has had this feeling and what your take on it is. Overall I feel like just about every trip i've taken has been positive in the end but I just can't get over the fact that it feels like I've crossed a point of no return. Once you realize something you take as true, it's really hard to unlearn it. PLUR fellow BLers'.
 
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2c-e does that for me.
But with every passing synchronisity that occurs, i feel like i have just eaten another piece.
the warm afterglow lasts for several days afterwards.
 
with great power comes great responsibility, and there can't be pleasure without the knowledge of pain. take them both with an open heart and the only one who can punish you is yourself
 
greenmeanies said:
with great power comes great responsibility
Click to expand...

I fail to see how seeing "behind the curtain" of reality gives you any type of power. It seems to me that it actually robs you of the illusion of the vivid concreteness of reality, which is a very powerful human evolutionary tool.
 
I always realise how little I actually know, then I always feel a sense of regret about all the time I've wasted in the past fucking about on the internet, drinking etc. when I could have been learning something new, such as a new language or reading something new. I always turn into a hippy and sit in the art section of my uni's library reading all the reviews I can for a week or so after having quite a good acid trip before slipping back into my usual lazy routine.
 
when eve ate the apple.. she complicated life in a way that was unnecessary i would say.. psychedelic drugs merely allow us to complexify our mind a bit if we desire and figure out new ideas - hopefully leaving a person with a simple, good mindset - if we take the garden of eden story to mean that certain thoughts are bad and that literal 'knowledge' can be bad i don't think that is what was being taught.. that would insinuate that we should shield ourselves from truth and understanding beyond what is offered in the bible.. people were taking psychedelic drugs from the beginning of civilization up till now - there has never been a consensus to abandon them - it doesn't say in the bible to not eat specific mushrooms, etc..

" And God said, "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so." "
 
My interpretation of the allegory is the oppositeof the OP's:

Eating of the tree of knowledge led to the emergence of distinct entities, allowing us to learn by observing stuff ('isomorphically', the universe fracturing to know itself), but as a necessary corollary, separation of humans from god/the universe (ie, expulsion from Eden).

This describes ordinary experience before psychedelics intervene.

dunno what the deal is with the other forbidden tree. ;)

Psychedelics sometimes reveal that things could be otherwise.

Now, I dunno whether this has anything to do with how things ARE for realz. ;)

ebola
 
i had a short bit of megalomania during my first acid trip in which i thought i knew the answer to every question that has ever been asked or will be asked....
 
Roger&Me said:
I fail to see how seeing "behind the curtain" of reality gives you any type of power. It seems to me that it actually robs you of the illusion of the vivid concreteness of reality, which is a very powerful human evolutionary tool.
Click to expand...

It doesn't rob you at all. We're all still free to return to mundania anytime we wish, as evidenced by your post.;) We're just not restricted to it. Sounds like a type of power to me.
 
Roger&Me said:
I fail to see how seeing "behind the curtain" of reality gives you any type of power. It seems to me that it actually robs you of the illusion of the vivid concreteness of reality, which is a very powerful human evolutionary tool.
Click to expand...

Why does reality have to be concrete?

Sometimes seeing behind the curtain is kind of vital to understanding the workings of it all.

You can learn a lot about yourself while tripping, and knowing yourself is a positive thing....

I sorted a lot of stuff in my life out after my first acid trip, it took away my depression that had spanned years. Self preservation is also a very powerful evolutionary tool, and LSD helped me get that back through letting me see that life was not just the bullshit and negativity i was seeing every day for so very long and that if you look at it with the right perspective you can always find light in the darkness.....
 
Concreteness of reality is important. Here's one of my favourites to throw at people.

Does time exist?
 
Powerful insights everyone who's relpied. That's help put all of my journeys in more positive perspective. They've definitely taught me alot of lessons and I guess nobody should have to feel guilty about seeking knowledge. Does time exist? My answer would be time is the essence of existance so yeah?
 
What is time though? It's not tangible, and it has no effect on the physical world whatsoever.

Take a clock for example. Batteries and mechanics, but time sure as hell isn't involved in how the clock works.

Time is just an ideal. A way for us to break down the length of our lives, and get a feel for where we might be at. Is this necessarily the best way to look at things? And just because we all believe something exists, does it make it so?

I understand the relevance of time as a tool for people to schedule and organise on a day to day basis, but that is not my question. The question is does time exist.
 
I think it's pretty hard to write a definition of time without using the word time itself at some point. Defining the word time in context might help answering the subjective question if time exists. I, personally, feel that time has a concrete existance beyond me or any object measuring it.
 
That's because you aren't aware of how badly the concept of time breaks down in the quantum world.
 
well if your gaining knowledge. supposedly "knowledge is power" so that could be where the power comes from that requires great responsibility.


during my one psychedelic experience i arrived at this conundrum where i was trying to decide if knowledge was inherently evil. especially since ignorance is bliss. i eventually came to the conclusion that knowledge is good as it can lead to wisdom and overall leads to a better understanding of everything (as long as the knowledge is true).
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." -Enrico Fermi


as far as the garden of eden goes... the two unique trees were the tree of the eternal life (eat of it and live forever) and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (eat of it and you will surely die). it was not the tree of knowledge in a general sense. it was specifically the knowledge of good and evil through experience. man was without sin prior to eating of this tree so the knowledge of good and evil did not exist as without sin there was no evil and without evil there was good could not be defined. the duality did not exist. by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil a direct commandment from God was broken thus introducing sin and evil to mankind which allowed for evil and good to be defined thus bringing the knowledge of good and evil. once sin was in the picture the tree of eternal life was to be guarded from man (and Satan) as God did not want man to be immortal with sin.


time is more than an ideal. it is a dimension of the universe. now subjective time is quite different from absolute time. but a concrete way to look at time would be the rate at which the electrons in any given atom are moving. i believe atomic clocks work some way similar to this and use the cesium-133 atom. the rate at which time moves forward does differ at different points in the universe as it is affected by forces like gravity.
 
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The problem is the type of knowledge you gain is usually quite grandiose and incomprehensible to the average person who isn't already going through this type of thought process. Trying to explain it is next to impossible, unless you completely and utterly break down your egotistical standpoint on your revelations, and rework it into an easily digestible format. ie: Don't be the douchebag who thinks hes god of the universe.

I used to force my opinions down other peoples throats, these days I tend to prefer finding out what people's real thoughts and feelings are on a subject and then try to open them up to the other possibilities. They definitely exist, but without any tact you won't get anywhere, and your knowledge will have no power.

EDIT: And to the above poster, you should research time more carefully. Atomic clocks are NOT a be all and end all, just the best we can do. In fact, it isn't the best we can do. We can do a crapload better, we just choose not to. The problem is, even when we break it down realllllllllllllllllllllly far, im talking millions of billions of times further than an atomic clock feasibly can, in the quantum world it still breaks down. Time has no physical meaning at those levels, and when you extrapolate etc. Of course this is entirely theoretical. I'm not saying I know anything, just asking some weird questions.
 
yeah i remember how after my psychedelic experience i had all the answers i needed for myself. part of my psychedelic experience taught me that i could not force my ideas or answers onto others. if i wanted to spread my knowledge i could only do so through attempting to show my beliefs to other people instead of telling them unless i was in an instructing environment (as a teacher in a classroom or possibly later on the down the road instructing my kids). however i didn't realize that my answers only worked because of the state of mind i was in after my psychedelic experience. whenever i was questioned about something my answers did not make sense as they were overly simple and most likely only made sense to me in the state of mind i was in. however, since coming out of that state of mind and losing the afterglow or whatever it was (i have a hard time calling it an afterglow as it lasted for over a month) those seemingly so simple answers that worked so well for me before suddenly stopped working. i think negative emotions and holding onto things started to get in the way.

anyway i guess i sorta rambled on there but the main point i was trying to make was a continuation of what eldaren said. in my experience it is near impossible to completely and fully explain what you have learned to anyone else (or even yourself at some other distant point in time) simply due to the fact that the knowledge made the most sense to you when you were in that state of mind.


edit: oh yeah i didn't mean that atomic clocks were the most exact way of looking at time just a more concrete way of looking at it than simply seconds on a clock. in an attempt to define time without using time in the definition i would say its the rate at which the universe is changing. and i think there's a limit to how small we can break time down into similar to how small we can break a particle down into. i think this goes along with the whole idea of our universe being a hologram. i'm not really sure on all this tho as it is very late and in all the quantum physics i have read i have read very little about time.
 
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