Our mind is tasked with accumulating data in a sensible manner. When the ordered manner, which events have, is lost, we suffer depression, as commonly seen in isolation chambers, which cause hallucinations! which are also known to lead to anxiety.
Being isolated affects us a great deal and human faces are a common hallucination. Other affects like tracers are physiological, tracers are encountered during a bout of dehydration, for instance. In schizophrenia thoughts are taking over the mind, meaning that any real information, ie data (intelligence), is lost and replaced with what is imagined.
Not all mind altering experiences are this way though. Many people experience euphoria, integration, and a sense of completion after their experiences. Before Albert Hoffman's experiments were shutdown, he was using LSD in experiments on grad students to study how it affected their novel thinking, with good results. LSD has also been found to aid in the deconstruction of complex problems into simpler parts.
LSD takes a person out of reality and the mind protects the experiencer with hallucinations.
AFAIK "reality" is a philosophical reference point, not a scientific one... so you'd have a hard time proving this point.
These are the same ones that lull us to sleep each night and put us at ease when we go into shock.
Anxiety is a defense mechanism, when the mind and body are not wanting to cooperate. LSD is a toxin that deprives a person. A part of ourselves rejects this.
I've had several NDEs in my life and none of them were like being on LSD. You can't qualify all experiences in altered consciousness as having the same source and the same purpose.
In terms of rejecting LSD because it's a toxin... I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Much like how our brain fills our optical blind spot with visual information to make it look like a complete picture, I'm sure that it does similar things to compensate in the presence of LSD; but I'm not sure how this can be qualified as rejection of a toxin which deprives. Some might simply call it useful adaptation.
We have to be able to look from outside at ourselves, as we would judge others, and see that we are vulnerable and prone to error.
There is no "outside". I understand you're a realist and thus believe in an objective, concrete reality that we are all bound by, but in practical terms it's not possible to view yourself from outside your own system. That doesn't mean you can't self-correct, through learning, certain errors.
You can talk about it as a spiritual tool, science choose this as a way to experience mental disorders in a new way.
That's one way it looked at it, but there were many others. It has been researched as an anti-depressant, a migraine treatment, a tool for enhancing novelty and creativity, etc.
But the "spiritual" is just that; it is not defined. You can add to that with your own insight, but to deny such basic facts to people is just cruel.
I don't think anyone is denying the basic fact that LSD can have intense psychological impacts. It's written across all literature and on most drug sites it's listed as one of the negative effects. In a thread like this, people are naturally going to give their biased input into the LSD discussion and you can't blame certain people for having only positive things to say because, for them, that is how it happened. If you always expect full disclosure then you should be looking at sites like Erowid instead of a discussion forum.
It may help you to avoid negativity in your own thoughts, because you personally are chasing down a dream.
Not much different than life itself, if you ask me.
LSD is not healthy and frankly, when you begin to really understand it, then you learn that it is a less interesting way to experience life, it deprives the mind, and in the long term has negative effects, like confusion and depression, that need to be disclosed at all times.
This is where your credibility really starts to degrade. Whether or not LSD is "healthy" is dependent upon its net benefits and net detriments to the individual. Given all literature, pros and cons, that would be up to the individual to figure out. I agree full disclosure is important from a harm reduction perspective. At the same time you can't always approach use with "this trip could turn out really good or really bad, so let's just see" because your intention and mindset on approach make a big difference.
There are limitations which we have been made aware of in terms of perception of reality, via science, to describe LSD as perception enhancing is complete malarkey.
The understanding we have of invisible reality are based on scientific theories.
People talking about multi-dimensions irks me, it is a contrivance to describe reality, where lower dimensions mean lower access to information. Saying LSD takes you to higher dimensions is contraindicative of what it actually does.
Layering of perception is one way to describe a basic type of hallucination.
It bothers you because you are stuck on what's real vs. unreal, instead of what is merely possible to explore. When I witness those other dimensions, I'm not caring whether or not they are validly realistic or mere contrivances, they are merely an experience. It's no different than walking in the woods and asking if trees are real or not. The only reason why people are forced to question reality while on psychedelics is because it's so different from what they're used to, but why stop questioning reality just because the psychedelic experience has ended? What IS real? Where does reality stop and illusion begin? Do we ever really awaken from the dream? These are philosophical questions and I think it's arrogant to say that science has solved them simply because it has some mechanical understandings of how neurological perception occurs.
Reality being something unchanged and outside of the mind, material reality, in a philosophical sense, i.e. what the mind is made of; this search for a practical meaning of reality does neither begin nor end with LSD.
I simply can't agree that reality exists outside of the mind. That's been debunked, even by science. All input from the senses is filtered by the brain and its total sum projected within the brain itself as an experience. Your experience of the rose is merely an internal projection whose data has been gathered by your physical space suit. We can all agree on what a rose is but it's an assumption based on us all having the same shared projection.
I agree that LSD is not the be all and end all of the search. Did anyone in this thread dispute that?
Marijuana obviously enhances the force of imagination and you see the results of its combination with psychedelics, people who lose touch with reality and become a danger to themselves or others.
Yes, that can happen, but so can the opposite which you suspiciously continue to omit from all your rhetoric. Look, I will be the first person to admit that LSD can have some scary impacts. I've experienced them. One of my first posts on these boards was about an LSD experience from hell where I took too much and it fucked up my mind for months. That doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
LSD is merely a tool. When used intelligently and with harm reduction in mind, it can have great positive impacts.
This obviously is what is happening, and obviously people can recognize and escape illusion, have remarkable thoughts, and so on, without resorting to drugs.
I was never a danger to myself or others before, during, or after LSD use. I do currently live in a post-LSD reality where I feel it is time to explore the merits of sobriety again, and I do agree that we can explore the illusion of reality without resorting to psychedelics; but don't mistake this for capitulating with your ideas, most of which I disagree with due to their incompleteness and one-sidedness.
