If weed isn't a "real" psychedelic how do you explain arabesque/hindu art?

[Listening]

it's not unfair to specify that some artwork seems to evoke form constants more characteristic of one class of drug over another--in which case perhaps cannabis is less likely to have played a role in that creative process...

Agree but my point (and why I reject the premise upon which the question is based) is that it may not have been any drug (which I know you say as well).

If the art does resonate uncannily with some particular hallucinogen, this to me is just evidence that these drugs do not bend reality: it is our minds that bend reality and, more than this, it is part of their basic operation to be able to do so. The drugs simply catalyse certain functions of the brain that can be activated via other means (meditation, contemplation, experience).

To me this question is like asking, "if our ancestors didn't have access to real psychedelics, how did they philosophize?" This is a good question to ask even if, and actually because, it is so confused.

 

[Colourblind]

I definitely get enhancements from smoking weed, and i also get enhancements from taking discociatives but tripping is what I am now. I'm typing, and each <<<STOP<<< E is blue, A is red, C is blue, H is red. Trippin! Lmao, trying to do that while tripping is hard. As you cant see what colour you've done what. Madness! But oh so beautiful. I expect this post will be pretty colourful. Bloodyhell even the Italics have got the better of me. Remind me to look back at this sober, could be an interesting learning experience.

 

[max_freakout]

The drugs simply catalyse certain functions of the brain that can be activated via other means (meditation, contemplation, experience).

This ^ is clueless prohibitionist nonsense, the mind's psychedelic capacity is only accessible via drug-taking, it can never be accessed by any kind of non-drug activity. Without drugs it is impossible to trip.

The typical sober meditation experience is the exact opposite of the typical high-dose psychedelic experience. Meditating typically makes people calm and chilled out, whereas a high dose of psychedelic drugs is an intense energetic mind-warp; these two experiences are entirely unlike each other, there is no real basis for comparing sober meditating to drug-tripping.

Sober meditating does serve as a remarkably effective technique for *avoiding* intense psychedelic experiencing.

 

[Xorkoth]

You're entitled to your opinion on this matter, but I don't think you're convincing anyone but yourself here. Psychedelics are tools, powerful, beautiful, potentially useful tools. I don't think I would have ever had my peak experience(s) that changed my life without them, but for me it was an unexpected catalyst (I was just trying to have a fun crazy time, like weed, when I ate those mushrooms the first time), and I'm probably not willing to dedicate myself to a meditation practice to the extent where I could facilitate mind-manifesting experiences. But just because that's how I got here doesn't make me discount other possibilities. If you look around with any real seriousness in your attempt (there's a very recent report on Erowid for example), you'll find people describing the experiences they've had during meditation. It seems ridiculous to me to discount that evidence entirely, I mean do you think they're making it up? It seems to me you are not being open-minded about this topic, but I believe we should all always try to be as open-minded as possible in life, because no one knows everything, or even anything for sure. If new evidence comes up, if you're interested in the truth, you should allow it into your consideration.

 

[max_freakout]

You're entitled to your opinion on this matter

I don't really have an "opinion" about this, what i say comes from my own experiences and from other people's testimony about their own experiences. That information is objective and independant from anybody's opinion.

If you look around with any real seriousness in your attempt (there's a very recent report on Erowid for example), you'll find people describing the experiences they've had during meditation. It seems ridiculous to me to discount that evidence entirely, I mean do you think they're making it up? It seems to me you are not being open-minded about this topic, but I believe we should all always try to be as open-minded as possible in life, because no one knows everything, or even anything for sure. If new evidence comes up, if you're interested in the truth, you should allow it into your consideration.

There is zero evidence that meditating sober makes people trip, all the evidence demonstrates that people do not trip when they meditate. In particular, people do not ever experience bad-trip/control-loss phenomena while sober.

If you don't believe this, try meditating yourself and see if it makes you trip. If you try out meditating for yourself you will discover that the sober meditation experience is calm and chilled out, practically the exact opposite of intense psychedelic experience.

Erowid is a very good source of information about this issue because it has thousands of reports of drug-induced experiences, but only one report of non-drug experience which does not sound very much like a psychedelic experience.

When people meditate sober, there is nothing to write a trip report about because it doesnt make people trip, and erowid's trip report vaults reflect this.

Being open-minded is a good thing, but deliberately lying to yourself is not a good thing. Anyone who believes that meditating sober makes you trip is deliberately lying to themselves and demonstrating a total lack of ability to distinguish between states of consciousness. This willing self-delusion and blindness is entirely a result of prohibitionist mentality and equivocative word-games.

I mean do you think they're making it up?

Making what up? Nobody is saying it in the first place, people never report intense psychedelic experiencing from sober meditation. If they did that would likely indicate some kind of mental illness, or a fertile imagination like a child drinking grape juice then pretending to be drunk.

you'll find people describing the experiences they've had during meditation

you rarely find this ^ because meditation rarely causes remarkable noteworthy experiences.

What you find much more often is people using vague wordplay to *avoid* describing their experiences in any real detail.

Compare this to psychedelic drugs, where people commonly have detailed descriptions of intense and amazing altered states.

 

[Ismene]

Agreed max but there are certain things that can be accessed - you don't need to take psychedelics to create art that seems psychedelic for example. That's why you get lots of indian art that seems psychedelic but isn't.

 

[max_freakout]

A crucial issue which is overlooked in these kinds of discussion is the role of drug prohibition in creating and supporting these false and absurd notions like "people trip when they meditate".

Drug prohibition creates a motivation to lie (to oneself and to other people) about the effectiveness of drug-free techniques like meditation.

Stan Grof is a good illustration of the mental distortion that prohibition creates. Grof had to start promoting drug-free techniques like hyperventilating when LSD was made illegal in 1967, just in order to save his career.

Grof's promotion of drug-free techniques was based on the illegality of LSD, and *not* on the effectiveness of the so-called "alternative" drug-free technique at making people trip. The truth is that hyperventilating never makes people trip, whereas LSD always does make people trip. But the prohibition of LSD distorts this truth by forcing Grof to promote hyperventilating over LSD.

People use equivocation (vague ambiguous language) as a mental tool to convince themselves that the distorted prohibitionist picture of reality is the true picture, and that entheogens are not required to induce transcendent experiencing.

Don't underestimate the power of self-deception

 

[Doldrugs]

The ONLY thing you have is opinion, max. Your argument is just faith cloaked in references to authors known for poor research and outlandish, unprovable theories.

Don't underestimate the power of self-deception

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[Listening]

I don't really have an "opinion" about this, what i say comes from my own experiences and from other people's testimony about their own experiences...

You have had your experiences (which apparently is an experience of the absence of something?) and I have had mine. I'm not going to try to convince you that my experiences are more valid than yours (though you seem to be sure that yours are definitive). All I know is that after meditating for an hour per day, every day, for a few years, I looked within and I saw... everything. There were no drugs involved. I guess you looked within and you saw... nothing? Maybe you just need to keep looking?

Or maybe I'm wrong and drugs are the answer to all of the worlds problems. The funny thing is that I'm not anti-drugs or anti-psychedelics. I am beyond thankful for my drug-induced experiences and have more to explore still. I'm just careful to distinguish the finger pointing, from the moon.

 

[Ismene]

All I know is that after meditating for an hour per day, every day, for a few years, I looked within and I saw... everything. There were no drugs involved.

That sounds a bit ram dass tho listening. Are you saying that you could've taken 900mics of acid and just sat there as tho nothing was happening because you'd meditated? I tend to think there's still states psychedelics take you to that meditation can't reach.

 

[max_freakout]

after meditating for an hour per day, every day, for a few years, I looked within and I saw... everything.

Note that this ^, as an example of a description of a typical meditation experience, sounds nothing at all like a psychedelic trip report.

 

[bernax]

you don't really need drugs for this art, they are just visual representations of mathematical patterns. And as we know the arabs were/are quite good at math

 

[Listening]

Note that this ^, as an example of a description of a typical meditation experience, sounds nothing at all like a psychedelic trip report.

That sounds a bit ram dass tho listening. Are you saying that you could've taken 900mics of acid and just sat there as tho nothing was happening because you'd meditated? I tend to think there's still states psychedelics take you to that meditation can't reach.

I never suggested that meditation was anything like a psychedelic trip and I know all about Ram Dass getting fooled by the yogi.

All I am suggesting is that the heart of the psychedelic trip - its "meaning" if we can use that term loosely - is not unique to the drug experience. The same class of insights, artistic revelations, and transcendental perspectives are to be found throughout history, where conceivably no drugs were involved.

I am not suggesting that you can have a drug trip without a psychedelic drug. I am suggesting that the trips induced by these drugs are not to be placed on a pedestal. To flip things on its head, I would say the same thing about meditation. Some Buddhists (and others) chase meditation in the same way as some psychedelic users chase a particular idea of a trip. Both are deluding themselves and cutting themselves off from the world. Both are attached to an illusion enlightenment.

 

[Doldrugs]

Both meditation and psychedelic drug use have similar proven medical value. But neither have ever been proven to give you the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

A lot of people think meditation is sitting and thinking about stuff quietly, or trying to think about nothing. A lot of people think meditation is magic. But meditation is actually a challenging process you have to learn. It can be done wrong. Without a lot of practice and/or good instruction you may "try meditating" and conclude it does nothing useful, but this is a meaningless evaluation. It would be like taking a gram of crappy, poorly dried mushrooms, going to a club, and then concluding mushrooms have no psychological or medical potential.

 

[max_freakout]

I am not suggesting that you can have a drug trip without a psychedelic drug.

That is what i am saying, the intense psychedelic state of consciousness (ie a high-dose psilocybin or LSD trip) is inaccessible without taking drugs. If you never take drugs, you will never get to experience what it feels like to trip, no matter how much meditating or yoga or standing on your head or whatever. In particular, the experience of altered-state ego death is only accessible via drugs.

Several posters here seem to disagree but they tend to avoid stating outright that you can trip by meditating, probably because of how absurd and dishonest that claim sounds when it is stated explicitly. Better to hide the dishonest claim behind vague language.

 

[InterestingFACT]

Having a drug trip is not synonymous with having a mystical experience, or a coming upon a moment of absolute clarity--of certitude about *something*--be it an acceptance that you can't change the imperfections of someone close to you, or the renewed confidence that you *can* go change your life around--move to a new city, or quit heroin, or quit your job that you hate and go back to school, or any of the infinite things you can think.

And yet, psychedelic drug experiences are--not always, but frequently--dedicated mostly towards achieving exactly such a state.

The distortions, the hallucinations, the vibrancy of the world, te monsters and spirits you may imagine up while going on your psychedelic journey... All these are *cool*, but they're distractions.

The reason psychedelics are a powerful contemplative tool is because they release large amounts BDNF in your brain, and turn up the gain on your interpretive processing (likely functioning in the parietal lobe in *exactly the same way* as they're known to function in the visual cortex.... We can't yet map the parietal like we can map V1, so we can't map the changes in wave pattern to our thoughts the way we can with V1 and our vision... But it's only a matter of time.)

Now, no one is claiming that you can induce exactly these changes in brain function at will, through meditation. But you *can* induce changed in brain function. There's MRI evidence of exactly that. And you *can* induce BDNF expression and synaptic neuroplasticity. There's proof of that as well.

I think psychedelics are a valuable tool. I think that mediation is also a valuable tool. There's no reason not to respect both for what they are.

----

Btw: if you want to see a drug-experience in a person not on drugs...how about HPPD that in some people lasts for years or permanently? Or how about genuine schizophrenia, with paranoid delusions and hallucinatory voices? These are examples of the brain inducing a different subjective experience of reality without the help of a drug. Are they the same as tripping? No. But is tripping on LSD the same as tripping on psilocin? No.

I, and many others who have used psychedelics frequently in the past, can at least partially enter that state at will--I can induce visuals on surfaces, or choose to become fixated on colors. I can also induce a feeling of dissociation from myself: sensation of an out of body experience--that is something j very much don't enjoy. But this is literally synaptic plasticity at work--repeated inducement of some patterns of neuronal activation tends to reinforce those patterns of activation. Psychedelics may just be creating "noise" in the mind, but anyone who uses them frequently can quite easily (and often unwillingly) become capable or susceptible to the generation of those patterns while in a "sober" state. HPPD is a fact. And it can last a very long time or very short time, or not occur at all.... *and it's a psychological phenomenon*. The people who become most anxious about it are those for who it doesn't fade.

So why is it so hard to believe that, through careful and repeated cultivation of a certain state of mind--that which meditation seeks to hold onto--the same reinforcement is not possible?

No. It's not a "trip." It's meditation. That's why we give it a different word. But it can do some of the same useful things.

 

[Xorkoth]

If you never take drugs, you will never get to experience what it feels like to trip, no matter how much meditating or yoga or standing on your head or whatever. In particular, the experience of altered-state ego death is only accessible via drugs.

I agree that you can't experience a drug trip without drugs... that is self-evident; how could you experience a drug without taking a drug? What I (and others) are saying is that drug trips are not the only way a person can have a mystical experience resulting in the sort of knowledge gained from a peak psychedelic experience. I've certainly only had such an experience from psychedelics, but how can you possibly feel 100% confident that it's not at all possible for anyone to have an experience leading to the essential realization of a peak psychedelic experience by any other means than what you happen to have experienced it on? Of course you're going to find far more reports of this type of experience from psychedelics, it's an easier path and psychedelics have become increasingly popular in modern times. Not many people care to dedicate the sort of time and discipline necessary to achieve such a thing without psychedelics, and I'd imagine of those who do, sharing their experiences on the Internet might not be something they are interested in doing.

I am not being close-minded, I am remaining open to a possibility that I have not personally experienced. You, however, are refusing to allow that possibility in your mind, which is actually exactly how I would define close-minded. The drug war and prohibition HAS attempted to devalue the psychedelic experience, absolutely, but that is a separate issue from whether it's possible to experience such a state by meditation or other means.

You come across as a zealot. At least Ismene is consistent, he doesn't believe in ego death at all from psychedelics or otherwise.

 

[max_freakout]

The reason psychedelics are a powerful contemplative tool is because they release large amounts BDNF in your brain, and turn up the gain on your interpretive processing (likely functioning in the parietal lobe in *exactly the same way* as they're known to function in the visual cortex.... We can't yet map the parietal like we can map V1, so we can't map the changes in wave pattern to our thoughts the way we can with V1 and our vision... But it's only a matter of time.)

This ^ is 100% arbitrary fabricated pseudoscientific nonsense which bears no relation whatsoever to what psychedelic drugs do to the human brain

 

[max_freakout]

I agree that you can't experience a drug trip without drugs... that is self-evident

You and I agree that it is not possible to access the psychedelic state of consciousness (tripping) without taking drugs, so for example you cannot trip by meditating

But i disagree that this is "self-evident". It requires some investigation to discover this, you need to meditate and trip yourself (or hear testimonies of other people who have meditated and/or tripped) in order to discover that meditating sober is a very different experience from tripping.

how could you experience a drug without taking a drug?

Here ^ you seem to be fudging two different things together, 1.the drug, and 2.the experience.

These are two completely different things, you don't "experience" a drug, rather you TAKE a drug, then you "have" an experience.

the crucial point is that it is not possible to "have" this particular type of experience (psychedelic experience) , without "taking" this particular type of drug (psychedelic drugs).

Psychedelic drugs and psychedelic experiences belong in two separate ontological categories.

What I (and others) are saying is that drug trips are not the only way a person can have a mystical experience resulting in the sort of knowledge gained from a peak psychedelic experience.

This ^ is just meaningless wordplay

Drugs are the only way to have a psychedelic experience, and that is the only way to acquire the knowledge of what a psychedelic experience is like.

Without drugs, both the psychedelic experience, and the knowledge (ie memory) of what a psychedelic experience is like, are rendered inaccessible.

So if you never take drugs, you will never know what tripping is like except as a secondhand description of somebody else's experience.

Several posters have deceived themselves into believing that you can trip without drugs by meditating, or holding your breath, or standing on your head etc. As you and I agree, that is incorrect, the only way to trip is with drugs

I've certainly only had such an experience from psychedelics, but how can you possibly feel 100% confident that it's not at all possible for anyone to have an experience leading to the essential realization of a peak psychedelic experience by any other means than what you happen to have experienced it on?

Again, more meaningless vague wordgames, trying to disguise the crucial point (that we both agree on) that you cannot have a "peak psychedelic experience" without taking drugs. And that implies furthermore that you cannot come to the "essential realisation" of what it feels like to trip, unless you take drugs and trip yourself. No alternative method that does not involve taking drugs (such as meditating) will ever reveal to you what psychedelic experiencing is like.

I am talking about the psychedelic experience itself, and the subsequent knowledge/memory/familiarity with the psychedelic experience. These are both inaccessible without drugs.

Of course you're going to find far more reports of this type of experience from psychedelics, it's an easier path and psychedelics have become increasingly popular in modern times.

Here ^ you seem to be slipping back into equivocative self-deception, drugs are not merely an "easier path" to psychedelic experiencing, they are the *only* path. A few sentences ago you acknowledged this point as being "self-evident", now you seem to be denying it again.

What do you really believe? Can you trip without drugs (= self-deception), or is tripping without drugs self-evidently impossible (= honesty)?

Not many people care to dedicate the sort of time and discipline necessary to achieve [[[such a thing]]] without psychedelics.

What exactly do you mean by "such a thing" in this ^ sentence? something precise and explicit? Or something vague and meaningless?

If by "such a thing" you are referring to psychedelic experiencing, then no matter how much time and discipline you dedicate, you will never achieve it unless you take drugs (which requires no time and no discipline, you just swallow a chemical)

I am not being close-minded, I am remaining open to a possibility that I have not personally experienced. You, however, are refusing to allow that possibility in your mind, which is actually exactly how I would define close-minded.

First you agreed with me that it is not possible to trip without drugs, now here ^ you seem to be disagreeing. What exactly are you disagreeing with me about? You already acknowledged that it is self-evidently true that you can't trip without drugs, so what is this "possibility that you have not personally experienced"?

 

[Xorkoth]

What I (and others) are saying is that drug trips are not the only way a person can have a mystical experience resulting in the sort of knowledge gained from a peak psychedelic experience.

This ^ is just meaningless wordplay

How so? I said a thing, pretty clearly I think. I'm stating the same point I tried to make in my entire post. I'm saying I believe it's possible for someone to experience the same essential realization (that we are all one) without the use of psychedelic drugs.

Just because someone doesn't experience the exact same experience (visuals, fear, and so on) doesn't mean their experience could not have the same end result. Everyone experiences psychedelics differently too. No two trips are exactly the same. I've experienced ego death 3 times on psychedelics and though the end result was the same each time, the actual experiences differed greatly from each other. Just as the actual experience differed from my own for others I have spoken with who have had that sort of experience, even though we arrived at similar conclusions.

What exactly do you mean by "such a thing" in this ^ sentence? something precise and explicit? Or something vague and meaningless?

If by "such a thing" you are referring to psychedelic experiencing, then no matter how much time and discipline you dedicate, you will never achieve it unless you take drugs (which requires no time and no discipline, you just swallow a chemical)

I was using it in the standard way that you use the word "thing" to refer to something you explicitly stated in a previous sentence. The "thing" i am referring to is an experience that has the end result of the blooming of a new awareness that we are all of the same universal mind, which is the thing that psychedelic ego dissolution has revealed to me.

This conversation is frustrating to me because you just seem to be disregarding anything anyone says to you that you disagree with by claiming it's meaningless wordplay. I chose my words carefully, they were not meaningless, and I think I've been pretty clear and direct.