☮ Social ☮ PD Social Talk Thread: If 2020 Was the Dumpster, Can 2021 Be the Fire?
- Thread starter cosmic charlie
- Start date
- Status
Xorkoth
Bluelight Crew
Incel 
cosmic charlie
Bluelight Crew
This Youtube Chanel called "Soft White Underbelly" is some really heavy shit. He does interviews with alot of drug addicts from the streets in California, their is alot of them. But viewer be warned some of them are pretty disturbing. This is the newest one im watching it for the first time as we speak.
Bella Figura
Bluelight Crew
Yeah I've been watching a lot of those recently. Pretty sad stuff.
cosmic charlie
Bluelight Crew
Yeah man its captivating but tragic, makes me so grateful I pulled myself from the streetlife in NYC years ago. I met alot of people that could have been on this show. I just found out about this the other day.
I think I've read posts of yours before, SKL, mentioning the "salience receptor" theory. That is right in line with what I'm talking about, and it's actually possible your posts helped me formulate my own perspective as I think I read those posts of yours 4-5 years back, and I just came up with hyper-significance/relevance in the past two years?
Anyways, I agree with a lot of what you are saying, though I do not agree that the entirety of the experience is bullshit. I think it is bullshit in that the reality of that type of state experience does not nullify, negate, or dismiss the relevance and reality of sober perception and living, and that there is a strong tendency for one to decide, as you mentioned in the post, that that state is superior to, more real, etc. to what is usually experienced. I think that is bullshit. But, I don't think the experience itself is bullshit. I think it is entirely true, just as there are all kinds of things that are true. However, what is not true is the relegation of that reality to other realms of reality/existence that are not that, and do not play by those rules. For example, that I can "raise my vibration" enough to completely change my life and fortune. No, you cannot change your life by experiencing god through the big s Self. You change your life by getting really fucking clear on how the ways you're living are affecting your life in ways that you don't actually want, and how to change things on the inside and outside as needed to then shift the outcomes you're seeing, etc. So again, I think the delusion and bullshit of psychedelics is the idea that without doing anything solid, and in the world, you can change things that are solid and in the world. The experience of godliness, unity, etc. I 100% think is real. I think it is the experience of wholeness of the Self, which is how we experience god. And it is beautiful and to be revered. And, it has it's limits.
Thoughts?
Ah, got it. I assume it's Windows for non-coding needs, then?
Deleted member 521610
Bluelighter
You change your entire life if you truly know how to use them as a tool. Read the LSD handbook written in the 1950's. Blindfold darkness high dose LSD headphones music and meditation to truly change and reprogram your mind.
The things i went through on trips help me everyday to be less stressed. To be compassionate and understand that when people cause pain they are coming from a place of pain in their heart. It allows me to know that this life is simply a play even if things get really bad and tough at the end of it all we die there is eternal bliss and love because we are god.
The thing about psychedelics is that everybody is trying to push their view and experince of them on everybody else when everybody is having a unique experince. And a majority of people these days never truly acutally go the full inner route of darkness and blindfolds to see the depths that they can acutally go.
If you manage to fully let go and manifest the LSD anything is possible. totally other realms lives past lives future lives becoming animals living as gods in heaven. This is the depths of LSD most people will never learn to tap into. How about living out full simulated realities within simulated realities within your own mind on a trip that feel like legit full lifetimes seeing how each possible choice can play out. This is the full power of LSD that most people will never even get a taste of. This is where the power of the molecule can truly shine and what therapists would try induce in the 1950's and 1960s.
In that respect LSD is one of the most powerful psychedelics of them all expect for 5 meo dmt that is stronger. LSD is leagues more powerful than psilocybin at 500 ug + than shrooms could ever be.
LSD should be targeted for thepary and legalization and remove the stigma behind it it can do everything all the other psychedelics can do if used properly.
The things i went through on trips help me everyday to be less stressed. To be compassionate and understand that when people cause pain they are coming from a place of pain in their heart. It allows me to know that this life is simply a play even if things get really bad and tough at the end of it all we die there is eternal bliss and love because we are god.
The thing about psychedelics is that everybody is trying to push their view and experince of them on everybody else when everybody is having a unique experince. And a majority of people these days never truly acutally go the full inner route of darkness and blindfolds to see the depths that they can acutally go.
If you manage to fully let go and manifest the LSD anything is possible. totally other realms lives past lives future lives becoming animals living as gods in heaven. This is the depths of LSD most people will never learn to tap into. How about living out full simulated realities within simulated realities within your own mind on a trip that feel like legit full lifetimes seeing how each possible choice can play out. This is the full power of LSD that most people will never even get a taste of. This is where the power of the molecule can truly shine and what therapists would try induce in the 1950's and 1960s.
In that respect LSD is one of the most powerful psychedelics of them all expect for 5 meo dmt that is stronger. LSD is leagues more powerful than psilocybin at 500 ug + than shrooms could ever be.
LSD should be targeted for thepary and legalization and remove the stigma behind it it can do everything all the other psychedelics can do if used properly.
Vastness
Bluelight Crew
Can agree with everything you quoted up until the last 2 sentences, specifically, or especially, the second to last. Those feelings you mention have real significance, and represent a view of the world that is not typically present in our everyday, consensus reality modes of consciousness. That they are induced by an external agent is irrelevant. While this kind of argument has to be made very carefully - and I may not have the energy to fully elucidate it right now - there is an element of naturalistic fallacy, in my view, in arbitrarily ranking "feelings" which are the representative qualia of endogenous chemicals in the brain, as intrinsically, above, more significant, or more "real" than feelings - again, the representative qualia and elements of perception - induced by exogenous chemicals.
There are, of course, quite rational reasons to err on the side of prioritising the value of those feelings which allow us, most of the time, to easily navigate everyday life, those that have evolved into us as the optimal shades that structure and shape our conscious experience of "reality". But the value, and, indeed, the potential reality of feelings which do not occur in nature, I do not believe should be so easily dismissed. Evolution is a crude and clumsy mechanism, and every aspect of what it is to be a human being bears the scars of the imperfect, winding roads that evolution tends to lead, creating lifeforms with adaptations and features that are functional, and work well enough, but not so well that they could not be improved.
Just as it would be better if the appendix had disappeared entirely, or stayed less resistant to random infections and the resultant appendicitis which would be a death sentence in ancient times, and just as it would be better if the heart of a giraffe did not have to pointlessly pump blood up a conduit which loops unnecessarily up the neck and back down again, courtesy of a part of the circulatory system getting trapped in a progressively lengthening part of the giraffe's anatomy and never quite managing to mutate it's way out of there - in all likelihood, there are ways that brains could work better, and that our default mode of consciousness could be better.
Sobriety is not necessarily the bedrock of reality, or the most "real", and it is a mistake, in my view, to get too fixated on this idea. Equally, of course, just as our quite functional, unaltered mode of conscious experience took billions of years to evolve, in a sense, it's exceedingly unlikely that a single chemical, or a combination of them, is going to perfectly correct whatever flaws there might be in the software of human consciousness. But the feelings that drugs and specifically psychedelic drugs induce are not a single and cohesive conceptual object, and on that basis, I think, although I admit I am not fully aware of the meaning of the concept, I believe I would dispute the "salience receptor" theory.
Psychedelic experiences are a patchwork of feelings, some unconscious, some fairly unrecognisable or indescribable, and some of them, of course, of less value than others. But some aspects of these experiences contain glimpses - in my view - of the possibility of another reality, by which I mean, what it could be like to be a sentient entity, with a mind that is built differently to our own. These realities exist, as far as we know, only in the abstract space of potential conscious experiences, and for sure, many of them are unfunctional voids of delusion, as unstable as the superheavy elements of the periodic table. But some of them might not be - the periodic table of consciousness, so to speak, is largely undiscovered, and there may well be many elements of experience which can exist in quite stable configurations, in other minds. This is hard to study - arguably, maybe impossible to study with any rigour, right now - but these possibilities, in my view, should be taken seriously.
Well put, also.
Buzz Lightbeer
Bluelight Crew
So I bought a darts board a couple months ago, highly recommended. Waiting on the oven, or until food is done cooking? Darts. Have an appointment and you'll be too early? Darts. Been sitting down for too long? Darts.
I'm on form these last few weeks, managed a handful of 180s, when bars open up again I'll be blasting people away left and right, unless they had similarly brilliant ideas. As much of a mental game as a physical one, it requires FF (full focus) and a throwing style that exudes confidence and flair. I'm absolutely nowhere in both aspects but this COVID-19 doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon!!
I'm on form these last few weeks, managed a handful of 180s, when bars open up again I'll be blasting people away left and right, unless they had similarly brilliant ideas. As much of a mental game as a physical one, it requires FF (full focus) and a throwing style that exudes confidence and flair. I'm absolutely nowhere in both aspects but this COVID-19 doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon!!
Zephyn
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2020
- Messages
- 2,054
Linux manI swear my productivity has increased two fold, so fast, so slick, so organized, got everything customized to my liking. I will never go back, and I'm only rocking a very standard Ubuntu.
Related:
you should check out bunsenlabs. its a great debian based distro that is super lightweight and fast, and customized perfectly out of the box. great for devving too.
Buzz Lightbeer
Bluelight Crew
Yeah I was looking into different distros, hadn't made a decision yet. It's a lot of work to reconfigure everything again, + I've got some scripts running and multiple edited configuration files to make it so my laptop doesn't get too loud (Dell laptops seem to have issues with this, especially on Linux, it's bs but yeah, took me a long time to figure it out), I kinda don't want to touch that now that everything is gorgeously smooth. I'm on the fence.... maybe tonight... don't think sleep is coming soon
Xorkoth
Bluelight Crew
I just got back from my vet re-checkup for my cat. 2 weeks ago he got an antibiotic injection because his mouth was all swollen, he had lost 20% of his body weight. Well he put it all back on in the past 2 weeks and has been so much younger seeming and more lively. Well, he's totally healthy, except he has severe dental disease and the vet says we need to put him under anesthesia and clean his teeth, do x-rays, and probably extract most of them. 
I don't want my kitty to have no teeth! And he's 16 years old, though the vet said she's not too worried since he's very healthy (we did full blood work and some other stuff). The vet did say that she would have guessed he was 10 years old at most, unless she knew he was older.
He might end up with no teeth and have his tongue hanging out a little bit. My handsome boy. I won't be able to pretend he's not an old man anymore...
It's also really expensive, but I have insurance for him with a deductible of $1000 per issue treated. And probably some of the stuff I have already paid will count towards that.
My poor kitty.
Yeah, the company has a bunch of standards and we all have to have the same computer setup, and 98% of the employees are not programmers at all, they use MS Office stuff only.
I don't want my kitty to have no teeth! And he's 16 years old, though the vet said she's not too worried since he's very healthy (we did full blood work and some other stuff). The vet did say that she would have guessed he was 10 years old at most, unless she knew he was older.He might end up with no teeth and have his tongue hanging out a little bit.
My handsome boy. I won't be able to pretend he's not an old man anymore...It's also really expensive, but I have insurance for him with a deductible of $1000 per issue treated. And probably some of the stuff I have already paid will count towards that.
My poor kitty.
Yeah, the company has a bunch of standards and we all have to have the same computer setup, and 98% of the employees are not programmers at all, they use MS Office stuff only.
electronDegenerate
Bluelighter
The discussion in this thread has me thinking.
As someone who was once very into the concept of entheogens and had a near reverence for the shamanic use of substances, I feel like there is more to it than *just* pharmacology and salience receptors. This may tie into my view of religion as a whole. I don't trust faith and believe people shouldn't trust religions, but rather their own internal spiritual experiences. I have too many problems with what the consensus reality says is the truth.
I feel like the perceptual changes I have experienced have let me step back from it all. Gained a view from the outside in. This doesn't have to be psychosis. I feel like the rampant misuse of psychedelics and drugs in general has created a tendency for people to not know how to integrate their experience into reality.
There is a lot to gain there. And a lot you could lose if you stop being able to function in that consensus reality. I don't think psychedelics somehow make you better than or more informed than anyone else. For all my psychedelic use I am still searching for answers in life, and I have met people that I envy greatly who seem to have learned their truth, even if it doesn't match with mine.
I may be off topic, but the discussion was good food for thought for me.
As someone who was once very into the concept of entheogens and had a near reverence for the shamanic use of substances, I feel like there is more to it than *just* pharmacology and salience receptors. This may tie into my view of religion as a whole. I don't trust faith and believe people shouldn't trust religions, but rather their own internal spiritual experiences. I have too many problems with what the consensus reality says is the truth.
I feel like the perceptual changes I have experienced have let me step back from it all. Gained a view from the outside in. This doesn't have to be psychosis. I feel like the rampant misuse of psychedelics and drugs in general has created a tendency for people to not know how to integrate their experience into reality.
There is a lot to gain there. And a lot you could lose if you stop being able to function in that consensus reality. I don't think psychedelics somehow make you better than or more informed than anyone else. For all my psychedelic use I am still searching for answers in life, and I have met people that I envy greatly who seem to have learned their truth, even if it doesn't match with mine.
I may be off topic, but the discussion was good food for thought for me.
Zephyn
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2020
- Messages
- 2,054
I took peyote with a shaman from mexico. I didn't have much faith in him but wanted to try peyote. At the end of the ceremony, he did this closing ceremony, and he waves a feather wand over my head while sing-chanting, and at that moment this necklace my ex had made for me when we broke up that had been tied on my neck fell off. this was not the type that could randomly fall off.
Vastness
Bluelight Crew
Just to expand a bit further on my own comments earlier, I agree with this and think it is fairly obvious, unless consciousness itself is "just" neurochemistry.
There needs to be a distinction made between the mechanistic, material explanation for, reason, cause of, process behind - whatever - the subjective, experiential event going on which is fundamental to the nature of being and all we really ever can truly know.
In the most simplistic terms, action of endogenous dopamine on a receptor triggers a feeling of reward, or motivation. But the feeling we experience and the measured, neurochemical allegory in the "real" world are not the same thing. Dopamine inducing an action potential in a cluster of isolated synapses in a petri dish does not contain any information about what the feeling of motivation or reward actually is. Maybe on some level, in some more advanced and enlightened future we'll be able to somehow peek into a subjective, inner world of a cluster of isolated neural tissue, but this would still not be the same thing as the feeling of dopamine induced alterations in consciousness that we experience in our lived and entirely subjective realities.
On that note - of course there is more to psychedelic experiences - or indeed, any drug induced experience - than simple neurochemistry and actions of a receptor (of course, it is never really one receptor, the brain is far too complex for that - but for the purposes of argument and not being too pedantic, we can take the term "salience receptor" to be a kind of abstraction, a pseudoreceptor, if you like, actually denoting the varied range of receptor types and subtypes that are activated by any given and profoundly altering psychoactive drug). The receptor activation by the exogenous agent is the material and measurable trigger for the change in behaviour of the conscious being, but it does not itself provide any information about the inner reality of that conscious being - which is it's own thing, currently somewhat immeasurable, but definitely very real, for better or worse - and no more illusory than consensus reality itself is an illusion which of course - it is. An incomplete representation of the unknowable "true" reality without, and a hazy, low resolution simulation generated by our brains.
But - again - other versions of this illusion exist, and can be accessed even with the crude tools available to us today. Their intrinsic value can be debated - the reality of their existence cannot.
These places within the psychedelic experience do exist, these ways of looking at the world are real - and, again, they hint at the existence of even more possibilities in the space of subjective experience as yet unexplored, maybe inaccessible to human beings.
The region of consciousness space occupied by the octopus - and in fact probably all cephalopods - one of the most remarkable examples of a mind that displays surprising levels of cognitive ability and yet which evolved along such a different route to our own, diverging from our mammalian branch of the tree of life however many billions of years ago - is surely mostly inaccessible to humans, no matter how many drugs we manage to pump into ourselves - and the same thing is true in reverse of course, an octopus cannot access much of the experiential space of human consciousness. But there is likely some overlap, courtesy of us both evolving on the same planet, under the same star.
On that same note, exogenous agitators of the brain's natural neurochemistry and resultant emergent subjective experience can expand the boundaries of perception into previously unknown, inaccessible regions in the untapped space of potential modes of consciousness, and that for me is what is so remarkable about them and where their true value lies, even if many regions on this hypothetical Map of Being should be marked "Here be dragons", home only to dangerous delusions.
On the flipside, there may be regions marked "Here is the mind of God"... although personally I do not believe such a region would be accessible by the human brain or, indeed any known or hypothetical biological lifeforms. It may indeed be more like an inaccessible asymptote on a multidimensional graph with representations of experience that trend to infinity - hypotheticals that can be studied in the abstract, but never directly.
TheAppleCore
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2007
- Messages
- 5,510
I'm glad I decided to pop into this thread when I did, because this is some great discussion. I love the concept and language of "hyper-significance".
I wonder if any of you can relate to the following observation. In popular culture, we sell the philosophy that all it takes to succeed is to believe in yourself. Hard work trumps smarts or connections. Henry Ford is quoted, "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right."
Enter psychedelics. If you really want to believe in yourself, you can do it. We now have the pharmacological tools to rewrite our personal narratives to something far more flattering and exciting. The question then becomes, were they right? Are you the insignificant nobody that you accuse yourself of being? Or do you have the tremendous potential, trapped in the shell of "imposter syndrome", of which society has been trying to convince you all along? I'm not suggesting one answer over another. But which perspective you take will determine whether the psychedelic effect looks like an antidepressant or a catalyst for manic delusion.
Totally. I'm really into the functional buzz these days: just enough of the Three Ts (tea, tetrahydrocannabinol, and tryptamines
) to go about my day with an extra layer of novelty.Has anyone else tried the oil-based THC tinctures that they're selling at dispensaries now? I have to say, I'm blown away by how much they have intensified my love of that molecule. It is so lovely to be able to measure out a precise dose by counting drops from a pipette, rather than eyeballing an unknown weight of a plant of unknown potency, particularly if you're after a subtle effect.
Vastness
Bluelight Crew
Personally, I think this is actually false, but it's a helpful belief to hold, because we can't know what we're truly capable of unless we try - and if we don't believe in ourselves, we will either just not try, or try but possibly unconsciously self-sabotage in other ways. Either way, it will be an uphill battle. But, ultimately, self-belief is not enough. Good fortune plays the biggest role, in that we do not choose our abilities, and this includes the ability to truly believe in ourselves. We can learn, of course, but our capacity and our limits are often determined in ways that are largely out of our control, and even out of our awareness. That said - hard work, or grit, does indeed trump natural ability, or "smarts", or connections, in some cases, although certain connections such as being born into immense wealth can impart opportunities which no amount of grit or natural smarts could achieve in a single lifetime - at least without a lot of good luck along the way, which brings us back to the start, that our fate is largely determined by things outside of our control, and many things that we believe are within our control may be less so than we assume. There is a significant bias in the popular consciousness favour of the victors who try and succeed, and ascribe their successes to the amount of work they put in, or their own natural abilities. On the other hand, a far larger volume of people try their hardest to achieve something and fail, hopefully, eventually, either trying again and again until they do succeed, or seeking another path to fulfilment in life - in the worst case they will consistently blame their failures on themselves, thinking if only they'd tried harder, if only they had done some things differently... and while these things might well be true, they are only really true when this knowledge is used in our mental models to plan for the future. They are not really true, in that that person who tried and failed could have tried harder, could have made a different choice - if they did, they would not be the same person that they are, and would be existing in a different reality. Choices never happen in a vacuum and it is never possible for a single choice to be the only difference between one of many possible futures - there are always multiple confounding, often invisible factors, influencing those choices, many of which will be setting events in motion in subtle ways long before the fabled choice, be it one that is celebrated and becomes a source of confidence, or regretted, and becomes a source of depressive rumination - actually occurs.
So yeah... I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of difficulty with that idea, although all that said - it's still a useful belief, in some ways, with some caveats, if you're able to hold certain dichotomies about the nature of being in your mind.
The self is an illusion - "you" are neither the insignificant nobody that elements of your consciousness tell you that you are, or somebody of tremendous potential that "you" might feel that you tell yourself, or that society might tell you. In this instance, I think it's important to define the separation between the "you", or "I", in this scenario, which can be thought of as a unit of awareness living within the strange landscape of a mind - and the identities that arise within that mind, that the mind tries to assume, while, quite often, different parts of the same mind with different ideas about what "you" are often in conflict, leading to much inner turmoil, things like impostor syndrome, and just the endless confusion and self-doubt and usually subsequent mental illness of varying degrees that comes from not being able to properly understand what you are. But this is a problem caused solely by identification of the mind and the self being one and the same - in fact they are not. The mind is a chaotic entity, rarely in agreement with itself, it's primary identity, in the most fundamental sense, is that of an organ to coordinate the nervous system in an evolutionarily advantageous way. With the evolution of successive layers of cortex, expansion and differentiation of neuronal architecture into highly specialised units, increased capability for higher and higher levels of abstraction, from the most basic, "if desirable chemical gradient, move towards", in likely pre-sentient, pre-neuronal bacteria, to "this food object looks similar to another food object, perhaps it is edible, how much fear do I feel?" - obviously this is still pre-language, and the less fearful specimens would eat the new fruit and die, thus reinforcing the evolutionary-instinctual fear towards a certain kind of fruit, or eat it and flourish, thus reinforcing the same pathway to favour less caution towards this abstraction of something which would one day be "food" rather than just a nameless abstraction.
Eventually our abstraction abilities obviously went off the charts, we evolved and started to use language, we exponentially expanded the amount of data we could retain by storing previously nameless, but now quite complex and varied abstractions, as words, or symbols. Obviously actions are also conceptual objects that can be defined, chained together into basic simulations to evaluate future events, which we now call "thinking", or "planning" to get even more specific. Eventually the mind was such a complex place that thoughts themselves were conceptual objects, thinking and feelings were events, and the same observational language we used to think about the external world, we now turned inwards. The result is that our brains essentially talk to themselves almost constantly. The exact extent and nature of this communication between different brain regions varies from individual to individual, and I wouldn't like to guess what's better, why this is, or the exact difference it would make to our actions - although I would suspect that in certain minds, the inner voices are cohesive enough that much neuronal crosstalk can happen wordlessly, and language is likely only invoked when facing a particularly difficult problem, via a top-down override from the neocortex into the deeper regions that usually govern the majority of our actions. These individuals, I would think, tend to be more confident and self-assured, and will doubt themselves less. On the other hand, with too much crosstalk, every decision becomes an inner debate, even an argument, that can be tiring, depressing, anxiety inducing, paralysing, psychosis in some cases.
In either situation however - the common mistake is to identify with the landscape of your mind - but you are not one and the same. "You" are the passenger, the experiencer, who hears the contents of your consciousness. But just because it is yours, doesn't mean it comes from you. It comes from your brain, which is something that has grown entirely in response to the external input of the world, from even before your conception, in the evolution of the mind of whatever species you happen to be. "You" have little control over this - by some arguments, you have no control, but obviously despite the fact that if you strip away the deterministic mechanisms that created your mind, there does not seem to be anything left - which is why I say that the self is an illusion - we still need to make choices, choice is the name we give to the deterministic process we experience in this reality, and we must make them, whether they are illusory or not. Generally, if you can choose to decide to allow yourself to believe that you are not your mind, then your "personal narrative", or what "you" are, becomes much less relevant, malleable and easier to guide, unbounded by fixed beliefs about what "you" are.
Christ, I'm rambling, maybe way off topic, I do apologise, it's late and I've had too much coffee and not enough sleep. Let me try to bring things back to the actual topic... Oh yes, psychedelics.
Speaking for myself, my use of psychedelics has really solidified my belief in the illusion of the self, of free will, and that we are all really just passengers in life. I would say that this is of dubious benefit and in many ways has made me too fatalistic - in fact, I find it very difficult not to identify with my mind, and all it's tumultuous, ruminative nonsense that rolls through it daily. Meditation probably helps to get a handle on that a lot more than psychedelics ever did.
On the other hand, there have been certain psychedelic experiences that have really reminded me of how freeing the disidentification of the self and the mind can be. Here you are, a unit of awareness, thrust into a random life that you did not choose, to a destiny you do not control. Armed with that knowledge, it's possible to summon an extraordinary amount of self-belief, and really extinguish a lot of self-doubt, because you know that whatever choice you make - it was the only choice you were ever going to make, so why not just trust yourself, accept whatever the outcome, and continue to experience life, and feel your choices, relishing in the magic sensation of enacting your will in the world through the instruments of your mind and your body. In this instance - in fact, free will is not really an illusion - free will is an expression of causality, of the flow of the universe, of events set in motion since the beginning of eternity, as far as such a concept makes sense - and as such, that is what you are. It's also not all you are, it's just all that you can experience, incarnate as you are in your biological body, in this temporary life and all it's wonder.
But, those insights are hard to hold onto, and it's easy to forget, to start identifying with the chatter of the mind again, intrusions into consciousness that you did not will and do not control and yet, somehow start to believe, feel some responsibility for, and again, identify with, even though you are not your thoughts, and you are not your emotions. I believe that psychedelic trips could go the other way, and this disidentification, exposure of the illusory nature of the self, could manifest as a feeling of being trapped in a life in which you have no agency.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this anymore, but I think about this stuff a lot, and I kind of oscillate, I think, between somewhat nihilistic fatalism which I think is the bad outcome, and complete acceptance, gratitude, and appreciation of being both the experiencer and the timeless, eternal agent of that experience. Because rather than the self being an illusion - in truth, the self is an expression of the flow of eternity, but this is not a mode of awareness that can fit within the neurochemical patternings that give rise to our thoughts, that are so easy to identify with, but in a sense, not really our own.
I'm not sure if I've really expressed myself very eloquently here and I recognise that there is a lot of potentially contradictory ideas that need to be somehow simultaneously grasped to truly "get it", and I'm undecided if that's even possible for anyone except in a fairly abstract, philosophical or intellectual sense. I also recognise that not everyone's interpretations of the nature of mind and the place that psychedelics have in that story is going to be the same as mine, and that different interpretations will lead to different outcomes, both internally in the sense of what it's like within one's inner world - whether or not it's a nice place to be - and externally in the sense of people's actual behaviour, something far more easily quantifiable.
Eh, I think that's enough from me, I hope that some of you get some glimmer of insight from that diatribe.
Zephyn
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2020
- Messages
- 2,054
you know just enough about psychdedelics to be dangerous! i hope you at least acknowledge "getting it" can come from a lot of different angles on the human condition. despite what you say here
Vastness
Bluelight Crew
Oh for sure, there are lots of different ways to "get it", whatever "it" is, and I don't claim any knowledge of any kind of objective truth about anything. That's just my experience and understanding of what "it" is (that - in summary - the mind and the self are separate entities and the idea that the self is it's own entity, separate from the flow of causality, entropy, or whatever force of creation - is an illusory idea, which is easily reinforced by identification with the mind, but this identification can be deconstructed via certain modes of cognition.
I make no value judgement either on actually doing this - I believe it to be at least somewhat desirable, for various reasons, but there are ways to do it - and outcomes from doing it, or "getting it" that can be either helpful or harmful to the entity that is the inhabited body and mind of a conscious being. I'm not exactly sure how to control the outcome, honestly, and am not even sure if I've succeeded in myself, although I believe myself to have avoided the worst - likely more from luck than judgement, which again, I believe is all life really is anyway.)
I'll add finally that I don't believe all living beings to be cognitively capable of analysing the landscape of their mind - perhaps this seems obvious, but I don't imagine, for example, a cat spends much time pondering whether it's thoughts and feelings are self-generated, or involuntary occurrences that impinge upon it's awareness from time to time... I think humans are just barely capable of it. Certain forms of monastic living, spending many hours a day in meditation, eschewing all attachments, a la Zen Buddhism and probably similar philosophies - seem to me a way to achieve this state of understanding, or "getting it", if you will. Drugs are a cruder instrument, the insights gleaned generally incomplete, transient, and because of that more prone to undesirable outcomes. Probably there are other ways I'm not aware of. I think conceivably, a species with an even more evolved mind than a human with a far higher capacity for introspection and self awareness could far more easily achieve this, although I couldn't say what that would mean for how they would choose to live.
I guess for me I feel that direct study of the nature of mind is a way to probe the nature of reality, and understand something about what exactly it is, why we are here, what we are, why there is something rather than nothing. It's debatable if drugs are the best way to do this - in fact I don't claim they are, I just claim they have value. Ultimately, I'm not even sure how much any of it matters to anything. Maybe it doesn't.
I make no value judgement either on actually doing this - I believe it to be at least somewhat desirable, for various reasons, but there are ways to do it - and outcomes from doing it, or "getting it" that can be either helpful or harmful to the entity that is the inhabited body and mind of a conscious being. I'm not exactly sure how to control the outcome, honestly, and am not even sure if I've succeeded in myself, although I believe myself to have avoided the worst - likely more from luck than judgement, which again, I believe is all life really is anyway.)
I'll add finally that I don't believe all living beings to be cognitively capable of analysing the landscape of their mind - perhaps this seems obvious, but I don't imagine, for example, a cat spends much time pondering whether it's thoughts and feelings are self-generated, or involuntary occurrences that impinge upon it's awareness from time to time... I think humans are just barely capable of it. Certain forms of monastic living, spending many hours a day in meditation, eschewing all attachments, a la Zen Buddhism and probably similar philosophies - seem to me a way to achieve this state of understanding, or "getting it", if you will. Drugs are a cruder instrument, the insights gleaned generally incomplete, transient, and because of that more prone to undesirable outcomes. Probably there are other ways I'm not aware of. I think conceivably, a species with an even more evolved mind than a human with a far higher capacity for introspection and self awareness could far more easily achieve this, although I couldn't say what that would mean for how they would choose to live.
I guess for me I feel that direct study of the nature of mind is a way to probe the nature of reality, and understand something about what exactly it is, why we are here, what we are, why there is something rather than nothing. It's debatable if drugs are the best way to do this - in fact I don't claim they are, I just claim they have value. Ultimately, I'm not even sure how much any of it matters to anything. Maybe it doesn't.
Xorkoth
Bluelight Crew
Psychedelics are a road to greater self-awareness and self-actualization. But the path is fraught with potential for delusion and rose colored glasses, and a lot of heavy trippers become just really out of touch, while feeling they're more in touch than everyone else. I would say that disciplined spiritual practice, meditation, etc, probably are a less dangerous road to go down for trying to heighten your awareness. A peak psychedelic experience can happen, whether intentionally, or not (my first trip changed my life but I expected to see some dancing fairies and giggle a lot, sort of like super weed, with hallucinations, I did not AT ALL expect the sort of paradigm-shifting, life-altering experience I had). When a peak experience happens, it is a brief sort of "shortcut" glimpse to a way of being that is much different from anything you've experienced before. This can, in positivre cases, lead to great amounts of thought and introspection, and can lead to changes in lifestyle and belief system. In some cases, this can be highly beneficial for the person (like me). The risk is that, well, for one, not everyone is comfortable enough with themselves to handle a trip, despite the acid head mentality of "let's dose everyone, the world would change" (I was that guy for a while for the record). Some people are deeply in hiding, and a trip can be powerfully confronting, and that confronting can traumatize people and lead to negative outcomes. And then the other risk is that for someone who had a peak experience and it changed their perspective, they can start to chase the psychedelic experience/ego death, instead of integrating their experiences and doing additional work while sober to try to truly become the thing that this trip showed you that you could be.
I have felt a few times that the drug (generally plant drugs, especially ibogaine) has its own consciousness and intention, but I am easily willing to accept that it is just an aspect of my own subconscious mind projecting into a separate presence, during a highly altered state. I am agnostic about that sort of thing but I lean toward it being just an aspect of yourself. I believe, from my experiences with oneness on early psychedelic trips, that we are all the universe experiencing itself subjectvely, so we all technically have access to information outside our human selves, since we are so much more than our human selves.
But again, I am not going to try to claim I know for 100% sure that is true. I do believe it, I would not say I am agnostic on that point, but I try to always keep an open mind and allow my opinions to change. But also like I said before, my beliefs bring me a lot of peace and satisfaction and a sense of spirituality and connection to something greater, which I believe humans evolved to crave and need to be totally in balance.
I have felt a few times that the drug (generally plant drugs, especially ibogaine) has its own consciousness and intention, but I am easily willing to accept that it is just an aspect of my own subconscious mind projecting into a separate presence, during a highly altered state. I am agnostic about that sort of thing but I lean toward it being just an aspect of yourself. I believe, from my experiences with oneness on early psychedelic trips, that we are all the universe experiencing itself subjectvely, so we all technically have access to information outside our human selves, since we are so much more than our human selves.
But again, I am not going to try to claim I know for 100% sure that is true. I do believe it, I would not say I am agnostic on that point, but I try to always keep an open mind and allow my opinions to change. But also like I said before, my beliefs bring me a lot of peace and satisfaction and a sense of spirituality and connection to something greater, which I believe humans evolved to crave and need to be totally in balance.
- Status