listerbean said:
This is sort of a rant. I just don't understand those that trip solely for the perceptual effects. I dosed LSD with a friend the other night and started talking about society, life, and all that good stuff and he was just like, "shut up I don't want to hear that, I just want to laugh at stupid things on the TV".
Maybe it's just me, but once I'm tripping, it's almost as if the visuals are just a side effect that I have to put up with to experience the real mind-blowing effects of LSD or other psychedelics. When someone asks me what I see, it seems to be a stupid question. What I see doesn't matter-- it's what I feel and what I intuit. THAT is what matters.
And the whole TV thing. How can anyone watch TV while tripping balls? When I trip, I see the TV for what it is: a light projector that projects tiny pixels on a screen. Who wants to watch that stupid boxed-in psuedo-reality generator? Let's explore! Let's go outside! Let's... do anything but watch TV. What do you think?
I partly agree and partly disagree with you... Yes, it seems a shame to take psychedelics just for the sensory effects, and to ignore or not care for most of the cognitive effects.
But really, I don't see the sensory effects as mere side-effects; indeed, they're often quite inextricable from the cognitive effects for me (e.g. experiences of infinite recursion accompanying 2C-E-induced visual motion temporal distortions; and, while on DiPT, intense awareness and meditation on the auditory sensory-motor loop as every movement I made jostled molecules in the air, which in turn jostled hair cells in my ear and thence by electrical signals to my auditory cortex: this clearly bound up with DiPT's auditory equivalent of the 'pretty colours'). They (visuals and audials; or, to be inclusive of proprioceptive and thermoreceptive psychedelia etc, 'sensuals') are, at least, quite suitable fodder for psychedelic thinking.
As for TV, no I disagree... it's not just a stupid box that projects pixels. If that's how you see it on LSD, fair enough; but the pixels make patterns, often of some complexity, with the patterns sometimes doing and communicating things of potential interest. As with the cognitive effects, it seems a shame to ignore and avoid nature on psychedelics, but the products of human technology (telly, stereo, computer etc) can be as inspiring as any nature, in my view. Just different. ETA: Having said that, in practice on the peak of most reasonable doses of anything I will generally find myself lost in silence, ceilings, and lightbulbs, or blades of grass, bits of blue sky; nothing so complex in and of itself as, say, a television or an animal.
And I have to admit that I take DiPT primarily for its 'pretty sounds' (disclaimer: seems not all people find DiPT-sound pretty :D), although it's always a delight and an honour when the cognitive effects arrive (particularly with DiPT, as it happens, I've generally had less difficulty accepting the psychedelic mental state).
So, in summary, what you feel matters, what you think matters, what you see matters, what you hear matters: each of these modalities is capable of incredible richness alone, and of so much more in combination with each other. Cognition divorced from sensation is, I would contend, as impoverished as sensation divorced from cognition.
And: nature good, technology good too. Or rather: nature good, technology a particularly surprising and complex product of and part of nature.
