In all of these threads I feel like my psychedelic use is very different from anyone else's, and I'd be interested to see if I ever find someone who trips for the same reasons I do. The reason I trip has nothing to do with spirituality: I'm firmly atheistic and highly individualistic. And I have other drugs for hedonistic purposes, although even my wildest night of alcohol binging or pill popping is still in a way an effort to connect with the world. I have fun when I'm tripping in the sense that the moment I walk out the door after coming up and see those glorious colours and patterns I feel like I'm in the best possible place I could be and I've found what I've been looking for. But it's not that sense of fun I'm looking for. I want to feel myself becoming insane, I want to experience something that I can't get any other way, something far away from my stable highly functional self. And I want to see images, not necessarily visual, but snapshots of the world, that move me, that are all wrapped up in complicated emotion, that inspire me. I love the human mind, especially how strange and complex its disorders and its capacity to imagine, and I feel like psychedelics get me closer to that.
It's a combination of artistic inspiration, mental exploration, and a strong urge to self-medicate my lack of extreme emotion. I've always envied the craziest of artists who live right on the edge and are able to make something beautiful out of it, as I never was close to the edge before I found drugs. But now I feel that I am, that I really have things inside my head that no one else does, and I've felt the moments of rapture and despair that being middle class, highly intelligent, and highly capable couldn't offer. I had a luxury problem, and I needed to kick it.
Every drug except marijuana has helped me in some way toward this goal, but I think none more than psychedelics, and I'll keep doing them as long as they keep helping.