The Mental Shitbox.
- Thread starter Psychonautical
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
nearjat
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This all really hits home with me, yet I've never thought of it this way.
Pre-LSD I had that clogged shitbox feeling (I was zombieing through life, leaping through hoops), after experiencing all that can be bliss (LSD), it was cleared. For a long while I seemed to have the ability to tune out the noise, and focus on the signal.
Lately because of various factors in my life I have been depressed and anxious with no focus, and had no explanation why I couldn't handle it as logically as I have been able to in the past.
Well it turns out that I have a date with Lucy next week, haven't seen her in about 4 months. That 4 months was a shocking number to me, it really feels like its been at least 2 years for some reason. I don't think the media fed shitbox idea is a clear universal concept, more so a generalized description of the stress that we build up over time.
Pre-LSD I had that clogged shitbox feeling (I was zombieing through life, leaping through hoops), after experiencing all that can be bliss (LSD), it was cleared. For a long while I seemed to have the ability to tune out the noise, and focus on the signal.
Lately because of various factors in my life I have been depressed and anxious with no focus, and had no explanation why I couldn't handle it as logically as I have been able to in the past.
Well it turns out that I have a date with Lucy next week, haven't seen her in about 4 months. That 4 months was a shocking number to me, it really feels like its been at least 2 years for some reason. I don't think the media fed shitbox idea is a clear universal concept, more so a generalized description of the stress that we build up over time.
Propyl Power
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Nicely articulated insights, skatardude 
ResinTeeth
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Viacom anyone?
My shit box doesn't get filled because I pay attention to the world. I rarely watch television and I don't need to watch the news to know the general direction the state of world affairs is going. My shit box is filled because I become overwhelmed with thoughts or feelings that I haven't let see the light of day, personal issues also like to make a home in the box.
Riemann Zeta: I'll take you up on that coke haha
Blurpinkle
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I am an actor in New York City - Home of the biggest mental shit box creation other than LA, and I can tell you I never watch cable TV and I haven't for about the last 4 years. "How can you be an actor without watching TV?" people will ask me all the time. Easy, I watch real life and I love films. I always have DVDs that I love, and I have the greatest thing in the world - the internet, so I can watch and read whatever I want on my magic screen. That's how I'm here talking to you isn't it?
The biggest thing is that most people are in a 'world trance' and they are not even remotely awake and aware. they go bouncing around to stimuli and don't create their world or even think about thinking or being, they just react in a big loop.
Now we are in a huge feedback loop, but if you realize that you can really interact with it and have some fun.
This other guy I listen to 'Blackout' has a show called BLackout's Box on thursday nights and he uses the same term as you 'clearing out the mindchatter shitbox'
He is very into spirit and humor and psychedelics you should check it out there are some very funny things on his site http://blackout.com
And again stay away from the TV
The biggest thing is that most people are in a 'world trance' and they are not even remotely awake and aware. they go bouncing around to stimuli and don't create their world or even think about thinking or being, they just react in a big loop.
Now we are in a huge feedback loop, but if you realize that you can really interact with it and have some fun.
This other guy I listen to 'Blackout' has a show called BLackout's Box on thursday nights and he uses the same term as you 'clearing out the mindchatter shitbox'
He is very into spirit and humor and psychedelics you should check it out there are some very funny things on his site http://blackout.com
And again stay away from the TV
nearjat
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Yeah to add to my last post, fuck TV. I very rarely watch TV for entertainment.
I don't know, I live my life strangely. I just try and make sure I am doing what feels right without hurting others. But the strange thing is how much I think, I am ALWAYS thinking. I am always contemplating, analyzing, abstracting, modeling, designing. I love to CREATE! Especially when I create something, from understanding its core mechanism (from analyzing other shit). Seriously I don't even remember the last time I've just zoned out and tuned out, I'm always busy in my head. So my "shitbox" has nothing to do with media, just my constant thoughts getting caught up in each other.
I don't know, I live my life strangely. I just try and make sure I am doing what feels right without hurting others. But the strange thing is how much I think, I am ALWAYS thinking. I am always contemplating, analyzing, abstracting, modeling, designing. I love to CREATE! Especially when I create something, from understanding its core mechanism (from analyzing other shit). Seriously I don't even remember the last time I've just zoned out and tuned out, I'm always busy in my head. So my "shitbox" has nothing to do with media, just my constant thoughts getting caught up in each other.
Ximot
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One Crying in the Wilderness
an excerpt from an interview with Ken Kesey
by Robert Faggen
Originally published in The Paris Review, Spring 1994
What follows is an excerpt from Robert Faggen's interview of Ken Kesey published in The Paris Review, Spring 1994. I feel that it aptly conveys the positive power of a terrifying entheogenic experience, or what's good about a really, really, wicked bad trip.
ROBERT FAGGEN: After you wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, you set out on the bus. What did you want to explore?
KEN KESEY: What I explore in all my work: wilderness. Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers sought that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight. Things were all owned by the same people, and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness. Throughout the work of James Fenimore Cooper there is what I call the American terror. It's very important to our literature, and it's important to who we are: the terror of the Hurons out there, the terror of the bear, the avalanche, the tornado--whatever may be over the next horizon.
As we came to the end of the continent, we manufactured our terror. We put together the bomb. Now we don't even have the bomb hanging over our heads to terrify us and give us reason to dress up in manly deerskin and go forth to battle it. There's something we're afraid of, but it doesn't have the clarity of the terror of the Hurons or the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War. Now it's fuzzy, and it's fuzzy because the people who are in control don't want you to draw a bead on the real danger, the real terror in this country.
FAGGEN: What is the "real terror" in America?
KESEY: When people ask me about LSD, I always make a point of telling them you can have the shit scared out of you with LSD because it exposes something, something hollow. Let's say you have been getting on your knees and bowing and worshiping; suddenly you take LSD, and you look, and there's just a hole, there's nothing there. The Catholic Church fills this hole with candles and flowers and litanies and opulence. The Protestant Church fills it with hand-wringing and pumped-up squeezing emotions because they can't afford the flowers and the candles. The Jews fill this hole with weeping and browbeating and beseeching of the sky: "How long, how long are you gonna treat us like this?" The Muslims fill it with rigidity and guns and a militant ethos. But all of us know that that's not what is supposed to be in that hole.
After I had been at Stanford for two years, I got into LSD. I began to see that the books I thought were the true accounting books--my grades, how I'd done in other schools, how I'd performed at jobs, whether I had paid off my car or not--were not at all the true books. There were other books that were being kept, real books. In those books is the real accounting of your life. And the mind says, "Oh, this is titillating." So you want to take some more LSD and see what else is there. And soon I had the experience that everyone who's ever dabbled in psychedelics has. A big hand grabs you by the back of the neck, and you hear a voice saying, "You want to see the books? Okay, here are the books." And it pushes your face right down into all of your cruelties and all of your meanness, all the times that you have been insensitive, intolerant, racist, sexist. It's all there, and you read it. You can't take your nose up off the books. You hate them. You hate who you are. You hate the fact that somebody has been keeping track, just as you feared. You hate it, but you can't move your arms for eight hours. Before you take any acid again you start trying to juggle the books. You start trying to be a little better person. Then you get the surprise. The next thing that happens is that you're leaning over looking at the books, and you feel the lack of the hand at the back of your neck. The thing that was forcing you to look at the books is no longer there. There's only a big hollow, the great American wild hollow, which is scarier than hell, scarier than purgatory or Satan. It's the fact that there isn't any hell and there isn't any purgatory, there isn't any Satan. And all you've got is Sartre sitting there with his momma--harsh, bleak, worse than guilt. And if you've got courage, you go ahead and examine that hollow.
FAGGEN: And that hollow is, for you, the new wilderness?
KESEY: That's the new wilderness. It's the same old wilderness, just no longer up on that hill or around that bend, or in that gully. It's because there are no more hills and gullies that the hollow is there, and you've got to explore the hollow with faith. If you don't have faith that there is something down there, pretty soon when you're in the hollow, you begin to get scared and start shaking. That's when you stop taking acid and start taking coke and drinking booze and start trying to fill the hollow with depressants and Valium. Real warriors like William Burroughs or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine the hollow as well as anybody; they get in there, look far into the dark, and yet come out with poetry.
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/kesey_ken/kesey_ken_interview1.shtml
an excerpt from an interview with Ken Kesey
by Robert Faggen
Originally published in The Paris Review, Spring 1994
What follows is an excerpt from Robert Faggen's interview of Ken Kesey published in The Paris Review, Spring 1994. I feel that it aptly conveys the positive power of a terrifying entheogenic experience, or what's good about a really, really, wicked bad trip.
ROBERT FAGGEN: After you wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, you set out on the bus. What did you want to explore?
KEN KESEY: What I explore in all my work: wilderness. Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers sought that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight. Things were all owned by the same people, and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness. Throughout the work of James Fenimore Cooper there is what I call the American terror. It's very important to our literature, and it's important to who we are: the terror of the Hurons out there, the terror of the bear, the avalanche, the tornado--whatever may be over the next horizon.
As we came to the end of the continent, we manufactured our terror. We put together the bomb. Now we don't even have the bomb hanging over our heads to terrify us and give us reason to dress up in manly deerskin and go forth to battle it. There's something we're afraid of, but it doesn't have the clarity of the terror of the Hurons or the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War. Now it's fuzzy, and it's fuzzy because the people who are in control don't want you to draw a bead on the real danger, the real terror in this country.
FAGGEN: What is the "real terror" in America?
KESEY: When people ask me about LSD, I always make a point of telling them you can have the shit scared out of you with LSD because it exposes something, something hollow. Let's say you have been getting on your knees and bowing and worshiping; suddenly you take LSD, and you look, and there's just a hole, there's nothing there. The Catholic Church fills this hole with candles and flowers and litanies and opulence. The Protestant Church fills it with hand-wringing and pumped-up squeezing emotions because they can't afford the flowers and the candles. The Jews fill this hole with weeping and browbeating and beseeching of the sky: "How long, how long are you gonna treat us like this?" The Muslims fill it with rigidity and guns and a militant ethos. But all of us know that that's not what is supposed to be in that hole.
After I had been at Stanford for two years, I got into LSD. I began to see that the books I thought were the true accounting books--my grades, how I'd done in other schools, how I'd performed at jobs, whether I had paid off my car or not--were not at all the true books. There were other books that were being kept, real books. In those books is the real accounting of your life. And the mind says, "Oh, this is titillating." So you want to take some more LSD and see what else is there. And soon I had the experience that everyone who's ever dabbled in psychedelics has. A big hand grabs you by the back of the neck, and you hear a voice saying, "You want to see the books? Okay, here are the books." And it pushes your face right down into all of your cruelties and all of your meanness, all the times that you have been insensitive, intolerant, racist, sexist. It's all there, and you read it. You can't take your nose up off the books. You hate them. You hate who you are. You hate the fact that somebody has been keeping track, just as you feared. You hate it, but you can't move your arms for eight hours. Before you take any acid again you start trying to juggle the books. You start trying to be a little better person. Then you get the surprise. The next thing that happens is that you're leaning over looking at the books, and you feel the lack of the hand at the back of your neck. The thing that was forcing you to look at the books is no longer there. There's only a big hollow, the great American wild hollow, which is scarier than hell, scarier than purgatory or Satan. It's the fact that there isn't any hell and there isn't any purgatory, there isn't any Satan. And all you've got is Sartre sitting there with his momma--harsh, bleak, worse than guilt. And if you've got courage, you go ahead and examine that hollow.
FAGGEN: And that hollow is, for you, the new wilderness?
KESEY: That's the new wilderness. It's the same old wilderness, just no longer up on that hill or around that bend, or in that gully. It's because there are no more hills and gullies that the hollow is there, and you've got to explore the hollow with faith. If you don't have faith that there is something down there, pretty soon when you're in the hollow, you begin to get scared and start shaking. That's when you stop taking acid and start taking coke and drinking booze and start trying to fill the hollow with depressants and Valium. Real warriors like William Burroughs or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine the hollow as well as anybody; they get in there, look far into the dark, and yet come out with poetry.
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/kesey_ken/kesey_ken_interview1.shtml
magic wedel
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That was interesting. I'm not sure how to find the new wilderness though.
Roger&Me
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bz.
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Mental shitbox? - Sounds like normal stress accumulating. Lot of our human stress comes from our neurotic and restrictive conceptions of things. Like superego blocking the unconscious, in Freudian terms, or conditioning blocking the free flow of energy in our bodies, in yogic terms.
I guess we need some katharsis every now and then, otherwise it may be that our critical mass gets overflown and we explode or something.
Things I do to loosen my mind are for example: Physical practise (yoga, walking, exercise), sauna, meditation, chilling with friends. Oh yeah, and about once a year I get the urge to get drunk as hell. Intoxication in general invokes the liberating energy of Dionysos.
- Sounds like normal stress accumulating. Lot of our human stress comes from our neurotic and restrictive conceptions of things. Like superego blocking the unconscious, in Freudian terms, or conditioning blocking the free flow of energy in our bodies, in yogic terms. I guess we need some katharsis every now and then, otherwise it may be that our critical mass gets overflown and we explode or something.
Things I do to loosen my mind are for example: Physical practise (yoga, walking, exercise), sauna, meditation, chilling with friends. Oh yeah, and about once a year I get the urge to get drunk as hell. Intoxication in general invokes the liberating energy of Dionysos.
Venrak
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Well even in Freudian terms, it is a breakdown of unconscious barriers that, as was stated by someone, impede the healthy flow or expression of instinctive energy. It's one's drive to do things, whatever they may be this energy must be expressed, and even if there are certain psychological barriers due to conflicting moral issues or traumatic events it must find a way out, and often in unhealthy means which can lead to dangerous behaviours such as habitual drug abuse, violence, cutting, or whatever works best for the individual to compensate his sense of inferiority, lack of power over one's surroundings, etc...
Now, when the mind is cluttered too much, when there are too many barriers up , like psychological scars we hear figuratively spoken of, the energy becomes dammed and this can lead to mental illness such as depression, development of anxiety issues, personality eccentricity, involuntary smiles or odd facial expressions, and well, many forms of insanity.
And this is why taking psychedelics, especially tryptamines I've found, but also 2c-b, aid so well in the clearing of this garbage kicking around, and these barriers, or psychological scars from our unconscious mind , in which time we can come to terms with this in the conscious and there is a subsequent release of the dammed energies, an urge to do, to create, whatever it is, it's what is called a sublimation, or expression of the energy. After these breakthroughs are achieved and the energy is released and is flowing more or less as it should, into the actions that hopefully are now feeling more aligned with who your Ideal Self is than before the trip. And then there's the processing of this information and these feelings the day after, often much longer...Going back through the trip, finding the meaning of it all with all neurons firing as close to baseline as goes for any of us.
Ego dissolution, though, is something else. For me on mushrooms after a good eleven to fourteen grams it's like... the computer's running and all the files are there, but there is no operating system running. I just seem to fade into the deep recesses of my mind, and like...Almost mechanically see how my thoughts work and affect eachother...Damaged or cluttered areas. Kind of frightening though a good tool as long as it's not strong enough to induce PTSD, because that's somewhat counter productive, but nobody ever wants a bad trip. Flashbacks are weird at best.
All in all to say that twisting you brain actually does wring the mental gunk out of it.
In a wonderfully therapeutic sense.
Now, when the mind is cluttered too much, when there are too many barriers up , like psychological scars we hear figuratively spoken of, the energy becomes dammed and this can lead to mental illness such as depression, development of anxiety issues, personality eccentricity, involuntary smiles or odd facial expressions, and well, many forms of insanity.
And this is why taking psychedelics, especially tryptamines I've found, but also 2c-b, aid so well in the clearing of this garbage kicking around, and these barriers, or psychological scars from our unconscious mind , in which time we can come to terms with this in the conscious and there is a subsequent release of the dammed energies, an urge to do, to create, whatever it is, it's what is called a sublimation, or expression of the energy. After these breakthroughs are achieved and the energy is released and is flowing more or less as it should, into the actions that hopefully are now feeling more aligned with who your Ideal Self is than before the trip. And then there's the processing of this information and these feelings the day after, often much longer...Going back through the trip, finding the meaning of it all with all neurons firing as close to baseline as goes for any of us.
Ego dissolution, though, is something else. For me on mushrooms after a good eleven to fourteen grams it's like... the computer's running and all the files are there, but there is no operating system running. I just seem to fade into the deep recesses of my mind, and like...Almost mechanically see how my thoughts work and affect eachother...Damaged or cluttered areas. Kind of frightening though a good tool as long as it's not strong enough to induce PTSD, because that's somewhat counter productive, but nobody ever wants a bad trip. Flashbacks are weird at best.
All in all to say that twisting you brain actually does wring the mental gunk out of it.
In a wonderfully therapeutic sense.
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bz.
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Which remains me of some psychedelic art -sessions we have somehow ended up having with couple of my trip friends. It's a funny sight: Few grown-up people sitting on floor of an empty room filled with different kinds of artistic instrumets, strange drawings laying all around and frequent manic bursts of laughter accompanied with incontrollable rolling on the ground.
There seems to be a clear therapeutic effect on this kind of shroom-sessions. And I have found that drawing is a good way to process the upcome or the trip in general.
malakaix
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That was a very interesting read. It's almost as if Kesey put my thoughts on the subject into descriptive meaning.
the_ketaman
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I prefer to stay far, far away from psychedelic drugs when things arent going to good in any way really. The only way your going to get me to take any kind of psychedelics is on a day when everything is as near perfect as possible, just a day with no negativity whatsoever. My brain cant handle problems well at all when im tripping. I may not be as mentally stong or tough as you guys, some could go as far a weak minded but Ive IV'd DPT so im not sure if thats true or not.
I need to be clear minded and feeling 100% if im going to trip otherwise I just get in loops or have a ot so nice trip(not a bad trip) and ive just had way too many not so good trips within the last few months that I really have learned my lesson, so I think events or doofs are the place to trip, then im not just taking drugs for the hell of it which I think im sometimes doing.
I need to be clear minded and feeling 100% if im going to trip otherwise I just get in loops or have a ot so nice trip(not a bad trip) and ive just had way too many not so good trips within the last few months that I really have learned my lesson, so I think events or doofs are the place to trip, then im not just taking drugs for the hell of it which I think im sometimes doing.
BreakingSet
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If we as individuals could harness the vast potential of ANY experience minus fear we would definitely stumble upon some solution or another. I refuse to release myself from a conceptual 'shitbox' only to find myself in a larger psychedelic box. I am free. One of these days I will eventually discover that my body is also a limiting factor, and on that day I will do what all people do, I will leave it behind. On that day I will also leave behind my mind. The identification of self that will be lost then will be the stuff 'I' imaganed myself to be. In that light its actually fun to see this 'shitbox' thing as just a bunch of stuff you imagine yourself to be, stuff you imagine is important, and cling to like life itself depends upon it.
Reexamine why you hold on to the stuff you claim is clogging your mind. You're the one grasping all the shit so tightly. No one else is doing it for you. This is why I deplore the idea of salvation; there is none coming. The only thing the world needs saving from is yourself.
A good way to start is to realize that self deprecation is never beneficial. You and no one else here has a 'shitbox'. We are all involved in our own ways in an intricate and beautiful reality (. Truly laughing at yourself might be the most cleansing thing available at this point. Psychedelics after all are just another thing, beneficial when not clung to.
BreakingSet
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I would go as far as to say that even the concept of how far we've come is arbitrary. When I pay attention, give attention, to what and who I really am, I find that all the arbitrary stuff I've been struggling with loosens and starts falling away. Its like an acorn of memory solidified around a dimensionless point of awareness. In my confusion I collected the shell around me, holding onto memories and dreams, acting as if they were real.
I've wanted to mention in other posts that you've made that I really dig your point of view. I imagine that you better the lives of those who know you. And that my friend is a beautiful thing.
Ximot
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BreakingSet
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