^i understand where you're coming from but i'm well experienced in such practices, i've seen first person what happens when you aren't ready for a spiritual revelation, full blown psychosis, that lasted at least 3 weeks. But every psychotic break i have, i come back stronger and stronger. I've scared myself when i was younger and less experienced. Now that i'm older i find regular life boring enough that if anything did scare me it'd at least make things interesting.
I also take many precautions, it takes years to build up and learn all this stuff so i don't recommend just messing around with poly drug use/abuse, fasting, sleep deprivation without having a solid base first and plenty of knowledge in many areas, like eastern religion, philosophy, religion itself, meditation, lucid dreaming, OBEs/Astral projection and the occult/whatever chaos magick reading material you want to delve into.
indeed, you have to be careful or you may end up delusional and thinking you are the second coming of Jesus Christ working for the CIA out of your bedroom. I practice rituals when sober on a daily basis, well i'm not sober on a daily basis but i'm not fucked up or tripping. I have way too much experience with mania, hypomania, psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia in psychosis as well as anxiety, depression and whatever other label you can slap on me lol.
I appreciate your concern, i can't really show you through text that i can handle it and am ready for anything, it's been a long journey to this point and i am fully willing to embrace whatever comes, even psychosis though i certainly do not push myself to that point anymore, i prefer a good old ego shattering every now and then instead.
@hypGnosis: Jung has always interested me, i believe i see archetypes while tripping but they aren't the ones he describes; they are usually the very patterns that come up in nature, like the pattern of bark on a tree, the leaves on trees, fractal like flowers, the underlying form of things that exist in the universe, like even galaxy like visuals swirling and such. I can't really explain them very well though and i find Jungs idea of which archetypes exist to be very odd and strange given my own experiences, i just can't relate to the themes he talks about. I think of it in a Platonic sense i guess.
I've been meaning to read Lovecraft's work but i dunno, i prefer to come to things intuitively rather than seek them out. In terms of symbolism and ideas borrowed from popular Occultist writers and stuff, i get some influence from it all but i just see it as another paradigm that you can use if you so wish.
I've been away from BL for a few days (or more i'm not even sure) on a massive drug binge which was not really spiritual in nature but due to such abuse, i need to heal up and regain some energy, focus and not end up in psychosis before going back to school. I still feel that energy connecting me to everything. I've gained a great amount of confidence in knowing that it is there, as far as enlightenment, well i'm not sure what enlightenment really is, my ego is still intact despite quite the battle with it over many years and i still have to remain functional in this world so kind of stuck in that regard but my understanding of life, the universe and nature has greatly evolved, as well as my sense of self and identity. That's pretty much what i get out of these experiences, in terms of anything concrete and physical, i haven't had any mystical experiences in quite a while, especially ones that blow my mind.
I seem to have been indoctrinated by the catholic church as a young child so i like to use the symbolism from the bible and imagery and such but it's also useful to 'paradigm shift' and use other things but for myself, the symbolism that is in my mind is deeply linked with symbols in Christianity for whatever reason and i find the most power in that, despite not being Christian in the first place. I do take a lot of things from Buddhism and things here and there from eastern religions for use with chaos magick, much of it just sort of seeps into my consciousness rather than actually seeking it out, maybe all those religion courses i've taken over the years are the reason for that though.
Lately i've been interested/fascinated by the catholic/christian/Jewish conceptions of evil. Sometimes i don't know what to think about it but it has great power, the concept itself i mean. I really don't think that, logically the concept of evil exists, well except in those that believe in it but still, i struggle with the idea and have some sort of reverence for it. Fucking Catholicism. I think associating the occult or chaos magick with satanism, heresy or evil or any thing like that is silly but with paradigm shifting, you can certainly scare the shit out of yourself for whatever reason. I think that fear is mostly manifested by the ego but i'm not sure why, embracing the fear seems to be empowering though. So i find the concept of evil useful in that sense anyway.
In the case of the greek Gods and mythology in general, i don't relate to much of it personally and as such don't use it or even consider it really. I like to use free association to find symbols or images/entities. I think a lot about native American/Canadian religion and spirituality and in the past along with Catholicism have found the most power in those ideologies and symbols/people to meditate on and channel with/through. I reason this is due to my upbringing and genetic make up but since i put so much belief in such things, i think what works for people varies because of this, perhaps just different roads to the same destination though.
i've certainly felt like a medium and had an entity writing text (like automatic writing while entity switching) through me at ridiculous rates after meditation and visualizing symbology used in the Catholic Church/Bible. I went completely psychotic from that though, could not handle the power at the time but during the period of psychosis i began to feel that massive connection to that oneness, unity or collective consciousness, whatever you want to call it and was also extremely euphoric the entire time.
I had experienced such states before while tripping on dissociatives and still consistently feel ithe same things on dissociatives far more so than traditional psychedelics, i think that is truly a source of immense energy (using symbols/ideas that you find intuitively and channeling/meditaing with them to transcend the self, paticularly while on dissociatives) and if tapped into could provide revelations/insights about yourself, your essence or being and plenty of other things without necessarily sending you into psychosis. I've come to believe that I was once a bear, a grizzly bear lol through such methods. Whether that is true or not, or that i like bears has anything to do with it, doesn't really matter, it just felt so real and that in itself i find strange and if i'm really high i will try to think as though i am a bear and feel that 'bearness' of existence, just for fun if nothing else lol. The bear theme has often popped up in psychotic breaks as well.
probably starting to sound crazy but when you probe those deep dark waters, you find some strange stuff sometimes, i just acknowledge it and keep travelling inward to see what else is there. I like to visualize it as walking through a dark cave and lighting torches, like synapses in the brain, or going through and turning or flipping switches. I know many other people intuitively have come to that very same visualization which i also find interesting.
sorry that was so long lol
