☮ Social ☮ PD Social Talk Thread: If 2020 Was the Dumpster, Can 2021 Be the Fire?

[SKL]

I don’t believe in either but objectively demons seem even less likely than plant spirits.
A plant, being a living thing, why wouldn’t it have a spirit when other living things do? Indigenous people have believed in animism for longer than organized religion has been around.

Does it make more sense to say that there is a spiritual world, which we know very little about at best, and that's really only if you are a believer in revelation, and that said spiritual world can effect us in various ways; or, given all that we know about plants and drugs, that eating plants turns us on to a spiritual world in a unique way, a sort of "short-cut" to a liminal space where the spiritual world can effect us on certain terms based around plants?

Really, I guess both will sound pretty far out to the avowed materialist. But he and I can nonetheless agree about people's drug experiences (as such.)

 

[TripSitterNZ]

I was a ex theistic Satanist in the past. I use to believe in demons satan enitites and spirits. Now i only believe in the total oneness of god/consciousness. I do not believe in a soul anymore but i still believe in ghosts but now probably in a way that they are a repeating energy even in spacetime.

Speaking foreign languages is not a sign of possession nor hard to pull off considering how they everywhere these days

Any psychotic patient with religious paranoia of course will respond to jesus.

Possession has never ever happpened nor will it happen. Because there is nothing outside of reality to possess reality. The spirit world the material world are not separate realms both neither have a validated existence that will last. All comes arise and come to pass in this quantum super positioning of reality as one energy.

 

[Vastness]

Thanks for clarifying "χάραγμα", that does make things somewhat clearer, I guess I could have just googled it indeed.

Here's where you and I depart. Yes, spiritual beings are "paranormal" (I would say "preternatural") but that doesn't mean they can only be encountered in an altered state of consciousness. There just isn't an equivalence between these two things. Now, as most disagreements do, this boils down to the definition of a word. Perceiving a paranormal phenomenon does not, eo ipso, mean one is in an altered state of consciousness unless you define an altered state of consciousness to include any and all perceptions of paranormal phenomena to constitute an altered state of consciousness. As drug users know, there are all sorts of indicia of altered states. Now, some things like temporal lobe epilepsy that are associated with perceiving paranormal phenomena are very much altered states, but I wouldn't be too quick to make that equivalency.

I would preliminarily agree with you, I think, in that conceivably, paranormal phenomena could be perceived in a state of consciousness which was measurably "regular", so to speak. For the record I'm not particularly bound to my usage of the word paranormal. I can accept "preternatural" too, although I think paranormality implies preternaturalness, although the converse, admittedly, is not true.

I would start by seeing if they are associated with any paranormal phenomena to use your terminology or symptoms of possession or oppression to use explicitly Christian terminology.

I was going to say no at first - but as far as symptoms of possession, yes, definitely. There are many examples of drug induced altered states which result in symptoms which very much mirror states that in an earlier age, would be described as possession. Whether entities are involved, is, I think, an open question, since those possessed or deep in a drug induced psychosis are very rarely able to give a detailed account of their own experience of that possession, or drug induced psychosis, but in some cases, I'm sure they would describe a sense of being possessed. I myself have experienced a sensation of possession under the influence of 3-MeO-PCP, although I do not necessarily attribute it to an entity other than a part of myself that I no longer recognised, and the conflict was fortuitously, a cognitive one, primarily, I was not compelled to behave in destructive or "demonic" ways.

I didn't say that. I said that they did not usually manifest themselves in dramatic phenomena like what is called "demonic possession" (which phenomenon is an undoubtedly real thing, even if that's not what it actually is.) There are very dramatic phenomena associated with "good spiritual beings" (more) but sadly in our lives it would appear we are more likely to encounter a bad one in dramatic manifestation than a good one in the same. This is very much not to say that we don't have them acting on our lives, but that goes beyond the scope that we are agreeing to here.

Hmm... OK, I won't explicitly disagree given your clarification that the phenomenon (of demomic possession, at least) is real even if the description of it is inaccurate. I have a hard time finding that story of the Miracle of the Sun convincing, as ever, it's convenient that it happened in an age before digital video cameras and satellites pointed at and recording solar activity constantly. I would however argue that "angelic possession" is simply not a recognised phenomenon because the changes it would induce in a person would not or at least, presumably, should not cause distress or a need to pathologise or explain it. There seem to be quite clear reasons why demonic possession has been, historically, more commonly reported than "angelic possession", which presumably in most cases would manifest simply as someone deciding to become an extremely selfless, giving, overall good person who people enjoyed being around. No-one would have any reason to suggest this person was "possessed", even if the transformation was dramatic. We would just attribute it to someone who managed to turn their life around, of their own volition and will.

What I'm saying, highly specifically and more formally, is that any (a) paranormal phenomenon that is more than a mere hallucination is not solely drug induced

I can agree with that.

and (b) drugs never induce paranormal phenomena by themselves.

I think this is simply unverifiable. Paranormal phenomena seem to be, almost by definition, unverifiable, so I cannot follow this line of reasoning.

If you don't believe in paranormal phenomena at all, that's something you should be able to agree with

I don't believe or disbelieve - I don't know. I believe it's probably, unlikely that any true paranormal phenomena have ever been observed by a human being, but I will not say it's explicitly impossible.

with the caveat that the set of phenomena conforming to proposition "(a)" is nil. If you do believe drugs, as such, can induce paranormal phenomena, then we disagree.

To expand on the above - I don't know. Admittedly, I do think it's unlikely that they can induce paranormal phenomena that are observable by anyone not experiencing the same drug induced experience, which most people would define, of course, as a hallucination. But I think this is also true of paranormal phenomena that are not drug induced, that unverifiable and to me quite dubious "Miracle of the Sun" you referenced notwithstanding.

But, I must admit I do not entirely follow how any part of this discussion supports the idea that "drug induced entities" belong in a class of their own. If this was not your intended meaning - and a quick re-read of your original post indicates that it might not be, simply that, usually, "drug induced entities" may not, actually be entities that exist in and of themselves, outside of our minds' simulation of reality. If this is all that you meant, and the same applies to any other "preternatural entity", experienced from a place that is not drug induced, then we may agree.

That said - given the known propensity for drugs to induce delusions, it might be arguable that if a preternatural entity is observed while not under the influence of a hallucinogen, this may be, arguably, more likely to be real than one that is observed under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen. Because obviously, this applies to absolutely anything mundane that we can usually perceive - the influence of a hallucinogen will reduce the likelihood of the reality of that perception. So maybe we don't disagree entirely, and I'll concede I may have misunderstood the context, but in my defence, I do think that the explicit distinction of "drug entities" as likely to be not real, implies a relevance beyond the simple fact that drugs - specifically psychedelics, which I assume is what we're mostly talking about here, really - distort our perception of reality such that this applies to every other element of our perception. Even if, admittedly, preternatural entities rather than simply, a swirly armchair, might quite rationally be argued to be less likely to be real than an object that we perceive on a day to day basis.

I'm trying not to let religious dogma as such define what I'm trying to say, and I hope I'm succeeding.

You have, I believe, and thank you for it, I don't think we really disagree as such, just attribute different amounts of relevance to different aspects of the topics under discussion. This has been an interesting discussion to attempt to parse.

 

[Zephyn]

I've had insectoid mantis aliens picking out lice from my aura on mushrooms, that was cool.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

well this short weed use was nice but ima quit it my lungs really fucking hurt i def cant not carry on smoking. And its randomly causing depression to come back.

 

[Xorkoth]

Chronic weed usage definitely makes me start to feel depressed, and apathetic/lazy. Occasional use is life-affirming and nice, but daily use is no good for me. Took me a long time to figure that out though.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

Cannabis can be a good tool if used right buts its so easy to abuse and fall into that daily use trap. Also it makes me spend way to much money on munchies and increases my metabolism by alot so i feel always hungry even when not smoking

 

[blistersinthedark]

Trust me, sausage is tasty, but the sausage making process is to say the least unpleasant to look at. To take acid again for me would be to uncover this unpleasantness.

Replying to this a couple of days late, but I've been wondering what you meant by that. Does the sausage-making process refer to the depths of an LSD experience or rather to the scene you were involved in?

 

[TripSitterNZ]

Went to the gym before made me feel alot better. Going to be sober for a week til I get everything out of my way. Eating clean and exercising every day has done wonders to repair my skin so far. I look probably the best I ever have. I cut down on drinking but replaced it with cannabis.

I need to probably have less guests at my house though. Can switch between been a major extrovert for a while then go into months on end of isolating myself taking extreme lsd doses on the weekly.

The amount of racism I hear from my friends that they encounter on the streets fucking makes me angry. If I ever am with them and some asshole comes along and bes racist I'm going to cop that assault charge.

Once I run out of weed I'm be done with it.

 

[SKL]

I'll speak a little bit about possession. First: rare, rare, rare. I have seen only one case that I could comfortably state met the standards, and maybe another one or two that suggested it. I am not, as a professional, running around looking for demons. That would be nuts. But I have experienced things that I can't explain which meet certain criteria.

Speaking foreign languages is not a sign of possession nor hard to pull off considering how they everywhere these days

Of course speaking foreign language isn't a sign of possession per se. When people speak languages they don't actually speak (and obviously this requires knowing the patient's background quite well), especially ancient languages with religious connotations like Aramaic or Latin, then something just might be up.

Any psychotic patient with religious paranoia of course will respond to jesus.

Yes, of course. If it is in particularly unusual ways, then you might have something else. I'm not talking about spider-crawling on walls like in The Exorcist, but unusual physical and behavioral changes. Demonized individuals have also been known to respond to the presence something like a crucifix even if it is not visible to them, or to holy water that they do not know is holy water. There are naturalistic explanations for this especially if the situation is not a double-blind one, but again, this is a preponderance of evidence thing.

Possession has never ever happpened nor will it happen. Because there is nothing outside of reality to possess reality. The spirit world the material world are not separate realms both neither have a validated existence that will last. All comes arise and come to pass in this quantum super positioning of reality as one energy.

Given that I've only really encountered this once or twice, I am not comfortable telling a story about it, as it's too close to giving out protected patient information. However, in a case of demonization, as distinguished from mere extreme psychosis, you might see, and I repeat myself a little but add more:

* Superhuman strength. Naturalistic explanations exist and this is also subjective. I'm talking about things like petite people throwing around large men like rag-dolls. You will see this to some extent, occasionally, in highly agitated people though.
* Preternatural knowledge. This is one that does not admit a naturalistic explanation if you exclude certain possibilities. You will see these individuals know things about people dealing with them that they have no way of knowing. Emphasis on "no way of knowing." I mean things that it is impossible for them to have overheard someone else discussing or have someone told them. I have experienced this. It is very scary. Languages fall under this category too, I guess.
* Religious preoccupation and response to religious articles. Admits naturalistic explanation. Seen in genuine cases of psychosis. It's a matter of degree and style of presentation. Subjective, I suppose.
* Unusual external physical manifestations. This is vague. Weird shit happens. The lights might go out or the room grow cold. I have heard people say that the room goes cold because all of the thermodynamic energy gets sucked into the individual in some way. That might be total BS, I have no idea.
* Unusual internal physical manifestations (as in having to do with the subject's body.) Maybe frothing at the mouth, weird bleeding, seizure like manifestations. Obviously these usually admit medical explanations.

The list goes on. Stuff like this. As you can see most of these are things that can be explained naturalistically. The truth is almost all of these cases are not actual possession. Some Christians sects see demons everywhere. The Catholic church absolutely does not. In fact the Church may be too careful in when permission is granted to do an exorcism. All naturalistic explanations must be excluded. This is, if I recall correctly (haven't seen the film in ages) accurately depicted in The Exorcist.

Basically stuff is of natural origin until it isn't. There is more to this universe than the physical world. I witnessed, and heard reports I would consider absolutely reliable (even more so than the amulet story which is kind of neither here nor there, just fucking weird.)

There's controversy among clinicians about multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder, which has some relevance to this subject, but that's not really why I'm bringing it up. MPD/DID is something I have never seen and I harbor doubts, as do many, about whether it's even a real thing. However, I've been told repeatedly by different people that they have seen it and simply know it is real and that if I ever see it, I will too. What I have to say about demonization is basically the same.

I have some other replies to make to other posts but I will leave it at that for now. This is rather off-topic and might be better served by splitting off into P&S.

 

[SKL]

Replying to this a couple of days late, but I've been wondering what you meant by that. Does the sausage-making process refer to the depths of an LSD experience or rather to the scene you were involved in?

I'll do this one quickly. I'm referring to the "dark underbelly" of the shadier parts of the psychedelic scene, and to the illicit drug business, which is something that I talk rather freely about now as I've been out for much longer than the five-year federal statute of limitations.

 

[ecstacylover]

But if you add in things like this person being able to speak about details of the lives of his caregivers which he would patently have no way to know about, and the ability to speak languages that he had no way of knowing (say, Ecclesiastical Latin), all while manifesting an aversion to religious objects, then you are starting to confound normal explanation. As you put it, "probabilistic weighing of the possible explanations," yes, but this, and perhaps the amulet story (to I think admittedly a lesser extent) are truly difficult to explain naturally. The situation with the psych patient, which I have seen firsthand, is what is known to Christians as "demonic possession," the amulet, which I haven't, "demonic oppression" i.e. persistent preternatural harassment. Stalking, if you will.

Whoa, that's intense. Even taking your experience at face value though, I would argue that such behavior could be explained within current physical theory. Behavior is ultimately mechanical and given the right set of initial condition, seemingly unlikely behaviors can occur. Quantum mechanics gives you even more leeway, and certain interpretations could accommodate such experiences with a few caveats.

I'm not saying the above answer is satisfying, and it somewhat seems like a cop-out. But the problem with your explanation of the phenomena is that you now need to explain these entities which mediate said possessions. Therein lies the problem with not thinking reductionist. And it seems that invariably some tenuous link is made between "supernatural" experiences as some sort of connect-the-dots to religious ideologies such as Christianity.

Ultimately I don't like the word supernatural because it creates a false dichotomy. There simply is what is, and even if we need better theories to understand how, the pieces of our world must fit together. How could it be any other way?

 

[Xorkoth]

I got my first COVID vaccine dose today. I considered for a short time whether I should, since I had COVID, and decided to, because after doing a lot of research, I have no problems with the mRNA vaccines, and I am interested in the more robust and longer-lasting immune response from it, especially given I will be back on the road playing shows later in the year.

They told me I have a higher chance of experiencing flu-like symptoms since I already got COVID. So far I'm fine though, hopefully I don't get those.

 

[Pfafffed]

Nice! I'm psyched that you were able to get in for a dose! I get my second in ten days. By May 9 I'll be ready to get back to life again.

 

[Img_9999]

Glad you guys are taking the vaccine. The amount of anti-vax discourse and covid negationism I see around the web is unsettling.

 

[SKL]

Glad you guys are taking the vaccine. The amount of anti-vax discourse and covid negationism I see around the web is unsettling.

As I've said elsewhere, to hear people being suspicious of the vaccine while stuffing their bodies with all kinds of recreational drugs is pretty funny. I got both mine a while back. 2nd one had me feeling like shit for maybe 6-8 hours about 12-16 hours after the dose. But it's worth it not to have to worry.

 

[Vastness]

to hear people being suspicious of the vaccine while stuffing their bodies with all kinds of recreational drugs is pretty funny.

God damn yeah, this is so true.



Ah man I've really been overdoing it on the amphetamine recently. Probably averaged 200mg / day over the past 5 days. I'm rationalizing that it's likely not 100% pure though so is probably a bit less... Balancing that out with either diazepam or gabapentin in an effort to keep things somewhat under control... which mostly... they are.

I've been in beast mode as far as work goes for once but gotta be really careful not to burn myself out before completing my exit plan... the major issue is sleeping, obviously. If you've been mixing speed and benzos all day, but are still trying not to take too many drugs... the alternative is just major insomnia, wasted hours of should I just not sleep, and then no, that's ridiculous, even a few hours is better than nothing. Ah but I'm still incarnate in the game of life and that's enough reason to endure and be happy. Much love everyone.

 

[SKL]

God damn yeah, this is so true.



Ah man I've really been overdoing it on the amphetamine recently. Probably averaged 200mg / day over the past 5 days. I'm rationalizing that it's likely not 100% pure though so is probably a bit less... Balancing that out with either diazepam or gabapentin in an effort to keep things somewhat under control... which mostly... they are.

I've been in beast mode as far as work goes for once but gotta be really careful not to burn myself out before completing my exit plan... the major issue is sleeping, obviously. If you've been mixing speed and benzos all day, but are still trying not to take too many drugs... the alternative is just major insomnia, wasted hours of should I just not sleep, and then no, that's ridiculous, even a few hours is better than nothing. Ah but I'm still incarnate in the game of life and that's enough reason to endure and be happy. Much love everyone.

Is this "euroamp" you're talking about? I always liked the stuff although being an American it was more of a special intercontinental treat I'd get once in a while 200mg daily for 5 days isn't terrible but you are certainly right that it is not sustainable. Speed to go up and benzos to go down is too much like the old Elvis cocktail and we all know where that went. You're riding the tiger now and that son of a bitch is hungry. Gotta knock yourself out for a good length of time and then hit the rest button and try for some natural sleep, my good man. You know the solution. Say it with me. Drugged sleep for a night. Drugless morning. Drag yourself through the day. Exercise or sex. Then bed. You'll feel better.

 

[Vastness]

Is this "euroamp" you're talking about? I always liked the stuff although being an American it was more of a special intercontinental treat I'd get once in a while 200mg daily for 5 days isn't terrible but you are certainly right that it is not sustainable. Speed to go up and benzos to go down is too much like the old Elvis cocktail and we all know where that went. You're riding the tiger now and that son of a bitch is hungry. Gotta knock yourself out for a good length of time and then hit the rest button and try for some natural sleep, my good man. You know the solution. Say it with me. Drugged sleep for a night. Drugless morning. Drag yourself through the day. Exercise or sex. Then bed. You'll feel better.

I guess it would be euroamp yeah, although the quality I've had has varied quite a bit. I had some stuff that seemed almost pharmaceutical (not that I've ever had actual pharmaceutically pure amphetamine to measure it against) and equally, some really disgusting shite that must have been 20% or less... with that stuff, 200mg was a reasonable, dirty feeling buzz. This stuff is not the best but also not the worst by a long shot, definitely leaning towards the better end of the scale. Your solution is sound advice, of course, but I did not take it, sadly, I did fall asleep though for about 5 hours before waking up to 3 missed calls about some fucking stupid shite that I needed to deal with. Ended up dosing 70mg to get out of bed which is always a bad sign. Gonna try to limit the redosing today and actually cut short my obsessive but somewhat, necessary workaholism and get some proper if drug induced sleep tonight... then tomorrow maybe just take some gabapentin so I don't have a seizure. Haha, I never really know if I'm overblowing the seizure risk of my benzo (ab)use which is never truly extreme, but can veer into the slightly more often than is optimal, for sure. "Optimal" of course, being a fairly relative descriptor.

 

[Xorkoth]

Man I am rockin' it out at work like a fucking boss (if I do say so myself). Since I got my promotion, my boss has changed, and I am in charge of leading development of new technologies and capabilities. This week I have done more development work than the outsource people we were previously using did in the last 6 months. My boss is freaking out, she's showering me with praise and telling the company president how great I am left and right. My goal for this year is to create a platform to replace the platform we had another company develop for us that we have been unhappy with... they charge $3,000 minimum for the tiniest change that would take me literally 5 minutes, and they'll say it will take 3 weeks. Also they give us surprise charges for stuff that was never an issue before that they apparently have to suddenly fix. So I will be leading the charge in bringing all of that programming in-house and designing new systems from the ground up. I will also be able to delegate outsourced programmers to work on specific modules if I want. I also have an idea for a system that will move us past our archaic practice of people creating Word documents with special formatting to design surveys, and then relying on a markup macro to tag the document and pull some rough XML into our software, and then having a programmer (the old job role I was in for many years) program everything. Instead when it's done, the survey designer will use a point and click interface to design the survey, which will save into a central database. Then various document formats can be exported, and a survey XML can be exported that will have everything but the highly custom stuff fully programmed and ready to go. This will eliminate 70-90% of the programming time for each project.

Basically I am singlehandedly dramatically improving efficiency and capability across the whole company, which is good because we're growing fast and already have to turn away work sometimes due to lack of availability.

I sense lots of raises in my future. %)

Also my job is really fun again. I love doing this sort of thing, bit I was getting sick of always being bogged down with 10 client projects at once, just grinding out what, for me, is grunt work, week after week, and doing this development stuff in my spare time. Well it paid off, and now I get to do development work all the time, as my official job role. And get paid a lot more to do it.