LSD: My Life-Saving Drug • Hacker News Board

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#231

Post by cnp » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:35 PM UTC

jqm wrote: post #131

kshahkshah wrote: post #11

There is a lot going on in this article and I won't comment on all of it. I'll just address people who are perhaps curious about psychedelics. May I highly suggest that those wishing to experiment with psychedelics do it only in a place where you feel absolutely safe. That is, no risk of police, parents (if that is an issue), or neighbours to bother you. Additionally and I do think this is very important: in nature .…

Nature is good but isn't necessary to trip. The first time I took LSD was under less than ideal conditions. It was in high school... and I mean during school hours my junior year. It was 1988. Yes, stupid and irresponsible I know but it was a great experience. I only took 1/3 of a tab... a friend had it and we split the tab between three of us. Coincidentally there was a field trip that day for Jr's and Sr's and I ha…

Nice :)

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#232

Post by cnp » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

timonv wrote: post #153

From a culture where drugs aren't very much taboo (Dutch), I'm very interested in the (scientific) positive effects of hallucinogens. There seems to be more and more research going on in this, for many taboo, field with very interesting observations. Here's a great article (of a series) from 2014 which hovers over several researches in the years prior and covers some essential history: http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/0…

Walter Benjamin's On Hashish might be a good place to start: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674022218

This subject is extensive. Hashish can be extraordinarily psychedelic.

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#233

Post by cnp » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #18

kahoon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it damage you? Did you continue to think you had a brain hemorrhage even after you became sober or was it "just" very traumatizing while it lasted?

I had decided to meditate and watch my breath at the peak of the experience, and felt my consciousness separate from my full body, and move upward into my brain (similar to the visual in the intro to Fight Club). I felt like I was a singular point floating around the blood vessels in my brain, and this freaked me out, so I took a sharp turn, which burst a vessel at the top of my sinuses. I felt the blood rush into my…

Trips can be very difficult, but they're not necessarily bad. Rick Doblin from MAPS talks about how MDMA can be used to integrate a difficult trip.

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#234

Post by fido68 » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

codeshaman wrote: post #85

I know I'm not alone thinking that psychedelics might just be the solution (or key to finding solutions) to a lot of humanity's issues, including climate change, fundamentalism, war.. And it's easy to understand why - because most of humanity's issues are consequences of the spiritual health of every individual living on the planet. If the group, as a whole, is spiritually and morally lost or deceived, things like wa…

It's interesting that this isn't anything new, it all together began in the sixties (source: http://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to-...) and we're only now getting there, with lots of caveats.

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#235

Post by edem » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 10:32 PM UTC

sj3k wrote: post #217

batat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the same thing without mushrooms. Am I at risk for becoming an enlightened homeless guy who will sleep on the streets for the rest of his life if I'll try mushrooms?

depends how much you eat

And what kind of shrooms you eat. :)

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#236

Post by wordbank » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

throwawaythisis wrote: post #170

astral303 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your other comments I noticed you referenced meditation. Can you talk about the effect that a 20 minute meditation session has on you?

I know you didn't ask me, but I'd like to share my experience with meditation because it's been so helpful to me and my particular challenges. I've been meditating semi-regularly for about a year now, usually every day for a long while and then generally short periods of no meditation at all. To give some context: I'm currently dealing with the effects of what in hindsight was a slowly ramping up 'social burnout' tha…

Alan Watts is awesome, I highly recommend "Out of your mind" lectures.

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#237

Post by pantalaimon » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 12:17 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #230

csorrell wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think of "chakra talk" as a particular dialect some people use to communicate where their emotional and mental state is at, you can hear the truth of what they are trying to say.

How about they adopt an everyday dialect that's not choke-full of metaphysics and New Age scents?

Is there such a dialect?

It's pretty hard to describe something so outside the everyday experience with 'normal' words - I try to view such 'mumbo jumbo' as just another metaphor, doesn't have to mean something supernatural is going in.

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#238

Post by chriscappuccio » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:42 AM UTC

ice303 wrote: post #206

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with just about everything you said, except the "in nature" part. Don't get me wrong, tripping in nature is awesome, maybe the best place to trip. But it isn't necessary and might not even be the best for your first time (depending on what you are doing). They real key is to not have too many stimuli out of your control, particularly having lots and lots of strangers around. Especially if you have to interact…

And please, get some trusty test kits. I've seen lsd blotters with 2C-I

No, you saw blotters with an NBOMe. Actual 2C-I would be much better and safer (and not absorb an active quantity into a blotter). Luckily NBOMes are now superceded by actual lysergamides like 1p-LSD

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#239

Post by stephenitis » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 7:22 AM UTC

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #157

easygenes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not expensive if you do 23andMe then import your data into geneticgenie.org

Except if you do 23andMe you then have a legal obligation to provide any learnings to health insurance companies. Yeah, that's right, we live in a world that actively hinders being proactive about healthcare.

source?

Re: LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

#240

Post by mercer » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 8:21 AM UTC

codeshaman wrote: post #85

I know I'm not alone thinking that psychedelics might just be the solution (or key to finding solutions) to a lot of humanity's issues, including climate change, fundamentalism, war.. And it's easy to understand why - because most of humanity's issues are consequences of the spiritual health of every individual living on the planet. If the group, as a whole, is spiritually and morally lost or deceived, things like wa…

I wish I could share your optimism, but I'm afraid that while global increase in psychedelic use might bring some measurable improvement, it probably won't be too much, and definitely not enough.

The main problems I see is that 1) the use of psychedelics is a bit of a shortcut, and as such perhaps deceptively ineffective for long-term change (in contrast to, say, daily meditation), and 2) humans seem to be really good at always returning to some base-line of behavior, and I suspect that this applies equally to 'enlightenment'. This might explain the first point as well.

I only need to look at my friends and extended social circle(s) to see how relatively little their frequent use of psychedelics had on them. The ones where it seemed to have most effect were people who treated it as a more meaningful (and/or spiritual) experience, and especially those who changed aspects of their daily life through this.

Whenever someone brings up Steve Jobs, for example, and his mention of LSD as life-changing, my immediate thought is: 'yeah, but he also lived in an stark, empty house, was spiritually 'active' (don't remember what exactly, some buddhist movement), and went as far as changing his diet and not going to a doctor when he should have. Clearly it wasn't just the LSD, but an entire way of living to go along with that.

I'm afraid that if the use of psychedelics becomes a cultural norm, we'll just give it a small place in our lives where it can do little harm and is defanged of it's power. Like a nice rite of passage to go through before you get back to 'real life'.