121–130 of 190 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DP/DR is like that. Psychedelics are a tool that can be used to remove psychological disorders, but in the same vain can be used to create psychological disorders. In an ideal world, if psychedelics were legal, they'd come with an instruction manual.
I think an argument could be made that the sense of self is a psychological disorder.
I'm the one who provided the third quoted anecdote in the article. What I didn't mention was the HPPD coincided with a sort of depersonalization/derealization effect. Basically I got very checked out from my own life. I felt as if I was a spectator watching my life happen and I didn't really feel any connection or agency towards anything coming into my sensorium. It was a really weird and hard time for me. Those feel…
Alan Watts wrote: > “Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the…
Many normal humans will not know that this experience is even possible, or might dismiss it straight off as humbo jumbo. (Many drug users that did the drugs just for fun will get this as a sort of surprise gift. Sometimes they dismiss it despite having experienced it, sadly.)
Once one have experienced this a couple of times, it is possible to learn whereto steer the mind during normal meditation. It is possible, although it requires skill, to come there with normal sober meditation.
I'm the one who provided the third quoted anecdote in the article. What I didn't mention was the HPPD coincided with a sort of depersonalization/derealization effect. Basically I got very checked out from my own life. I felt as if I was a spectator watching my life happen and I didn't really feel any connection or agency towards anything coming into my sensorium. It was a really weird and hard time for me. Those feel…
I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.
YMMV of course.
I got HPD from a fairly large dose of 4FA once. I had persisting light sparkles pretty much exactly like the first image in the article.
I researched online and discovered the term HPPD but information was extremely sparse then. I see there's a fair amount more now which is encouraging.
From the advice I found I got myself some Lion's Mane supplement, meditated and exercised a few times a week. A few weeks later I just kind of forgot about it and noticed one day that the HPPD had disappeared.
The effect wasn't hugely detrimental on a practical level, but it was very strange coming to terms with the fact that this may well be a permanent change.
A very quick search did not turn up anything useful. Anyone knows what theory I am talking about?
Another thing to mention for (some?) people with some sort of psychoactive or hallucinatory experience is that "real" things can complicate matters. An example: If you wear glasses with coloured reflections and are not used to it, then it can compound your paranoia about the other things that are "not real" that you are seeing. A similar thing about streetlights: Foggy or misty nights already do funny things to the lights and you can overexaggerate this effect by confusing real and not real things.
One should be careful about these things. In my case I had these kind of experiences at university and without psychoactive substances. Doing abstract mathematics certainly can complicate matters, but it is not a prerequisite. Also, crazy people may be crazy, but often their fears are logical in the sense that you can't really disprove them. I mean, how do you really prove to someone that they were not kidnapped by aliens? In the end you just need to show the value of Occam's Razor in your own life.
I think the best case scenario is maybe analogous to eventually writing an interesting movie (I think the Twilight Zone was inspired by such experiences) and NOT getting to some super hyper special plane of existence. I do also think that the creative cycle has both a logical and an illogical component. The latter is like training the model, where you cycle through senseless things with funny connections until the logical part takes over and makes it concrete. It's like the difference between "OMG what is this weird static electricity thing OMG it's so weird" (which is a fair observation) and going to "So, what we can say about electricity is that x, y and z. And this is how to build a circuit."
I do see patterns sometimes, and one time when I was posing for a artist and have stared at the same trees outside the apartment for 3 hours straight, I have gone into a very heavy trip state, but it's never disrupted my life in any way. The key is, every time I saw hallucinations unders psychedelics (or without) I could easily "feel" my imagination creating them, and just allowed it. Now I'm so used to the tripping state that I even take LSD when I go out clubbing and dancing - I've stopped taking all other "club culture" drugs (alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, mephedrone) because of their health effects, and LSD has very gentle stimulating effect, and you don't have any kind of hangover afterwards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on... so people normally DON'T see these moving colors and shapes whenever their eyes are closed?
Not all moving colors and shapes you see with eyes closes are the ones the parent describes. There are different kinds of them... (the ones described are pressure based "phosphenes"). You describe another. And if you close your eyes in a lit place (outside in the sun, etc), you probably don't see phosphenes at all, just various shapes and colors caused by small leakage of light through the eyelid skin).
I have always had this, is this not normal?