Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

Right, so it's only "skeptics" who point out the bleeding obvious?

I think we can safely say it is most certainly all within the brain. That's what the drug is directly influencing, and as a result your mind goes over the waterfall and you are forced to just go along with it, or suffer if you put up resistance.

The problem with long term fans of DMT, cannabis, and all manner of psychedelics is that you end up writing books about it that mean more to you than they could anyone else. There's exceptions (Castaneda), but that's generally how it goes.

The thing is, if you need to take Ayahuasca before your own brain tells you that your abuse of pot is out of control, then that points to something far less sophisticated than the exotic make-believe problems of spiritual junkies. It points to the obvious: that you're lazy. It really is that simple.

Not to undermine the importance of getting back to basics or nature, and sorting through personal issues, perhaps even under the influence of psychedelics - that can be a very cleansing experience. But you shouldn't need to go to Brazil for that and drink sewerage tasting cocktails of God-knows what and vomit your guts up. That is nothing more than conscientious stupidity (IMHO).

http://america.infobae.com/notas/57978-Peru-joven-estadounid...

http://peru.com/2011/11/28/actualidad/otras-noticias/video-m...

I am not saying don't do it.. just be careful with what you do.

Likewise. I have only used them twice for that reason. I will also say the two times I have had terrifying hallucinations, they were induced by intensive meditation, not by drugs. The thing is, I think that you get out of these things what you put into them. The time I tried mushrooms, I could move in and out of reality as I chose. I attributed this to preparation because many of the others who tries mushrooms with me could not do this.

The time I tried LSD was different. I could not move back to reality, but I spent most of the time in meditation. Finally later I gave up on meditating only to have a series of life-altering epiphanies and hallucinations immediately following.

These experiences can happen without drugs to be sure, but there is something about taking oneself out of the normal world that seems to facilitate them.

Here, brain, inside, outside, no idea what any of that means.

It's like saying what is outside of everything, or what is inside of outside.

Not one single thing can be explained, but as if by magic Scala 2.10 build times remain slow and another Ruby library gets hacked into.

And so it goes...ours is not to reason why

Occam's razor says you're probably right, but personally I'm holding out the slim hope that there's something much cooler going on, call it primitive telepathy or whatever. The next few decades will hopefully tell.

> But you shouldn't need to go to Brazil for that and drink sewerage tasting cocktails of God-knows what and vomit your guts up. That is nothing more than conscientious stupidity (IMHO).

This is less stupid than popping a pill whose side effects take longer to list than the rest of its commercial. I mean, just look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venlafaxine#Adverse_effects. That's stupid, and it was a good point made in the post.