Brian Wilson explains rather well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d45F7PqxxY
Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
51–60 of 170 posts
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by wi…
"There. No drugs, just reflection, same result." It's one thing to talk about oneness and accept it on an intellectual level, quite another thing to experience it. Houston Smith, one of the greatest religious scholars, had already had a whole career writing and talking about religion, but when he finally took a psychedelic he said that he finally got to experience what he was writing about. There have been studies th…
These experiences are not equivalent to what you'd get from reading a bumper sticker or an Einstein quote.
Where did I say they are? When I said "same result" I was referring to Einstein (assuming the reader would get the point, not exactly equating that either), not to reading that quote.
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#53Try reading this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DZEWF8 for another point of view on LSD and the impact it has.
I tend to think of these things as karmic accelerators. The karma that would usually ripen over 2 years is, instead, experienced in 12 hours. If that karma is negative, that might take the form of an immediate psychotic crisis instead of some longer-to-unfold variety that might, due to time, be more manageable. My personal belief is that, moreso than any religious belief, it's important to manage the karma we experie…
I have always thought LSD works in this way:
Your brain gets data, and has models of how all the data fits together. For example, if you look at someone you don't know, your brain will get the data "appearance" and plug it into the model "assorted stereotypes" and get out some expectations about who that stranger is.
What LSD does is perturb those models of how data fits together. If your models are in line with reality, you don't have much to worry about. After your trip, everything will settle back to about where it was before. If, however, your models are out of whack (e.g. you blame others for failures that are your own fault) then you run the risk of having some really really unpleasant realizations while you're looking at the data without your old model mucking things up.
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#54I note that "It's like tripping your balls off on LSD" is missing from the list. But, funny thing: It's the most accurate. Instead you get a bunch of gobbledygook about death, eternity, and direct messages from god. The fact that you might just be having an episode of impaired cognition does not actually enter your brain. Let's not make this more complicated than it is.
Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
While recreational drug enthusiasts are often boring (especially cannabis enthusiasts), your post is misleading -- it overlooks the fact that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin cause an extraordinary change in cognition when compared to the rather mundane effects of alcohol, cannabis, coke etc.
At the end of the day, the state of one's cognition is rather important to one's perception of life. It is extremely memorable to alter your cognition in such a dramatic way, and to experience the temporary loss of the personality that you are accustomed to waking up with, and it's fair enough that people should want to talk about it. And it seems very likely that understanding the effects of those drugs on the brain will be helpful in understanding the construction of consciousness by the brain. For what it's worth, the stuff about death definitely chimed with me; I've been sure I wasn't coming back.
So yes, some druggy people are definitely pretentious, and the crap about "evolved people" would make anyone cringe, but those observations do absolutely nothing to diminish the significance of psychedelics as substances providing a unique and extremely dramatic perturbation of our perception of reality which will presumably be scientifically important.
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#55I don't understand the negativity in this thread... haven't taken LSD myself, but Steve Jobs was a fairly smart individual, and described taking LSD as a profoundly important action in his life. Perhaps there's something to it beyond the ramblings of "burn-outs" and "hippies."
I won't get into what I've done and haven't (real name) but it's not negativity so much as caution.
First, spiritual experiences are hard to describe but I'm not impressed by people who claim to have had profound experiences. People will also claim profundity out of the "drugs" of the bourgeois nincompoops-- power and money-- because the thrill of power is profound to a typical vapid nincompoop.
That's the fundamental problem with drugs: the upsides are subjective and personal-- that doesn't mean they aren't real-- while the downsides are often visible and awful.
Is LSD evil? No. Is there "something to it"? Yes. In fact, there was a lot of good research being done on these drugs until the 1960s, when they were (improperly) listed as Schedule I, meaning they have no medical value (which is not true). Should it be stigmatized? No, a lot of great people (not just "burnouts") have done it. Is it dangerous? Yes, it is. Can LSD be spiritual for some people? Yes. Do you need psychedelics to be spiritual or to have spiritual experiences? No, absolutely not.
If you choose to use these drugs, you're doing something that society knows very little about. You're experimenting with stuff about which our knowledge is in its infancy. Because society doesn't know enough about these drugs, it fears them, hence the stigma. That also means that if things go wrong for you, you will get no sympathy from the vast majority of people.
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#56I don't understand the negativity in this thread... haven't taken LSD myself, but Steve Jobs was a fairly smart individual, and described taking LSD as a profoundly important action in his life. Perhaps there's something to it beyond the ramblings of "burn-outs" and "hippies."
Its just that burn outs and hippies are the ones to both do it the most and talk about it the most.
But many people can think of something in there life that resulted in a complete change in the way they think - about some thing. Death of a loved one, some traumatic experience. Growing up, having kids, falling in love. Whatever. We naturally hate to think something as emotional or meaningful as those events could be compared to a simple drug, but at the end of the day, anything and everything you think and feel is the result of a chemical reaction. Is it so far flung to think that some other chemical reaction may lead to insightful experiences?
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by wi…
> Also, what is "impaired cognition"? Compared to what, exactly? How about this for an operational definition: When you open your eyes and are seeing shit that isn't there, you're suffering from impaired cognition. It's really not that difficult, unless you want it to be. Edit: OK Fine. I give up: It's mysterious cosmic stuff that puts you in touch with the everlasting oneness of all humans and the universe. Good luc…
Again, don't mistake your simplicistic, non-scientific view of things with any desire on my end of "wanting" things to be "more [???] complicated than they are". Even just in "stuff that is there" are so many implied assumptions. Also, optical hallucinations don't enter into any of this.
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
There's no shortcut to being an interesting and clever person. You gotta put the hours in. Agree absolutely. My opinion is that "experience" is just a small part of being spiritual, at least on this side of death. It's nice, but it shouldn't be the primary goal. Experience without a larger context is just insanity.
I agree that people usually misinterpret their experiences where psychedelics and religion are concerned. However it's worth noting that in striving to create and discover interesting things one becomes vulnerable to all manner of possible obsessions and addictions -- most call it going 'crazy' (e.g. Beethoven, van Gogh, Tesla, Michelangelo, Schumann, John Nash and presumably many who ceased to function altogether in their pursuits)
It seems that psychedelic drugs have helped some people historically in locating an internal pointer or state which, if remembered, prevents this from happening. One wonders, for example, if the Beatles or Steve Jobs, notwithstanding their hard work, could ever have become what they did if they hadn't also taken LSD at some point.
Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
There's no shortcut to being an interesting and clever person. You gotta put the hours in. Agree absolutely. My opinion is that "experience" is just a small part of being spiritual, at least on this side of death. It's nice, but it shouldn't be the primary goal. Experience without a larger context is just insanity.
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Re: Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
#60I note that "It's like tripping your balls off on LSD" is missing from the list. But, funny thing: It's the most accurate. Instead you get a bunch of gobbledygook about death, eternity, and direct messages from god. The fact that you might just be having an episode of impaired cognition does not actually enter your brain. Let's not make this more complicated than it is.
Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
What do you expect from shroomery.org's phpbb installation?
It's optimistic, I think, to assume that you can even "put the hours in" to become an interesting and clever person. It seems more likely that, like many things in humans, being an intelligent (which is what I think you were proxying through "interesting and clever," so I'll cut to the chase -- correct me if I'm wrong) person is something that has a biological component, a critical period in development, and a long, hard road to substandard functioning if you miss out of one of the above.
I know a PhD who did lots of hallucinogens during his crisis of faith in grad school -- he talks about it all the time, because it became a big part of who he sees himself as, and he's one of the most intelligent, interesting, and clever people I know. When he brings up psychedelic experiences, it's always relevant and adds something meaningful to the conversation.
Personally, I think he's probably become a much better person since then, not because you can learn wisdom from drugs, but because drugs give you perspective the same way any divergent life experience gives you perspective. If I had a friend who climbed mountains and always talked about it, I wouldn't begrudge him that -- he's probably learned a few things along the way.