Thread: Insight - How can a drug teach?

It's sort of a two sided coin. On the one hand our awareness is so bottle-necked in our sober state of mind that it's very difficult to see things as they are without psychedelics. On the other hand one takes their mind a LOT more seriously. Everything is intensified, including one's emotions and imagination. Because of these stronger emotional ties, one's thoughts can cause turmoil and worry to no end if they take them too seriously. When you're exploring experience beyond the consistent world, exploring farther out does not mean you're getting closer to God, it just means your spiraling into even more remote locales of the imagination. Truth is felt through the realization of truth and sober works just fine for that, but it's like trying to win the superbowl without steroids.

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

but it's like trying to win the superbowl without steroids.

You just won the game.

That's true. These insights often COULD be reached while sober, and sometimes that's sufficient or even appropriate. But the psychedelic state, aside from sometimes leading one to those insights, makes them much more...more real, so to speak.

Originally Posted by Supernova

You just won the game.

Does he get a ring?

I tripped one time, and only on a quarter hit of acid, but it was an amazing experience. I didn't get any hallucinations, more it just made me look at things differently and spurred me to a lot of deep thinking. I think the key is that it makes you look at things in a new way, from an unfamiliar vantage. A Yaqui shaman would say it helps to shift your awareness point. Well, they'd actually say your assemblage point, but that takes a lot of study to understand what they mean by that... awareness works for the purpose of this conversation.

The "systematic derangement of the senses" is what I think Baudelaire called it. How can you come out of an experience like that without at least gaining some kind of insight, though sometimes I suppose you're under the influence of negative emotions or just have a bad trip and nothing useful comes of it.

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

Truth is felt through the realization of truth and sober works just fine for that, but it's like trying to win the superbowl without steroids.

Personally, I've been able to reach incredible altered states of consciousness without the use of drugs. My friend who did LSD didn't get any spiritual truth from it--all he saw was melting faces. I really think it depends on the person.

Originally Posted by Naiya

Personally, I've been able to reach incredible altered states of consciousness without the use of drugs. My friend who did LSD didn't get any spiritual truth from it--all he saw was melting faces. I really think it depends on the person.

This may not have been the case, but in my experience, your friend didn't get very powerful LSD. I've taken acid that makes things "melt" and wave and generally I hallucinate a lot, but nothing will compare to the LSD I had the luck of getting twice. The hallucinations weren't just more intense, they were much more deep. From the other acid I simply felt excited and kind of giggly, and I hallucinated a lot. This other acid though, it was crazy how different it was. I felt like I was losing my place in space-time. I literally thought I got stuck in a time loop because my mind was doing such a good job of convincing me that I had already seen, heard, felt and experienced everything I was right then. I really felt as though the things I was experiencing were already in my memory. My body felt like some intensity was being brought upon it to the point that I nearly couldn't take it anymore, but at the same time I couldn't really go over the edge. My friends had similar descriptions, but more like their body felt so good they couldn't take it anymore. I could see that somewhat, but I digress. The point is, this powerful acid really changed my perspective at the time. I could so readily believe any explanation my mind conjured up for anything, it was like I was a little kid (possibly even farther back than that), that I had regressed to the point at which I didn't see things from a day-to-day perspective, like everything I was taking in was new. Even the most worldly and mundane things inspired me. I could literally sit and stare the entirety of one of those acid trips because everything was so beautiful, it all made sense, and it was so... amazing.

I've had experience with altered states with dissociatives as well, namely Delsym. I will admit that I believed, felt, and experienced some very... different things, but overall I was and felt too fucked up to really say that it provided me with any kind of insight. Not to mention I couldn't focus my eyes on it, ever. I will say that many of those experiences were more like dreams in a way, though. I never really felt my body, not like numbness but it just wasn't there--hence dissociative I guess, lol.

One thing common to both of those drugs was time distortion--more specifically, dilation. After a while I got so used to it on Delsym that it didn't seem as though time were really all that distorted. On acid it never changed, though. On the plateau not as much, but during the peak it was ridiculous.