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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2615 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 15, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've lived an entirely straightlaced life and have zero interest even in marijuana. I'm not interested in drugs per se. What I am interested in is the apparently mind-opening power of psychedelics. Aldous Huxley's essay "The Doors to Perception" has once again made me curious. For those of you who have experimented with mescaline or whatever else, have these experiences changed you deeply and permanently? Would even taking small amounts grant you clarity or creativity without some terrible drawbacks?

I think of Carl Jung's advice, to "beware of unearned wisdom," and I think that expresses a healthy conservatism about these things. But then again, millions of people have used caffeine and nicotine both recreationally or for work. People now use marijuana for medicine. So why not use psychedelics for whatever positive effects they bring? I also think of people having bad trips or frying their brains. My mother grew up in the 70s and recalls a few people who made themselves permanently insane through some wacky experiments or other. I think ultimately it's better to leave well enough alone, but I'd like to hear different views.

Scott wrote an interesting post about heavy psychedelic use was making people weird https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ In addition to the sites own comments, it was discussed on HackerNews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406

Notice the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402462 about the cozy-weird.

I've maintained an interest in the topic, despite my own, youthful dalliance being forty years ago. So I read https://old.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/ Perhaps I still dream of opening the doors of perception and ripping away the veil of illusion to see reality. But I notice that today's psychonauts have little success. I had no success myself last century and my friends insisted that psychedelics were just for fun; there were no deep truths to be discovered that way. More troubling is the posts asking for help to recover from the lingering after effects of bad trips. Such posts meet with sympathy, but little practical help. There are rather too many for my taste, and problems seem to arise somewhat at random. Yes, heroic doses often lead to trouble, but small doses are not entirely safe. And having tasted the forbidden fruit, the curious often return for a larger bite, and bite off more than they can chew. Had I read those anecdotes as a young man, they would have put me off experimenting.

I want to return to the concept of the cozy-weird. I don't want my mind opened so that I can see the out-there-weird. I've no faith in the value of the out-there-weird. But I do want to open my mind so that I can look at the cozy-weird and see the weirdness of it. I doubt that psychedelics help. One route is to study statistics and logic and spot pervasive bad reasoning; that provides loose threats to pull on, unraveling the veil of illusion and exposing the weirdness behind the ordinary. Another route is Buddhist meditation practices. Cultivate noticing ones emotional responses and how the defense mechanisms of the mind keep you socially safe by not letting you see the weirdness of the cozy-weird. I think that there is more than enough weirdness in the cozy-weird to let you escape from your straightlaced life. There is no need to go down the route of psychedelics and out-there-weirdness.

I swear by magic mushrooms for anyone struggling with depression or other persistent emotional problems. It's very much the "have you tried turning it off and on again?" solution.

I've done LSD. It was a curious experience, put me in an unusual mindset - I somehow got the impression that, as dedicated Christians say, God has a plan. It felt like a sense of peace, like there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, because everything was already going to happen in accordance with the plan of a force much more powerful than any of us. But that's pretty much it though, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary at all or feel compelled to do anything I wouldn't otherwise do.

My take is that it can be a fun experience if you're open to and interested in that sort of thing. But I'm highly skeptical that it's likely to cause any long-term change in your personality, positive or negative.

I have also lived an entirely straightlaced life. I had the opportunity to take a mild psychedelic in a safe environment and took advantage of it: ketamine. People say ketamine is non-addictive (like all psychedelics I guess) and I have to agree. It was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it, but I don't exactly have an urge to go out and have that experience again. It was what it was.

I don't really have any advice other than "I, a straightlaced square, took a not-too-strong-but-strong-enough does of ketamine in a safe environment, had an experience I consider valuable, and didn't come out of it a loon." I'm pretty much the same person I was. I don't know if that's reassuring, or means that there wasn't any point to it.

Universal Love…

I had a friend who described their experience on LSD rather pessimistically. If you’re going to do this, you probably shouldn’t be pessimistic. But a false sense of profundity doesn’t seem very appealing. The prospect that after tripping, it would seem appealing, or even critical, life-changingly important? That’s chilling.

Depends drastically on your mindset. If you're already in an incredibly negative space and feel stuck with no way out, psychedelics can be the best thing that has ever happened to you. That's my own experience, and the experience of many friends who've also dabbled.

The hallucination you feel on Acid/LSD can, for some people, feel like a transcendent or spiritual experience. There is a reason psychedelics and all psychoactive substances have a long religious history.

But it is, sadly, all bullshit - at least in one way. You’re not getting an experience of the true, transcendent nature of the universe, whatever that is, you’re not stepping outside yourself, your brain is just generating a slightly different story, the input sequence to your neural network is subject to a new modifier, a dialed-up parameter, whatever you want to call it. That might be meaningful, it might even afford you some kind of genuine self-reflection (it has not in my experience) that could be of use to you, but is it ‘real’? That depends on how you see it.

I think for a lot of people regular psychoactive substance use, where it changes their life “for the better” (something usually asserted only by them) and is not done directly for eg. pain relief, acts as a placebo that allows them to undergo the work of personal transformation without the self-consciousness that doing so sober can involve. They give themselves permission to grow.

The other stuff is chemical. You can take MDMA with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, talk for 6 hours and feel like you’ve been in deep love with them for years, but again, how real could that ever be?

acts as a placebo that allows them to undergo the work of personal transformation without the self-consciousness that doing so sober can involve. They give themselves permission to grow.

It's interesting calling it a placebo. To my mind it's less a placebo, and more proof that personal transformation can happen, and is directly experiencable/achievable. In this day and age of 'nobody ever changes' that can be invaluable.

The other stuff is chemical. You can take MDMA with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, talk for 6 hours and feel like you’ve been in deep love with them for years, but again, how real could that ever be?

How real is 'deep love for years'? We have such a poor understanding of love, our culture barely even discusses it outside of a purely facile sense. The ancients believed that in the right circumstances you could fall in love with someone on the spot - but only a certain type of love.

The notion of love is far more complicated and multifaceted than we give it credit for. Is the type of love engendered by MDMA the exact same as the type of love between an old married couple? Probably not.

That being said, is it still a valid and meaningful type of love? Absolutely.

More importantly - can it lead to a deeper love for the other person, or even yourself? It's hard to say but results seem promising.

Even if you think it's all bullshit, is there not some deep value in experiencing these powerful and beautiful states? What if someone has never felt it before, don't they deserve it?

I did mdma with my girlfriend early on in our relationship and it was pretty great. It’s too easy to spend years with someone falling into a routine and putting a lid on risky and vulnerable topics. Sometimes drugs are an actually very effective way to connect deeply with someone.

As KranK (RIP) used to say, taking drugs is like putting on shit-smeared glasses. You'll definitely look at the world differently, but will you learn anything new about it? When a man comes up with stuff like Vangers and Perimeter without resorting to psychoactive substances, I am inclined to trust his advice that you don't need drugs.

For those of you who have experimented with mescaline or whatever else, have these experiences changed you deeply and permanently? Would even taking small amounts grant you clarity or creativity without some terrible drawbacks?

Yes and yes. I'd recommend reading How to Change your Mind to get a better idea of the history and how these substances operate.

I would echo Jung's warning, and make sure you go into the psychedelic experience with the right mindset. You can absolutely 'see God' or 'experience the divine' while on these substances, but the conclusions you make about your experience are often wrong, and less important than the experience itself.

A good frame to think about psychedelics is that they increase the randomness or chaos of your mental states. This can be excellent if you are 'stuck' in a mindset that you do not like, such as depression or anxiety, and desperately need a new perspective. The most positive thing about the experience lies in the fact that these drugs can show you what it feels like to see the world in a new way.

For instance, if you've always been depressed, you can get a brief glimpse of what it's like to see the world without the grey cloud hanging over you. It won't fix your depression automatically, but it can give you hope and motivation to change your own mental state, and periodically help you course correct.

As someone who has taken his share of heroic doses, as well as microdosed for years on end, I have mixed feelings about the whole experience. I went into the experience of psychedelic use as an atheist, and came out having a suspicion that there may be a karmic cycle of birth and rebirth; also that there may be a transcendent cosmic consciousness from which we all come and all return to. There is a horror in having this suspicion that I may be reborn again, that all of my attachments to my family, friends and self will be ripped from my consciousness and I will be left alone, with nothing before going through the whole cycle again. There is also a horror in suspecting that since the cosmic consciousness that we all may stem from is indistinguishable from ourselves that I may eventually experience all the suffering in the universe. There were times while using when I had an awareness of the Earth as an organic entity and felt a sense of terror at all the suffering and destruction that occurred within this entity. The shift in perspective that I experienced when having used also made me more aware of the transience of all things and sorrowful in their passing. Psychedelics can amplify horrors that you scarcely knew to exist and then you cannot un-forget them.

All that being said, they have improved my life considerably. They (paired with therapy) helped me overcome substance abuse. They helped me overcome self-alienation and self-hatred and develop self-compassion. But the experience isn't without its downsides, and shouldn't be entered into lightly.

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EDIT: One more thing, I know that the Myers-Briggs is just astrology for boys, but before the whole psychedelics/therapy thing I was invariably an INTP, and the years since I always test as an INFP.

There is a horror in having this suspicion that I may be reborn again, that all of my attachments to my family, friends and self will be ripped from my consciousness and I will be left alone, with nothing before going through the whole cycle again.

Agreed. To me the entire Buddhist/Hindu cosmology is profoundly horrific when you get right down to the roots. Most people who subscribe to these beliefs seem to not consider them too deeply, at least in the West.

When you really consider what 'no attachments' means - you're looking at dropping all the love for your friends, family, etc. Not caring about a single other human being.

Sure Buddhist monks give all sorts of rhetorical flourishes to deny this dark truth, but I don't buy it. At the end of the day Buddhism is a profoundly anti-social philosophy, as far as I'm concerned. It also promotes radical selfishness in it's sanitized form that many western rationalists love. Gives them license and a 'spiritual' presence while being utterly narcissistic nihilists.

Had you had any exposure to Buddhist ideas beforehand?

Very much so. A precocious interest during my teen years, a few courses in undergrad, and continued curiosity afterward. However, after I started using psychedelics I had a appreciation of how the Dharmic religions and Taoism may all be reactions to the same transcendent experience.

Were you able to achieve those experiences via meditation?

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