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.
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?
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.
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