The thing is MM, you don't have to. The problem is, there's no way to tell until you try. *sigh*
And some people, it just isn't good for. As I've said before, if you even think you might be one of them, you probably shouldn't try.
"If you understand, no explanation is necessary. If you do not, no explanation is possible."
Me, I think it's something everybody should experience at least once. It changes the way you see the world forever. Long after it wears off and your 9-5 life comes back. If that's a good thing or a bad thing...well, depends on personal experience and perspective I guess.
Really? Everybody? Tell you what, Av. I'll do it (take pot) if there is a paramedic on standby, and if someone is there to hold my hand. Not you, Av. Oh jwaneeta...
Avatar wrote:Me, I think it's something everybody should experience at least once. It changes the way you see the world forever. Long after it wears off and your 9-5 life comes back. If that's a good thing or a bad thing...well, depends on personal experience and perspective I guess.
No way. I wont take the chance it will make me lose it, as some - like the original Pink Floyd singer - go mad. Plus, I'm happy to experience the world the way I do.
Waddley wrote:your Highness Sir Dr. Loredoctor, PhD, Esq, the Magnificent, First of his name, Second Cousin of Dragons, White-Gold-Plate Wielder!
If that's the way you feel Lore, then it's best if you don't. Because even that fear could be enough to make it real. It's all in the mind. Hell. Everything is all in the mind.
No chickening out either. Interesting how the experience of religious ecstacy can be so easily likened to commonly "experienced" hallucinogenic states.
Often wondered what sort of effect things like ergot had on the collective unconsciousness...
While I've certainly experienced hallucinogenic states, (although not religious ecstacy ), I'm basing my comment on what has already been said here, most notably by you.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, my own hallucinogenic experiences have not been characterised by this often commonly experienced phenomenon of ego-dissolution, but that's just me.
Avatar wrote:While I've certainly experienced hallucinogenic states, (although not religious ecstacy ), I'm basing my comment on what has already been said here, most notably by you.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, my own hallucinogenic experiences have not been characterised by this often commonly experienced phenomenon of ego-dissolution, but that's just me.
--A
I'd love your ego to be dissoluted! Life here would be so much simpler
Waddley wrote:your Highness Sir Dr. Loredoctor, PhD, Esq, the Magnificent, First of his name, Second Cousin of Dragons, White-Gold-Plate Wielder!
Matrixman wrote:In defense of screenwriters, they should not be required to experience any of the things they write about. Just as SRD is not required to actually visit a place called the Land in order to write about it.
True enough. However, until they do devolve to a more primitive form of man, then hunt, kill, and eat a small goat, they can only fantasize that it would be the most supremely satisfying time of their lives. Lots of fun to watch it in a movie, but we shouldn't assume it's the way things would really feel.
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest -Paul Simon
A good point Fist. No doubt those proto-hominids who had to survive like that by necessity would have a different opinion of it's value and satisfaction when compared to supermarkets, hot water and ice-cream.
jwaneeta wrote:The deepest raptures are named by Western Mysticism (with their usual mania for catagorizing everything) as Flights of the Spirit...
And Eastern Mysticism calls them samadhi, moksha, and turiya.
True 'nuff. But, that's what the Ravers call themselves. No one else thinks of them that way.
Avatar wrote:Me, I think it's something everybody should experience at least once. It changes the way you see the world forever. Long after it wears off and your 9-5 life comes back. If that's a good thing or a bad thing...well, depends on personal experience and perspective I guess.
I don't know if it changed my perception of the world forever, but it was a fun experience. But I've only dropped a total of maybe five times all told, and the stuff I had in the late 1970's was much better than anything I ever had with Paul in the late 1980's/early 1990's. No 'madhouse effect' as you're coming down, as Paul calls it, in the 1970's stuff. Ever since I experienced madhouse several times, I've had no desire to drop again.
I also don't recall a feeling of connection with the universe or a higher spirit. I do remember one time with Paul feeling interconnected to him, which I believe has continued to affect our relationship and marriage for the better. Sort of as described in the opening verse of I am the Walrus. That has stayed with me forever.
For me, it took a couple of tries to get to the level of profound personal change, but the immediate alterations of perception, of both social and material worlds, were SO radical that I began a very subversive course of reflection. If experience were as plastic as all that, I reasoned, how could I accept anything for granted? This is what changed me forever. Now I am convinced that nothing is as it seems. Technically speaking, of course, I am insane. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that everyone is, in fact, insane in their own special way, and that the way I am insane now is morally and functionally superior to the way I was insane before. This does not make me morally or functionally superior to anyone else, however, despite my prejudice inmy own favor, an issue I have yet to come to terms with. I think this is what I might mean by the experience of the other challenging one's egocentrism, if I were to use that expression.
On the note about madhouse, that seems to be a product of toxicity in the user as well as chemical impurities in the product, and is not found in all trips. Generally, the fresher the dose, the fewer breakdwon products, and the more spiritually minded the manufacturer, the better the trip. It's kind of like prasad food offerings in Krsna consciousness: they can be contaminated by being handled by an impure-minded devotee. Deep psychological damage can also be exposed for healing during acid trips, which can give the madhouse experience on its own.
The thing about the interconnection experience is that it is Life-Altering, since it deprives you permanently of certain illusions about what it means to be a separate human being in a world of radically spearate human beings. It's like the opposite of autism. I call it "walking in another's moccasins." You literally have the SAME consciousness and physical presence and location internally and externally, albeit for a fairly limited time. This experience is only possible when all or most of your ordinary experiential filters are off, and is not reproducible scientifically, as far as I am aware.
As far as transcendent experience, I don't get the I-and-Thou devotional love experience; rather I get the all-is-one and one-is-none existential experience.
My sense of the void is like a spiralling downard into the maelstrom: deep fear/panic and helplessness with a sense of crushing defeat and loss, coupled with very strange sensory visual themes. It reminds me of a nightmare I used to have a very young child of being sucked down the drain in the bathtub into a sewer. Yah, Freud might say I'm nuts, but I'd have to shoot him.
Avatar wrote:While I've certainly experienced hallucinogenic states, (although not religious ecstacy ), I'm basing my comment on what has already been said here, most notably by you.
Don't mind me, I was just trying to hijack the topic in order to gush about CC. It's a kink of mine.
It interests me to read how few altered states include the experience of love, as least as it's understood in the West. In Western Mysticism, of course, devotion is the driving force, the end and aim -- in fact it's the whole point, and ecstasy is just a by product, so to speak.
In the East, it's just one discipline of several. The way of emotional love or devotion is called bahkti yoga in Hinduism, and the way of self mastery by physical aceticism is called raja yoga, I believe. Karma yoga is another, but I can't remember what differentiates that one...
Fist, I really liked the excerpt you posted at the beginning of the thread. I've never read that book and it sounds v. interesting. I'm going to hunt it up on amazon.
Hey! How about a redeemed Raver named Bhakti? He used to be a bad mofo called Moksha, but then he got religion, and now he wanders the Donaldsonverse, helping the helpless!
Yes, I did meet my deadline. See what it does to my brain?
More from Paul (I don't think he's seen jawaneeta latest yet though):
Plissken, you would love the --temporary-- visual alterations on LSD once you understood how they work. Nitrous Oxide is even more pronounced as the scanning program ceases but the visual cortex still works. Its a kind of replacement of reflex with conscious attention that is very interesting. Artists and writers who fail to introspect inevitably produce schlock, on LSD or otherwise. It's just that schlock is so much more interesting when you're wasted.
(Dona?) Jwaneeta, where would you start from if you didn't believe in "Something Else?" I started from a belief in the unqualified absolute, and found that no descriptor is adequate to point to my goal. Its the process of "neti neti" (not this, not that) (via negativa?) advocated in Hinduism that guides me, and I see no reason to shoehorn my experience into an ideological framework. Yet this speaks nothing of practice; all my insights have been given not taken. I find that belief in the ultimate power, wisdom, presence, and benevolence of Something Else makes my experiences cohere better than belief in the generative power of my paltry few trillion neurons. But is it necessary? Are some forms of belief actually types of disciplined unbelief? Besides, this reminds me of that Geico commercial: "I have an Agent, but He doesn't always come through for me..." Also, what did I say about the void that made any sense?
Also, another love poem, from Dante's Paradiso Canto XXXIII
...my sight, becoming crystal clear,
Was piercing deeper and deeper through the rays
Of that deep Light which in itself is true.
55 From that point on, my power to see was stronger
Than speech that fails before such sights can show,
As memory falls short of the beyond.
As someone who while dreaming sees a vision
And, after he has dreamed, the feeling stays
60 Impressed, but all the rest slips from his mind,
I am like that, for almost all my seeing
Now falls away, but sweetness sprung from it
Still drips down, drop by drop, into my heart.
So is the snow unsealed beneath the sunlight;
65 So were the sayings of the Sibyl upon
The light leaves left to drift off in the wind.
O highest Light, lifted up so far
Above all mortal thinking, lend my mind,
Once more, a little of what you were like,
70 And grant my tongue such powerful expression
That it may leave behind a single spark
Of glory for a people still to come.
For by returning some spark to my mind
75 And sounding out a little in these lines,
Your triumph shall be thought of more profoundly.
I think I would have been lost in a daze
With the dazzling I endured from that live beam
If my eyes once had turned away from it.
I remember I grew bolder for this reason
80 In bearing up with it, until I merged
My gazing with the infinite Goodness.
O grace abounding, by which I have dared
To fix my eyes through the eternal Light
So deeply that my sight was spent in it!
85 Within its depths I saw gathered together,
Bound by love into a single volume,
Leaves that lie scattered through the universe.
Substance and accidents and their relations
I saw as though they fused in such a way
90 That what I say is but a gleam of light.
The universal pattern of this knot
I believe I saw, because in telling this,
I feel my gladness growing ever larger.
One moment made more slip my memory than
95 Twenty-five centuries reft from the adventure
That awed Neptune with the shadow of the Argo.
So my mind, held in absolute suspense,
Was staring fixed, intent, and motionless,
And by its staring grew the more inflamed.
100 Within that Light a person is so changed
It is impossible to give consent
Ever to turn from it to other sights
Because the Good, the object of the will,
Is gathered all in it, and out of it
105 The thing that there is perfect has some flaw...
...Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —
140 Except that then my mind was struck by lightning
Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.
Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,
145 By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Avatar:
Your experience sounds like most of mine at lower doses and without Nitrous Oxide. I don't advocate the practice, but combining LSD and Nitrous, or going for the heroic dose, does break the stranglehold of the mental and access the subconscious/symbolic realms more directly. You'll need a second person to keep you safe though, as unconsciousness, though brief, is not necessarily healthy and commonly occurs when using Nitrous, and larger doses mean more difficult landings. The difficulty once the barrier is broken, though (and I liken it to jumping into deep water) is that memory often ceases to function during the experience, which is larger than the 'buffers' normally permit. This means that sometimes dozens of attempts are necessary to obtain and recall the experience of no-self or meta-self or Other, even with the drugs. It is like my one friend said, not long before his incarceration in a mental hospital: "I only use psychedelics as a meditative tool." Acclimatizing your psyche to a nonstandard world is not an automatic or straightforward process. Yet you needn't give up. If you do enjoy the experience, simply augment it by vision quest or shamanic practices or other Western Mysticism techniques. Kabala uses sleep deprivation; others use fasting; I personally enjoy the sensory deprivation route. They're all valid challenges to the received view. By the way, I agree that hallucinations never produce something that isn't already there. You just re-interpret perceptions to mean something unusual. There is almost always a narrative/mythological component and an empirical/material component. By the way, Ergot mostly caused gangrene to poor SOBs who ate it because the rye was bad and times were tight. It also induced a few abortions and cured a few migraines. Properly extracted, though, I am sure it packs a punch!
Matrixman: I disagree that screenwriters should not take acid before writing about it. Of course they should take acid. If it messes them up, they should write about that. As for fantasy writers, they should definitely have a fantasy before writing one for someone else; it is open to debate to what extent SRD visits the Land, in my view. Don't worry about your first time, I went straight from Beer to Acid and have been much the better for it. You should definitely have a caring and experienced guide though. And who's to say that killing small game with your hands and eating it warm isn't fun? Its the weeks of starvation and suffering in between that bother me. I like dry socks and air conditioning more than raw flesh.
jwaneeta wrote:In the East, it's just one discipline of several. The way of emotional love or devotion is called bahkti yoga in Hinduism, and the way of self mastery by physical aceticism is called raja yoga, I believe. Karma yoga is another, but I can't remember what differentiates that one...
Kundalini yoga is one I've read a few books about. In any event, all of the different types of yoga have the same purpose: union with the Hindu Godhead/ultimate reality - Brahman. ("The irreducible ground of existence. The essence of every thing." "The eternal, imperishable Absolute. The supreme nondual reality of Vedanta.") All yoga techniques are supposed to strip us of our worldly selves, leaving us with nothing but our True Selves - the atman - which is an infinite portion of the infinite Brahman.
jwaneeta wrote:Fist, I really liked the excerpt you posted at the beginning of the thread. I've never read that book and it sounds v. interesting. I'm going to hunt it up on amazon.
Do you mean Conversations With God? If so, I've quoted it many times here. Here's a few. (If you mean the Biology of the Brain one, just ignore all these quotes. )
Neale Donald Walsch wrote:Now the supreme irony here is that you have all placed so much importance on the Word of God, and so little on the experience.
In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.
Your experience and your feelings about a thing represent what you factually and intuitively know about that thing. Words can only seek to symbolize what you know, and can often confuse what you know.
GOD: Life evolved through a series of steps in the blink of an eye that you now call billions of years. And in this holy instant came you, out of the sea, the water of life, onto the land and into the form you now hold.
NEALE: Then the evolutionists are right!
GOD: I find it amusing – a source of continual amusement, actually – that you humans have such a need to break everything down into right and wrong. It never occurs to you that you’ve made those labels up to help you define the material – and your Self.
It never occurs to you (except to the finest minds among you) that a thing could be both right and wrong; that only in the relative world are things one or the other. In the world of the absolute, of time-no time, all things are everything.
There is no male and female, there is no before and after, there is no fast and slow, here and there, up and down, left and right – and no right and wrong.
Your astronauts and cosmonauts have gained a sense of this. They imagined themselves to be rocketing upward to get to outer space, only to find when they got there that they were looking up at the Earth. Or were they? Maybe they were looking down at the Earth! But then, where was the sun? Up? Down? No! Over there, to the left. So now, suddenly, a thing was neither up nor down – it was sideways…and all definitions thus disappeared.
So it is in My world – our world – our real realm. All definitions disappear, rendering it difficult to even talk about this realm in definitive terms.
Religion is your attempt to speak of the unspeakable. It does not do a very good job.
No, My son, the evolutionists are not right. I created all of this – all of this – in the blink of an eye; in one holy instant – just as the creationists have said. And…it came about through a process of evolution taking billions and billions of what you call years, just as the evolutionists claim.
They are both "right." As the cosmonauts discovered, it all depends on how you look at it.
But the real question is: one holy instant/billions of years – what’s the difference? Can you simply agree that on some of the questions of life the mystery is too great for even you to solve? Why not hold the mystery as sacred? And why not allow the sacred to be sacred, and leave it alone?
The great teachers of your Christian religion understood this. They know that Jesus was not perturbed by the crucifixion, but expected it. He could have walked away, but he did not. He could have stopped the process at any point. He had that power. Yet he did not. He allowed himself to be crucified in order that he might stand as man's eternal salvation. Look, he said, at what I can do. Look at what is true. And know that these things, and more, shall you also do. For have I not said ye are gods? Yet you do not believe. If you cannot, then, believe in yourself, believe in me.
NEALE: Whew! You inspire me!
GOD: Well, if God can’t inspire you, who in hell can?
NEALE: Are You always this flip?
GOD: I meant that not as a flippancy. Read it again.
NEALE: Oh. I see.
GOD: Yes. However, it would be okay if I were being flip, wouldn’t it?
NEALE: I don’t know. I’m used to my God being a little more serious.
GOD: Well, do Me a favor, and don’t try to contain Me. By the way, do yourself the same favor.
And here's a thread I started, using it as the premise, back when Darth was being particularly anti-religion:
kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4788
jwaneeta wrote:Hey! How about a redeemed Raver named Bhakti? He used to be a bad mofo called Moksha, but then he got religion, and now he wanders the Donaldsonverse, helping the helpless!
Hmm... I don't know. "Bhakti" sounds like a pretty lame name for a character.
jwaneeta wrote:Yes, I did meet my deadline. See what it does to my brain?
There's some bit of information I'm obviously not privy to.
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest -Paul Simon
Fist and Faith wrote:Hmm... I don't know. "Bhakti" sounds like a pretty lame name for a character.
With all the Love I possess - Bite me!
*nyuk nyuk*
I am the self-fulfilling prophecy. Give love, and you WILL receive love. Let your every answer, your every action and reaction, your every desire, be rooted in love.
In the world of the absolute, of time-no time, all things are everything
This is the key: resolution of opposites into nonduality. It's not ego-death, it is the pure unnecessity of questioning the totality of experience. And it is the duals of time and space that bring it into being. For if there is to be something rather than nothing it must have duration and location, according to our ways of thinking. And we ask ourselves is there One or Many, and discover that the answer depends on whether there is Change, which depends on our conceptions of Same and Different as well as our sense of Now and Then. In the most basic substrate, these categories are no longer essential, but are acidents of consciousness. The immediate perception of the substrate as underlying its superficial accidents destroys confidence in the world of appearances, which must then be rebuilt in order to permit action from a compassionate motive.
I was talking more about LSD MM. 
There's some bit of information I'm obviously not privy to.