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monkeybus
Hare Krishna



Registered: 07/29/07
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Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer
#14185727 - 03/26/11 07:35 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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More and more positive articles on psychedelics in the mainstream press of late methinks.
Read me
Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer
An LSD trip brings a restless insistence on recategorising and recontextualising anything that catches your attention
At 14, I was much taken by phenomenology. The idea that certainty was an illusion, our experiences and logical conclusions forever trapped behind imperfect senses, gelled with my distrust of religious dogma and fondness for science's inbuilt doubts. These things are important, at 14.
Ten years later, flat on my back beneath an orange east-London night sky, with Elgar on the headphones and illegal indole groups rewiring my brain, phenomenology went from a nice idea to case proven.
As photography's true pleasure is in the taking of the picture rather than the printing of it afterwards, the point of the psychedelic experience isn't in its recollection – let alone in that direst of hippy pastimes, the recounting of how fried we were, man. (Although to the startled Japanese tourist seeking directions whose shoes were vomited over in Kew Gardens one eternal afternoon: sincere apologies. Man, we got that dose wrong.)
The value is in the view suddenly revealed, the mundane perception revealed as an interplay of elements each with their own unique existence, combined for an instant into something with its own being. We think, necessarily, in cliche, in tested metaphors, but cliche get stale and metaphors only work by hiding detail. It was profoundly arresting to find myself in a place where none of that applied and to be forced to deal for a few hours with rude novelty at every level.
You can't, in general, do much while you're there apart from go along for the ride. Yet acid's restless insistence on recategorising, recontextualising and generally mucking around with anything that catches your attention leaves the world you return to forever a little looser at the joints. The realisation that Out There, beyond the parish boundaries of our normal senses and thoughts, is enormously different and strange, is not something you can properly lose thereafter. It is a richer, stranger place I live in now than then.
It can go oh so badly wrong. The overwhelming insight that the interface between consciousness and reality is fractal, vouchsafed at Glastonbury as the sun went down, the Cure came on and the LSD went in, isn't something I've ever found much of a use for. As with the mescaline-drenched Aldous Huxley transfixed by the cosmic mysteries of his grey flannel trousers, you had to be there.
Despair, wretchedness and timeless, unspeakable alienation aren't much cop either.
But when it's right: ah, when it's right. There is a concept among psychedelic connoisseurs of the museum dose, a sub-critical amount of a drug that heightens perception without completely ripping down the wallpaper. It works. You can look at a Constable landscape and focus one moment on the technique, the myriad painterly tricks, then switch to being swept away by the sense of place and time practically forced down your throat by the whole thing. That's yours to keep.
There's also a lot to be said, if it were possible, for the largely incommunicable psychedelic experiences at higher dosage. The deeply unsettling return of childhood emotions and perceptions. The ersatz spiritual states – spirituality with waterwings, as Alan Watts called them – which nonetheless seem to match as closely as can be told those recorded by religious esoterics. Ego death, that moment when the self simply vanishes to leave a pure world where Out There and In Here no longer have meaning, is transcendental in any possible reading of the word.
Psychedelics don't change the kit of parts you're made of but they do reveal them, albeit by use of a bejewelled sledgehammer. If you're lucky – or perhaps just that way inclined – they go back in the box with a few new ways of working; at the very least, with a broader sense of beauty and acceptance of how enormously strange the whole business of self is. That can lead, if you wish, to more understanding of how different the world can seem to others, thence to more compassion for them. And yourself.
I'm not a skilled art critic, an enlightened cosmic being or a devastatingly insightful cognitive scientist by virtue of having taken LSD, any more than a trip to Stockholm on Ryanair has left me able to fly or speak Swedish. But I have been places where the world was no longer constrained by normal thoughts, normal senses, and brought back souvenirs that I treasure greatly.
And to look on the bright side, I no longer throw up on the footwear of passers-by.
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3Cajun1Mo8
Fung Padawan



Registered: 11/07/10
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: monkeybus]
#14185864 - 03/26/11 08:49 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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This doesn't seem like news to me...just some guy babbling bout psychedelics...
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monkeybus
Hare Krishna



Registered: 07/29/07
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: 3Cajun1Mo8] 1
#14185873 - 03/26/11 08:52 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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Click the link.
From a "newspaper"
Qualifies as "news"
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Humility
Working on it



Registered: 10/07/08
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: 3Cajun1Mo8]
#14186135 - 03/26/11 10:33 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
3Cajun1Mo8 said: This doesn't seem like news to me...just some guy babbling bout psychedelics...
You couldn't have said that 10 years ago, much less 20 when 80+% of the "drug" articles were negative if not Reefer Madness-esque type stories.
People don't even realize how fast things are changing .
--------------------

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3Cajun1Mo8
Fung Padawan



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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: Humility]
#14186222 - 03/26/11 10:58 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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I mean im glad that there is a newspaper somewhere letting a writer talk about these kinda subjects, just it didnt seem like news but more alike to a trip report. but when I read it the first time, but i was in a "just woke up and pissed cause I cant wakenbake" kinda mood.
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Cyclohexylamine
Turn on, Tune in, Drop out



Registered: 09/08/10
Posts: 14,327
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: 3Cajun1Mo8]
#14186325 - 03/26/11 11:23 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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LSD
-------------------- Yes this is tymo - I just changed my name Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to awake from that dream? How would you know the difference between that dream world and the real world? There is NOTHING better than feeling that warm dissociative fuzz creeping up your body from IM K Something abut that anaesthetic rush... Qualitative Research Chemical Effects and Experiences The Wonderful World of Methoxetamine The 3-Meo-PCP Chapters, Part One
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Sophistic Radiance
Free sVs!



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Loc: Center of the Universe
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: 3Cajun1Mo8]
#14187034 - 03/26/11 02:09 PM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
3Cajun1Mo8 said: I mean im glad that there is a newspaper somewhere letting a writer talk about these kinda subjects, just it didnt seem like news but more alike to a trip report. but when I read it the first time, but i was in a "just woke up and pissed cause I cant wakenbake" kinda mood.
It's a fucking editorial.
-------------------- Enlil said: You really are the worst kind of person.
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plustax
Stranger
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That's great. Like others have said no way in hell this would have been given the greenlight 20 years ago.
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Nymphaea
Money-less Wanderer


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Quote:
Tchan909 said:
Quote:
3Cajun1Mo8 said: I mean im glad that there is a newspaper somewhere letting a writer talk about these kinda subjects, just it didnt seem like news but more alike to a trip report. but when I read it the first time, but i was in a "just woke up and pissed cause I cant wakenbake" kinda mood.
It's a fucking editorial.

People read that shit and might learn something.
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Plant Trees
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Moonraker
Friend


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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: Nymphaea]
#14189096 - 03/26/11 09:10 PM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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Thanks for that. Really well written. Couldn't agree with it more, psychedelics and existentialism (to me) go hand in hand.
-------------------- A human race with more highly developed spiritual capacities, with expanded consciousness of the depth and the incomprehensible wonder of being, would also have greater understanding of and better consideration for the biological and material foundation of life on this earth, Above all, for Western people with their hypertrophied rationality, the development and expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. To fall in hell or soar angelic, You need a pinch of psychedelic.
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FleshCap
FleshCap



Registered: 11/10/08
Posts: 685
Loc: Cali Underground
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: Moonraker]
#14189498 - 03/26/11 10:56 PM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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insightful, nevertheless...
--------------------
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TheDudeAbides
Livin Off FrostyBarley Pops andPork Soda



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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: FleshCap]
#14190082 - 03/27/11 01:15 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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It's Bill Hick's dream - Positive drug story in the news.
-------------------- outputrotation said: x-com and unsolved mysteries are the only things that have ever made me truly scared
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jackdaniels
come here young man



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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: TheDudeAbides]
#14190648 - 03/27/11 05:35 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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love it
-------------------- LSD FTW
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Littleman

Registered: 10/01/06
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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: jackdaniels]
#14190923 - 03/27/11 07:25 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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this ones even better i thought: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/22/lsd-acid-trip-self-knowledge?intcmp=239
"There is no hiding with LSD Beyond the flowers that turn into cats, an acid trip forces users to face whatever comes up, and self-knowledge often follows
Is LSD a great spiritual teacher? Or indeed a teacher at all? My answer is an emphatic "Yes", even though there will always be students who learn nothing from their teachers or misuse what they do learn..."
-------------------- "Well Right after the 4th hit he was so far gone he puked all over him self. He had no clue that he threw up on him self and was finger painting in it on his stomach." - Mudnpool NZ Psilocybe Hitlist:
Subaeruginosa-Weraroa-Semilanceata -Subsecotioid - Angulospora - Tasmaniana - Alutacea
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Joolz


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Re: Psychedelics' bejewelled sledgehammer [Re: Littleman]
#14191050 - 03/27/11 08:27 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
Littleman said: this ones even better i thought: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/22/lsd-acid-trip-self-knowledge?intcmp=239
"There is no hiding with LSD Beyond the flowers that turn into cats, an acid trip forces users to face whatever comes up, and self-knowledge often follows
Is LSD a great spiritual teacher? Or indeed a teacher at all? My answer is an emphatic "Yes", even though there will always be students who learn nothing from their teachers or misuse what they do learn..."
What a wonderful quote, thank you.
-------------------- Prohibition didn't work for God; Eve ate the fruit.
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