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michael_lifshitz
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Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions.
#5812888 - 07/02/06 04:27 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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I had a very powerful drug experience today. Involving mushrooms and marijuana.
I talked to a friend who I used to be wonderful friends with, but our ways sort of split, so we rarely see eachother anymore, but still have meaningful experiences when we do see eachother.
I feel sort of without direction, and talking to my friend, who has strong direction, and just the mushrooms and my thoughts in general led me to a path of great suffering for about an hour. I felt a lot of pressure building up negatively. I am currently on a fast and not having food makes me feel a tiny bit more empty than having food. Today I really felt how my entire identity and happiness is based on these rediculous outisde factors. Food, friends, love, I don't even know. What am I living for? What will ever keep me satisfied?
Then I realised that to rid myself of all these rediculous attachments, though it seems like there would be nothing left, would simply reveal to true wonderful nature of it all. I need to be content with nothing before induldging in things. I really feel like a stronger spiritual practice is going to be coming up. I need to start being content with nothing, I really do.
Coming down now, however, I feel quite happy, and through the whole experience I realised despite the negative energy, that I was learning and such. But now I feel like Im certain that the way I am living is not good enough, and something has to happen.
I want to push deeper into this on a coming mushroom experience, with just myself. And see if maybe I can plunge over that barrier and feel content with nothing, after all my attachments are lost, which I find mushrooms do nicely, they just generally bring with the lack of attachment a feeling of deep emptiness, a void, which I want to fill with the joy and beauty of simply being.
I shouldn't need one tiny thing to be happy.
Having said this, I love the thought of life and the oppurtunity that I have to grow from all this.
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Syle
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: michael_lifshitz]
#5812940 - 07/02/06 04:49 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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good luck friend!
-------------------- https://kenaisigh.bandcamp.com/ <- Just completed the 2021 RPM challenge for February - An EP in one month (5 songs or 20 minutes). Check it out!
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Huehuecoyotl
Fading Slowly


Registered: 06/13/04
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: michael_lifshitz]
#5812942 - 07/02/06 04:49 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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"I feel sort of without direction"
Heres some direction: http://lib.ru/KASTANEDA/kast03_engl.txt
-------------------- "A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions." ― Carlos Castaneda
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michael_lifshitz
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Huehuecoyotl]
#5812954 - 07/02/06 04:54 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Oh I have certainly read that book. And actually, now that you mention it. I have much direction, I just forgot. To be imppecable and to be a better person and to be without suffering.
Thank you actually, thank you for the reminder.
I feel like reading some other castaneda books now, but there are many others books I would like to attack first.
Thanks again.
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Huehuecoyotl
Fading Slowly


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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: michael_lifshitz]
#5813202 - 07/02/06 06:43 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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I was just trying to be helpful. Hint: being immpeccable has nothing to do with "being a better person". It is about accumulating personal power.
-------------------- "A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions." ― Carlos Castaneda
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


Registered: 04/08/04
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Huehuecoyotl]
#5813278 - 07/02/06 07:08 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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impeccable is not impeccable? that's a bit of a switch!
--------------------
_ 🧠 _
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slaphappy
Its just me


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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: redgreenvines]
#5814835 - 07/03/06 05:45 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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You have to do something. And its not eating more mushrooms.
If at first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try it again. The next time you fall, it will hurt more, because you're allready hurt. How about healing first - you don't need drugs.
Just a thought.
-------------------- The argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.

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michael_lifshitz
Student


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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: slaphappy]
#5815328 - 07/03/06 10:02 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Well I think the journey of awakening is one I will be on for a while, I think mushrooms have the ability to teach me and help me along the way.
This experience was not negative, I feel rejuvenated after it.
I feel more directed and more efficient and more mindfull.
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thatiAM
Stranger

Registered: 06/14/06
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: michael_lifshitz]
#5815352 - 07/03/06 10:09 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Quote:
michael_lifshitz said: Well I think the journey of awakening is one I will be on for a while,
Why be on it for a while? Just do it. Awakening is as available to you right now, this very second, as it has ever been before or ever will be for as long as you exist. It is within the simple majesty of merely existing.
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MarkostheGnostic
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Huehuecoyotl]
#5816370 - 07/03/06 03:20 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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In the movie 'Zardoz,'when Sean Connery's character realized that his entire world-view and the culture in which he grew up was modelled after Frank Baum's children's story 'The WiZARDofOZ,' he became insane with rage:

I was fairly put off by Casteneda's fiction-posing-as-anthropology, and later pissed about the possibility of a fiction doctoral dissertation (having suffered writing one myself). Astral phenomena 'borrowed from C.W. Leadbeater's occult works, from the 70's series Man, Myth and Magic, some things gleaned from Nagualism (very little of which is printed), almost nothing about human sexuality, demeaning of mystical experience into 'The Mold of Man,' the somewhat Gnostic Demiurgic notion of a demonic crow deity who eats the 'sparks' of human consciousness at death....I could go on, but I won't because this post is neither to attack you or your interest in Casteneda's books. However, it is questionable whether guiding a young seeking individual to a fiction series as a credible source of direction is helpful or ethical. It may arguably be said that greater direction can be obtained from Melville's fiction Moby Dick. At some point, the parent who teaches their child about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny is going to have to burst their child's world view - just like in ZARDOZ. One may well ask what subtle sadism parents demonstrate by their child's belief in a fiction - ones which the child can hardly extract any abstract principles from - and in which none are embodied.
I'll add that my early trips included attempting the 'Gait of Power' (taken, more than likely from the Tibetan Lung Gompas, who ran for days in trance, even through blizzards), looking for "power spots," feeling myself shrink (almost small enough to come eye-to-eye with a drooling mosquito!), attempting to "see" the astral egg around people, experience the (Manipura-Manipulative) "Gap," and numerous and sundry other Casteneda things. I was strongly effected by the notion of becoming a "Man of Knowledge," and that aspect has remained. I appreciate the term "impeccability" even though I do not see myself primarily in the Martial archetype of warrior (although the name Mark[os]/Marcus derives from Mars, god of war.
So, with all that being said, what are your limits with regard to the seriousness of the writings of Carlos Casteneda? I've read all but the last one with those pictures of postures.
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Veritas

Registered: 04/15/05
Posts: 11,089
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#5816759 - 07/03/06 05:09 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Quote:
However, it is questionable whether guiding a young seeking individual to a fiction series as a credible source of direction is helpful or ethical. It may arguably be said that greater direction can be obtained from Melville's fiction Moby Dick.
Or from the Bible. 
Seriously, though, we don't know that Casteneda's books are works of fiction, any more than we know the Bible is the non-fictional word of God. He may have created an amalgam (Don Juan), who represented many shamans whom he interviewed and learned from, and he may have embellished details in order to create an interesting presentation of the teachings he received, but that does not mean that there is no truth to his books.
Hey, at least they haven't been through translation after translation, like the Bible. At this point, the English version of the Bible could be like the end of the line in a game of "Telephone." That would explain a great many contradictions and inconsistencies.
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Huehuecoyotl
Fading Slowly


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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#5817128 - 07/03/06 06:50 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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"I was fairly put off by Casteneda's fiction-posing-as-anthropology"
Sorry Markos, but you let your prejudices obscure your understanding of the work. The fictional state of the work has nothing to do with spiritual validity. The practices Castaneda details work as advertised.
-------------------- "A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions." ― Carlos Castaneda
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MarkostheGnostic
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Veritas]
#5818073 - 07/03/06 10:47 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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The Bible is an example of Hebrew 'midrash' - a concept that moderns have little understanding of. Instead of first learning to understand how, why and with which models they wrote those books, they simply apply their medieval, renaissance and modernist interpretations. There is an internal logic to Biblical writ, once one realizes that the scientific/journalistic mentality did not exist then. Midrash was a Hebrew literary device which used colorful stories to illustrate spiritual principles. Literal/historical interpretation was not intended in the minds of midrashic authors. We as moderns demand space-time accuracy, objective, empirical evidence. Moreover, Hebrew writing has been long understood to be on four levels: the historical, the allegorical, the symbolic and the mystical. A certain sophistication and discernment needs to be in place with which to discriminate.
Later, with the NT tomb narratives, the literal, physical 'resusitation' of the corpus of Jesus was understood by the very crudest of individuals. The language was still midrashic and the allusions to the non-physical body of Jesus appearing in 'the upper room' behind closed doors, yet eating fish, attests to a condition not physical but transmutable, transitional. Philosophical, Gnostic Christians 'got it,' but the multitudes did not and the multitude's understanding came to be mainstream orthodoxy - not the deeper more penetrating thinkers. I could write a book on this but others have already done so.
Carlos Casteneda told my old friend and former professor, the well-known (from TCL and Discovery channel) Egyptologist (and parapsychological student of J.B. Rhine while at Duke U.) Bob Brier "There is no Don Juan." Bob Brier reported that back to me a couple of days after meeting at Harry Houdini's grave on the yearly anniversary - Halloween 1974 - the day Houdini died in 1926. I believed Bob then, and I believe it still. I have analyzed various sources of Casteneda's masterful weaving together of occult notions and find him to have been a master story-teller - much as were the midrashic authors of the Biblical books. So persuasive was he that many of us got pulled in to a fictional collage of a world view.
The Bible as "word of God" is a statement of faith and a doctrine, but God is not the object of Casteneda, sorcery is and knowledge of a sort, but not knowledge of Transcendental Reality - knowledge of the Astral Plane and a knowledge where the metaphysics are focused on "will" - magickal will - and it all remains in 'form.' The Astral needs to be transcended for the Causal Plane (just as the Patrick Swazy character in the movie 'Ghost' eventually is released from his entrapment in the lower Astral Planes, along with even lower astral demons, until his liberation into the Light of the Causal Plane). Beyond that is said to be Formlessness and Divinity proper (Kabbalistically and in other systems). Compassion NEVER enters into 'the teachings of Don Juan' that I can remember, only "will," and that says it all.
Peace.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Huehuecoyotl
Fading Slowly


Registered: 06/13/04
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#5818184 - 07/03/06 11:19 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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It is apparent that rehashing the old "is there or is there not a Don Juan" argument is ridiculous for me since I do not myself believe or care if such a man existed. Don Juan was just the vehicle for the message real or not, but I would rather talk about the message than it's historical authenticity. Your understanding of the message is very rudimentary and clouded with prejudice. Have a nice day.
-------------------- "A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions." ― Carlos Castaneda
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slaphappy
Its just me


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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Huehuecoyotl]
#5818532 - 07/04/06 12:53 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Quote:
Huehuecoyotl said: It is apparent that rehashing the old "is there or is there not a Don Juan" argument is ridiculous for me since I do not myself believe or care if such a man existed. Don Juan was just the vehicle for the message real or not, but I would rather talk about the message than it's historical authenticity. Your understanding of the message is very rudimentary and clouded with prejudice. Have a nice day.
Why? How?
-------------------- The argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.

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thirdeyetruth
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: michael_lifshitz]
#5819988 - 07/04/06 01:15 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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i think that any spiritual shroom trip will leave you wanting MORE. but its not about emtiness, its about this lust for life. i had a similar trip once where i felt every emotion, from fear to joy to sadness to peace, this all culminated when i reunited with my group of cracked out friends. we gathered together suddenly realized that everyone was feeling the same thing, sharing the same FEELING. this transcended beyond language to something instinctive, and indescribable, i think you might know exactly what im talking about, you should charish that emptiness meng.
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Schwammel
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: thirdeyetruth]
#5820059 - 07/04/06 01:35 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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lets cut to the chase,,,
there ain't anything about shrooms taht I want to live the rest of my life for...
you really want to be a guru thats seen the light for the rest of you're life?
well keep eating those toad stools becuz it ain't gonna happen.
this is it. the moment, your 3 seconds in the sun,
spread it out if you want
it ain't gonna happen
unless you do it...
shrooms are fine
but they aren't you
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thirdeyetruth
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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Schwammel]
#5820089 - 07/04/06 01:47 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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werd.
i still belive there was value in experiencing that moment, so while understanding what your saying, and even if my 3 seconds are done, they are still mine, and i cant close my eyes to that experience
im just lettin it grow
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Schwammel
Auk

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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: thirdeyetruth]
#5820118 - 07/04/06 01:56 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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me too.................
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michael_lifshitz
Student


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Re: Mushroom experience today. Many insights and questions. [Re: Schwammel]
#5821943 - 07/04/06 11:37 PM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Im just saying this experience led me to realise how trapped I was in samsara, and reaffirm my drive to escape it. It made me happy not sad. I don't feel like the mushroom is me, or anything. I just feel like it taught me a valuable lesson.
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