Drugs & Weed & Ketamine

Man Whyzed you say no personality, but I see you speak as if they do, have souls, like gods even almost like some poster before sayd, filmsnob.
He said plants they have souls and when you take em in you take in their soul and become their soul, but what is a soul but neurons and configurations, zap-patterns really.

I like that life is a chemical boost. It’s going no where, to its end, make the most of it.
Take a plant in you with you in the day you are two lifeforms, enjoying the chemistry of life together. But just dont fuck up.
But the fuckest up is if you never try.

But dont try the bad shit all at once. I mean the persons I know sometimes, they go far.
One guy, he swallowed antipsychotics. he is now dead. Like it said on the brochure. Side effect: blah, blah, death. blah, further blah. Face smashed on the pavement. Very medicinal for his mom. I dont mean to be cynical. but its not really me whose being cynical. I just report the facts dont shoot.

Drugs of pharma, no thanks
Drugs from the corner, no.
Drugs from the gods,

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTIWloXBCww[/youtube]

Hey barbarian, I was wondering if you ever were at one of those gabber parties back in the 90s? I think you would fit there perfectly.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOMT3bRJXOo[/youtube]

Some people are really sensitive to drugs and get paranoid this is true. I know one was 19 when he ate space, and then he nearly discovered she was another gender. It was a terrible experience and she was rattled and never recovered even though he only did it once. Sad.

I don’t think the drugs have soul or mind, but think they reveal it. As described by Gib allowing you to see your mind from alternative angles or on new levels.

I don’t know about generally, but perhaps in some or many cases. It’s the age proceeding massive hysterical and uninformed drug opposition, which is still prevalent or at least lingering. And drug acceptance is commonly very poor - b-boys and gangsters, immature youths, down and out bums and undesirables, personal issues, social decay and all the rest. The main thing to know about drugs, other than they are a powerful technology for good or evil - like all technology, then - is probably that we are terribly misinformed and uneducated - disregard what you thought you knew. Most drugs, in my experience, don’t induce comedowns. Most are not physically addictive. I think permanent alteration is typically only the consequence of abuse, ad even then only with some drugs. I don’t think you’ll succeed in permanently altering yourself physically with maximum doses of LSD daily for ten years - no physical alterations are found yet. I think the only permanent alterations with non-toxic drugs is personal/mental, and can be for the better or worse but typically for the better, at least with some - psychedelics.

I think we really need to disentangle ourselves from the ideas surrounding drugs to the large part. Gust as people are good in some ways and bad in others, so too are collectives, like professional groups or civilisations. Ideas about drugs on the societal level are comparable (or maybe even are) immature traits or mental illnesses of societies. Whichever side of them you follow (for or against), you basically get harmed.

Many plants are very dangerous - datura, belladonna, fly agaric, mandrake. Man and nature (that the two could be, or should be distinguished - art does not imitate nature, nature imitates art) both make poisons. In some regions (Australia lol, or psychiatry perhaps) we may make more toxic substances than others - but western medicine still get’s the job done. I think we should think of it as a necessary evil and fall back rather than an outright winner - the thing is you evolved over millions of years that your senses might guide you, but being an ancient system your guidance system is suited to the ancient rather than the novel - so your taste buds tell you what to and what not to eat if it comes from the garden or grew wild on a bush (more than not), but don’t necessarily warn you that an e-number or pesticide is toxic. We don’t feel radioactivity for instance, just the physical degradation that follows major exposure.

So shrooms (psilocybes) and mescaline cactuses are super safe - if used respectfully and maturely. Fly agaric is dangerous, as is belladonna. LSD is very safe (again, with respect), whilst 25-i is plain dangerous.

This is what I’m saying though - it’s a dangerous world, but you’re fucked if you don’t play the game. It’s true, but what’s truer is that the fuckest up thing is if you bang 5 tabs and get behind the wheel, then write an ‘exciting!!!’ account of your great trip/car crash on erowid (grrrr).

= weirdo. (grrrr)

Anyone here actually ingested any ketamine?

:laughing: That actually does spell weirdo if you rearrange the words. I never noticed that. I wonder if it’s on purpose.

Good eye, Wendy!

So far in my career of drug induced intoxications, I’ve come up with two theories to explain paranoia:

Theory #1: direct stimulation of the fear centers. Drugs that are known to give one “bad trips” usually strike at the hypothalamus, which plays an important roll in basic emotional responses. The paranoia comes about because we cannot deal with fear that comes from an unknown source. We experience terror, but cannot name that which we are terrified by, so we fill the void with something–people are watching me, that man wants to kill me, the cops are onto me, demons lurk near to me–so as to feel that we at least can identify the source of the fear and thereby gain a better sense of control over it. Nothing is scarier than fear we don’t understand. (makes you think our paranoid delusions are actually helping us).

Theory #2: alarm system in the brain–same as theory #1–fear without a source–but this time stimulated indirectly. It’s a theory that says the brain has an embedded alarm system that goes off when it detects insanity. Drugs, by definition, put one into a temporary state of insanity. If too intense, this state might set off certain “alarms” in the brain that signal the presence of danger–not danger from outside, but within the body–just as the stomach gets nauseous when it detects poisons–so it triggers the fear response. How does the fear response help? It compels one to hide somewhere, to find shelter, a safe place where nothing can get you. It’s more or less the equivalent of lying down to rest when you’re sick. If you just find a safe place to hide–stay there and do nothing–chance are your temporary state of insanity won’t get you into any really trouble.

For a while, I figured theory #2 must be correct because bad trips triggered by unnamed terror arise on all sorts of psychedelics–mushrooms, acid, pot–chances are pretty minimal, I thought, that all such drugs happen to strike at the fear centers directly–more likely they all put one into a temporary state of insanity such that the “alarm system” in the brain gets triggered. But then I had a counter thought: all these drugs–the psychedelic–stimulate similar systems in the brain. I haven’t researched it enough to pin down exactly what this system in the brain is, but on all such drugs, one has very similar experience–there must be a system in the brain that coordinates emotion, musical experience, and the imagination–all these drugs seem to heighten this system–emotions are more intense, music is more intense, the imagination is more intense–and so maybe it’s this brain system that, when over stimulated, triggers the fear response–not necessarily in response to an alarm (but maybe it is in response to an alarm), but directly since fear is probably one of the emotions that is heightened within this brain system.

Gibroth,

Couldn’t a good trip occur when one does not realize one has lost control; it’s obliviousness? During a bad trip, one realizes one has lost control and unsuccessfully struggles to regain it? This struggle trips the fear switch. It’s an alarm, definitely.

Yes, that’s exactly it. If I OD on some drug and I get that “oh shit” kind of feeling, I’ve learned to remind myself that this is going to be a trip no different than any other, it’s just going to be really, really intense. And usually that does the trick. I end up just coasting through the trip… and indeed the joy lies in losing control.

Of course, I’ve also learned that it’s always a matter of threshold–even if I’ve habituated myself to the bad trips, there’s always going to be a level of intensity that I can’t take… I could tell you stories.

Stories!!

What do you want to know?

I’ll tell you four stories, four bad trips I remember having:

1) On AM-2201: I just smoked up and could feel the high coming on really strong. I had an “oh shit” moment, but then just told myself to relax, get a drink of water, and go lay on the bed. So I did that, hands shaking while I filled the glass. I laid on the bed. I heard the rain outside. I focused on the rain. It started to transform. It start to sound like static, like electric sparks, and it sort of “migrated” along the wall to the middle of the room. I transformed a bit more, started to sound like language, like something was speaking to me. It became like multiple voices sharing the same sound. Then I could make out what they were saying: they were telling me that they could transform matter and experience, that they could make my world whatever they wanted, that there were no rules, that any minute they wanted they could flip my entire world up-side-down. When they sensed that felt threatened by this, they tried to reassure me that they were only trying to teach me a new technology. I didn’t know whether to trust them or not. I was terrified. I felt like something was immanent, some unfathomable transformation of my reality was about to happen. Then for some reason I recognized a gap between the raw auditory sounds themselves and the meanings of the words–I all of a sudden recognized no meaning in the sounds and all the meaning in my thoughts. Then I thought: THIS IS JUST A DELUSION!!! ← And I snapped myself out of it.

Later that night I had a very intense experience of my ex making a very strong psychic connection with my mind. She entered into my mind, becoming one with me essentially, and forcing me to experience all the pain I put her through. The guilt was unbearable. ← But that too I eventually came to recognize as delusional.

2) On AM-2201: I was in Regina, visiting my mother in the hospital. I decided not to get a hotel and rather slept in my Durrango in a deserted parking lot. I smoked up. The trip became so intense, I starting thinking I wasn’t in my Durrango, but some kind of military vehicle, and I was actually in the middle of a war. I imagined that I only conjured up the idea in my mind that I was in Regina, and all this time my life was a series of fabricated memories that I invented for myself because my fragile mind couldn’t handle the reality of being in the military and at war. And just now I was snapping out of it. I was suddenly flooded with a sense of terror, a sense that death was immanent, that all those bombs and gun fire outside spelled my impending doom.

Later in that same trip I had this really weird experience where I was just hunched over in the fetal position, looking at some kind of shining light on the floor, and listening to myself breathe. I was breathing really slowly, and I could feel my heart beating. It was pounding at something like 1 beat every 10 seconds. ← That’s slow. It was a real contrast with the 2 beats a minute from a little earlier. And I remembered watching one of those late night shows (I think Conan) on which he had a Buddhist guest, someone who could slow his heart to about 1 beat per 10 minutes, and he would use the pulse coursing through his veins to drive a tiny chisel or hammer into a mold or some clay, essentially creating a tiny sculpture. It was just a very surreal state of mind to be in. Just staring at that light on the floor.

3) On pot: I had this really horrific vision about the core of the universe being sheer, utter pain and suffering, and that in the afterlife we were all going to become one with it. This vision included a depiction of the evolution of life being a kind of “escape” process for God to temporarily get away from himself, putting tiny pieces of himself into little organism so as to temporarily experience individuation from the rest of himself. It’s sort of the idea I was trying to get at here. ← That too I snapped out of and returned to thinking of the experience of existence (i.e. being God) as simply a great unknown.

4) On pot: I thought there were little invisible “gremlin”-like demon surrounding me. I had this imagine of them latching onto my head drilling into my skull with jack hammers, trying to get into my brain. I felt like they were trying to jump into my brain to take control of my body.

^ That’s all I can think of for now. They sound really silly writing them out in this thread, but at the time they were deadly real, and I was terrified.

Not knowingly… why do you ask?

R you sure its delusion? I believe in telepathy. I mean the last bit could be partly real? Maybe drugs like they unfilter, they both allow for delusions and super-truths, and supertruth and delusion mix, and they become a trip which is a bad trip often.
But telepathic fears seem really common. Maybe it is all delusional. I cant tell for sure. Who can?
I definitely believe in telepathy though. I dont think our thoughts are exactly leadlined.
Now elon musk is developing telepathic machines and apps, which work telepathically on the brain, so… the brain is telepathic, potentially. Otherwise Elon Musk couldnt make money off it.

But this sounds like a very cozy trip. In the car, was it raining? I hope so that would be nice.
Yes we can slow down the heartbeat by breathing very slow. I can do kung fu quite well and we need to slow the heart in combat.
When I was in the deepest training I smoked a joint once with a dude and he said later that night that he hadn’t seen me breathe once.
it was because I was using taostic breath, like one breath a minute.

Unfortunately that seems pretty real to me possibly, like The Real, from Lacan.
And also Schelling says this about primordial chaos of drives which ends its pain by becoming the universe.

Thanks gib. These were great stories.

For me, there is no difference between truth and delusion, only permanent truth and temporary truth.

You mean like a device you strap on your head to receive a remote signal?

Geez, I can’t hold my breath for more than 30 seconds.

Yeah, I don’t know what to think of it. I guess we must go through life never really knowing the answers to these things. We find out when we die.

Glad you liked them.

Just seems like most people think there’s more to it than there is.

Care to elaborate on what that may be?

Nah.

We appear to have perceptions and creations, that is all. Perceptions: senses - sight, sound etc. Creations: ideas, mental visualisations, interpretations. What else? What ‘truth’ do we have? How does one know oneself to be delusional? ‘knowledge’ seems to be delusion to me. My perceptions do not strike me as accurate messengers of reality, more diagramatic representations of reality (like an elaborate form of the little bleepy LED screen in the submarine that shows the missile approaching) designed by evolutionary forces to manipulate my mind to serve the survival of the ever more sophisticated machine-like DNA. Spirit serving seemingly non-conscious matter, in essence an unthinkably elaborate rock that engineers reward and suffering to achieve it’s ever increasing sophistication and power to do more of the same … :open_mouth: Hello, beastie. Cows like eating grass, hawks like eating meat but not grass - it’s not that grass tastes bad and cows are just stupid to eat it, it’s that the senses portray life to the mind as is most befitting the survival interests of the DNA - in reality I doubt grass is either tasty or not. In fact I think the taste exists only in the mind… what is the sound of a tree falling in the rainforest with no-one to hear it? Perhaps the experience itself is a truth if not one revealing of any truth other than itself, but even that is supposition and therefore less than certain. Beyond the contorted mirror of reality that is your senses are your creations, which seem to be error prone. Perhaps the most common mistake of youth is to suppose knowledge or trust value judgements with naive assurance and meet with suffering if not tragedy as a consequence. I did, most I know did. Open your eyes, gamble wisely, forsake your knowledge. Maybe you should listen more? Something worth hearing might be being spoken

…Glad you know your stuff. In this case seemingly that ‘it’s a small affair’. I could challenge the assertion, but underestimation, lack of accurate impressions and the such appear to result in suffering, which makes a more compelling point than little I ever could. Let’s hope you’re right… If not I guess it’ll turn you around or obliterate you for your refusal. If it’s broke fix it, if you can’t fix it, chuck it. OK. ‘be-cause’. ‘dis-ease’. It’s so funny the way we speak without seeming to realise what we are saying, or even that we are saying it. Planet earth. ‘Earth’. Billions of years of Dead things. Dance on a grave? All the dancing we do is on graves. The winners write the rule books, the ground was once a trillion trillion trillion stories, but those appear to have been swallowed by the sands of time… Consumption is the transformation of other’s order into yours via the destruction of theirs. Order feeds on chaos.

I think delusion is indeed a temporary form of truth - it appears to be self-extinguishing (shudder…). Yet ‘delusion’ refers to inaccurate reflections or misleading ‘sign-posting’, doesn’t it? The un-truth is real, but it’s claim is false. An accurate mirror is not what it reflects, but it may still give a truthful impression. I think we ought to distinguish between truth and delusion rather than confuse the matter…

Let’s accept an argument, for the sake of discussion: Some mind-altering molecules can induce a valuable experience (perhaps recreational, perhaps self-transformational, like healing or personal growth and development) without ill effect providing appropriate and mature handling. How would we go about transforming a hysterical and oppositional society into one that was basically less mentally ill, and instead prepared to respect such a technology and honour it’s demand for maturity and best-practice?

Are you suggesting I don’t be afraid of the voices? Try going through it yourself and then tell me to listen.

I choose my delusions wisely–as wisely as I can–not every one that invades my mind is healthy.

I think we ought to recognize which truths we have to live with and which can be entertained for only a few hours.