Also I try to help addicts that ask for help not because of some moral conviction, but as a celebration of my own sobriety, an act of gratitude. And seeing an addict struggling to find a way reminds me also of my own disease, and helping him or her is akin to helping myself.
I remember the second night I smoked weed in the place, when my guilt complex kicked in, and I just said fuck it and laid down on the floor and started uttering the puny-making regrets and fears as you were at the window smoking as always, I knew then that was the moment I was finding health, admitting to the utter puny-makingness of the guilt complexes that go with weed. Your knowledge of the drug allowed me to just lie down on the bottom of the abyss. That was it, freedom. Thank you for that.
I now think many drug users who hurt their loved one aren’t wrong about what they try, but neither they nor their loved ones have the philosophy to make it understood. People do use drugs for good reasons, namely because they add to the world. And by adding to the world they say that the world needed adding to, that it was lacking. This is the pitfall, the bleak day after, the statement that was implied by the high.
Therefore it speaks to reason that the only way to resolve drugs is to make them add to the world of sober people. This is like navigating a thread into the eye of a needle - not by any means impossible, but it needs steadier hands, by which I mean steadier will, than what is afforded usually by drugs.
“Green is the color of anger” - like it was yesterday I remember wondering what this strange prophecy we made would come to mean in my life. What an incredible three years this has been.
Lesson: the best way to use drugs is with a sober person who has experience with them, can’t be phased. It will tell you what you are on that drug. I saw that what I was wasn’t half bad, just loaded with guilt that wasn’t actually mine. Just, for a while there, guilt is easier to carry than wrath. But gween is da color of anga.
That may be true, but there’s a difference between seeking altered states of consciousness and seeking fun. I don’t consider a pleasant buzz to be an altered state of consciousness. And I don’t consider all altered states of consciousness to be fun. I’ve always thought of salvia divinorum to be the litmus test for this. It’s an incredibly potent drug and the experience is jarring to say the least–an altered state if there ever was one–yet to say it’s unpleasant is an understatement. He who goes after a drug like salvia is in a whole other class of drug user than he who goes after something like coke or heroin.
I’d like to be a psychonaught. I think the exploration of altered states of consciousness is not only fascinating but a great learning experience. Yet I want to live a healthy life. What I’m trying to do is get everything I got from the drugs without the drugs–that is, in healthy ways. The drugs take a toll on not only my physical and mental healthy, but my spiritual health as well, and do damage to everything around me–my job, my finances, my family, and my soul. If I could have more control over my mind–the states it goes in and out of–without the unwanted side effects–I’d considered that a great achievement.
Well good luck with that. But I assure you, drugs do it better. I’m just telling you so that when that truth inevitably hits you, you have the option of seeking help instead of jumping onto an even worse downward spiral. Alcohol kills people.
The explanation is simple. Whatever meditative techniques allow a master to alter consciousness, drugs highjack the same areas of the brain faster and more potently.
Cause they be chemicals see?
And the light buzz does the alteration we all truly seek: an emotional one.
Coffee, which you also quit, and cigarettes, don’t do this. Their effects don’t actually alter your consciousness, so AA and rehabs alow them.
Btw all addicts are snobs who look down on addicts with different drugs of choice. To the man.
Until you leave a straight alcoholic stranded in an island with only weed or, yes, even a “psychonaut” with only coke or heroin. It doesn’t fail. The addiction is to the altered state of consciousness, and even more honestly to the emotional alteration they produce.
This is science. But if that ever convinced a jun-sorry-addict, we would all just watch the Discovery Channel.
Only a hard look at your life and the consequences of your behavior will ultimately convince you.
That’s the second step. The first step, admitting that your life has spiraled out of control and you need help, you already took. Congratulations!
*Alcohol kills people if they are lucky. More often it strips you of your dignity and your honor. More importantly your dignity.
You are a surviver. I know because that’s what an addict is. Drygs remedy a pain that would drive a non addict insane. Literaly, coocoo. But now the remedy has become the problem, and whatever caused the pain is long gone, and surviving now means quitting the remedy.
I worry that this is too technical. But it will help you some day. To have been told the truth and informed that there is help. And it works not to get you off the drugs, but to actually feel good about life and yourself. Just you need to quit drugs first. So now you know. I’m here whenever you need me. And there is an AA anywhere in the wzzorld.
When I had done 6 months of days filled with yoga and meditation, involving the astral ream as the mere first circle of depths (in the middl is the silver star, where some more serious fun starts) and then smoked a joint, that point was made to me. It was only then that I saw what I had opened myself up to.
Drugs forcibly alter the psyche.
What a recovering addict must ask is, what if you don’t alter it?
The psyche is forcibly altered by drugs. This has a direct almost Newtonean effect on related psyches.
So in order to justify it all, you have to actually go through with the chance as if it is a plan with moral foundations.
This is what I understand as morality; a psychologically effective prerogative. A means for the will to assert itself in ways that are not directly common sense or of direct evident use value, so a for it to bring about changes in the ways people behave.
Looking very angrily at specific gestures of a loved one will cause some form of moral awareness in that person. Completely useless and pointless, but still experienced as an objective law that frowns down from above. This force that I call morality - which is perfectly immoral in terms of the most popular particular moralities - is the strongest weapon man has at his disposal.
But a weapon is nothing without a strategy.
This can mean too many things, please rephrase…
I assume don’t mean if you don’t use drugs.
If you do not alter the psyche while on drugs, you are either well 'ard beyond Yobs Mailbag or a mere surface.
If you do not alter it after having been altered, it all depends to what point you came with the altering before you put down the hammer.
For what happens if you never use drugs, I think you’re lucky if you don’t become a retard.
All in all the answer that I can most honestly give to what I think you ask is, youve used enough kinds of drugs, seen enough depth, hit enough walls, burned up enough phoenixes to heed your own word about fate - to know that it matters whether fate or the other thing. And that is ultimately why we use drugs, to throw a wrench in the wheels of the blind and brutal malice given by the triviality of collective psychological security. I.e.; to enable happiness, first by discovering the pervasiveness of unhappiness.
/// —Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day, but yet am I no God, no God’s- hell: DEEP IS ITS WOE.
God’s woe is deeper, thou strange world! Grasp at God’s woe, not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre,—
—A midnight-lyre, a bell-frog, which no one understandeth, but which MUST speak before deaf ones, ye higher men! For ye do not understand me!
Gone! Gone! O youth! O noontide! O afternoon! Now have come evening and night and midnight,—the dog howleth, the wind:
—Is the wind not a dog? It whineth, it barketh, it howleth. Ah! Ah! how she sigheth! how she laugheth, how she wheezeth and panteth, the midnight!
How she just now speaketh soberly, this drunken poetess! hath she perhaps overdrunk her drunkenness? hath she become overawake? doth she ruminate?
—Her woe doth she ruminate over, in a dream, the old, deep midnight—and still more her joy. For joy, although woe be deep, JOY IS DEEPER STILL THAN GRIEF CAN BE. /// - Zarathustra, The Drunken Song.
No person who has not tested his chemical integrity can feel truly secure. All know the abyss. Few dare to know themselves knowing it. Not just out of cowardice - there can be courage in such ignorance - or at least a virtuous stubbornness that serves life. Life doesn’t require its individual specimens to feel stable. It is not given or required by life that we feel in touch with anything.
The question is clear for a recovering addict. What if you don’t alter it?
Relax. I’m not putting all my eggs into that basket. If I don’t get to have an AP experience, or if it turns out to be anticlimactic… oh well… life goes on.
I know where to place my priorities: self-confidence, social skills, self-acceptance, and most of all, family.
No kidding. The question that comes foremost to mind is: is AP nothing more than a chemically based altered state of consciousness? If it’s your soul literally leaving your body (as opposed to a hallucination), I don’t know how that counts as a chemically induced altered state of consciousness. Is your consciousness altered during your flight through the cosmos? Maybe in some way. But I can imagine the same flight being experienced from a completely sober point of view.
The point is: can drugs induce the experience of AP (or OBEs) even if only as a hallucination?
And if the answer turns out to be yes, is there anything of worth in striving for the real thing (assuming your soul really does leave your body)? Most would say yes. The argument would be the same as always. You may feel awesome on the drugs, but it isn’t real. It’s a false feeling of awesomeness.
And if a “real” feeling of awesomeness is just feeling awesome in the natural way (i.e. without leaning on drugs as a crux), isn’t that just as much in the head as the drugs? What if this is true of AP? What if even “real” experiences of AP/OBE are “just in the head”? Are they not worth striving for just because you can do it quicker, easier, and much harder by a chemical injection? What about feeling better about yourself?
I never once, on this journey, expected that if I were so lucky as to find substitutes to the drugs that they would surpass or match the potency of the drugs. I told my therapist, “I’d like to feel like I’m on one cup of coffee and maybe two shots of tequila. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” ← That would pale in comparison to my regular caffeine days of 3 to 4 cups of coffee and then getting totally hammered that night at a strip club. But I want that more than the latter, and if I could get that without the drugs, nothing could turn me back.
What’s with this demonizing of altered states of consciousness? You can be steadfast against them if you wish, but it’s the self-destructive effects of the drugs which I’m against. I don’t see what’s so evil about altered states of consciousness in themselves.
You’ve also pointed out another reason my goals are incompatible with AA. If AA meetings allow caffeine and nicotine, then I should stay clear of them for the same reason Arc thinks I should stay clear of bars.
Amen. We’re a society of caffeine addicts and booz drinkers who look down on marijuana users as “druggies”.
You are, once again, confusing pleasure with ASCs. What about salvia? What about bad trips? There’s nothing in an ASC in itself that is addictive. Pleasure, happiness, is addictive.
Convince me of what? That I need to live a sedentary life of self-deprivation and asceticism? That I need to wallow in the misery of having no control over myself? That self-improvement, and persuing life building goals and healthy substitutes to drugs is a terrible thing?
Thank you! 
I’m not entirely convinced that’s true either. I know in my case, I started using drugs out of curiousity and a rebellious attitude towards social norms. I knew nothing of the potential of drugs to numb pain–I just wanted to know what it was like–and I certainly didn’t go into it with the desperate cry, “Oh God! Please give me something to kill the pain!” HOWEVER, it did eventually fill a hole in my life which it created ← and that’s the emphasis… it created it… and then, without the drugs, the emptiness of the hole would be unbarable. So whereas I don’t think all drug users begin by trying to find a remedy to their pain, I do think the drugs eventually make it painful to quit.
Pedro, I sincerely thank you for your offer of help, but you’ll have to tolerate me if you wish to help me. I’m not always a pleasant person, and I will bite you if I feel like it… shamelessly. I’ll bet you’ve gathered that already. ← But it’s all fun and games as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been around ILP far too long. HA! HA! 
But I am not a recovering addict.
I guess it’s like level 2 shit after initiation.