2 months--no drugs or alcohol

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! :smiley:

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! :evilfun:

But I am not a recovering addict.

I guess it’s like level 2 shit after initiation.

So Ill answer: play Mega Man.

I play life

I guess thats the answer to your question then.

If you don’t alter it, you play life.

Seriously though I tried to answer your question but remember its only weed that has a grip on me, no other drugs ever interested me enough. So I just may not know what the fuck you’re up against.

In my opinion weed is bad enough for an addict that suffers from the disease.

Because it is not so much the specific chemical as what you use the fact of consciousness altering for.

So in my rehab they would say: quitting drugs is easy, you already did it.

Another thing they would often say was a promise that eventually hit home for me: we don’t quit drugs to live an ok life. We quit drugs to live an extremely good life.

My own life is better now than it has ever been. Drugs are not some shadow that hangs over me. They are something I am grateful for for having made me and I stay the fuck away from to protect this glorious shit I now have.

They even promised that my life would be better than even supposed normal people, which I thought was a scam so obvious it was dishonorable.

And lo and behold, my life is better than non recovering addicts by some distance.

The only thing that would make my life better, and every recovering addict who has done it confirms that it is harder than quitting heroin, is quitting cigarettes.