2 months--no drugs or alcohol

[Fixed Cross]

Drugs forcibly alter the psyche.

What a recovering addict must ask is, what if you don't alter it?

This can mean too many things, please rephrase...
I assume don't mean if you don't use drugs.

[Fixed Cross]

If you do not alter the psyche while on drugs, you are either well 'ard beyond Yobs Mailbag or a mere surface.

[Fixed Cross]

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.

[Fixed Cross]

For what happens if you never use drugs, I think you're lucky if you don't become a retard.

[Fixed Cross]

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.

[Fixed Cross]

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.

[Pedro I Rengel]

The question is clear for a recovering addict. What if you don't alter it?

[gib]

Well good luck with that. But I assure you, drugs do it better. On what basis do you assure me? 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.

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.

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?

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.

And the light buzz does the alteration we all truly seek: an emotional one.

That's actually wrong. Most do seek the buzz, but not all. Also, I don't consider a buzz to be an altered state of consciousness any more than being jacked on caffeine.

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.

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.

Btw all addicts are snobs who look down on addicts with different drugs of choice. To the man.

Amen. We're a society of caffeine addicts and booz drinkers who look down on marijuana users as "druggies".

The addiction is to the altered state of consciousness, and even more honestly to the emotional alteration they produce.

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.

Only a hard look at your life and the consequences of your behavior will ultimately convince you.

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?

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!

Thank you!

Drygs remedy a pain that would drive a non addict insane.

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.

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.

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!

[Fixed Cross]

The question is clear for a recovering addict. What if you don't alter it?

But I am not a recovering addict.

[Pedro I Rengel]

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

[Fixed Cross]

So Ill answer: play Mega Man.

[Pedro I Rengel]

I play life

[Fixed Cross]

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.

[Pedro I Rengel]

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.

[Pedro I Rengel]

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.

[Pedro I Rengel]

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.

[Pedro I Rengel]

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.

[Fixed Cross]

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.

Thats some really good news - and also corresponds to my statement that, with some exceptions, it appears that one must have tested ones chemical integrity to be an all round stable psyche.

[Fixed Cross]

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.

Im lucky I never could smoke more than one without getting nauseous. I tried to get addicted when I was 18. Always found the first cigarette very pleasant. But to me a drug harder than most. It goes to the head so directly and violently, I think I would get migraines if I smoked half a pack.

[MagsJ]

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.

Hats off to you for ^this^ sir, for this ingenious piece of thinking.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Took a lot of hard work and pain.

But then, compared to the prospect of what my life would have been without treatment, it was a breeze.

That's why we always take a minute of silence at the beginning of AA meetings. To contemplate our luck and spare a thought for those of us still in the struggle or who just didn't make it. It is as much in their honor as for our health that we do it.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Im lucky I never could smoke more than one without getting nauseous. I tried to get addicted when I was 18. Always found the first cigarette very pleasant. But to me a drug harder than most. It goes to the head so directly and violently, I think I would get migraines if I smoked half a pack.

Lol I actually don't think you're an addict. But just in case, your friend Pezer is always there if you need help.

[barbarianhorde]

Took a lot of hard work and pain.

But then, compared to the prospect of what my life would have been without treatment, it was a breeze.

That's why we always take a minute of silence at the beginning of AA meetings. To contemplate our luck and spare a thought for those of us still in the struggle or who just didn't make it. It is as much in their honor as for our health that we do it.

Somehow I feel it could help also to read the Aeneid. It has something of Dantes crossing the inferno, you can already see how Rome had turned Greece dark -the Aeneid as an ode to Homer is botched, but as a portrait of a powerful soul with a great shadowy burden who does what has to do, and leave what he has to leave, it offers a large, wel built space between great arches on pillars- maybe the soul of Mithras.

Mithras a god whose initiation involved such things as pulling out all pubic hairs one by one, a kind of proto-Christianity for strange elites, many soldiers were getting initiated as well as that short lived emperor Julian who brought back for a short period the sacrifices to the old Gods.

Romans knew hard work and pain like no other people probably ever will. They hammered the world out of the ground.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Not my kind of sanctity. But I know what you mean, with the halos and stuff.

Testing one's own pain. My father used to belong to a decidedly mithraic sect of the Catholic Church, the Opus Dei, whose adepts are encouraged to mortify the flesh and wear special dentured belts that make you uncomfortable all day or even make you bleed or itchy clothing and such things. Not as penance but, well you get it.

I did have some proclivity for it as a child, or no, rather admiration. A certain conquering Russian emperor had such proclivites.

Me? I have learned to have more respect for those who reap pain from the world than those who studiously inflict it themselves. The halo doesn't impress me, and it really is just the idea of sanctity. The reality is that that Russian emperor was a maniach, the paintings of halos never actually pointed to anything other than the paintings of halos. S'why you need the mortification, to give it some realness, meanwhile it ends up that the mortification was the only real and the rest mania. Like a fever.

I started reading the Aenid once. I simply couldn't deal with the dripping cornyness, so I stopped. Also don't like Dante.

Romans knew all sorts of things. Aaaaall sorts of things.

[Fixed Cross]

Yes it corny. I read it with Latin, my teacher was trying to make it seem romantic but she needed a lot of mockery for that.
I didn't know about the halos, but it makes sense from what Ive read about Julian.

He thought it was because it was righteous that Zeus should be revered.