Starting to feel like there's something more to psychedelics

Thanks for this quote.

I think "ignorance is bliss" applies here and there is nobody tending the end of the tunnel. In fact there's nothing valuable, just the realization that statistical facts of life make utopia impossible. The lowest common denominator will always bring us down, and there will always be one unless we become as inhumane as those we oppose.

It's like if there was the cure to cancer, all diseases, everything bad. A substance which would grant us eternal happiness. But it exists only on some far away planet for which individuals would have to completely abandon the Earth, our actual reality, to find.

During the travel you'd have to devote many generations to it to find it. And once you get there, what if it's no good? What if they get there, and eternal happiness on some foreign planet is actually horrible because it's foreign to human nature? It's not even nice? Too late for them, they can't go back. Ignorance is bliss, should've stayed on Earth.

We are meat bags. We are rats. Maybe there is something more, maybe there is something spiritually higher, but I think humans are fundamentally incompatible with it. A rat who temporarily enters a human mind and gains the knowledge that he is a rat, still has to return back. And this knowledge does the rat no good. Ignorance is bliss, too late, he wishes that all he knew was still rat consciousness.

It's like studying the human brain, psychology, neurochemistry, and physical determinism in general to determine whether free will exists

What is the end goal here?

"It exists" -> Yay that's what we've been assuming forever

"It doesn't exist" -> Human society, at least the portions of it that understand the gravity of this discovery, literally falls apart unless this secret is hidden

So why search? WHO CARES. I DON'T WANT TO KNOW. I'm scared for the discovery that free will doesn't exist to be made, at least now my pre-determined mental states involve me denying determinism and affirming free will which results in my being happier. I don't want to make the relaization

Ignorance is bliss.

Yes, the 60's movement was a terrible failure with longstanding repercussions. The core problem was they couldn't accept what humans really were, and thought they could change and shift into something else. Unfortunately you can't.

It's kind of interesting. This theme has popped up throughout history. The latest iteration is "mind uploading" and the proliferation of cyberpunk and genetic engineering stuff. Redefinition of the human species.

Anyone interested in this should watch "Texhnolyze".

>Anyone interested in this should watch "Texhnolyze".
Well, I guess not necessarily. I liked it, and it readily came to mind. Along with Serial Experiments Lain.

>proliferation of cyberpunk and genetic engineering stuff. Redefinition of the human species

I first took acid a few weeks before my 16th birthday. I know it changed me immensely but I was so young that it's just part of who I am. Most of what your feeling will go away in a few weeks/months. It's pretty common. The philosopher Joe Rogan has had similar thoughts where he said "reality felt slippery and unreal". You may want to look into his work.

Why do no one's psychedelic / hallucinogen experiences sound novel to me? It decodes to things that are fairly standard.

Just don't get it.

As much as i love Rogan as an entertainer and an interviewer, he is really uneducated in many of the things he talks about. I would definitely not trust his word on more than an interesting opinion from a laymen.

Check out erwoid.org

They have hundreds of written experience from people on drugs, psychedelics included, and link many many resources on the topic.

I completely understand what you're saying

One question does matter though: Have you tried any decent doses of psychedelics?

Yeah he's a but unscientific and buys into a lot of hypothetical nonsense especially on his DMT talks. He takes hypotheses like "DMT is released upon death" as absolute fact

He's a cool guy and he's more open minded than Joe McBobbington off the street, but at the end of the day he's still a bit, not quite up there. It's a bit weird when he's brought up with actual scientists on the matter or giants like TMK/Leary/Huxley

Continuing on my OP

Overall LSD feels unsatisfying to me. Like it has given me far more questions than answers

On the comedown I always think, "Damn if only I had taken an extra half a tab, then I would have had time to peek around that corner at the startling revelation that was coming my way"

The reality is that you will continue to find as many corners as you want. I think LSD definitely fucks with the "reward upon making discoveries" part of the brain. It's a rabbit hole

No worries op I feel ya. My advice is to not go around asking others who haven't had psychedelics about psychedelic experiences. Last year I took 7.5 grams of shrooms at a party. I remember everything I saw during my trip and all the ideas I had the the coming month after it. Pretty life changing imho, feels almost like too much at first. Visions of the future and society. Whenever I tried to explain my trip to people that asked about it they wrote me off as a hippie. Just tell them they should try it as it's too difficult to picture. That trip and those visions got me reading into astronomy and very excited for the future. Really high don't know if this made sense

Oh and with all that said OP what you experienced sounds very normal to most psychedelic experiences. What you do with that is what matters.

This is just for LSD but there are experiences for every drug:

erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD.shtml

Again not reliable resources, there are those on the site too. But i found it interesting to compare my experiences with others.

I haven't done any psychedelics.

In high school I was considering getting some peyote buttons, or some acid, but never got around to it. Now I''m vaguely curious but overall don't really care. There's not much of a spark because none of it sounds particularly novel.

I also have a deeply rooted fear of risk or sharp change as far as the mind goes. I had to work very hard to get things where they are. I've seen hell. So the curiosity is gone for now.

I think because our brains are so similar. The set/setting and memory inputs aren't that substantial if you take a high enough dose. I ate too many shrooms once and had this intense trip where I was the universe being created, over and over in some weird time loop which seemed to never end. It was pretty horrifying. I've spoken about it with lots of people and many others had similar experiences. It's referred to as the birth trip or something similar. Some people interpret it as the big bang, others as reliving their birth.

The first time I took acid I also took way too much and was having full blown alice in wonderland style hallucinations. I rode a snake around my back yard with my friend. "riding the snake" is a popular trip culture thing, sung about by jim morrison. I had no knowledge of this at the time, I was just a young kid.

youtube.com/watch?v=647NxThCfy8

Don't do them

The reason you don't understand why these things feel so amazing to you though is because written descriptions don't do the experience justice

Psychedelics overload your brain with neurotransmitters and neural impulses in places they don't belong, so basically these experiences feel super important. The best word to describe them is just "significant feeling" because that's how they fuck with your brain. They can really fuck you up with this trick, and the "there's more coming around the corner" trick I mentioned earlier

I suggest you legitimately never try any.

The curiosity should stay gone, PLEASE do not try psychedelics. They WILL change you, at the very least temporarily. And you don't want to be changed.

Yes, they are nothing more than delusions, as an example, the closest thing you can have to that experience without drugs are dreams (like DMT for example, which is the same substance in the end).

And I can tell you I worked many math problems in my dreams before, had them solved all in a night's rest, only to wake up and realize the proofs made absolutely no sense and couldn't be salvaged in any shape or form.

LMFAO

I did not expect this to be as accurate as it was. THIS IS IT.

"My essence has no label"

Exactly

I can't tell you how many times I've "reasoned" myself into making these ridiculous conclusions about random unrelated topics

It's all bullshit man, informed by your preconceived notions. Very much like a dream, but you're lucid so it's superimposed on reality.

>I ate too many shrooms once and had this intense trip where I was the universe being created, over and over in some weird time loop which seemed to never end.
I had that exact same thing happen. Fucking shrooms.

>The reason you don't understand why these things feel so amazing to you though is because written descriptions don't do the experience justice
The thing is that it either sounds like things I've already experienced, or intensified versions of the everyday with a bit of a different kind of perceptual highlighting.

>I suggest you legitimately never try any.
>And you don't want to be changed.
It's not so much that I don't want any change, I just don't want to be thrown off balance or left adrift. Most of the change in my life has been rapid, engineered, and arguably artificial. Which is why my own internal change has been fairly choppy. A lot of it was reactionary, I did it to remain functional and to get by. I abandoned that way of doing things and adopted a model of incremental and more fluid change.

The concern is less that I'll experience something I don't want to know (though that is part of it), and more that it'll change subsequent processing such that I'll struggle to contextualize it or use formerly stored data for the same operations. I guess I have a lot of mental overhead, clutter, and I cannot move on or risk distortion until it has been used to create what it was put there for to begin with.

Solid advice

There are lots of issues I've observed in myself

The main issue is that you become more aware of your own mental machinery. Things that you used to not even be aware of because they were mental-muscle-memory, you become aware of them and can never forget what you realized about your own mind, and it will stick with you for life

It can be interesting but it can also hinder you because you're so preoccupied. It's like if you remember "Oh yeah I have an ingrown toenail" all of a sudden when you had somehow forgotten for an extended period of time and you had been more productive back then, now you're focusing on how much it hurts. Kind of, lol

Don't do it it will show you things you don't want to know, that quite frankly are useless to know. Like how weird the format of memories stored in your mind is. It's kind of layered and fractalized. Don't think about it too much.

Damn spot on I notice the same shit
Especially memory and the difference between short term and long term. It's literally like RAM and disk

Dude literally I laid in my bed and OBSERVED my short term memories being moved between short term and longterm. It's like the scales on a fish where each scale reflects a universe of your entire body's qualia when that memory occurred, and the scales and reflected forward and backward into time and they reflect off each other to build your past. Idfk. We have so much more detail in every memory than we remember.

>you become more aware of your own mental machinery
Yes I started to do this as a teenager, and eventually had begun to slip the cover of the black box of the mind, felt around its machinery, and tried to do very low level architectural re-engineering. As you said, a lot of it is clutter that doesn't need to be drawn into the forefront of the mind. I had to unlearn a lot. Spent a lot of time on memory encoding and storage, building of associative links, false memory creation, memory manipulation for the purpose of "removal", deliberately conditioning responses, and trying to create systems that afforded directed rapid state changes. These tools ultimately got in the way, eventually.

So I kind of understand on that level. I have visual snow and had Alice in the Wonderland syndrome frequently as a child. Most of the sensory and perceptual stuff seems relatively similar. Also had a lot of health problems and experienced being crippled in too many ways to recount, mentally and otherwise.

I don't know. I'm feeling tired and I guess I don't really want to talk about it beyond that. Sorry for starting a conversation I didn't plan to follow through with.

My friend and I are both aspiring mystics, both Philosophy doctoral students (he makes the better latte but I make the better frap), and he's done plenty of psychedelics but I have never done them.

He expressed a lot of the same stuff I've read in this thread. It's interesting. He says that no matter how much you do it, even after years and years, the realisation is always "just around the next corner" like someone said above, but it never comes. He knows a lot of burnouts who have been chasing that corner for like 30 years. Some of them are serious philosophers and scientists, too, but they're still burnouts. I met some of them and it's like they're only 10% on this plane of reality because it's just so insignificant compared to what they were chasing last weekend.

He says he mostly regrets them.

>I don't know. I'm feeling tired and I guess I don't really want to talk about it beyond that. Sorry for starting a conversation I didn't plan to follow through with.

Lol dw. I'm going too. What you described seems really cool to me but something that would likely result in being fucked up. It kind of sounds like that retarded "Tulpa" thing people used to post about. I wondered whether it was real and these people were legitimately mentally ill in some weird way so it worked for them, or it was all an elaborate joke.

There's probably a reason Jung was institutionalized many times. Bit of a chicken and the egg situation though.

>It's interesting. He says that no matter how much you do it, even after years and years, the realisation is always "just around the next corner"

Yep. I'm so glad I made this thread. Thanks for telling me other people have this too.

I know I will never do any psychedelics ever again. It's scary to think you can get sucked into something that feels so philosophically significant but in reality it's just your brain being fucked with.

tl;dr

When you get the message, hang up the phone.

>The main issue is that you become more aware of your own mental machinery.
Indeed.
Although this doesn't have to be detrimental. The insights gleaned about your own mental processes can be used to understand others' as well, which can be applied quite profitably. I find that now, with little apparent information to go on I can infer with quite some accuracy other people's mental state and thought pattern and use this to influence our interaction to my benefit. Although it can be a double edged sword, where I find their tendencies to be grating and hard to ignore.

>Mother Teresa and devote my life to helping others
She went to her grave hating the church, they do not help, they build for people only to enslave. Sounds like you had a bad trip or something but that's part of the expansion, facing your deepest fears, the fears of all mankind!

>none of it sounds particularly novel
Wew lad, you really should try it once but be in a sound frame of mind in a good environment, preferably outdoors, nature is best. I personally think they reconnect man with his primal self, give you access to a million years of where we came from to present day. The wheels of life is what I eventually saw after one summer of tripping fairly hard, tolerance builds quickly. LSD has been proven to deprogram cultists and cure even hardcore alcoholics among other things. The shrinks were loving the shit until it was made illegal but those law makers fear change, want to keep the status quo which is why our world is in trouble today.

this, if you get the get the message hang up the phone. not everyone needs to do psychedelics
dont follow leary and mckenna were hypocrites, think for yourself, the menu is not the meal

>It kind of sounds like that retarded "Tulpa" thing people used to post about.
I never tried to make one, but for what it's worth, it's probably possible. In high school I noticed something in my head that I could either send instructions or information to. I used it to hold values during mental calculations, had it sort memories and route or return them in a different state, etc. I'm not sure if this is a real thing I discovered, or if I was partitioning part of myself off and treating it like another entity. It didn't feel like me at the time, but I can no longer find it. Either it was deliberately created, or has been integrated.

About the notion of a tulpa specifically. The last real thing I embarked on had to do with "building wonderland". I would create logic dictating certain sensory distortions, and bridging, and tie it all to a grand switchboard of sorts. This involved augmenting awareness and reasoning as well. It would evolve over time and via information garnered during its use, as an iterative process. For example, if I wanted to see things melting, or treat light as a liquid. Treat color gradients as geometry, etc. View archways as portals and see their internal contents differently. Tap into the base human awareness of depth and relative distance, along with linguistic separation of arbitrary wholes into parts, to create whatever visualization or auditory deal out of that. I didn't just want to know my front yard was composed of trillions of tiny machines, I wanted to see it. Etc. Most of this was designed with utility in mind, some for escapism because my health was falling apart I was in constant pain and I couldn't psychologically handle trying to meaningfully continue. I thought I could create somewhere else, and live that while my body withered away and hopefully killed me.
[...]

And it worked, to a decent degree. But I didn't have fine control of it. For example I would look out into another room and for a moment see it snowing. I became afraid of passing over thresholds because I would become a different person, I was having a lot of difficulty with the notion of identity and self experience. There was no real delineation between my environment and myself. I would also use objects as a proxy to my subconscious workings and have them talk to me in a trance-like state. In my pre-existing state that was already prone to selective self delusion, I lost it. Became very scrambled. I remember having to leave a store because I felt like the floor was just a thin superficial sheet and it would crumble into a grand abyss at any moment, and people's voices were scrambled and seemed to be blurred together and looped on top of itself.

I could have probably created a tulpa though. Not that I'd want one. A lot of what I found was quite beautiful. It's difficult to know I could return if I wanted, even though I know its nature much better now. I just got a small flash of that detached, floaty, hazy "magical" feeling. It's been a while.

Going to so some math on shrooms this weekend. What do I work on, Veeky Forums?

This thread proves psychedelics make you stupid.

/thread