/u/craftmacaro posts an incredible insight into the necessary perception shift regarding hallucinogenic drugs.
reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/qkeyvm/...Posted Nov 2, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC
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I don't know much about the subject, but that is certainly an interesting take on it.
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Ok, so you have that feeling. You grew up in a drug phobic society. Many people have the feeling that premarital sex is of the devil because of the nonsense they grew up around. It's ok to have the feeling, but be willing to challenge it.
I for one had my life massively changed through a powerful medicine that our government calls a drug. In a few nights of working with it, it turned my good.life into a great life.
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Cool.
What’s the most pain you’ve ever been in?
What if one day you woke up and half your body no longer worked?
Just stop being able to walk.
Your taste buds change overnight, rejecting all the foods you used to eat, like yesterday you used to eat? No more dairy, meat (at all), zero tolerance for sugar (again, like none).
Lumber punctures, bi annual Ocrevus infusions, so many blood draws you’d cry.
I’m a 36, ‘retired’ aerospace engineer.
I have RRMS, Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t do anything to get it, it just happens.
Overnight I lost everything and I need cannabis for my pain. I absolutely didn’t use to. I won’t take pain pills.
I think your perspective is pretty messed up when you allow yourself to judge other peoples pain. Just because you don’t see it m, doesn’t mean a thing.
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Why would someone need to justify a “CBD habit”, in your opinion?
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You should learn more about the compounds in “weed” and find new social circles if you’re being pressured to do drugs regularly.
You’re thinking of THC, CBD is not psychoactive.
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Weed isn't special.
People like to get altered and rarely are interested in the actual downsides of it.
Alcohol is fine, but not if you over do it. Same for weed.
The trick is that some substances have possible real world benefits other than getting fucking wasted.
Unfortunately we need to be able to do the research to support that. The perception that drugs are bad in all cases gets in the way of that.
We are seeing some benefits now of THC or CBD use. However, they certainly are not the cure-all many wish them to be. Its just another fad being capitalized on.
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As someone who has sampled almost every drug class in existence and not had to go through rehab/developed a substance addiction; CBD and psychedelics(hallucinogens) are the least of societies problems. CBD in my mind is on the same level as caffeine. LSD, Psilocybin, DMT and Mescaline do require education before use. Also, psychedelics have little to no addictive potential (since you can’t redose compulsively like cocaine or heroin).
You might be thinking, your a closet addict in denial. My drug experimentation has fallen significantly since I’ve run out of drug classes to try. Over the period of 4 years I experimented with various doses of dozens of drugs. Mostly out of curiosity and to catalog their effects on the body. During this period I worked in healthcare, worked 40 hours per week, less than 4 call outs per year and my yearly evaluation with my job was always above meeting expectations. I understand there are individuals that are not capable of self control and end up going on drug binges. My opinion on this is that there are underlying mental health issues that contribute to peoples drug addictions. People can use drugs responsibly without getting addicted.
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And that opinion is based on how much research into pharmacology or entheogenic botany?
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Idk I couldn't read it, it was just word salad.
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Tl;dr - Hallucinogens don’t make you see ghosts, unicorns, dragons, etc. They don’t make you “see” things that you could interpret as real even though they’re not. We need to stop the stigma that they do
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You can literally see kaleidoscopic patterns and changed colours though - which sort of counters u/craftmacaro’s point, and kind of supports it, because what is revealed by that experience is that all visual input is so able to be heavily controlled by the medium of brain the light goes through to arrive at being visual information, and what we normally see when not on LSD is not necessarily what is actually there.
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Tuesday, but there’s a huge difference between seeing pretty colors and seeing a freaking ghost
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Your reading comprehension level is very limited if that constituted "word salad." Seriously, start reading some books again, because you're doing yourself an incredible disservice.
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It’s missing some punctuation marks for sure, which makes it a harder read…
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Psychedelics are really best thought of as an aid for metacognition.
Go through your day as normal, and all manner of automatic processes take hold without you even realizing it. You step outside and its colder than you expected, so without thinking you pick up the pace to your car. An indistinct brown truck drives by, but your brain quickly decides it is insignificant to whatever your purpose is at the moment and so it is ignored — not by choice, but by habit. You sit down in some posture that's become hard-wired over the years. You look at some person crossing the street and a kaleidoscope of different associations click into place quickly putting together a loose approximation of that person based on their clothes, age, gender, and a thousand other characteristics that would probably be difficult even to name. "Oh that's a businessman, and that person over there is probably a mom, and that kid looks like she's playing hookey, and that guy looks like a nice old man." An idea drifts into mind, "What a lovely tree. I wonder what the light looks like standing underneath it," and is quickly ridded because it lacks utility.
All these thoughts and behaviors happen not at your bidding, but because we simply need shortcuts and heuristics throughout life to get things done. There simply isn't enough time to pay mind to everyone and everything that goes by and so over the years, we learn to be parsimonious with our attention. We go from babies that are either fascinated or terrified by everything that passes in front of us, to adults who parcel-out interest only to but a few narrow subjects. We settle into small tribes of friends and family, read books and articles about certain subjects, listen to certain kinds of music, eat certain foods, care about certain kinds of people... and anything beyond this is either crudely processed or discarded without even the faintest consideration.
Psychedelics have the effect of taking-away whatever filter it is that makes these things largely automatic and invisible to us. That truck isn't simply written-out of the scene by some subliminal process, nor the cold air. Those people aren't simply assessed then forgotten. Even your breathing suddenly becomes a thing of which you are acutely aware. Everything — everything — is strange and wondrous and beautiful anew not because you are seeing things that aren't there, but because you are no longer ignoring a billion things that are.
Thing is, what eventually becomes most interesting is that awareness itself. As your mind turns inward, you start considering all those heuristics and all those shortcuts and begin wondering about their worth. If you are lucky, you find some that have perhaps been leading you astray, and you sit with them and consider perhaps trying to revise those things. You realize that you have been behaving in some selfish way without even really being aware of it, or that you have been beating yourself up over something silly or that you have some bad habit you would like to break or any number of other things. Things may get overwhelming here and spiral into a scary and confusing place, but usually not. One way or another you come out the other side.
The trip fades away. The veils raise back up and you come back down into your normal, filtered state of mind. But that introspection remains. Days or weeks or months later you find yourself doing whatever behavior it was that triggered it, but this time you remember. You think to yourself for the first time in a long, long while, "Is this how I want to choose to approach this?" That's when the growth happens.
This post is better than the parent post. This is exactly what it is like and exactly the appeal of hallucinogens. Not seeing wicked creatures and fantastical effects. This.
The term "psychedelic" was originally intended to point here as well. The roots are "psyche," as in "psychology" from the Greek for something like "mind" or "spirit" and "dēloun," meaning "reveal" or "make visible" or — more literally — "cast light upon."
Mindfulness. Well put. Never hear people in trees put it this way.
You are now breathing manually.
Amazingly well said, I'm saving this share with people
Incredible description, couldn't put it into words any better than you have here. I've been sober from psychedelics for almost a year now but miss the experience for the exact reasons you've stated. The only thing that's come close as far as introspection goes has been meditation, but it doesn't even compare. Just having a moment to BE part of the environment and notice everything going on around you in ways you normally don't, while also being with yourself in a way that would benefit most people, is in itself indescribable. Its an experience.
This should have been best of
This is similar to the benefits meditation brings me.