How have your experiences with psychedelics changed you?

I am currently doing qualitative research on the subject of transformative psychedelic experiences. I plan to further this research later in my academic career to advocate the use of psychedelics in a responsible therapeutic manner, for their remarkable potential in healing, catalyzing progress of therapy, and inducing peak experiences. I feel that it would be beneficial for me to collect reports of many experiences had "in the wild," or in a naturalistic, non experimental setting. These abound on the internet, but since the subject matter I am searching for is rather specific, Ive decided to make a new post, perhaps getting responses of specific relevance to what I am studying from intelligent psychedelic explorers.

My aim in this post is to hopefully gain many rich descriptions of various peoples psychedelic experiences (with drugs such as psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT, ayahuasca, etc.), which they feel fall into the category of "mystical" or "transforming."

What I particularly am interested in knowing, beyond the details of the experience, is how it has initiated lasting change in your normal perception of your self, others, your world, and the interrelations of those.

I am proposing that what is transformed is actually the persons own social construction of their reality; their identity, their view of the world, all of the linguistic tricks that have been used to make sense of the world are shaken, critiqued, and reconstructed after the reportedly ineffable experience.

So, anyone had one of those?

Please describe as richly as you can, and focus on how your identity and values were transformed, if they were, and how you perhaps lived differently afterwards, in your own words and terminology.

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

 

i got no idea what sort of info you want
I dont even know what changes can be accounted to purely from certain drug experiences
and if not any drug experience in particular, then just drug use in general
but drug use in general includes a lot more than psychedelics
so who knows

drugs might not have affected me much at all.. maybe it's all just 'growing up'

 

I posted this story on a previous thread
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=328877&f=48

that thread has some good info. Psychedelics are certainly a means of self expansion and need to be researched further.


Did my mind change forever....without a doubt. There was 4 of us and we decided to take an eighth of shrooms each. Our plan was to take them at midnight and watch the sun rise in the morning. My brain was overtaken during those 6 hours and as the Golden sun rose above the dancing purple trees, the tears began to fall. It was if I saw the light of God blanket my body in an unending love of all that is given to us for granted. After, i sat in the lawn chair in my friends backyard, feeling the breeze on my face, I was free. Because of the mushroom trip, I am free of desires, material possessions. I see people without bias, i look at the person rather than the clothes they wear or any other form of putting labels on a human being. The state im in is where money has no value, and I smile everyday knowing that I could live happily ever after knowing these beautiful ideas. The mushrooms were a catalyst to the change that happened to me. The trip will always be one of my most profound memories. Remember that there are more beautiful things in life then paper currency, and we are all brothers and sisters conjoined by the fundamental building block of energy and love.

 

psychedelics gave me a different option on how to bend my outlook on things and give me a different viewpoint on everything.

 

I guess the more significant influences psychedelics have had on me are those relating to God, the self, and the nature of reality.
LSD was initially how you've suggested, my social conditioning was broken down to a pure state of what I thought was being, without attachment and without fully processing the information flow.
Psilocybin however has almost entirely destroyed any sense of identity I had, leaving me now with a very different perspective, in every sense of the word.

As for this speculation, I would say this is how it is received in the beginning, and for the majority of people reporting psychedelic experiences it seems to remain as such, but for me it is only one peice of the puzzle that is consciousness.
What you are getting at with 'the linguistic tricks that have been used to make sense of the world' is in fact one of the most common psychological effects reported, but the way I see it is that this deconstruction of concepts held as real is humanity taking baby steps collectivley into realizing the presice programming from which I believe we are birthed out from.
When one learns how to be aware of this, the reflection of programming becomes apparent everywhere one looks. This seemingly chaotic cosmic manifestation is perfection, in my eyes. And after certain strange occurences go down which defy reality in the state we currently accept it to be, the thought of having choices or free will is brought into serious questioning.
I wont go further into this since this is not specifically what you were looking for but just wanted to share my experience and my reconstructed view lol.
It seemed so painfully obvious and pure to me during a particular magic mushroom trip, that human existence and all life forms, are here for no comprehensible 'purpose' other than to act as mediums for Nature's awareness, the force generating the momentum and operating the mechanics of dimensions, particles, nuclear forces etc. It felt like my mind was an organic computer designed by Nature serving the sole purpose of Nature, experiencing Itself, through many different mediums.
Perhaps Nature wants to experience Love in as many ways as possible? And if that is so, maybe there is no actual being, no personality, but rather a continual conflict between the illusion that we control the mind and the reality that we are Nature personified?
Anyway my mind has surely been infected by psychedelics and forced to confront many of my contradictions and experience the holes in my understanding of life, but as StonerBill says this is mostly attributed to growing with life, these ideas would most likely have come of their own accord, whenever the mind is ready to experience them. It's just that since we have taken psychedelics, these ideas have a neon rainbow haze surrounding them :tongue:
God bless

 

Hey, great replies so far.
As for what you were saying about our linguistic tricks being only part of the puzzle, I would have to agree with you, but I would also say the social constructionism demonstrates that the language we have been given to encapsulate, evaluate, and categorize our reality has a farrrr greater effect on even our perception than we realize. Their maxim is that "Language is not transparent," meaning that it does not simply convey some sort of reality, but distorts and even, in a sense, "creates" that reality, or the way in which it is understood. My personal opinion is that while language is not transparent, it is also not opaque. I would say transluscen, but anyway that aside...
I'm really liking the feedback so far. How about EGO-death? Oceanic, cosmic consciousness? Unity with everything? These primary mystical experiences are what I see as the most transformative, but of course all experiences are in various degrees.
Keep replying, great stuff!

 

Im not really sure that the ego can be destroyed. If you think about, we have to judge the idea were thinking about to actually think about it and if there is no ego then thinking doesn't happen. Ego-death may mean that your mind has been changed to a state where everything is accepted as it is? stopping the ego might happen when you begin to forget about yourself and completely focus on the people around you.

To be unified with everything, one just needs to think of it and it will be so. Sure psychedelics help with that goal but it really isnt a necessary requirement. I am connected to and you to me by means of energy. The most simple building blocks of life create the entire universe we float around in so it really isnt a stretch to say we are already unified with everything.

Have you ever had a chance to try any psychedelics UnityofOpposites? When writing a paper on drug experiences it certainly helps that you at least tried one substance because psychedelics can be put into words but it will never match the magnitude of the real experience.

Oceanic cosmic consciousness = DMT

 

Yes I have, and as a matter of fact that ineffable aspect is my whole point, in a way.
As for what you were saying about EGO-death, yes, you obviously must be critical of what you mean by that exactly, which is also a part of my point. But to me, EGO-death, real EGO-death, is that ineffable experience, because it is that which you absolutely cannot talk about and can barely even think about, because our thinking is so tied up in language. Ego-death is an experience of what could be called pure perception, pure beingness, a lack of I-ness or a centrality to experience, even a lack of embodiedness. You can see why it is really ineffable, and these words about it evaporate as they leave our mouths, meaning really nothing but only pointing at, in an imperfect way, that truly ineffable thing which we have experienced.
I experienced to total lack of embodiedness (literally felt as withdrawing out of my body and up into...I have no idea what, not necessarily my brain), and was transformed afterwards, although my EGO did, of course, come back, or was re-born, if you want to word it that way. My proposal with this paper is really just that after such an experience, there is a re-construction or re-orientation of sorts, due to the fact that the person is no longer "grounded" in their previous socially (linguistically) constructed notions of theirself and the world (one realizes how much the world they think they are in is really inside their head, e.g. time and space recognized as being a product of consciousness, etc.), but now is grounded in a sort of...something else. Call it what you like, but my point is that central aspects of the being have been re-oriented in some way, based on a different set of assumptions and givens as a result of this experience, especially if the person doesn't brush it off and begins to live on its hint.

 

so heres a question for ya: when we relinquish ourselves from the left-brain organising tendancies, do we put ourselves in the hands of the right brain? or is there also a right brain ego which also dies?