What Psychedelics are to me.

There is a fine filter in your brain that tells you what is and what is not infact BULLSHIT. Lies, untruths and it directly helps mold your perception of all things.

Now.. this filter is a blessing, after all we'd all be helpless lemurs if we removed it entirely and allowed the flow of information to overcome our minds.

But... there comes a point where this "filter", becomes deluded, so to say and no longer functions at a good rate anymore... It begins to make harsh untrue rationalizations about the world in an attempt to be more efficient.... where it once saw a tree it now sees a chair waiting to be made.. where it once saw a friend it now sees a potential enemy... where it once saw hope it can only find dispair.

Yes, it becomes dull, like the edge of a knife after many uses and although it can never be replaced it can be made again.

Psychedelics clean this filter, this muck on my mind, so called "stinkin' thinkin" by the BRILLIANT folks at recovery centers. They will make you anew, take you back to your childhood state of mind and allow you to be full of wonderment, trust and amazement again.

Psychedelics are the rebirth of your mind, to be used in case of emergency...

There are those who can just have a fun trip, just to have some fun and get along with each other... but I unfortunately either trip with the wrong people or am not this way...

the more isolated I am when I come in, the more connected I am when I come out.:2thumbsup:

 

I think that is a lovely description of their function.

 

YES! It would be great to see more discussions like this here. I'm quite a layman on this subject but I think what you described is similar to modern thought of the effects of psychedelics and along the lines of the thoughts of Huxley.
I don't recall some of the terminology, I think one of the theories going around is that this "filter" was evolved in our brains exactly for the reason you mentioned, we'd be overwhelmed by our senses if it wasn't filtered out to just the data that we need at any given moment. I good example of this filter in action is like when you're in a room filled with people talking, like at a party, your brain filters out all the background "chatter" so that you can converse with the one person you're talking to. Then all of a sudden you hear your name spoken and it is singled out so that you notice it. Your brain is constantly doing this so fast its not even noticed.
I think that is one component of what makes a good psychedelic experience so powerful. Seeing, hearing, feeling and experiencing things in such an amplified way, outside our normal conditioning.
I think in many ways our understanding of the human mind today is about as advanced as the science of physics was in 1500. It gives me hope that at least there is some research going on, such as at MAPS. I've been trying to learn a bit more about this myself, though time and education makes it limited.
You may find this discussion in the forums interesting...

http://www.maps.org/pipermail/maps_forum/2002-November/005186.html

 

i believe that what psychedelics truly are is a link between our dimension and other dimensions. If one was to look into theoretical science they would know that there are a many dimensions that exist in our universal space. i could go on for hours but here is a link that i pretty much sums up my views on psychedelics

http://diaryofapsychedelicjunkie.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/dimensional-spaces/

 

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=404634&f=117

 

yea that is pretty boss

 

Let me see if I can expand on that in a coherent way, with a theory I read about filters that makes great sense to me.

It's possible that we are equipped to see much more of reality than we normally do. If one was to divide the mind into two parts, one the cognitive "aware" part, the other the subconscious or "memory storage" part, we could call filters that part of mind function that interacts between those two parts. The cognitive or self aware part is experiencing and evaluating our environment with constant reference to our memory, comparing and contrasting what we get through our senses with what we "know" in our subconscious. Our subconscious memory is subject to our predjudices and conditioning, affecting how and what we experience as "reality". It has been theorized that certain psychedelics reduce or eliminate this filter, allowing us to see and experience reality from a different perspective.

One could call our individual perspective one aspect of our filter. The subconscious being our "ego" or "self". Having this filter shut off could explain "ego dissolution" and why we see new connections and meaning in our environment differently when tripping.

When one accepts the science behind color and sound for instance, color is merely photons traveling at different wavelengths, sound simply sonic vibrations traveling through a fluid space, both received by our eyes and ears and interpreted with our brain, it's easy to realize that "reality" is truly what we make of it.

 

Nonsense.

Psychedelics are a way for 14 year olds to trip ballz, d00d. (prefferably during school)

 

Oh, right. I forgot. And while driving. Thanks for setting me straight.

 

Yeah, acid totally improves driving a large truck through a school zone at high speed. Way more fun, it gives you all sorts of blood red tracers and fractals stuck to the windshield.

 

wow you deff are one of the few people who should stay away from psychedelics.

 

That's amazing information! Thank you so much! I felt that I was starting "anew" kind of, and that a positive psychedelic experience was intensely important in my life... now I know it is.

I used to be such an angry person now I'm calm and collective and realize how ridiculous I've been!

I will have to disagree with you on one point, of the supposed non-reality of psychedelics. Although your senses are distorted, looking at the world from that different perspective can give you immense insight to the world around you and inside of you. Although some things are a bit...goofy I'll admit!

 

"Psychedelics dissolve boundaries" - Terence Mckenna

First they dissolve minute boundaries, like your relationship to your father, to strangers, etc.
In higher doses they dissolve physical boundaries, like the inability for the walls to breathe, or woodgrain to run like a river. The final boundary is the concept of yourself, the dissolution of ego entirely. When you are no longer seperate from your surroundings.

Culture is formed by boundaries- what you can do, can't do, what you own, what isn't yours, who you know, who you dont, who you are, your social status, monetary status etc.

these concepts begin to dissolve and the madness of boundary adherence becomes hysterically hilarious.

On another note...

Everyone seems to be talking about lsd here. I, for one, like plants, organisms rather, like morning glories, mushrooms, cacti, ayahuasca, etc. When I take these plants in isolation, there is a guiding wisdom that teaches in metaphors which seems to be absent when I take pure chemicals. I think there is far more to the experience than what science could ever offer. Lets not forget that these substances were discovered eons ago by our human ancestors, and a wealth of firsthand experience and knowledge lies in the tradition of shamanism.

Dont get me wrong, I get the whole neurotransmitter gig, mind creates models of reality we take to be real, but, again in the wise words of terence mckenna

really anyone who has really worked with these things ultimate position is...hell if I know.

 

I strongly disagree.

Psychedelics do not dissolve boundaries.

They amplify us, and the more you do that, the more you amplify what we are: a consciousness, build of our surroundings.

You don't become one with your surroundings, you become one with your understanding of your surroundings, because an understanding is all that you are.

Psychedelics effect mood and perception. Your brain does the rest. There's no god, there's a hallucination of a god, for instance. You need to have a strong physical understanding of psychedelics before taking them and becoming a superstitious waste of oxygen.

Psychedelics both concentrate or integrate, AND expand or magnify your personality.

 

Psychedelic use, shrooms especially; have made me much more connected to my instinct, my emotions, and nature. They have helped me connect to people in a more natural way with less of the social anxiety I am used to.

However, they have also helped me to come more to peace with and understand those who I disagree with; and the aspects of culture that I am in opposition to.

I would say that for me, they have dissolved boundaries in some cases but have also strengthened my connection with myself; in some ways strengthening my feelings, thoughts, opinions, and biases.

 

Well skip, I'm not denying most of what you say-that's a lot of what I love about psychedelics.

However, I see the world in purely physical ways, and while I can enjoy the religious feelings, or use them to examine things, I resent people using psychedelics without a proper understanding that it really just IS all in your head, and becoming very superstitious. DMT has nothing to do with god, and has no personification. LSD does not make you psychic, and puking on mescaline is not purging you of evil spirits.

It's fine if people think these things WHILE on the drug, but they must be able to look at the experience objectively afterwards, or else the whole thing was not only wasted, but counterproductive.

Now to some degree, through placebo, all of the above CAN almost be true, ie. you can purge negativity by puking, because that's how you understand it, you can have a higher understanding through DMT, but the DMT's the only god and it's a physical, chemical one. There are people with almost psychic abilities ("brain wave reading" or whaver-there's people who can have you describe something with your mind, like your house, and describe it back to you) but it's not BECAUSE of acid, it's because of the amazing things our brains can do, even if the acid might put you more in touch with it.

I don't mean that you're wrong about what psychedelics physically do to our brains, and calling our brains a biocomputer is 100% right. But computers run code, which can make them "think" whatever you want-it's important that as self aware computers, we don't let some of that code (namely, superstitious things that we should be hundreds or thousands of years past) run away with us.