Don't really care about enlightenment

^ Ditto

 

Psssshhh that they need that experience. Dude come on, were in the LSD section.

 

And this. This is the most accurate despcription of psychedelic enlightenment. I have been there, and I have been there again. Thank you for the words.

 

Exactly.

Enlightenment doesn't mean you're high all the time.... it means it allowed a change is understanding and perspective. Psychedelics often let or make people rethink what they know and what they think they know, and can simply show one feelings and sensations totally unimaginable to those who have not taken them. It puts things in perspective, and shows you how much there really is in you and your brain, and is very much able to produce a lasting effect.

 

Why does it matter how much or how little LSD I have taken? It's taken me far, and I have reached points of ego death and had very REAL realizations. But to call it enlightenment is a little much, IMO.

Enlightenment, for me, suggests a long path and a certain amount of major understanding of many different facets of life. Drugs definitely can get you to a similar place, but it isn't the same because there is no journey, so to speak.


And I don't mean to downplay the experiences we have all had on psychedelics, because they definitely are life-changing. But they are also a crutch if you believe that drugs are the only way for you to resurface in an enlightened state.

If you are trying to tell me that you take drugs in order to REACH ENLIGHTENMENT, then I say BULLSHIT - resounding - BULLSHIT. That isn't enlightenment, that is you taking the shortcut. If you were trying to reach enlightenment you would be hardcore meditating, and living your life in a very specific and thought-out manner.

Not saying you may not do this to any degree, BUT, it is my belief that the continued use of LSD (perhaps even WHILE on this path to "enlightenment" through life practices) can be negating process made and assuredly unnecessary - if ENLIGHTENMENT is your goal. Like you are treading water or something.

That being said, LSD can still be fun, and I don't think there is anything wrong with taking it recreationally. And as has been said, the 'enlightenment' stuff happens alongside it. But there has to be a point where you ask - am I taking the drug to feel enlightenment? Or do I just enjoy getting fried?

I can make a similar argument about weed and alcohol too, but I think the gist is here.

 

Because "it" doesn't always happen on your first time

For me it was somewhere around my fourth or fifth time for example.

I'm not going to pretend to know what triggers "it", I imagine it is dose related, setting related, I can tell you the factors that contributed to to *my* "it", so when you say things like "why does it matter how much lsd i have taken" it tells me that you haven't experienced "it" yet. You've experienced realizations yes, that happens every time on LSD, but there is an experience that is even greater which is available through this compound. It is like a torrential cascade of realizations, but even that description misses the mark, it is almost like the whole platform on which we view realizations collapses and we become equipped with a new platform. This is what I describe as "being enlightened" in the context of LSD/psychedelic use. No one is saying that you need LSD to be "enlightened", but you also don't need a boat with an engine to cross the pacific ocean. Certainly there are beings who are buoyant enough to literally swim across with their bodies, but do you know any such predisposed or inclined beings? I don't, only in myths. In the real world, life-changing transformative events which can be induced within hours or minutes, require either just the right kind of psychedelic experience, or some profound life event that rarely happens.

I can also tell you that nobody who has not experienced it is taking the drug for enlightenment, simply because they haven't the foggiest what that means. If they say that is their reason, what they really mean is "I am taking LSD to fulfill what my mind believes enlightenment will be like". The real thing is an inner apocalypse and rebirth. Inconceivable.

 

Once again, and as always, Mr. Writer is right on the money here

Beautiful post brother.

Ladies and gentlemen; we give you Mr. Writer.. one of humanity's prominent explorers on the consciousness front!

 

Sometimes it seems that we, like they (conservatives and whatnot), devalue the psychedelic experience and the life that often goes with it, never stopping to consider that some of us die in this process, a fair number go to prison for what we are committed to, and many of us are unalterably changed (often to our family's and society's great distress) by journeys along this path. It ain't no disco.

Purp, sure, have your opinions, but imo, you aren't qualified to [1] give a definitive summary of how to become enlightened or [2] to judge my or other's state of enlightenment (mine is barely a glimmer at the moment). That wasn't an insult; I wouldn't claim those qualifications either. I don't claim to be enlightened; I claim to have been enlightened as a direct result of lsd and to have taken a boddhisatva path as a result of that. I've stumbled and wandered, but the sum or themes of my life are far greater than they would have been had I not become psychedelic.

It's changing, man. We should pay attention to the old prayers and wise people, but for many people this thing that started in the early 1960s wasn't and isn't just fun.

 

I don't think it is a crutch.

I think if you have an experience, that is the important part.

I think that the experiences from LSD or meditating or anything else are quite unique, one is not a shortcut for the other, just as tiny chemical changes make all these psychedelics quite different themselves.

I understand that drug-free ways of reaching similar states are worthwhile, but I don't think that using a drug is cheating, I don't think that how long you take trying to understand something really has much bearing on the importance of the understanding.

Because something is hard does not make it more worthwhile, unless the gratification you get from it IS from the challenge..... so that's obviously an individual thing.

It's important to note that you can't take a drug TO become enlightened..... I have little experience with meditation, but I assume it's exactly the same. You must work at it, and whatever happens happens, but if you TRY to become enlightened you will end up deluding yourself, and making negative progress, even when the experience is over.

As for pot and alcohol, I don't think they should be grouped at all..... pot is a legitimate psycheledic, and can be used legitimately, or very illigitimately, and either of these uses can be in moderation or excess. Alcohol is liquid stupid, and can be legitimately used in moderation, but not really in excess.

I also think there are many different types of "enlightenment", and that it's not one-size-fits-all, I don't agree that you have to live your life in any particular way, or meditate in any particular way, OR use drugs in any particular way, to get there

 

I haven't read all of the posts in this thread, but I must say that I agree with the first posts. So much. Psychedelics are lovely. And I'm perfectly okay with the way things are right now. I've often thought of how silly it is to think that you can find god in a small tab of lsd, and if you accidentally drop it into a pot of boiling water, your chances of being enlightened are lost. What the fuck is enlightenment anyway? You'll often hear that we all have Buddha nature and we haven't come to that realization. Ram Dass (when he was with Leary) once went on a huge LSD binge to see if he would become a more enlightened human, and of course he did not. I'm not in any mood to think.

Over on bluelight, I made a thread about a terrible trip I had, and it somehow got directed into a psychedelics/enlightenment discussion, which really pissed me off. I had a great post directed to the user somaeye about why I thought he was deluded, but it got edited out of my posts, those fucks.
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/632473-The-Bad-Trip-Experiences-of-Infinite-Solitude-and-Terror

 

I still dont know what i am looking for when i take LSD because each trip is always so differnt. And if dropping acid with a couple good buddies isnt considered a good time then i dont know what is

 

enlightenment is the last thing you should fear when taking psychedelics.. surpassing worldly suffering doesn't happen by accident while you're trying to get smashed. for everyone saying that psychedelics are the path to enlightenment.. really?? do you really believe that?? i wouldn't go around saying that because it makes you sound INSANE.

 

Actually, I don't really agree with the first post, I'm not interested in getting smashed, but I am for sure interested in having a good time. But being able to learn from it. I don't want to transcend reality, I want to grow closer to it. I just want more understanding, more richness in life. Obviously psychedelic experiences can be extremely rich, and so can all sorts of experiences. When I first saw Monet's Water Lilies, I felt a profound sense of peacefulness that I cannot begin to describe. Basically it was like heaven or something. This was similar to the psychedelic experience. It is magnificent, but it does not last. What can we learn from those sort of states? Can we learn from any sort of altered state of consciousness? Like opium, or chocolate, or zoloft, or datura? I want to learn more about the nature of my own soul. And if I do learn more about my soul, I don't expect to become "better" than anyone else.

And, as Sasha Shulgin said, if you use psychedelics for a Saturday night high, you'll get yourself in a bad place psychologically. I've learned that personally, but I have obviously adjusted my perspective.

The forward, preface, and introduction put it nicely.
http://www.maps.org/t2e/

 

LMFAO fuck off

I'm going to pretend I didn't read this and choose to NOT engage in a psychedelic pissing contest. "Oh ho ho! My third-eye-dick is longer than yours!"

Truth is you are not aware of what I have experienced or not. Just because I can enjoy LSD and at the same time recognize the stigma of what I am doing in the real world - I somehow am not qualified to talk about it...

 

That's what I was saying, I can't determine what it's like for you, so it is hard to imagine. But my point is that you are still under effects of a drug, a SHORTCUT to the realizations that would come naturally if you were to live a certain way. This is my belief, this is what I have been taught through religion (I am no longer "religious"), it is what I have concluded that most religions get at fundamentally, it's what I have experienced to be true in my own life and it is what I have read about in many 'life coach' type books.

But if you can't have that experience without that drug, and you are chasing that experience by taking that drug - that is a crutch.

LSD is a shortcut. It takes an hour or so to start breaking open your mind in ways that takes many normal people lifetimes to accomplish.

There is nothing wrong with this - my point is just that if you are using LSD as "enlightenment" then you are still so jaded as to what being enlightened is, and that you are nursing an attachment issue with a man-made drug. CRUTCH.

That's the thing that I am saying - you can't TRY. So actively eating a compound in order to feel as if you are enlightened...and then coming back to baseline and spouting off as if you have the word of god...well...I see that as cheating. It isn't REAL enlightenment. It is drug-induced. The experience was very much real for you, but your holier-than-thou, preachy attitude has no clout when sat next to a monk that has sacrificed their entire life to attain perhaps a small slice of understanding.

I guess the interesting thing here is that often there are the same conclusions - between drug user and monk/meditator. My point being that the drug user can not come to conclusions without the drug.

My point was to say that pot and alcohol become habitual type things. If it becomes a habit to take LSD in order to feel 'enlightened' then that feeling is false, and will probably diminish in time - or you have to take more LSD to 'explore further reaches' - which further proves to me that drug induced enlightenment is just not the same and will only leave you a burnt out shell.

Me too. I think that is ultimately what is important here. My point is just that LSD isn't mana from god - it is a drug that helps us release a little bit from our Earthly perspectives. And I believe that to ridicule people that enjoy taking LSD to get fucked up, is no less 'disrespectful' than to say that LSD is the key to unlocking your mind and that it takes one to 'enlightenment' - to me that's sort of a slap in the face of what ENLIGHTENMENT truly means to be.




--As far as APPRECIATING the 'enlightenment' DURING the trip, well, I think - but don't hold me to this - I think that is WHY we all take drugs in the first place. It's called getting HIGH and it is chemicals in our brains making us feel good.

 

not quoting, since double quotes don't work on these forums, and the quoted post becomes unreadable.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, or at least see why you're saying it; but:

You said LSD could be a crutch to enlightenment if one must keep taking it habitually to become or stay enlightened. I don't think that this is the case. I have not taken LSD in over a year, and though I think I could benefit from doing so (just as someone who meditates could use a refresher every so often) I don't think I'm losing anything by not actively taking it.

I'm simply saying that a change in perspective is impossible with any reasonably amount of psychedelic drug use, and that the thing that determines how positive this change is, almost always, is the willingness of the drug user to accept this change or work within it and with it, as opposed to fighting it.

By the way, I say enlightenment because it's the word that we use, but it's not at all what most people think "enlightenment" is, though I would argue that it's considerably more enlightening than going to most churches, for instance, something that many americans would offer up as an enlightening alternative. When I say enlightenment, it's not in a holier-than-thou way, though I do think that it can be done wrong and that one can simply become deluded or damaged as opposed to gaining understanding,

Understand that by enlightenment after a trip, I don't mean you trip foreven (that's called HPPD and something that most of us try to avoid)...... I mean that you're not the same person, and won't see things the same way. And I don't mean enlightenment in any particular direction-that's why anyone who goes into it looking for enlightenment will mess themselves up, there is no way to even describe the things you can feel and "see", so if someone goes poking around in the dark and trying to see the wrong thing, they can easily delude themselves on LSD.

Anyway, as often with this sort of thing, the Truth said it better than I could:

"fight the ocean and you will drown"

If someone does not accept a change in perspective while on, and after taking LSD or a similar drug, they will be harmed by it, and should simply avoid it.

 

But you are the one who is creating this pissing contest, and engaging in it with this very remark. I will reply to this but this is no pissing contest. When a pilot who's logged 9,000 hours behind the wheel of an aircraft explains something to a pilot who's logged 90 hours, it is not a pissing contest, it is experience. You can get butthurt if you like, but that is not my intention, and I invite you to look at the reasons why you feel that you with a handful of psychedelic experiences have equal knowledge of that experience with someone for whom it is quite literally a way of life.

I think you misunderstand. I'm not talking about social stigma, at all. If you can point out where you think I refer to this, maybe that would clarify things. What I am talking about is an experience, a rare experience, which is rare even as a psychedelic experience (hence the importance of number of exposures). An experience which in fact, my girlfriend had not 12 hours ago! It is not your "average" psychedelic "aha". And believe me, there is a whole spectrum and zoology of "aha"s in psychedelics. It is the mother of all Ahas, and there is never another once you have it. The change in the mind is done, and with time it is only reinforced, wooden beams are added with more trips, but this experience is the entire foundation of the home becoming assembled within minutes or hours. Ultimately I don't know you haven't experienced this, in the same way that I don't know whether you are an artificial intelligence on the other end of the keyboard. But I feel as confident in one as I am the other. I know how this sounds, and I know how egotistical this could be interpreted, but there is no pride in what I am saying, and it does not make me better than you to have experienced this which I think you have not. It does make me more qualified to talk about it though, despite your ideas (which are held by many people first starting out with psychedelics) that everyone gets to the same place at the same time.

The fact that you are referencing religion and life coach books, while at the same time saying you are no longer religious, makes me ask just how solid this theory is. The being who meditates for decades to reach what someone can reach after a fraction of that time with chemical catalysis, well I cannot speak whatsoever of that being. Perhaps his awakening is actually not even the real thing. Perhaps mine isn't. Perhaps neither of ours is. Perhaps both of ours are equally valid. My gut tells me it is the latter. Unfortunately I am unpersuaded that the long road is the good road. This is a matter of technology, the intelligent arrangement of the natural world to service our desires. You are telling me that the man who starts a fire by rubbing two sticks together is somehow more intimate with the fire than one who starts it with a modern lighter. I tell you that aside from a subjective sense of connection to the process of creating the fire, there is no ultimate difference between both beings if they really understand what is happening.

Just because I can't fly without an airplane does not mean that the unreal reality of being thousands of feet in the air traveling at 80% the speed of sound is somehow lost to me and forever unreachable because I took a "shortcut". All roads lead to rome.

99% of psychedelic users will never know whether or not they can have the experience without the drug because they will never even try, so this is irrelevant. For all you know, every single psychedelic user would have it if they only went to a monastery for 12 years.

Meditation is also man made

The experience I am talking about is not chaseable. It is not perceivable in any distant sense or way until it is crashing and thundering upon your world. Once it comes, it has arrived, and afterwards there are only footnotes to add. The opus is writ upon your life thereafter. I don't chase the experience I had on my fourth or fifth time with LSD. It could never come again. It is binary, like a switch. Once you turn a light on, there is no further positions in which that light could be "onner", though with further experience brightness levels can be adjusted here and there

 

I don't think you really get what I am saying...

You are so caught up on a drug to reach some sort of divine peace, but if that drug vanished from your life - would you still be saying the same crap?

There definitely is a big difference between living a life dedicated to reach some sort of conclusion, rather than taking a drug, tripping for some hours, and then go back to your weekly grind at the office. (And no, not even every person that even dedicates their life to theology or a lifestyle will reach an enlightenment - it is the journey that is the important part...if your journey is only 8 hours long to enlightenment...well...that clues me in to how REAL that enlightenment actually is...)

It's a fucking huge difference and if you can't seem to see that then I don't know how to explain this further.

LSD is fucking awesome - but to me it is still just a drug. The things I ponder and resolve when I am tripping, I take seriously. But I don't think that tripping gets me any closer to Godliness, just because I experienced something Godly.

 

It is here, It is now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgphYPf0PA"]Genesis - it. - YouTube

Here is the major problem with this specific topic that I have observed in my 35 years since first sampling psychedelics.

We are talking about that which transcends and supersedes language.

Compounding that is we are also talking about an experience which on the one hand is so subtle and fundamental and on the other is paradigm shattering and beyond comprehension.

It is also an experience with many imitators and wanna-be's.
What I mean is that it is very possible, given how fundamentally profound and personally insightful that a psychedelic can be, many feel and believe that they have indeed gone through the eye of the needle and went through the proverbial "ego-death" (said with thundering ominous godlike voice over), but alas more often than not they haven't.

I will quote my former self;

For me and in my experiences, enlightenment is part and parcel with seeing yourself from a perpetual 3rd person view, being actively aware of the how's, why's and wherefore's of your motives and intentions that fuel your actions and also being able to extrapolate those actions out into the future of all those they impact.

Knowing in a gestalt manner rather linear, rote memory.
Finding contentment and balance regardless of outside situations because you know all is as should be and can be no other way.
Knowing how to play the game of life, and I don't mean maneuvering through cultural and societal mazes.
The game of life that supersedes all others is the one that we need to learn to play.
Those are just some of the things that speak "enlightenment" to me.
And experiencing moments of sublime bliss are not predicated on psychedlic use for me. Had my first experience of "Cosmic Consciousness" at the age of 6 sitting in a cherry tree. I have had three other such spontaneous occurrences, but only twice in 35 years with the help of psychedelics.
But does that mean I'm some holy saint?
Hell no, you guys know I'm a complete douchebag asshole at times, but I'm fully aware of it at the time.

but whatever, I'm rambling on again

 

"In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse; The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short."

Also consider the story of the Zen ox herder who became enlightened and went back to his everyday life. But I am leaning towards you. When I had peak experience, or so I think, I thought I was going to be a DMT prophet and create peace on earth. Actually, I never mentioned this, but I thought about how Mr. Writer once told me that I would laugh about Lao Tzu trying to write about the Dao, and indeed I laughed very very hard. But the next morning I was back to how I always was. That experience is now just a memory. It was so ... outside of knowingness, it was what is always there, it can't be any other way, but I have no idea what it feels like now that I'm not tripping.. meh. Insights shouldn't leave with the drug's effects.