Esotera said:
Wouldn't mind trying LSD, it's supposed to completely change your perception of the world. Still...I'm not really allowing myself to take any drugs, barely any caffeine/alcohol either these days.
I'll 100% vouch for the "completely change your perspective on the world" talk. (Not any of that "like I saw God and I like saw my best friend and like me and like we were all
one" silly bullshit you hear in movies.)
It's something that's pretty much impossible to explain, but why acid has this effect is something I've tried to hash out with friends, and I think we've come up with a pretty reasonable explanation. Our theory is that almost everyone, throughout their whole lives, only sees reality from one perspective. This isn't a very interesting statement, since it's true by definition (you experience everything from one POV because your POV is composed of everything you experience.)
What acid does is it allows you to see the world from a radically
different perspective. It isn't to say that you "learn" anything
while on the drug. Rather, it creates context once you're straight again that informs your perspective for the rest of your life. A good analogy might be... if you have one picture of something, it's 2D (ignoring that the brain fills in the details to make it seem 3D, it's just an analogy.) This makes it impossible to judge the dimensions of anything, as all you have is a flat image. But if you have two pictures of something from different angles, you can use them to build an accurate, 3D idea of their actual properties.
Essentially, it allows you to see through a lot of bullshit. It makes you capable of judging what
really matters in life vs. what's arbitrary or contrived. (I think Bill Hicks had it right when he compared life to a roller coaster: it has highs and lows, thrills and lulls, but at the end of the day, it's just a ride. Acid helps one understand this and enables one to focus on enjoying the ride more and helping make it more enjoyable for others, both for peers and generations to come, rather than "winning.") It makes you care passionately about the things that matter and more willing to roll your eyes at the things that don't.
It also makes you far more empathetic. This was something that came very hard to me in my adolescence. (I remember once telling my mother that I was scared I didn't have a conscience.) But seeing reality from a perspective outside normal human experience allows you to easily see reality from the perspectives of other humans. It makes you care more about others, helps you understand others' viewpoints, and greatly aids in communicating with other people from a POV they understand.
Maybe some people may not take all this away from the experience. I can see how some might be able to write it off as, "Lol that was crazy. Whelp, back to what I was doing." But I think for an intelligent, introspective individual, it can be life-changing. This may be veering into conspiracy theory territory, but I feel like a big part of the reason that acid is illegal comes not from the fact that it's "dangerous," but from the fact that it allows people to reject nonsensical, divisive power structures and focus more on what's good for humanity as a whole.
Or, uh... that's just what I've heard...
tricky-crazy said:
IrateDonnie said:
tricky-crazy said:
Hallucinations are fun for a while but it can become a nightmare pretty quickly.
I understand exactly what you mean, except you can wake up from a nightmare. I used to have a buddy that took a trip & never completely returned.
Well it really depend on the case, using hallucinogenic drugs once and being schizophrenic is two different thing.
Taking drug will last you for a couple hours and then you return (normally, don't know much about your friend that never returned), being mentally ill affects you 24/7.
The thing that I hated with my hallucinations is that it was constant, I never knew when things were real or not real, I was questioning
everything.
When you start to hallucinate a plethora or crows that scream at you that you should kill yourself, the appeal of hallucinating start to wear off.
I would say, try hallucinogenic drug once to see how it feels, but centering your life on it is not fun at all.
Yeah, that must be terrifying. One of the biggest things about hallucinogens like LSD is mindset, in that you can always focus on it not being real. I've never had a bad trip, because as long as you go in with the right state of mind, you can always assure yourself, "Don't worry, you're on a drug. This is only temporary." That's the big difference between hallucinogens and dissociatives... with the latter, you
can't maintain that presence of mind. So if things go bad, they can easily become absolutely horrifying. Obviously it's not something I can comment on from personal experience, but I think schizophrenia would be more like that.
