/psy/ - Psychedelics and the Shamanic Tradition

It seems like psychedelics increase the number of active neural connections in the brain; connections that would otherwise weaken and die off. So I'm starting with a materialist approach for sure… but, when we experience sensory or mental process that is extraordinary, we're still human, but, it's breaks otherwise weak connections, and then we find ourselves reflecting on something beyond human, that we didn't know exist. Transcendence. No matter how colorful or muddy – the experience is beyond what we thought we knew.

I think the mind is way beyond the machine metaphor though. I'm only starting my own psychonaut exploration, one that goes beyond a mad sampling of drugs, but it seems to me that what we experience can be crafted to accept these supernatural experiences as natural phenomenon. In a practical sense, the line that exists between altered reality and delusion may be much closer to delusion, but if it's controlled, consensual, and desired… doesn't that only matter as far as you're able to sustain yourself in such condition?

Meditation is indisputably mind altering, and something that, as traditionally practiced, provides an extremely consistent positive benefit to those who practice it. But have you ever gone ghost hunting? Tried to see the aura of objects? Bend your own perception in a way that contradicts what we know is there? Or maybe just taught yourself to naturally apply a different logical process or perspective in a situation? Our perception and everything we experience as 'human' is malleable. How about when you go asleep at night? We dream, and convince ourselves of an entire world. Full of people, many who we have never met before. We do superhuman feats and experience perspectives of all types that contradict our waking life, without giving it proper thought. Our mind is capable doing these things resting, so why would it be so strange it could do something relative in waking life?

In the confines of logic and a materialistic approach, this still offers a huge number of possibilities. To name a few things, we can train our minds to process a certain type of queue or information in a more desirable manner (no matter how elusive the result that our 'black box', the brain, comes up with on processing it); we could experience separate personalities or altered states on command; we could tap into our creative subconscious and sit back into the theater of our own mind with the meditative training to do such a thing. The potential is extraordinary. Psychonauts such as Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, Anton LeVey, Tibetan monks, and many others less famous, I refuse to have been men who only convinced themselves of lies. Those who have been afflicted with schizophrenia and powerful delusions likewise experience alternate realities, as unfortunate as those cases are. I do not doubt that the average man sees blue just as the same color as the next average man thanks to common physiology, but our minds are certainly capable of seeing red instead.

Bumping for 'please let this board gain popularity'

LSD does the opposite.

It shoves your nose into the blunt "meat hook" realities of life.

It's like watching the movie Martyrs from beginning to end, absorbing it all, in one instant.

And then you get to sit around for eight hours until it wears off. It's no party.

However, I did it 35 times because it was a psychiatric drug and I liked to try and transcend my mental limitations. It didn't work. Ultimately, what it did was show me too clearly what my limitations are.