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Interesting article regarding psychedelic experiences, people taking them for potential depression relief and having spiritual experiences instead.

M

Moonbeam

Elite Member
This article seems to suggest two attitudes toward the psychedelic experience, scientific theorizing about it as a phenomenon and the ineffable experience of experiencing it. People looking for one thing may find something else entirely, realizations that imply the oneness of everything, a realization that can’t be given but can be experienced.

www.rollingstone.com

People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression -- and Accidentally Meeting God

As the medicalization movement hits setbacks, psychedelics are re-emerging as powerful spiritual tools.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com
 
Moonbeam said:
This article seems to suggest two attitudes toward the psychedelic experience, scientific theorizing about it as a phenomenon and the ineffable experience of experiencing it. People looking for one thing may find something else entirely, realizations that imply the oneness of everything, a realization that can’t be given but can be experienced.

www.rollingstone.com

People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression -- and Accidentally Meeting God

As the medicalization movement hits setbacks, psychedelics are re-emerging as powerful spiritual tools.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com
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Experiencing the whole universe connected as one will do that to some people.
 
People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression — and Accidentally Meeting God
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Never experienced.
But as I understand it, this process helps deconstruct and break people down.

So it makes sense that some of them would revert back to more base notions such as religion. Popular culture already installed the ideas in our heads, just sitting there waiting to be acted upon. Faith in science is never gaurenteed and must be held sacred in place of dogma. A broken person will look for dogma and find it comforting.

A similar process can happen to society at large during a violent upheaval, such as the Iranian Revolution.
But I wouldn't call that progress.
 
Best night of my life was sitting in warm rain on a beach in the south of Thailand with my future wife high on shrooms, watching thunderstorms in the distance.
 
Jaskalas said:
Never experienced.
But as I understand it, this process helps deconstruct and break people down.

So it makes sense that some of them would revert back to more base notions such as religion. Popular culture already installed the ideas in our heads, just sitting there waiting to be acted upon. Faith in science is never gaurenteed and must be held sacred in place of dogma. A broken person will look for dogma and find it comforting.

A similar process can happen to society at large during a violent upheaval, such as the Iranian Revolution.
But I wouldn't call that progress.
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Yes, as I said, how people theorize about the reports that people claim to have transformative experiences on psychedelics and actually having the experience oneself can be two irreconcilably different animals. Just as a theoretical exercise within the the realm of normal reasoning one could maybe reply to your post thusly: What do you envision when you say the process deconstructs and breaks people down. Aren't you saying that it makes them more amenable to delusional religious thinking? But suppose something else is going on, suppose what is being deconstructed and broken down isn't the person but the the dualistic state of consciousness made possible by thought and language and what is revealed isn't the acquisition of delusional religious thinking but an awakening.

Evolution has given us senses to help us navigate a dangerous environment and to reproduce. We have thus an inborn sense of pleasure and pain. From this we derive notions of experiences described a peak. In order to inwardly evaluate the positive or negative experience generated by some psychedelically induced experience one would have to have hind-sign in a more normal conscious state in which to evaluate, I would say. Without having something to compare, a personal knowledge of altered states of consciousness, how could the value of an experience be validated.

Remember too, that the words used to describe many psychedelic experiences are very much like the words used by mystics whose experiences do not involve the use drugs.
 
fskimospy said:
Best night of my life was sitting in warm rain on a beach in the south of Thailand with my future wife high on shrooms, watching thunderstorms in the distance.
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sandorski said:
I hate shrooms. My best highs have always been from cannabis, especially for contemplation. Shrooms make me feel physically trapped.
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Being in nature helps keep a shroom trip in a happy place. I always preferred LSD or MDMA because the trips were typically enjoyable no matter where I happened to be.
 
fskimospy said:
Best night of my life was sitting in warm rain on a beach in the south of Thailand with my future wife high on shrooms, watching thunderstorms in the distance.
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A future wive should have that effect. Now your post has made someone she doesn't even know also happy for that night.
 
sandorski said:
I hate shrooms. My best highs have always been from cannabis, especially for contemplation. Shrooms make me feel physically trapped.
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LSD dude. Love my weed, but some of the best highs I’ve had were on acid.

Always said I’d do acid every day…except you can’t work or do much else when tripping. And it’s tiring. No sleep, little food consumption.

Used to drop a hit at lunch on Friday. Trip thru to Saturday morning. Drop two hits when coming down…trip to Sunday am. Then sleep Sunday away.

Couldn’t do it today but back then…early 1970’s…we were indestructible. Youth does that.
 
sandorski said:
I hate shrooms. My best highs have always been from cannabis, especially for contemplation. Shrooms make me feel physically trapped.
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Perhaps what you had wasn't a magic mushroom but some other species or it was laced with something bad. If not the dose may have been insufficient to take you through the armor we wear, the ego, and it put up a struggle not to die. That, in my opinion is what a bad trip is, successfully holding on rather than experiencing ego death. I see psychedelics as a kind of free ride. Rather than feeling what we really feel, our self contempt, we jump over it and go straight to heaven. If you don't make the jump you can wind up in hell. The issue is fear and fear plus psychoactive drugs can cause paranoid associative thinking. It's a mini psychosis and because we are not psychologically educated we have no idea that all that is really happening is that we are fighting a desperate battle against some childhood traumatic event we do not wish to relive and imagine instead we are dying etc. You strike me as a person with a high degree of certainty, in other words not too open to letting go of that need which will cause you to want to hang on to your normal ways of seeing things that many other people. Humility is a possible solution to that, I think.
 
And in all my psychedelic dabbling, which were numerous and over several years, never had any religious experience…never saw God or the like.

Did see boxes on a grocery store shelf start dancing, tho. Broke out into the laughs…good times!
 
I had many an amazing time tripping in my twenties. I'm ready to do it again when I find the right tripping partner. Or when my best friend in Colorado visits.
 
Long before I took any drugs I had had a transformative experience born out of the desperation I felt from searching for meaning and finding only the emptiness left after the loss of all my sacred beliefs. An external shock, wind shaking my house, while in a deep state of introspective examination of the question of why I suffered shifted that deep inner focus instantly into awareness of the present. In that moment I knew everything there is to know, that joy is being and that any ambition to be happy is the ego chasing its tail, that to want is sickness itself, that hope for change is misery.

Drugs showed me that god is our human potential and that seeing that was a gift, but to seek it over and over would be the me of the past. I got some mushrooms many years ago but I never took them nor any other kind of the usual kinds. Visiting heaven a few times was enough. I know I'm in the middle of it even though I don't see it.
 
Meghan54 said:
And in all my psychedelic dabbling, which were numerous and over several years, never had any religious experience…never saw God or the like.

Did see boxes on a grocery store shelf start dancing, tho. Broke out into the laughs…good times!
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Hehe, I remember the first time I smoked a joint. I thought it had no effect whatsoever. I remember walking outside of my buddies house and looking back at it. Suddenly I was a camera fixed atop a tripod. So much fun.

I never saw God either. What I experiences was the sense that everything within my awareness was being created in that moment by me. I was at cause, the creator. Cured now but not something that I would have wanted to tell my local Grand Inquisitor.
 
Early studies with LSD and monks showed similar results. When the test subjects realized they could chemically achieve the same union with their god that they achieved through meditative contemplation, many left their religious orders, realizing it wasn't a god at all that provided the grace they felt.
 
dank69 said:
Being in nature helps keep a shroom trip in a happy place. I always preferred LSD or MDMA because the trips were typically enjoyable no matter where I happened to be.
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Like walking on a nature trail at night with a light snow. It was a black and white world.
 
Love shrooms, but its been a while. Last acid trip for me was in early 80s. Cant really generalize shrooms as there are different varieties, but never had a bad experience with them. Was very picky with acid though and had to ensure it was tested by close friends.
 
IronWing said:
Early studies with LSD and monks showed similar results. When the test subjects realized they could chemically achieve the same union with their god that they achieved through meditative contemplation, many left their religious orders, realizing it wasn't a god at all that provided the grace they felt.
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I would guess that you are poo pooing a possible realization some monks may have had as disappointment in religion itself, that it is a bias you have toward religion that causes you to interpret such information in that way. Perhaps had you been one of those monks yourself you might have a different understanding. I can invent a different interpretation:

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself in the same way that religion is a bridge to realization only, not itself the truth. Those who look not at the finger but see it points to the moon, those who have via some religion have discovered its inner meaning, have no need or use for the finger or the religion. Siddhartha Gautama practice a in many different schools of enlightenment according to what I have heard, including a form of straight ahead wondering that sought to destroy a major preoccupation people have with surviving physically. In this practice you wander and never beg for food. Long ago people understood there were many monks who wondered on this path and out of kindness would feed them. Coincidentally most monks had the good sense to along paths that would land them where people of that sort lived.

But Siddhartha took it to extreem and found himself in the wilderness in the middle of a river near death and too exhausted to cross, so he decided to hold on to a branch and determined to die right there if he could not reach enlightenment which he did. Part of his realization as I heard from on Yogi was that he realized he had been wasting his time starving himself and wondering around. The truth had always been right there within him. When his deciples found him radiant under the bo tree having achieved his aim, they waited expectantly for the great truth to be revealed. And he did so. He said to them, "Let's eat."

It is hubris to think you can understand the lives of those in the world but not of it if you are of it yourself. A real religion will have traces of teachings that will tell you that and you may need to waste a lot of time realizing it.

So you have realized that religions are insane asylums for people who need certainty spoon fed to them. What about you? Is all there is to do in the world that crap on other people's paths? Isn't the belief that religion is stupid just another form of self arrogant certainty. It's quite likely you are holding on to some personal grudge that some religion tricked you for a bit and you are looking to get even. Get over yourself.
 
amenx said:
Love shrooms, but its been a while. Last acid trip for me was in early 80s. Cant really generalize shrooms as there are different varieties, but never had a bad experience with them. Was very picky with acid though and had to ensure it was tested by close friends.
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God knows. Some people might be allergic to something in them asside from the psychoactive chemicals.
 
Back in the 60s and early 70s, I knew a lot of people who enjoyed psychedelics of a wide variety...LSD, STP, shrooms, peyote...and most did it for the trip, not for depression...but many did indeed have "spiritual experiences."
(and more than a few absolutely freaked out...had "bad trips" and ended up in the psych ward for a while.
 
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