Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
The hallucination you feel on Acid/LSD can, for some people, feel like a transcendent or spiritual experience. There is a reason psychedelics and all psychoactive substances have a long religious history.
But it is, sadly, all bullshit - at least in one way. You’re not getting an experience of the true, transcendent nature of the universe, whatever that is, you’re not stepping outside yourself, your brain is just generating a slightly different story, the input sequence to your neural network is subject to a new modifier, a dialed-up parameter, whatever you want to call it. That might be meaningful, it might even afford you some kind of genuine self-reflection (it has not in my experience) that could be of use to you, but is it ‘real’? That depends on how you see it.
I think for a lot of people regular psychoactive substance use, where it changes their life “for the better” (something usually asserted only by them) and is not done directly for eg. pain relief, acts as a placebo that allows them to undergo the work of personal transformation without the self-consciousness that doing so sober can involve. They give themselves permission to grow.
The other stuff is chemical. You can take MDMA with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, talk for 6 hours and feel like you’ve been in deep love with them for years, but again, how real could that ever be?
It's interesting calling it a placebo. To my mind it's less a placebo, and more proof that personal transformation can happen, and is directly experiencable/achievable. In this day and age of 'nobody ever changes' that can be invaluable.
How real is 'deep love for years'? We have such a poor understanding of love, our culture barely even discusses it outside of a purely facile sense. The ancients believed that in the right circumstances you could fall in love with someone on the spot - but only a certain type of love.
The notion of love is far more complicated and multifaceted than we give it credit for. Is the type of love engendered by MDMA the exact same as the type of love between an old married couple? Probably not.
That being said, is it still a valid and meaningful type of love? Absolutely.
More importantly - can it lead to a deeper love for the other person, or even yourself? It's hard to say but results seem promising.
Even if you think it's all bullshit, is there not some deep value in experiencing these powerful and beautiful states? What if someone has never felt it before, don't they deserve it?
I did mdma with my girlfriend early on in our relationship and it was pretty great. It’s too easy to spend years with someone falling into a routine and putting a lid on risky and vulnerable topics. Sometimes drugs are an actually very effective way to connect deeply with someone.
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As KranK (RIP) used to say, taking drugs is like putting on shit-smeared glasses. You'll definitely look at the world differently, but will you learn anything new about it? When a man comes up with stuff like Vangers and Perimeter without resorting to psychoactive substances, I am inclined to trust his advice that you don't need drugs.
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