roachboy

i am not sure how loosely you are using the term philosophical in this thread...in any technical sense, no. in a bigger sense, yes--but it took a long time and alot of work to apprach that kind of space in any comparable way again.

for me, the relation is a complex matter. i could not start even to talk about it in a post.

however, i really disagree with this quote from earlier:

"What you need to realize about drugs is that, while they open doors to your inner mind, the doors close that much more tightly afterwards."

first, a hallucinogenic experience is not always or necessarily about one's "inner mind"-----whatever the hell that is. it is as often and as necessarily directed outward--it complicates the idea that the boundary of your skull is the boundary of your subject-position, for example--it eliminates some (or all) of the usual filters that you bring to bear on everyday experience in order to limit and organize information--it does not necessarily replace it with anything except an image of its own functioning (a machine-like sense with mushrooms, for example) but it **does** put you in a position where, whether you are ready for it or not, you see that much of what you take as given in the ways you order your experience is arbitrary and could be otherwise.

as for these "doors" that close afterward--i do not recognize anything at all--at all--from my experience in that statement. nor the experience of anyone i know or have known who has used these drugs. the statement sounds to me like something out of one of the "this is your brain...this is your brain on drugs" adverts.

how i usually say what i think on this matter is that these drugs can let you skip steps. sometimes that is really not a good idea--it depends on who you are at the moment you do them--and what you are afraid of. on the other hand, these experiences can show you things far outside the space of your everyday perception--and sometimes these stay with you--and they way in which they stay with you is not at all a bad thing necessarily.

and i do not think that you return to the space you are in when you are tripping. ever. not even across a sequence of experiences. if you do converge on a space like that, through some other kind of practice--call it meditation if that is what you do, call it something else, if that is what engages you--you will find a different version. maybe higher, maybe not. maybe more controlled, maybe not.

however, i would say this, and as strongly as i can manage: hallucinogens are not something to fuck around with. they can do you great damage, if you screw up. and i do not consider than recreational **at all**.
it is not like watching some tv show.
you can learn nothing out there.
it is the simplest thing in the world to learn nothing.
people do it all the time.
but it is not given in advance that there is nothing to be learned there.

some people will not see anything of interest, in this or any other space, no matter what the form they are presented with.

other people reject this as a procedure as a function of temperment. for some among these, it may be unnecessary to go this way at all--they might find similar things in other ways.

maybe.

for yet others, it can be an extremely valuable experience.

but it is not a game.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite