psychoactive philosophy?
 

Sorry if this has been done before.

I was just wondering if anyone here has had some philosophical experiences on drugs. I'm thinking hallucinagens (LSD, mushrooms, those sorts of drugs) but if you've got something to share about other drugs go right ahead.

I had what I thought was a very profound philosophical experience on a drug called AMT. Unfortuneatly because I had work the next morning I couldn't really reflect on the experience the next morning and subsequently much was forgotten. But I was coming up with all these wierd questions about life, and these questions were firing out of my brain like bullets out of an assault riffle.

There is one thing I thought about that stuck in my mind for one reason or another though. The concept of owning land seemed like a bunch of bullshit too me at the time. I had never really thought about it, but it seems kind of wack that if a person owns a piece of land they are allowed legally to kick you off that property. How can it be that parts of the world are off limits unless given permission?

Now that I'm in my sober mind I realize that many problems can occur if you just let people walk around your house, and that we've set up a pretty good system of keeping people sheltered and having a place to sleep, though it could still be much improved I think. However I still do think from a philosophical standpoint the concept of property is rediculous.

Well anyways I just wanted to see if anyone here can share some crazy philosophical debates one might have had while in a different state of mind. The reason I even mention drugs in this topic is because I truely feel that hallucinagens spark philosophical thinking.

I watched Pink Floyd The Wall and The Crow back to back on LSD once, and it changed my whole philosophy on life. I totally understood what they were saying and could see clearly many things that had been vaguely festering in the back of my mind for many years. In particular, I saw how American culture is nothing but one big cult of mass consumption with Madison Avenue advertising agencies presiding as high priests. I wrote about that in my poem November about ten years ago, excerpts of which I have posted in the Tilted Literature forum.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...ight=spiritual

:)

Yeah, I did. Then it occurred to me that it was my brain that was doing the thinking and the only thing the drug was doing was to convince me that I was thinking "deep" thoughts. In brief, drugs are blunt and phony philosophical tools. I don't care what Aldous Huxley or anyone else said or says.

John Locke is the champion of private property. Look towards Thomas Hobbes as an alternate contract thinker that suggests that private property only exists because the state says that it does.

Actually the drug is responsible for the thinking. When on hallucinagens you're able to process multiple thoughts at once making you realize things about life that you didn't realize before.

I'm not saying you need drugs to think about philosophy, but I found on hallucinagens you enter a new perspective of reality, and part of that perspective, for me at least, is thinking about everything in a philosophical way.

I think about everything in a philosophical way anyway.

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. It's not a good habit to get into for purposes of "illumination". There are other effective techniques that, while requiring a lot more hard work, achieve the same ends without damaging the mind's ecology.

Very well put- like practically all things, it has its ups and downs and any opinion on it is relative. So you can't really call it bad, nor can you say it's good. It's a way, but not necessarily the most effective way. Of course, the most effective way to something is the always most difficult. I didn't do drugs (acid/ecstacy) for the spiritual experience- I did it mainly to keep me awake to dance all night (of course, not the wisest choice and I realized that really fast) but through doing them, I did feel enlightened and had much more deep thoughts and even epiphanies. But I realized that even being sober I can experience those things. The ego doesn't like to let us experience a heightened or reality spiritual states very easily, that is why it seems difficult, unfathomable, impossible, or even, to some people, totally false and crazy. Drugs do tend to make it easier, but the consequences (long and short term) are not worth it.

Drugs are merely a tool.

The key is to attain those levels of introspective intellect without them, through mediation or whatnot.

I remember a story of a guru who was given 20 or 30 times the threshold dose of LSD and laughed at the person who offered it.

I agree.
Plus the fact that whatever 'insights' you might have had or thought you had, are inaccesible/lost/forgotten/plain-stupid when sober.

I did the usual undergrad experimentation. It was interesting for the experience, but I have no desire to relive it. What I retain the most about the episodes was the appreciation I had for the clarity of sobriety after the trips were over. I prefer to be in control of my mind as much as possible.

A wee anecdote: One of my sisters is a psychologist. We shared a flat while she was in grad school. One Friday night, she asked me to stay home with her and a friend to watch out for them while they were on acid. I rented a couple of videos and settled in while they did their thing.

Watching other people on drugs has to be one of the most boring things in the world. I finally went to bed after they spent a couple of hours examining a large piece of lint. I didn't think they could get into any trouble handing it back and forth to each other.

That's true for the most part. Some are vivid and coherent enough to stay with you for a long time afterward though.

Totaly agree with Art.

Everything you can do with drugs you can do without them and then some. Drugs may open certain avenues but they also disable some brain functions. Try meditating and really go deep.

Hmm - think ill try it now, havent done it in a long while.

The best way to understand things is to contemplate them with an empty, open, clear mind. Meditation can achieve more than any drug possibly could. You know when you've reached this ideal state when you can keep your eyes open and ears unplugged, yet would not know that you were not blind and deaf it you were to think about it. Of course, you wouldn't be thinking about it, but you get the idea.

Drugs cloud perception and heighten external senses. The only way to achieve enlightened thought is to be able to ignore the senses and focus inward.

I agree that a lack of drugs or any external body changing substance is the best way to go. If you really want enlightenment, you need to overcome your own perceptions. This cannot be done for you using chemicals. Any thinking you can do under the influence of a hallucinogenic substance can be done at any point in time.

"Yeah man....woah...the universe.....and me.....it's all so....wow...."
"yeah man....woah"
"yeah...woah...the universe....hey could you pass the nachos?"

ive been doing alot of philosophical thinking while under the influence of weed, but then again, i only smoke indica and the thoughts kinda becomes my "mental blanket" from the world, layer upon layer of chains of thought that when reviewed later on, just tells me that my ego thought i was onto something great. It seems i think like that without drugs, im just not the couch statue then.

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.

Roachboy, if you would try to interpret things metaphorically as well as literally, you'd see that much of what you just wrote is an unnecessarily verbose reiteration of what I said. But hey, if you enjoy typing that much.... ;)

I was looking through this thread again and I was struck by this quote. Despite the inconclusive data that will always be brought forth in discussions on matters of individual experience (much like faith conversation), this one sentence truly gets to the heart of why I don't like drugs.

Living a consistent, self-directed, rational, and responsible life is important to me. To defer responsibility to a drug to help you do your thinking for you strikes me as being the antithesis of everything that I stand for as a cogent, self-aware individual.

I have heard all kinds of stories of amazing "success stories" with drugs, and my dad ran a teen rehab center - I've seen both sides. In the end, I'm never impressed much with either because of this issue. Those who become enlightened often give commentary that is so myopic and vague about self-discovery using religious metaphors and terminology that I get nothing out of it. And those who end up at the other end of the spectrum are tragedies. Everyone else in the middle of these two extremes give me even less to work with.

I can't imagine what I am missing that would be of any importance to me, others in my life, or society by not taking drugs. I am productive, inquisitive and curious, always searching and learning, in a great relationship, and totally responsible for myself. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Whoa this thread went in a crazy direction. Let it be known that I don't use hallucinagens a lot. I havn't even had the opportunity to try LSD yet. I've done mushrooms 3 times in the last year, and AMT 3 times as well.

I see these drugs as seeing the world from a completely different perspective, and I truely believe that that same state of mind cannot come sober. I think the enlightenment you get from say meditation is completely different from that of a drug. I don't neccessarily think psycoactive state of mind is needed for deep thought, but in the nature of the drug it will usually trigger some very different thinking. I wanted this thread to be more about those wierd thoughts that might have come to tfpers.

But whatever, continue this thread however you guys want or let it die :)

gee sinister, perhaps i made a mistake in talking about my own experience in a thread that asked about ones own experience--maybe i should have just written that for an account of my experience, anyone interested should just read what you wrote. because obviously your experience is the same as mine.

jesus, this is ridiculous...

I wasn't commenting on your experience at all. My comment was in reference to your nitpicking my choice of words. Yes, it is ridiculous.

the words contradicted my understanding of the topic.
that's all.
it was not an attack on you, your position, anything else.

fyi---a few weeks ago i did mushrooms for the first time in about 20 years--the sense of recognition--the realization that i had integrated aspects of what i saw when i was voyaging before into how i think, how i see, in a variety of different registers still, was quite a jolt. which is why maybe i wrote so much---it has been on my mind of late.

My apologies if I misunderstood your intentions. You will find that I often follow Jung in using analogy, metaphor, and symbolic imagery in an attempt to make my ideas more accessible. By "inner mind", I don't mean to imply a spatial relationship between an "interior" and an "exterior" such as we perceive in three-dimensional objects; i.e., I don't see one part of the mind as being "inside" another, like so many layers of an onion, although that could be a useful model. Things that one spends many years trying to grasp on an intuitive level cannot be easily conveyed to someone else in a few words. That only works when we talk about mundane things that everyone can see and thus agree on basic descriptions of their properties.

Okay, I'm babbling like a madman now, so I'm gonna give it a rest. :lol:

Drugs simply eliminate our inhibitions, and let us focus in directly on our thoughts without distraction. They don't make us think anything that wasn't already in our heads.