Doors

next step: DMT

next step: DDT

OK, Beachgoat.

I've Never Been Down the Salvia Road but I really can't imagine being more out there that Strong Acid or some of the higher level mushrooms from the shops in the Netherlands. How would you compare the experience? I seriously doubt I could bring myself to dabble with psychedelics at this point in my life but I am curious.

I think I'm done for a while. If I lived in some utopian dreamland with few responsibilities, I might keep this up. That was the muddled point of my post, which in retrospect should have been saved till after bedtime.

Still, if I luck onto some DMT and a long weekend, maybe.

Compared to mushrooms: insights are similar; the total dissociation and general mindmeepery are not.

Compared to LSD: go directly to peak, stay there five minutes, come down and go about your business. That's the thing, it's just too easy to do over and over. With LSD and mushrooms and just about everything else you sucmeepb to exhaustion, which tempers your drive to keep playing with them.

I went on a nitrous binge once. It was pretty intense, but eventually made me kind of sick.

I understand now, more than ever, what is means to be a biological system generating consciousness. The problem is I don't have a clue as to what to do with this understanding.

I think you figured out something more important than the "quantum-ness" of our meager existence - that the lucky few who reach this understanding have no real mental schema set up to deal with it while sober, and so they retreat back into the awful truth that only psychedelics can provide.

I too have had great difficulty accepting my fate, but I've chosen the worldly life, if only for my own sanity and false sense of security.

meep sanity, it's a collective delirium we all play the tune to in the band called society. Why did some people shave their eyebrows, rape young boys, eat the flesh of the vanquished, act scared of magic spirits and worship Jerry Lewis, or tolerate Pol Pot?

I applaud your introspection and we have all come to realize at one point or another that the depth of our understanding is infinite because at the same time it is so insignificant. Yeah,yeah, the whole duality bullmeep regime--but it's true, at least it is universally applicable.

And that's what you tend to gravitate to--handle things with monkey paws you have, sometimes use your tail. Call these tools what you will, but the primate mind has limited connectivity and access to deeper realms is only by certain conduits. The pharmacological doors are just random neuroreceptors in a very very complicated array of very very dense connections--we really haven't understood what makes it tick with billions here and billions there thrown around as parts of the brain we can observe but not accurately model.

Shaman, pharmacologist, hillbilly paint-huffer--all get to their ends one way or another at varying degrees; but eventually it's you stuck listening to your own bullmeep and believing every word. Praise Jebus! can I get an AMEN?

So people form religions and other constructs to try and organize these dark powers and unthinkable realms of our own minds--maybe we are just a little too dumb to figure it all out.

Maybe that utopia is what the older/ancient cultures had discovered that put them in equilibrium with their environment as well as their mental demands. A certain strain of Anthropology says that cultures [people] adapt behavior to their environment--and like any theory is debatable, we can see that there are parallels and "creative differences" when people are given similar inputs across cultures and environments.

So where does that leave "pharmanauts"? We definitely don't have the cultural basis to react to our environment the same way as our Shaman ancestors, but we do have access to the tools, and more so than they did as dictated by their environment. The challenge as I see it, is not the doors of perception or even what we see beyond--it is the lack of relationship to reality from the "spiritual" realm and the chaotic mess we have today. Previous human explorers had some guide, the recent ones like the hippies got tied up playing with their meeps.

We might evolve to bridge the two, or never make it; oh what a challenge!

In other words, salvia meeped you up, and your mind is trying to describe the damage in easy-to-cope-with, but hard-to-reason-about terms.

When doors are in the floor, there is a special name for them.

Enlightenment doesn't require a special chemical. It's already in your head, man. You'll learn this in time. The first plane of thought you need to come to grips with is a simple one: you live in reality. Deal with it. No amount of chemical ingestion can carry you beyond that fence.

What lies beyond that fence might be revealed to you in a flash that lasts for an eternity, seconds after or before you die. Or maybe it's just a clever lie that your brain horselaughs up when you ingest certain substances. At the end of the day, it's irrelevant. You live in reality and what lies beyond that will never be revealed to you in a pipe or a windowpane.

The journey you desire is already in your mind.

Of course there is nothing else but reality, but there is no objective way of perceiving it. Frogs, jellyfish and chimpanzees all exist in the same reality, but their perception of it is as subjective as ours.

My own bullmeep theory (which borrows from a dozen more educated researchers) is this: The perceivable environment we live within is chaotic and scary. Our senses and cognitions evolved to break down this chaos into manageable bits. We grow accustomed to the way we make sense of these bits and build ever branching, ever growing mental constructs which interact with one another to generate a sense of reality. Anything outside of these constructs seems counterintuitive - like, say, relativity or quantum teleportation or meep bleaching.

The constructs are so complex that they often result in competing strategies for understanding the environment, which is how one person can have several opposing opinions on the same internal cognition or external stimuli.

All cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, friction between constructs. So, we engage in justification and revisionist memory to salve the dissonance.

Entheogens shatter these constructs, or at least shuffle them, while at the same time alter the way our senses deliver the goods to them. The individual must reassemble all the broken pieces into a new objective view of reality, which is the altered state. In this state, all cognitive dissonance is handled by creating narratives in the same way dreams explain away random nerve cascades from the pons.

The result? A new subjective reality which, if we were to able to maintain it, would eventually become as easy to navigate as the one we've grown accustomed to. Since we can't, we float down to Earth and realize how much opinion is involved in everything other than math.

The thing is, at least for me, going on a binge as I did, it makes me feel a lot more like a sack of meat and nerves. It feels like consciousness is just a happy accident, and we are probably a long way from doing anything worthwhile with it. I feel much more like I'm 4/5 animal, 1/5 god, which is something I always assumed but never actually felt. All my nihilism before was just playful posing. This new feeling of ignorance and impotence is rich and creamy.

I wouldn't say it meeped me up. It feels more like when you first realize as a child that you are going to die, and for a while it's all you can think about, all you can see. Eventually, you figure out a way to keep that thought process buried until something triggers it for a while and you figure out how to bury it again.

It's difficult to shrug off and say "meep it" right now, but I assume I will integrate this feeling just like I did as a child and get back to playing video games and improving my resume without contemplating the point of it all as much - because there is no point.

I don't have a clue what my great grandfather's hopes, dreams, fears and accomplishments were. So, it figures that I will be forgotten just as easily within two or so generations.

The sun will eventually devour us, or beyond that, the universe will expand and cool to the point that no life can be sustained (or it will collapse in and start over).

Everything we ever have done or will do will be destroyed and forgotten. So, any meaning you apply to your 80 or so years in this clustermeep is yours and yours alone. Somehow, I find that comforting.

"Entheogens shatter these constructs..."

This is the part I don't agree with. Entheogens simply short-circuit the normal operation of your gray matter. This causes you to interpret the stimuli that would otherwise appear natural as 'supernatural' because your brains interpretation of it is completely new and unrecognized. You start to gets criss-crossed signals that randomly interpret sound as sight and texture as motion, etc. It's not another plane or construct but a disconnect from what actually is.

Having gone through this maze of Entheogen exploration in my 20's I can confidently tell you that it is a dead end road. That understanding that always seems to be "just out of reach" will forever be - just out of reach. You will never find a higher level of control or understanding but it will always seem like it is just right over there. Just one good trip away.

I'm not telling you not to explore this sensation and I'm not trying to meep on your experience. I understand exactly how meeping good it feels to believe that you are truly understanding your existence on a whole new level. I really do. I just don't want you to drop off a deep end.

You are playing with a drug that has had absolutely zero long term studies done on the effects it can have on your brain later in life. Especially at the level of dose you're experimenting with. Do you really want to risk meeping up your brain while searching for something that probably doesn't even exist?

Or, to perhaps greater effect: if you walk down this road you may become Wotak. Is that what you really want? Pull ba ck now before it's too late.