FYI ("you" meaning everyone). I'm almost always sarcastic. If I post something that seems harsh or bitchy, please re-read it, visualizing a smirk on my face.

Of course, the afterlife is death (nothing), hence my sarcastic comment "...be pleased to know how you access the internet from the afterlife!" If there was an afterlife, then maybe the internet could be accessed - a sort of "white surf". Hee, Hee!!!

This is a common objection from those with no experience with psychedelics. After all, many drugs with abuse potential (alcohol, barbiturates, and opiats) diminish consciousness, not expand it. Stimulants (caffeine, amphetamine, and cocaine) keep a person wakeful, but his consciousness is not usually said to be expanded. Psychedelics are in a different class entirely. Some who have used them have compared the expanded state to be as superior to ordinary waking consciousness as ordinary waking consciousness is to dreaming. In general, reports in the literature based on interviews with subjects, and other annecdotal evidence confirms this assessment.

I enjoy my alcohol (prefer it with an "e", the whiskey that is) and I enjoy my dreaming (esp when coming down from ssri's or tricyclics - I nowadays use as analgesics (not really the correct term) - yes they work on lots of pathways). And you know as well as I do that removing inhibitions (as alcohol does) can open all sorts of doors - you have to titrate not simply inebriate. OK no experience with LSD but get informed, ergotamine tartrate goes there whatever the small difference in structure and hey, migraines always got there, probably even for the Neanderthals. In fact, fiddling about with serotonin can cause many encounters of the unpredictable kind. Also, I get there through music. In the early 70's I sold my best oils after sleepless days and nights of music. Although many "normal" life experiences can provide abstract psychotropic experiences if you go looking for them. So actually no need for psychedelics. As a med chemist of bygone days I have looked at ALL sides of psychotropics and neuroleptics, including adverse reactions and contraindications. Most experimenters are merely off-track rebellious teenagers or age-concerned 2nd decaders who back off when they grow up. Some jump, others become institutionalized. You and I have both used "some". It's a really important word for the parents and partners of those who jumped. I know someone who "jumped" via a shotgun. He might have looked better for his wife if he'd actually jumped.

So, Rick, you reckon that to expand consciousness we have to take psychedelics? I say, get a life, there's plenty of material there! Now nootropics, well that's a different story. They enhance what we've got, not replace it.

I think it is more like a numbing or dampening (repressing/regression) vs. heightening and amplifying (growth/development)!

Hey, the year (1992) that this image was taken in Calgary, Alberta. My LCBO card.

Hey, how about brainmeta.com as a mechanism for expanding consciousness. I'm addicted, how about you?

I would like to continually like to remind one of Plato's cave.



I was thinking here that to get to the "truer source of reality" what underlies our basic intepretations of such "thought constructs," would be to defined essentially in a geometric way, first. This is how first principle is established, as observation to a "geometric way" leads all concepts from this beginning?

Although theoretical, it establishment with the basis of science would be very important. As Feynman diagrams are.

See:

Creativity Methods and Strategies

I did not say that "we have to take psychedelics." Some people prefer meditation. I would never recommend doing something that could result in frightening, dangerous, uncontrolled, or life-changing experience.

Damn straight. These casual straw-man accusations are tiresome.

There are many ways to expand consciousness. I think meditation is by far the safest and best-documented method.

(Psychedelics are a lovely way to kickstart the mystical motivation though... mushrooms, for instance, induced in me an experience of my union, for ever and ever, with the universe. It was beyond superlatives. But you do have to know what you're getting yourself in for.)

I meditate almost everyday and I find it is effective and refreshing

Snap! Meditation is the hot shit.

I dunno....meditation only gets you so far! I found competitive sporting activities heightened perceptual awareness 10 fold (hockey, soccer, basebal and especially boxing, muay thai and brazilian ju jitsui aka ground and pound).

But I would never trade in the experiences that I had with various drugs for anything in the world - to each his/her own I say.

Yes indeed.

Appo deepo bhava. (Be a light unto thyself.)
- Gautama Buddha

You were probably in touch with some misfiring neurons (hee, hee). There is a chance, you know, that hallucinogens take one further away from reality (whatever that is).

So why aren't you still using them?

I'm guessing because they stopped having their desired effect. Either Trip killed off some brain cells involved with his trips, or he desensitized to the drug effects.

Deal with life first, then loose oneself if you wish in the issues of drugs for, and gains in the ideas of expanding consciousness. Sadly, giving an ole status here, somehow the young think this advice insignificant?

It is to dangerous for "anyone" for that matter.

Castaneda was different kind of situation, and definitely accomplished the "looseness" that Don Yuan wanted in "freeing him," from his body home and principles he held tight. Shifting the tonal, by the" slap" definitiely jars the envelope?

But it is more then that if you wanted to understand the beginning of the universe, how it such a light started the from such a beginning, and I give some help, in terms of the picture's link.

I wondered which Trip used? I'd be interested to hear more about habituation effects in vivo as it were. Hey, Trip, any info?

Drugs should certainly still be considered for one to test the bounds of reality, you just have to go about it the right way.

Well that's fine and dandy. So you have a road map while you give such advice?

erm im not really into giving advice about drugs, tis not my area of expertise. I would suggest talking to someone like life mirage about hallucogins or other mind expanding drugs, he seems to really know what hes talking about. Trip and other people who have done experimentation should also be able to shed light on this question.

If it's true that drugs only bring out what's already there (and I don't know if they do), doesn't it follow that each of us could tap into those same places without drugs, if only we knew how to do it?

This is a crazy thought, but what if there was a different way to meditate that has never yet been tried which could tap right into the "essence of reality"? Yeah, I know it's a long shot.

Yeah it is true you can do it without drugs, its a matter of choice really.

See "Maps of Consciousness" by Ralph Metzner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Metzner

....no, at the age, (approx 18 to 25) my cognitive and intellectual development could not completely comprehend the vistas of reality that were opening up before me. When you become desensitized, there is usually a want to do more, but that is where the problem of addiction starts to take hold and if one is not strong enough mentally, many multidimensional problems tend to arise.

....and there was never 'a desired effect', it was about fluidly experimenting with different modes of thought, via various sources, in an attempt to grasp the temporal emancipation and explosion that occured and has arisen out of the late 60's and early 70's.

....and, yes, I killed a hell of alot of brain cells in many various ways, but I didn't want them ones anyway. I was killing off ones that I had no need for while simultaneously allowing for regrowth of more heightened intellectual cells.

Killing of the old to make room for the new! Can ya dig it man?

what the grave? seems to me you didn't kill off too many. unless you had more that your fair share in the first place!

In post 31 this was addressed?

QUOTE

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures

The tibetan book of the dead is about life? Pass the threshold, and without the guidance, what is the clear light? Clear Mind? So you practise this in life.

While it is indeed complicated by all the information in your links, the essence of the thinking, is that without the constraints of the life as we had known it, how would you know where to step next, or retrace your steps, if the trip never ended?

What shall the objectve been then in life now that we make life bearable and not fogged by all our illusions? Colors shaded by, that are less then the clear light? So you practise, and when the time comes you will be ready for the journey?

If you undertake this without the proper guidiance, imagine, what a "lost world" you could loose yourself in?

we have to keep reminding ourselves that the untripped "reality" is a construct. so to control the tripping experiments is probably impossible (at the moment at least). so apart from the possible illusion of tripping, there might not be any tripping. And tripping is probably almost all internal, saying nothing about the state of the outside world at all. maybe the internal world is more important anyway, who knows? maybe the trips are the fog, such as that we get in Yorkshire! (I should never have moved from Derbyshire!)

How do we see the world? With all our biases and such, that we have a opinion about it? The constructs, as a very concrete thing, as we touch them.

Those who lost "touch" with reality, are people "lost" inside?

when we touch a surface, we don't actually touch a surface. we are repelled from surfaces and although we sense that we have touched it, we are actually a small (very)distance from it. in fact, we are actually sort of "floating" above the ground when we walk on it. it's all a bit like putting two same poles of magnets together. they feel as though they are touching (try it with your eyes closed).

....wow, that is an intriguing line of thought hey hey!

he's talking about the magnetic fields at the atomic level, you butt munch! You really killed some important brain cells during your forays of youth! The magnent thing with your eyes close, though--never heard of that. Pretty stinking cool stuff!

actually, not magnetic fields but electron wave packet repulsions:

http://www.advancedphysics.org/forum/archi...php/t-2701.html

or just generally search Google for: touch physics repulsion

Err! Yea! that's what I meant! (blush!)

How would such a definition as mental construct find it's place among our interactions?

Would we not need some "mental construct," to say that if the processes exist and we are fundamentally part of that process, are there different ways in which to measure our valuations in relation to how we might now see earth?



So there is this "touching" in the way you have said it at a fundamental level and then there is the touching at another level? I am justing tryng to understand it from a frame of reference, yet the idea, ideal, is much finer in it's measure? Where did it begin?

QUOTE

electron wave packet repelling eachother by exchanging virtual photons

As you know this process is also encapsulated as part of GR.When you engage Gauss's thinking, Gauss's coordinates, it is not without "seeing in ways" that one might not be accustomed to how we treat this subject? Yet you look for the consistancy that is thread through all the geometric incursions we send our perceptions into?

So what is this consistancy?

Hey, That's heavy man, but not so on the moon.

Hey Hey:

I have other information about moon measures. But I was defintiely thinking of Mendeleev when I was thinking of the geological strata and the impact craters



I struggle Remember, pictures are always links.

I periodically think of Mendeleev but his work is so elementary.

The book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080651652...glance&n=283155

(See http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/psyched...ce/tibetan.html for a free copy.)

was based on an early model of the psychedelic experience based on a paradigm in Tibetan Buddhism. One of its authors, Leary, later became a Hindu. His later writing reflects a more eclectic outlook.

Do we want the trip to ever end? Life is the trip.

...but of course he was....and it is an intriging way of articulating things. Dumbass!!

BrainMeta, a refuge of urbanity and civility.

Hey hey:

How appropriate

The elemental, and our attachments, makes it hard to be free?

But if there is music in your heart, how would this change the "resonantial feature" of the way you had always seen life wrapped( the sphere)? How would you let things in, and know that these sounds have value?

An Mri measure in conceptual thinking?

Thanks for the link and reading material. I appreciate it.

Your last statement of course made me think.

And then it came to me, that the division between "life and death," although spoken and referred to here in regards to what I thought the Tibetan Book of the Dead to mean, I also know it's importance in how we look at life. Why I was able to respond. My "correlations of cognition" are apparent to some in familiarity?

Who has not become wiser, by our time and research, to have come to some conclusions like we do?

So yes, you could become "lost in life" very easy. Those are the one' s I worry about, because had they not worked to live life respective of what "clear mind" would indicate, then indeed, how would we not become so confused by the illusons we have perpetuated?

It had to start someplace? Our emotions possibly? Discord, in a way of thinking, that sends harmonics and respective colors to dance in certain ways? What would a person look like whose colors have been sent into the way I had just described?

A MRI image possibly that is different, as thought processes deviate from what was to be structured?? Zeropoint of consciousness, as a starting point and then all that follows? The Harmonic Oscillator is a very enlightening perspective to hold when you think about "everything." Lies at the basis of this reality?

Is it possible to use such measures in this way?

Early information talked about in terms of "Kirlian photography" has a sorted history in terms of the validation one might give it, but imagine indeed that such refinements in thinking could be "mapped" much like the elemental qualites given in "spectrum analysis?"

Fanciful Pondering Then

A fanciful story, maybe? I need to be better educated better here.

You had to know where the energy is injected, in raising the octave. You had to know, how that pyramid as a model was built? You had to know how the lower centers, when raised to heart values, at that point, makes you aware of what happened below you?

Such a transcendance in thinking then has matured to what truth is implied and how we weight things now held in context of the third eye, yet, I am not sure about it all and the equivalence matter based brain distinctions we give it.. Yet in analogy, what is "seeing" and what is seeing?

Some abstract thinking by mathematicians are very good when it comes to articulating imagery? Yet the symbols may indeed be very confusing, and constaty worked to form the basis of that perception?

I also knew of many humourless scientists.

....people see what they want to see!

like who?

Most of my colleagues, who hid their sports cars, mobile phones and consultancies.

Johnny you get handsomer with each photograph. I can see why you're a big star.

....yes, my point exactly!