TRIP REPORT -- 4 tabs LSD

[Joseph Maynor]

Ok.  Today I did 4 tabs of LSD.

Lemme give you some insights.

Here's an album to set the mood.  I gotta write this.  Bear with me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_in_Malaysian_Pale

Edited December 11, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Joseph Maynor]

Substance taken: 4 tabs of LSD

Location: Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

When taken: about 4 hours ago

If you read my mushroom trip report, I basically repeated that procedure from a physical location standpoint.  I walked to my office from Golden Gate Park.  But this time it seems like I did it in a quarter of the time as last time.  Mushrooms really dilated time it seems.  Maybe LSD speeds it up, I'm not sure.  Ok, lemme get to some real insights.  This is just speculative preliminaries.  I sense a stimulant effect to LSD similar like to cocaine, believe it or not -- except with a tad of added anxiety which I alleviated by drinking 2 beers and chewing a couple of peppercorns whole.  

New record comes on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Jelinek

Edited December 11, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[nightrider1435]

Bro you took 4 tabs of acid 4 hours ago, I wouldn't dive into a trip report yet, your still tripping lol.

[Joseph Maynor]

Judgments -- One insight I had pretty quickly is just how much judgments cause us anxiety.  I kept hearing or seeing things as I was walking -- or I'd imagine something or recall something -- and I would catch myself judging.  And I had an insight pretty clearly that I should not judge.  And so I tried to keep the mind from making judgments.  The silence was what I was aiming for.  No words, no thoughts.  I had to distract the mind from getting fixated on going into judgment-spirals -- I had to lightly bop on the head like an ornery kid and then it would release.

Culture -- Today is my 40th birthday.  If anyone knows culture it is me.  It took me a while to become aware of how deep culture goes.  I recently described Enlightenment in terms of culture as follows:  I wrote, "The truth about Enlightenment is that culture is not the truth."  This is clear as day.  It's a negative statement.  I doesn't tell you what Enlightenment is, but it tells you what Enlightenment is not.  Enlightenment is not culture.  Enlightenment is something other than culture.  Enlightenment cannot be defined in terms of culture.

Musical Interlude:

The Ego -- The Ego is the Mind, but the Mind is not the Ego.  The Ego is a habit of the Mind.  It is a habit that is encouraged by culture -- a conditioning if you will.  With awareness, you can learn to recognize symptoms of the Ego and release them like a hot cigarette that falls into your hand that you flick away before it has a chance to burn you.  You'll get to the point where this happens kinda automatically.  This is where you get up underneath the culture and let the Mind cannibalize the Ego for you, which is the only true remedy for Ego.  With awareness the Mind will change its habits, and this is when Ego starts to diminish from your life.  

Meaning -- Meanings are intrusions or interjections into reality by the Mind.  The Mind has a lot of these meanings up its sleeve.  They come in the form of visualizations, memories, judgments, concepts, statements, fantasies, imaginings, etc.  Now, keep in mind when I use the word Mind I am turning a heterogeneity into a monolith for ease of communication.  What we have are happenings not a monolith.  However, for ease of communication it behooves us to refer to all of it collectively as the Mind.  You have periods of no thoughts interrupted by thoughts.  In the stillness parts there is no meaning and no Mind.  One feature of meanings is that they can be released by the Mind through awareness in the moment.  

Language --  I like to call these words and vocalizations instead of language.  Language is ambiguous -- although I'll gloss and use language here to mean words and vocalizations.  The major point here is that meaning is a property of thoughts not a property of words or vocalizations.  All vocalizations are primary over words.  Thoughts cannot be ambiguous, only words can.  The reason being is that vocalizations in different contexts cause different meanings to arise.  The best way to think of language is that it causes thoughts.  Language is culture, you can see that by all the different languages we have.  Language doesn't have meaning, it causes meanings.  So, technically speaking, words don't have meanings as Wittgenstein smartly pointed out.  They're pieces of culture that when matched up with a context cause meanings after being translated into vocalizations.  Although language doesn't properly have meaning, we can gloss that it does, as long as we realize that that's not technically correct.

Reality -- Reality is a word/vocalization we throw around a lot, isn't it.  We forget that reality in that sense is just a bit of culture.  What we are focused on is the meaning caused by that language.  The meaning points to the moment, does it not?  It points to the now, to the place where existence truly is, not where meaning records its tracks or projects an invisible trajectory into the future.  Reality includes thoughts, but only when looked on objectively in the now. In other words, thoughts are real but what they say is a fib.  So, reality includes thoughts.  Watch your face immobilize as you enter a psychedelic-trip of a fantasy that is just a part of the now as the grumble in your stomach is anticipating satiety.  You do this all the time!  We tend to have an edited version of reality that edits out these thought-trips as I call them.  That's the Mind's doing.  

Science -- When you read a Science textbook you are often told that historical concepts are not relevant except as a casual footnote here or there.  We only discuss the most current scientific theories.  This shortchanges the student, however, because it is only by looking at the History of Science that we can understand it.  Science was a split of emphasis on Aristotle, which was probably most officially started by the metaphorical but also tough-minded Englishman, Francis Bacon.  There was a fight among philosophers in the Late-Middle Ages about which part of Aristotle was most important to emphasize.  The Empiricists, following Bacon emphasized the Organon, which included Aristotle's theory of right reasoning, or Epistemology, as we might call it today.  The other philosophers, knows as the Scholastics emphasized Aristotle's more speculative, theoretical musings, like his Physics and his Metaphysics.  Science was an attempt to judge good theory from bad, and it worked by trying to extend the method of adjudication of empirical facts into a foundationalism which could ground knowledge, or at least prove that the other guy's theories were hogwash.  Theories were subjected to the fact, to the test, to the eye -- and then extended accordingly.  The problem is that you can't build a foundation for knowledge this way, and ultimately Science turned out to be just another example of a theoretical idealism, an attempt to ground knowledge which has no ground -- as Wittgenstein's later theories of knowledge point to.  You're not gonna find the right theory that then gets to disprove all the other theories -- it doesn't work like that!  Knowledge is not a tree, it's a center-less grab-bag.

Time -- Time is an interesting word because we think that it means one thing, but in fact there is subject called The History of Time.  Time is a piece of culture, it is not a single, objective thing.  It is an abstraction from the perception of change in the Now.  We tend to think of the Now as one thing, but that’s an abstraction.  The Now actually doesn't exist.  There is actually no such thing as the snapshot we call the Now.  But it is useful to think of the Now, and because we can peceive change, it is useful to think of a past and a future too.  Once we have those concepts, we can come up with a family of related concepts called Time, which actually have a history of development that you can study.  Time is a family of concepts that the Mind creates to conceptualize change.  But that change is actually illusory, because all that exists is the ever-present Now.  The Mind creates the illusion of linearity out of this ever-present Now, and thus we get concepts of time.

Space -- Space, like time has a history that you can study, called the History of Space.  Space is an element of culture -- it's a learned construct.  The Mind creates concepts of space just as it does time.  Space originates mostly from sight (and from testimony of the sighted).  If you shut off sight, it becomes more difficult to have the same concepts of space.  If you blindfold your eyes and pay attention to sensations in your body, it becomes harder to hold the container view of space that we hold.  If you hear a sound, you can perceive it as having a location.  But if you listen carefully, you'll determine that sounds so not have a location.  Furthermore, sensations in the Body do not have a location.  The concept of space is generalized by the Mind from the sequence of shifting planes of sight that we see.  The Mind puts a generalized constant where there isn't one.  It's kind of like the illusion that the Earth is flat.  We assume that the Earth is flat because the Mind tells us it is, but it is not.  Space is a projection of the container-metaphor by the Mind onto a constantly changing set of perceptions in the Now.

Mathematics -- Mathematics needs to be tipped from horizontal to vertical to see what it is.  Going back to Descartes, Mathematics was held to be an example of pure, certain truth -- the golden boy of Epistemology as it were.  But this was mistaken.  Mathematics is not the most important theory, it’s the least important theory -- if we look at it for what it is.  And what Mathematics is is not a vehicle for Science.  Science uses Math, and when it does colors Math with a different meaning than Math has.  So, to that extent, it is no longer pure Math.  Pure Math is entirely abstract and almost meaningless.  In Math we have equations, inequalities, operators, sets, functions, models of space and time, etc.  All of these are generalizations and abstractions from specific facts that can be empirically observed, and then theories are built on top of them.  Mathematics is not one thing, it's a heterogeneity of theories that all had a different reason for development.  That's what I mean when I say Math needs to be tipped vertical -- you need to look at the History of Mathematics to properly see what it is.  A Math textbook makes Math look way too uniform than what it really is.  It's not a monolith.  There is no center to Math, no foundation to it, as Wittgenstein again wisely determined.  Instead of Math being the center of Epistemology, actually the empirical fact is.  And certainty is not as important to Epistemology as Descartes thought.  This placing Math at the center of Epistemology confused philosophers into various foundationalisms until Hegel said enough is enough by blowing a hole in the hull of Kant's foundationalist theory of knowledge.  That was the dawn of Postmodernism.

I had to end it here.  I got tired.  To be continued.  I'll pick up the second-half of the list soon when I feel motivated to write like this again, I promise.  These are just insights -- not intended to be the last word on anything.  Tear it apart.

Edited December 12, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Nexeternity]

@Joseph Maynor  I should not judge is a judgement though 

[Leo Gura]

Do not post on this forum while you are high.

I will be locking such threads in the future.

The irresponsibility you guys demonstrate with your trips is making me regret sharing psychedelic information with you.

[Joker1111]

I have a guy who sells 4 tabs of acid for 40 bucks. I say it' legit since my long time buddy tried it and it' legit. Now I wanna try a full tab because I tried a gram of shrooms and It went positive so I'm confident to go 

[cirkussmile]

2 beers? 

I thought you had better judgement

[WaveInTheOcean]

4 tabs of LSD and you were able to write such well-formulated posts 4-5 hours in? Either you're a very special human being or those tabs contained zero LSD:

[HII]

It doesn't make sense to judge a dosage of lsd from the number of tabs. Some contain 80mcg, others 400.

Taking notes while tripping makes sense, because all the thoughts might be lost afterwards. If you have to publish the notes in this forum during the trip might be debatable, but I'd like to hear what exactly is the problem with these particular posts.

As for the 2 beers, he is an (ex) alcoholic, so you have to take that into account. People have all sorts of dogmas about psychedelics. And I do think it's best to follow them. But I don't think it's necessary to always immediately freak out if someone doesn't.

On the other hand, @Joseph Maynor you have to take into account what this looks like to other people: Guy randomly drops 4 tabs of LSD, drinks beer, sits in a public park and types his thoughts into this forum. Just doesn't make you a very good role model I guess Maybe you could have explained some of your experience and decision process which lead you to do this trip with this dosage in this setting...

[Dodo]

I don't know guys, if we literally don't judge and read the information shared, I see it as rather interesting and insightful to contemplate.

I enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting, @Joseph Maynor, very interesting read. 

Quote

The silence was what I was aiming for.  No words, no thoughts. 

 

Edited December 11, 2017 by Dodo

[UDT]

8 minutes ago, Dodo said:

I don't know guys, if we literally don't judge and read the information shared, I see it as rather interesting and insightful to contemplate.

I enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting, @Joseph Maynor, very interesting read. 

 

I agree, why judging him because he is breaking the "rules" on what to do and how. The man is 40 years old, its his own way, the article is perfectly fine written, nice musical interludes, nothing ununderstanable.

Ironic that hes breaking the "best practice of psychedlics" (culture?) and it offends people.

 

[Dodo]

Oh, and Happy Birthday! 

[The White Belt]

You only just had mushrooms a few days ago right? Shouldn't you take time to integrate that trip firstly? The time in between trips seems way too short in my opinion! 

[cetus]

@Joseph Maynor

 

[Nahm]

For what it’s worth, i took a trip around 4 months ago. Still integrating. 

And Happy Birthday!

[pluto]

4 Tabs!? Man if i had 400mcg of my tabs i would be warped into an alternate dimension and universe lol

Happy Birthday though but yeah i have to agree with Leo and others. I understand its your Bday but in future remember to be respectful and sensible when it comes to psychedelics and plant medicine or it can backfire. Trust me i been there.

Edited December 11, 2017 by pluto

[Joseph Maynor]

I'm gonna continue on:

Truth -- Truth is a word that goes back to Aristotle at least, so it has a cultural basis too.  There has been a fight among philosophers about what truth is a property of.  Is it a property of a sentence, a statement, a concept, a thing, an object, etc?  Some philosophers have all but argued that Truth is synonymous with Reality.  But, see, all we're doing here is re-arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic because  -- words are cultural things, they're not what they point to.  What we're concerned is that we are pointing to by the word Truth.  Truth as a word is very ambiguous, and it points to a family of loosely related concepts that get at the theme of resolution.  When I tell you that you're statement is true, I'm affirming you as being right, as being sound in your judgment.  When I say, that's not true, I am rebuking your assertion and declaring that at the very minimum it does not resonate with me.  So, truth has a connection to claims (or the contents of thoughts) which reality does not.  Reality could give a shit about the content of thoughts.  Truth, on the other hand, seems to be a property of a thought -- as in, such and such a thought is true -- or perhaps it's false.  We acquire this metaphor from basic facts that can be empirically confirmed and then tested to confirm them -- as in, Bob is either wearing his seat-belt when the cop pulled him over or he was not.  For those kinds of claims, they do behave in a binary way, and thus we can use the true/false model very well in those circumstances.  But if you wanna say that the statement -- non-duality includes duality -- is true, that's a little bit more tricky.  The true/false binary model seems to break down there.  The model/ metaphor has been forced beyond its origin point, and instead of us realizing that -- we want to force every square peg into the true/false round-hole.

Intuition -- Intuition is the pre-conditioned-you that lies up underneath the conditioned-you.  Intuition is God, or the voice of God, however you want to label and conceptualize it.  If you are religious, you think this is a separate being other than you.  If you are enlightened, you realize that this is actually you -- it's the authentic you.  Alright, let me unpack this a little.  We all have a conditioned layer that comes from years and years of cultural learning.  So, there is a you up underneath all of that conditioning that has become trained, so to speak.  That trained you is called the Ego, and it’s a part of the Mind.  Intuition is that untrained part of you that never died that speaks-up once in a while, especially when you get away by yourself somewhere remote and quiet.  What enlightenment does is it frees that pre-conditioned part of yourself from culture.  When that happens, you can be you more authentically, which will allow you to become more genuine and more happy.  So, you can see how Enlightenment is the antidote to culture in the sense that it frees the authentic-self, which I will discuss next.

The Authentic-Self -- I previously remarked that you need Life Purpose as well as Enlightenment because Enlightenment doesn't teach you squat about the Authentic-Self.  That's a wince-able comment, but hear me out.  Enlightenment is training the Mind to see culture fully so that it realizes the suffering that culture causes.  Life Purpose is taking that pre-conditioned self and examining it to see what kind of being it is.  You are a being up underneath that cultural clothing: you're just a much different being than the Ego believes it is.  The Authentic-Self has a unique personality, a set of values, tastes, interests, strengths, etc.  The problem is, the Mind has suppressed these qualities and has culturally conditioned the Ego (you) with a different set of traits.  You can be Enlightened all you want and not see your Authentic-Self fully.  For that, you need to do Life Purpose work which digs at those traits like an archaeologist digs at half-buried and hidden dinosaur bones.  So, Enlightenment and Life Purpose work are two sides of the same coin -- they are ultimately two different perspectives on the same reality.

Belief -- There's a great joke that if you ask two lawyers for an opinion -- you'll get three opinions!  Beliefs are in the air, they are a part of our culture.  We feel we must firmly cling to beliefs to be mature grown-ups in an uncertain world.  What seems to separate the child from the adult is firmness and accuracy of belief.  Recently, I took a stand against the belief that "non-duality contains duality," which I raised on the forum as a question for feedback.  Beliefs are funny things, when you turn against them, you had better turn against them all, lest you get nabbed by one of the crocodiles and dragged down into the pond.  The solution to beliefs is to hold them all loosely.  Don't cling hard to beliefs.  Don't cling hard to beliefs about Enlightenment.  Beliefs are exactly what Enlightenment is loosening up on you.  And you must loosen them all, even the ones you like to show-off with.   All beliefs are false!  You'll hear me me say that often.  That means that no belief is ever true.  That means that no thought-story is ever telling the truth about reality.  Sure, the thoughts exists as thoughts, but the stories they tell are fibs.  So, all beliefs are fibs in this way and are thus false.  All beliefs are culture.

I'll pick up the rest at a later time.  I got tired.

Edited December 13, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Nahm]

@Joseph Maynor give a try reading this whole post, in the light that the subject is you.

Every word, is about you.

So, what is the author? 

 

[Joseph Maynor]

I'm gonna continue on:

Enlightenment -- Be an explorer in the fullest sense.  This is what we are here to do.  This is a life where you are supposed to be expanding.  Do not waste your potential, do not waste this life.  Discover your authentic-self fully through a life-long, multi-faceted process of reality exploring reality fully.

PILLARS OF ENLIGHTENMENT (REALITY EXPLORING REALITY FULLY):

1.  Daily Meditation Habit (Microscope on the Mind)

2.  Non-Dual Theory (Scaffolding to orient the Mind to favor awareness over the Ego)

3.  Psychedelics (Exploring inner-being)

4.  Self-Inquiry (Realizing no-Self fully)

5.  External World-Inquiry (Realizing no-World fully)

6.  Cosmopolitanism/ World Travel (Exploring outer-being, world cultures through travel, learning other languages)

7.  Education (Exploring world ideas, culture, and history leading to reliable knowledge and wisdom)

8.  Cultivation of the Authentic-Self (Maslow's Pyramid, Life Purpose (including Career), Self-Actualization, Self-Transcendence)

9.  Spirituality (Reconnecting to being the Watcher and purifying away illusions)

10.  Cultivation of the Body (Nurture and fortify the Body, it's your constant companion)

11.  Exploration of Art (Exploring non-linguistic ideas and patterns of ideas, exploring linguistic arts like poetry and fiction)

12.  Life Practice (Perfecting your strengths in a way that makes you feel good/proud, eradicating weaknesses if authentically desired)

13.  Being Good (Being a source of love and inspiration to others rather than not doing this, assisting others)

14.  Authentic Relationships (Where you realize and perfect the idea that we are all One)

Philosophy -- Philosophy is a cultural-narrative that a lot of people are not privy to.  There are people who can drive a car and people who understand all the details about how a car works -- the Philosopher can do both.  And Philosophy has happened all over the world.  We often do not realize that the language and ideas that we use today have a history.  Those ideas didn’t just come outta nowhere, they were birthed and then cultivated into what we use today over many years.  This explains culture, or the milieu of our 2017 Western Mindset that we have.  A lot of you folks are aping aspects of the Eastern Mindset too in your language and notions.  Do you realize that?  You are aping, that's right!  I majored in Philosophy and have studied this Philosophy narrative from East to West, and every one of you should too!  How can you be Enlightened if you don't know where your words and ideas come from?  Can you really get up under culture if you don't see fully what culture is?  How can you locate your authentic-self when you are so trained on paradigms that you can't unhook yourself from all of them -- because you don't see all of them in the first place!  You gotta be capable of seeing something to be able to treat it.  Smart people have been talking to each other, recording ideas, and publishing these ideas, and then building off these ideas -- which continues the narrative into the future.  That's Philosophy!  Philosophy is an ongoing conversation, an ongoing discourse or narrative, that has now spanned at least 2,500 years, which is around the time that thought could be preserved in writing.  Smart people then take these ideas and build off of them or oppose them, like a mischievous child might add a new head onto an existing hydra built by a prior-generation.  Philosophy is intellectual culture and history.  Philosophy is language.  Philosophy is what has been said that has been preserved, and all the norms and traditions that have been built around that -- our intellectual cultural development basically.  You are not a blank slate: The Mind needs to fully realize the scope of that intellectual conditioning and how that conditioning is causing a lot of suffering to the Authentic-Self.  Studying Philosophy and the History of Philosophy is not optional in this work, it's mandatory.  Try to always put Philosophical ideas into a historical context.  You need to be seeing how Philosophers are like artists being influenced by each other's work.  How many of the words and ideas that you use today are genuinely original with you?  But you feel so original don't you?  Haha.  The Mind likes to think of itself as being original -- but this is a delusion.  You're running so many borrowed-scripts it's shocking!  That's what the study of Philosophy exposes you to.

Value -- You probably don't know yourself very well at all.  Value is interesting because we are so clueless about the values and personality of the Authentic-Self.  The Authentic-Self has values and personality, which is kind of odd to say like that, but it does.  And those values are very different, although not entirely different, from the vague values that you think you have now.  This is what makes Life Purpose work the other side of the same coin from Enlightenment work.  You need to be doing Life Purpose too even if you are damn Awake!  Life Purpose is not just for "other people," it's for you too.  Unless you do Life Purpose work, you're not gonna examine the Authentic-Self like a scientist examines a slide under a microscope.  Just because you've found the Authentic-Self doesn't mean that you have fully charted it.  You probably don't really know jack about the Authentic Self yet.  What you think you value now are the Ego's values, not the Authentic-Self's values -- unless you’ve already done some of this archaeology work.  You gotta be like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom going down into that underground city and finding out what is down there.  You can't learn anything first-hand any other way.  You gotta mine that Authentic-Self by exploring it.  That's what Life Purpose work is all about guiding you to do.  So, just because you've done Enlightenment work doesn't mean you know squat about the Authentic-Self's personality at the micro-level.  This is why Enlightenment work and Life Purpose work are two sides of the exact-same coin -- you need both-sides to get to where you wanna be with this work.

Edited December 14, 2017 by Joseph Maynor