Author Topic: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances  (Read 3996 times)

Ramsus

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #15 on: December 28, 2008, 10:49:31 pm »
Drain on the medical industry? Not if they have to pay for their care themselves for any problems resulting from their own drug use. Then it'd give the medical industry a new market to feed off of.

Besides, look at the cost of the war on drugs, and you'll see that there's more than enough money there if you feel some obligation to help people. If anything, it's the cost of keeping drugs illegal that's the real burden.

justin3009

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #16 on: December 28, 2008, 11:00:14 pm »
Pretty interesting conversation going on here...The thing that came to mind when "If anything, it's the cost of keeping drugs illegal that's the real burden." was said, would it really help anyone at all if the drugs were legalized?  There'd probably be an insane sky rocket of deaths from people randomly trying out drugs but doing the horribly lethal ones.  That's how I would see it, but I'm not sure.  I'm probably getting off track a bit from stating that though.

Also, from what's been said and that thing inside our brain is causing a "spiritual effect"...Is anything spiritual at all then?  If it's just something in our head that's causing it, I don't see how anything could be labeled as a spiritual experience.

chrono eric

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #17 on: December 28, 2008, 11:06:18 pm »
Drain on the medical industry? Not if they have to pay for their care themselves for any problems resulting from their own drug use. Then it'd give the medical industry a new market to feed off of.

Besides, look at the cost of the war on drugs, and you'll see that there's more than enough money there if you feel some obligation to help people. If anything, it's the cost of keeping drugs illegal that's the real burden.

I agree completely. I suppose I was a little ambiguous. By "drain on the medical industry" I was actually thinking about a future state of affairs. If many addictive drugs were legalized, I predict that the state of drug addiction would be covered by health care as a medical disease (especially if medicine is socialized in the future, and I'm not sure how I feel about that).

I believe this to be so because most people that are addicted to drugs do not have the money to pay for their own health care. So in a future world where cocaine is legal for example, I predict that cocaine addiction will be treated as a fully legitimate medical condition. But I may be wrong.

As far as entheogens go, I think most of them are illegal because they were inadvertantly swept up in the misconceived "war on drugs". People that have never had an entheogenic experience or even a psychedelic experience often operate on the assumption that hallucinating is very, very bad and that anything that makes you hallucinate is therefore also very, very bad. People are terrified of them. They aren't like normal psychotropic chemicals. They hold the poptential to change your life forever.

I have a particular vested interest in keeping Salvia divinorum legalized. The active ingredient Salvinorin A binds to and produces analgesic and anaesthetic effects at k-opioid receptors in the CNS. This has never been observed before. It holds great promise to lead to new discoveries in safe general anaesthetic drugs, and since I will be working in the medical industry this is of primary importance to me. If it is made illegal, research could not be performed without a DEA liscense and progress/discoveries will slow to a halt.

Also, from what's been said and that thing inside our brain is causing a "spiritual effect"...Is anything spiritual at all then?  If it's just something in our head that's causing it, I don't see how anything could be labeled as a spiritual experience.

This was the point that I raised above, and here was my response and interpretation of it:


In either of these examples, does the fact that the experience was derived from an alteration of normal neural activity invalidate the spirituality of it? I say no, of course not. People that experience such things often change their lives completely afterwards. To them, it's more real than reality itself. What would one want to be a "true spiritual experience"? God speaking to you directly? And how would one separate that experience from a simple auditory hallucination?

So in my view, every "spiritual" experience is inseparable from a temporary neurological change, but that doesn't make it any less spiritual. It's the lesson that you learn from it and the actions that you subsequently take in life that validate it's spirituality

EDIT: I think a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that spiritual experiences come from without instead of from within. Just because a near death experience is caused by DMT and just because you may not actually be talking to your dead grandma while experiencing one doesn't make it any less spiritual.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2008, 11:10:22 pm by chrono eric »

justin3009

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #18 on: December 28, 2008, 11:08:00 pm »
How'd I miss that tidbit of information?  Anywho, very good point there chrono.  I see now.

chrono eric

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #19 on: December 28, 2008, 11:19:44 pm »
I am very glad that this thread actually is composed of meaningful responses instead of ignorant or insulting ones by people that do not understand or are unwilling to open their minds to the nature of entheogens, psychopharmacology, and native spiritual practices.

Drugs are neither good nor bad. And drug use is neither good nor bad. It's drug abuse which is bad. Indeed, it has been demonstrated countless times that psilocybin "magic" mushrooms for example endow people with long term spiritual and mental health benefits after just one time use. It seems that many people are unwilling to accept the possibility that some mind altering substances can actually be healthy for you, despite the intense effects they produce.

justin3009

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #20 on: December 28, 2008, 11:23:55 pm »
Most people won't accept it because we have teenagers rampant across the US doing drugs 24/7 because it's "fun".  Which has been stated very obviously that it does give drugs a bad name.  It's hard to open people's minds to this type of thing when hardly no one uses it for health issues.

Shadow D. Darkman

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #21 on: December 28, 2008, 11:30:03 pm »
Most people won't accept it because we have teenagers rampant across the US doing drugs 24/7 because it's "fun".  Which has been stated very obviously that it does give drugs a bad name.

True.

chrono eric

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #22 on: December 28, 2008, 11:38:19 pm »
Most people won't accept it because we have teenagers rampant across the US doing drugs 24/7 because it's "fun".  Which has been stated very obviously that it does give drugs a bad name.  It's hard to open people's minds to this type of thing when hardly no one uses it for health issues.

Yes, and the hippies didn't help either. To the person undergoing the experience, it is typically profound and spiritual, but to a congressman pondering over whether or not an entheogen should be made illegal - they look at videos of idiot high school kids tripping and as an outside observer they think it just makes people stupid and thus dangerous.

This is a quote from the Salvia divinorum Erowid.org entry here http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia_basics.shtml:

Quote
At higher doses users report dramatic time distortion, vivid imagery, encounters with beings, travel to other places, planets or times, living years as the paint on a wall or experiencing the full life of another individual. Needless to say these can be extremely powerful experiences and should only be attempted with a sitter. While most people remain unmoving during the experience, some individuals will attempt to get up and walk around while in a completely dissociated state.

While sub-threshold effects are somewhat innocuous--leading some people to be cavalier in subsequent experiences--once full effects are achieved, many people find S. divinorum to be unpleasantly overwhelming and more scary than fun. As has been found with pharmaceutical kappa-opioid agonists, salvia is aversive for many who try it.

Now here are some idiotic high school kids recording their experience on video:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=salvia+trip&search_type=&aq=f


Because of them, legitimate spiritual uses of this entheogen will probably be federally outlawed within several years. I hope I'm wrong though. I really do.


justin3009

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #23 on: December 28, 2008, 11:40:13 pm »
It's shit like THAT is what pisses me off and completely corrupts the meaning of things that could be used to help.  Is that even legal to put up on Youtube or anywhere for that matter?

chrono eric

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #24 on: December 28, 2008, 11:43:31 pm »
I assume it is legal because Salvia divinorum itself is legal, despite being the most powerful psychedelic known to man (close race between it and DMT).

I've been encouraging people that have undergone entheogenic experiences in a religious or secular setting or people that have a vested interest in keeping these substances legal to report people that post these videos to YouTube. I'm going to go find a particularly offensive Fox News broadcast to post here in which one idiot erroneously and with zero evidence states that "Salvia divinorum is 10,000 times more dangerous than cigarettes" and Fox News just broadcasts it as if it's fact.

EDIT: Upon watching the video again, he actually says it is 1,000 times more dangerous than cigarettes. Which is still completely incorrect, not supported by any evidence, and a stupid assertion to make.
« Last Edit: December 29, 2008, 12:11:49 am by chrono eric »

mav

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #25 on: December 28, 2008, 11:44:56 pm »
Drugs are neither good nor bad. And drug use is neither good nor bad. It's drug abuse which is bad.
My goodness, thank you for saying this. I don't intend to reply to this topic too often, as I feel that my input may push away from the topic of the spiritual use of mind-altering substances (a discussion which has been unnervingly enlightening so far), but most people's current perception of drugs (i.e. illegal drugs) is completely negative solely due to the abusers of the drug. We happily neglect the history of drugs and the fact that it's been used throughout decades by brilliant, brilliant people who intend to explore their minds. Abusers have made drugs look bad for the rest of us...an altered state of mind isn't inherently evil.

Anyway, I'm out--but Chrono Eric, this has been quite enlightening, do go on, my good man.

Ramsus

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #26 on: December 28, 2008, 11:48:32 pm »
I think on another level that as a society, we've given up being independent, thinking adults in favor of being mere children under the supervision of authority figures. That way we can spend more time playing games, watching movies, and buying useless junk without ever having to face the realities of survival and death, yet alone stop to notice how the rest of the world is doing, or even where it's all heading for us if we blindly keep going the way that we do.

We don't even have a choice of whether or not we want to try something risky in a lot of cases, because we've rigged things to where it's someone else responsibility if we screw our own body up, which is insane. Life is inherently full of risk, and the risk of dying doesn't disappear until you're dead.

People have to learn to take more responsibility for their choices and accept the outcomes, and let other people do the same.

They sell rat poison at Wal-Mart, but nobody buys it and eats it. And even if they did, that's their right.

Ramsus

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #27 on: December 28, 2008, 11:52:28 pm »
Most people won't accept it because we have teenagers rampant across the US doing drugs 24/7 because it's "fun".  Which has been stated very obviously that it does give drugs a bad name.

True.

Posts like this are why I'm tempted to add a post voting/rating system where instead of actually replying to a post just to say, "I agree." or "Good point!", you can just mark it as such and give it a thumbs up.

Kind of like Slashdot or something.

Shadow D. Darkman

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #28 on: December 28, 2008, 11:55:11 pm »
That would help. Thanks for the thought.

chrono eric

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Re: On the spiritual uses of mind altering substances
« Reply #29 on: December 29, 2008, 12:01:17 am »
OK here it is, prepare to be completely dumbfounded by the idiocy of some people and Fox News in particular. Now, I'm a reasonable person and I never really bought into the whole "Fox News being conservatively biased" thing. But then again I never really watched Fox News. Then I saw this:

http://www.myfoxla.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail;jsessionid=51227D8FA3079FBBA06D4CBB346B69B2?contentId=6400179&version=3&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=1.1.1&sflg=1

Some hilarious video highlights:

1) In the beginning it shows someone cutting up Salvia leaves with a credit card like it's fucking cocaine or something. What?

2) The newswoman says "It packs the punch of LSD". First of all, LSD and Salvinorin A are completely different classes of chemicals that affect completely different parts of the brain. The effects they produce are completely different (although Salvia's is more intense for sure). The only comparison between them is that they are both active in microgram concentrations. Presumably they used this analogy as a scare tactic since LSD is so notorious, I think. If they had said "packs the punch of DMT" for example, I doubt people would have raised any alarm flags. I myself often compare Salvia to LSD when talking to people, but it is to highlight the differences in effects to a well known drug and to highlight the difference in the profoundess of the salvia experience.

3) A guy with absolutely no medical credentials or knowledge on the subject says at one point: "salvia is 1,000 times more dangerous than cigarettes." I'm not even going to comment on the stupidity of that statement.

4) A "drug abuse expert" suggests that Salvia is dangerous because someone might get in a car and drive. Well in that case, why is alcohol legal? Besides, on Salvia you are more likely to think you've become the car than to actually get in one an operate it.

Nowhere in the video do they mention that the trip only lasts 15 minutes at most when smoked.

AND THE GRAND BULLSHIT FINALE:

5) At about one third of the way through the video (I can't see the time for some reason) a big list of medical conditions is displayed on the scene and you are meant to think that they are side effects of Salvia divinorum use. Here's the list for your outrage:

-Depression
-Drug Addictions
-Stress
-Insomnia
-Digestion
-Alzheimers
-AIDS - what. the. fuck.
-Chronic pain
-Schizophrenia

No shit. You can't make this stuff up. It's complete propaganda and scare tactics.

Anyway, I'm out--but Chrono Eric, this has been quite enlightening, do go on, my good man.

Thanks for the kind words mav, I'm very glad that this thread has inspired people.
« Last Edit: December 29, 2008, 12:04:58 am by chrono eric »