Do You Think Hallucinogens Can Lead To Paranormal Experiences?

[Anonymous]

About the experience itself and what you come away with; I would have thought that a lot depends upon your starting point. If you're a kid just having a great wheeze with your mates and trying everything that fashion throws your way, then you're starting from a very superficial understanding of the world and the psychedelic experience is likely to reflect that. A 40 year old searching for meaning in his otherwise dreary life may be more likely to have a deeper experience with a religious slant.

In the same vein, a shaman, who has been entrusted with a certain position of responsibility by his tribe and consumes a drug with a view to venturing over to the 'other side' in search of answers to a specific question, is likely to have yet another experience.

According to Stanislav Grof, this other side exists as an objective reality and is a bit like Pandora’s box: once you've seen inside, you'll never be the same again. So the stuff should not be messed with. It's not a toy. There's no going back once you've looked into it.

If I've understood him correctly, what Grof is saying is that psychosis and schizophrenia are experiences born of an accidental stumbling into the other side - that is, without any sort of guidance or roadmap that would allow one to return to 'normality'. The best treatment is not to sedate the patient to the point where they are rendered harmless and easily manageable, but rather to push them through it using LSD for example, until they are able to find their way home. After that they are basically shamans, able to dip in and out of the transpersonal realm at will.

In this light, a casual flirtation with LSD or a similar drug could leave a person part way along the path to enlightenment - i.e., in a psychotic state. This would involve all sorts of feelings of dread and existential terror and should obviously be avoided unless you intend to go the whole hog.

The difference between our recreational use of drugs and the traditional shamanic way of using them is therefore nothing to do with whether a certain chemical has been extracted from a plant or put together in a lab, but rather is a question of objectives and the basic mind set of the user. If you start, you must become a shaman even if it kills you, which it will in the sense that your starting personality will be irrevocably annihilated during the process.

 

[GSX1400]

Re: Paranormal and Drug induced moments.

Paranormal and drug induced moments are TWO different things compleatly.
Paranormal moments come WITHOUT the use of drugs(Example a near Death expereance)and i have had 2 of them.
Mind expanding drugs(Shrooms,Sid,Dmt,Ayauhwasca, or Salvia Devinoria)only give you a vision ....quote]

How do you know? As it happens, DMT is manufactured within the brain in the pineal gland and may well be released at times of huge emotional stress such as in near death experiences. It may be the very substance that mediates all paranormal experience.

That isn't to say that things like near death experiences aren't real; it could mean that having DMT flowing around the brain causes the brain to tune into a different reality. The same could be true of other drugs.

So what I mean is, take TV for example: BBC is around you right now whether or not the TV is switched on. Even if you switch it on and tune it to channel 4, BBC is still all around you. You have to tune into it and then you'll receive it loud and clear. Maybe our every day experience is like the channel we are currently tuned into. Certain locations or natural phenomena such as infra-sound or sleep might spontaneously re-tune us into another 'channel' and drugs could do the same.

 

[MrSnowman]

Poor Bill. He was banned a looong time ago, so I wouldn't expect a reply anytime soon It was a shame really, as the guy struck me as a totally mental genius.

But on Bill's behalf:

Yes, you're probably right
Peace, Love and Serendipity

xxxBillxxx (RIFTMBP)

 

[crunchy5]

Over the course of a horrendously misspent youth, I took hundreds of trips on Acid or mushrooms, the only remotely paranormal event was. One night while lying on my back in a tiny little playground park with a few trees in the middle of an estate, I caught site of movement so I sat up and saw a little man about 3ft come out of the small patch of trees pick up a branch off the ground and pull it back to the trees. He did this a couple more times and then didn't come back. I furtively went over to the trees and looked in I saw no movement or little men the patch was small with only houses or a fence to its rear. these events took place at about 4am so I think it's unlikely it was a kid making a den. The fact that I remember these events so clearly after more than a decade shows how strange they were to me. The little guy was dressed all in grey or so it appeared to me, he had a normal sized head so I don't think it was a "grey". 8) 8)

 

[witchflame]

Go to many 'sacred sites' around the country such as stone circles etc. and you will find, weirdly enough, the little pixie bonnets of the psylocybe growing merrily there.

Strange how they choose such places to grow!

Witchflame,

 

[chockfullahate]

sorry to drag a thread back form the dead, but yesterday tried salvia. me and a friend bought some, both took it the same time, and my experience was vastly different to his. He basically laughed and laughed and saw a statue of krishna bow to him, (statue wa sthere btw, not bowing tho) and i had a total feeling of unreality, as if reality was tearing and everything in the room was being sucked into a vortex in the centre of my vision, and then, i felt as though i was looking through someone elses eyes, as if a spirit if you want was aware of being a spirit, and was looking through a body, and i couldn't then figure out if everything was real, best way to explain it really is as though i was looking through a window into this reality. absolutely bizarre and a beautiful experience.

 

[MaxMolyneux]

Re: does anyone think hallucinogens can lead to paranormal e

I'm talking about LSD use, peyote etc, does anyone really think it can lead to "true" spiritual experiences?

Well if anyones smoking something and mention seeing things, then I'd more likely believe it was the drugs.

 

[Gemaki]

I'd love to try that, Chock, but I'm too scared.

 

[PortaCelt]

Don't know if this counts as a paranormal experience, but some scientists are saying that psilocybin is good for your spiritual well-being.

http://tinyurl.com/n7uhm

Psychedelic mushrooms earn serious 2d look from science

By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | July 17, 2006

Psychedelic mushrooms have been a stubborn part of the nation's drug problem for decades, offering their users a potentially dangerous, and decidedly illegal, way to warp their consciousness. Now government-funded scientists have found that the active ingredient in the mushrooms could be a powerful tool for scientific research, and they say it should be explored as a potential treatment for depression, anxiety, and other disorders.

In a paper published last week, scientists at Johns Hopkins University say that a single dose of psilocybin routinely brings about positive psychological changes that can last for months. This lasting effect is surprising and mysterious, the scientists said, but seems to be the result of what they call powerful drug-induced ``mystical experiences" that include a feeling of the sacredness and oneness of the universe. More than two-thirds of the volunteers described their session with the drug -- several hours in a laboratory, under close monitoring -- as one of the most meaningful and spiritually significant events in their life, on a par with the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

``That just blew me away," said Roland Griffiths , a Johns Hopkins scientist who led the study and is considered one of the world's top investigators into the psychological effects of drugs.

Griffiths and other scientists said that the results suggest the time has come to study the scientific and medical potential of psilocybin, some four decades after the drug abuse of the 1960s shut down research into psychedelic drugs.

Neuroscientists could study people under the influence of the drug to answer basic questions about human perception and consciousness. But the research also shows that scientists can safely and reliably provoke a mystical experience in a laboratory, meaning they now have an unprecedented chance to study the nature of the mystical experience itself, using brain scanning and other techniques to probe the biological basis of a puzzling human phenomenon that has powerfully shaped the world's religions.

``This represents a landmark study, because it is applying modern techniques to an area of human experience that goes back as long as humankind has been here," said Charles R. Schuster , a former director of the government's National Institute on Drug Abuse and currently a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University School of Medicine .

The Hopkins team is planning follow-up work to look at the drug's medical potential, but other groups have already begun similar research. Preliminary results from a study underway at a California hospital show that a single session with psilocybin helps patients overcome the anxiety and depression that come with a diagnosis of incurable cancer. A scientist at McLean Hospital in Belmont is studying the use of ecstasy, another illegal psychedelic, for the same purpose. A researcher at the University of Arizona, meanwhile, is testing whether psilocybin can treat obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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