Herbal Remedies

[thirdform]

@thirdform the idea that psychedelic are "psychotomimetic" was abandoned decades ago.

only cos psychotomimetic carries negative connotations for continued research. It wasn't refuted.

I think psychosis and schizophrenia can be positive, but our culture does not permit for that.

 

[thirdform]

this is only ever a temporary experience. total ego death looks like: actual death, catatonic schizophrenia or alzheimers. one of the unheralded advantages of psychedelics is not that they take you there - but that they wear off quickly and bring you back.

talking of the mystics ramakrishna is the most convincing example of someone who regularly experienced ego dissolution - bhava/samahdi (and is able to talk about it intellectually in all honesty)

he readily discusses the inability for people to stay in those states of mind indefinitely. he talks very plainly about kinds of ego formation: the wicked "I", the servant "I", the ego of devotion and the ego of knowledge.

I couldn't agree more. this is the main reason why I'm a marxist, not a mystic. eventually you realise that we are all egotistical beings. I also am politically opposed to mysticism in its aescetic form, which at least in the middle east was men of knowledge playing poverty olympics.

To make a technical deviation, the mystics are correct that God is the pure substance of existence. Anselm's ontological argument was never about whether God exists or not, but why there is something rather than nothing. Avicenna also posed this question. However if you pursue this enquiry to its logical endpoint, then you are denounced as a heretic, as Spinoza was of course. In this sense Kant locating God as irreducably complex fundamentally misunderstood what the ontologists were getting at.

 

[thirdform]

Well hang on, I never said there was no connection. I said I didn't think they were the same thing - for one thing, I understand schizophrenia isn't exactly enjoyable, whereas many people clearly enjoy psychedelics a lot.

But regardless of whether that view is correct, or whether the question can even be answered in any sort of objective way, I'm just surprised to see someone attacking scientism while at the same time adhering to a viewpoint that, to me, seems extremely scientistic.

Schizophrenia can have peaks where it is enjoyable (I speak from personal experience.) this is what I mean by our culture overly pathologising psychosis as an illness.

 

[thirdform]

Sorry to keep prodding but what are you basing that on? I'm interested in what you have read or experienced. Do you think if you asked a group of people who were going through a manic stage what they were experiencing they would sound at all similar to a group of people having a really enjoyable trip? They may both contain hallucinations, distortions of reality etc but they are still totally different experiences. Again, psychotic responses can be triggered by psychedelics, but then its a combination of the two things.

What are you basing this on? how are they different in the sense you are speaking of? You're making blind assertions.

 

[thirdform]

Yes, of course you can't measure subjective states, by their nature. But there are all sorts of things you can measure - electrical activity and blood flow in different parts of the brain, levels of hormones and neurotransmitters, etc. If you're willing to overcome an anti-science prejudice then these might provide a valuable insight into whether any two subjective conditions are the same thing, or kind of similar, or totally different.

Of course, you're also free to dismiss the entire field of neuropharmacology as bad and wrong and insist anyone who works in it is an idiot.

you're not a neuropharmacologist though are you? You look at the conclusion, and be like yep, discredited. You don't actually have the technical knowhow to analyse the data. This is just 'defer to authority' feudal priest logic. You're more religious than you think you are.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Schizophrenia can have peaks where it is enjoyable (I speak from personal experience.) this is what I mean by our culture overly pathologising psychosis as an illness.

Fair enough, I won't gainsay your personal experience. I was under the impression that that the psychotomimetic model had been dropped because the phenomenology of the two states wasn't thought to be very similar by most people in the field, quite apart from the negative connotations.

 

[thirdform]

Fair enough, I won't gainsay your personal experience. I was under the impression that that the psychotomimetic model had been dropped because the phenomenology of the two states wasn't thought to be very similar by most people in the field, quite apart from the negative connotations.

just be honest you made a blind assertion to make yourself feel good.

 

[pattycakes_]

only cos psychotomimetic carries negative connotations for continued research. It wasn't refuted.

I think psychosis and schizophrenia can be positive, but our culture does not permit for that.

I think I posted this before but it's really interesting and worth posting again

Stanford researcher: Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.

news.stanford.edu

In some cultures schizophrenics experience positive voices in their head.

Quelle surprise, those cultures are not in the West.

 

[thirdform]

I'm not saying schizophrenia and taking acid are the same thing not least because one schizophrenic state is never identical to another. I am merely observing that the states are far similar than they are different.

 

[thirdform]

I think I posted this before but it's really interesting and worth posting again

Stanford researcher: Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.

news.stanford.edu

In some cultures schizophrenics experience positive voices in their head.

Quelle surprise, those cultures are not in the West.

The work of Erica bourignan is very useful as regards this. She sees schizophrenia as essentially a perging ritual, which, given adequate guideance can be used to either heal or elevate people in amazonian societies to people of a certain status.

 

[constant escape]

Believe it was Matthew that mentioned upthread how certain degrees of trauma/stress can incur such ego fragmentations.

My question is, can this fragmentational trauma be willfully administered? Ideally, without the use of substances. A sort of constant fission, a constant tension, felt as the destabilization of ones reality into perhaps a multiplicity of realities.

A manner of attaining more than one perspective, perhaps? in the manner that each psyche experiences a different reality, has a different perspective.

Hence the interest in developing a manner of stabilizing some kind of multiplicity like that, wiring them together, coordinating them, to minimize the chance of some runaway and volatile psychosis. Essentially it would be a psychopathological vaccine, introducing a destabilizing agent in the interest of reaching some new and metastable arrangement.

As it is now, I've largely considered this fragmentation in terms of belief systems, -isms, and the prospects of navigating them. That said, seeing as these are largely manners of mapping ones reality, rather than permutations of reality itself, I get the sense that deeper energies need to be involves than merely the energies of logos.

 

[constant escape]

by deeper than logos I mean having the ability to channel yourself into darker realities as well as brighter ones, perhaps even evermore neutral ones, not just being able to switch between this or that articulated belief system.

 

[thirdform]

Believe it was Matthew that mentioned upthread how certain degrees of trauma/stress can incur such ego fragmentations.

My question is, can this fragmentational trauma be willfully administered? Ideally, without the use of substances. A sort of constant fission, a constant tension, felt as the destabilization of ones reality into perhaps a multiplicity of realities.

A manner of attaining more than one perspective, perhaps? in the manner that each psyche experiences a different reality, has a different perspective.

Hence the interest in developing a manner of stabilizing some kind of multiplicity like that, wiring them together, coordinating them, to minimize the chance of some runaway and volatile psychosis. Essentially it would be a psychopathological vaccine, introducing a destabilizing agent in the interest of reaching some new and metastable arrangement.

As it is now, I've largely considered this fragmentation in terms of belief systems, -isms, and the prospects of navigating them. That said, seeing as these are largely manners of mapping ones reality, rather than permutations of reality itself, I get the sense that deeper energies need to be involves than merely the energies of logos.

hang on, a vaccine is a substance.

I disagree with this. It sounds dangerously close to eugenics for my liking.


The type of development I would like to see is society adapting itself to cope with what was considered previously volatile psychoses.

 

[Mr. Tea]

just be honest you made a blind assertion to make yourself feel good.

Well, no, because that's not what it was, as much as you clearly enjoy making that accusation.

 

[shiels]

The work of Erica bourignan is very useful as regards this. She sees schizophrenia as essentially a perging ritual, which, given adequate guideance can be used to either heal or elevate people in amazonian societies to people of a certain status.

got a link? Can’t find much on that name

I’ve read a bit about the SA shamanic approach to certain mental states as access to the outside which can benefit the whole community if treated with compassion and integrated. So madness as message not unfortunate accident

 

[pattycakes_]

@shiels

Erika Eichhorn Bourguignon

Erika Bourguignon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[constant escape]

hang on, a vaccine is a substance.

I disagree with this. It sounds dangerously close to eugenics for my liking.


The type of development I would like to see is society adapting itself to cope with what was considered previously volatile psychoses.

Could be an issue in my terminology, but as far as I can tell (which is still broad and blurry), being able to administer such developments could result in some degree of normalization/acceptance of psychotic or psychotic-like states. Speculation.

What I mean is, as far as I know, it might be possible to willfully rewire your brain, provided one can muster enough energy, focus, etc.

 

[constant escape]

hang on, a vaccine is a substance.

And yeah, didn't catch this apparent contradiction, but its all good. I do mean without the use of substances, and I just just referring to vaccines as examples of metastabilizations, of introducing some critical amount of this or that destabilizing agent, which, as far as I can tell, can apply to immaterial, purely psychic matters as well as physical ones.

 

[constant escape]

And the eugenics threat is one for which I would rather err on the side of caution. That said, I don't see it being a major obstacle here. Other major obstacles sure. But people of all races and of all times, from what I gather, have pointed in the key directions I'm pointing in.

I suppose any sort of racist eugenics issue may stem from the conflation of technological advancement with intrinsic evolutionary advancement - which is admittedly a conflation I need to take pains to avoid making.

 

[constant escape]

Should be possible to not only reason your way around that one, but also steer your belief around it, all in good faith.