i was reading the music thread today and a discussion (argument?) ensued as to which type of music was perceived as psychedelic. I wanted to wade in with my thoughts but am a newb. I think it is a very personal meaning to each individual depending on what goes into your brain in the way of outside stimuli as you are growing up.I was tripping many years ago and David Bellamy came up on the telly. He was drilling down into the ice on the North Pole and i remember seeing his beard all iced up and i thought it looked really cool, all crystally and sparkly. Now i think of David Bellamy"S beard as psychedelic. Can anything be psychedelic? What does psychedelic mean to you, in genearal? And if you reply please no dictionary quotes.

a psychedelic mind sees everything as psychedelic


To me psychedelic is colourful

I mean, when you're tripping hard enough, everything looks psychedelic. I don't see why you couldn't learn to perceive some of those qualities in sober life.

What is psychedelic can range between different people, as what some people experience on psychedelics won't always present itself the same in aesthetic, character and content to some than others. If a person has had psychedelic experiences that are high in fractalesque detail, then it would make sense that this person would find other such patterns encountered in daily life psychedelic as well. If this kind of pattern permeates the music such as pieces within pieces within pieces of a whole, then this would probably be registered as psychedelic as well, if recognized.

If like me, during a heavy DMT experience, have witnessed a hallucination of a lullaby being chimed away on an instrument that sounded like a cross between a harp and a music box, all of a sudden lullabies, harps and music boxes become psychedelic.

I also have heard many sci-fi sounds, engine sounds, rocket sounds, computeresque bleepy-bloopy sequences and the like and thus these have become psychedelic for me.

To me, Egypt and Egyptian art has always been beautiful, but it wasn't until I started receiving Egyptian visions through DMT that I began to regard them as psychedelic.

I have no doubt that people that never take psychedelics, or do not witness certain features of a psychedelic first-hand, that these people will never find such qualities psychedelic, but I think it probably wouldn't leave quite the impact that it would have if it had been personally witnessed. Part of taking psychedelics is enhancing pattern recognition (both within and without the experience) such that patterns of detail may be strikingly ambiguous to the uninitiated, can appear quite orderly and significant to one who has dealt with such patterns "under the microscope" so-to-speak.

anything you become aware of to a rediculous degree becomes psychedelic in my opinion

psychedelic = enhanced state of awareness

I would say something is psychedelic if it can interest your brain or mind on a deeper level than normal consciousness.

For example a tin of beans. The beans inside aren't psychedelic but if you put the beans out and they form an interesting shape or pattern then the beans have took on a psychedelic form imo. lol a bit of a silly example but it basically shows that anything can be psychedelic. As i said in the music thread, you can't put the psychedelic experience in a labelled box. It can happen anywhere or anytime if you have had psychedelic experience with dmt or acid or mescline etc. Those substances can open your mind to the possibility that anything can be psychedelic imo good question OP.

Psyche-delic, something that reveals the self, the mind, the soul.
For me psychedelic is everything that reveals something about myself or enables me to understand something about the world around me and my place inside it.
Certain substances can certainly be a big psychedelic trigger but do not necessarily need to be. A yogi may use cannabis as a strong psychedelic plant, while a common stoner might just use it to laugh about the newest episode of How I met your Mother. Of cause the psychedelic potential differs with the substance.
Music, literature and art can definitely be psychedelic. Living things like trees, birds, fish, insects... all kinds of plants, animals and other liveforms can be severly psychedelic, especially in combination with certain substances. I have a seawater reef aquarium and I can certainly say that marine animals are pretty psychedelic.
Similarly the ocean and other waters, mountains, the vulcanic fields of island or other landscapes, conversations and sciences like biology, physics, chemistry... Although they are "just" more suffisticated observations of some of the things already mentioned.

All in all there are many things that can be called psychedelic, but none of them necessarily has to be. Maybe the most psychedelic thing is the mind itself, if you allow it to observe itself and let it run free through awareness, meditation, budo, sports.. whatever works for the person in question. Of course all of these things can be supported by certain substances.

everything... once you blast open the doors of perception

take a big dose of mushrooms in nature and stare at a big green leaf help up in front of the sun, then maybe it'll hit you

we're flying through outter space right now at hair raising speed my friends..spaceship earth happens to be a magma rock covered in unimaginably complex system of interconnected organic life processes.. all contained in an enourmous gravity well orbiting around a nuclear fireball (sun)...in the neighborhood of a few hundred billion swarms containing trillions of other nuclear fireballs. And that doesn't even begin to explain the utter beauty, weirdness, mystery, and complexity of it all. Consciousness and the multiverse it finds itself in (if there not one and the same already) is the ultimate psychedelic experience

And we are star dust. parts of the universe playing with itself. what could be more ridiculously psychedelic

IMO everything is psychedelic


But on the other hand- to contradict myself for a second- "psychedelic" is only a word coined by Osmond...Its greek roots actually mean "mind-manifesting". So yea things are a bit different if we want to strictly use the term that way

Donnie Osmond?

no, humphry osmond

good answer

Great quote! I agree very much with this. So in essence, you don't need psychedelic substances to have a psychedelic view on reality (though they certainly do help ). I think I have always had a psychedelic view on reality even before I was aware of psychedelic substances or the meaning of the word psychedelic. I remember when I first read about LSD and the like in my early teens I was instantly fascinated and when I finally got around to trying them it only reinforced the way I already looked at reality (though it expanded it exponentially and made me more aware and open to much deeper layers that I didn't know existed within my own mind and existence).

This is an especially good thread so far! By and large I agree with all of these definitions.

My wife and I tripped together a lot in the early years of our relationship, and now even 20 years later (I think it's been 15 years since she's taken anything) we have a great time pointing out psychedelic things to each other. Nature is chock full of it. Soap bubbles! Sea slugs! Clouds!!!

Really, I think anything that, in its inherent form, displays or reveals the deeper nature of our reality- I would call those things psychedelic.

I really like this definition. I was hunting for something like it, but I think this hits the nail on the head.

I love this

To me psychedelic has always meant a blurring or removal of the individual's illusion of separateness.

Well in regards to music, and I may offend some people here and I apologize beforehand if I do.

I don't the Grateful Dead is very psychedelic and never understood why they had such a huge psychedelic following. I mean being formed during the acid tests you would think they'd be a little trippier or more experimental.
I would definitely consider Pink Floyd to be more psychedelic, even though collectively the members of the Dead probably did over 1000x the amount of LSD as the members of Pink Floyd.

But thats just like my opinion man

Syd barrett probably did more lsd than the whole of the grateful dead put together lol j/k

^^^^^ lol That thought definitely crossed my mind

verbatim that

I just randomly came across a passage in " The Food of the Gods " book that a psychiatrist named Humprey Osmond coined the term psychedelic, and it means " Mind Manifesting "