CatholicPsychonaut wrote:Shivaya wrote:This is thread is making me ask a more basic question: Why do we do it?
No one here describes anything enjoyable, so why so we put ourselves through this? Hard to integrate, hard to go on with normal life, hard to go back... why do we do it?
Interesting question, Shiva... I have been asking myself the same question as of late. I am 100% miserable lately, something which I only partially attribute to my DMT consumption. Actually, it is a symptom of the same disease that led me to smoke DMT in the first place. Now that I have smoked it, I am made more acutely aware of the things in my life that I need to address, the ways I earn my living that I need to change... The only problem is that the DMT didn't really give me the courage to make the change, and now I'm miserable because I KNOW I need to do something different to be happy, but I'm not brave enough to do so.
You and me both brother.
Knowing what needs to be changed, and not being able to muster the willpower to do so is one of the main reasons i am taking a good long break from psychadelics. Its not the same knowing i have work to do before i can learn more, and often times counterproductive to the reasons we trip in the first place, to improve our lives (well some of the time
). I guess continuing to trip without "integrating" what you learned, is by definition crazy. But you can also do that to beat the lesson into your head, but i don't reccomend that, it diddn't work for me, and believe me, i tried.
For me, Everything was fine, until i got into the heavy stuff, and your mind has to deal with it, or know what you have to do and not be able to change it for whatever self-limiting reasons.
But, it could be the greatest lesson ever learned from tripping. The thing that changes your life the most. Sometimes you have to accept that you can't change something you want to, and learn to live with it as well.
Cognitive dissonance is one hell of a mistress.
"let those who have talked to the elves, find each other and band together" -TMK
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, etc. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.” - Wendell Berry