Interesting posts.

I think the "tuning in" and having a silent mind is a step that one needs to get fairly good at before doing imagination traveling. Because you basically want to be good at catching your mind if it drifts to an unwanted place or thoughts and redirect it to your willed direction.


LAtely I have been having cannabis + meditation sessions were it is easy to transition
from a heavy visual experience to a quiet mind state and back and forth, it seems to be
a great way of exploring.

More conclusions from the imagination experiments. (see previous posts)


The imagination seems to be alive and influenced by an external force that provides uncanny images(visual forces?) but at the same time you are able to influence and create your own images and scenarios and be surprised by them.

The imagination is probably our best tool, it lets us access the infinite(another dimensioN?), the other and our own creative power and influence. This tool has been suppressed by modern culture.

Practice makes perfect, the more you use your imagination the better you get and the more you can surprise yourself with your creations or unexpected experiences or solution or conclusions. Everything becomes more vivid.

THe meditation accompanies all emotion- well being, ego death, compassion but at the same time - Vitality and confidence in yourself, your creative ability and your survival.

.....

I know these are all debatable but that is how I feel at the moment.

There is a part of me that must agree that, ultimately, it may be best to gain the most ground in meditation soberly. It is easier in some respects to meditate high. But also, what if you don't have it or can't get it?

That said, ganja is deeply rooted in the quest to know higher realities and as long as one does not depend on it exclusively for any ability to meditate, I say let no other come between a man/woman and their inner quest.

While this article has some valid points, her self-righteous attitude is just typical religious americana even if it's the new-age yogi school. Unfortunately, she makes a ton of assumptions about what is and is not possible under the influence of cannabis:
Julie Phillips-Turner: 5 reasons yogis shouldn't smoke marijuana


On the other hand, the media frenzy over everything weed is pure stupidity, especially where it exploits chillum-smoking sadhus. I liked this article in hinduism today that offers a variety of perspectives (not all enlightened):
The Chillum Question

Well a lot of people agree that through "herbs" you can reach enlightenment I think it was written in the oldest books of yoga as one of the ways(i remember researching this once a long time ago) . What herbs? it is debatable but we can deduce that it was mind altering herbs. I don't care to go to much into detail.

For many people believe that all influential religions steam out from a shamanic use of some type of drug. And what happened was that the drug or the info about it became lost for thousands of years and from there we get all these religious rituals to make up for the lack of mind altering drugs.(meditate with your back straight, two breaths in one out, cross your fingers etc etc)

The funny thing is that now, all the people that are religious fanatics want to say that don't use mind altering drugs to get there since the "natural" is better. For me it is because then their rituals become unimportant.


SO in conclusion I believe that for people living in big cities that don't have time to spend 11 hours in a cave meditating. The mind altering herbs are a great way to get there .

Smoke weed close your eyes and meditate with no sense of guilt.

after recently eating a fair amout of lucy( 25 hits in about 2 weeks) i was drinking and smoking some hash oil the other night and in a sort of half sleep trance i was pulled into intense dmt esce visuals and a feeling of body being lifted up while my mouth felt almost held in place, when i was semi frightened by this knowing i wansnt under the influence of any psycedelic i moved and returned to a baseline so to speak. i dont know if it was due to a deep state of relaxation and conciously drifting into sleep while having thoughts of psychedelia but i am very interested in this topic and others experiences

I use MaryJane during my meditations regularly. As I do at least 30 minutes per day, with some much longer sessions thrown in per month I have found that when Mary joins me I do find myself getting to that undefined body space very quickly (Where you lose all sensation of where you stop and the world begins) I love this feeling and sometimes when I reach it I can knock myself out by getting excited and if I am using Mary at the time,return to normality fairly quickly, though without I do find it easier to stay there. (Similar to your experience of not being able to hold it as long?) I deduced from this that I simply require more control over my emotions and mind, Mary is simply putting me on a fast-track and I need to learn to keep up with her!

Interesting thread.

Yesterday, I realized that cannabis is actually more especially suited to meditation than it is for any other purpose. In working, problem-solving life, while fun and certainly useful as escape therapy, herb makes it much more difficult to follow conversations, remember instructions, and take considered approaches to various problems or challenges. I find it harder to be present as the saying goes. The reason is because it just launches my mind into the clouds. Now if I apply some discipline to that state whilst not having to perform workaday duties, in other words - in a state of meditation - it becomes extremely useful.

I definitely see that it has its limits for meditation as well. But if anyone has attempted to meditate and struggled with it, or they are not sure where they are going with it, a little ganja can help. That marijuana somehow gives rise to or creates "maya" as one of the authors in those links said, is a bit absurd. Maya does not require THC to lead you astray.
We all struggle with maya, even people who have never smoked pot in their life.

Another extremely helpful drug for meditation is caffeine, but only in very careful doses. Too much, and you can really ruin it in my experience.

I once had a permanent mental change from an epic/heroic dose of cannabis, and this thread seems like the place to share it. One of the reasons that I have gotten into psychedelics is to try and treat some life long problems with PTSD and OCD. I have been in therapy trying to deal with this for quite a while and one of the things that has completely bothered my therapist is that all my memories were in 1st person perspective. She tells me that everyone has dreams and memories from 1st and 3rd person perspectives. I simply didn't understand this and told her, "How can I possibly have a memory where I am looking at myself from the outside? That makes no sense. Everything happens in 1st person perspective and that's how I remember it." But when I asked around, some people were pretty shocked that I had no memories or dreams this way. My therapist delved into this a lot.

I am no stranger to meditation, and when I was younger I was able to meditate until my mind was blank and also achieve out of body experiences (Yay!), and some lucid dreams (Yay!), and common side effects like profound sleep paralysis (Boo!). I didn't really start smoking weed until I was in my mid 30's due to my disdain for all things drug-like. But my desperation to deal with PTSD and OCD sort of drove me to it. Over the years I have tried several different medications (8 in all I think) and none of them even touched it. So in my quest to fix this I started to read about cannabis and psychedelics and started to experiment. My doctors were just throwing drugs at me and shrugging when it didn't work, so I actually thought I might get farther if I took matters into my own hands. Before you judge me please take note that I have been in the medical field for over 20 years and for several years taught pharmacology on a college level. When I decided to do this I hit the ground running and did it right.

Then there was this one night...I was depressed with a capital D. I thought my marriage might be ending. I had just bought an 1/8 bag of green stuff and everyone in the house was asleep but me. So I went to my lair in the basement and decided to have a serious introspective journey to figure out what to do. I started some of my old meditative practices, and I fired up my favorite bong. Dosage? I usually take 1 or 2 tokes to chill out or relax. I take 3 or 4 to get high. That night? I am sorry to say I finished a couple of hits left in the bowl. I filled that puppy up to the brim with new stuff and took 15 or 16 long deep hits to get it down. I dumped the ash out and loaded up again and took another 15 or 16 hits until that was ash. So total hits was something like 35 or so? Anyway...I have never smoked anything like shatter so I had never gone this far. Something in my head simply snapped.

I had really disturbing visuals for a few moments. Everything in the room would get closer to my vision field and then recede away again. Imagine a Hitchcock Vertigo kind of thing that repeated for a few seconds. Then I heard some sort of low deep whooshing sound that was too loud for comfort. I thought I was being fed into some sort of machine. But the sound started to slowly speed up and raise in pitch. After awhile it sped up to normal and I realized the it was just the central air fan. So basically I was high as balls, but it wasn't quite psychedelic. This was something entirely different. After the world stopped imploding on itself and time sped back up to normal I tried to get introspective and work on the current problem.

The next day I realized something: I now had memories in the 3rd person perspective. This was fascinating and also scary. For the next few days I was not sure if these new memories were real. And to be honest, some weren't. They were just projections onto my abusive, rotten childhood. But in time I got used to it and through more meditation and introspection (and maybe a little more weed, but not as much) I got to the truth. Memories of my childhood have almost doubled. Some are horrible memories that were obviously being repressed. But some are perfectly pleasant. I guess I was throwing the baby out with the bath water in my attempt to do a global search and delete of my entire childhood.

Anyway, long story short...this change was permanent and useful. My therapist didn't like the fact that my single most profound step forward in therapy came from an earth shattering drug induced haze. But she is actually not opposed to light weed usage. She would just rather I not do heroic doses. I left out stories of drinking ayahuasca, eating shrooms, and smoking changa. Gotta keep something back from the therapist, right? I am currently growing/extracting to get farther, and this is basically why I landed on your doorstep. Hopefully I can succeed where shitty psychotherapy has failed.

If I was you Boo Radley, my therapist would hate me. With an experience like yours, I would enlighten him/her past the point of where they'd like to be enlightened about the effectiveness of all natural psychoactive plants.

In the end, they may feel as if their entire profession is a sham, and rightfully so, ...

I'm curious, do you still see that therapist? Do you feel indignant vibes from him/her because you self-medicated; and even more so, because it worked?

I just wonder sometimes if psychiatrists and therapists know how much more they could be helping people if they didn't follow the traditional schema, and if they even care.

This morning after eating a good amount of coco canna oil and having been only taking maybe 10 good hits through out my days the last couple weeks (very low tolerance.) I got on here to read this thread and then lay back in bed and closed my eyes. I completely disconnected from my body I felt I was floating above myself, but also at the same time were looking up from below and there was a small light among a great canvas of black. Almost like the light at the end of a tunnel but looking from below. This lasted a good three hours or so, it was extremely warm and enjoyable. Lately smoking herb gives me panic attacks.

I have had several therapists. This particular one is very nice, and helped me quite a bit. However, insurance will not pay for a psychiatrist to do therapy. I was seeing a person with a Master's Degree in therapy. I would have to go to another psychiatrist who would see me for 20 minutes, dismiss everything I said, and throw some spaghetti at the wall in the form of zoloft, paxil, citalopram, escitalopram, evavil, prozac, and a bunch of others and just say, "Oops, this didn't work lets try another." Psychiatrists in the US can't make any money doing what they do, and insurance companies won't pay for this level of care. So I get to see a therapist with a masters, and I get once a month med checks that are 20 minutes long with a psychiatrist. Due to insurance restrictions that's all they can bill for. And to make it look uglier, most psychiatrists were the worst doctors in medical school and the reason they wound up as a psychiatrist instead of a surgeon, PCP, urologist, or just about anything else is that this was the only residency they could get. So I was having to go to one of these 20 minute medication mills that has, no kidding, 20 or 25 of these guys handing out stuff from there list o' insurance covered candy to see if any of it works.

But my therapist was actually pretty sympathetic to my plight and even admitted that she smoke weed herself on occasion. She was concerned about my Terrance McKenna style heroic dose, but that is understandable. She was afraid that I had gotten way too depressed and had done something that maybe I shouldn't have. And this was just displayed as a concern. I appreciate that, and to be honest if I were a practitioner in this field and a super depressed guy told me that he did an epic amount of drugs and permanently kicked his mind into another gear I would have a few questions too. Once I had a long conversation with her she was cool with it and didn't rat me out or try to put me into some in-patient program. So no harm there. She actually did me some good.

But here I am with another long post...so I will cut to the chase. She saw me on and off for about two years and the more she learned the more she started to admit that she was in over her head. So she and my primary care physician put their heads together and approached my insurance company explaining that I was a special case and needed more attention. So we got a few visits cleared for someone with more credentials. They found someone close to me that has BOTH and MD and a PhD in psychology. These are rare birds indeed. By my reasoning he must have spent 20 years in college, grad school, and residencies to get these credentials. This won't be a guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class. This is a guy who has a hard on for mental health. My first appointment with this fellow is next week, so we will see how this goes.

I don't think I will go into my psychoactive experiments on the first visit. I will feel him out first. He has a lot of letters after his name, but he may still be uninformed. We'll see. But my basement pharmacology experiments continue...

Very interesting. Intense altered states show you the power of meditation in a clear way cuz you get immediate results. On substances, so far I've tried it on cannabis and ayahuasca and couldn't do it in either case. Actually I tried it on a PCP analogue and it was extremely easy. Has anyone here tried meditating on dissociatives? I usually find meditation tricky since I'm a newbie, but on dissociatives I'm like a meditation master, I can sit there indefinitely observing. I'm a newbie to meditation. But theres another altered state where meditation happens to work insanely well. I get this thing called sleep paralysis, its when my body falls sleep but my mind is still awake. So I'm laying there paralysed and I start getting bombarded by hallucinations (they call them hypnagogic hallucinations). Its fun, interesting and disturbing at the same time. It can get downright terrifying at times, to the point that I learned how to pull myself out of paralysis to escape it (that takes massive effort, I wouldn't put that effort in for nothing). I've been getting it for years and tried all kinds of things to make myself immune to the hallucinations (they prod me in the back, cover my eyes, bite me, and on occasion even sodomise me lol, so they can be a pain in the ass) and after trying a thousand things that had little or no effect, I eventually I figured out something that works. Its to simply lay there and observe everything, without reacting to any of it, or analysing it. A few years later I was at a Buddhist retreat and learned about meditation and figured out that this is called Vipassana meditation.

If anyone here gets sleep paralysis, try meditating and see what happens. With me, the nature of the hallucinations instantly change and I become immune to everything, nothing can make me react in any way. It makes it much more interesting too because its like when I don't react to the hallucinations, they lose interest in me so they go off and do their own thing and I can watch them doing their own thing. Well, I can't see them I don't get visual hallucinations in sleep paralysis, I get auditory and tactile ones so I can hear trippy things like conversations, music playing and trippy alien sounds. Sleep paralysis is amazing, its like a whole new type of altered state that we can access without substances (although I find opioids make me much more likely to get it) and we can see things you can't see anywhere else. Like how dreams start. Buddhists talk a lot about the power of breathing, I thought that was all nonsense before, but lately I realised that by slowing my breath in sleep paralysis I can intentionally transition myself into a dream. Makes sense since we fall unconscious when we don't get enough oxygen to the brain, and when we sleep we don't breath as much since we use less oxygen. But theres more to it than that. Its not just about using less oxygen, the breath is actually what controls our ability to enter dreams. That means the Buddhists are right, by controlling our breath we can alter our consciousness.

We need to find a way to induce sleep paralysis, because psychonauts here would love it. Its as mind blowing as any psychedelic I've tried, and thats saying a lot. I managed to induce it once so far, I did it with affirmations I said in my head "I WILL REMAIN 100% CONSCIOUS AND LUCID WHEN I FALL ASLEEP TONIGHT AND REMEMBER EVERYTHING". The very first time I tried it, and that night I went into sleep paralysis for the first time in months. I tried it 5 times after and couldn't replicate it, but if it worked once, then its possible, we just need to find the right technique. Affirmations work really well for lucid dreams, but I had never heard about them inducing sleep paralysis thats real interesting stuff. There are techniques online for inducing sleep paralysis, they sound pretty difficult, I never bothered trying them since I get it naturally but I'm gonna use my natural tendency for this to try and uncover some mechanisms and find a way to induce it. I'm 100% sure breathing is an essential aspect to it. I get sleep paralysis all the time on opioids, and opioids induce respiratory depression. I also have naturally low blood pressure and pulse and sometimes when it gets really low, I get a bout of sleep paralysis. So oxygen supply to the brain has something to do with it. When I'm in sleep paralysis, if I breath fast the hallucinations get less intense. If I slow my breath, the sensations get really heavy and I rapidly go into dream mode. The body panics at first, you feel like your suffocating but you're not, when the body is paralysed it doesn't need as much oxygen. Sorry for derailing the thread, I'm gonna transfer this to a thread of its own.