I don't understand specifically how it's a "bad link"... the information is absolutely applicable to understanding the personal healing capacity of the body. So if you could please explain to me what you perceive the disconnect to be (as in, how you don't believe it's "quality information", in which specific ways its not, I would truly appreciate it for my own understanding so I can learn from your viewpoint and adjust my future "quality information" posts accordingly (not being touchy btw, I just truly don't understand)

Also just for clarification, I'm not here to convince anyone of how bad these things truly are, the fact of the matter is that they are both, and because this forum consists of all kinds of people with varying levels of experience ranging from novice to (I'm sure in some aspects far surpasses my own experience in a lot of levels) I simply feel it proper to also point out the dangerous aspects, or the pitfalls in the use of these drugs for the general safety of the user; for example the dangers inherent in excessive dosage, which can generally lead to harmful experiences. I'm just simply sharing some of the dangers I learned from my own experiences so they could possibly be avoided by someone else in the future... it may not help you, if you already know this stuff, but maybe it will help someone else who's new to this. I'm not preaching against the drugs, if anything I'm supporting their proper use with the intent to eliminate as many side effects as possible, that's all. Again if I'm somehow wrong in doing so then please let me know how here as well so I can learn from it.

I don't understand in which way it's confrontational, it was intended as supporting evidence for the informative link which was deemed "improper information". And which "earlier post" are you referring to specifically? I just don't understand the point, clarification would be appreciated. Thanks (confrontational in regards to your earlier post? or confrontational in regards to me posting that "inspirational healing journey" video? Not sure if you're saying you made a mistake, or if you're saying I made one... for what it's worth I see where I made the mistake, and I apologize)

I'm assuming you're referring to this post. And I also assume you're referring to my memes as "confrontational"... just for clarification, it's called a joke. I would like to think that I can respectfully and intelligently challenge any viewpoint on this forum which I do not directly understand, for the purposes of a fruitful and educational discussion and clarification where appropriate, moderator viewpoints including. If I'm somehow wrong in this presumption, then please let me know.

I don't feel in any way that the attempt at a little humor was out of line

Not ANY experience is a poison, but SOME experiences are certainly poisonous, if they contribute consistent damage to your being in any way

Absolutely, it depends how you use the sex energy; if you use it in a consistently lustful way, you're just wasting energy, and it will draw negatively on your life-source, and so would be considered poisonous. If you use it in a creative way, to enrich yourself and grow from it to higher love, then it's not poison, but in fact is a very healing and positive application; same energy, two different applications

If LSD has gone to the point of causing flash backs, then it was used in a damaging way, either for too long, or too high of a dosage, I've used LSD a handfull of times and have never had any kind of flashbacks from it or any trauma whatsoever. Trauma itself, is another form of poison, it's damaging, but can be healed... should be avoided whenever possible.

No, it's not about staying at home in bed, it's about wisely using the energies and medicines provided for creative and beneficial means and applications while eliminating as many side effects as humanly possible in the process; respect the medicines and your own bodily energies and use them appropriately to enrich yourself, that's all I was basically saying

Hope that clears it up

"If LSD has gone to the point of causing flash backs, then it was used in a damaging way, either for too long, or too high of a dosage, I've used LSD a handfull of times and have never had any kind of flashbacks from it or any trauma whatsoever."

Why do you still insist on speaking about YOUR opinions as if they are facts that can be generalized onto everybody?

Many people have experienced residual perceptual changes or spontaneous spiritual experiences leaking into life after lsd(or other psychs)... some of these experiences you could very well call "flash backs"... and yet they consider them to be a blessing- not a negative side effect (although that is a possibility to of course...its not strictly either or)

because I have direct experience with trauma on the whole, and I know what it is, it's damaging to the psyche, and can happen from a wide variety of things. And can also absolutely be healed... but the cause of it (trauma being the effect of the cause) is from a damaging experience... soo, ergo, if trauma was cause by LSD, then the use of LSD was damaging for one reason or another in that particular instance.

A spiritual, or beneficial perceptual change will never leave one traumatized; it will leave one more liberated and enriched. So, I guess trauma in and of itself also has two different expressions; positive and negative. Love can be traumatizing, but in a positive way. Enlightenment or enlightening insights can be traumatizing (like "NO WAY THAT'S ABSOLUTELY TRUE... I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT PERSPECTIVE AT ALL BEFORE, BUT IT'S ABSOLUTELY TRUE" would be an example of a positive trauma. But trauma which creates fear, or negativity, or tension, comes from a negative experience and is psychologically damaging (tho again, can absolutely be healed with time and proper respect)

Also flashbacks, as far as I understand them from having to deal with army PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and TBI (traumatic brain injury) cases, are due to conscious looping over some traumatic event that was never properly re-integrated into life... and so causes traumatic depression, hence flashbacks... because the consciousness is stuck in some past event somewhere.

Here's a few links that may help on healing negative cases of conscious trauma for those that need it;

Healing Traumatic Memories

and

Dynamic Meditation


^^have personally used this in conjunction with psychoactive substances with great success

Also if anyone is interested about knowing what depression truly is, here's another link with lots of good information where I helped a fellow servicemember address his TBI and depression, all of page 2 is full of useful information.

healing trauma and depression

I recently had a discussion with a fella who said that the body fights psicolybine in immune system and that's where the effects come from. It struck me as 'wtf' and since i don't know for sure i coulden't tell him he was wrong. I'm still not sure if the immune system is affected in any way.

As for psychological damage like trauma.. It is my understanding that psychedelics can reveal what is normally hidden in subconscious activity. For someone to experience trauma from a psychedelic experience, it is likely the person had to have had some kind of mental imbalance in the first place. The psychedelics likely excegerrated and broke open the gates of a subconsciously troubled mind. I would be happy to have this happen, because that means unhealthy subconscious activity is now conscious activity, allowing me to move on to the next step, which is - Intergration -

(btw, sorry i don't have scientific references to support my claims. But i don't think a quick google search will reak up any study which refers to this particulair psychological issue i am presenting here..)

I think 90% of the people who experience trauma from psychedelics fail at this aspect of intergration. Understandably so. A possibly life-shattering experience is something you would rather just ignore and act as if it never happened. Denial is only the first step to the cure. On top of that, psyches have a weird way of opening up consciousness. Without proper guidance it is impossible for some people to even understand what happened and how to deal with it.

But to say that mushrooms or dmt is toxic because it 'might' catalyze a traumatic experience i just can not agree with. Not that my opinion matters, or the opinion of brokenChild. I am inclined to respect any opinion voiced. So long as i don't read an article in the newspaper written by brokenChild with the catchy title "Psychedelics are poisonous. BE WARY OF DMT FREAKS!" *_*

I admit i have not used LSD myself so i can not speak for it's effect on consciousness. For me, LSD might be a hazardous trauma introducing substance with a ridiculously high LD50 rate.

^^lulz no brother, I would never write an article for the paper. My thoughts/expressions and experience is directed for the sole purpose of proper application to the people and places that need it; not to the news media, could care less about the media.

I hear absolutely what you are saying on the troubled mind aspect and psylocybin use, and to my experience that's generally true, I can tell you prior to using myshrooms I was certainly troubled.

That still leads to reason that excessive doses of any psychoactive drug can and will in some cases lead to possible psychological trauma, simply from the overwhelmingness of the experience and the mental strain they put on the psyche. Again, these experiences are rare, and can be avoided with proper respect of the dosage, but I can absolutely speak towards my own experience of having this happen to me once before (the 7 illusive grams of mushrooms... still not sure what kind they were, but they were fairly potent, and first time I took such a hefty dose, tho I had certainly built experience up from prior use before attempting it; was just simply too much.... in the same way that alcohol, in too heavy of a dose, is purely poisoning to the body; but a red glass of wine a day is allegedly chock full of antioxidant benefits and heart-health supportive according to most medical studies (common knowledge can be googled).

Again tho, that's just my honest opinion based on my own extensive experience with these drugs

Also, per DMT use, I have to say that ayahuasca is a marvelous and magical medicine, and will leave it at that

Lighten up a little

I'm not here to dispute beliefs, if anything I can only present to you my viewpoint on all beliefs, which makes sense to me, and this video will help, particularly at 1:17 in, but the whole video is very educational in my honest opinion



just presenting a viewpoint, not trying to tell anyone what to believe or not believe, that's everyone's own personal right and freedom.


As far as the standards of this place goes, I clearly see the intentions and the benefits of this wonderful community, and am absolutely happy to uphold those standards to their fullest potential. But, on that same note I feel like one should also be free to at least respectfully ask for clarification, and mayhaps it's best that those standards be flexible enough to allow room for positive, enriching and fruitful growth for the sake of benefitting the community as a whole. That's just my view on it tho, felt it needed a little clarification. Thanks for your thoughts JBark, I always appreciate your input

There is nothing that jbark said that would warrant the response "lighten up a little". Read his words carefully, because you claim to know how to listen.

To end this ordeal of "I know, I have experience", I have a specific autoimmune disease. That does not make me an expert on that disease, NOR on autoimmune diseases in general. Again, we are all different, between and within groups, and to facilitate dissemination of information, we follow specific guidelines and rules (in this forum). My advice is to try to ease up on definitive statements such as "oh this is because" "then it has to be this" "this only happens when".. etc, unless you are able to provide supporting evidence of those claims.

I'm light as a feather these days, my friend, light as a feather.

But I do have to note that posting a video about a man who prevailed despite overwhelming opinion and dismal odds after dreamer042 pointed out that a link you posted was a dubious support of your claim can easily be taken as a glib dig and not a joke. Being generous, posting it was at best ambiguous - and at worst a slap in the face that says "I don't agree with you" in a confrontational, infantilizing and disrespectfully ridiculing tone. At least two of us here assumed you were "taking the piss" and provoking further dispute...

To be honest, it really is hard to get a feel for your intentions. You equivocate between apologies and glibness, so that even those apologies leave (at least me) wondering if they are genuine or sarcastic. This may be at the root of why you are meeting so much resistance here. At the risk of sounding condescending, maybe reread your posts and imagine all the possible reactions someone else might have. If it is ambiguous, clean up the language so you won't be misread or misinterpreted.

Anyway, i hope we can get back on track. I am certain you have good intentions and hell, despite the preceding two paragraphs, I am a pretty light guy (with a healthy balance of humour and gravitas).

Cheers,

JBArk

I have provided all the supporting evidence I possibly could to the claims that I've made, if for some reason there is still a difference of perspective, then I will respectfully agree to disagree.

Point accepted, and respectfully taken into consideration, I'll do my best to be as clear as possible in my statements. Again, perhaps at times it's just the limiting capacity of the language to express.

Think of it like this; I know what I'm saying, and what I'm talking about, because I speak from my experience. Of course, if you had full and direct access into the totality of my experience, you may agree, you may disagree, but at least you would know exactly the perspective from which the statement was formulated, and you may at least see relevant validity in it.

That said, obviously I cannot give you my experience, nor you me yours, so the best we can hope to do is find some common ground for clear communication. Basically if at some further point I make a statement which seems unclear to you, I am absolutely open to the request for clarification for the purposes of common understanding and proper interrelation. Thanks again brother

The only proper references you provided were in respect to cannabis and its purported toxicity. The rest involved a post made in another forum, a website(!), an online magazine, and foxnews. These are not evidence, they are people with personal experiences who decide to share them, pretty much what you are doing (some of them may have other motives as well, rendering their validity completely dubious). We are looking for actual studies on the rest of your claims, studies like those you found regarding cannabis.

It's not a difference in perspective, but rather a difference in the methodology of research. When we make claims, we think how much we can generalise them to the population, and the best way to do this is to test these hypotheses a great amount of times, taking all the factors into consideration, and with different individuals. Then we can see some tendencies.




We all have unique experiences. Yet, we cannot generalise it to anyone else besides ourselves; every condition, event, behaviour, approach, manifests itself differently to each and every one of us.

Respectfully, your experience is just that: your experience, not to be applied universally or generalized - there is protocol for that, and a few hundred years of refining a process so that one person's experience can remain a mere interesting anecdote, while rigorous study and the collecting of mountains of data under the most objective of conditions possible can garner credible support and reproducible, peer reviewed results for the kind of claims you have made here.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh - it's not meant in that spirit. It's just that you keep posting statements like the quoted one (and others in your post) that underline that you are likely not really getting what we are getting at. (I am including The Neural in this, as I agree with his posts).

Anyway, I feel again like I am needling you, but I hope you don't take it this way. Just trying to clarify and re-clarify my point, as thus far you seem genuinely interested in understanding it, unless I am reading it wrong. Just ignore this post if you are getting annoyed.

Cheers,

JBArk

To quote benzyme from Laughingcats' paper thread : "tough crowd".

This thread has veered a little from the premise of its title but I think it raises a few points that are relevant.

Anecdotes and personal experiences, be they positive or otherwise, do not constitute firm evidence. This is where it starts to get tricky ie a personal experience MAY be applicable across the board but it is impossible to know whether that is the case when the sample size (ie those with that experience) is small (low number). The observed results MAY be simply a chance finding, or MAY be due to some aspect of the indivuduals make-up or constitution. And who can say for sure that all people will have the same experience under the same conditions?

Its often said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics but the latter are an immensely powerful tool for lending support to ideas of cause and effect, outcomes etc, and tedious as they are, its worth knowing a little bit about statistics so one can actually get an appreciation of what scientific trials and papers are putting forth. Although anecdotal reports and experiences mean a lot to the subject, making extrapolations on the basis of this to all and sundry is not a robust way of establishing the 'facts'.

Well, at least you guys are thinking Now let's see if we can clear up some confusion;

First of all, the fox-news article was provided by Jamie, not by me. I simply affirmed it's relative application based on my personal experience with the plants and what I could confirm their effect to be on me.

Secondly, the link I provided, which was deemed as "bad link" or "bad information" is absolutely false, in my perspective, and the supporting evidence that I provided for the assertion of this fact was the transformation video of that paratrooper.

So, let's take a look at the information in that link again, shall we?
http://www.lifetrainings...is-running-you-life.html


Now, if this information is not relevant to the video, and the change in Arthur's state of mind which was clearly expressed as a positive change in his overall health as a whole (he had actual bone problems, and all he did was change his conscious attitude and put forth some due diligence, pushed through some yogic exercises, and was able to literally transform his body, with seemingly nothing more than the right attitude and some elbow grease)

Now, if that link does not support the information in this video, then I honestly don't know what does;


As far as my link to a website on the nature of depression and anxiety, and some of those psychological problems, I studied all kinds of psychology in college for over 5 years, everything from behavioral psychology to clinical psychology, and I can verify for a fact that information is true and accurate, as well as applicable to a whole slew of individuals that I've come across. This includes everything from military trauma patients (I served in the army for 2+yrs) as well as the general traumas received from simple things from fear, to car accidents, to any host of problems big and small. Again, does this apply to absolutely EVERY trauma out there? I have no idea to tell you the truth, but I can tell you that the knowledge certainly does apply to proper understanding of what trauma is on the whole.

I can also tell you, from my own experience, that I used that very same information to clear out my own depression and traumas, with the aid of about two months worth of ayahuasca sessions, and that understanding, as well as just personal conscious response. I can't find any lasting issues from my past anymore and I also no longer have any kind of depression issues that I can tell (which, by the way, lasted for the majority of my life (almost two decades) and no medication on its own was able to fix (I've tried everything from uppers, downers, mood stabilizers, pot, absolutely everything) Soo, long story short, that information, with the proper understanding and application, can actually help a lot of people, I do not present this lightly. I'm not saying it will fix absolutely every fault in every way, but it is certainly essential to fix quite a lot of people's common psychological problems based on my own personal understanding, and my knowledge of psychology on the whole. As well as my personal and direct experience



Also, another point that I will bring up which is absolutely vital to this discussion; you guys place SO MUCH importance on medical studies, but you don't even see or realize their limited application. ALL medical studies are studies done on a group of people, and the data extracted is a statistical average, which applies to NO ONE! It only applies to the "average man" which exists nowhere... so individual application of case studies, even medical ones, is limited at best. That's why there's so many conflicting studies out there, because if a study is done on a different group, it is bound to yield different data... yes, certain generalizations can be extrapolated that may yield consistently valid results, but the application of studies on the whole, when it comes to individual experience, is limited at best.

As mentioned before, I work with anabolic substances quite regularly (steroids) basically because I need my own healing benefit from it (patching up old lasting physical injuries from the army) so I've learned quite a bit about their proper medical applications. That said, I started out by looking at medical studies, and even gave some advice to a few friends based on those very same medical studies; "sound" advice, or so I thought. Experience, however, showed something completely different. The truth is that every physiological system is unique to the individual, and a general case study does not always apply to the unique and specific needs of the individual. So, there's no way, even with medical studies, to generalize any kind of common application. The caviat always exists that "this may not work for this specific person". Such is life, yet we do the best we can.

I absolutely agree with this statement, but on the same hand there ARE certain things that we can generalize as a common truth applicable to just about everyone;

For example, excessive dosage of ANYTHING leads to side effects of one sort or another when it comes to drugs; and this is true with just about every drug on the planet. The good doctor can even confirm this from his own experience. If you take 10 tylenols all at once, you're gonna have some problems. The same way, if you take too much DMT all at once, you're also going to have some problems, I don't care who you are (as a general statement). The same for mushrooms, if you eat a pound of them, God help you. These are true generalizations, and are applicable to the human experience on the whole. The same way that if you stick your raw hand in the fire and hold it there long enough, you will get burned; this is an ABSOLUTE truth. Some truths are relative, relative to the individual, but some truths ARE absolute; we need food and water to live, we need to breath air to live... these are things that can be said about humanity as a whole.

I hope that cleared some of it up

Again, I will continue to make this same statement wherever applicable (and I'm not trying to be an asshole btw ) because in some cases I do see it's validity. My experience proves to me that if I take too high of a dose of any drug, there are going to be consequences, so based on that experience, I know what I'm talking about, and will suggest to others, for the benefit of their own personal safety, to respect the dosage of any and all medications.

That's basically all, and don't worry about the needling, I don't mind the challenging viewpoint at all, again it goes back to understanding from the proper perspective. Also I'm certainly not getting annoyed, I love nothing more than an intelligent discussion


edit- and if it wasn't clear enough, I mean no disrespect by that statement, if must be this can just be one of those cases of agree to disagree, but I completely understand what you are saying, and do appreciate your input

We do place importance on studies in general. This is what this forum is all about, and subsequently formulates the respective rules. If you feel that the importance we place on accurate information is excessive (and detrimental to a given goal), please take it up with the administrator, not the members who abide by the rules.

Yes, we do realise their limited application, why the (again) definitive statement "You do not"? We too have studied a variety a things, and some of us the same things you have studied, and possibly for a longer amount of time, yet we do not claim to "know what we're talking about". We too are skilled at statistics and data interpretation. Try to think of yourself as equal to us, instead of someone who will "enlighten" us. We all share information here, of many kinds, and if we decide to speak of things as facts, then (again), please follow the guidelines to do so. I ran out of ways to make this clear.



So, certainly, your personal study of N=1 (ONE person rather than a group of people), applies to no one as well (with way less power than a group study, which is our point to begin with).