Brainstorming

[Forkbender]

I'm really questioning reality lately. It seems to me that drug induced visions can be more real than day to day life. For me they make it clear to me that my intuition that all things are one is correct, while in real life you encounter 'other' things. But how can we know if something is more true than something else? Where does this certainty come from? Is it science or a gut feeling? Do we need to resort to relativism for us to accept the world as it is? Could it be that my intuition is wrong? Most people on this forum will ascribe some truthfulness to their trips, but couldn't there be a psychoanalytical explanation behind this? Couldn't these substances give us exactly what we want without us noticing it is just our own subconscious (I'm obviously not saying that this is the case, but we might consider it)?
One thing these substances can teach us is how to let go of old patterns in which we are stuck and which limit us in our everyday life. In this sense the old adage "Free your mind, and the rest will follow" might be very applicable. But how much freedom can we handle? Isn't it the case that when we are totally free, we aren't part anymore of the oneness of it all? And free to do what? Usually freedom is about starting new things. What kind of things? Art? Habits? Or is it even more personal? At what point do we recognize that enough is enough and that we need some security as well? Is it plausible that at this point we start using drugs that are more intersubjective, like perhaps MDMA (though this can be on shrooms as well, it is not this black and white)?
Your thoughts please...

 

[tryptonaut]

But how much freedom can we handle? Isn't it the case that when we are totally free, we aren't part anymore of the oneness of it all? And free to do what? Usually freedom is about starting new things. What kind of things? Art? Habits? Or is it even more personal?

I think what I learned from my experiences is that what is important in life is that I feel good in every moment, that I always do things which I enjoy. There is no other greater meaning I can grasp - everyone is going to die at some point and up to that moment you should enjoy life, every single moment. That's the best you can make of it (and it's not bad, is it?).

I'd like to add a quote from Franz Kafka which I think is also very much to the point:
"The key to eternal youth is the ability to recognize beauty. He who has this ability will never become old."

 

[aynama]

what I am currently thinking, is that freedom and time are closely related.
Time and its passage can be seen as signs of freedom. And vice versa.
If past seems like gone by very fast, then maybe the freedom was not such as one would imagine. Less time - less freedom. And time as it is to oneself - the subjective time - as freedom is subjective also, to a certain extend.

So if one feels, 'Oh where did the time go?' - then one's life was not as free as one might have thought, while it was 'going' - in the past presence

so to feel that time is ours - so that it feels right - is to have freedom

hm..

and to the question 'how much freedom can we handle?' - it might have a lot to do with how much time we can have, to give our mind a certain place to handle the freedom..

 

[toadlicker]

being a slave to time puts one on a leash. to be free one would have to upset the balance of all they have known, seperate belief from fact, but not all facts are concrete, what we see and what is really in front of us are 2 different things, for example, we know dragons don't exist, why b/c we've been told that all our lives, but had we never been told this surely dragons would still walk with us,
humans only see what years of programing have told us to see, seeing time as an unmovable force holding the world together was only the idea of man, the realms of fantacy may have been reality at one point, the only reason we don't see these realms is because we're programed not to.
another example is: if you were to look at the most horrible sight you've ever seen, maybe a murder, at first all you see is a pile of red and slime, the more you look at it the more detail your mind brings out, if we were to see every aspect of this grizzly murder all at once without giving our brain time to prepare for it we could not handle the reprecussions, and madness would be the result,
i think drugs like lsd and others like it help to open the blocked off parts of our brain just for a little while exposing this alternate reality thats always there. but then i also think alot of mental disorders are caused by these parts of the brain opening without drugs or warning, that i think is the reason why some mental patents are talking to things and people that aren't seen by us "normal"people, they see them b/c they are there and we've blocked them out over centuries of denial.