8 ms·

> Everything was so obvious, answer for question "why?" was known, even if i couldn't say it out loud, i could feel that answer for this question was somewhere

> Everything was so obvious, answer for question "why?" was known, even if i couldn't say it out loud, i could feel that answer for this question was somewhere in my mind, but i just couldn't access it. Feeling that it's there made everything clear, i felt peace. So, what was the answer? > Everything that i did in life before and what i would in future seemed such trivial and not important. That connection with reality, understanding different forms of it, changed me. I feel like LSD can give you answers, answers for questions that you would not find without it. Reality includes the past and the future though. This just sounds myopic. I apologize for not immediately grasping your experience, I've not experimented with LSD.

colordrops 11y ago
> So, what was the answer? The poster you replied to specifically said he had no way of finding words to explain his experience. This is common with LSD trips and other such experiences. The very first line in the Tao Te Ching is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Some things are ineffable. For instance, it's not possible to explain the experience of the color red to a blind person. You can explain metadata like the fact that it is light of a certain frequency, but there is no way to actually convey the experience. > Reality includes the past and the future though. This just sounds myopic. The future and past may or may not exist as physical realities, but that's not relevant to the direct human experience. Unless your brain has time travel capabilities, your experience of the past is just replaying memories and the future is just simulations of potential paths. There is only what is happening right now - future and past are just fafuture. That doesn't mean you can't think about the past and future and make decisions based on those thoughts, but it is impossible to experience the past and future
- superswordfish 11y ago
  > This is common with LSD trips and other such experiences. What other experiences? > The very first line in the Tao Te Ching is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Some things are ineffable. So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? Or that it was a religious experience? I don't follow. > For instance, it's not possible to explain the experience of the color red to a blind person. That's bogus. You're likening abstinence from LSD to a disability. > Unless your brain has time travel capabilities, your experience of the past is just replaying memories and the future is just simulations of potential paths. I didn't say anything about time travel. My point was it's a bit concerning that somebody would refer to their past and future as "trivial and not important." You mentioned using knowledge of the past to plan the future. That suggests you agree that the past and future are connected and important.
  - rosser 11y ago
    > So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? No, he's saying, "Some things are ineffable." — in exactly so many words. There are experiences we can have that simply can not be articulated in something as clumsy and imprecise as language. The same word can mean subtly different things to the parties of a single conversation, and this kind of thing is pretty much all subtlety. The experiences you can have working with psychedelics are among the most, "You really had to be there," things possible, for values of "there" that generally taken to mean, "inside the same skull".
    - superswordfish 11y ago
      But we're humans and our foremost means of communication is language. Who cares if it's clumsy and imprecise? Try us, it's the best we've got. Saying it's ineffable is lazy. Unless you're talking about the centerpiece of your religion, I suppose, so I thought parent was suggesting that this person had stumbled upon the Tao. Edit: My comments are getting hammered into oblivion, forbid somebody should try to hold something up to the light and expect an answer other than "you have to use psychedelics to get it." Maybe it's bad to care about objectivity when in the company of psychonauts? Sorry, but I have a hard time distinguishing what I read here from a host of other woo, and I'm left with questions, not answers. My questions are not meant to be dismissive in any way, but they are deliberately prying.
      - colordrops 11y ago
        Perhaps that is your answer - that you will only be left with questions until you experience one of these states firsthand.
      - nostalgiac 11y ago
        It's not lazy to say something such as an LSD trip is ineffable. It's just how it is. Sure a lot of the sounds, sounds and experiences may technically be describable. But it's the experience itself that is ineffable. I've done LSD twice myself, and won't be doing it again for many years as I started suffering from panic attacks and pretty much an existential crisis as many others in this thread reported. That said, I don't regret taking it at all. It definitely broadened my mind to how simple we take the world for granted.
deciplex 11y ago
> So, what was the answer? There isn't one, of course. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin put your mind in a state where you perceive knowledge that you don't actually have. For many, that's enough to (begin to) resolve depression and anxiety, but obviously no drug is going to reveal the "true" nature of reality to you or something ridiculous like that.
- billmalarky 11y ago
  >Drugs like LSD and psilocybin put your mind in a state where you perceive knowledge that you don't actually have. I'm not sure altered perception is by definition "false" or "untrue." It's hard to be objective about experiences that by their nature are outside our objective reality.
  - AstralStorm 11y ago
    They are inside objective reality (in that they can be studied scientifically) but are most likely internally generated. This makes them true in the sense that e.g. dreams are true experiences.
    - billmalarky 11y ago
      I guess what I was getting at is that maybe dreams or trips can be defined as truthy experiences so far as the fact that our brains are experiencing them, even if they aren't objectively "true" in what we define as the "real world." Experiencing "meaning" from music for example isn't necessarily objective, but it still feels a bit like "knowledge" to me. For what it's worth I've never used hard psychedelics, and I haven't studied classic epistemology since college so my viewpoint comes a bit from a point of ignorance but I wanted to provide a different perspective for discussion.
    - collyw 11y ago
      There isn't as far as I am aware any evidence that indicates that experiences are internally generated or "likely internally generated".
  - 11y ago

colordrops 11y ago

> So, what was the answer? The poster you replied to specifically said he had no way of finding words to explain his experience. This is common with LSD trips and other such experiences. The very first line in the Tao Te Ching is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Some things are ineffable. For instance, it's not possible to explain the experience of the color red to a blind person. You can explain metadata like the fact that it is light of a certain frequency, but there is no way to actually convey the experience. > Reality includes the past and the future though. This just sounds myopic. The future and past may or may not exist as physical realities, but that's not relevant to the direct human experience. Unless your brain has time travel capabilities, your experience of the past is just replaying memories and the future is just simulations of potential paths. There is only what is happening right now - future and past are just fafuture. That doesn't mean you can't think about the past and future and make decisions based on those thoughts, but it is impossible to experience the past and future

superswordfish 11y ago
> This is common with LSD trips and other such experiences. What other experiences? > The very first line in the Tao Te Ching is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Some things are ineffable. So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? Or that it was a religious experience? I don't follow. > For instance, it's not possible to explain the experience of the color red to a blind person. That's bogus. You're likening abstinence from LSD to a disability. > Unless your brain has time travel capabilities, your experience of the past is just replaying memories and the future is just simulations of potential paths. I didn't say anything about time travel. My point was it's a bit concerning that somebody would refer to their past and future as "trivial and not important." You mentioned using knowledge of the past to plan the future. That suggests you agree that the past and future are connected and important.
- rosser 11y ago
  > So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? No, he's saying, "Some things are ineffable." — in exactly so many words. There are experiences we can have that simply can not be articulated in something as clumsy and imprecise as language. The same word can mean subtly different things to the parties of a single conversation, and this kind of thing is pretty much all subtlety. The experiences you can have working with psychedelics are among the most, "You really had to be there," things possible, for values of "there" that generally taken to mean, "inside the same skull".
  - superswordfish 11y ago
    But we're humans and our foremost means of communication is language. Who cares if it's clumsy and imprecise? Try us, it's the best we've got. Saying it's ineffable is lazy. Unless you're talking about the centerpiece of your religion, I suppose, so I thought parent was suggesting that this person had stumbled upon the Tao. Edit: My comments are getting hammered into oblivion, forbid somebody should try to hold something up to the light and expect an answer other than "you have to use psychedelics to get it." Maybe it's bad to care about objectivity when in the company of psychonauts? Sorry, but I have a hard time distinguishing what I read here from a host of other woo, and I'm left with questions, not answers. My questions are not meant to be dismissive in any way, but they are deliberately prying.
    - colordrops 11y ago
      Perhaps that is your answer - that you will only be left with questions until you experience one of these states firsthand.
    - nostalgiac 11y ago
      It's not lazy to say something such as an LSD trip is ineffable. It's just how it is. Sure a lot of the sounds, sounds and experiences may technically be describable. But it's the experience itself that is ineffable. I've done LSD twice myself, and won't be doing it again for many years as I started suffering from panic attacks and pretty much an existential crisis as many others in this thread reported. That said, I don't regret taking it at all. It definitely broadened my mind to how simple we take the world for granted.

deciplex 11y ago

> So, what was the answer? There isn't one, of course. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin put your mind in a state where you perceive knowledge that you don't actually have. For many, that's enough to (begin to) resolve depression and anxiety, but obviously no drug is going to reveal the "true" nature of reality to you or something ridiculous like that.

billmalarky 11y ago
>Drugs like LSD and psilocybin put your mind in a state where you perceive knowledge that you don't actually have. I'm not sure altered perception is by definition "false" or "untrue." It's hard to be objective about experiences that by their nature are outside our objective reality.
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  They are inside objective reality (in that they can be studied scientifically) but are most likely internally generated. This makes them true in the sense that e.g. dreams are true experiences.
  - billmalarky 11y ago
    I guess what I was getting at is that maybe dreams or trips can be defined as truthy experiences so far as the fact that our brains are experiencing them, even if they aren't objectively "true" in what we define as the "real world." Experiencing "meaning" from music for example isn't necessarily objective, but it still feels a bit like "knowledge" to me. For what it's worth I've never used hard psychedelics, and I haven't studied classic epistemology since college so my viewpoint comes a bit from a point of ignorance but I wanted to provide a different perspective for discussion.
  - collyw 11y ago
    There isn't as far as I am aware any evidence that indicates that experiences are internally generated or "likely internally generated".
- 11y ago