The only signs we can come up with were a few times going back 20 years, either at a party (drugs) or a canoe trip (drugs) where she thought people were talking about her/plotting against her. I wasn't on the canoe trip, but I always believed her that some people in another group of friends we know were mercilessly cruel to her. Now I tend to think it was a manifestation of whatever this is.
Other than that she's been one of my most solid friends and always had her shit together, very successful career, someone I would call when I needed life advice, etc.
It's pretty easy to slip into this. I don't have a good answer for solving this but criminalization is definitely a bad answer, so we will have to find a way to discourage such tendencies. It may be that it is mostly or entirely a cultural thing in which case public understanding of the drug is a prerequisite, so I'm glad more are starting to learn about it as a result of decriminalization and legalization.
I hope she can find some way to be comfortable again.
But I think there are some serious risks to heavy, prolonged use that probably aren't well-studied or understood. Also for all I know her problems stem from the acid and not the shrooms.
I’m all for people trying them but the effects shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve had powerful feelings of anxiety, love, euphoria, mania or sadness on different times. Very different from pot which has a pretty uniform and predictable effect on me.
Cannabis is quite a powerful drug for many. A lot more powerful than most "hard drugs" like stimulants, empatogens, opioids or sedatives, which don't "mind fuck" at all unless you do them days on end or ridiculous dosages.
No one is getting ego-death and dimensional transcendence from ripping dabs of THC concentrate all night. Just lots of paranoia and distress.
Its distressing to spill your coffee. It's also distressing to have your house burn down. The difference is large.
The THC induced paranoia and distress are usually due to effects like time-dilation, memory impairment, depersonalization, thought loops etc, which I'd put into more or less same category as you get from psychedelics or dissociatives.
Plenty of bad trips with quite low doses of THC too: https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=70884
I think the "hardness" of different drugs, especially in how strong the effect is, is mostly a cultural and legal artifact that doesn't really correlate that much with the actual experience.
Acid also stimulates dopamine receptors, so this could be similar to amphetamine psychosis.
And what have you done for us?
I mean a cup of coffee might push the wrong person over the edge if they’re already in the midst or about to enter a serious mental health crisis?
Of course you’d have to assume a psychoactive substance might contribute but maybe not?
I’ve had serious depressive stints of existential crisis where the world felt like it was telling me I don’t need to exist anymore and I’ve had them before and I’ve had them before and after smoking pot, did it contribute maybe ? Maybe not. I’ve smoked pot since and never had the same symptoms.
I feel like that whole "world feeling it was telling you you didn't need to exist anymore" may have been it trying to point to you towards a no-self experience, which can actually be a very beautiful experience, where the 'you' experiencing reality fades away and there is just reality.
I hope this comment was okay with you, and I apologize if it disturbed you. Still, if you've got nothing better to do with your time, no-self may be something to look into.
At some point I kind of just agreed with this new idea and have been running with it since.
Buddhism often tells you to let your pain and suffering be your guide, and it works,at least in my experience.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
She later apologized and said she thought I was joking. We don't talk anymore.
As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.
It is interesting to observe, retrospectively, how the brain can adopt a new set of axioms and coerce every one of the "senses" into supporting those axioms - no matter how detached from "our typical understanding of reality" (whatever that means) they are.
Brainwashing is real. Just make people really emotionally unstable and then hit them with an onslaught of social pressure with a vision.
https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neu...
In short, I had lost all faith in the "official narrative" of creation/existence/whatever as taught in schools/society/etc. that I had grown up believing (growing up I'd have called myself atheist, then agnostic). You might call this an anti-science view, but I'd counter it is more scientific to reject a theory when it does not match observations than to keep it just because it's "the standard". Anyways, this put me on a path of not knowing anything to believe, which is to say any seemingly small flashback/thought/whatever could shatter whatever worldview I had been temporarily existing in and send me into a seizure.
This continued for some time until I began to be touched by what christians would call the Holy Spirit, which guided me towards preachers of the Gospels (aka "The Word", aka "Jesus Christ" (see John 1)). I began to see the innate truth presented by The Word, as I saw how my lived experiences were consistently in agreement with it. For one, I embraced prayer and observed the Father respond to it.
Basically, I built up a new worldview around The Word (Jesus Christ) and it has been unshakable, in stark contrast to all the attempts I had made to do the same without Jesus (Matthew 7:24-27 summarizes this well).
(For those following along, this is a cute and fun example of Scripture being used to rebuke attempts to shake the foundation. The forces that be typically aren't so overt.)
Ephesians 5:18 instructs us to "not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit". And it is indeed accurate that the feeling is a higher high than wine or weed will take you. I suppose molly or heroin might be superior but I have no experience with those. And there's something psychologically nice about feeling good because you are doing the God-ordained right-thing, versus simply hijacking chemical receptors. And the Holy Spirit has no "come-down", which is nice.
Do you have Scriptural support for that? It seems like the Holy Spirit often communicated with words (e.g., "the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.”"), unless you think that is simply the way it is recorded
You're saying you see dead people.
I'm trying to imagine how it relates from your short summary[1] but I'm confused how Aphantasia plays into that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995645
Phenomenologically, I'm not sure people typically "see" Jesus (Holy Spirit, et al) as much as perceive their presence or influence.
(I'd say the seeing dead people thing was a simple, bad-faith comment, but I believe it was Thomas Aquinas who made the "if you can't see it, it's because God didn't want you to see it" class of arguments regarding insensible phenomenon, so maybe it's actually a profound theological treatise they're working up.)
Yes.
> Phenomenologically, I'm not sure people typically "see" Jesus (Holy Spirit, et al) as much as perceive their presence or influence.
Not quite. Jesus is unique in the Trinity as being the fleshly form of God that can indeed be associated with a clear image, that people (at least at some point in history) were expected to see and hear. Accordingly, I have heard some (but certainly not all) Christians speak of "seeing" Jesus in a phantastic sense (sometimes quite regularly - even constantly), and conversing with Him at length in this same sense. That is beyond my ability to reason about, so I do not.
> if you can't see it, it's because God didn't want you to see it
Indeed. Learning of my own aphantasia left me feeling profoundly broken, and it was in a sense the subject of that original "bad trip". It was unsettling to learn that "everyone else" has some seemingly magical power that I do not, and I had developed a fascination with finding a way to "fix myself".
I've since come to consider my nature to be God's intentional creation, so if there is some way I am different from others there is certainly a good reason for it – even though I might not know what that reason is.
I’m starting to come around to the view that ridicule of religiosity is quite often more vacuous than spirituality.
So who has any right to ridicule anyone else for having a different perspective?
Just choose whatever narrative that floats your boat and live and let live.
It’s one thing to be ignorant of the creator (and deny creations miraculous nature), but to be ignorant of world history; please read about Rome.
> So who has any right to ridicule anyone else for having a different perspective?>
> Just choose whatever narrative that floats your boat and live and let live.
Sometimes the right answer is that there isn't enough information to choose, therefore making it 'objectively' correct.
I don't need to have an answer for life, the universe and everything to reject that kind of answer. It smells way too much of humans. The Bible even has a bit where it says a pot should not criticize his potter for making it crooked -- while the potter blaming and condemning the pot he made is perfectly fine and sane. If you have a problem and try to fix it with such things, you now have two problems. "Jesus can save you, if you let him" -- nope, he can just do it if he exists and gives a fuck about anything other than playing abusive games.
The Quran is no better, with God bragging how he could have made everyone rightly guided but didn't because he promised to fill hell with people and djinn and always keeps his promises.
It all boils down to "might is right". That stuff isn't insane, by definition, at least to those who actually lap it up, because God threatens the people who reject it.
If a God exists, and made clouds and sparrows and sunshine and love, I would basically be spitting in his face for even considering any that sordid stuff. You might say I know my shepherd's voice, and differentiate it from humans in a trench coat pretending to be a giant, which sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me. I can dig Meister Eckhart, anything below that is just brown shirt antics in my sight, and my reaction to it was and is "come at me, bro". Don't tell me my knee will bend, bend it. Shit or get off the pot.
And people who are fine with being saved from eternal torture through essentially random chance ("being pulled"), while others who are every bit as bad as them get tortured forever, who are crying tears of gratitude while looking the other way, are not the ones I would want to spend eternity with.
> That God kinda-became human to "sacrifice" himself (with no loss, got up 3 days later to live forever, nothing was sacrificed) in order to forgive the sins of people, but only if they believe it
Christianity and its doctines are much deeper and richer on these topics than this characature would imply.
2. 'profound and incomprehensible suffering' - what is Jesus supposed to have suffered which is different from many other humans who have been betrayed, tortured and killed? Whatever you think it is, it appears to be extra-biblical. The Gethsemane quote is just "my soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death". Allowing for loss in translation this is an expression of suffering well within human experience.
3. 'the vast majority do beleive that there are effects for everyone, regardless of belief in this life or the next' Sorry, no. The vast majority of modern Christians belong to churches for which 'sola fide' is not just an essential part of their theology, but the foundation of their existence.
And everyone is affected: even if they may not be saved, they are all still resurrected in the end days. This is uncontroversial, and documented throughout the bible. Here is a summary: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/will-all-people-be-resu...
And not sure why you say "conservative Evangelical" as if it means less. They are the most biblically-based sect around.
But in my opinion, it's because they're better than the religion. That is their humanity, such humanity is not found in the source materials. I can only speak for myself: in my early 20s, I was confused and deeply in pain about the state of the world, and through a series of coincidences (or signs from God :P) I ended up kinda, vaguely, believing in it. I wanted to believe in it. But I could not get over my empathy for everyone: if everybody isn't saved, nobody is saved. Not to mention that "saving" someone from the wrath you inflict on someone for not believing you saved them is equal parts crazy and abusive. Jesus can mock the wise and laud the wide-eyed children all he wants, but even in the deepest depths of my desperation I could not accept it. I read the stuff, I think about it, and I'm out.
My beef isn't with God, if it exists. But I do have beef with religion, yes. Disappointed with the Bible, I turned to the Quran, found the exact same content with even more bragging. And something about "Jesus can save you (if you let him)" did kinda trigger me, since the Bible says, nobody can come to God lest they get pulled. So don't blame people for not getting pulled, that's victim blaming.
Under these interpretations, there is no "wrath" inflicted upon the lost, they simply do not gain the reward of having faith and instead enter into the "default" death state.
> "Jesus can save you (if you let him)" did kinda trigger me, since the Bible says, nobody can come to God lest they get pulled. So don't blame people for not getting pulled, that's victim blaming.
Your view is sounds consistent with a lack of belief in Free Will, is that what you believe? The Calvinist branch of Christianity supports this view, but it is not the only interpretation. If you don't believe in Free Will might as well just stop reading here because nothing is in your control anyways :)
If on the other hand you do believe in Free Will, it must be the case that you have a choice in coming to Christ. It is true that nobody can come unless they are pulled, but they can also resist that pull. The Bible speaks many times of God saying mortals resisted His call. Most famously perhaps Sodom and Gamora.
And the pull can come in many forms, most commonly in being preached the Gospel. It is very hard at this point to exist in the world without someone at some point having attempted to preach the Gospel to you, and the Bible makes it clear that Jesus Christ gave up his life so that all may be saved. Indeed, the most famous sentence in perhaps all of time supports this: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (emphasis mine).
So under a non-Calvinist interpretation everybody has the opportunity to come to salvation, assuming they have heard of Christ (the pull), and it is up to them to choose to do so, by choosing to believe in Him.
It's a shame you can only experience your comment from your perspective.
Now, you are the author of the entire creation. At any point you can intervene in any way you want, for instance to relocate an entity that was very far from the light to be much closer to it. And you do indeed do this quite regularly. In fact a large amount of what you do as the author is go out to find the entities that are very far from the light and shepherd them back to be close to it. Sometimes, this relocation sticks: the entity sees the light, recognizes it, and continues to pursue it. Sometimes, it doesn't: the entity either wanders around aimlessly with no regard for the direction of the light, or indeed it actively pursues darkness.
At the end of the generation you have a spectrum of entities: those who never left the light, those who strayed occasionally but always took to your shepherding back, ..., all the way to those who actively ran away from the light at every opportunity. So yes, you are the author. You have complete control over how all these entitles move into the next generation, and you can save all of them if you'd like. But why would you?
And if the goal is just to allow as many entities as possible to enjoy the light, why not relocate them all to be close to it? Why not save all of them into the next generation?
> And if the goal is just to allow as many entities as possible to enjoy the light, why not relocate them all to be close to it? Why not save all of them into the next generation?
I'm not sure that is the goal, but regardless your machine only has finite resources, but is changed with presenting an infinite environment. Sacrifices must be made.
And if you have an argument to make, make it. Don't just say "other people made arguments, and trust me: they were really good".
Sure, he was wrong... but not worthy of ridicule. It's just so easy and satisfying to assume that disagreement indicates stupidity.
Ditto for any flamewar, but the religious kind is particularly bad and also easy to avoid.
> As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.
It's best not to proselytize on HN. It's ok to talk about your own experience of course, but when it starts to move into standard religious tropes, that's already a kind of flamebait and discussion quality plummets, and boy did that happen in this thread.
I think the best you can do is be a calm friend and imagine you're dealing with a two year old without being condescending.
You could also try contacting https://challengingpsychedelicexperiences.com/
There are also therapists who work with people before and after psychedelic experiences, called psychedelic integration therapists. They usually have legit mainstream psychotherapy qualifications.
There are also integration circles where people support each other. For example, https://acerintegration.com/ This was set up by a researcher in psychedelics. Not sure if it would be appropriate for someone experiencing psychosis though. You could also try contacting the researcher directly for recommendations: https://www.drrosalindwatts.com/
There are also forums where you could ask for advice, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/
They might be able to point you to other resources like this in your area.
Another contributing factor in all this is she lost her job, which gave her a lot of satisfaction. She has savings, so she's not hurting for money. But sitting around all day in her head and getting depressed isn't good.
Do you know how frequent the macrodosing became? I have never seen or heard (anecdotal) of microdosing leading to a psychotic break. But frequent use (more than once every three weeks) of large quantities will almost certainly harm you in the long run.
I assume stuff like that happens a lot in her Phish group. Other times we've hung out at a party she's broken acid/e/shrooms out and I'm thinking, "We're not 25 anymore, we don't have to do this."
At the time I kind of admired her for still being willing to go to those deeply introspective trippy places, whereas I'd rather just get a nice buzz and not plumb the depths of my soul. But now I'm thinking it's probably a good thing to hang that stuff up after a while, or at least not keep doing it regularly.
From my experience, the psychedelics will "tell you" to slow down, but it's up to the individual to make that choice.
I can't say the drug use caused it, but I and the rest of her friends are of the opinion that it contributed (we all have experience with psychedelics, mostly in our younger days). We know that the microdosing also turned into macrodosing on a lot of occasions. She's in a group of friends who follow Phish around, and it's basically part of their identity.
She's doing better now, but still thinks she's in some kind of a stimulation, and has described feeling like she's on a never-ending acid trip. She's always been one of my most solid friends, and this came completely out of left field.
We can't get her to go see any psychiatrists who would want to put her on anti-psychotics (which is basically all of them). So we just tell her we love her, and try to convince her that if this is all a big simulation, we're not in on it either.