Capsule summary of why I live drug free.
Generally, you have two groups of drugs, those that strengthen neurotic defenses and those that break them down. The first category includes nicotine, barbiturates, and heroin as the most extreme killer of physical or psychological pain.
But we're talking about the "mind expanders" here, the ones that break down psychological defenses, including the hallucinogens like marijuana, acid, peyote etc.
These drugs tend to break down psychological barriers. If you break down a neurotic defense with a drug, it allows you to see things from a new perspective not available to you before. The problem is that the defenses are there for a reason: to protect from the past, and breaking them down all at once can subject the user to a flood of overwhelming pain and trauma from the past. Now, that's what therapy is about: it breaks down the barriers a little at a time so you can confront the past. But a person with a lot of psychological pain from the past can be so overwhelmed during a drug trip that it drives him to psychosis.
That said, I once dropped acid and went into a bad trip. I curled up on the couch trying to stop the psychological pain but to no avail. I was so miserable for so long that I decided to kill myself. Once I decided, the bluff was called and I saw my ego defenses drop just like that. When my ego defenses dropped, so did my ego, and my identity included the universe. It was a religious experience.
So the drug expanded my mind in the sense of a changed identity; I was no longer simply a bag of bones ruled over by an ego. It took me many years to integrate this experience. I was obsessed with repeating the experience of the immense high, which I did without drugs many times, but it was always followed by depression.
Finally I stopped chasing the high, but my identity was changed forever.
My conclusion is that acid and other strong hallucinogens are very risky; they can drive you crazy, and it may take a bad trip to fundamentally change the person because there’s nothing intrinsically therapeutic about drugs. It's an attempt at self-treatment, and it usually doesn't work. One only has to look our society today to see the reactionary mood of the people, despite that many of them may have experimented with drugs in the sixties. Of course some people have been changed for the positive by the use of drugs too.
Messing with drugs for self-enlightenment is a risky business, sometimes it helps a person, but usually it’s only a temporary effect, and it can be disastrous. Overall, though, I think America has been changed for the positive with the help of hallucinogens. In a sense, religion came to America in the form of hallucinogens.
When I grew up in the fifties, there was an oppressed atmosphere caused not so much by the external conditions, like in Russia, but by our own individual repression; we were all very uptight. The collective mind of America has opened up since the fifties, and a major cause was the experimentation with drugs in the sixties.
A good book discussing neurosis in relationship to different drugs is Arthur Janov's, "Primal Revolution" that is available used for two or three bucks on Ebay or elsewhere.
I'm currently taking an anti-depressant in low doses to help with nerve damage from a pinched nerve. All I can tell you is that my dreams are much more interesting lately.
So, they do exist?
I've expanded my mind and consciousness a few times, bust mostly on logic and complex reasoning and questioning. One or two by the beauty of things and the intuitive nature that opens a sort of spiritual gateway, look on life. But on bio drugs, I've expanded it aswell, at least one 'level'. I've read on
www.thegooddrugsguide.com that acid is the best mind-amplifier. But something steers me away from chemicals, such as my not so common sense. So, my preliminary conclusions are that daily life will do the most. Most of that will be by complex thinking and some by primal feelings and intuition. And on drugs, one step on chemicals, other steps on chemicals. This last step, I might not be willing or able to make. Of course, if they do not exist, there is no answer, because there is no problem (M. Duchamp
