A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Trying to be happy via drugs drives home just how non-arbitrary it is.
Drugs give you variation around a set point. Uppers crash you down. Downers make you tense when they wear off. Only real world work can move that set point around which drugs just make you fluctuate.
Psychedelics can absolutely kick that set-point into another universe if you let them. I can't begin to explain how it works or how it feels, but I have personally have had some very significant life changes since I started using them on a regular basis.
Sure, you can use psychedelics for fun, but in a proper environment they can be a strong driver for extremely healthy mental change.
Real work is an absolute requirement. No argument there. However, a person may need a complete mental rewiring to get to the point where they are willing to move forward. Like myself.
They are being explored for clinical applications like treating depression.
And they absolutely should be. They are amazingly powerful substances that deserve all the study we can afford to give them.
What I find absolutely fascinating is that their abuse potential is extremely low. After a 50ug dose of psilocybin, the last thing I want to do the next day is do it again. It's not because it was a bad experience, but it's just how it works. (Also, lightning fast tolerance. Once you saturate your 5HT2A receptors, it takes a while to recover.)
Well put
Yep, pretty much any mind altering substance can teach you that. It is one thing to philosophise about it, but another thing entirely to experience it first hand. Can also be experienced through meditation (especially Buddhist jhana meditation), although it's a skill that takes time to learn.
I did that 10 days vipassana retreat where we meditated for more than 16 hours a day for 10 days. Eventually I got there, but it was very underwhelming, way to much work for too little blis/reward or what you want to call it. Never tried mind altering substances (other than alcohol and marijuana) because I'm too afraid to get hoked and to destroy my life.
Psychedelics won't hook you. You will be very overwhelmed the first time and you will think about the experience and if it was pleasurable, you will probably be open to doing it again but it's not an addictive experience unless you want it to be. And even then it will take you a long time to develop an addiction. One hit of LSD or some mushroom chocolates with people you can trust and enjoy being around would should be something everyone tries once. The art of the 60s will definitely have a whole new meaning.
I used to get mushroom tootsie rolls from a friend of mine. They're kinda fun. I've only taken them like 3 or 4 times though, and it's been a couple years since.
Like you said it's not really addictive unless you want it to be. Tbh I think the reason I don't find it addictive at all is that one time I just had a negative trip. Like it wasn't really bad, but it just didn't feel right.
Best time I ever had, doing MDMA and listening to "Surrealistic Pillow" by Jefferson Airplane. I didn't even care that everyone around me was hooking up, I was in it for the jams!
I still don't get what this post is saying, and I'm totally sober right now.
"How arbitrary the connection between how you feel and how well things are going," wtf?
It refers to the fact that feelings are not a reflection of the outside reality, but a reflection of one's perception of it. According to OP, this is proven by how feelings completely change by simply changing the way the brain perceives reality, via a psycotropic compound, while actual reality remains unchanged.
This is a well known scientific and philosophical fact, that OP has only come to know recently thanks to personal experience with psycotropic drugs
Such epiphany resulted in the shower thought we are commenting.
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It doesn't really matter what's happening, with regards to how you're feeling. You can be going through shit and having a good time, or king of the world and just miserable.
I assume they refer to smoking weed. It can show you the mountain before you is not always high, and that it is not always a mountain.
Sober, you might feel completely different about some specific problem, but with this you can actually take a look at it and deconstruct the problem in peace
It about how much you are influenced by chemicals made by your body in your day to day life.
Like how much your emotional state of mind depends on your body chemistry going perfectly.
Getting high on weed gives you a noticeable, controllable disruption to highlight this effect.
In my experience, it made it very clear how easy it is to have a disconnection between what is happening in the "real world", my perception of it and what happens in my brain.
Basically your brain is a big box of chemical reactions that happen regardless of what's going on in the world, and you unconsciously interpret the world through whatever your brain makes you feel at the moment. (For example, think about the fact that you don't notice your nose most of the time, it's there at all times but your brain filters it)
As I've gotten older, this is true, but in the reverse of what is implied. I can be like "man, what a great day, I got a ton done, I'm feeling very proud of myself, I think I'll hit the vape."
Cut to two hours of anxiety about a misspoken word in the midst of the aforementioned day punctuated by two panic attacks about tomorrow.
Man I'm sorry that that's how you experience it. When I'm high I listen to my favorite music and zone the fuck out. The real world rarely enters my thoughts.
Often I'll think about projects I want to work on and get mega inspired from random stuff I find on the internet. Of course, the motivation evaporates when I'm sober, but at least I took notes while I was blasted 😂
Getting high just increases my anxiety more...it has never made me happy or relaxed me in any way. So this isn't quite as universal of a statement as you might think.
Getting more anxious arbitrarily when high would also support their statement. They didn’t say that getting less anxious was what indicated a disconnection between feelings and reality
Now this is an actual good argument. I might just have to concede that I'm wrong here in this case then. At least, anecdotally. I don't know anyone who gets high and is just.......the same. Which by your argument is what it would take to falsify OPs claim. Nice catch!
I used to enjoy it, but over time I ended up in a similar boat. Just a huge bust of anxiety, especially socially. But on the other hand, I feel pretty okay in the day to day. I've come to see it as a sort of forced introspection - not necessarily revealing anything I don't already know about, but bringing it all to the surface and forcing the mind to see it. In that respect, it could still be drawing a line between feeling and how things are going.
Not that it makes it necessarily more universal, but I think there's a grain of truth.
I think some of it depends on where you live, what repercussions you have if caught, and how safe you feel when doing them (environment, friends, activities, etc.). I'm good now, but when it was illegal where I live, I found it harder to enjoy weed.
There also tends to be a level of anxiety felt strongly by those who bought into the "just say no" era of the war on drugs. That's not bad, and I definitely understand it having been on the "drugs are bad, m'kay" side of things, but the more your believed minor drug use turned you into a junkie, the harder it was to question that.
My older sister is one of those types who still believe the propaganda. I get it and do not push it, but when she brings it up, I talk honestly about it. I think it's helped her feel comfortable about the idea, but not enough to try it. I respect that.
I noticed, when I smoked like a fish -- taking a hiatus from October 1 through the end of the year -- I noticed a lot more connections between bullshit than when sober. It offers you a bit of insight that either makes you say, "hmm," and move on with your day, or drives you to anger that you can't see such things while sober.
I've found it gives you perspective that things really aren't going that badly.
Or, you get anxious and you think things are way worse and scarier than they are but for me that's only if I make a.mkstakr and get way too high
I'd argue that drugs can help the individual do things opposite their current nature. To shake them out of the box they're currently stuck in. Some people can see how the way they feel doesn't match their current situation on their own steam. Some need drugs to help them focus on that. The questions we don't ask ourselves when that connection is noticed are the ones that have the strongest possibility of allowing us to change our views and remove that which is unhelpful from our lives so we can be the best version of ourselves.
I've been noticing in my own life lately that things are going great on all fronts and yet I'm miserable. I had not paid close enough attention until I had to bring up the discussion of how our language (literal words) shape our perception of reality with my kids. Now I'm seeing why I'm mostly miserable because I'm actually hearing what words I use daily. Language shapes us more than we realize.
Concentration skills gained through meditation and self contemplation can help us without drugs. Though I'd argue that drugs are often key to breaking cycles so we have the energy less spread out and we can focus on the issues we actually have. There is a time and place for them. They cannot become a crutch.
Yeah, mindset and words definitely matter. I used to roll my eyes at people that would talk about gratitude, but starting your day by writing three specific things you're grateful for helps reframe how you look at the rest of the day.