LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process

I wrote this a while ago.


i will enlighten you with
something that has enlightened me. i have just finished reading the
book LSD Spirituality, and the Creative Process by Marlene Dobkin de
Rios, Ph.D. and Oscar Janiger, M.D.





describing the indescribable. this was written by doctor janiger. he
studied LSD and its effects in a way no one else had ever done. he had
volunteers take the LSD in a home setting, with the least amount of
anything that could influence them. almost 1000 people were involved in
this study, and after extensive research on all of the volunteers'
reports on their experience, this is what he came up with to describe
the effects of the LSD experience.



After you have become more familiar
with the restless state of your nervous system, you settle down to wait
for what will come. In about one hour, you begin to notice an
extraordinary change in your state of consciousness. At first, you seem
rather confused, according to common sense standards. People ask you
questions and you answer dreamily. You often feel that things are
extraordinarily clear. You become alert and sensitive to minute
changes. You say: "I see! Now I begin to understand," awed by revelation. You enchant yourself with the airy thought that the
experience had an odd logic of its own but it is quite enough to let it
flood your brain and leave the question of whether or not your
consciousness is clear or clouded to others.

You senses seem to take in more sight and sound. The eye becomes the
camera with an automatic zooming lens. It rushes up for close, almost
microscopic vision. And then your eye sends you strange messages that
makes you wonder: What if everything is alive? You see an animistic
world living, walls inhaling, oil paintings with muscles moving under
the canvas. You endow these animated things with a conscious
personality. You see the hedge breathing. It swells and subsides with a
regular inhalation and expulsion of breath, calmly, contentedly. And
suddenly you feel involved with life everywhere. The sounds you begin
to hear, you begin to see and touch, as if all your senses were on a
single antenna. You can touch sound, and watch it conduct the tempo of
the breathing walls. The words became a gesture, the gestures graceful
and gradual. You swear that you have seen the most beautiful sight ever
seen by anyone anywhere. The color fantasies flow with great
plasticity. The designs were formal, symmetrical and exquisitely
perfect but drawn in jeweled illuminated colors like melted precious
stones. They formed patterns, which dissolved swiftly to be replaced by
other patterns. And the light from within shines with such luminosity
that you become overwhelmed by the beauty.

You have a feeling of nowness. There is no past of future. This moment,
this ecstasy, is the only time you are alive. Happiness is not
something to be experienced in the future. It is now. In one of the
minutes, sn infinity of extraordinary events, lives and stories could
be going on. Clock time is irrelevant. You are involved in a larger
cosmic time, which tells you that in a flash you can see it all.

Suddenly the meaning of the universe becomes completely clear, but you
cannot make meaning from a proverb. It is a small insignificant
question when you are synthesizing all the great paradoxes of cosmology.

Of all the big changes you notice, the change in self-concept and body
image is the most immense. You feel at first no sharp definite location
of yourself. This is you, which stands outside yourself, shows no rigid
shape. You feel dissociate and removed. Suddenly you find yourself
about fifteen feet tall looking down at your own feet. You take
pleasure in your body as if just discovering it.

LSD brings out a feeling of warmth,
goodness, love, benevolence, laughter, great grinning. This love may be
what leads you to feel a sense of union.





that's not the ENTIRE thing, but i'm way too lazy to put it all
up here. although this sounds like lots of fun, and blah blah blah,
this book does not condone the taking of LSD, and LSD-like substances
without controlled environments. in fact, the author de Rios studied
many indigenous people and their use of the natural LSD-like plants
like peyote and ayahuasca. janiger's research shows that many of the
people that have ingested LSD and had a 'bad trip' had those trips due
to the culture of the western world. many people can't handle the fact
that them, their identities, their individuality, their egos are all
dissolved into oneness with their surroundings, thus resulting in a
freak out. neither authors believe in recreational use of LSD or any
other substances along the same lines, but de Rios firmly believes that
hallucinogens are a huge part of our history as humans, and the
government is slowly taking away all the rights of people in all
cultures to use hallucinogens for religious and spiritual purposes,
which have been used for thousands of years.



and i know all of you have recently become very interested in the
mayans and 2012 (probably thanks to derrick haha). much of the art from
the mayans contained the south american water lily, and later research
has shown that the water lily contains an opiate like substance in it's
stem. it is believed (and speculated) that the mayans used this water
lily as an aide to achieve a greater consciousness.



what do you think? recreational use is definitely out of the question,
but many thousands of years has shown that we as humans have used
hallucinogens as part of religion and culture. it is said that many
hunter/gathering communities of people that use LSD like plants observed
the animals to learn about plants such as peyote and ayahuasca. it is
also said, that even though these animals put themselves in danger,
they seek out these plants.



the government stopped looking at what humans could benefit from with
LSD after they realized it really had no purpose against the enemy. it
was thought that a sort of 'truth serum' could be made from it, but
alas, they failed and it was made illegal due to retarded people of the
60's and their negative comments and 'research' (which mainly consisted
of testing patients that had metal health defects in a hospital
setting. i think i might freak out too).



janiger didn't influence his volunteers in any way to have a spiritual
or religious experience in any way. he gave them little information
about what the LSD was going to be like other than it could be stopped
at any time and that it had it's dangers since it was an
experimental drug at the time. 25% of his volunteers had a
spiritual/religious/mystical experience. almost everyone had a sense of
unity and oneness. many of the people reported it as a life changing
experience. they felt more creative, they felt less self conscious.



there are always negative things in the positive, though.